In a speech to the 12th Xiangshan Forum in Beijing, Sevim Dagdelen warns of a growing historical revisionism to whitewash Germany and Japan’s role in WWII.
The following is an address delivered by Sevim Dagdelen, foreign policy spokesperson for the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (Germany) to the 12th Xiangshan Forum in Beijing, which took place from from Sept. 17 to 19.
Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit, Kyrgyzstan, 2013. (Office of the President of the Russian Federation)
By Sevim Dagdelen
The High Representative of the European Union, Kaja Kallas, declared in September 2025 that it was entirely new to her that Russia and China referred to a shared past as fighters against fascism and militarism in the second world war. Russia and China wanted to rewrite history, and the world believed them, according to Kallas.
One could dismiss this statement by one of the E.U.’s highest representatives as confused or uninformed. What is interesting, however, is that it encountered no objection from the heads of state and government of Germany, France, Poland and Italy. One must therefore understand Kallas’s historical judgment as an expression of an E.U. policy that seeks to rewrite history in order to flank the preparation for war with historical politics.
In any case, Kallas’s remark is reminiscent of the phrase by the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana (1863-1952): “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
The Role of the USSR and China in the Second World War
When the Third Reich attacked the U.S.S.R., 27 million people were killed, the majority of them civilians. In the attack of Japanese militarism on China, 20 million people died, among them 16 million civilians. The U.S.S.R and China bore the main burden in the fight against the Anti-Comintern Pact, which the Nazi regime and the Japanese empire joined in 1936.
Japanese soldier overlooking Chinese corpses along the Qinhuai River during the Nanjing Massacre, 1937. (Murase Moriyasu, Public Domain, Copyright Act of 1970)
That pact was complemented by the secret German-Japanese agreement of 1937. Joint plans of military intelligence aimed at dividing central Asia and the Caucasus into German and Japanese spheres of influence. Regarding the U.S.S.R., there were, in addition, joint partition plans aimed at creating colonies with the help of separatist and fascist militias in the Caucasus and in Ukraine.
In the new transmitted historical images, the simple negation of history becomes a means to an end — a negation that is intended not only to make people forget the crimes of the Nazi regime and Japanese militarism but above all to seek a revision of the outcomes of the second world war.
From the Potsdam Agreement to a Multipolar World
Eighty years ago, in Cecilienhof Palace at Potsdam, U.S. president Harry Truman, British prime minister Winston Churchill, and the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the U.S.S.R., Josef Stalin, agreed on the Potsdam Agreement. As a consequence, the U.N. was founded.
Germany and Japan had attempted with their imperialist wars of plunder to subjugate the U.S.S.R. and China and to divide the countries. Both powers failed due to bitter anti-fascist resistance. On the ruins of the destructive works of the Third Reich and the Japanese empire, a multipolar world was to emerge, not least shaped by the national liberation struggle of colonised peoples.
However, already with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. leadership attempted to intimidate their former allies and to establish its own hegemony through “atomic diplomacy.”
The West as an Unwilling Midwife of a New Epoch
At the end of the cold war, this calculus seemed to have succeeded, and confidently one spoke of the only remaining world power and the “end of history.” However, in these days little remains of that optimism of NATO.
The meeting of heads of state and government under the framework of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation was received with shock by the Western elites. For now, it is becoming exactly that multipolar world whose prevention over decades had determined its own geopolitical agenda.
Like apprentice sorcerers whose instruments of power slip from their control, U.S. President Donald Trump, with his punitive tariffs against India and — with qualifications — also German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, with the conclusion of the German-Japanese armaments agreement, have revealed to the world that a departure from colonialism can only be achieved against the West and its leading powers.
Japanese Minister of Defense Nakatani meeting H.E. Boris Pistorius, German Federal Minister of Defense, Oct. 19, 2024. (Japan Ministry of Defense)
Thus, the West has been and is the unwilling midwife of a new epoch. The corresponding German-Japanese secret protection agreement in the military field was already signed in 2021. Now, after the visit of German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul to Japan in August 2025, the military co-operation between the two countries is to be massively intensified, for example, through the development of the German cruise missile “Taurus” by Japanese companies for the propulsion of the weapons system.
The Return of Colonialism in a New Form
However, anyone who believes that these setbacks could foster a reversal in the West is mistaken. U.S. President Trump is now attempting to bind all NATO states into a trade war alliance against China, with the goal that trade partners like Germany impose punitive tariffs on Beijing and New Delhi in the range of 50 to 100 per cent.
The pretext is to target Russia — but the real aim, however, is the imposition of a colonial world order. Just as Trump attempts to position NATO against China, this reflection is found in the military domain: since the NATO summit in The Hague in June, China has officially become a target of the military pact.
“[S]ince the NATO summit in The Hague in June, China has officially become a target of the military pact.”
Through bilateral military agreements by NATO member states with Asian countries and Australia, front states are being attempted that can also provoke conflicts. Germany is among the countries that are going ahead alongside the U.S., through agreements with Japan, the Philippines and a strategic partnership with Singapore.
Denial of Reality and Loss of Power
If historians later look back on this time, they will be astonished by how precisely the West, through trade wars and proxy wars, damaged its own interests, and at the same time desperately tried to impose its will on other countries — such as India.
But whoever decides which country may trade with who must accept the accusation of colonialism. It is a mindset that recalls the unequal treaties of the 19th century. At the same time, it is an expression of a backwards-looking policy, for the global balance of power has changed fundamentally.
Neither China nor Russia nor India allows its policy to be dictated any longer by Washington, Brussels, Berlin or Tokyo. The rise of the global South, the West has simply missed.
There is in this indeed something deeply irrational — and yet a piece of dangerous denial of reality. For instead of working together toward a multipolar world and remembering the founding idea of the U.N., one gives in to the illusion that one can return to a politics of fragmentation and division — and “ruin Russia,” as the former German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock so unwittingly aptly put it.
Responsibility for a Multipolar World
There is, therefore, more than ever a common responsibility to stand for the equality of sovereign states in this world and for the shaping of a multipolar order. In this world, there is certainly room for many things — but not for the politics of a backwards-looking, nostalgic colonialism.
However, anyone expecting the U.S. to voluntarily give up the concept of global hegemony — in view of plans to station U.S. troops more extensively on the American continent — may be mistaken.
Everything points to a return of the West to a cold war strategy: a strategy of rollback, with new priorities in the world regions. Latin America and a claimed Western hemisphere seem to be the first focus of the U.S., while in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, Washington’s allies are placed in the front row, to preserve U.S. resources.
This unavoidably recalls the words of Mao Zedong: “The United States of America are the main stronghold of modern colonialism.”
But the emergence of a multipolar world is irreversible. What matters more and more are partnerships for mutual security and peaceful development to the benefit of all. We have a just world to gain. We should not let this opportunity pass.
Sevim Dagdelen is former member of the Bundestag and foreign policy spokesperson for the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Growing up in Cold War America, I knew very little of the USSR’s or China’s role in the Second World War. I was on my 30s when I began to be re-educated. When the USSR imploded, I was,like many others, hopeful that a more open, democratic socialism would develop. Instead I saw a great tragedy, sponsored by the USA unfold with the corrupt Yeltsin and the rise of the oligarchs. Putin surprised the imperialists by reining in the oligarchs and kicking out the NGOs that were merely fronts for the CIA/WALL STREET combine. The goal of the USA has never been to “democracize” Russia, but to cut it up into smaller sections all the more easily to capture and exploit it’s vast resources, a variation of Hitler’s plans. Putin’s great crime is that he has managed to thwart this program, but that he has also set Russia on its course to regain it’s natural position as a world power. The constant shrill cry that Putin us an authoritarian dictator rings hollow. He did not invade Iraq, setting of a chain reaction of wars (largely finances by the USA), nor has he ever called Russian troops into Russian cities. That was our gang.
The thing is weaponizing countries against godless communism sometimes makes everything worst by losing eastern religious countries in the process and helping communism succeed after centuries of western embarrassment along with South American gold disabling their empire. Do overs are no longer a viable two theater war alternative in this age.
We may have to learn to live with our planet to survive rather than destroy it to save it.
US is past its use by date for democracy.
Democracy doesn’t exist except in the minds of its abusers, the people who go to great lengths to make it appear as if it does exist, and great lengths to ensure that the masses are never represented and never able to control or influence government, all the while believing that they do have a say.
Of course, ever since the end of WW2, both Germany and Japan have been effectively occupied and have puppet governments controlled by the USA. The actions of these governments cannot truly be attributed to their peoples whilst the invaders still hold power.
There is a very real equivalence between German and Japanese atrocities and Ukrainian and Israeli atrocities demonstrating that no lessons were learned and western governments are more than happy to turn a blind eye, again, to atrocities to further their agendas.
My thoughts exactly, but for some reason parts of the internet in Russia and China still act as of Germany and Japan were independent sovereign nations not being puppeteered by the USA.
Sorry for responding so late.
An accounting of the mass murder and looting of Asia by Japan’s fascist military, including its teaming with Japan’s criminal underground and Zaibatsu (conglomerates) in this murder/looting spree, and the subsequent looting of this treasure by the West to fund wars, coups, covert ops, drugs, and Western banks, can be found in “Gold Warriors: America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold” by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave.