The battles of ideas and historical erasure
In an intellectual landscape dominated by imperialist narratives, marginalized communities face an urgent struggle against historical amnesia and factual distortion. The post-Soviet era birthed a generation conditioned by neoliberal hegemony – a worldview manufactured in Washington and Brussels, steeped in Francis Fukuyama’s triumphalist “End of History”. This period of US unipolarity witnessed the unchecked expansion of hyper-imperialism, where corporate power subsumed state sovereignty, not toward egalitarianism but toward the total subordination of the Global South.
The collapse of the Soviet Union enabled imperialist forces to rewrite history systematically, erasing alternative epistemologies. Academia, media, and popular culture became battlegrounds where the contributions of adversaries were muted or vilified, while Western achievements were hyperbolized.
The Soviet Union’s deliberate marginalization in WWII historiography
Nowhere is this erasure more egregious than in the western portrayal of World War II. The Soviet Union, which suffered 27 million casualties and annihilated 80% of the Third Reich’s armies, is reduced to a footnote in mainstream narratives. The seminal events like the 872-day Siege of Leningrad, where civilian casualties exceeded total US military death in the entire war, receive disproportionately scant attention compared to Western Front engagements. Even the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz, Majdanek and other concentration camps is obscured, while Zionist Israel – ostensibly a guardian of Jewish memory – remains conspicuously silent.
Western historiography attributes Soviet success solely to the US-USSR Lend-Lease Agreement, framing the alliance as one of mere convenience. This revisionism parallels the moral equivalence drawn between communism and Nazism – a false dichotomy that equates Stalin with Hitler and Marshal Zhukov with Himmler. Such distortions serve to traumatize communist sympathizers and legitimize imperialist hegemony.
The Global South’s exploited labor and resources
Imperialist erasure extends beyond the USSR (and now Russia). The Global South’s material and human contributions to the Allied victory are similarly negated.
Sub-Saharan Africans were conscripted to fight in the Pacific Theater against strangers with whom they had no quarrel. North and West Africans were deployed as cannon fodder against Hitler’s armies, while Latin America and Asia supplied the raw materials that sustained Allied economies.
Indian soldiers for example played a key role in the defeat of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and Japan in almost all theaters of the WWII. It is estimated that 2.5 million Indians fought in various theaters including North Africa and Italy. But out of pragmatic reasons the right wing BJP government has increasingly shied away from taking part in May 9 Victory Day commemorations, reckoning its geopolitical interests.
There has been a great economic dimension under-acknowledged. For example The Belgian Congo supplied 80% of Allied uranium, while Malayan rubber and West African agricultural products sustained Allied industrial production.
Africa’s anti-fascist resistance predated the European war. In 1935, Mussolini’s Italy invaded Ethiopia – the only African nation to defeat a colonial power post-Berlin Conference. This underscores that the Global South’s resistance to fascism was foundational, not peripheral.
One of my grandfathers passed away in 2006, his final years marked by an unfulfilled longing to reconnect with his Nigerian comrades from his service in the Burma Campaign. Like many colonial veterans, he retained an unwavering – if tragically misplaced – faith that the British Crown would eventually recognize his distinguished service to the “House of Windsor” (British Ruling Royal House) with promised bonuses or reparations. This quiet hope persisted despite his complete loss of contact with fellow soldiers and the absence of any formal acknowledgment from imperial authorities.
His case exemplifies what historian David Killingray terms the “hollow covenant” of colonial military service – where pledges of postwar compensation were systematically deferred or denied to African troops . The archival invisibility of soldiers like my grandfather, Joji Kihwelo “Simbakalia”, underscores the structural neglect of non-European combatants in British war records. Colonial contingents have often appeared as statistical aggregates rather than named individuals in imperial archives, rendering their service anonymous and their claims unverifiable. This personal narrative mirrors broader patterns of institutional forgetting: fewer than 12% of East African veterans received the land grants or pensions they were owed as Killingray argued, while oral histories of their contributions remain conspicuously absent from mainstream WWII memorialization. Hence my grandfather’s story (which is shared millions in Global South) thus transcends familial memory; it embodies the collective betrayal of colonial soldiers whose sacrifices were instrumental to Allied victory yet excluded from its historical and material rewards.
Reclaiming Victory Day for the global working people
May 9 is not merely a Russian commemoration but a day for the Global South to assert its legacy. As Russian troops parading the Red Square and global dignitaries lay flowers on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, we must reflect on Victory Day’s contemporary relevance: a call to dismantle neocolonial structures that still deny the Global South prosperity and self-determination.
The fight against fascism was waged by Soviet soldiers, Ethiopian and Chinese peasants, Black and Latin Americans as well as Vietnamese guerrillas alike. Their collective struggle must be reclaimed – not as nostalgia, but as a blueprint for liberation. Nevertheless, the struggle for not to forget and deterrence against disillusionment is the nucleus and the foundation to enable us to succeed in the quest for complete liberation. The Global South must resist any attempt to alienate and/or footnoting it in such important historical events.
A luta continua, contra o esquecimento.
This article was first published by Sauti ya Ujamaa Blog.
