As we honour those who defeated fascism in 1945, we must recognise the fight is far from over

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 were 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 celebrate today, also 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 great victory for the victors to co-opt the defeated fascists to trounce the very freedom fighters who had resisted fascism. In Greece, in Vietnam, in Indonesia, in South Africa, and across the West, the victors employed fascists to preserve the prewar colonial order and the pseudo-liberal regimes whose economic and ethical bankruptcy had begotten fascism.

Today, fascism’s spectre is rising again. In Ukraine – on the very battlefields where it was once crushed – Nazism lives on, armed to the teeth, striking from within both 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, and in its 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, working people who starved and bled to break fascism’s spine. That is the legacy we must reclaim. Not the hollow nationalism of flag-waving and 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 simply 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!

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