Ceylonese activism during World War II and need for a new peace movement

Ninth May, 2025, marked 80 years since the Soviet Red Army defeated Nazi Germany.

- BY SHIRAN ILLANPERUMA

Of all the allied powers, the Soviet Union paid the highest price in the war against Nazism and Fascism-27 million Soviet citizens were killed, including every second member of the Communist Party. In the occupied territories of the USSR, around 1.5 million children were exterminated by the Nazis. War does not stop at destroying living labour - around 73,000 Soviet settlements were razed and 32,000 enterprises destroyed during the Nazi onslaught.

The scale of the atrocity is numbing to read, even today.

Significantly, the red flag raised over the Reichstag also signalled the disintegration of the classical colonial system. The weakening of European colonial powers during the war and the subsequent moral prestige of socialism in the Third World enabled the sequence of national liberation struggles that ensued in the coming decades.

It is no surprise that the historic Bandung Conference, which sparked the non-aligned movement and the Third World project, occurred almost exactly a decade after the end of the Second World War.

As Sri Lankan communist Pieter Keuneman noted in an essay, "Sri Lanka and the victory over fascism", penned 40 years ago:

"Victory over fascism has also provided a powerful spur to the democratisation of international relations. It has made it possible for nearly half the world's population, whom imperialism had excluded from any say in world affairs, to emerge as an independent force that has made-and continues to make-an important and positive contribution to the world-wide fight for peace, disarmament, decolonisation and social progress."