2025 marked the 80th anniversary of the defeat of fascism in World War Two. Unfortunately, the history of this extremely important conflict is not very well understood today.
It was not the United States and its Western allies that defeated fascism in WWII. That is a myth that is promoted by Hollywood movies.
In reality, it was the Soviet Union and China that defeated fascism in WWII. However, their heroic contribution was later erased by the West, when the US waged the First Cold War against the global socialist movement.
The vast majority of Nazi casualties, approximately 80%, were on the Eastern Front, in the Third Reich’s savage, scorched-earth battles against the Soviet Red Army.
More than 26 million Soviets died in the Nazi empire’s genocidal war. Compare that to the just over 400,000 US Americans who died, and the roughly 450,000 Brits who lost their lives.
This means that 62 Soviets were killed for every US American who died in WWII. Yet, tragically, their sacrifice has been forgotten in the West – or, better said, erased from public consciousness for political reasons.
The fact that the USSR defeated Nazi Germany was even admitted by the inveterate anti-communist Winston Churchill, an explicit racist, colonialist, and erstwhile admirer of Hitler who oversaw the British empire’s extreme crimes, including a famine in Bengal in 1943.
In a speech in August 1944, Churchill acknowledged:
“I have left the obvious, essential fact to this point, namely, that it is the Russian Armies who have done the main work in tearing the guts out of the German army. In the air and on the oceans we could maintain our place, but there was no force in the world which could have been called into being, except after several more years, that would have been able to maul and break the German army unless it had been subjected to the terrible slaughter and manhandling that has fallen to it through the strength of the Russian Soviet Armies”.
Then, in October 1944, Churchill said, “I have always believed and I still believe that it is the Red Army that has torn the guts out of the filthy Nazis”.
In fact, the USSR wanted to crush fascism even earlier by proposing a surprise attack on Nazi Germany in 1939, weeks before Hitler invaded Poland. Soviet military officers made an official request to British and French officials to form an alliance against Nazi Germany in August 1939, but London and Paris were not interested. The USSR had a million troops ready to fight, but the Western European powers were not prepared.
What the capitalist countries in Western Europe and North America had hoped for was that Nazi Germany would attack the Soviet Union, which they considered their main enemy. This is why the Western imperial powers had long appeased Hitler, signing shameful deals like the 1938 Munich Agreement, which allowed the Nazi empire to expand in Europe.
What the Western capitalist “liberal democracies” and the fascist regimes shared in common was mutual hatred of communism. The rich oligarchs who controlled Western governments feared that they would lose their privileges if workers in their countries were inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution.
In the 1930s, the US State Department spoke positively of fascism as an alternative to communism, and the US chargé d’affaires in Germany praised the supposedly “more moderate section of the [Nazi] party, headed by Hitler himself … which appeal[s] to all civilized and reasonable people”.
It must be emphasized that, when the Japanese empire officially allied with Nazi Germany in 1936, the name of the deal they signed was the Agreement Against the Communist International, or the Anti-Comintern Pact. Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy subsequently signed the agreement in 1937, and the fascist regimes in Spain, Hungary, and other European countries joined in the following years. It was extreme, violent anti-communism that united all of these fascist powers.
While there is widespread ignorance about the Soviet Union’s leading role in crushing Nazi Germany in WWII, the heroic contribution that the people of China made to the defeat of the Japanese empire is even less well known.
For Europe, WWII began in 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. For the people of China, the war started much earlier, in 1931, when the Japanese empire invaded the Manchuria region of northern China.
For 14 years, the people of China resisted Japan’s aggression, as the imperial regime sought to colonize more and more Chinese territory.
By the end of the war in 1945, roughly 20 million Chinese had lost their lives. This means that approximately 48 Chinese were killed for every US American who died in WWII.
In China, WWII is known as the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, and it was part of a larger conflict called the World Anti-Fascist War.
China held an important event on 3 September 2025 commemorating the 80th anniversary of the defeat of fascism. It featured key leaders of countries that are today, once again, fighting against imperialism and fascism, including China’s President Xi Jinping, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, the DPRK’s leader Kim Jong-un, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, and officials from other countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, including Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel and Nicaragua’s representative Laureano Ortega Murillo.
The United States has long taken credit for the defeat of the fascist Japanese empire, but this erases the enormous, heroic, 14-year contribution made by the Chinese people.
Although it is true that the United States was briefly allied with the USSR and China during WWII, and it did provide significant military assistance through its 1941 Lend-Lease Act, Washington immediately terminated that partnership in 1945.
In fact, even before WWII officially ended, the United States had already started to recruit fascists to help them wage the First Cold War. US intelligence agencies saved many Nazi war criminals in the infamous Operation Paperclip. Instead of facing justice, these genocidaires assisted Washington in its subsequent attacks on the Soviet Union and its communist allies in Eastern Europe.
Later, the CIA and NATO created Operation Gladio, in which they used fascist war criminals as foot soldiers of their new global imperialist war on socialism. The former top Nazi military officer Adolf Heusinger was appointed the chair of NATO’s military committee, and the ex Nazi Hans Speidel became commander of NATO’s land forces in Central Europe.
The United States even rehabilitated Nazi war criminal Reinhard Gehlen, who had directed Hitler’s military intelligence on the Eastern Front in WWII, and who later led the CIA-backed Gehlen Organization to help Washington wage its cold war against communists.
The United States did not defeat fascism; it rehabilitated and absorbed fascism into the capitalist empire that Washington built after WWII, centered in Wall Street and based on the dollar.
The contemporary German government published the results of a study in 2016, called the Rosenberg project, which sifted through classified documents from 1950 to 1973. It found that, at the height of the Cold War, the government of capitalist West Germany, which was a member of NATO, was full of former Nazis.
In fact, 77% of senior officials in West Germany’s Justice Ministry had been Nazis. Ironically, there had been a lower percentage of Nazi Party members in the Justice Ministry in Berlin when the genocidal dictator Adolf Hitler himself was in charge of the Third Reich.
Similarly, in Japan after WWII, US occupation forces released Japanese war criminals from prison and used them to construct an imperial client regime. The CIA helped to create and fund the powerful Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has essentially governed Japan as a one-party state, with few exceptions, since 1955.
Notorious war criminal Nobusuke Kishi had overseen genocidal crimes against humanity against the Chinese people as an administrator of the Japanese empire’s puppet regime of Manchukuo, in Manchuria, during WWII. After the war ended, the United States strongly supported Kishi, who led the LDP, established the de facto one-party state, and became prime minister of the country.
Still today, the Kishi dynasty is one of the most powerful families in Japan. Kishi’s grandson Shinzo Abe also led the LDP and served as prime minister from 2012 and 2020, closely allying Japan with the United States, while antagonizing China and rewriting the history of WWII.
In short, after the Soviet Union and China led the fight to defeat fascism in WWII, the US empire recruited fascists to fight its global war against socialism.
Today, it is extremely important to learn these facts and correct the historical record, because 2025 is the 80th anniversary of the end of WWII, and it is clear that the proper lessons have not been learned in the West.
The planet is still plagued by extreme imperial violence, and closer than ever to another world war.
The United States and Israel have been carrying out a genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, committing atrocities that are reminiscent of the fascists’ crimes against humanity in WWII.
Fascism has its roots in European colonialism. The genocidal tactics that the European empires used in Asia, Africa, and Latin America were later used by the fascists inside Europe.
Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was inspired by the genocidal crimes that the German empire had committed in southern Africa, and also by the genocide that the US colonialists had carried out against indigenous peoples in North America. The Nazis were likewise influenced by the US government’s racist laws against Black Americans, in its apartheid system known as Jim Crow.
Given the close links between fascism and Western imperialism, it is not surprising to see that, today, the US regime has become increasingly fascist. Politicians in Washington scapegoat immigrants and foreigners for the many domestic problems in their country, including the significant growth in inequality, poverty, and homelessness. They have no solutions other than more violence, racism, and war.
The increasing political desperation and instability in Washington is combining in a toxic mixture with the greed of US corporations in the military-industrial complex, which profit from war, and are thus incentivized to push for more conflict, not for peace.
The United States, as the leader of NATO, has already been waging a proxy war against Russia in Ukrainian territory, using the people of Ukraine as cannon fodder in an imperial war, tragically destroying an entire generation of Ukrainians in a vain attempt to maintain US global hegemony.
The US empire has also used its Israeli attack dog to wage war on the people of Iran, in an attempt to overthrow the revolutionary government in Tehran and impose a puppet regime, like the former king, the shah, who was propped up by Washington.
The number one target of the US empire today, however, is the People’s Republic of China. US imperialists fear that China is the only country powerful enough to not only challenge but to defeat Washington’s global hegemony.
The US empire is waging a Second Cold War against China, and it has weaponized everything in this hybrid war, imposing sanctions and tariffs to wage economic war, using its control over the dollar system in a financial war, and exploiting the media to spread disinformation and fake news as part of an information war.
Part of the US empire’s strategy in this information war is to erase the Chinese people’s major contribution to the defeat of fascism and imperialism in WWII.
This is why it is so crucial to defend the facts, and to teach the true history of WWII to people today. If we don’t correct the historical record, the fascists and imperialists of the 21st century will weaponize ignorance in order to carry out the same crimes that their ideological brethren committed in the 20th century.
Dennis Revell
2025-12-27 at 09:07
: You could have mentioned the likely critical contribution of Yugoslavia – whose refusal to allow Hitler free passage on his way to fight in Greece – causing the partly fraticidal war in the Balkans – delayed Operation Barbarossa for three months – which was critical, as far as changing weather conditions during that three months was concerned.
Rick H
2025-12-29 at 08:22
Catholic nationalist Ante Pavelic’s Eustacha took care of that problem by genociding most of the Serbs (Orthodox Christians), who had defended Yugoslavia. By infiltrating the government, the Eustasha enabled the Nazis to invade and take over.
Rick H
2025-12-29 at 13:02
Catholic nationalist Ante Pavelic and his Eustasha took care of that problem by undermining the government in Belgrade to enable the Nazis to invade and pass through Yugoslavia. This is reported in the book “The Vatican’s Holocaust” by Avro Manhattan (pseudonym of its Jewish author). Pavelic’s goal was a 100% Roman Catholic Independent State of Croatia (a breakaway state from Yugoslavia). To accomplish that, the Eustasha genocided nearly all the non-Catholics, most of whom were Serbs (Orthodox Christians). All of the Catholic orders, including nuns, eagerly participated in the genocide. As a result, today’s Croatia has almost no Serbs, Jews or Gypsies and is majority Roman Catholic. After the book’s author died, it went out of publication, and none of his books remained in publication.
Airlane
2026-01-15 at 10:52
‘The Vatican’s Holocaust’ is available at archive.org and other sites as a pdf and epub.
Thomas Zychowski
2025-12-27 at 12:51
Western narratives, via Hollywood films, textbooks, and media, marginalized these immense sacrifices, emphasizing D-Day and Pacific campaigns instead. This distortion enabled the U.S. to rehabilitate Nazi and Japanese war criminals, claim sole moral victory over fascism, and vilify former socialist allies, sustaining historical myths that bolster ongoing hegemony.
subcomandante Felix
2025-12-28 at 10:37
It was like Churchill told Truman after the defeat of Nazi Germany, “Fascism is dead. Long live neo-fascism!” Fascism was never defeated it just morphed into democracy. Now that Trump has stripped the illusions from so-called U.S. democracy, we can clearly see what America has always been.
Calgacus
2025-12-29 at 01:41
Aaargh. More WWII revisionism. With the passing of the WWII generation who could refute such rewriting, the probably majority now believes various revisionist craps over the once universally known original story.
Why mix decent analysis of current events with nonsense about WWII that unlike the real story, only hurts the Left? Surely because Norton does not know what he is talking about and naively takes some writers playing a game of telephone, on faith.
The craziest WWII revisionism is Trump-adjacent “Right Revisionism” – We should have allied with the good guys, the Nazis to get those bad guys, the satanic Commies. Who along with the Joos, suckered the USA into fighting for evil. Lindbergh said such things, including the Chinese/Japanese Yellow Peril. After Pearl Harbor.
Next is the Center Revisionism that started with the Cold War. The US & UK were good guys and together defeated the Nazis & Commies, who were equally bad and basically allied. Obsesses over the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact as proving this.
This piece is “Left” Revisionism: The USSR (& China) alone won the war. Basically against Germany, Japan, the UK & the USA, who were always allies with minor differences and tiffs.
All of these revisionisms are insane. The original, obviously, obviously true story – the real “Left” story is that told by the Hollywoods of all countries, especially during the war: WWII was a close run-thing, the Axis was defeated by the Big Three (one can throw in China too, which FDR, but not Churchill & Stalin, always supported as one of the allies on a level with the others, as in the “Four Policemen” of the projected UN Organization.) Each of the Big Three, maybe Four were absolutely necessary to victory. If one had defected or dropped out, Hitler would not have lost.
This Left revisionism presents a grossly distorted view of the USA’s relations with fascism and Nazism. In reality, FDR, Hitler’s most consistent and strongest opponent, not the State Department had final authority. FDR was convinced Hitler was dangerously insane ever since he read Mein Kampf – in German, not bowderlized English. President-elect FDR talked about nothing but Hitler, meeting with his advisors when Hitler came to power a couple months before the US inauguration. Far more important than the pro-fascist, even pro-Nazi bent of State Department apparatchiks that FDR complained about: After Pearl Harbor, FDR joked that at least it meant that the State Department would become neutral in the struggle against the Axis.
Some notes / tweets here refer to absurd falsehoods that Chomsky, partly following his source David Schmitz, promulgated. Stating that the US/FDR “installed” Admiral Darlan & Marshall Badoglio. Reflecting moronic ultra-Left views and fairy tales of Chomsky’s youth that he apparently uncritically swallowed & believed ever since.
In reality, Darlan was a Vichy admiral that the allies made a deal with. Getting Vichy French forces to surrender quickly and later join the allies, in return for Darlan retaining power in North Africa over these French forces. No US installation- he was already installed. He was soon assassinated by someone trained at OSS anthropologist Carleton Coon’s camp, possibly at Coon’s instigation. The connection was close enough for Coon to be removed by this turn of events welcome to everyone but Darlan.
Badoglio’s “installation” is equally fictitious. Fascist general Badoglio overthrew Mussolini by himself. Again, moronic complaints against dealing with him, mutating into the installation lie repeated here. This was the greatest missed opportunity of the entire war. That Eisenhower and unfortunately Kesselring saw instantly.
Eisenhower wrote that he wished he had the same latitude that 18th century commanders had. For he could have landed forces in Rome & its ports, bottled up the Germans in the South and gone straight North to easily conquer Germany with no forces in between. He had to get approval from his superiors. FDR in turn had to contact Stalin, who was fine with it, but it took time to negotiate with Badoglio. Kesselring raced North above Rome and the opportunity was lost – to end the war nearly 2 years earlier and save millions upon millions of lives. These ridiculous even shameful complaints and irrational, ignorant denunciations of US/Allied actions weigh nothing in comparison with that.
Finally, anyone who wants to really understand the war and its historiography (as well as the origins of the Cold War) – has to study the work of the (now forgotten) historian’s historian Frederick Schuman. He predicted the course of the war in books written generally 5 years before the events – as his obituary notes. Analyzing railway scheduling and other evidence, he was only person in Washington aside from FDR who contended that the USSR could hold out against Germany in the catastrophic days of Germany’s seeming unstoppable success.
But what is important here is that in the late 40s, Schuman, always friendly with Soviets like Foreign Minister & ambassador to the US Litvinov, and writing in pieces for the USSR’s US magazine Soviet Russia Today, denounced the birth of Center Revisionism and the fraudulent distortions that started the Cold War – by his former co-workers Secretaries George Marshall, Jimmy Byrnes on down. And further, he ridiculed such revisionist efforts – like this one in the distant future – for their absurd lies against the Original Story based on the often horrific experiences of hundreds of millions of people. Explicitly saying the obvious, that all of the Big Three were needed to defeat Germany & Japan. A quasi-official expression of wartime Soviet opinion. Soviet/Russian historiography has through the years changed the least, hewed closest to the truth.
Stalin, Khrushchev, Zhukov knew and said that they did not win the war alone. Mao, Zhou & Chiang all agreed on the crucial importance of foreign aid and alliance for the war against Japan. “Left” revisionism, like this piece’s, serves no purpose but that of the crypto-fascistic forces that created the Center & Right revisionism.
JonnyJames
2025-12-31 at 10:33
I take your points, but it seems you misrepresent the overall point of the article. Who says the USSR and China won the war alone? It is not black and white, but the BS from the west implies that the Anglo-Saxons won the war alone.
I don’t find empty political labels of “ultra left” “right” Center Right to be helpful at all and detracts from your otherwise informed post. The facts are facts, we can interpret them however we want, don’t smear folks as left right or polka-dot.
Sadly, the use of emotionally-loaded and biased labels is ubiquitous in our cultured.
I would think that Churchill was a key figure in all of this as well.
Even Wikipedia states that over 75% of German military (Wehrmacht) was destroyed by the Red Army before so-called D day happened.
JonnyJames
2025-12-31 at 11:15
Silly humans, full of hubris and greed, always want to skew events, past, present and future, to make themselves look good and their “enemies” look bad.
For decades, public discourse in the west has been flooded with Russophobic and Sinophobic BS so deep I need a wet-suit. It has become the source of sarcastic humor, and ridicule. The Sycophant-Stenographers that pose as “journalists” are largely ignorant of history, as are the dumbed-down, mis-educated plebs.
Sadly, the vast majority of the population (no matter what level of education) are ignorant of basic facts. In the US, ignorance is a virtue to be celebrated, facts don’t matter. Cynically, we can say none of the facts of WWII really matter because public opinion is manufactured by the oligarchy. There is no “marketplace of ideas”, there is no democratic choice, so fugeddaboudit. Most people will believe what they are told.
Of course, pointing out a few basic uncomfortable facts will get you labeled as “ultra left” or “ultra right”, “a Putin apologist” or some other ad-hom, childish name-calling. We plebs are not allowed to point out flagrant falsehoods of the Ministry of Truth. Nothing new under the sun and all that…
The “good news”:
They can fool most of the people most of the time, but…
Calgacus
2026-01-02 at 13:17
Thanks for the serious reply. Writing the USSR & China out of WWII history is madness. But so is writing the US & UK out of it as Norton naively does. I focused on the serious errors Norton made, not what he did right, the large part of the essay I agree with. As I said “Why mix decent analysis of current events with nonsense about WWII that unlike the real story, only hurts the Left?” Bad WWII history, what I called “Left Revisionism” – seriously damages the Left- right now. It cuts the Left off from the mainstream of society, just spouting another conspiracy theory, instead of the Original Story that you and I – and once everyone – know is true. Good history has the possibility of uniting society against the fascist resurgence. But you gotta get the history right. Norton doesn’t, so he harms his own cause.
JonnyJames: Who says the USSR and China won the war alone?
Ben Norton does:
“It was not the United States and its Western allies that defeated fascism in WWII. That is a myth that is promoted by Hollywood movies. In reality, it was the Soviet Union and China that defeated fascism in WWII.”
JonnyJames: It is not black and white, but the BS from the west implies that the Anglo-Saxons won the war alone.
Yes, “the BS from the west” is the BS I called “Center Revisionism”. You are a sensible person, so you gravitate to the only story that makes sense, the true one that around 100% of the world knew in 1945, “the Original Story”. It is so obviously right that when Norton, naively following the equally blind Chomsky & David Schmitz start spouting equally outrageous BS – it passes notice.
Chomsky-Zinn history, mechanically lambasting the USA, the capitalists, is usually within the spectrum of debate, of reality. The US has a lot of crimes to answer for. But NOT when writing about Lincoln & FDR, not about the Civil War & WWII. Then Chomsky-Zinn history becomes what Marxist Harvey Kaye said about Zinn’s People’s History – “crapping all over Lincoln & FDR”. It’s not a matter of interpretation. Many of the facts presented in Chomsky or Zinn’s or their epigones on the Left’s histories of those eras are just not facts. The Center Revisionism that Norton aims at here is dangerous, but deserves much better & more informed criticism than his. Like Schumans’s in the late 1940s. BTW, Schuman was Henry Wallace’s main foreign policy adviser then; a likely Secretary of State or the like in a Wallace administration.
Attacking Hollywood makes little sense. Sure, some movies tend to “Center Revisionism”, especially those focused on Cold War stories. But Hollywood, like the WWII cinema of every country, tells stories that are remarkably similar to each other. And are better, saner than a great many – maybe most – “academic” works. Especially movies made during or before the war, even before the height of the Cold War, until 1949, say. With movies and TV it is a bit hard to separate noxious revisionism from the natural tendency to focus on one’s own country, so I think that they should be judged charitably. There are essentially no post 1945 “Right Revisionist” movies – because that revisionism is essentially Nazism. But the closeness of all countries’ cinema is an important fact hidden in plain sight. How likely is that, how is that possible? Unless, as is the case, Hollywood & Pinewood (UK) & Mollywood (Moscow Hollywood) are all – just telling the truth – the Original Story?
More revisionist US / FDR bashing with no basis in fact here:
“What the capitalist countries in Western Europe and North America had hoped for was that Nazi Germany would attack the Soviet Union, which they considered their main enemy.”
Not crazy concerning “Western Europe” – but a flat falsehood, a lie for “North America” – the USA. FDR & the USA did NOT consider the USSR an enemy. But DID consider Nazi Germany a great danger and an enemy.