May Day, 60th V-E Day, 60th Hiroshima-Nagasaki Day, 30th Victory in Vietnam Day

As May Day, International Workers Day, May 1, approaches, this year being on a Sunday with larger than usual celebrations and renewals of commitment to the struggle, this year we also commemorate the 60th Anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps and Victory in Europe on May 8, the 30th Anniversary of the Victory of the Workingclass of the World in Vietnam on April 30, 1975 and the 60th Anniversary of the first act of the Cold War, the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.

For the sake of the younger generation who must carry on, this history is recalled as it is the heritage we all defend daily.

We salute the Red Army that liberated Auschwitz in January 1945, Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945 and Sachsenhausen on April 22, 1945. It was the Red Army that, in spite of the counter-revolutionary Stalin, fought the decisive battle of World War 2, the Battle of Stalingrad of the winter of 1942-1943, and won the race to Berlin against the US, which began its opposition to Nazi Germany with its invasion of Europe in June 1944, 6 years after Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1945, the official commencement of World War 2.

We salute the Americans for liberating some European death camps and for liberating the Japanese prisoner of war camp where my mother, a Holocaust refugee, was imprisoned as a member of the Dutch Army medical corps in the former Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, in 1945, sometime after Pres. Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, after they spent a great deal of time conquering real estate in the Pacific Ocean area.

World War 2 ended with an anti-communist warning to the Soviet Union, poised to attack Japan, that the 20th century was to be an American Century, with the unnecessary and unjustifiable nuclear bombing of Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, forcing us all to live under the terror of the nuclear threat of capitalism and its profit motive.

Just as Victory in Europe Day, May 8, 1945, was the happiest day in the life for the World War 2 generation, who had great hopes that a far better, socialist world would rise out of the ashes of that nightmare, so too is Victory in Vietnam Day, April 30, 1975, the happiest day in the life of the anti-imperialist members of the Vietnam War generation, whose hopes were not so great, but who understood that the "little people in black pajamas" had defeated the mightiest military death machine of the United States, the world had seen since Nazi Germany, thus ending the illusion of the "American Century" 30 years after the world's workingclass ended the illusion of the Nazis' Thousand Year Reich, which lasted 12 years.

Labor was not a major part of the peace movement of the 1960s-1970s as it was primarily a student anti-draft movement ending for the most part with the end of the draft in in 1973. The post-World War 2 prosperity of 1945-1973 quelled serious labor support.

That prosperity is long gone and now, for May Day, the call to organize the unorganized must be loud and clear if we are to stop the war and fascism of the US capitalist class in the 21st Century.

Happy May Day!