Alex Constantine - August 17, 2007
" ... From the early 1930s to the early 1940s, the left was totally destroyed in most of Europe (Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain, Hungary, Japan, Poland) or reduced to a shell of its past influence (France, Norway) or isolated from the main centres of power (China, Indochina) or coopted into imperialist regimes (Britain, us). Tens of millions of workers, peasants and others were killed; hundreds of millions were ruled by bloody tyrants who allowed not even elemental class organisations. There were theorists then, on both the right and left, who saw the new rising fascist or "bureaucratic" power (Burnham) as "the wave of the future" (Lindbergh), impregnable and all-powerful.26 Some intellectuals turned toward philosophic and literary exercises in the occupied areas (Sartre, Camus). Fascism and imperialism surged from the capitalist economic crisis of the East and West and the passivity of the left. Social democrats in Germany and Austria offered to share power with the Nazis until they were physically driven from office, some jailed, others exiled, a few remaining in Germany unmolested. ... "
http://www.dsp.org.au/links/node/105