HITLER started it. Personally. That – with only slight exaggeration – is what eight year olds are still being taught at school about the origins of the second world war, as I have discovered from conversations with Daddy’s Little Princess senior.

OK, you have got to simplify things for kids. At her age, I’m happy enough to see the girl reading JK Rowling; AJP Taylor can wait. Now is not the time to walk her through contending interpretations, which range from blaming everything on the aggressive expansionism of Nazi Germany to the thesis that world war two was essentially the continuation of world war one.

But of course, other eight years olds in other European countries are being offered entirely different explanations. This is especially the case in eastern Europe, where the conflict still has a resonance far in excess of that to be found here.

In the Baltic States and Poland, in particular, Soviet dictator Stalin is held as much to blame as his Nazi counterpart. They point to the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of 1939, as a carve-up that implicates the USSR as much as Germany.

Earlier this year, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe passed a resolution recommending that 23 August, the date the pact was signed, be observed as a day of remembrance for the victims of all totalitarian and authoritarian regimes.

Such a position might as well have been purposely calculated to cause apoplexy in Moscow, where world war two is known as the Great Patriotic War, on the understandable basis that the eastern front was the location of one-third of the 70m deaths arising from the global hostilities.

While the claim that the USSR should take most credit for the military defeat of the Third Reich chimes with the nationalist agenda regnant in the Kremlin, it has sufficient accord with the truth to represent more than propaganda. On any fair reading of history, the contention is true.

Moreover, the experience of Britain’s wartime alliance with the Soviet Union was a seminal event for the UK left. The Communist Party of Great Britain, despite the twists and turns it had to go through every step of the way, and despite its shameful strikebreaking role, saw its membership jump from single-figure thousands to perhaps 60,000 on the back of the reflected prestige.

I can still remember discussions with that generation, who continued to be actively involved in the east London labour movement when I arrived on the political scene in the early 1980s. Vicarious pride in the achievement of ‘their Red Army comrades’ clearly sustained a lifetime of political commitment for many of them.

That just leaves the need to explain away the shabby and cynical little deal concluded by two certain foreign ministers way back when.

Those sympathetic to Russia routinely compare the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact to another shabby and cynical little deal struck in Munich the previous year, in which Chamberlain and Daladier agreed to let Hitler detach Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia.

Morally, it is difficult to maintain equivalence. It’s not as if Britain and France said ‘alright then, Adolf, if you must. Bagsy Carpathian Ruthenia and we’ll shake on it.’ The case that both were essentially attempts to play for time, at whatever expense to other peoples, probably bears more scrutiny.

But evidence suggests that rather than using the period that followed the Ribbentrop-Molotov to enhance war preparations, Stalin was actually surprised when the Nazi tanks rolled into his turf.

All that is for the historians. Ideologically, the importance of the OSCE’s call is the explicit attempt to draw an ‘equals’ sign between fascism and Stalinism. At the analytical level, the anti-Stalinist left can make the case that the social content of the two systems was qualitatively different, but we should always be mindful of the quantitative similarities. On balance, lesser evilism dictated critical support for the USSR.

But ultimately, it is not our job retrospectively to defend Soviet foreign policy seven decades after the event, and nor is it our job to specify what commemorative events are appropriate for countries with varying historical experiences.

As historical experience of Stalinism renders plain, repudiation of its legacy is a sine qua non for the rehabilitation of any meaningful Marxist project today.

KICK over the wall, cause governments to fall, how can you refuse it? Once again, I’m showing my age by introducing a blog post with a couple of lines from a Clash track. But the sentiment expressed here constitutes an aphorism that should hold good for anybody on the far left, irrespective of generation.

So it is that in about a week, Europe will mark the 20th anniversary of that unforgettable day in Berlin when the wall that was very likely the reference in this particular lyric was indeed kicked over, and in some places, torn apart by hand.

Its destruction was thankfully followed in short order by the demise of the repressive dictatorship that cowered behind it. Take any analytical position you like on the Deutsche Demokratische Republik – actually existing socialism, state capitalism, deformed workers’ state, you name it – but there is no getting away from the sick joke that inhered in the very choice of name.

This was a government sustained essentially by the presence of the Red Army rather than any real degree of legitimacy in the eyes of those it ruled. Where the border wasn’t walled off, it tended to be landmined.

Not good enough for you? Don’t forget that it was also patrolled by frontier guards with orders to shoot to kill those – and there were many – willing to run through the minefields.

For those that stayed put, all group assemblies were subject to police and political control, with anti-government meetings illegal. Academic and intellectual life was controlled by the state, on the grounds that ‘education must serve the party’. Surveillance was prevalent on a scale beyond New Labour’s wettest dreams.

Trade unions were not independent. The press was heavily censored, as was artistic expression. Dissidents were subject to beatings, harsh prison conditions, psychological harassment and work camps.

The DDR was, in short, the antithesis of any vision of socialism worth having. Nobody on the left should regret the downfall of the vicious gerontocratic Stalinist clique that tried to hold it together.

Yet some sections of the left almost certainly do regret it. Keep a look out for apologetics of one stripe or another in the days ahead. The DDR instantiated non-capitalist property forms, we will repeatedly be told, and that is not a point I would dispute at the theoretical level. And women had the right to free abortion on demand. As many times as they needed it, in fact.

The most interesting debate to be had here is whether it might have been possible to bring about democracy without a return to capitalism. But given developments elsewhere in eastern Europe, and the inevitably desire for reunification with the other half of Germany, that was never realistically on the cards.

Instead, the fall of the wall by the spontaneous mass action of those it was designed to cage in, and the emphatic rejection of Stalinist authoritarianism this represented, should be regarded by the left as one of the great moments in history, for the symbolism alone.

JOHN Demjanjuk – currently standing trial in Munich, accused of complicity in the murder of 27,900 Jews at Sobibor concentration camp in world war two – is 89 years old and apparently in failing health.

Let’s work on the basis that he really did do the wicked things of which he is accused; the prosecution is seemingly confident of its case, even almost 70 years after the killings took place. Is justice really served by putting Demjanjuk in the dock?

That’s the question Holocaust historian David Ceserani asks in the Independent this morning. Ceserani, himself Jewish and the author of a recent book on Eichmann, has previously advocated that perpetrators of Nazi genocide should be brought to book in all circumstances, irrespective of the passage of time. But in this instance, he takes the opposite stance.

Let us grant that if Demjanjuk is as ill as he looks, and not just play acting, than incarceration is out of the question. Banging up elderly and frail individuals – even elderly and frail former death camp guards – is clearly inhumane. The good society extends humanity even towards those who did not show it themselves. What we are still left with is the educative value of the judicial process.

The question of retribution for the horrors of the twentieth century is a live issue in many countries. They handle them in different ways.

The Nuremberg trials were externally imposed on Germany, and subsequent Entnazifizierung was always half-hearted if that. Ceserani rightly details the lenient sentences dealt out to war criminals in West Germany in the immediate post-war decades. His point that Demjanjuk is originally Ukrainian, and thus an ideal scapegoat, is well made.

France prosecuted Vichy collaborators in a series of trials that continued into the 1990s. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission guaranteed kid glove treatment to the architects of apartheid.

In eastern Europe, Stalinist bureaucrats routinely reinvented themselves as democratic politicians. Only in Germany and – to a lesser extent - Poland have many of them suffered real sanction.

Spain, by contrast, has consistently been determined to fudge Franquismo by trying to pretend it never happened. Indeed, a 1977 amnesty law passed during the transition to democracy was a clear indicator that these matters were then judged too sensitive for anybody to be brought to book.

Last year, prosecuting magistrate Baltasar Garzón threatened to bring posthumous charges against those behind the disappearance of 114,000 people over the 15 years following Franco’s rebellion against a democratically elected republican administration, right in the middle of the tensest decade in European history. Opposition from the political right led to the idea being dropped.

What purpose, then, can there be in resurrecting history? Well, firstly there is the argument that some increment of moral satisfaction accrues to surviving victims - or more likely their descendents - of course. Good.

This is a minor consideration. At every level other than the emotional, those so avenged will not be any better off as a result of a formal finding that those they already know to be culpable were indeed guilty.

What is more important is that future generations are not under the impression that atrocity can meet with impunity. It is right to make Demjanjuk stand trial and account for his atrocities, for the historical record alone. Thereafter take him to the hospital, for whatever amount of time he has left.

BACK in 2000 - the year in which ‘The Holocaust Industry’ was first published - I can plausibly claim to have been too preoccupied with the arrival of my first child to have kept up to speed with then-current controversies.

But to allow almost a decade to elapse without picking up on what must rank as the most important polemic of the twenty-first century so far was clearly a bad call on my part, which I have rectified in the last few days.

Norman Finkelstein’s work remains of sufficient first-rank import that all educated people should feel themselves obliged to read it and then take a position on the issues it raises.

The book is based on the premise that the historical reality of the Nazi holocaust has since 1967 been hijacked by ‘Jewish elites’ in the US, and transformed into an ‘indispensable ideological weapon’, used to justify unquestioning Washington support for the actions of the state of Israel.

It also details the way in which the memory of the murder of up to 6m Jews has been used to ‘shake down’ both Switzerland and Germany for large sums of money in respect of their real or alleged complicity or culpability in these events.

The standard charge against Finkelstein is that his account dovetails neatly in the narratives of the neo-Nazi far right, resurrecting the Shylock stereotype of Jewish hucksters out to extract a pound of gentile flesh.

Yet serious scholarship - much of it undertaken by Jewish men and women - has for many years undermined key aspects of the authorised version of what happened in the holocaust.

The work of Raul Hilberg and Hannah Arendt, for instance, highlighted uncomfortable but undeniable findings that bourgeois elements within some Jewish communities in Nazi-occupied Europe sought to save their own skins by various degrees of collaboration with the SS.

The facts of the Rudolf Kastner case are a matter of historical record. Aware that by 1944, Hungarian Jews were being shipped to Auschwitz at the rate of 12,000 a day, Budapest-based Zionist leader Kastner negotiated with Adolf Eichmann the passage to Switzerland of 1,685 wealthy Jews, in exchange for money, gold and diamonds.

An Israeli court, ruling on a libel action brought by the Israeli government against a critic of Kastner in 1955, found that he had effectively damned the many to save the few. He was subsequently assassinated, after which the verdict was overturned by the supreme court.

Morally speaking, it is possible to put a number of constructions on Kastner’s actions. Perhaps, it might be maintained, he preserved the lives of those whose lives it was possible to preserve, and nothing he could have done would have prevented the deaths of the others. Which of us, had we found ourselves in his circumstances, would not at least have been tempted to do as he did?

But another obvious reading is that he cynically acted in the narrow interests of his own class, to the fatal detriment of the impoverished majority of Hungarian Jewry.

Finkelstein’s book effectively charges that today’s American Jewish elite, motivated once again by class interests, have advanced their own political ideas and bankrolled the projects that instantiate these positions by using the holocaust to delegitimise criticism of their goals.

That is not an accusation to be made lightly, and Finkelstein’s pervasive rhetorical flourishes do him no favours. But if you are going to engage in polemic, there is no point in not stating your stance as aggressively as our media-dominated age requires.

Ultimately the documentation is sufficiently meticulous to seem to me persuasive; Finkelstein’s thesis only falls if the underlying evidence used to buttress it can be refuted, and as far as I am aware, nobody has been able to achieve that.

Yet looking at some of the reviews from the time, I remain a little puzzled by the reaction to publication of ‘The Holocaust Industry’ in some quarters of the British left. You can read what Alex Callinicos, a leader of the Socialist Workers’ Party, had to say about it back in 2000 here.

Amid the somewhat forced praise - ‘Finkelstein ... has raised legitimate questions’ - Callinicos compares some of the author’s formulations with the ‘rantings’ of holocaust denier David Irving. He concludes:

But so exaggerated is his polemic that at times [Finkelstein] comes, quite contrary to his own intentions, dangerously close to giving comfort to those who dream of new holocausts.

That, I think, is an unfortunate way to characterise the writings of an academic who has done his best to set down the truth as he sees it, much as that will discomfit many. That no more damns the work of Finkelstein than it discredited the work of Hilberg or Arendt. If there are any guilty parties here, they are those whose actions Finkelstein simply documents.

Yet in more recent years, Callinicos himself has reportedly been ready to mount a qualified defence of the ‘Thermidorian’ regime in Iran, a government that really is headed by a holocaust denier who does indeed dream of wiping Israel off the map.

Finally, you will notice that the link to the Callinicos article leads to the archive of a US-based Marxist discussion list. This is because the piece appears to have been taken down from the website of Socialist Worker, the journal in which it was originally published.

Hopefully someone will be able to let me know the technical reason for this step, and reassure me that the removal was not purposely undertaken as a gesture of friendship between the SWP and their Islamist allies of convenience a few years back. Surely that could not be enough to justify an about face on an issue of such monumental impact on recent history?