Translated "Avante!"article by Albano Nunes, Member of the International Department

World War One 1914/18 Armistice centenary was officially celebrated with a peace ephemeris and surrounded, both in France and Portugal, by the most hypocrite considerations of universal attachment on peace and fraternity. When Macron, the main celebration event master of ceremonies, with France involved in NATO’s reinforcement, armament run amid the European Union and multiple military operations in the Middle East and Africa besides being the advocate of an “European Army” (which Trump considers to be a challenge to the USA hegemony amid the imperialist field) what credit holds his statement on “ let us promise and give priority to peace and place it above everything”?

In fact, struggle for peace is a current imperative but only consequent if USA, NATO, EU and Japan’s aggressive strategy is frontally fought and the militarist escalade, in which almost all capitalist great powers are committed in coalition, as rivals, against workers and peoples, ought to be denounced.
Rivalries, that the capitalist system structural crisis deepening is sharpening and holds amid its bulge, conflicts of tragic proportions, as precisely what happened with the 1914/18 War. Peace talk, but war is prepared, a war that in this nuclear era ought to represent humanity holocaust.

It is indispensable to undo the colossal lie that the Armistice was an act of peace. It was not. Instead, it was an act that opened the path to the sharing of the world among the then great capitalist powers. The Versailles Treaty, signed a few months after, was a plunder treaty –“ this is not peace but conditions imposed by bandits” – Lenine declared – that nurtured the German revanchists unto the Second World War. Proletarian Russia, the country that firstly fought against war carnage, was removed from the treaty. The just peace and no annexations for which the young soviet power fought for, did not fit in the winner powers’ plans.

During the celebrations, another issue, not to be mentioned, although concerning the greatest, important and most spectacular event related with 1914/18 War: the October Revolution, and with it, the impetuous development of the worker class revolutionary movement and the national liberation movement, throughout the whole world. This was the great event and the Armistice and Versailles Treaty were conceived against it. A new historical époque was born, the passage from capitalism unto socialism, together with the merciless class struggle, capitalism in crisis seeking for fascism and war, in order to stop the liberating advance. History does not repeat itself, but there are lessons one ought never to forget. And when the worst reaction boosts its head, and the drums of war beat, it is the time to work together unto the struggle against exploitation, for democracy and peace, against prevarication and the forging of historical truth.