Statement of Secretariat of the ECI on 9 May

We proudly commemorate 9 May, a milestone of the Great Antifascist Victory of the Peoples. We pay tribute to the millions of people who sacrificed their lives, fought with guns in their hands, and struggled against the fascist imperialist Axis of Germany–Italy–Japan and their allies. We honour the decisive contribution of the Soviet Union and the glorious Red Army, which suffered 20 million casualties, and the invaluable contribution of the Communist Parties that led the national liberation and anti-fascist movements around the world.

We are inspired by the Antifascist Victory of the Peoples and strengthen our daily struggle against the EU and bourgeois governments, against all those who provocatively attempt to distort9 May and turn it into “EU Day”. We continuein defiance of those who try to turn black into white by equating communism with the monster of fascism and falsifying History so that the peoples, especially the youth, forget the Antifascist Victory of the peoples and its historical lessons.

The Second World War, like the first one andthe current war in Ukraine, is a result of imperialist contradictions and competition for the redivision of markets and spheres of influence. The people pay a heavy price for the condemnable Russian invasion of Ukraine, like the previous US-NATO-EU interventions that led to it: dead and wounded people, refugees, extremely expensive energy and fuel, and high prices. The pretexts used by imperialists of the bourgeois classes for the imperialist war in Ukraine are accompanied by anti-communism, unhistorical sermons, and alleged slogans of de-Nazification. The history of the Antifascist Victory of the Peoples and overall of the Second World War clearly proves that Nazism–fascism is a creation of the capitalist system itself. That is why the struggle against fascism is inseparable from the struggle against the capitalist system that gives rise to it. We repel the attempt made by bourgeois forces to arrogate the anti-fascist struggle andVictory of the peoples. Their utterly false and hypocritical “anti-fascism” is replete with anti-communism.

That is why today the right side of History is found in the camp of the peoples against the camp of the imperialists; it is found in the struggle in every country against the imperialist war in Ukraine, the struggle for the immediate cessation of the participation and involvement of each country in the imperialist war.

We draw lessons from the Great Antifascist Victory. Socialism once again proved its superiority by the indisputable fact that in the same territory where the massacre of peoples is taking place today, different peoples and ethnicities had been living together for decades in the USSR. We continue with the unshakable belief that socialism is timely and necessary, that it is the only answer to the barbaric capitalist system, which gives onlypoverty, wars, and refugees.