A cannonade of blather has been launched over beaches of Normandy today and many salvoes of freedom and democracy light up the sky there. Let's state the obvious: The great antifascist crusade in Europe failed.
The displacement of Italy and Germany succeeded, but fascism had already taken over nearly all of Europe before September 1, 1939; in the few states purported to represent democracy, democracy was a strange and phony system. No one in Egypt thought England was a democracy; no one in the East Indies thought the Netherlands were a democracy; no one in Congo thought Belgium was a democracy; no one in Vietnam thought France was democracy.
To the Russians who did most of the fighting and dying in the supposed antifascist movement, when that wing of the antifascist drive got to the German-speaking , it areas did not distinguish between fascists and antifascists; if you spoke German, you were a fascist.
Though it was fought with ideological weapons, from the perspective of 2019 it is hard to see the war an Europe is anything but a continuation of the struggle for national hegemonies that had been going on for 500 y.ears
For 50 years after the war ,fascism was suppressed except in Iberia and Greece but only suppressed. People who lived in Europe did not reject it. It's more than a little ironic that the place where antifascist political sentiment is strongest today is probably Germany.
The '30s were low, mean decade. The present time is not yet as low or as mean but we're on the same path.
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