“General your tank is a powerful vehicle….it has only one defect: it needs a driver”
Capitalists fear war. And well they should. Never mind that their system knows no end to pillage and destruction. Never mind that it has temporarily solved its major contradictions through two world wars. Capitalists fear war because it drafts young workers, trains these conscripts as soldiers and puts guns in their hands.
Many know that World War I ended when workers and conscripted soldiers took power in Russia and built a socialist Soviet Union. Likewise, as a result of World War II, Chinese workers and peasants were able to seize power, throw out all the imperialist exploiters and start to build a socialist society.
What is less clearly understood is that these revolutions were not isolated incidents, but rather the most organized expressions of a revolutionary internationalism that swept the whole world. We have written before about the Indian Naval Mutiny at the end of World War II. Lead by Sikh, Moslem, and Hindu sailors, it marked the beginning of the end of the British Empire. Among other demands, it called for Indian troops to be withdrawn from Indonesia!
What were Indian troops doing in Indonesia? It turns out they were part of the British Army that invaded Indonesia to disarm the Japanese. That was the mandate handed the British. However, that wasn’t their dirty scheme. They planned to disarm the Japanese and hand Indonesia back to the Dutch.
It was a plan that unleashed the fury of the largely unorganized Indonesian youth and workers. Even before the British arrived, working out of local ethnic or religious groups, they had taken over offices, mines, plantations, railways and radio stations from the Japanese. The British troops arrived on September 29, 1945. The first soldier was killed on October 11.
Turn the Guns Around!
As the resistance grew the British realized they needed the help of the Japanese troops to put down the rebellion. Instead of disarming them, they recruited them. But some 200 defected to the Indonesian side. In this, the Japanese soldiers were following the lead of some 600 Indian troops.
Refusing to take part in what became a bloody massacre in city of Surabaya, a British paratrooper unit staged a sit-down and had to be sent home. Another group of British soldiers put out a resistance newspaper in Jakarta. Some Australian troops handed their weapons over to the largely unarmed Indonesian rebels.
Australian dockworkers and seamen refused to carry troops or munitions to the war zone in a political strike that affected some 500 ships. Indian dockworkers were brought in to break the strike but they, too, promptly joined it. Collections to support the strikers were held on board British warships in Sydney Harbor with a delegation elected to hand the money over to their Indian brothers, turning 200 years of colonial occupation upside down.
In Holland, widespread anger at their government’s plan to re-colonize Indonesia spread among the Dutch soldiers. They organized a massive demonstration in Amsterdam followed by a two-day general strike.
Several days, later soldiers at the Harderwijk camp near Amsterdam bluntly refused orders to ship out to Indonesia and formed a committee representing 150 rank-and-file communist soldiers to seek support from the Dutch working class.
The story of this explosion of working class revolutionary internationalism is still hidden from our history, whether in books or films. Along with others, like the Indian Naval Mutiny, it shows that World War II was more than a struggle between imperialist powers to divide or re-divide the world. It was primarily an opportunity for the international working class to use its revolutionary potential to change the world.
The politics of the international communist movement in those days— socialism and national liberation – ultimately led to its defeat. Nevertheless, the scale and revolutionary force of the internationalism that was unleashed still scares the capitalists.
Learning from the mistakes of previous communists, ICWP is building today an international Party fighting for communism, not socialism or national liberation. Let the imperialists start their wars. Our revolutionary history tells us that we can and will finish them!
Posted 3/17/2017
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