Some thoughts on the 80th Anniversary of Victory over Fascism

Eighty years ago today, the monstrous machinery of the Third Reich was finally ground to dust. The swastika was torn from the Reichstag, the death camps liberated, and Europe—bloodied, traumatised, but unbowed—emerged from history’s darkest night.

It was not merely a military victory; it was the triumph of solidarity over fascism, of internationalism over racial tyranny, of humanism over industrial-scale slaughter.

And yet—and yet—that magnificent victory, which we have every reason to remember and to celebrate today, proved that there is no such thing as a final victory against fascism, against misanthropy, in a world built on the systematic exploitation of People and Nature – a world not yet mature enough for Peace with Justice.

It took no time after that magnificent victory against fascism for the victors to co-opt the defeated fascists to trounce freedom fighters who had fought against fascism. In Greece, in Vietnam, in Indonesia, in South Africa, across the West, the victors employed fascists to maintain the prewar colonial order, the prewar pseudo-liberal regimes whose economic and ethical bankruptcy had begat fascism.

Today, fascism’s spectre is rising again. In Ukraine, in the same battlefields where it was crushed, Nazism lives on, armed to the teeth, striking out both from within the Azov Battalion and the Wagner Group. In the European Union fascism is back — not in jackboots and sieg heils, but in the xenophobic demagogues in our parliaments, in the militarised borders of Fortress Europe, in Europe’s rearmament madness, in Europe’s sickening support for the last Apartheid state’s genocide of the Palestinians.

The defeat of Nazism was not the work of generals or politicians alone. It was the result of sacrifices by millions of unsung heroes—partisans, women and men resistance fighters, ordinary soldiers, the working women and men who starved and bled to break fascism’s spine. That is the legacy we must reclaim. Not the hollow nationalism of flag-waving, of military parades – but the radical, internationalist solidarity that once united the world against tyranny.

Eighty years on, the fight is not over. Lest we forget fascism was not just defeated in 1945—it was out-organised, out-mobilised, out-dreamed. And if we are to defeat its heirs today, we must do the same.

No pasarán—never again!