De wapens aan ons

Paradoxaal antimilitarisme van Nederlandse communisten tijdens het interbellum

Samenvatting

Dutch communists identified themselves as antimilitarist throughout the interwar period, as they protested and propagated against imperialism, war, and fascism. At the same time they glorified civil war as necessary means to create world peace. This article attempts to clarify this apparent contradiction by tracing Dutch communist ideology concerned with war and militarism. The case study focuses on the prediction of a second World War at the Sixth World Congress of the Comintern in 1928 up until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. This article explains how the consolidation of the Soviet Union replaced classic Marxist ideas of a fatherland-lacking international proletariat with communist beliefs of honourable self-sacrifice for the proletarian fatherland, by focussing on the communist heritage of the First World War. The second section examines the nature of the predicted world war from 1928 onwards, along with its implications for the Dutch Communist Party and their youth movement. The final section is dedicated to the actions which Dutch communists undertook to protect their proletarian fatherland from a hostile coalition of imperialists, fascists, and social-fascists who were believed to prepare a war to destroy the Soviet Union. This article shows how Dutch communist youths began to see themselves as freedom fighters with a belief in what they considered a just proletarian war.