The front page headline of today’s Morning Star is a bold lie. Following the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact the Morning Star wasn’t anti-fascist. It was, as it is today, dismissive of the capitalist Western democracies, opposing rearmament and undermining the war effort until 1941. We should never allow the communists to forget…

Whereas democratic socialists like Aneurin Bevan unequivocally backed the war, Communist Party members were resolving their own stances in the wake of the Stalin-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact in August. On instructions from the Communist International’s Moscow headquarters to regard the war as one between imperialist powers for imperialist objectives. The Comintern put the Soviet national interest of the “first socialist state” ahead of the policy needs of individual communist parties and nations elsewhere. Palme Dutt, the Party’s leading theoretician, headed the majority of the traitorous central committee who took the Comintern’s line, of not supporting Britain in an “imperialist war”. The Morning Star’s editorial line reflected the central committee’s diktat, declaring in December 1939 that the war against Hitler was not “a people’s war.”

It was not until the Nazis attacked the Soviets in 1941 that the paper’s editorial line changed. The true history of the Morning Star newspaper is not one of forever fighting fascism.