Vijay Prashad, executive director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, delivered the opening address of the 2025 Global South Academic Forum (GSAF) on Thursday (13) in Shanghai, China. In his presentation, “Two lies and one enormous truth,” he questioned false narratives promoted in the West about the World Anti-Fascist War, commonly known as World War II, and argued that it was the Soviet Union and Chinese communists who were primarily responsible for defeating Nazi-fascism.
At the end of the address, Prashad presented the new Tricontinental study, “The 80th Anniversary of the Victory in the World Anti-Fascist War.”
With the theme “The victory of the World Anti-Fascist War and the postwar international order: past and future,” the GSAF brought together 258 participants from 31 countries across Asia, Latin America, and Africa to discuss the legacy of the conflict and its implications for the contemporary international order.
Prashad began his presentation recounting the 1942 siege of Leningrad, when conductor Karl Eliasberg gathered 15 surviving musicians from the Leningrad Radio Orchestra to perform Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony. The city had been under siege for more than 300 days, and the population suffered from hunger and extreme hardship. The performance was broadcast over loudspeakers toward the Nazi trenches as an act of cultural resistance.
“In the Soviet archive, there is a line written by an intelligence officer: ‘Even the enemy listened in silence. They knew it was our victory over despair’,” Prashad said. A German prisoner of war later remarked that the symphony was “a ghost of the city we could not kill.” The siege would continue for another 536 days.
He also emphasized that the Soviet Red Army destroyed 80 percent of Germany’s Wehrmacht during its offensive across Eastern Europe. By the time Western forces approached the German borders, the Nazi regime had already collapsed. It was the Red Army that liberated most of the concentration camps. The reason the Soviet Union could direct all its forces against Nazi Germany, he argued, was that Chinese communists and patriots held off Japanese militarists on the eastern flank, fighting with inadequate weapons yet inflicting massive losses on the Japanese army and tying down 60 percent of its troops.
According to Prashad, the first lie is that the Western Allies opposed fascism from the beginning and were the ones who won the war. In reality, Western governments sent troops to crush the October Revolution after 1917, with forces from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Romania, Estonia, Greece, Australia, Canada, Japan, and Italy invading the young Soviet republic.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared in 1919 that the Allies should destroy “the foul baboonery of Bolshevism.” During the 1930s and 1940s, Western governments pursued a policy of appeasement, allowing Hitler to strengthen his military arsenal as long as it was directed against the Soviet Union. When Hitler invaded the USSR in 1941, Western countries waited three years before opening the second front in 1944. The second lie, Prashad said, is that it was U.S. sacrifices in the Pacific War and the atomic bombs that defeated Japanese militarism.
World War II began in China in 1937, two years before Germany invaded Austria. Chinese communists and patriots kept 60 percent of Japanese troops occupied, preventing them from attacking the Soviet rear. Prashad highlighted the 1940 Hundred Regiments Offensive, in which 400,000 communist soldiers under Zhu De destroyed 900 kilometers of Japanese railway infrastructure. “The Japanese were already substantially defeated and prepared to surrender” when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, he said. According to Prashad, the bombings were “entirely a demonstration of U.S. power” and a warning to Asian communists.
The enormous truth, Prashad argued, is that “it was the Soviet Red Army and the Chinese communists and patriots who truly defeated Nazi Germany and militarist Japan.” According to figures presented in the study, between 50 million and 100 million people lost their lives in this struggle.
Prashad also rejected the idea that fascism and colonialism are fundamentally different. After the defeat of fascism, he noted, the Dutch, French, and British—backed by the United States—returned to reclaim their colonies in Indonesia, Indochina, and Malaya with extreme violence in the 1940s and 1950s. “This shows that Western colonialists were by no means antifascist. Their real enemy was the possibility that workers and peasants would choose a socialist future,” he said. He concluded: “You cannot be antifascist and support colonialism or capitalism. It is simply impossible. These are antithetical formations.”
Tricontinental Institute launches study on the 80th anniversary of the antifascist victory
At the end of his presentation, Prashad launched the document “The 80th Anniversary of the Victory in the World Anti-Fascist War,” written by Neville Roy Singham, chair of the Tricontinental advisory board. The study was supported by the institute’s research team and includes extensive investigation and statistical analysis. An earlier version had been published on the Chinese portal Guancha.
The Global South Academic Forum began in May 2023 with the “International Communication Forum of the Global South” in Shanghai, the first conference in China dedicated to the Global South. That meeting brought together more than 100 participants from 20 countries and resulted in the “Shanghai Academic Consensus,” which proposed a new global information order. In 2024, the initiative expanded into the GSAF, centered on building a knowledge network for and by the Global South, bringing together more than 250 scholars from 27 countries.
