(Mirror.)

Within the camp, first barrack foundation is located next to the entrance. The foundation consists of c. 20 cm high and 1 meter wide bank of fine sand (Figure 6) and is the size of prefabricated barracks that the Finnish woodcraft enterprises sold [to Axis] troops in great quantities […] (Figure 7) (Westerlund 2008b, 133; Kallatsa 2009, 21).

A concrete slab that served as a base for a stove is identifiable within this foundation. Remains of some more lightweight structure were documented opposite to the barrack. Deeper into the camp, a kitchen and mess hall (with cooking area reinforced with concrete), and an animal shelter with a turf foundation (and a manure pile behind it) stood on the riverside terrace. A rubbish pit filled with German tins was documented between the barrack foundation and the kitchen (S1; see Seitsonen and Herva 2011, Figure 10.7) in 2006 and excavated in 2009.

One of our informants had visited the mess hall as a young boy on a cloudberry-picking trip, possibly in 1943, and his recollections indicated that there had been structures in the camp that have not left any visible traces on the ground. He reminisced, for instance, that near the kitchen and the animal shelter had stood lightly built tent-like structures, some of which had been covered with turf for insulation, including a sauna for delousing the soldiers.

These lightweight structures were probably ‘yurt’-shaped cardboard and plywood tents, an important wartime product of the Finnish woodcraft industry (Figure 7). There are several vague stone and concrete features that may derive from the foundations of stoves used in lightweight tents.

[…]

Artefacts related to everyday economic and household activities form over two-thirds of the catalogued finds, as might be expected in a base inhabited for nearly four years (Table 1). Sherds of porcelain and glass, cutlery and empty ration tins were most common in this category. The food economy seems to have relied largely on [Wehrmacht]-issued canned meat and fish, some produced in the occupied Denmark and Norway (Figure 10(i)–(j)).

Many of the tins and tin tops have indented manufacturer stamps on them, but as far as we know, there are no guides at the moment for decoding the canning plant identities; descriptions of the tins’ contents were marked on the storing cardboard boxes or crates (Nash n.d.).

Nearly 500 sherds of porcelain were catalogued and show an interesting variety: at least one-third are of a Finnish origin, mostly products of the Arabia factories with various flowery and gilded designs, whereas the rest comprise [Wehrmacht]-issued ware. Two sherds of the latter are products of Johann Haviland, Bavaria and one sherd has the stamp ‘Fl.U.V., 1942, Bohemia’ (Flieger Unterkunft Verwaltung, Flight Barracks Administration; Figure 10(d)–(g)).

Some of the Arabia sherds have manufacturing dates on them which show that they were made in the late 1920s and the 1930s. Some could also be refitted and turned out to be from an Arabia Pääsky jug (Figure 10(b)). The presence of Finnish wares is interesting in the view that there was a large German supply depot in Kaamanen, some 20 km away from Peltojoki, where large quantities of military-issued porcelain was stored: when it was exploded in 1944, the surroundings were sprinkled with porcelain sherds. Why, then, such a prominent presence of Finnish civilian wares in a [Wehrmacht] camp?

Also one piece of cutlery found at Peltojoki, a small spoon with flower ornamentation, is a civilian item, whereas another spoon is a Finnish military issue, with the stamps Puolustuslaitos, Sorsakoski (Finnish Defence Forces, Finnish manufacturer), and the Finnish swastika emblem (the symbol of the Finnish Defence Forces since 1918, and unrelated to the [Fascist] swastika).

The rest of the cutlery finds are standard [Wehrmacht] issue, all stamped Fl.U.V. (Figure 10(j), (s)–(t)). Pieces of bottle glass were found primarily in the glass dump on the upper terrace (S31) and indicate that alcohol was abundantly available. A couple of bottle tops shows that at least French Delbeck wine or cognac and products of Swedish state-owned Aktiebolaget Vin & Spritcentralen were consumed at Peltojoki (Figure 10(v)–(w)).

[…]

Documentary sources and memoirs show that the [Wehrmacht], including the battle-hardened élite Gebirgsjäger, were poorly prepared to, and overwhelmed by the unfamiliar Arctic environment, which effectively stalled their advance so quickly in 1941 (Pipping [1947] 2008, 10; Jokisipilä 2005). […] The [Wehrmacht's] performance improved over time, however, as manuals were prepared (e.g. Halter 1942; Wehrmacht [1943] 2006; Merkblatt 18a, 17 1943; Merkblatt 18a, 26 1944) and active training programs assisted by Finnish specialists implemented (Alftan 2005, 189; Airio 2014, 238–240).

[…]

A tabulation of the recovered finds by the origin illustrates the place of Peltojoki in a wider network of [Axis] military logistics and movements of things (Table 2, Figure 11). For instance, canned food was imported from Denmark and Norway, and alcohol from Sweden and Central Europe, whereas porcelain finds included Central European as well as Finnish products; as an extreme example, at a nearby WWII site fish tins originating from Brazil were uncovered in a German dump.

The presence of products from numerous countries and factories echoes also the commercial importance of war efforts for diverse entrepreneurs in the occupied countries, as well as in [the Third Reich], Finland and even the ostensibly neutral Sweden. The [Axis] presence instigated a major economic boost in Lapland (e.g. Björklund 1981; Westerlund 2008a), which was not without ethical implications, given that PoWs were quite liberally used as a cheap workforce by various companies in different countries (e.g. Westerlund 2008a, 2008b; Suhonen 2011).

(Emphasis added.)

Some anticommunists may not see what the 'big deal' is with Fascists benefitting an economy, but that is only because somebody conditioned them to believe that 'economic prosperity' should trump everything else… including war crimes. I once had a conversation with an anticommunist who explicitly defended the phenomenon of overproduction because it was necessary to 'keep inflation down'. The obvious wastefulness of the process was irrelevant to him!

---

Click here for events that happened today (November 2).

1893: Battista Farina, Axis businessman, existed.
1933: Home rule in Malta (at the time a British colony) was suspended after the Nationalist Party continued to advocate Italian as an official language to be used in schools and court proceedings, in order to strengthen ties to Fascist Italy.
1935: Czechoslovakian police arrested twenty‐eight people accused of spying for the Third Reich. Coincidentally, the Fascist cruiser Nürnberg was commissioned in Kiel in Julius Streicher’s presence.
1936: The Spanish Nationalists captured Brunete.
1938: Per the Vienna Award, an Italo‐German arbitration commission gave the Kingdom of Hungary a large piece of Czechoslovakian territory consisting of 5,000 square miles of land and one million people. Coincidentally, a Spanish Nationalist cruiser sunk the cargo ship SS Cantabria.
1940: First day of Battle of Elaia–Kalamas between the Greeks and the Fascists, which notably involved Greek Air Force pilot Marinos Mitralexis, after running out of ammunition, ramming a Fascist bomber. Meanwhile, the Axis commissioned submarine U‐69, the first Type VIIC U‐boat of the Third Reich’s Kriegsmarine which became its most numerous class.
1941: The Finnish conquest of East Karelia completed when the Soviets withdrew from Kondopoga, and the Luftwaffe bombed the Soviet cruiser Voroshilov in harbour at Novorossiysk, putting it out of action until February next year. On the other hand, British cruisers captured a Vichy convoy of freighters and passenger ships north of Madagascar.
1942: The Axis commissioned submarine U‐306, but lost the village of Kokoda and the accompanying airfield to the Allies.
1943: The Battle of Empress Augusta Bay commenced as the Imperial Japanese Navy responded to the surprise invasion of Bougainville Island. Meanwhile, the Allies commenced their bombing of Axis‐occupied Rabaul, and Allied warships along with flightcraft damaged Axis submarine U‐340 off Punta Almina, Morocco.
1944: The Axis lost Nompatelize to the U.S. Seventh Army without a fight, and Moscow requested permission for Soviet troops to enter Bulgarian territory, but the Axis sent fifty thousand of Budapest’s Jews on a forced march to Austria, with ten thousand dying over the course of six days on the way there. Meanwhile, the Axis submarine U‐181 torpedoed and sunk the Allied tanker Fort Lee in the Indian Ocean.
1945: The Allies indicted forty‐two staff members of the Dachau concentration camp at Nuremberg.
2012: Giuseppe Umberto ‘Pino’ Rauti, Fascist politician, dropped dead.

There is a myth that ‘democracy’ elected Adolf Schicklgruber into power. While it is correct that the so-called ‘National Socialist German Workers’ Party’ became the Weimar Republic’s largest party in 1932 (despite lacking a majority), which is probably how this misconception originated, Adolf Schicklgruber himself was unappointed by the common voter. Instead, the bourgeoisie’s representatives appointed him:

For two years, repeatedly resorting to Article 48 to issue presidential decrees, the Bruening government sought and failed to build a parliamentary majority that would exclude Social Democrats, Communists, and Nazis. In 1932, Hindenburg dismissed Bruening and appointed Franz von Papen, a former diplomat and Center party politician, as chancellor.

Papen dissolved the Reichstag again, but the July 1932 elections brought the [NSDAP] 37.3 percent of the popular vote, making it the largest political party in Germany. The Communists (taking votes from the Social Democrats in the increasingly desperate economic climate) received 14.3 percent of the vote. As a result, more than half the deputies in the 1932 Reichstag had publicly committed themselves to ending parliamentary democracy.

When Papen was unable to obtain a parliamentary majority to govern, his opponents among President Hindenburg's advisers forced him to resign. His successor, General Kurt von Schleicher, dissolved the Reichstag again. In the ensuing elections in November 1932, the [NSDAP] lost ground, winning 33.1 percent of the vote. The Communists, however, gained votes, winning 16.9 percent.

As a result, the small circle around President Hindenburg came to believe, by the end of 1932, that the [NSDAP] was Germany's only hope to forestall political chaos ending in a Communist takeover. [Fascist] negotiators and propagandists did much to enhance this impression.

On January 30, 1933, President Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany. Hitler was not appointed chancellor as the result of an electoral victory with a popular mandate, but instead as the result of a constitutionally questionable deal among a small group of conservative German politicians who had given up on parliamentary rule. They hoped to use Hitler's popularity with the masses to buttress a return to conservative authoritarian rule, perhaps even a monarchy.

Within two years, however, Hitler and the [Fascists] outmaneuvered Germany's conservative politicians to consolidate a radical [anticommunist] dictatorship completely subordinate to Hitler's personal will.

I have to admit that at first I forgot why I wrote this draft when I went back to review it (I had written nothing other than two URLs, both of which had little to do with November). It quickly dawned on me that presently it is election season here in Imperial America, and for months now centrists, social democrats, neoclassical liberals, and other (white) moderates have been pressuring everybody to vote, frequently under the pretension that it is necessary to ‘stop fascism’.

I have been studying fascism for seven years now and I can confidently say that engaging in a hopelessly broken process like a U.S. election is not an antifascist method. The most that voting may do is measure how little opposition that the ruling class can expect from the general public when the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie inevitably appoints its own representatives to the government. That is it. U.S. elections are effectively nothing more than glorified public opinion polls, just like the Third Reich's plebiscites.

My best advice is to boycott the election as a means of protesting an illegitimate process. Your time would be much better spent on supporting the proletariat (especially strikers) through direct action. If you absolutely must recommend voting, though, you could at least familiarize yourselves with the gross corruption that is part of the process, then constantly demand election integrity. I personally don't consider that the best action to take, but I can promise you that that would be more effective than scorning adults who feel alienated from voting.

In any case, the point here is that stopping fascism is not so easy that you can do it at a ballot box (something that thousands of voters in the Saar Basin learned the hard way in 1935). Rather, (neo)fascism is the inevitable consequence of capitalism's contradictions and inadequacies. Only when the lower classes finally overthrow capitalism will neofascism lose its purpose. Don't blame me; I didn't invent reality.

---

Click here for events that happened today (November 1).

1921: Harald Quandt, Luftwaffe lieutenant, existed.
1933: The Dachau concentration camp commander, Theodor Eicke, put its regulations into effect and it became a blueprint for other camps. Under Article 12, people who refused to work, or shouted while on the job, were to be shot immediately.
1935: Somebody attempted to murder future Axis politician Wang Jingwei and three other officials shortly before he died himself.
1937: The Defense of Sihang Warehouse ended in an Imperial victory while Imperial troops advanced deeper into Shanghai by crossing Suzhou Creek.
1939: Chinese forces launched the Winter Offensive on multiple fronts against the Imperial Japanese Army while a royal decree in the Netherlands established martial law in key regions mostly along the German–Dutch border.
1940: Fascist forces reached the Thyamis River. Coincidentally, Instanbul declared neutrality in the Greco‐Italian War.
1941: Berlin claimed that the United States ‘attacked Germany’ and that its head of state had been placed before the ‘tribunal’ for world judgment; Berlin disputed the Allied account of the sinking of the Reuben James and claimed that an Axis submarine only attacked after Allied destroyers attacked Axis submarines first. Meanwhile, as the Reich commissioned the submarine U‐214, the Axis occupied Simferopol on the Crimean peninsula, and Jews in Slovakia were required to travel in separate train compartments and send and receive letters marked with the Star of David.
1942: The Matanikau Offensive commenced during the Guadalcanal Campaign and finished three days later with an Allied victory. Meanwhile, the Axis’s Army Group A captured Alagir, four Axis sailors escaped from an internment camp at Fort Stanton, the Soviets formed a committee for the investigation of war crimes committed by the Axis, and strikes broke out in Haute‐Savoie in protest of the Vichy government’s forced recruitment of labour for the Third Reich.
1943: The 3rd Marine Division landed on Bougainville in the Solomon Islands and secured a beachhead, leading that night to a naval clash at the Battle of Empress Augusta Bay.
1944: As Allied units landed at Walcheren, the Axis submarine U‐483 torpedoed Whitaker and rendered a constructive total loss, an Axis kamikaze sunk Abner Read, the Axis lost three ships in the Kvarner Gulf, an F‐13 Superfortress conducted a reconnaissance sortie over Imperial Japan, and the Western Allies commenced Operation Infatuate.

Doing a little research on horror films from the Third Reich, it appears that only a handful of titles originated from it: Der Dämon des Himalaya, Der Student von Prag, Fährmann Maria, Der Hund von Baskerville, and (technically) Spuk im Schloß. (A few sources call Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse and Der Schimmelreiter horrors, but that is quite arguable, and Fascist Italy’s horror films were even fewer: Maciste all’inferno and possibly the lost film Il caso Haller.) From what I can tell, this very particular subject has attracted little more than a passing interest from Anglophone academics, and going by first impressions, none of those films looks especially political either.

Nevertheless, I know how to improvise, so I am inviting you to read about a film that is instead somewhere in the same neighbourhood as horror: propaganda that demonises us. It lacks the supernatural elements of an ordinary horror film, so you may be disappointed that it does not depict us as unfigurative monsters. That said, it does feature an early example of what I like to call “anticommunists’ ignorant view of how communists talk”, so let us not look this gift horse in the mouth, shall we?

Quoting David Welch’s Propaganda and the German Cinema 1933–1945, pages 214–217:

Goebbels was returning to his original mission of safeguarding Europe from the ‘Jewish‐Bolshevik conspiracy’. Reflecting this shift was Karl Ritter’s virulently anti‐Bolshevik film G.P.U. (1942). Interviewed by Filmwelt while making the film, Ritter outlined the basic propaganda message that was to be disseminated: ‘That the German Armed Forces had destroyed the terror organization of the G.P.U. which had been established by Jewish‐Bolshevik “criminals” intent on planting the vile seeds of Bolshevik revolution throughout the world.’³¹

G.P.U. came from an original idea by the actor Andrews Engelmann, who starred in the film and wrote the script together with Ritter and Felix Lutzkendorf. Production was started in December 1941, and it had its première in Berlin on 14 August 1942. The following synopsis is taken from the Allied Commission’s Catalogue of Forbidden German Feature Films:

Olga, a White Russian refugee from Bolshevik terror, has joined the Bolshevik G.P.U. Secret Police in order to find the man who killed her parents. After many years she at last meets him in Riga and then in Kowno in the summer of 1939. He is Bokscha, one of the chief agents of the G.P.U. in Europe, instigator of numerous assassinations, uprisings, acts of sabotage, etc. Bokscha falls in love with her, she goes with him to many countries. At last in France she feels the time is ripe, denounces him to Moscow as a traitor and he is liquidated.

She goes to Moscow, refuses the decoration offered to her, discloses her real reasons for joining the G.P.U., and she too is liquidated. Interwoven is the story of a young Baltic couple whom Olga befriends; in Rotterdam they are arrested by the G.P.U. and imprisoned in the cellar of the Commercial Attaché of the UDSSR, and the film ends with the victorious advance of the German Army into Holland in May 1940 when the two young people are at last released.³²

The film is intended to reveal the Jewish influence behind Bolshevism and the brutality of the G.P.U. In the prologue to the film, G.P.U. is translated as: Grauen (horror), Panik (panic), Untergang (destruction). So as not to leave the audience in any doubt, the Programm von Heute, which accompanied the film, stressed the insidious nature of the G.P.U. in a language reminiscent of that used to describe Jews: ‘It is mid‐1939. Like the threads of a spider’s web the G.P.U. spreads out beyond the Soviet “paradise” to engulf many unsuspecting lands.’³³

In fact the term ‘G.P.U.’ was no longer employed in the USSR; it had been replaced in 1934 by NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Domestic Affairs). But of course this did not affect Goebbels’s anti‐Bolshevik propaganda. The G.P.U. was so firmly embedded in the minds of [anticommunist] Germans as the symbol of Russian barbarism that it had to be perpetuated regardless of whether it existed or not.

Moreover, the Russian Secret Police are presented as a Jewish‐directed Communist organization. This is established in the first scene where Olga Feodorovna is giving a violin recital for the International Women’s League in Riga. Introducing Olga, the Chairwoman maintains that the organization was established to further international cooperation and is ‘totally unpolitical’.

But an old man interrupts and claims that they are in fact organized and financed by Jewish interests in Moscow. He maintains that he has proof that they had sent greetings telegrams to the Jewish politician Litvinov‐Finkelstein.³⁴

The Chairwoman repeats that the organization is concerned only with promoting peace and freedom for all people. But the old man will not be interrupted:

OLD MAN. Don’t interrupt! I said, financed by Moscow! The conclusive evidence is the presence of this gentleman, who calls himself a Soviet diplomat. Do you know who this Consular Attaché Smirnov is? He is the murderer Bokscha, G.P.U. agent … yes, G.P.U. agent! The blood of hundreds of thousands of poor people clings to his hands. Yes, I have evidence. I also have evidence that he murdered my son … [struggle] … You will not keep me quiet! Not you! Look at him, this representative of peace and freedom! He should be caught…

The fact that the old man was seen to be violently removed from the hall by G.P.U. agents and subsequently murdered tended to substantiate his allegations. Other scenes served to highlight Jewish participation in the G.P.U. and the manner in which the Russian Secret Police carried out their subversive activities in other countries. Invariably, Bolshevik meetings would take place deep underground, where they would dispassionately plot sabotage and murder beneath portraits of Lenin and Stalin.

In Moscow, Bokscha is shown plotting the downfall of foreign politicians and the sabotage of allied shipments from Sweden. Action is needed in Finland; we are told that Molatov is waiting for a chance to give an ultimatum and then invade the country. Bokscha is sent to Helsinki, where G.P.U. agents are conspiring with Jews to find an appropriate excuse for a Russian invasion. Once again, the meetings take place in cellars where the Bolsheviks can seek refuge in the shadows:

BOKSCHA. I have a very amusing plan; an assassination attempt on Soviet employers and Soviet citizens in Helsinki. This would precipitate an ultimatum and then an invasion.
JEW. And who will carry out these assassinations?
BOKSCHA. Funny question! We will, of course, our people.
ANOTHER MAN. So you mean we should kill our comrades?
BOKSCHA. Yes!
JEW. Do they know about it up there?
BOKSCHA. Of course not, they would report to Moscow in noble indignation.
JEW. [laughing] Yes, that’s certainly very funny.
[They all start laughing and Bokscha closes the meeting. As they leave, one turns to the Jew…]
ANOTHER MAN. That’s a wonderful plan!
JEW. [throws his hands in the air] Oh, wonderful, wonderful!

The Jewish‐Bolshevik conspiracy is invoked by the fact that Bokscha is prepared to engage Jewish agents in his subversive activities. Such scenes are intended to reveal the alien beliefs and behaviour of the G.P.U., who are prepared even to murder their own comrades. The moral appears to be that the ends justify the means — a philosophy that could be equally applied to [anticommunism].

It is interesting to note in comparing these two different political systems that at no time in [the Third Reich’s] film propaganda is Bolshevism discussed in terms of Marxist‐Leninism, although ideological comparisons are implicit throughout. Rather, Bolshevism is equated with certain brutal types that recur in [anticommunist] cinema under different guises, ranging from the barbaric Chernov in Friesennot to the cynical murderer Bokscha in G.P.U.

If the [Fascists] were not prepared to enter into an ideological debate then they had to specify a target for hatred. The stereotype employed in G.P.U. is, of course, Nikolai Bokscha. Yet he is not an amalgam of either the Untermensch line or the deeply committed Communist; he is neither a racially inferior Slav nor a misguided Party member.

Instead, he symbolizes the opportunism of Bolshevism and its alienation from Western civilization. He is referred to in the film as ‘one who has made a career for himself without being either a Jew or a proletarian’. Olga summed up his value to Moscow as a ‘good executioner who is worth a great deal to the Central Bureau’. In another scene with Olga in the Soviet Embassy in Helsinki a portrait of Lenin is drawn to his attention, and he replies: ‘Oh yes! It was the era of proletarian revolution. A dark age! Fortunately one forgets!’

In G.P.U., Asiatic features have largely disappeared from the stereotype image of the Bolshevik enemy. He is now portrayed in collusion with conspiratorial Jews. In fact, in Nikolai Bokscha we have the archetypal bourgeois, albeit a brutal and cynical one. Filmwoche referred to him as ‘the bourgeois after his acre of land, and a manipulator of chaos for his own enrichment’.³⁵

(Emphasis added.)

Aside from maybe the antisemitism being too obvious, it does not sound like there is much in this film that a committed antisocialist would find objectionable: the antiutopian pretensions, a hypocritical upper‐class communist, assertions that we murder hundreds of thousands of innocents (just ’cause), assertions that we’re cannibal‐like savages who enjoy killing each other, and of course, blatant anachronisms (antisocialists are nothing if not inept at managing time). All of these are well trod tropes for those of us who made the mistake of either trying to reason with antisocialists or subjecting ourselves to their mindnumbingly brainless content.

---

Click here for events that happened today (October 31).

1881: Toshizō Nishio, Axis general, was born.
1922: Benito Mussolini became the Kingdom of Italy’s Prime Minister.
1924: Members of the Association at the 1st International Savings Bank Congress (World Society of Savings Banks) announced World Savings Day in Milan, Fascist Italy.
1934: The Third Reich’s ‘People’s Court’ announced that ‘several persons were tried for high treason and sentenced to death recently’, but did not reveal any names.
1937: As the Sihang Warehouse’s top floors burst into flames due to Imperial shelling, Rome’s governor Piero Colonna officially inaugurated the stolen obelisk of Auxum.
1938: Poland noted to the Third Reich that Danzig was to remain independent, and that Warsaw was disinterested in signing the Anti‐Comintern Pact.
1939: Benito Mussolini dismissed three military chiefs (Alberto Pariani, Giuseppe Valle and Luigi Russo) and two cabinet ministers (Achille Starace and Dino Alfieri), replacing Starace with Ettore Muti as Fascist Party Secretary and Alfieri with Alessandro Pavolini as Popular Culture Minister.
1940: The Battle of Britain finished, causing Berlin to abandon Operation Sea Lion.
1941: An Axis U‐boat torpedoed the destroyer USS Reuben James near Iceland, killing more than one hundred U.S. Navy sailors.

The trope that we are sensitive to criticism while our problems only continue to fester is an all too common one in the capitalist media. Unfortunately for anticommunists, if they think that they are a viable alternative, then they have another think coming. Case in point:

Smart also quoted an anonymous Ukrainian official who said that Pugliese is an “activist” known in Kyiv for “his public anti-Ukrainian rhetoric,” which “coincides with Russian propagandist narratives.” This individual reportedly said that “Ukraine would consider him to be, writing in all capital letters,” an “UNDESIRABLE PERSON.”

My guess is that this official came from the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation, which a few months later accused Pugliese of promoting “anti-Ukrainian rhetoric and narratives aimed at demonizing the Ukrainian military,” not least of all with social media posts in which the Ottawa Citizen journalist “repeatedly spoke about the so-called problem of nazism in Ukraine, particularly related to the supposed nazi regiment ‘Azov’. Such rhetoric about the ‘Ukrainian Nazis’ clearly echoes the Russian narrative, which Putin used as an excuse for his invasion of Ukraine.”

[...]

In early 2014, Chris Alexander “committed to work with” the nationalist Ukrainian Canadian Congress “to take immediate and concrete action condemning Russia’s continued economic and political coercion of Ukraine.” That summer, he had an awkward moment at the annual Ukrainian festival in Toronto. A neo-Nazi from “Right Sector Canada” set up a table to raise money for “anything.” When the CBC interviewed Chris Alexander at the festival, and asked him what he thought about this, the Minister fumbled as Right Sector flags waved in the background.

“You’re telling me something second-hand that is a rumor that I have no ability to comment on in a responsible way,” Alexander said, standing in front of a booth for the largest Ukrainian-Canadian financial institution, which is also an OUN-B front, and has supported the Banderites’ book publishing operation in Ukraine.

For the first anniversary of the February 2014 coup d’etat in Kyiv, an important far-right Ukrainian politician, Andriy Parubiy, took a trip to Canada. Parubiy, a former neo[fascist] paramilitary leader, commanded the “Maidan Self Defense Force” that provided the muscle for the “Euromaidan” protests that started in late 2013. A few months later, he was secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, and by 2015 served as the first deputy chairman of Ukrainian parliament. In this capacity, Parubiy took several meetings in Ottawa, and addressed the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) in Toronto.

“I thank the Ukrainian community,” said Parubiy, “which to a large degree displays the [pro-western, nationalist] position of Ukraine, and obviously the [Canadian] government orientates itself on the position of the community.” At the UCC event, he appeared alongside Chris Alexander, who donned a handkerchief from the far-right-led Maidan Self Defense, and made a warmongering speech to Toronto’s nationalistic Ukrainian community.

We know, as you know, that Vladimir Putin is only going to face his comeuppance and his whole mad nightmare is only going to come apart at the seams, when the whole world is standing against him, with every option on the table […] This is the biggest issue facing the world today, in my view […] What is happening in eastern Ukraine has roots that go as far back as […] the Second World War, but it really has to do with the incomplete process of ending the existence of the Soviet Union for good — ending the oppression and the Faustian bargain that had been made in the Second World War with Stalin’s Soviet Union, for good.

[…]

We must speak out against this dangerous ideology [of Russian revanchism] which is present in our own city of Toronto, which is present across Canada, which comes to use through state-sponsored Russian channels that are preaching absolute poison! For Vladimir Putin’s media handlers to be calling the government of Ukraine, calling us Ukraine supporters, [and] to be calling the whole western world “Nazis” is nothing less than reprehensible, and we must be taking the lead, not only in fighting, and supporting those who are fighting, not only in making sure that Ukraine gets all the support that it needs, but in denouncing one of the greatest perversions of history that I have seen in my lifetime […] Ladies and gentlemen, let’s join that fight as well.

There are ideas as stake here, there is ideology at stake here, there is history at stake here, and all of our democracies! All of our democracies depend on the outcome of this struggle. It is going to be a great struggle. We are just at the beginning of this struggle, and I think when I see groups like this assembled, when I see determination on the level that is plain from all of your faces, I know that the future of Ukraine is still bright. I know the ties that bind Canada to Ukraine have never been stronger, and I know that Canada’s leadership in the world on this issue, as on others, has never been more important. […] Slava Ukraini!

Left to right in Toronto, 2015: Paul Grod (UCC president), Ted Opitz (Conservative MP), Andriy Parubiy, Chris Alexander, and Markian Shwec (UCC-Toronto)

Before moving on, let’s take a moment to digest Alexander’s comments about the “perversions of history.” It almost goes without saying that according to him, “Hitler was an ally of Stalin, Putin’s idol,” and “Putin has resurrected this red-brown alliance.” This politician and former diplomat helped to initiate the project to establish an extremely problematic “Victims of Communism” monument in Ottawa.

As David Pugliese recently reported, “The Department of Canadian Heritage is being told that more than half of the 550 names on the Memorial to the Victims of Communism should be removed because of potential links to the Nazis or questions about affiliations with fascist groups, according to government records.”

His numerous stories about this controversial project are another reason for Alexander to have an axe to grind with the award-winning journalist. Pugliese, who specializes in writing about military issues, apparently also embarrassed Alexander back when he was Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Defence.

In the spring of 2022, Chris Alexander told his ~130,000 Twitter followers that Russia is “committing the same war crimes as Nazi invaders.” A couple months later, he said, “There is no substantive difference between the threat to world peace represented by revanchist Nazi Germany in 1939 & that of genocidal, irredentist & fascist Russia in 2022.” Last year, Alexander shared an article about the “Jewish Question” from the U.S. Holocaust Museum, just to compare “Hitler’s determination to ‘remove the Jews’” with “Putin’s obsession with ‘removing Ukraine.’”

Even before Putin launched his so-called “special military operation,” Alexander said that “Germans should understand” they don’t deserve all the blame for “the horrors of the Second World War,” which the Kremlin started. “Germany has overcome its Nazi past. It now needs to face down, with equal vigour, Russia’s dark Stalinist legacy.”

I actually agree with him that Germans should understand that they do not deserve all of the blame for the horrors of the Second World War. Certainly, the Imperial bourgeoisie deserves a great deal of blame for starting it by invading Manchuria in 1931, and anticommunists from the Anglosphere, Austria, the Balkans, the Baltics, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Finland, France, Hungary, Iberia, Italy, Poland, Romania, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Turkey, and elsewhere deserve blame for only aggravating the violence, but contemporary anticommunists do not want to talk about any of that, do they?

Likewise, modern Germany is most certainly not a model for the Russian Federation if it seeks to face down its “dark Stalinist legacy” (don’t laugh!). Between the surviving architecture, the abundance of neofascists, and the mistreatment of anticolonial Jews, only Italy or Japan would be a worse model.

Whatever you may think about the Russian Federation, hopefully we can at least come to an agreement that it is not the greatest threat to world peace today.

And Chris Alexander is undoubtedly the worst historian in Canada:

In the coming months, before Ukraine’s unsuccessful counter-offensive, Chris Alexander insisted, “The war will only end with fascist Russia’s defeat, as the Second World War ended with Nazi Germany’s defeat.”

---

Click here for events that happened today (October 30).

1882: Günther Adolf Ferdinand von Kluge, Axis field marshal, existed.
1893: Roland Freisler, State Secretary of the Reich Ministry of Justice, was unfortunately born.
1906: Hans Otto Georg Hermann Fegelein, Waffen‐SS commander, made life less tolerable with his presence.
1933: Dozens of SA men marched to the Turkish embassy to hold a guard of honor for the Turkish Republic and stood there the whole day. Later that day, Ernst Röhm, head of the SA, and the rest of the core SA leadership came to congratulate the ambassador and to walk past the honor guard with him—many of this honor guard had served in the Ottoman Empire. Finally, Rome signed the ‘Agreement modifying the Agreement of March 10, 1924, concerning the Issue of the 7 % Tobacco Loan’ at Warsaw.
1941: The Axis sent fifteen hundred Jews from Pidhaytsi to Bełżec extermination camp.
1942: Lt. Tony Fasson and Able Seaman Colin Grazier drowned while taking code books from the sinking Axis submarine U‐559.
1944: Axis personnel deported Anne and Margot Frank from Auschwitz to the Bergen‐Belsen concentration camp, where they died from disease the following year, shortly before WWII’s end.

For those of us unaware, Mountain Jews are Jewish people who have lived in the North Caucasus for several centuries. They are a unique demographic, identifying neither as Ashkenazic nor Sephardic (though some have had Ashkenazic neighbors), and there are undoubtedly aspects of their culture that many of their Jewish siblings elsewhere would find odd.

When the anticommunists reinvaded Soviet Eurasia in 1941 and later made it to the North Caucasus, some of their victims were Mountain Jews:

[T]he [Axis’s] first encounter with Mountain Jews ended with the latter’s murder. This first massacre of Mountain Jews took place outside the borders of the North Caucasus, in the Shaumian Kolkhoz in the Crimea, most of whose members, it would seem, were Mountain Jews.⁴⁶

In March 1942 one of the Gentile neighbors informed the [Axis] authorities about the “Jewish presence” in the area. In response, Einsatzgruppe D—in cooperation with the military gendarmerie (Feldgendarmerie) and local collaborators—rounded up and murdered all 114 Mountain Jews there.⁴⁷ This was carried out in full cognizance of the fact that these were Mountain Jews, i.e., not Ashkenazi.⁴⁸

The Mountain Jews had been settled in the Crimea under the aegis of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, whose aid the Soviet government accepted as part of a program to resettle Jews “on the land”; the [Axis powers] were aware of this, and it may have inclined Einsatzgruppe D to view the Mountain Jews there as participants in the same “world Jewish conspiracy” and therefore to kill them along with the Ashkenazi Jews.⁴⁹

It should be noted that the annihilation of Mountain Jews was mentioned only in a local military report,⁵⁰ but not in the more official Ereignismeldung (Situation Report) that Einsatzgruppe D sent to Berlin. Thus it may be that the Einsatzgruppe considered its decision to murder the Mountain Jews in the Crimea a local matter, and that they thought they did not need to obtain authorization from Berlin for such actions—either before or after

[...]

The first communities of Mountain Jews captured by the [Axis] in the Caucasus, at the end of August 1942, were two kolkhozes in Bogdanovka and Menzhinskoe (Kursk Raion, Stavropol Krai), in which the Mountain Jews constituted a significant portion of the entire Jewish membership.⁵⁷ Meanwhile, spontaneous incidents of looting Jewish property, brutalization of Jews, and murder multiplied rapidly.

There is no evidence that the [Axis] even considered treating the Mountain Jews here differently from their Ashkenazi co-religionists: perhaps the fact that they lived together caused the [Axis] to view them as a single entity. Scores of Mountain Jewish families who remained in Bogdanovka and Menzhinskoe were murdered by machine gun fire on September 20 and August 19, 1942, respectively,⁵⁸ a total of about 850 victims.⁵⁹

We do not know with certainty which [Axis] forces were responsible for exterminating the Jews in these two places. In theory, the kolkhozes were situated in the operative domain of Einsatzkommando (EK) 12. However, Soviet findings claim that a large Wehrmacht unit camped in Bogdanovka⁶⁰ and murdered the Jews there; this points to the possibility of the direct involvement of the [Wehrmacht]. This would increase the likelihood that the [Axis powers] (at least in Bogdanovka) were unaware of the Mountain Jews’ uniqueness.

Hence,

86. Both Altshuler and Arad estimate that about 1,000 Mountain Jews perished during the Holocaust. Altshuler, Yehudei mizrah Kavkaz, 151; Arad, History of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, 2004, 535. However, this estimate does not take into account up to 1,400 Mountain Jews murdered in the village of Ganshtakovka (see n. 56). With this the death total reaches between 2,000 and 2,500, some forty to fifty percent of the original number in the region occupied by the [Axis].

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

If 2,500 seems like a 'low' number, your suspicion is justified by numerous factors, namely the Axis's limited reach as well as its relatively brief presence where Mountain Jews lived:

The [Axis] advance had brought under occupation large sections of the North Caucasus, including Orzhonikidze (after liberation changed to Stavropol) and Krasnodar territories (krai, pl. kraia), the Kabardino-Balkar Autonomous Republic, and a large part of the North Ossetian Autonomous Republic, homes to a large portion of the Mountain Jew population. These found themselves under [Axis] occupation for varying periods of up to five months.

However, most of the large groups of Mountain Jews were in fact not overrun. Out of a Mountain Jewish population of 35,000 in the USSR on the eve of the Second World War,⁸ the only major centers that would be occupied were Nal’chik (capital of Kabardino-Balkaria, occupied for only two months) and Mozdok (in Ordzhonikidze Krai, occupied for four and a half months). In addition, Mountain Jews were a significant component of the local population in some small rural settlements.

Silly racial theories:

The [Axis] did not conclude decisively whether the groups were of Jewish origin. Two variants contradicted the possibility of common ancestry with European Jews: (a) the Mountain Jews originated in Persia after mixing with the Persians;³⁸ or (b) they derived from a mixture of several “Eastern races.”³⁹ [...] The [Axis powers] were [...] inclined to the opinion that these were not Jews at all because physically they did not have a Jewish “appearance,” and because they practiced polygamy.⁸⁰

Along with Soviet and partisan recruitment:

A factor reducing the number of Mountain Jews falling under [Axis] occupation was the induction of males between the ages of eighteen and forty (and in many cases older than that) into the Red Army and (to a much lesser extent) the partisan movement. Many testimonies¹⁰ document the enlistment of the men, since at this point—about a year into the war—the Soviet Union was maximizing the exploitation of its human resources to fight the war.¹¹

We can reasonably assume that a large percentage of the men of the community had been drafted before the [Axis] arrived.¹² Regarding participation in the partisan movement, we have only isolated examples and incomplete information allowing no basis for estimating the percentage of Jews who adopted this course.¹³

Taken together, these reasons explain why the Axis’s violence against Mountain Jews was surprisingly less awful than it could have been; the majority of Mountain Jews who had come under occupation survived thanks to the Axis’s uncertainty and hesitation. Even so, for some of us this is going to feel like an inadequate compensation; two thousand deaths is still deeply upsetting.

Further reading: Beyond the Pale: The Holocaust in the North Caucasus. I leave you with a quote from page 196:

Ashurova recalled how the Ifraimov family of Mountain Jews paid with their lives for an unsuccessful attempt to rescue a family of Ashkenazi Jews: “Our Mountain Jews hid two sisters who were physicians… [The Axis] executed both sisters with the Mountain Jews who were hiding them. Twelve souls [were killed] instantly.”⁴²

---

Click here for events that happened today (October 29).

1879: Franz von Papen, conservative who was instrumental to the Fascists’ ascension to power in Berlin, existed.
1897: Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda, blighted the world.
1941: In the Kaunas Ghetto, the Axis shot over ten thousand Jews at the Ninth Fort, a massacre known as the ‘Great Action’.
1942: In the United Kingdom, leading clergymen and political figures hold a public meeting to register outrage over the Third Reich’s persecution of Jews.
1944: The Axis lost the Dutch city of Breda to the 1st Polish Armoured Division, and its loss of Hungary was imminent as the Red Army entered it.
1955: Something, most likely an Axis mine, sunk the Soviet battleship Novorossiysk.

In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, middle-class liberals condemned general strikes as unpatriotic, economically disruptive, and politically divisive acts that threatened the potential for industrial recovery and national unity in Italy.

Though there was disagreement among the liberal middle classes about the merits of the workers’ reasons for striking, they were unanimous in their criticism of workers’ demonstrations as harmful to the Italian patria (fatherland).

With the 1920 factory occupations and the concurrent emergence of workers’ self-defense groups, the liberal middle classes began associating workers’ demonstrations with physical and ideological violence.

Finally, during the biennio nero, middle-class liberals blamed workers’ demonstrations for the continuing armament of the fasci and the increasingly popular appeal of fascism. Some even expressed explicitly philofascist sympathies, citing the fascists’ successful suppression of disruptive and divisive workers’ demonstrations.

The persistency of general strikes, factory occupations, and workers’ self-defense groups over the 1919–1922 thus turned Italian middle-class liberals increasingly sympathetic to fascism.

Though the liberal middle classes were not unanimous in their philofascist sentiments in the months just before Mussolini’s March on Rome, the writer Renato Simoni was accurate in the declaration he made in his summer 1922 column for the newspaper L’Illustrazione italiana: “the [workers’ demonstration], which was supposed to be a large protest against fascism, has enabled fascism to demonstrate its merits.”¹⁵

Not all middle-class liberals were convinced by these merits—that is, by the way fascists violently challenged the radical labor activity and ceaseless workers’ demonstrations of the biennio rosso—but some certainly were.

[…]

La Stampa emphasized the combativeness of some of the workers who were present; for example, the royal guards had no choice but to arrest “the most quarrelsome and hotheaded” of the demonstrators.⁷²

Additionally, while describing instances of violence involving “a young man struck with a blow to the head falling to the ground” or “a manual laborer struck and [with] his hands on his bloody head,” the newspaper employed the passive voice and thus obscured the direct agency of the policemen and fascist squadristi in the events. It even characterized such incidents as “scuffles” and “skirmishes” rather than as obvious acts of police and fascist violence against demonstrating workers.⁷³

In this way, La Stampa underlined that violence was present at yet another workers’ demonstration while absolving the perpetrating policemen and fascists of their responsibility in that violence. As it had done in its coverage of worker demonstrations in prior years, it presented the outbreak of violence as inherent to the strike rather than the direct consequence of the state and fasci’s violence toward workers.

[…]

La Stampa also held the arditi del popolo at least partially responsible for the fascists’ refusal to immediately disarm. The newspaper asserted that “that which is boiling up, the formation of antifascist forces that took place in Rome a few days ago, and the simultaneous debut of the « Arditi del Popolo », have offered fascism a motive to cry provocation and interrupt their attempts” at peace and disarmament.”

The public exercises of the arditi del popolo in Rome had thus frustrated and angered the fasci into continued armament, which they might have considered stopping had it not been for the 6 July demonstration.⁷⁷

[…]

According to Tasca, despite the fundamentally liberal rhetoric used by the secret action committee in their proclamation of the strikes, the fascists received support from liberal newspapers, many of which had originally “blamed the fascists for contributing towards socialist participation by their excesses.”

However, at this point in what had become a de facto civil war, “the conservative and ‘liberal’ press,” along with the Italian bourgeoisie more generally, “congratulated the fascists who were containing and extending, in the name of the state, the work of destruction” and suppression of workers’ strikes.⁸⁴

[…]

L’Illustrazione, however, went beyond criticizing the striking workers and condemning the economic disruptiveness and violence of the strike, using that criticism as justification for its praise of the actions taken by fascists against the strikes. Explaining how the “the fascist reaction [to the general strike in Milan] produced a broad and immediate consensus in public opinion” that was sympathetic to the fascists, the issue included an entire page favorably depicting “blackshirts [replacing] workers on train platforms and other public services.”⁸⁶

The publication thus not only offered an account of increasing public advocacy for the fascist response to the general strike but itself expressed support for the fascists. It also provided an analysis of the Italian public’s philofascist turn to the Right, declaring that “fascism has protected our right to feel Italian” and that, while “we, the masses, we, the tranquil population […] are threatened with thirst and hunger by the activity of the red organizations […] the fascists focus only on responding to those who cause it.”

Thus, in L’Illustrazione’s conception, with the proclamation of the general strike on the evening of July 31st, “the public [was] called to judge [between] the two disagreeing parties […] the fascists and the socialists”; since “there [was] no government” left to resolve the people’s problems, the public ended up siding with the fascists, who emerged as the ones “who [helped] us, [defended] us” from the industrial sabotage perpetrated by the working-class movement.⁸⁷

The workers’ demonstration, which in the summer of 1921 was perpetuating fascist violence by merely giving existing fascists further reason to be violent, was in August 1922 turning middle-class liberals into explicit supporters of fascism.

(Emphasis added. Click here for more.)

Read the paragraphs below and then remind yourselves that somebody wrote these over one hundred years ago:

The strike would have “damaging effects […] on the national economy” and “would be a disaster for all […] bourgeois and proletarian alike.” Furthermore, it would divide the Italian working class along ideological lines: the “Italian populace [was] made up of innumerable proletarians who [were] not socialists,” so the strikers could not truthfully present themselves as a “universal proletarian force.”

[…]

By criticizing the actual tactic of the general strike, it also showed how divisive acts like worker demonstrations could undermine that potential for agreement; besides, there was no need for a strike when “parliamentary political pressure alone could easily” change the policies of the Italian government—for example, its official position on foreign socialist states.²⁹

[…]

According to L’Illustrazione, just as “little boys [played] shopkeeper, grocer, salesman, [and] sailor” to feel what it was like to be an adult, Italian workers were childishly taking over factories in order to feel what it was like to be a production manager. For this reason, the revolutionary aspirations of the maximalist working-class movement represented nothing more than the “infancy of a [naive] new society [that mimicked] the toils of grown-up society.”

In L’Illustrazione’s view, and as alluded to by La Stampa, the occupying workers simply lacked the technical knowledge and intelligence necessary to efficiently run factories on their own.⁶⁰ The factory occupations were an inconvenient nuisance to Italian society but were too “childlike” and uncoordinated to pose an existential threat to it.

[…]

In the same issue, weekly column writer Renato Simoni further captured middle-class liberals’ growing sense of class insecurity: “we pass from danger to danger! Oh how tragic is the life of the poor bourgeois in Italy!”⁶²

Seven days later, he criticized the occupying workers for being “unsatiated and insatiable” in their emands to their employers and accused them of “wanting the industrialists, after having licked off all the salt, to eat the plate too”: the workers “were not content with [mere] control of the factories [but demanded] the factories and the industrialists [themselves].”⁶³

In the newspaper’s view, the occupiers did not merely want to secure a stronger position in wage negotiations or increased workers’ participation in management decisions. Rather, their motivating ideology was allegedly a violent one that sought to devour their employers and endangered the “poor bourgeois.”

[…]

The publication castigated workers for their decision to go on strike, yet again detailing the costs that society incurred as a result of the workers’ demonstration: according to L’Illustrazione, “the tyranny of the reds” temporarily shut down public services, wasted public funds, and destroyed the national credit.

Yet the weekly also mocked the strikers for their inability to significantly disrupt everyday life in Milan, describing the ways in which the city’s trains, telegraphs, and postal system remained functioning throughout most of the strike despite what it claims were the striking workers’ best efforts: “the strike is dying in front of a laughing public.”⁸⁵

In this way, the magazine condemned the disruption that the strike caused in Milan while simultaneously making fun of its inability to paralyze life in the city, a pair of remarks whose inconsistency is indicative of the newspaper’s continued disgruntlement with and hostility toward the working-class movement.

---

Click here for events that happened today (October 28).

1897: Hans Speidel, Axis and then NATO general, existed.
1922: The Fascists marched on Rome and, with the monarachy’s permission, became part of the Italian government.
1940: Athens rejected Fascist Italy’s ultimatum; Fascist Italy consequently invaded Greece through Albania a few hours later.
1941: The Axis and its Lithuanian collaborators commenced massacring thousands of Jews from the Kaunas ghetto.
1944: The Axis lost Ukraine to the Soviets.
1945: Kesago Nakajima, Axis lieutenant general who oversaw the Nanking Massacre, dropped dead.

Understanding how fascism was often informed by the politics of imperialism and colonialism is of particular importance for historians of fascism and the far right in the former settler colonies of North America, southern Africa and Australasia. Scholars, such as Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini, have described settler colonialism as an invasive process involving the violent dispossession of the indigenous population, which shares an affinity with fascism’s need for violent expansion and the ‘cleansing’ of populations for the desired nation.¹⁸

Robin D.G. Kelley and Cedric Robinson remind us that many Black activists in the interwar period saw ‘fascism as a blood relative of slavery and imperialism’.¹⁹ While staunchly anti-fascist, the Communist Party of South Africa noted in the early years of the Second World War that non-Europeans in the Union were not wholly convinced that fascism was much different to the racial hierarchy that existed in South Africa at the time.²⁰

[...]

In its strongest formulations, the idea of ‘decoloniality’ might actually lead one to question the very distinction between fascism and colonialism in the Southern African context. Decolonial thought would stress the undoubted reality that in the colonial era, subjects of all southern African régimes, whether settler-controlled or metropolitan-centred, led lives constrained by racial structures and ideologies and the accompanying denial of democratic rights, high levels of state violence and extremely coercive labour practices (and that this history has long-lasting legacies).

This emphasis would point to the conclusion that there was no significant difference between overtly fascist colonial governments (such as Portugal in Angola and Mozambique) and those which claimed to align with democratic values (Britain in Northern Rhodesia for instance). In both cases the experience of the colonised was, it could be argued from this perspective, much the same.

In South Africa, such a view actually has a precedent in the Second World War politics of an important Black leftist group, the Non-European Unity Movement. The NEUM opposed the pro-British war effort of the government of Prime Minister Jan Smuts, arguing that his régime was itself fascist.

They adopted a rhetoric which portrayed themselves as analogous to the European resistance, for instance referring to Black participants in state structures as ‘Quislings’. Black people, in this view, had nothing to gain from an Allied victory, as South African segregationists were indistinguishable from [German Fascists].

However, there is also a strong Black intellectual history in the region, in which opposition to fascism is a significant theme. Within South Africa, at the same time as the NEUM was emerging, the leadership of the main African nationalist organisation, the ANC, supported the war effort, using the rhetoric of the Atlantic Charter and Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms.

It is true that they thus hoped to bring leverage to bear on the Allies to impose a liberalisation of racial policies on Smuts. But ANC leaders like Dr A.B. Xuma believed that their ends would best served by an Allied triumph than by the success of Hitler and his local allies in the radical wing of Afrikaner nationalism. The distinction between fascism and other forms of rule was seen by them as being a weighty one.

Moreover, during the era of guerilla war against the [anticommunists] in Mozambique and Angola, Ian Smith’s government in Rhodesia and the South African apartheid order, both the insurgent movements and their allies abroad were often anxious to portray their opponents as ‘fascist’. This was rhetorically useful, as a tactic of delegitimisation, but also (although often inconsistently) used as a point of departure for political analysis.

There is thus a serious history of southern African Black intellectual engagement with the topic of fascism, and a closer look at that might be one useful way in which thinking about fascism from a decolonial perspective could be useful.

But, there are broader issues to which the decolonial approach might also usefully point us. One potential application is to insist that the experience of southern Africa needs to be given greater weight in Europe-focused studies of fascism. There is considerable debate on whether the [...] Estado Novo (1934–1974) was ‘technically’ fascist, but it is indisputable that it belonged to the family of prewar European [anticommunist dictatorships].

Its (NATO-backed) colonial wars in Angola and Mozambique from 1960 to 1974 were major military and political struggles. Yet this enormous conflict has not sufficiently registered in the mainstream of European historiography. A decolonial perspective might suggest that this marginalisation reflects a reluctance to integrate the colonial world into historical thought about fascism.

Similarly, [Fascist] overseas operations in the ‘global South’ have seldom been taken seriously as part of the main story of German Fascism. During the 1930s [the Third Reich] ran a vast international organisational operation. This included powerful [Fascist] movements amongst the wealthy German community in South African-ruled Namibia and support to small but vociferous fascist movements in South Africa.

During the Second World War, a mass Afrikaner fascist movement, the Ossewa Brandwag, emerged in South Africa, which had strong clandestine links to [Fascist] intelligence and carried out sabotage operations. Without exaggerating their significance, a lot more could be done to relate these developments to events within the Reich and in the course of the Second World War.

The question of whether they were more significant in the history of [German Fascism] and the world conflict than has generally been allowed, might at least be a useful one to ask.²³

(Emphasis added. Click here for more.)

Some of the Anglophile far right, such as the League of Rights groups that spread from Australia to Britain, Canada and New Zealand or the National Front inspired groups in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, emphasised the previous network of white Dominions across the British Empire. The ‘white man’s world’ of the British Empire was venerated by the far right as the traditional international order that had been undermined in the postwar period.

These groups called for apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia to be brought into a renewed British Commonwealth of the white Dominions, with these states under white minority rule championed as bulwarks against communism and multi-racial democracy.

Fascist Italy practised apartheid in East Africa, and it seems that Apartheid South Africa was a source of inspiration for the Fascists, so this perception should be easy to understand.

---

Click here for events that happened today (October 27).

1842: Prefascist member of the Chamber of Deputies, Giovanni Giolitti, existed.
1858: Saitō Makoto, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal of Japan, was born.
1884: Shirō Takasu, Axis career naval officer, was delivered to the world.
1890: Toshinari Shōji, Axis major general, started his life.
1894: Ernst Friedrich Christoph ‘Fritz’ Sauckel, burdened the earth.
1937: The Opera Nazionale Balilla and all the various Fascist youth organizations became reunited in the Gioventù Italiana del Littorio, headed by the PNF secretary Achille Starace, and coincidentally other Fascists released the propaganda film Scipio Africanus: The Defeat of Hannibal in Italy. Meanwhile, Tōkyō announced the capture of Pingding in Shanxi Province after a three‐day battle and rejected a proposed conference in Brussels to settle the war in China.
1938: The Third Reich began arresting Jews with Polish citizenship with the intention of deporting them to Poland. Coincidentally, the Battle of Wuhan ended in a Pyhrric Imperial victory.
2018: A neofascist opened fire on a Pittsburgh synagogue, massacring eleven humans and injuring six (including four police officers).

Dimitrije Ljotić’s Yugoslav Nationalist Movement, also known as Zbor (Rally) [...] was a pro-fascistic yet highly conservative political association, which received steady financial and political support from [the Third Reich] dating back its foundation in 1935, and which espoused an extreme anti-Communist, anti-liberal and anti-individualist ideological programme. Zbor was a marginal political phenomenon in the interwar years, and did not succeed in receiving more than 1 per cent of electoral support throughout the 1930s.³⁶

However, Ljotić and his close political associates were to become the decisive political factor during the subsequent [Axis] occupation of Serbia, and assumed important positions in the collaborationist government. Zbor advocated a return to the archaic cultural and religious traditions of the Yugoslav nation, and heavily criticized the political course and influence of Western democracies; unsurprisingly, this ideological stance profoundly shaped its adherents’ contributions to the modernization debates.

[...]

The [Axis] régime in rump Serbia implemented some of the most brutal occupation policies and practices in the entire [Axis occupation of] Europe. The cumulative effects of forced labour, detention and execution of the ‘politically unreliable’, constant economic exploitation and food requisitioning were severely worsened by the harsh reprisals in response to the developing armed rebellion of the Communist and nationalist forces.

The initial [Axis] plan not to set up a collaborationist régime with political and governmental duties needed to be changed as the situation with the guerrilla resistance deteriorated and no further reinforcement of the [Wehrmacht] in Serbia was allowed due to the Eastern front demands. In that context, the originally installed purely administrative body functioning under firm German auspices proved inefficient, and what was suggested was ‘reorganizing and strengthening the Serbian administration so that the Serbs themselves might crush the rebellion’.⁵⁰

The puppet government of General Milan Nedić, a high-ranking pre-war military officer and politician with a favourable popular reputation, was thus established in August 1941. From the very beginning of the [Axis] occupation, Ljotić served as one of the most important men in the collaborationist setting in Serbia: he immediately founded the Serbian Volunteers’ Corps (SDK) which was integrated into the Wehrmacht; members of Zbor joined the collaborationist cabinet, while Ljotić himself became a Commissar for the Rebuilding of the City of Smederevo.

Ljotić’s actual political influence extended well beyond what was suggested by his official title. He had a privileged access to the [Wehrmacht] and occupation authorities in Serbia: although he never formally joined Nedić’s government, he maintained significant influence over its decision-making and plans throughout the war years. Still, the government’s areas of authority were heavily restricted from the very outset, and they only shrank as time went on, as the government failed to secure popular backing, pacify the population or eliminate the military rebellion.

The government functioned under constant [Axis] threats of even more brutal anti-civilian retaliations, executions of the most prominent members of the intelligentsia, and the dismemberment and occupation of Serbia by the other Axis forces, etc. According to Tomasevich:

[T]he Serbian puppet government was so subservient to the [...] occupation authorities [that] it cannot truly be said that it had its own policies in any field of government activity. It was simply an auxiliary organ of the [...] occupation régime.⁵¹

Distrusted by the political and SS elements in the [Third Reich’s] apparatus, the government’s activity was largely reduced to low-level administration, pro-[Axis] propaganda efforts and pointing out to the population the futility of any anti-[Axis] operations.

[...]

From the very beginning of the occupation, wartime writings held on to the rhetoric of participation in an exceptionally significant project, one of building the New European Order. They also constructed Serbia as an important, equal, honourable and respected member of the renovated European family of nations.

In fact, as Nedić’s Minister Olćan noted in 1943, while England’s plans for the post-war reconstruction of Europe relegated the Balkans to the political margins and envisaged an insignificant international position for the region,⁸⁰ Serbia under Nedić had been awarded a ‘dignified place in the European community’, which would, after the war, become a ‘family of harmony and happiness’.⁸¹

(Emphasis added.)

As elsewhere in Axis propaganda, Serbia’s collaborationist government critised the United Kingdom for abusing India:

Numerous lengthy treatises on Indian politics, culture, history, literature and religion criticized the ‘British rhetoric of superiority and detestation’ with regard to the local population, the rhetoric that some of the most prominent pre-war intellectuals had themselves internalized. [...] ‘India’s contacts with the West in more recent times brought to [the country] much misfortune, tragedy, unhappiness’.⁶³

While one could easily gloss over this as nothing but another generic attempt to persuade people into siding against the Western Allies, it is more useful to think of it in comparative terms: the colonisation of India was an example of a 'bad' occupation, whereas the Axis's presence in the Balkans was an instance of a 'good' occupation. In other words, no matter how rough the Serbs might have had it, the Indians had it worse. When seen in this light, Axis propaganda (hypocritically) criticizing British colonialism becomes much easier to understand.

---

Click here for events that happened today (October 26).

1935: Due to a food shortage in the Rhineland–Palatinate and Saarland, Berlin proclaimed meatless and butterless days for those regions on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Meanwhile, Benito Mussolini called international sanctions against Italy ‘the most odious of injustices’ during a speech commemorating the 13th anniversary of the March on Rome.
1937: The Third Reich commenced expelling 18,000 Polish Jews.
1942: In the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands during the Guadalcanal Campaign, one U.S. aircraft carrier was sunk and another carrier became heavily damaged, while two Axis carriers and one cruiser took heavy damage.
1944: The Battle of Leyte Gulf ended with an overwhelming Yankee victory. Hiroyoshi Nishizawa, Axis aviator, was killed in this action.
1956: Walter Wilhelm Gieseking, Axis composer, perished.
1960: Toshizō Nishio, Axis general, died.
1961: Sadae Inoue, another Axis general, expired.

This past summer, Batulin participated in the “Nation Europa” conference, and so did Kristian Udarov, another fighter from the Terror battalion and the Belarusian Volunteer Corps. Yesterday, Udarov’s younger brother died fighting in the National Guard’s Azov Brigade. Earlier this year, Vadin Kitar took a photo with Udarov, who is affiliated with the far-right Ukrainian organization “Tradition & Order,” which was also represented at the neo-Nazi conference in Lviv.

Denis “White Rex” Kapustin, the commander of the Russian Volunteer Corps and one of the most notorious neo[fascists] in Europe, prominently featured in this event, which went unreported by the western media. “White Rex” was one of the only people whose identity wasn’t concealed in photos that the HUR released surrounding the operation to clear the chemical plant, including an awards ceremony led by military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov. Reportedly for his neo[fascist] fighters, this mission was dedicated to avenging the death of Mykola Kokhanivsky, the extremist commander of the rogue “OUN” volunteer battalion, who died this year in the Vovchansk area.

Several years ago, the Security Service of Ukraine arrested Aleksandr Skachkov, a Russian neo[fascist] who served in Kokhanivsky’s unit, for circulating the neo[fascist] manifesto of Brenton Tarrant, the 2019 mosque shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand. The journalist Oleksiy Kuzmenko discovered that Kokhanivsky was an early promoter of the Telegram channel, “Tarrant’s lads,” that Skachkov was accused of running. In my article about Nation Europa, I explained that the HUR Timur unit’s “Team Nobody” is linked to a Telegram channel that has provided its subscribers a “full video in good quality” of the Christchurch massacres.

British military intelligence gave two thumbs up to Budanov’s neo[fascist] special forces, if only after completing their mission in Vovchansk. A public “intelligence update” on October 1 said, “It is likely that Ukrainian control of the plant will facilitate further counter offensives in the north of the city to push the RGF [Russian Ground Forces] back towards the Ukraine-Russia border.”

Although the western media hasn’t given too much attention to the HUR’s achievement in Vovchansk, this British update stirred a few triumphant articles, such as “Ukraine Recaptures Vital Chemical Plant in Latest Blow for Vladimir Putin” (Huffington Post) and “Russian Stronghold Falls” (National Interest). I’m no military analyst and have no idea how important a victory this may have been for Ukraine, but the British seemed to hint at the possibility of more cross-borders from the HUR’s neo[fascist] special forces.

Before Russia’s 2024 offensive in the Vovchansk and Kharkiv directions, the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC) and its allied units carried out a series of incursions into the Belgorod region of Russia. In the spring of 2023, journalist Leonid Ragozin noticed that Aleksandr Skachkov, the alleged circulator of the Christchurch manifesto, participated in the first RVC raid. Skachkov had a KKK patch on his chest, produced by a company commander in the 3rd Assault Brigade.

As some readers may recall, Vadim Kitar’s girlfriend is the main representative of the Azov-linked brand, “Company Group Team,” and last year, Volodymyr Zelensky gave a peculiar shoutout to this “military community” on Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces Day. Indeed, the “CGT” brand, perhaps above all others, appears to unite those in Ukraine’s “autonomous neo-nazi army” — the Azov movement and allied units. For example, in June 2024, when the Azovite commander of the NGU Svoboda battalion’s Paragon company gave an interview to the battalion’s official podcast, he was interviewed by a neo[fascist] CGT enthusiast from the Svoboda unit.

Last year, when Petro Poroshenko visited the aforementioned 36th marine brigade and received a neo[fascist] patch from one of its units, the former president put his arm around a soldier wearing a CGT shirt. These are just a couple examples that I found months ago, before discovering the degree(s) of separation between them and the Vedmedi SS. Seeing the CGT spokesperson fundraise for her boyfriend’s Junger Group in recent days, I looked up the definition of a “company group” again: “a collection of parent and subsidiary corporations that function as a single economic entity through a common source of control.”

---

Click here for events that happened today (October 25).

1891: Karl Elmendorff, Fascist opera conductor, was born.
1895: Arthur Schmidt, Axis commander, stained the world.
1908: Gotthard Handrick, Axis fighter pilot, started his life.
1913: The Butcher of Lyon and later CIA asset, Nikolaus Barbie, disgraced humanity with his presence.
1921: Michael I of Romania, Axis collaborator, blighted the earth.
1927: The Fascist luxury liner SS Principessa Mafalda sunk off Brazil’s coast, taking 314 lives down with it.
1936: Count Nobile Ciano conducted a two‐day visit to the Third Reich, which resulted in the Rome–Berlin Axis Pact. Meanwhile, the Rexist ‘March on Brussels’ ended in failure due to low turnout and rowdiness by those who did show up; the authorities made several hundred arrests including Rexist leader Léon Degrelle when he tried to address his followers (though they soon released him).
1939: Mitsubishi delivered the second Zero fighter prototype to the Imperial Japanese Navy for testing.
1940: Sixteen Axis BR20M bombers attacked Felixstowe and Harwich in Britain; one crashed on take off and two crashed on the return flight. Meanwhile, four groups of Axis Bf 109 fighters swept southern England, shooting down ten Allied fighters while losing fourteen of their own. At dusk, Axis He 111 bombers attacked Montrose airfield in Scotland. Overnight, the Axis bombed London, Birmingham, Pembroke, Cardiff, and Liverpool. Lastly, the Regia Marina formed the Forza Navale Speciale (FNS) under Vice Admiral Vittorio Tur.
1941: The Axis lost its fighter pilot Franz Xaver Freiherr von Werra to Allied firepower, but the Axis exterminated 1,776 Jewish women and 812 Jewish children in Vilnius, Lithuania (for a total of 2,578 people), and the Axis set a warehouse full of civilians, mostly Jews, on fire at Dalnik, Ukraine.

Axis submarine Galileo Ferraris attacked Allied convoy HG-75 west of Gibraltar and was discovered by an Allied Catalina flightcraft; Galileo Ferraris's crew scuttled the submarine after being attacked by the Allies, but the Axis was able to hit HMS Lamerton with the deck gun before the engagement was over; six Italians died in the engagement, forty-four survived. Later in the same day, Axis submarine U-563 attacked HG-75, but she was driven away by Allied corvette HMS Heliotrope.
1942: Erwin Rommel visited Rome to press for more supplies for the war in North Africa. He arrived in Egypt to assume command of all Axis units in North Africa by the evening.
1944: Heinrich Himmler ordered a crackdown on the Edelweiss Pirates, a loosely organized youth culture in the Third Reich that assisted army deserters and others in hiding from the Fascists. As well, the final attempt of the Imperial Japanese Navy to win the war climaxed at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Coincidentally, the Axis lost its last Romanian city, Carei, to the Eastern Allies.
1945: Five decades of Imperial rule in Taiwan formally ended when the Republic of China assumed control. Meanwhile, Robert Ley, head of the ‘German Labour Front’, committed suicide while awaiting trial for war crimes… no comment.
2000: Mochitsura Hashimoto, Axis submarine commander, expired.

As trains carrying writers from around Europe rolled into Weimar on Thursday, October 24 1941, the [Axis’s] articulation of an alternative model of European literature began with, or rather through, these writers themselves.³³ In political terms, the group the Germans assembled in Weimar reflected the map of [the Axis in] Europe. Predictably, it included some invitees distinguished solely by their [...] fascist political commitments.

In literary–political terms, however, it represented regions and trends that the French model of European literature had generally excluded from the upper echelons of international literary exchange. Substantial contingents represented the literatures of Europe’s northern and southeastern periphery, from Norway and Finland to Croatia, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria. Of course, individual writers from some of these countries had achieved success in Paris.

But the writers the [Axis] called ‘European’ were generally ‘national writers’ ― both in the sense that their readership was largely confined to their nation and in the sense that they placed their talents at the service of the political-cultural project of the nation, rejecting the autonomous status of the ‘international writer’.³⁴

In their national contexts, several were important figures. Veikko Antero Koskenniemi was Finland’s ‘unofficial national poet,’ author in 1940 of new lyrics for the hymn in Sibelius’s Finlandia; historical novelist Fani Popova-Mutafova was a leading intellectual of interwar Bulgaria; Slovakian novelist Jozef Cíger Hronsky led the influential nationalist cultural association Matica Slovenská.³⁵

The focus on national writers accounts for the heavy representation of authors of naturalistic novels set in the rural village or farm — not so much out of ideological linkages to [Fascist] ‘blood and soil’ ideology, but because this was the central literary genre for many of Europe’s predominantly agricultural societies.

Writers in this vein included prominent figures like internationally successful Belgian children’s author (and Flemish nationalist) Felix Timmermans, and Europe’s greatest novelist of ‘the soil’, Norwegian Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun, who communicated his support for the Writers’ Union by telegram.³⁶

Moreover, a significant group among these ‘national’ writers could also be classified as ‘regional’. Works by writers like the Transylvanian-Hungarian Josef Nyirö, Dutch writer and Frisian nationalist Pieter Sybesma, or Norwegian Lars Hansen, whose ishavslitteratur ― travel literature set amid the icy landscapes of the North Pole ― sold well in Germany, all expressed unique forms of life seen to have emerged from the intensely local relationship between people and their regions or landscapes.³⁷

But the predilection for rural themes did not mean the writers were themselves all provincials. The group included many sophisticated, multi-lingual, urban intellectuals, often responsible for translations into their national languages of major works from more established literary languages, above all French and German ― but not for this reason any less nationalist.³⁸

Right-wing Finnish nationalist Koskenniemi, for example, had translated Goethe and Balzac into Finnish. Croatian Antun Bonifačić’, cultural director of the Ustasha régime’s foreign office, had studied at the Sorbonne and published a study on Paul Valéry.³⁹

As these writers mixed and mingled with one another, while being told repeatedly that they were ‘the intellectual select [geistige Auslese] of all European nations,’ they were offered a definition of European writer that built on a [fascistised], antisemitic updating of the traditional German-Herderian model of literature: European literature was composed of national literatures, and only those writers who most authentically expressed their nations’ spirits deserved the title ‘European’.⁴⁰

This was a European literature with no place for cosmopolitan exiles, modernists who appealed to Parisian trends while ignoring the local public, or, needless to say, Jews; nor for those European nationalities now slated for repression, like the Poles, Czechs or Russians, among many others. But with regard to those nationalities it included, this model called on the broad currency of the German model of literature, which after all had stimulated the emergence of some of these national literatures to begin with.⁴¹

Moreover, by including and celebrating regional and rural writers, this vision of European literature capitalized on the international 1930s trend for literary regionalism. Partaking of what Roberto Dainotto calls the ‘metaphysics of place,’ writers and critics across Europe saw in realist texts about specific rural regions a comforting vision of uncorrupted traditions ― cast against the cultural rootlessness and superficiality of urban modernity ― as a basis for literary (and political) renewal and regeneration.⁴²

In Germany this kind of thinking had received its most sophisticated exposition by Martin Heidegger, and had been fully systematized in multi-volume works of völkisch and racist literary theory.⁴³ Thus the writers gathered at Weimar cannot simply be dismissed as ‘applauding pieces of scenery, comparable to the participants in any number of State and Party events’.⁴⁴

On the contrary, this assemblage reflected a careful strategy on the [Axis’s] part: presenting this particular group of authors to the world, to one another, and to themselves as European deliberately labeled national and indeed regional writers as the most European. It turned Larbaud’s definition of the European writer, whereby the ‘European’ was the supra-national, precisely on its head.

(Emphasis added.)

The inclusionary pretensions coupled with the exclusionary practices should sound familiar to some of you: creators (usually white cishet men) who either promote or conform to the status quo are honoured by prestigious institutions while revolutionary socialists are ignored.

---

Click here for other events that happened today (October 24).

1910: Gunter d’Alquen, SS officer and journalist, was sadly born.
1922: The Fascists held a huge rally in Naples and made the final plans for the march on Rome.
1934: The Gestapo sent a telegram to every police station in the Reich ordering them to send to Berlin all files on men known for their ‘homosexual practices’.
1938: Joachim von Ribbentrop contacted Warsaw to suggest an anti‐Soviet alliance that would guarantee the Polish–German border for twenty‐five years.
1941: Axis troops shot 142 Greek hostages in another reprisal to discourage antifascism. Meanwhile, other Axis soldiers marched Jews from Odessa’s jail two kilometers down the road toward Dalnik, shooting any who fell behind.
1944: The Empire of Japan’s center force suffered temporary repulsion in the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
1945: The Axis lost the infamous Vidkun Quisling, Minister President of Norway, to a firing squad.
1990: Somebody revealed the existence of Operation Gladio.

The Molot Group, a little known unit in the famous 3rd Assault Brigade of the Ukrainian Ground Forces, is associated with the Hitlerite “Nord Storm” (NS, a double entendre, also refers to [so-called] National Socialism), another group affiliated with Ukraine’s most powerful neo-Nazis. The Azov movement created the 3rd Assault Brigade but originated in the notorious “Azov Battalion,” which joined the National Guard of Ukraine (NGU) and became the “Azov Regiment” by 2015 — and the “Azov Brigade” by 2023.

Whereas the NGU Azov Brigade has made an effort to clean up its image, if only to substantiate propaganda about its “evolution” and “depoliticization,” the 3rd Assault Brigade, established in 2022 by NGU Azov veterans, is more open about its [neofascism]. Many of its units use the Black Sun, and at least a couple use Slavic pagan symbols. Many if not most Ukrainian neo-pagans are possessed with the conviction that their country is actually the ancient Aryan homeland and birthplace of “white civilization.” They appropriated the Black Sun years ago, giving neo[fascists] the excuse that it’s just a pagan symbol, as far as they know.

Mix of pagan and [Fascist] symbols in these patches of 3rd Assault Brigade units. On the left (“Myron platoon”), the symbol of the Slavic pagan god “Chur” above an Azov wolfsangel. On the right (“Algiz platoon”), a “life rune” above crossed German stick grenades from the insignia of the notorious SS Dirlewanger Brigade.

In August, a neo[fascist] fighter from the NGU Azov Brigade died in eastern Ukraine’s Serebryansky forest. Ivan Vovchanskyi, 33, better known as Veleslav Shipit, served in its 5th battalion, “Lyubart.” Several years ago on the Russian social media platform VK, he reposted an image of a Black Sun, along with the lyrics of a song: “We don’t regret anything — Hitler for a thousand years! There will be no more of you, the answer is cast in steel…” In 2018, he made his Facebook profile picture one of him wearing a shirt with a [Fascist] eagle, in which an OUN trident replaced the swastika.

Contrary to a popular evidence-free narrative that the NGU Azov unit was eventually “depoliticized” and somehow separated from the broader Azov movement, the latter’s neo[fascist] paramilitary organization “Centuria” formed the Lyubart battalion in 2022. That year, “Veleslav Shipit” read the Bhagavad Gita, an ancient Hindu scripture that describes an epic struggle between warring cousins, which reminded him of the Russia-Ukraine war. Shipit was not your typical Azov fighter, but a “pagan theologian” and “priest” from Lviv. One pagan group that mourned his loss makes amulets for the 3rd Assault Brigade.

My favorite blog, “Events in Ukraine” by Peter Korotaev, published a primer on paganism and Ukrainian neo[fascists] this year. As Peter mentioned, in the summer of 2017, the year that some “experts” say neo[fascists] were purged from the unit, the NGU’s Azov Regiment set up an idol to Perun, the Slavic god of thunder and war.

They did this to celebrate the 1053rd anniversary of a medieval Kievan prince’s “great victory” over the Khazar Khaganate, which had a Turkic elite that converted to Judaism. “This grandiose victory over the Jewish state ranks among the most significant events in Slavic and world history,” said the commander of the Azov Regiment. “The invincible spirit and weapons of the descendants of Perun destroyed the parasitic system.”

According to the NGU Azov website, “Khazaria is a state that for many years led a parasitic way of life, destroyed and plundered the southern lands of Kievan Rus, and destroyed the Slavic people.” This Perun idol was erected on the Azov base near Mariupol to be a sacred site, “where before combat tasks, each fighter could consecrate his weapon and worship the deity, gain strength and invincibility from the shrine for the upcoming battle.”

At the risk of stating the obvious, I would like to confirm that I am in no way sharing this information in hopes of either angering or embarrassing neopagans (many of whom not only loathe fascism but also tend to have a better grasp of the lore than these petty bourgeois paskudnyaks). The point here is identifying neofascists by how they misappropriate cultures.

Zionists in particular (be they Jewish or Christian) have a very similar habit of abusing elements from Judaism for their own neoimperialist or ethnonationalist purposes while their understanding of it tends to be unremarkable. So if white supremacists abusing neopaganism makes you cringe, know that at least you aren't alone. Either way, hopefully it motivates you all the more to... inconvenience them.

---

Click here for events that happened today (October 23).

1876: Louis Rudolph Franz Schlegelberger, state Secretary in the German Reich Ministry of Justice, worsened life with his presence.
1880: Dominikus Böhm, Axis architect, started his life.
1902: Robert Eberan von Eberhorst, Axis engineer, was born.
1936: Berlin and Tōkyō signed the final, secret text on the Anti‐Comintern Pact, and Berlin and Rome signed the Italo‐German Protocol. Berlin likewise ordered the Condor Legion to Spain to fight for the Nationalists.
1940: Adolf Schicklgruber and Francisco Franco met at Hendaye to discuss the possibility of Spain officially joining the Axis.
1941: The Third Reich prohibited Jews from emigrating, including in its occupied territories. Coincidentally, 2,014 Jews originally from Cologne arrived at the Łódź ghetto in Poland. Meanwhile, the 3rd Panzer Division of the Panzergruppe 2 outflanked Soviet troops at Mtensk one hundred kilometers south of Moscow. In Odessa, the Axis and its collaborators exterminated 5,000 Jews by shooting and 19,000 Jews by burning as reprisals for the previous day's bombing, and the Axis arrested 20,000 civilians (mostly Jews).

On a lighter note, four crew members of Axis submarine U‐106, on watch on the deck, were swept overboard in the Bay of Biscay and were all lost.
1942: The Allies commenced the Second Battle of El Alamein, which proved to be the key turning point in the North African campaign, and the Battle for Henderson Field began on Guadalcanal.
1943: A transport of prisoners from Bergen‐Belsen Concentration Camp arrived at Gas Chamber II of Auschwitz. In the undressing room, one of the Jewish women seized SS man Josef Schillinger's pistol and shot Schillinger and another guard, Wilhelm Emmerich! Other prisoners joined in to attack other guards, but the SS eventually took control of the situation. Schillinger died on the way to the hospital; Emmerich survived the wound, but became permanently disabled.

Additionally, U‐23 sank Soviet merchant ship Tanais at anchor off Poti, Georgia, with a torpedo. The ship broke in two, with the stern sinking immediately, and the bow sinking a few minutes later. Eleven died, ten survived.
1944: The Battle of Leyte Gulf commenced as the III.Panzer Korps launched a counterattack near Debrecen and Axis soldiers rounded up Jews in Budapest city.

As the decade advanced, though, it became increasingly evident for Milá and his comrades that carrying on the fight from European soil was not an option anymore. Accordingly, many of the second‐generation activists devoted huge efforts to the strengthening of a fully international strategy which went beyond the borders of Europe. As Ernesto Milá explained in his memoirs:

Although in Europe it had become impossible to work, in other geographical areas there was a much more favourable situation. [...] This web of contacts in Latin America and Africa was enough to establish an international strategy. It was about staying on the defensive in Europe, improving positions in Latin America and Africa in such a way that we were able to establish ‘sanctuaries’ in these areas and, at the same time, the basis for generating the economic means that would allow us later to ‘return to Europe’. Based on this strategy, we intervened directly in some Latin American, Central American and African countries between 1975 and 1985.⁸³

In the context of the 1980s police prosecution, therefore, Milá (and other activists like Delle Chiaie), finally decided to depart to Latin America, where they engaged in collaboration with a number of activists and régimes.⁸⁴ Once again, this was possible thanks to the transnational network, which facilitated some stable money streams, exchanges of information and data between very distant countries, as well as of documentation and media.⁸⁵

In turn, Milá would end up in Bolivia working as a political adviser for the short‐lived dictatorship of Luis García Meza, along with other neofascist ‘comrades’ such as Stefano delle Chiaie and Klaus Barbie. His tasks there were incredibly varied. First, he would regularly meet with the highest echelons of the military or with important politicians and businessmen. Second, Milá used these contacts to collect information about communist guerrilla movements like the Peruvian Sendero Luminoso. Milá would then write reports advising on the best strategies to prevent the expansion of these movements and fight them.

Milá would also create and spread fake news which was sent to the different news agencies in the continent. The idea was to give the impression that these guerrillas were a huge imminent threat for the stability of the region. Finally, Milá would also help in taking care of the different businesses the network had at its disposal there, in this case managing three mines (gold and copper) and several rubber plantations.⁸⁶

However, the activities of Milá on the other side of the Atlantic would not last long, either. As the dictatorships in Latin America began to collapse during the 1980s, the Spanish neofascist was confronted with the need to return to Europe. This, in turn, would mean the end of Milá’s political activism. Indeed, upon his return to Spain in 1983, he was arrested by the police, indicted on firearms and illegal demonstration charges, and eventually sentenced to two years in prison.⁸⁷

On 3 October 1985, El País informed of a new arrest, this time in the streets of Barcelona, and his immediate confinement in the Modelo Prison, in order to execute his pending sentence for the arson of the UCD [Barcelona Union of the Democratic Centre] headquarters in Barcelona that had taken place in 1980.⁸⁸

(Emphasis added. Click here for more.)

The geography used by Thiriart to delineate his ‘Third Force Europe’ also showed a particular understanding of international relations and, more specifically, of the ongoing decolonization process. In this regard, the Belgian neofascist conceded that re‐structuring the basis of relations between the colonized and the colonizers was necessary, but always without harming the interests of Europeans.

Thiriart was thus able to wave the anti‐imperialist flag while advocating for a different strategy than the one defended by the United Nations. At the same time, Thiriart portrayed himself as a champion of Western supremacy and a firm defender of Europe’s civilizing mission, arguing that Europeans needed to keep a strong presence in Africa and the Middle East as a way to help other ‘peoples’ progress, despite the growing ‘anti‐white‐racism’. In his own words, ‘We have been colonisers and not colonialists, as you try to make us believe. We have taught [black folk] everything, including the techniques they are turning against us today.’⁴⁷

Linked to his views on decolonization, Thiriart also presented a different perspective on the racial dimension of his ‘Third Force Europe’, which, in his view, could not be built around one single privileged race. Accordingly, Thiriart condemned the conception of an ethnically Germanic continent as harmful and dangerous, thus taking distance from the more biological racist theories predominant in Northern European neofascist groups, especially Germany. Instead, the Belgian neofascist envisaged a Europe in which Slavs, Latins and Germans were ‘of equal value’.⁴⁸

The very existence of the diversity of races in Europe, Thiriart argued, ‘makes us substantially and irrevocably condemn racism as a political argument’.⁴⁹

At the same time, though, the Belgian neofascist defended the importance of keeping the various races separate, especially the ones from outside of Europe, such as blacks and Arabs, that threatened to corrupt the European whiteness. In this way, Thiriart was creating a certain hierarchy of races in order to avoid what he labelled as the ‘confusion created by a theoretical, abstract and unrealistic egalitarianism’.⁵⁰

In essence, Thiriart was using an anti‐racist rhetoric to present a new form of racism which would be very influential in the following decades.

[...]

In order to accomplish these goals, neofascist activists first needed to destabilize the state by rendering normal public life intolerably dangerous. If the parliamentary régime of capitalist interests was pushed hard enough through an increasingly violent struggle, the younger militants reasoned, the moderate and conservative parties in government would eventually lose control of the situation, thus leaving the existing far‐right parties in control.

In other words, an escalation of violent actions (which ranged from attacking bookstores to full‐on terrorist attacks) would exacerbate the vulnerability of democratic institutions and rally societal support behind the military or police forces, which, in turn, would ally with these neofascist groups to attack enemies of the government. The ideal outcome of this strategy would be the elimination of left‐wing actors and the constitution of authoritarian régimes with corporatist economies, headed by those far‐right parties which were still part of the system.⁶

As a way to carry out that strategy, the emergent neofascist groups decided that it was better to create a series of malleable horizontal structures, instead of the more rigid single vertical organization. The outcome was the network baptized by the press of the time as the ‘Black International’.⁶⁷

This web was flexible by necessity, allowing the individual members to work on single campaigns in their own countries or to come together and concentrate their combined strength on a single episode across borders. The pliability of this form of collaboration was confirmed by Ernesto Milá in his memoirs:

The network of international relations constituted at that time was, above all, an informal network of relationships based on past experiences and collaborations formed around a relatively small group of people who maintained common bonds and ties for more than a decade. It was not only a militant structure, but also and above all a network of informal relations that crystallised at certain times and for certain actions. Its gestation had been long, and, in fact, it added different networks.⁶⁸

The ensuing violent actions throughout Western Europe were thus the outcome of a unique strategy, carried out by a constellation of groups, movements and underground cells, which cooperated with each other and coordinated their actions on the basis of their belonging to an imagined space of solidarity. In terms of membership, these networks were clearly transversal, including people from very different social backgrounds, ranging from politicians and journalists, to military personnel and policemen, and others.⁶⁹

It is worth noting that the transnational and malleable network was the place where the three spaces described in this special issue eventually merged. First, the violent actions which neofascists carried out collaboratively within the web provided them with a clear space of social experience and concrete political engagement.

Moreover, the members of these networks used the already existing spaces of knowledge circulation to exchange insights about the best way to carry out those violent actions. This was crucial because many of the young militants were born after the Second World War and, therefore, had no combat experience.

In desperate need of military training from those ‘comrades’ who had been fighting ‘the war against communism’ since the 1940s, the younger militants thus set up a number of training camps across Western Europe to learn the basics: how to make a bomb, fire a gun or even follow a potential ‘target’.⁷⁰

This military training not only represented a space of social experience and concrete political engagement, but also contributed to expanding and strengthening the imagined spaces of belonging and solidarity. The fact that the militants volunteered to go to these camps clearly showed that they shared the desire for a different type of Europe.⁷¹

Furthermore, training to carry out violent actions together only intensified that sense of belonging. As Junio Valerio Borghese used to tell the young activists who would join the network: ‘Only action unites.’⁷²

As regards the physical contours of this transnational activism, the CIA noted in a report issued in May 1983 that the violent actions of the neofascists, although generally spread across all of Western Europe, had quickly become ‘more prominent in countries with a fascist or Nazi past such as Italy, West Germany, and Spain, and in countries like France that have deep historical cleavages between left and right’.⁷³

Specifically, the U.S. intelligence services concluded, after conducting a careful analysis of the different strikes, that Italy emerged as one of the main epicentres between 1969 and 1974.⁷⁴ After the dissolution of the Portuguese and Greek régimes, though, this initial focus shifted slightly to include Spain; with ETA’s assassination of Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, Franco’s right‐hand man and potential successor, the defence of the Francoist régime had become the main neofascist active cause in Europe.⁷⁵

In this way, the years between 1974 and 1978 witnessed a considerable flow of neofascist militants from different parts of the world (mainly Italy, France and Argentina) coming to Franco’s Spain in order to ensure that, after the imminent death of the dictator, the country did not fall into communism.

Partly as a result of the internationalization of neofascists in Spain after 1974, the far‐right strategy became increasingly violent, reaching its climax in the years 1976–77, with the clashes in Montejurra which ended with two dead and several wounded, and the assassination of five labour activists from the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) and the workers’ federation Comisiones Obreras (CC.OO) in the centre of Madrid.

This last action, also known as the Atocha massacre, caused a considerable backlash in Spain, eventually facilitating the legalization of the PCE and the approval of the [pseudo]democratic constitution in 1978.⁷⁶

(Emphasis added.)

---

Click here for events that happened today (October 22).

1936: The Belgian Rexist Party announced its intention to march on Brussels in a conscious imitation of Mussolini’s March on Rome in order to ‘sweep out the Paul van Zeeland government and its corruption’ despite a government order prohibiting the march.
1937: The Duke of Windsor and his wife met Adolf Schicklgruber at the Berghof. As they departed Schicklgruber made the Fascist salute, which the Duke returned!
1940: Per Aktion Burckel, the Axis deported 29,000 Jews in Alsace‐Lorraine, Saarland, and Baden to Southern France. As well, Adolf Schicklgruber and Pierre Laval met for the first time at Montoire‐sur‐le‐Loir, around the same time that the Reich commissioned the submarine U‐108. Additionally, Rome set the date of the invasion of Greece to October 28, 1940. The government had decided to attack Greece without informing the Germans, as the German Reich had a history of starting wars without sharing advance information with the Kingdom of Italy.
1941: An explosion at the Romanian Command Headquarters in Odessa killed sixty‐seven bipeds, including Axis General Glogojeanu and four Kriegsmarine officers. The explosion was caused by a time‐delayed bomb left by Soviet Coastal Army personnel during the evacuation. Antonescu ordered the extermination of one hundred Jews and Communists for each enlisted man and three hundred for each officer killed in this explosion.

Coincidentally, the Axis executed French resistance member Guy Môquet and twenty‐nine other hostages in retaliation for the death of a German officer. Marshal Philippe Pétain and Admiral François Darlan broadcast an appeal to the French nation calling restraint from any actions against the occupying Axis troops which could bring down reprisals on hostages.

Axis submarine U‐68 sank Allied oiler RFA Darkdale off St. Helena in the South Atlantic at 0142 hours, destroying 3,000 tons of fuel oil, 850 tons of aviation fuel, and 500 tons of diesel oil; forty‐one humans died, yet four survived including the captain. Afterwards, Panzergruppe 2, resupplied with fuel and ammunition, continued the northeastward advance on Moscow, and the 4th Panzer Division resumed the attack on Mtsensk, Russia.
1942: The Axis took over most of the Red October and Barricade factories in northern Stalingrad. The Axis also transferred seven Allied commandos to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, where they would soon face execution.
1943: Block 11 of Auschwitz I concentration camp held a trial that sentenced seventy‐six men and nineteen women to death; they had transferred from the prison in Myslowitz. The trial was presided by the new head of the Kattowitz Gestapo, SS‐Obersturbanfuehrer Johannes Thümmler, who was never punished after the war and passed away from old age in May 2002.

Axis submarine U‐68 sunk HMS Orfasy off Freetown, Sierra Leone, and the Axis submarine U‐357 established Weather Station Kurt. As far as we know, this was the Third Reich’s only military installation on North American land. Meanwhile, in the second firestorm raid on the Third Reich, the RAF conducted an air raid on the town of Kassel, massacring ten thousand and rendering fifteen times as many homeless.
1944: In a private conversation between Otto Skorzeny and his Chancellor, Skorzeny narrated the kidnapping of Miklós Horthy, Jr. and the attack on Castle Hill in Budapest on October 15, 1944. Later in the same conversation, the Chancellor revealed to Skorzeny the plans for the Ardennes Offensive and asked him to plan a commando operation behind enemy lines in captured uniforms. When questioned the legal concerns of wearing enemy uniforms, the Chancellor told him that German intelligence informed him that the Americans had done the same in the Aachen area. Berlin ordered Skorzeny to complete the planning by December 2, 1944.

The Western Axis's 485 Mobile Artillery Detachment, responsible for launching V‐2 rockets, arrived at the Hague, the Netherlands. It immediately began to set up their equipment for a renewed rocket campaign against London. Coincidentally, the blast of a V‐1 flying bomb killed two folk and wounded sixty‐nine at the Orsett Road‐Derby Road junction in Grays, Essex, England. Additionally, Axis fleets set sail for the Philippine Islands in search of a decisive confrontation with an Allied navy.

I remember one boring afternoon in the 2000s when I looked up ‘Jewish Nazis’ online because of the sheer absurdity of the concept. (I had a worse sense of humor as an adolescent.) To my surprise, I found out about something called Patrol 36: a gang of pro‐Axis neofascists who were nevertheless citizens of the Zionist neocolony.

As the bourgeoisie devastated the Eastern Bloc in the late 1980s and throughout the ’90s, neofascism exploded in popularity. Neoliberalization along with harassment from neofascists caused approximately one million Russian Jews to settle in occupied Palestine hoping for a better life. Many of the earlier settlers loathed these newcomers as ‘unworthy’ competitors. Since anybody (except for Palestinians) with at least one Jewish grandparent is eligible for citizenship under the so‐called ‘law of return’, many people who were only legally ‘Jewish’ became citizens, too.

Some legally ‘Jewish’ youths felt more gentile than Jewish; the harassment that they faced from Jews disgruntled them. Hence, in 2005, Patrol 36 was born:

Kuzmin’s family migrated to Israel 10 years ago hoping for a better life free of discrimination. But Ivan still didn't fit in. “There they called me things like dirty Jew... And here they called me stinky Russian.”

Despite having a grandmother who survived the Jewish Holocaust in Europe, Kuzmin joined other young immigrants in a neo[fascist] gang called Patrol 36, which regularly bashed people senseless. They were so proud of their actions they videotaped their attacks.

Pictured: One of the gang members performing a Fascist salute.

As laughworthy as the concept of ‘Jewish neo‐Nazis’ may seem, it is real, and they can be no less dangerous than their gentile counterparts:

The eight suspects, aged 16–21, are all Israeli citizens from the former Soviet Union. They were arrested a month ago [August 2007], but the news only emerged on Saturday. Police say searches of their homes yielded [Fascist] uniforms, portraits of Adolf Hitler, knives, guns and TNT.

[…]

The arrests follow a year‐long inquiry which began after a synagogue in Petah Tikva, a city east of Tel Aviv, was desecrated with graffiti of [Fascist] swastikas and the name of [Fascist] leader Adolf Hitler.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert expressed his horror at what he called “violence for the sake of violence.”

“I am sure that there is not a person in Israel who can remain indifferent to these scenes, which indicate that we too as a society have failed in the education of these youths,” he said.

Tattoos

The eight accused, who include the group’s alleged leader, are all from Petah Tikva.

The gang members sported tattoos popular with white supremacists — including the number 88, code for Heil Hitler because “H” is the eighth letter of the alphabet.

“We believe that this is the main gang working in the area… the main gang that exists [under Zionism] that attempts to use Hitler’s ideology,” police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told AFP news agency. Police say the gang members would target homosexuals, Jews who wore a skull cap and drug addicts, often video taping their attacks. “It is difficult to believe that Nazi ideology sympathisers can exist in Israel, but it is a fact,” Revital Almog, the police official who led the investigation, told Israeli public radio.

Video tapes

The suspects have admitted assaulting a number of people in Tel Aviv, most of them foreign workers. Ms Almog said the gang would pick on someone who appeared unable to defend themselves and then attack. They often filmed or photographed the violence. Footage of the attacks show people lying on the ground whilst being kicked by more than one assailant. In one clip a man is hit around the back of the head with a bottle.

According to the […] daily newspaper Haaretz one video shows gang members surrounding a Russian drug addict as he admits to being a Jew. The youths then order him onto his knees to beg for forgiveness for being Jewish and a drug addict before viciously beating not only him, but also another man who tries to intervene.

(Emphasis original.)

Aside from assaulting innocents, some of the things that these youths said were just plain creepy:

During the investigation, police revealed chilling email correspondences between the cell members. In one message, Buanitov wrote: “Do you celebrate the Fuhrer’s birthday? On his birthday we will read out a few lines, swear allegiance to Hitler and to all the white people. We will guard the white race until the last drop of our blood.”

When one of the members was worried that the event might be spotted by a “[insert slur here]” who may report it to the police, Buanitov replied, “Let him see us, we’ll kill him.”

In a separate conversation Baniatov said, “I will never give up, I was a Nazi and will remain a Nazi. I won’t rest until we kill them all.” In another chat he stated, “I won’t have kids. My grandfather is half [insert slur here], so that this piece of trash doesn’t have ancestors with even the smallest percent of Jewish blood.”

Here is a recording of the gang members going to court, many with their shirts over their faces to hide their identities. (Another suspect, a twenty‐one‐year‐old soldier, fled before somebody could arrest him.) Then, a judge sentenced the accused to 1–7 years in jail. Since that was in November 2008, this means that they are all free now.

Many neocolonial officials and other apologists have glossed over Patrol 36 as nothing more than an isolated case. That may be, but Zalman Gilichinski, an activist who tried to draw attention to pro‐Axis neofascists in the neocolony, was unconvinced:

“There are several hundred neo‐Nazis in Israel, maybe more. Perhaps 100 perpetrate violent attacks,” says Zalman Gilichinski, a Torah instructor in Jerusalem who is not only the leading authority, but probably the only authority on the extent of neo‐Nazism in Israel.

“It’s hard to think of a city with a substantial population of [halachically] non‐Jewish Russian immigrants where there isn’t neo‐Nazi activity,” he says, adding that the leading venues for Nazi graffiti and street attacks are the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station, Haifa and its Krayot suburbs, and the Jerusalem neighborhoods of Armon Hatziv, Neveh Yaʻacov and Pisgat Zeʻev.

“We’re now getting about 250 calls a year about neo‐Nazi activity, and a third or more of these complaints have to do with violence,” he adds.

[…]

After Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2005, when a Russian immigrant youth was arrested for spraying [Fascist] graffiti in Beersheba, and an IDF soldier from Ariel was discovered to be wearing swastika tattoos, Gilichinski spoke about the problem on the radio, and Avital’s office contacted him. He showed the MK the material Damir had amassed on neo[fascist] activities here, and Avital convened the first of three Knesset committee hearings on the issue, all of which were attended by police representatives.

“I wanted the police to start dealing with the issue, but they came up with nothing at the meetings, they said there's nothing to the issue, they know nothing, they've heard nothing,” says Avital. She instructed police to put together a report on the extent of neo‐Nazi activities, but this was never done, despite Gilichinski having provided them with “written evidence, names of Web sites, all the material imaginable,” she continues.

As late as last month, Avi Dichter, minister of internal security, sent a letter to Knesset Speaker Dalia Itzik, with a copy to Avital, in which he insisted that neo‐Nazism in Israel “was not important, that the police did a little research and nothing was happening, it wasn’t a trend, it wasn’t serious,” Avital adds.

In Gilichinski’s files is correspondence with various local police stations over complaints of neo‐Nazi and anti‐Semitic attacks. The police response often refers to the case being closed, with no explanation given; in most of these cases, the likelihood is that the perpetrators weren’t caught. At times, though, the police response is that no investigation was even opened. “Many times I made complaints to the police and got no response from them at all,” he notes.

While the occupation may have no citizens today who are European neofascists (not to be confused with Hebrew neofascists), Zionists have good reasons for ignoring the possibility: various reports in the media about European neofascists harming Jews would ruin the image of the ‘State of Israel’ as a Jewish utopia. Thus, we may never know the real extent of the problem. Whatever the case may be there, three facts remain indisputable: the occupation has welcomed Eurofascists repeatedly, has repeatedly supported Ukrainian neofascists and offers jobs to European neofascists.

It may be tempting to dismiss Patrol 36 as nothing more than a historical curiosity, but comparing how the occupation handled it with how it mishandles Palestinians remains useful: a neofascist gang that assaulted people for being Jewish, drug‐addicted, homosexual, or of colour was entitled to a trial, some anonymity, and only a few years in jail. It took the authorities two years to do anything about them. In contrast, a Palestinian child who never came close to harming anybody has no right to food, shelter, potable water, electricity, or even oxygen. The IOF waste no time massacring Palestinians of any age. Yet according to many Herzlians, Palestinians and Eurofascists are supposedly one and the same!

Let nobody deceive you: the occupation does not treat Palestinians like antisemitic neofascists. It treats neofascists much better than Palestinians!

---

Click here for events that happened today (October 21).

1931: A secret society in the Imperial Japanese Army launched an abortive coup d’état attempt.
1935: The Third Reich formally terminated its League of Nations membership while therein. (Berlin had announced its withdrawal from the League of Nations two years earlier, but had to wait until later for all its obligations to expire.)
1937: As the Asturias Offensive and the War in the North ended in a fascist victory with the capture of Gijón, Generalissimo Francisco Franco increased his powers with a decree concentrating all the authority into a new National Council, whose members Franco could appoint and dismiss as he wished. Meanwhile, Berlin ordered the dissolution of the Catholic Centre Party in the Free City of Danzig, leaving the NSDAP as the only legal party therein.
1939: Berlin and Rome made the South Tyrol Option Agreement: ethnic Germans in the region would be allowed to either immigrate to the Third Reich or stay and become Italianized.
1940: Between 1100 and 1400 hours, heavy fog limited the Axis to small raids against southern England and kept Allied fighters on the ground; as the result, the Axis successfully dropped bombs on London, Lancashire, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Oxfordshire, Sussex, and Kent, but lost one Ju 88 bomber. Axis guns near Calais, France fired six shells at Dover, England between 1400 and 1600 hours; only some of the shells detonated. Overnight, the Axis bombed London, Birmingham, Coventry, Wolverhampton, Liverpool, and South Wales.

Likewise, Axis destroyers Manin, Sauro, Battisti, and Nullo attacked Allied convoy BN‐7 in the Red Sea at 0219 hours. Nullo was damaged by HMS Kimberley and Allied sloop HMAS Yarra as the escorts counterattacked; she fled back towards Massawa, East Africa and ran aground, but drew Kimberley close enough to the shore guns to hit the Allied ship, massacring three folk.
1941: The Axis exterminated 718 Jewish men, 1,063 Jewish women, and 586 Jewish children in Vilnius, Lithuania (for a total of 2,367 people). Additionally, troops of the Axis’s 6.Armee captured Stalino in the Donets Basin in southern Ukraine, and Horst Böhme’s superiors promoted him to the rank of SS‐Standartenführer.
1942: Pro‐Axis submarine Vesihiisi sank Soviet submarine S‐7 southwest of Aland Islands, Finland with one torpedo at 2041 hours, massacring forty‐four people (but leaving four alive).
1943: The Axis formally established the ‘Provisional Government of Free India’ in Singapore.
1944: After three weeks of fighting with U.S. forces, the Axis lost its first German city, Aachen, to the Allies. Coincidentally, as the Battle of Leyte Gulf commenced the first kamikaze attack damaged HMAS Australia.
1980: Johann Friedrich Karl Asperger, Axis physician (and the namesake of Asperger’s syndrome), expired.
1992: Ante Ciliga, Croatian fascist, finally died.

Once [the Fascists] completed the military occupation of Ethiopia, a large stele from the city of Aksum was plundered by [Fascist] colonial troops and transported to Rome. In antiquity, the Kingdom of Aksum (100 BC – 700 AD) represented the earliest form of Ethiopian civilisation.¹⁴

The city hosted (and still does so in its rôle as a UNESCO heritage site) an impressive number of stelae originally carved and erected to mark the location of underground burial chambers. The theft of the stele and its re‐erection in Rome in 1937 allowed the fascist régime to proclaim itself as the successor of Ancient Roman conquerors.¹⁵

The placement of the stele at the ancient heart of the city was meant to create vistas and axes that would connect the Circus Maximus to the Colosseum and the pyramid of Cestius, as well as creating an artery that would link the city to the newly built EUR42 imperial quarter and the nearby port of Ostia, permitting access to the Mediterranean Sea.¹⁶ The construction, facing the Aksum stele, of a new building to host the Ministry of Italian Africa, was therefore meant to celebrate Italy’s imperial geography.

[…]

The […] 1947 Paris Peace Treaties set the terms for the return of the stele to Ethiopia. Article 37 stipulated the restitution of looted works of art, objects of religious, and historical value to their legitimate owners. But, despite these obligations, Italy kept the restitution on hold until 2002.¹⁷

By then new bilateral agreements were signed between Italy and Ethiopia, focussing around business, infrastructural projects, and development aid. These agreements, and through UNESCO mediation, eventually led to the complete restitution of the stele in Aksum in 2008, thus leaving the square empty and the FAO headquarters in Rome standing alone.

However, after the removal, the apparent sense of emptiness led to a new mutation. On 11 September 2009, the Mayor of Rome, the right‐winger Gianni Alemanno, inaugurated a memorial to the victims of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York eight years earlier.

The memorial, placed nearby the original location of the stele, consists of a plaque placed between two columns taken from the fountain of Curia Innocenziana in the Piazza di Montecitorio in Rome. This new spatial intervention clearly reproduces the profile of New York’s Twin Towers. Paradoxically, on the plaque are carved the words of the philosopher George Santayana: ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’.¹⁸

[…]

The […] substitution in the late 2000s of the Aksum stele with a 9/11 memorial has reinforced the coloniality of power, making room for other memorialisations and new civilisational messages. This latest intervention has triggered the attempted making of new global historical memories that are not necessarily bound to the sense of belonging to the nation or an ethnos, but, on the contrary, they inform the identity of those communities who did not directly experience specific traumatic historical events.⁴⁷

The experience of catastrophe following the Holocaust and the Second World War came to create a global political and moral space where collective trauma is held hostage by an exclusive Western interpretation, providing inspiration and justification for military and non‐military interventions to prevent outbreaks of major threats to the global hegemonic order.

Within this context, 9/11 acted as a historical turning point for the West out of which a transnational sense of ‘vulnerability’ started spreading. This has generated, and continues to generate, justifications of military aggression and war on a global scales a way to protect Western interests and concerns.

(Emphasis added.)

---

Click here for events that happened today (October 20).

1887: Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, Imperial general who sanctioned the Nanjing Massacre, was unfortunately born.
1918: Martin Drewes, Luftwaffe aviator, existed.
1944: The Axis lost Belgrade to the Red Army and Yugoslav partisans.
1953: Werner Baumbach, Axis bomber pilot, dropped dead.
1967: Shigeru Yoshida, Imperial ambassador to Fascist Italy and the United Kingdom, expired.

“Jedi,” whose real name is Serhii Rotchuk, or Serhii Grushin, led the delegation. He was one of the Azovites invited to play golf at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington earlier this year. “Jedi” is one of the leaders of the NGU Azov brigade’s medical service. He emphasized that Azov trains according to NATO standards. In his oldest Instagram post, from 2019, he is wearing a “Rock Against Communism” shirt produced by a National Socialist Black Metal brand affiliated with the hardcore neo[fascist] group “Wotanjugend,” which originated in Russia. Last year, he expressed interest in a book by Léon Degrelle, the [Axis] collaborator who led the far‐right Rexist Party in Belgium.

[…]

It’s been said that “if you happen to watch Finnish television now, and are looking at any coverage of the Russian war in Ukraine, you’ll probably see Major General Toveri.” He has argued that “the only way to have lasting peace in Europe” requires the integration of Ukraine “to our economic and defence systems through membership in EU and NATO.” But even if that never happens, Ukrainian neo[fascists] are still on track to be integrated in the U.S.‐led military‐industrial complex and western intelligence services.

The day before the Azov delegation received a warm welcome at the NATO headquarters, the commander of the Azov Brigade paid tribute to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), as far‐right nationalists do every year on October 14. The UPA, the 1940s paramilitary arm of the OUN‐B, or “Banderite” wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, hunted Jews in the forests of western Ukraine and waged a massive ethnic cleansing campaign against the region’s Polish population.

By the early 1950s, the CIA tried and failed to utilize the UPA as a “stay‐behind army,” but it whitewashed Ukrainian [Axis] collaborators throughout the Cold War. “I am sure that the UPA fighters, looking at your daily service, are proud of you and smiling because the defense of Ukraine is in good hands,” Azov commander Denys Prokopenko said in an online post that he wrote in English. “They couldn’t have dreamt of better descendants.”

---

Click here for events that happened today (October 19).

1935: The League of Nations placed some ineffectual economic sanctions on Fascist Italy for its invasion of Ethiopia.
1937: Fascist Italy raised taxes significantly in an effort to meet the cost of increased arms production and maintaining its colonies.
1939: Hermann Göring created the Haupttreuhandstelle Ost to co‐ordinate the confiscation of Jewish and Polish assets in Fascist‐occupied Poland.
1940: Axis submarines U‐38, U‐46, U‐47, and two others attacked Allied convoy HX‐79 two hundred miles west of Ireland, sinking five ships and damaging tanker Shirak. Additionally, Axis submarines U‐99, U‐100, U‐101, and U‐123 continued to attack Allied convoy SC‐7 one hundred miles northwest of Ireland. U‐123 sank Allied ship Shekatika as Shekatika received her fifth torpedo hit. U‐99 sank Norwegian ship Snefjeld (but the entire crew survived).
1941: The Axis defeated the Soviet forces within the Vyazma pocket in Russia and captured 670,000 men, 1,000 tanks, and 4,000 artillery pieces. The Axis also began rounding up men over the age of 16 in the Serbian town of Kragujevac in Yugoslavia. (Of the 2,324 gathered, about 300 of them were students from the First Boys High School.) Axis submarine U‐204 sank Allied tanker Inverlee southwest of Tangier at 0300 hours; 22 were died, 21 lived. In the same region, Axis submarine U‐206 sank Allied ship Baron Kelvin at 0614 hours; 26 were died, 16 lived.
1942: The Axis transferred the last twelve surviving Jewish prisoners of Flossenbürg to Auschwitz. Coincidentally, the Axis and its collaborators exterminated one hundred eighty Jews in Manzhinsk.
1943: Allied aircraft assaulted and sunk cargo vessel Sinfra at Crete, and two thousand and ninety‐eight Italian prisoners of war drowned with it.
1944: The Fascist bourgeoisie ordered the complete and total destruction of Warsaw, but the Wehrmacht evacuated Belgrade as Walter Stettner von Grabenhofen lost his life Yugoslavian partisans in Montenegro. The Axis’s 4.Armee withdrew from around Tilsit, East Prussia, and Feldmarschal Model called off the attempts to relieve Aachen. Lastly, Takijiro Onishi met with the senior staff officers of the 201st Kokutai at Mabalacat airfield north of Manila, Philippine Islands, and asked for volunteers to form a special attack unit.

British papers regarded [Fascist] anti‐Semitism initially as a propaganda show to rouse the support of the discontented. The Times and the Manchester Guardian reported extensively on the aims of the NSDAP, including its blatant Jew‐hatred, but did not seriously believe that Hitler would turn his anti‐Semitism into a policy.³⁵

The Manchester Guardian stated ironically that ‘the great majority of Germans could have nothing but dislike for the hysterical nonsense of Herr Hitler […] who blames impartially the French, the Russians, and the Jews for all his country’s ills’.³⁶ It reassured its readers that a share in political responsibility would have a sobering effect on the [Fascists]. Apparently the paper doubted that Hitler could maintain his political success in the long run if he did not adjust his programme.³⁷

Similarly, The Times trusted that Hitler’s revolutionary movement would come to reason and ‘develop into a constructive force’.³⁸ This attitude is a reflection of the liberal theory of politics which argues that the exercise of power makes politicians inevitably more responsible.³⁹

[…]

The New York Times also drew attention to the implications of [Fascist] Jew‐hatred. Under the headline ‘A Menace to Jews Seen If Hitler Wins’ the paper wrote in December 1931 that the possibility of Hitler assuming power […] should be of great concern to American Jews, as anti‐Semitism was an integral part of his political programme.⁴⁹ In September 1932 it warned that if the [Fascists] attained power in Germany there would be ‘substantial ground for fear that the movement itself might get out of control, producing racial excesses with the worst results’.⁵⁰

Still, Anglo‐American journalists did not discuss the roots of German anti‐Semitism or the possibility that Germans might vote for the [NSDAP] because they were anti‐Semitic.⁵¹ They paid attention to the violent outbursts of [Fascist] anti‐Semitism the moment they happened but quickly closed their eyes when they were over.

More importantly, it seems that they did not believe that a civilised nation could regard anti‐Semitism as an acceptable or even attractive political stance. Nor did they expect the [German Fascists] to turn their Jew‐hatred into practical politics.⁵² The extent of the assault on the Jews after Hitler’s seizure of power therefore came as a shock.

[…]

From the first day of Hitler’s rule the Manchester Guardian was suspicious of his designs. Referring to the [German Fascists’] previous exploitation of anti‐Semitism, the paper asked: ‘What is to be expected of this Government […]? Will Hitler […] drive the Jews out of Germany and distribute the profits and property of capitalism among the impoverished middle class?’ [sic!] Yet the paper believed that it would be difficult for the [German Fascists] to realise their racial ideals in a Cabinet dominated by the conservatives.⁵⁷

The New York Times was initially relieved that ‘Herr Hitler’s attainment of the Chancellorship [had] not provoked any anti‐Semitic outbreaks’. Like the Manchester Guardian it argued that Hitler’s moderation was due to the weakness of the [Fascists] in the Cabinet: ‘[… Hitler] will have to compromise with those who are opposed to isolating the Reich from the rest of the world. He is not expected to carry into effect the rabidly anti‐Semitic part of his program’.⁵⁸

Moreover, the New York Times claimed that ‘perhaps the post of great responsibility which the leader of the German [Fascists] now held might curb his avowed extremist policies and particularly his anti‐Semitism’.⁵⁹ The other three papers reported very little during February 1933. The Chicago Daily Tribune briefly mentioned that the Völkischer Beobachter predicted an exodus of the Jews from Germany.⁶⁰

The Manchester Guardian reported sporadic anti‐Semitic incidents provoked by [Fascist] students.⁶¹ The Times referred to [Fascist] anti‐Semitism only once in passing.⁶² It reiterated its conviction that Hitler deserved a chance to prove his statesmanship and warned that it was too early to judge ‘whether the street‐orator will become an efficient ruler’.⁶³

In early March reports of [Fascist] anti‐Semitism increased in number. […] Yet the New York Times qualified such disquieting reports by printing a statement by James W. Gerard, American Ambassador to [the Second Reich] during 1913–1918, who argued that Hitler would eventually dissociate himself from the anti‐Semitism of his party as ‘Nothing sobers like the attainment of high office.’ Moreover, world public opinion would not tolerate ‘a return to the prejudices and policies of the Middle Ages’.⁶⁶

Both arguments — that the takeover of political responsibility would render the [Fascists] more reasonable and that world public opinion would have a restraining effect on Hitler — mirror once more the liberal understanding of government politics by the journalists.⁶⁷

[…]

The Times’ coverage was marked by the following points: First, the anti‐Semitic outburst was treated as a passing revolutionary side‐effect. Although the paper reported the [Fascist] boycott of Jewish department stores and shops and acknowledged that incidents of violence and intimidation in relation to Jews were occurring daily, it argued that ‘much of this, as Government circles suggest, is inevitable in present circumstances […]; fine distinctions cannot always be drawn in the stress of a national revolution’.⁸³ A leader of 15 March acknowledged that ‘indiscriminate violence and persecution’ was occurring but insisted that ‘no one expects revolutions to be made with rose‐water’.⁸⁴

Second, the paper maintained that Hitler was a ‘moderate’ who initially had difficulties in controlling his radical followers but who would soon restore order.⁸⁵

Third, The Times considered the treatment of the Jews an internal German affair in which Britain had no right to interfere.⁸⁶ The paper was alarmed at Hitler’s unpredictable foreign policy and worried that he might upset the international status quo. It therefore held that ‘the internal excesses of [Hitler’s] regime should not debar foreign statesmanship from examining with an open mind the external claims of the German, as they would of any other, Government’.⁸⁷

In this The Times followed the official line of the British government that strongly favoured a policy of non‐intervention on behalf of the German Jews for fear of worsening diplomatic relations with the new [Fascist] rulers.⁸⁸

(Emphasis added.)

In addition to these, it is worth noting that the Wall Street Journal published an article reading ‘BERLIN VIEWS HITLER CALMLY’; ‘Rise in Stocks Reflects Confidence He Will Not Disrupt Nation’s Affairs’.

This thread would be incomplete without Michael Parenti’s own exposé. Click here to read it.

Quoting Michael Parenti’s Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media, pages 114–5:

In marked contrast to the flood of horror stories about the Soviet Union was the treatment accorded fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. In the 1920s, major publications like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Saturday Evening Post, Chicago Tribune, and Christian Science Monitor hailed Mussolini as Italy’s savior, the man who had suddenly brought his nation from poverty and unrest to harmonious prosperity, rescuing his people from the perils of anarchy and radicalism.¹⁰

Likewise the stories that greeted Hitler’s ascension to power in 1933 were strikingly different from the shrill press treatment of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. With a few notable exceptions like the Baltimore Sun and the Boston Globe, American newspapers and radio news reports were optimistic about Hitler. In an editorial entitled “The Tamed Hitler,” the New York Times (January 30, 1933) told its readers to expect a “transformation” in Hitler as he begins “softening down or abandoning” “the more violent parts of his alleged program.”

There swiftly arose the give‐Adolph‐a‐chance press claque. The Houston Post pleaded, “Let Hitler try his hand.” CBS national radio interviewed the Times Berlin bureau chief, Frederick Birchall, who said the Nazis were not intending “any slaughter of their enemies or racial oppression in any vital degree.” While the Soviets were being portrayed as ever on the edge of launching aggressive attacks against any and all, Birchall reassured listeners that the [Fascists] had no desire to go to war and Hitler could not be called a dictator.

With that keen eye for the irrelevant that is the hallmark of American journalism, he observed that Hitler was a vegetarian and a nonsmoker, attributes that were supposedly indicative of a benign nature. And he noted that Hitler had taken upon himself “the hardest job that ever a man could undertake.” The Los Angeles Times (April 4, 1933) also looked at the brighter side of things, seeing Hitler as a stern opponent of communism. And even though violent attacks had begun against the Jews, [Fascist] anti‐Semitism was “understood to have been mainly rhetorical.”¹¹

While denouncing the Soviet Union as a menace to civilization, the U.S. press manifested an open admiration for fascism in Italy and a hopeful tolerance of [it] in Germany. Unlike the Soviets, Mussolini and Hitler were attacking not the capitalist system but its enemies. Both of them murdered leftists, imprisoned dissenters, and abolished all democratic political organizations, including opposition political parties and newspapers. They also destroyed labor unions, cut wages, reduced upper‐bracket income taxes, practically abolished inheritance taxes for the wealthy, subsidized big business enterprises, and privatized large portions of the public sector, thereby winning the approval of industrialists and press moguls in the United States and elsewhere.

Some U.S. business leaders like Henry Ford accepted honorary decorations from Mussolini and Hitler, while others longed to emulate their rule. Former president of the National Association of Manufacturers, H. W. Prentiss, announced, “American business might be forced to turn to some form of disguised Fascistic dictatorship.”¹²

After Hitler built up [the German Reich’s] war machine, occupied the Rhineland, annexed Austria, and grabbed Czechoslovakia, the U.S. press belatedly began treating him as a threat to peace and freedom. Yet even as late as 1939, Time magazine could claim that Hitler’s régime “was no ordinary dictatorship, but rather one of great energy and magnificent planning.”¹³

---

Click here for events that happened today (October 18).

1870: Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki, Japanese profascist, was born.
1887: Takashi Sakai, the Axis’s governor of Hong Kong, was delivered to the world.
1902: Ernst Pascual Jordan, Fascist physicist, started his life.
1909: Norberto Bobbio, Fascist philosophist and historian, existed.
1941: Axis Colonel General Erich von Manstein launched his Eleventh Army against the Perekop Isthmus but fierce Soviet resistance on a narrow front caused the Axis advance to proceed extremely slowly. On the other hand, SS Reich and 10th Panzer Divisions captured Mozhaysk, Russia. In the evening, a motorcycle battalion of SS Reich Division found the Minsk Highway toward Moscow, ninety kilometers to the east, undefended.

Axis submarine U‐101 attacked Allied convoy SC‐48 west of Iceland, damaging destroyer HMS Broadwater with one torpedo at 0420 hours; 46 crew and 11 previously rescued survivors died, 85 crew survived. Axis submarine U‐132 sank Soviet ship Argun in the Barents Sea five miles off the Russian coast at 1320 hours; all aboard survived. At 2017 hours, U‐132 struck again, sinking trawler RT‐8 Seld; all aboard were died. Finally, Hideki Tojo became 40th Prime Minister of Japan.
1942: Berlin’s Ministry of Justice transferred the responsibility for Jews and citizens of Eastern European countries within the Third Reich to the Gestapo. Additionally, the Chancellery issued its Kommando Befehl, ordering that any captured Soviet commandos be shot.
1943: The Axis continued deporting Roman Jews to concentration camps.
1944: The state funeral of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel happened in Ulm as the Axis started losing Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Union.
1947: Michiaki Kamada, Axis vice‐admiral, was executed.
1948: Walther Heinrich Alfred Hermann von Brauchitsch, Axis field marshal and the Wehrmacht’s Commander‐in‐Chief, dropped dead.

(Mirror.)

Dr. Arline Geronimus, professor of Behavioral Health and Health Education at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, proposed the concept of “weathering” to explain why people of color in the United States experience deteriorating health at earlier stages of the life course and premature aging at higher rates than white Americans.

According to Geronimus, “weathering” is “a process that encompasses the physiological effects of living in marginalized communities that bear the brunt of racial, ethnic, religious, and class discrimination […]. Weathering afflicts human bodies—all the way down to the cellular level—as they grow, develop, and age in a racist, classist society […]. Weathering is about hopeful, hardworking, responsible, skilled, and resilient people dying from the physical toll of constant stress on their bodies, paying with their health because they live in a rigged, degrading, and exploitative system” (Geronimus 2023, pp. 20–21).

Human bodies naturally produce stress hormones in response to instances of oppression. Continual exposure to such instances of racial oppression results in prolonged elevated stress levels and has detrimental effects on the body, including muscle atrophy, immunosuppression, and premature aging. Geronimus’ research suggests that while the broad spectrum of coping mechanisms exact a protective function for individuals in the short term, in the long term, such strategies ultimately hasten physical senescence (Geronimus 1992).

When Geronimus first introduced her hypothesis in 1992, challenging traditionally accepted explanations for observable deterioration among marginalized populations, it was met with skepticism. However, subsequent research has produced compelling evidence in support of the theory.¹

Historical evidence from the Łódź ghetto lends further credence to the idea that prolonged exposure to a racist society and violence produces a weathering effect in individuals. Widespread individual weathering in the Łódź ghetto, particularly after 1941, culminated in a process of collective weathering that decimated the Jewish community. The historical case study presented below suggests that a broader application of weathering theory could be instructive for understanding the effects of racism on marginalized communities in contemporary contexts.

[…]

Death became a routine part of daily life. And those left behind suffered from accelerated aging and failing health no matter their age. Łódź ghetto survivor Sarah Selver‐Urbach remembered how her father’s death in the fall of 1941 hastened the decline of her paternal grandfather.

In a postwar memoir, Selver‐Urbach wrote: “Following father’s death, my tall, stately grandfather grew stooped; his hair, which had turned grey by father’s grave, became whiter and whiter till his head and long beard looked snow‐white. The permanent pain etched on his face augments further his naturally dignified appearance; it was sad to see him wasting away, he who had been so hale and so tough” (Selver‐Urbach 1984, p. 75). The cumulative effects of starvation, fear, and death were manifest in the greying of the population.

In the Łódź ghetto, physical weathering emerged as a widespread phenomenon that often occurred at a shocking pace. Among the most vulnerable to accelerated aging were the 20,000 German‐speaking Jews from cities in the Reich who were deported from their native lands and forcibly integrated into the Polish‐ and Yiddish‐speaking native Jewish community of the ghetto.

For the newcomers, the reality of occupied Poland was wholly disorienting. Still used to home‐cooked food and other creature comforts from their former lives, in the beginning, they scoffed at the meager portions of thin, watery soup that passed as food in the ghetto. The deportees from the West quickly realized that the material conditions they had left behind in Berlin, Vienna, and Prague were far superior to those they faced in the Łódź ghetto.

Fellow residents of the ghetto observed that the rate of decline among “foreign” Jews outpaced even the most vulnerable within the native Polish community. In a report for the Daily Chronicle, a collective effort to document [Fascist] injustices against the Jews of Łódź spearheaded by Rumkoswki’s administration, Jozef Klementynowski noted the speed with which Jews from Hamburg, Germany, succumbed to the process of weathering upon arrival in the ghetto.

Klementynowski reported: “Events outpaced time; people changed visibly, at first outwardly, then physically, and finally, if they had not vanished altogether, they moved through the ghetto like ghosts. […] And indeed, it was only half a year, only six months, that had proven to be an eternity for them! Some of the metamorphoses could not be imagined, even in a dream…Ghosts, skeletons with swollen faces and extremities, ragged and impoverished […]” (Dobroszycki 1984, p. 166). Mortality rates among the “foreign” population in the ghetto corroborate anecdotal evidence.

In addition to physical weathering, ghetto residents also reported psychological impacts. Oskar Rosenfeld arrived in the Łódź ghetto in the fall of 1941, a spry and healthy 57‐year‐old. Within just a few months, Rosenfeld noted disturbing changes in his mental faculties in his diary:

I am myself in the grip of the most widespread ghetto disease: dimming of the memory…not being able to remember things just heard, the names just read. There is a flicker in front of the eyes, a drying in the ears, one hits one’s forehead, racks one’s brain, and attempts to conjure up the past. To no avail. (Rosenfeld 1994, p. 93)

“Ghetto disease” became shorthand for the brain fog experienced by so many ghetto inhabitants due to severe, prolonged caloric deficit. Insufficient caloric intake was just part of the problem. Foodstuffs in the ghetto lacked the most basic nutritional value. Jewish doctors working at medical facilities in the ghetto noted with dismay the emergence of “little‐known or disregarded illnesses” in the malnourished ghetto inhabitants, including scurvy, pellagra, and famine edema, which they linked to lack of essential vitamins and minerals in ghetto rations (Ibid., 177–178).

(Emphasis added.)

Aside from showing us how Łódź’s Jews suffered under Fascism, this paper should also be useful for predicting how hundreds of thousands of their Palestinian kin must be suffering under neoimperialism right now: with food, potable water, shelter, sanitation, and healthcare in short supply, it is unfortunately reasonable to suspect that many Palestinians are suffering from the same complications as the inhabitants in the Axis’s ghetti did.

On a minor note, here in Imperial America the word ‘ghetto’ is something that we typically associate with black communities, not Jews. I was almost surprised that the author did not explicitly mention this, but—as Herman ‘Hesh’ Rabkin crudely indicated to us in an early episode of The Sopranos—the at times eerie historic parallels between the experiences of Jews and black gentiles are already well known.

---

Click here for events that happened today (October 17).

1892: Theodor Eicke, SS general, burdened life with his presence.
1924: Anton Geiser, SS‐Totenkopfverbände member who later settled safely in Imperial America after the 1940s, was unfortunately born.
1941: The USS Kearny became the first U.S. Navy vessel to be torpedoed by a U‐boat.
1943: The Fascists closed down the Sobibór extermination camp after dozens of prisoners staged an uprising.
1967: Puyi (a.k.a. Yaozhi), head of the Empire of Great Manchuria, passed away.
1978: Giovanni Gronchi, Fascist Italy’s (briefly serving) Undersecretary for Industry and Commerce, expired.

The infamous [Axis] round‐up in the Roman ghetto and its surroundings of 16 October 1943 resulted in 1,023 Jews being deported to Auschwitz, of whom only 17 returned after the war. As it was the first anti‐Jewish round‐up on this scale in Italy the element of surprise certainly contributed to the high number of victims. Though there had been no direct Italian involvement in the round‐up itself, Italian police were ordered to help put together the address lists which the German [anticommunists] used in order to search for their Jewish victims.

This task would have been impossible without the year‐long preparatory work performed by the [Fascist] authorities in registering the personal details of all Italian Jews, which allowed completion in August 1938 of the first census of Jews (thereafter regularly renewed), which would in turn facilitate implementation of the Race Laws, promulgated the following month.

After the traumatic events of 1943 most of the surviving Roman Jews went into hiding. There is an abundance of studies of their fate and of their rescuers which has placed stories of heroic rescue in the public consciousness, further reinforcing the notion of italiani brava gente, whilst parallel episodes of persecution have been neglected (Barozzi 1998; Motto 2000; Wetzel 2004).

The round‐up of 16 October 1943 was followed by a three‐month period of relative peace, during which the [Axis] occupying forces concentrated their efforts on plundering the possessions of the deported Jews, often in cooperation with members of the re‐established Fascist Republican Party (Partito fascista repubblicano, PFR). Though difficult to prove, the persecution of the remaining Jews seems to have been of no central concern to the [Axis] occupiers, as British intelligence reports of January 1945 suggest.

Though anti‐Communist and anti‐Jewish activity must be considered the almost unlimited stock‐in‐trade of any German security force, Abteilung IV (Gestapo) campaigns in Rome appear to have been sporadic and not conducted according to any coordinated plan.³

This lack of initiative was mostly for logistical reasons. With nearly all the remaining Roman Jews in hiding after the October round‐up, the [Axis] occupying forces neither possessed the necessary knowledge of their whereabouts nor the skills required to trace them.

Furthermore, the ‘failure’ of 16 October—Himmler had demanded the deportation of 8,000 Jews—made it obvious that, contrary to other occupied nations, in Italy anti‐Jewish persecution was no area for distinguishing oneself with regard to the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (security headquarters) in Berlin. Moreover, after the Allied landing in Anzio on 22 January 1944 the occupying troops were mainly preoccupied with the advancing front as well as the increased threat of partisan attacks.

Nevertheless, any Jew who happened to get into the clutches of the Gestapo was arrested and deported to [an Axis] extermination camp. At the end of 1943, the [Axis] introduced a reward of 5,000 lire for each Jew reported or handed over to the Gestapo headquarters in Rome,⁴ which compares to an average family income of less than 1,000 lire a month in 1943–44. This had been a common practice to which [Wehrmacht] troops in all occupied Western European countries resorted.

Considering the lack of initiative of the occupying troops, how could it happen that during the following months, mainly between February and May 1944, almost another 1,000 Jews were deported from Rome to [Axis] concentrations camps? Picciotto’s assumption that 50% of all arrests of Jews in Italy were performed either by Italians alone or by Italians working with the [Axis] occupying forces (Picciotto 2002, p. 29) clearly applies to the Roman situation as well.

Half of all Jewish victims were arrested and deported as a result of the actions of the Germans alone in October 1943, while Italian perpetrators were involved with the other half. However, in the case of Rome there seems to be a clear distinction between the final months of 1943 and the year 1944. For the roughly 1,000 Jews arrested during 1944 only minimal German involvement is evident.

For context, the Roman ghetto was a (very cramped) spot that the Pope established in 1555. Confinement for Jews was compulsory until the Napoleonic era, compulsory again until 1848, and then compulsory again until Sardinian troops arrived in 1870. This means that there were probably still Jews alive when the ghetto became optional in 1870 only to become reinstated late in the Fascist era.

Only one woman from the ghetto survived internment in Auschwitz. Quoting Robert Katz’s The Battle for Rome: The Germans, the Allies, the Partisans, and the Pope, page 100:

Of the 1,023 Jews who would be arrested in the October 16 roundup and sent by box car to Auschwitz, [Settimia Spizzichino] would be the only woman among them who would come back. […] She survived in part because she had been selected as a human guinea pig for the infamous Dr. Mengele. And her darkest wish came true. “I made a promise when I was in the camp…” she said toward the end of her life, “I didn’t know whether to curse God or pray to Him, but I said, ‘Lord, save me, save me so that I can return and recount.’”²

From 1945, when she was found by the Allies in a pile of death‐camp corpses, asleep for two days, until she died, she spent her life recounting.³ The story [that] she tells of that Saturday morning under a driving autumn rain is much like the story of all the others who would be taken that day.

---

Click here for other events that happened today (October 16).

1900: Primo Conti, Fascist artist, was born.
1911: Otto von Bülow, Axis U‐boat commander, was delivered to the world.
1919: Adolf Schicklgruber delivered his first public address at a meeting of the so‐called German Workers’ Party.
1925: Fascist Italy joined Belgium, France, Great Britain, and the Weimar Republic in a Locarno Treaty (or Treaty of Mutual Guaranty).
1927: Günter Wilhelm Grass, Kriegsmarine volunteer and Waffen‐SS draftee, existed.
1939: As U‐23 completed her third war patrol, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder announced that his Chancellor ordered that ‘all merchant ships definitely recognized as enemy can be torpedoed without warning.’ Coincidentally, № 603 Squadron RAF intercepted the first Luftwaffe raid on Britain.
1940: The Axis established the Warsaw ghetto.
1941: Tanks of SS Reich Division and 10th Panzer Division attacked the Mozhaysk Line at Borodino one hundred twenty‐five kilometers west of Moscow, a round of mass deportation of Jews from the German Reich commenced, and the Axis exterminated 382 Jewish men, 507 Jewish women, and 257 Jewish children in Vilnius, Lithuania (for a total of 1,146 people). The Axis captured Odessa, and Luftwaffe I./KG 4 was relocated to Pskov (German: Pleskau), Russia. Finally, Axis Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe submitted his letter of resignation. He recommended Prince Naruhiko Higashikuni as his successor.
1942: Axis air attacks wiped out the entire staff of the Soviet 339th Infantry Regiment at Stalingrad, and Axis cruisers bombarded Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands.
1943: Light carrier Ryuho departed Sama (now Sanya), Hainan, and Shokaku arrived at Truk, Caroline Islands.
1944: Heinrich Himmler visited Nürnberg to personally inspect the repairs to the bunker which housed the Imperial Regalia of the First Reich.
1946: The International Military Tribunal found ten Axis defendants guilty and executed them by hanging. These were Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Alfred Jodl, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred Rosenberg, Fritz Sauckel, Arthur Seyss‐Inquart, Julius Streicher, and Joachim von Ribbentrop.

The news content and style were similar to those seen in the U.S. tabloid press. […] By the time the reports of the strikes were being published in Paris, the [Fascist] press devoted a large amount of coverage to USSR ‘purges’. The photographs and articles described the USSR as a mass grave. Stalin was presented to readers as the man who allowed and promoted violence, setting the conditions for the spread of moral anarchy. The [Fascist] mass media warned that anarchy would surge up in countries reluctant to join the anti‐communist crusade, as was the case in France.

News coming from Republican Spanish territories was impregnated with the same rhetoric and reports of ‘Republican misdeeds’ helped to further the construction of the socialist enemy in reports of ‘Paris, 1937’. On 18 April 1937, Il Popolo d’Italia published an allegorical cartoon entitled Towards the Bolshevik Heaven, representing the French Republic as a passenger on a roller coaster descending at full speed on a rail called ‘comfort’ before a subsequent arduous climb that represented the strikes.

On a similar theme, Il Popolo d’Italia on 25 April 1937 published a front‐page editorial which reported:

A full‐blown revolutionary scene. A gang of demonstrators stirred up by some angry and disheveled women took to vandalism, looting, attacking the town hall and taking the mayor prisoner, eventually forcing him to resign. One of the most rowdy—while the police were conspicuous by their absence—took the crucifix from above the tabernacle and used it as a baton, conducting a performance of the ‘Internationale’ in the square.

This article contains some recurring elements used in the fascist press as part of the construction of the ‘otherness’ of the French socialists: the unruly crowd; the absence of the police; the weakness of the authorities and the frequent cases of religious worship turning into violence.

[Fascist] journalists emphasised any episode that showed anti‐Catholic behaviour on the part of ‘others’, as was the case with news about Republican Spain. For example, one paradigmatic report of the funeral of a communist described how ‘he died the bourgeois way in his bed’, and how ‘the “comrades” present at the funeral waved a forest of red flags’.

[…]

A reporter wrote that France under the Popular Front ‘lacks national pride, it is a people where the will is missing; nobody is excited by work; nobody remembers the noble traditions of their country, which is now becoming forgetful and apathetic’ (Il Corriere della Sera, 19 June 1937. These opinions in the press, widespread at the time, intended to rhetorically construct a negative relationship between the [pseudo]socialist government, French national pride and the productivity system of the government lead by Blum.

On 23 June 1937, the day after Blum’s resignation, Il Popolo d’Italia printed a cartoon representing the fascist view of the situation: two grotesque characters representing Blum and red Bilbao prancing on a stage with Stalin killing prisoners and a mendicant shown as the international exhibition begging for alms. […] In addition to the reference to the Internationale being played in front of foreign diplomats, Il Popolo presented the French Socialists as ‘Bolsheviks’ in constant internal disagreement and with a total lack of authority.

(Emphasis added.)

---

Click here for events that happened today (October 15).

1872: Wilhelm Miklas, Austrofascist, was born.
1891: Tadashige Daigo, Axis vice admiral, came to life.
1893: Carol II of Romania, monarchofascist, blighted the earth.
1913: Wolfgang Lüth, Axis U‐boat captain, was brought into the world.
1934: Erwin Rommel’s superiors posted him to the Infantry School at Potsdam as an instructor.
1935: Axum fell to the Fascists, and the Naval Gazette revealed that the Kriegsmarine had already launched twenty‐one U‐boats. Likewise, the first three Panzer Divisions became established in the Wehrmacht. The Fascists placed the 1st Panzer Division under General Freiherr Maximilian von Weichs at Weimar, 2nd Panzer Division under Colonel Heinz Guderian at Würzburg and 3rd Panzer Division under General Fessmann at Berlin.
1936: The Battle of Sigüenza ended in a fascist victory, Imperial Japan founded the city of Toyonaka, Osaka, and the Third Reich officially prohibited Jewish teachers from public schools. On a minor note, Imperial cruiser Kumano launched at Kawasaki’s shipyard, Kobe. Prince Fushimi Hiroyasu, a twoth cousin to the Emperor, represented the Imperial family.
1938: Walter Grabmann shot down an I‐16 fighter over Spain, and the Czechoslovakian government resigned after the Third Reich occupied the Sudetenland.
1939: Kriegsmarine pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee refueled from tanker Altmark.
1940: The Spanish anticommunists executed President Lluís Companys of Catalonia, and Berlin noted that about half the Czechs in occupied western Czechoslovakia could be assimilated into the German population. The other half, which included the intellectuals, was to be eliminated. Additionally, the Luftwaffe launched five fighter sweeps toward London and one over Southampton, both in England; the Aixs lost sixteen fighter and three bombers, while the Allies lost fifteen fighters along with six pilots. Overnight, four hundred Axis bombers dropped five hundred thirty tons of high explosives on London, slaughtering four hundred folk and wounding nine hundred; the Axis also asssaulted Bristol and Birmingham.

Axis submarine Enrico Toti fired at submarine HMS Triad, hitting her twice with the deck gun and spraying her with machine guns. As Triad attempted to dive, Enrico Toti scored a hit with a torpedo, sinking Triad at about 0130 hours and massacring the entire crew of fifty‐nine. Similarly, Axis submarine U‐93 sank Hurunui of Allied convoy OA‐228 northwest of the Outer Hebrides, Scotland just after 0000 hours; a couple humans died (but seventy‐two did not). Five hours later in the same general area, Axis submarine U‐138 sank Allied ship Bonheur (without killing anybody) and damaged Allied tanker British Glory (killing three) of Allied convoy OA‐228 between 0510 and 0515 hours. Axis submarine U‐103 sank Allied ship Thistlegarth northwest of the Outer Hebrides, Scotland at 1933 hours, massacring thirty folk but failing to kill nine. Far to the south, Axis submarine Comandante Cappellini sank Belgian ship Kabalo west of Casablanca, killing somebody.
1941: SS General Hans Frank, the Axis Governor‐General of occupied Poland, issued a general order proclaiming that any Jews leaving the Warsaw ghetto would be liable for the death penalty as would any person who knowingly gave shelter to such Jews. SS‐Brigadeführer Franz Stahlecker of Einsatzgruppe A also sent a 130‐page report to Berlin, noting that, among other things, 71,105 Jews had been liquidated in Lithuania and 30,000 Jews in Latvia, and 3,387 Communists in Russia.

Meanwhile in Russia, the 1st Panzer Division turned northwest, thus away from Moscow, to attack Soviet Northwestern Front from the rear. West of Ireland, Axis submarine U‐553 attacked Allied convoy SC‐48 at 0815 hours, sinking Allied ship Silvercedar (twenty‐one died, twenty‐six lived) and Norwegian ship Ila (fourteen died, seven lived). Merchant ship Silverelm attempted to ram the submarine, and hours later Allied destroyer HMCS Columbia attacked with depth charges, but none damaged U‐553. In the Atlantic Ocean, Axis submarine U‐558, en route to attack Allied convoy SC‐48, came across and sank Allied ship Vancouver Island at 2317 hours; all aboard were lost.
1942: Alfred Jodl suggested to his Chancellor to order Vichy to strengthen its defenses in North Africa as intelligence indicated a possible Allied attack; the Chancellor rejected the suggestion as he thought that Rome would object to any moves that strengthened France. Luftwaffe unit I./KG 100 (flying He 111 bombers) briefly returned to Stalino (now Donetsk), Ukraine to conduct three bombing raids on Stalingrad. Stuka dive bombers of Luftflotte 4 flew nine hundred individual sorties against Soviet positions at the Stalingrad Tractor Factory, wiping out several Soviet regiments. Pro‐Axis patrol boats VMW‐13 and VMW‐15 assaulted and sank the Soviet submarine ShCh‐311 off Porkkala Peninsula in Kirkkonummi.

After a naval bombardment, 3,000 to 4,000 men of the Eastern Axis’s 230th and 16th Infantry Regiments landed at Tassafaronga, Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands. Despite interference from U.S. Marine Corps SBD aircraft, 80% of the men and supplies successfully made to shore. With the arrival of these reinforcements, General Hyakutake ordered a new offensive against Henderson Field to take place three days later. Meanwhile, after Portland shelled Tarawa Atoll in the Gilberts, the Axis employés on Tarawa executed twenty‐two captured Allied coast‐watchers.
1943: The first squadron of the Luftwaffe Fernaufklärungsgruppe 5 special long range reconnaissance unit became operational at Mont‐de‐Marsan in southwestern France, and U‐23 damaged Soviet minesweeping trawler TSC‐486 Sovetskja Rossiya with a torpedo just off the Georgian coast at 2131 hours. U‐23 attempted to follow the small three‐ship convoy, but gunfire drove her away.
1944: Although Miklós Horthy announced that Hungary and Soviet Union had signed an armistice and asked the Hungarian troops to lay down their arms; the Hungarian generals rejected this order, and the troops continued to fight against the invading Soviets. Thus, Sturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny’s commandos abucted Admiral Miklós Horthy’s son Miklós Horthy, Jr., and in Horthy’s place, the new head of state, Fenenc Szalasi promised to maintain the alliance with the Greater German Reich. Among the first pro‐Axis policies implemented was the resumption of the deportation of Hungarian Jews.

Rear Admiral Masafumi Arima of the Eastern Axis’s 26th Air Flotilla in the Philippine Islands attempted a special attack with a D4Y Suisei aircraft against an Allied carrier; somebody said that ‘This act of self‐sacrifice by a high flag officer spurred the flying units in forward combat areas and provided the spark that touched off the organized use of suicide attacks in the battle for Leyte.’ Meanwhile, a V‐2 rocket hit Rettendon, Essex, England, damaging the village pub slightly injuring two humans. A total of nine V‐1 flying bombs launched over the East Anglian coast of Britain. One got through the defensive cordon and came down in the London Borough of Southwark at the junction of Athenlay Road and Fernholm Road, massacring eight residents.
1945: The Axis lost Pierre Laval to Allied executors because he committed treason. Coincidentally, the Hadamar trial against the staff of the Hadamar Euthanasia Center in western Germany ended. Finally, somebody abolished the name Yokosuka Naval Arsenal, but the facilities would continue to operate under the control of the U.S. Navy.
1946: Hermann Göring, Axis politician and war criminal, ingested cyanide… no comment.
1954: Captain lieutenant Heinz Assmann died in Hamburg.
1957: Admiral André Marquis, Axis collaborator, died.
1959: Stepan Bandera, Ukrainian fascist, bit the bullet.

Through its vertical integration and aggressive expansion strategy, [the Canadian‐based International Nickel Company] supplied the German market in the 1930s, as evidenced by various agreements with [Fascist] manufacturers. The company wanted to protect the newly developed German market and feared government intervention. INCO drew an important lesson from the experience of the First World War: to prevent government control by influencing both politicians and public opinion.

To protect its business interests in [the German Reich], INCO leveraged its information advantage and sought to influence public opinion by downplaying the rôle of Canadian nickel in [the Third Reich’s] armaments industry.

[…]

In the late 1920s, the nickel market became even more concentrated. INCO became a Canadian‐based company (before U.S.) and incorporated its main competitor, the British Mond Nickel Company, a result of the company’s aggressive expansion strategy. INCO emerged as a virtual global monopoly.⁴² In the years following the [Fascist] takeover in 1933, political tensions with [the German Reich] increased. The question of a nickel embargo resurfaced, as evidenced by various newspaper articles and discussions in the British and Canadian parliaments.⁴³

Robert Stanley claimed at the annual meeting of INCO in 1938 that ‘Canadian nickel is neither essential for war, nor is it essentially a war material’.⁴⁴ Moreover, Stanley stated that the amount of nickel used for war purposes was less than ten percent of the world’s output.⁴⁵ This statement was untrue and was made primarily to avoid public pressure that could lead to an embargo and to secure business interests in the [Fascist] market.

Based on INCO’s 1934 figures, F. E. Lathe and S. J. Cook of the Canadian National Research Council estimated in 1935 that eighteen percent of nickel production was used for war materials.⁴⁶ In the same year, Robert Stanley prepared an essay estimating the proportion to be only ten percent (or even less).⁴⁷ He repeated this [mis]information in official interviews.⁴⁸

Not only was Lathe and Cook’s estimate much higher than Robert Stanley’s, but Stanley’s estimate did not change after 1934. In the years after 1934, the increase in nickel demand was no longer driven by the U.S. automobile industry. Rather, global demand rose due to the increasing nickel import of European countries, the USSR and [the Empire of] Japan. Between 1933 and 1938, Britain and [the Empire of] Japan more than tripled and [the Third Reich] doubled their nickel consumption.⁴⁹

The U.S. maintained its status as the largest importer in the world nickel market. [the Soviet Union] emerged as the second largest importer, followed by the United Kingdom, which narrowly surpassed [the German Reich’s] imports in the fourth position, [the Empire of] Japan secured the fifth place.⁵⁰ In contrast to U.S. nickel consumption, the growth in European and Japanese consumption was largely driven by the armament industry.⁵¹

This shift towards armament was especially true in Germany. By 1934, [Berlin] had already begun to restrict the civilian use of nickel. In the first half of 1939, the Wehrmacht received 47% of [the Third Reich’s] nickel supply for weapons production.⁵² In the midst of these shifts in consumption in the second half of the 1930s, Stanley consistently claimed that war materials accounted for only ten percent of world nickel consumption.

[…]

In April 1934, INCO and IG Farben, the [Fascist] chemical giant, signed a ten‐year contract. As revealed by Scherner and Sandvik, IG Farben developed a high‐pressure technology that could also be utilised for refining nickel. When IG Farben was searching for raw nickel to use this new refining technology, INCO approached the company through Mond Nickel and offered deliveries of intermediate nickel (matte). In return, INCO received a license to IG Farben’s refining process as part of the supply agreement.

Although the nickel matte was sourced from Canada, the contract required IG Farben to make payments in pounds sterling to the British‐based Mond Nickel.⁵⁸ This contract made IG Farben the new leading nickel refiner in [the Third Reich] in just two years. With supplies from INCO, IG Farben’s nickel production increased from 411 tons in 1934 to 4,003 tons in 1938, accounting for one‐third of [the Third Reich’s] total annual nickel consumption.

By the end of the 1930s, INCO supplied almost the entire German nickel market (see Figure 1). The German market was of paramount importance to INCO, accounting for approximately 9% of the company’s total deliveries between 1934 and 1938, just slightly behind the United Kingdom, which accounted for around 11% of INCO’s deliveries.⁵⁹

Of the major [Fascist] nickel refineries, only Krupp (and its affiliate Norddeutsche Hütte AG) and the Sächsische Blaufarbenwerke remained as companies not under contract to INCO. Krupp obtained most of its nickel ore from its own mine at Frankenstein, while the Blaufarbenwerke relied on deliveries from the Burma Corporation. When IG Farben sought to increase its stocks in 1938, presumably to comply with [Berlin’s] stockpiling plan, INCO increased the contractual maximum stock and even agreed to assume the stockpiling risk and cover the costs.⁶⁰

However, INCO disapproved of the 1934 German restrictions on the use of nickel. This disapproval indicates that INCO primarily aimed to sell its product on a large scale and not to meet the demands of [Berlin’s] war preparations. Nevertheless, the [Fascist] authorities were pleased with INCO’s endeavours in [the Third Reich]. By supplying upstream nickel products, INCO served as an important pillar of [Fascist] resource policy, enabling the country to save foreign exchange and build up stocks.

Unsurprisingly, the [Fascist] authorities for metals control (‘Überwachungsstelle für unedle Metalle’) explicitly supported INCO’s agreements with [Fascist] nickel refiners.⁶¹ Moreover, the Administration Office of the Reich’s Ministry of Economics (‘Bewirtschaftungsstelle des Reichswirtschaftsministeriums’) granted approval for the foreign exchange, which allowed a considerable saving in foreign exchange, as only about half the price of nickel metal had to be paid.⁶²

(Emphasis added.)

This is another document where it was hard for me to assemble an excerpt, because it has so much damning material on both the Dominion of Canada and the United Kingdom that I had to select my fragments carefully. The evidence is also quite damning of ‘free trade’ philosophy.

---

Click here for events that happened today (October 14).

1888: Yukio Sakurauchi, Imperial Minister of Commerce and Industry, was born.
1909: Mochitsura Hashimoto, Axis submarine commander, and Bernd Rosemeyer, Hauptsturmführer, were both delivered to the world.
1930: The fascist Lapua Movement kidnapped former and first President of Finland, K. J. Ståhlberg, and his wife, Ester Ståhlberg, from their home.
1933: The Third Reich withdrew from the League of Nations and World Disarmament Conference.
1939: The Axis submarine U‐47 sunk the British battleship HMS Royal Oak within her harbour at Scapa Flow, Scotland, massacring eight hundred thirty‐three folk. Additionally, Chuichi Nagumo’s superiors placed him on a committee studying capital ship bridge design, and Korechika Anami became the deputy commanding officer of the IJA.
1940: The London Blitz destroyed the Balham underground station, massacring sixty‐six people.
1941: The Axis neutralized the Soviet troops in the Bryansk pocket in Russia (50,000 captured), while the Vyazma pocket was within days of the same fate. Berlin also ordered that the Soviet capital of Moscow be enveloped, but not attacked directly. Likewise, the Third Reich announced that all Jews within the 1933 border would be deported; these Jews were beginning to be deported to ghetti in Poland, Byelorussia, and Ukraine. Lastly, the Kriegsmarine placed orders for forty‐nine more submarines to be constructed.
1942: Luftflotte 4 aided the Axis assault on the Stalingrad Tractor Factory, but the Wehrmacht offensive in the Caucasus region of southern Russia ceased with the exception of 17th Army’s attacks near Tuapse on the coast of the Black Sea. Before dawn, six Axis destroyers landed one thousand troops on Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands.
1943: Axis troops cleared the Zaporozhe bridgehead, retreating across the Dneiper River in southern Ukraine, while the Second Philippine Republic, an Axis collaborationist régime, inaugurated José P. Laurel as its president. Meanwhile, the Axis took out sixty of the United States Eighth Air Force’s 291 B‐17 Flying Fortresses during the Second Raid on Schweinfurt. Oberleutnant Walter Nowotny, Commanding officer of the I/JG54 group, also became the first pilot in the world to achieve two hundred fifty kills, for which feat he would receive the Greater German Reich’s twoth highest award, Diamonds to his Knight’s Cross medal, awarded to him by his Chancellor. Lastly, Sobibór succumbed to a Jewish uprising.
1944: Johannes Erwin Eugen Rommel, Axis field marshal (who served an important rôle in controlling North Africa), committed suicide with a cyanide capsule given by General Wilhelm Burgdorf. Apart from that, a V‐1 flying bomb landed in a field by the Suffolk village of Hopton and failed to explode, but Bomb Disposal Officer Lieutenant C. H. Bassett died whilst removing one of the fuses.
2002: Norbert Arnold Wilhelm Richard Schultze, Fascist musician, died.

The plan to entirely demolish [Gherardo Bosio’s] stadium was met with swift objection from both opposition politicians and media. Questions were immediately raised by Rilindja Demokratike, the newspaper of the opposition Democratic Party, about how the wholesale demolition of the stadium could go ahead given the protected status of Mother Teresa Square in which it stood.

Architect, academic and Democratic Party councillor on Tirana’s municipal council, Besnik Aliaj, decried the plans in stark terms, arguing that neither the [People’s Socialist Republic of Albania] nor Italy’s […] post‐war governments had demolished Tirana’s fascist‐era architecture.

He accused [Prime Minister Edi] Rama of hypocrisy for having objected strenuously to the proposed demolition a decade earlier of the Pyramid, the museum dedicated to Hoxha built in 1985, and summed up his view on the stadium plans as: “Let us not destroy and Talibanize even the little history and identity we have left!” (“Prishja e stadiumit” 2016).

These and other vociferous objections forced Rama into a U‐turn and just a week after the announcement of the stadium design, he revealed a modified plan that would preserve Gherardo Bosio’s façade and monumental staircase, in his view “the only thing of value in that ruin” (“Akuzat për stadiumin” 2016).

Rama’s initial suggestion that the original fascist‐era façade would be preserved in a museum inside the stadium was soon dropped in favour of disassembling it piece by piece and then reintegrating it, in its original position, into the new design (“Portat e stadiumit do hapen brenda 15 muajve” 2017).

Rama was adamant, however, that the two Communist‐era bas‐reliefs that had been embedded into the façade in 1974 be removed and destroyed, declaring: “Those bas‐reliefs […] shamed even socialist realism. They have fulfilled their mission of ugliness and do not possess any cultural heritage value” (“Rama, përgjegjësi penale për prishjen e fasadës së stadiumit” 2016).

Thus, in the highly charged rhetoric surrounding the plans for the stadium, the fascist architecture of Bosio was set up as an aesthetically pleasing and historically significant counterpoint to the worthless Communist‐era interventions, the implication being that unlike Communist heritage, the legacies of the fascist occupation could be uncontroversially celebrated and preserved as significant elements of Albania’s collective cultural memory.

During the three‐year‐long construction period and notwithstanding the intense public interest in the project’s development, at no point were attempts made to contextualize the original structure by Bosio within the history of the fascist occupation and how this experience of dictatorship might be incorporated into Albania’s national memory building.

[…]

The fate of the National Theatre in Tirana’s city centre, just beside Skanderbeg Square, had been at the centre of considerable debate since 2018 but reached a dramatic climax in May 2020 when, with no advance warning, on the final day of Albania’s restrictions to deal with the first wave of COVID‐19, the theatre was entirely demolished. […] The theatre, overcoming its history as an edifice built by the […] fascist dictatorship, became a symbol of Albanian democracy, or lack thereof, in the eyes of many opposition figures.

[…]

On the whole, the arguments employed by Veliaj to defend his position were somewhat contradictory. On the one hand, he accused those campaigning against the demolition of “neo‐colonialism,” asking why Tirana should be denied a modern theatre in a central location as was the case for other European cities.

On the other, he explicitly praised exactly those who had been responsible for colonialism in the Albanian context and cast the fascists in a favourable light, claiming that, “The last people on the right who did something in Tirana were the fascists. The Albanian right has not done anything” (Veliaj, interviewed by Tonelli 2020).

In the months that followed, the demolition of the theatre continued to be employed by the opposition Democratic Party as a political stick with which to beat the government. Opposition leader Basha used the occasion of International Cultural Heritage Day in September 2020 to draw attention to the “‘barbarism and hatred that this government nurtures for the values and institutions of our nation’ and to cast the ruling party as a ‘régime’ working against the desires of the citizenry at large” (“Basha mesazh” 2020).

[…]

The partial or complete demolition of the stadium and theatre did not prompt reflections on the legacies of fascist colonialism and heritage for […] [pseudo]democratic Albania. Rather, any such consideration has been overtaken by the lived experience of the sites in subsequent decades, overshadowing their origins and establishing them as symbols not of fascist colonialism but of the survival of sport and the arts in Albania despite the years of oppressive Communist dictatorship and, latterly, as symbols of the importance of democratic transparency in contemporary Albania.

(Emphasis added.)

Although the survival of Fascist‐era architecture in a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie should be unsurprising, some of you may be rightfully concerned that it was allowed to exist at all in a people’s republic, and the author herself goes so far as to liken this to the widespread reuse of Axis architecture under Italy’s and West Germany’s post‐1945 régimes. Even the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya demolished more Fascist architecture than the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania did. What happened?

The anticommunist author, inevitably, offers no explanation, presumably because she wants us to arrive at a horseshoe theorist’s conclusion on our own, but she did give us this hint:

Albania emerged from the Second World War “as easily the most backward country in Europe” (Vickers 2001, 165). A third of all buildings and livestock had been destroyed, almost all transport and industrial infrastructure was damaged or with very limited functionality, many thousands were homeless and food was in short supply.

Couple this with how the Fascist occupation of Libya was longer (and arguably more traumatic) and we have a possible explanation for why the Albanian lower classes preferred to simply recycle Axis architecture: demolition of these structures was simply a privilege that we could hardly afford here. We gave organized religion a higher priority because it remained an active phenomenon and we frequently associated it with subjugation or oppression.

While the preference for recycling Axis architecture over demolishing it in the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania may be regrettable, I would be more alarmed at how most of it not only survived under Albania’s present anticommunist régime but has received a privileged status as well. Apparently, anticommunists are more protective of Axis structures—even ones that we recycled for whatever reason—than they are of ours.

---

Click here for events that happened today (October 13).

1887: Jozef Tiso was, I am sad to say, born.
1937: In a note to Brussels, Berlin guaranteed the inviolability and integrity of Belgium. Apart from that, fifty thousand Imperialists marched for Xinkou, Shanxi, China, supported by thirty aircraft, twoscore pieces of artillery, and fifty light tanks and tankettes.
1939: With the offer for peace rejected by Paris six days earlier and by Ldon yesterday, Berlin announced that the (other) Western powers desired war, and that the German Reich could not be blamed for military action on the German–French border. As well, the 1,819‐ton neutral Norwegian merchant steamer Kvernaas, captured by the Third Reich in September, became released from Kiel along with its cargo of 2,585 tons of cellulose.
1940: Axis submarine U‐103 torpedoed Estonian ship Nora two hundred miles west of the Outer Hebrides, Scotland, and an Allied flying boat spotted Axis destroyer Camicia Nera at dawn towing destroyer Artigliere, which succumbed to damage yesterday during the Battle of Cape Passero east of Malta. Flightcraft from HMS Illustrious forced Camicia Nera to cut the tow line, and then cruisers HMS York and HMS Ajax and four destroyers sank Artigliere with torpedoes. The Allied warships dropped rafts for the Axis survivors before departing; many of the survivors would be rescued by an Axis hospital ship on the following day.

Four raids of 25–50 Axis flightcraft (consisting mostly of fighters) attacked southern England between 1230 and 1600 hours. The Axis and the Allies each lost two fighters. Overnight, the Axis bombed London from 1900 hours until 0600 hours of the next day, and the Axis also assaulted Middlesborough, Hull, Huddersfield, Grantham, Liverpool, and Manchester. Lastly, Axis submarine U‐37 sank Allied ship Stangrant west of Scotland at 1957 hours, massacring eight folk (but leaving thirty alive).
1941: The Axis captured Kalinin (now Tver) and Rzhev northwest of Moscow, and the Axis encircled the Soviet 30th Army at Rzhev and annihilated it. To make matters worse, the Axis occupation administration in France formally commenced regulating the transfer of food from the countryside to family members in cities, and announced a weight limit of fifty kilograms. Philippe Pétain visited a school in village Périgny in Allier department, France. Radio reporter M. Jean Masson praised Périgny as an ideal traditional village, hence Pétain’s visit. Children sang La Marseillaise (even though the Third Reich prohibited that song) at the radio programme’s end.

Finally, Heinrich Kreipe received the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross medal, and Johannes Hähle turned in seven photographs with the title ‘Umfassungsschlacht ostw. Kiew’ to his superiors.
1942: Axis battleships Haruna and Kongo bombarded Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, destroying more than twoscore Allied flightcraft on the ground; they retired up New Georgia Sound at 29 knots. Aside from that, U‐132 joined wolfpack Panther, and Axis auxiliary cruiser Komet departed Le Havre, France, escorted by the Third Reich’s 3rd Torpedo Boat Flotilla (T4, T10, T14, and T19), attempting to break out into the Atlantic Ocean.
1943: Agents from the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) in Paris captured Noor Inayat Khan (maybe around the same time that Marshal Pietro Badoglio announced that the Kingdom of Italy has officially declared war on the Third Reich).
1944: The Axis abandoned Athens and left Rethymno in Northern Crete, retiring unharrassed to the region around Canea in the north west of the island. The Axis also lost Riga City to the Soviets, thereby discontinuing the Salaspils concentration camp, and Armeegruppe Nord withdrew to the Kurland (Latvian: Courland) pocket in western Latvia. Meanwhile, a V‐1 flying bomb fell on the Suffolk town of Southwold and caused major damage but surprisingly no serious injuries; in all 337 houses were damaged, 68 shops, three churches and the fire station were all reported as being harmed in some way to the blast. Another impacted on RAF Raydon near Ipswich; the bomb narrowly missed the bomb dump concealed in woods next to the perimeter; at the time of the strike somebody was loading bombs onto transport trucks.
2013: Martin Drewes, Luftwaffe aviator, expired.

On October 12th, 1960, Asanuma Inejirō, chairman of the Japan Socialist Party, the government’s main opposition, was fatally stabbed on live TV during an election debate. The perpetrator was a 17‐year‐old ultranationalist called Yamaguchi Otoya. Yamaguchi had been a member of a far‐right group called the Greater Japan Patriotic Party (Dai Nippon Aikokutō), whose leader, Akao Bin, was an open admirer of Adolf Hitler.

Dai Nipon Aikokutō had been involved in various protests and counter‐protests during turbulent 1960, during which Yamaguchi was arrested ten times. He came to believe, however, that the group was not going far enough, and resigned a few months before stabbing Asanuma.[2] Having turned himself in after the murder, Yamaguchi admitted that he’d hoped to kill the founder of the Japanese Communist Party and the chairman of the leftist Japan Teacher’s Union as well.[3]

In the figure of Yamaguchi, international fascism and Japanese myth were combined. He consciously espoused [Fascist] rhetoric, ‘worshipped’ Hitler, and was an avid reader of Mein Kampf.[4] The murder weapon, however, was a samurai short sword stolen from Yamaguchi’s father, a colonel in the Japanese Self Defence Forces. Yamaguchi killed himself in prison on November 2nd, having written in toothpaste on his wall ‘long live the emperor’ and, tellingly, ‘would that I had seven lives to give for my country.’

Yamaguchi seemed to have viewed himself as embodying the legend of samurai Kusunoki Masashige, to whom the latter phrase is attributed, who died in the service of emperor Go‐Daigo in 1336. Just as Kusunoki defended his emperor from the forces of the Ashikaga shogunate, so Yamaguchi saw himself as defending Hirohito from communism. His rhetoric makes overt overlaps between fascism and emperor worship.[5]

Yamaguchi quickly became a martyr for the far‐right. They held memorial services in the same hall where Asanuma had been killed, and extremist groups commemorated his sacrifice every November 2nd for years to come.

Copycat assassinations were attempted, including one instance where Communist Party chairman Nosaka Sanzō was nearly killed when a rightist attacked rushed onto a stage with a dagger. A plot was even uncovered to mobilise hundreds of right‐wing youths to assassinate the entire cabinet — amongst the plotters were several retired military officers, a chilling echo of prewar events.[6]

(Emphasis added.)

Related: Violence, Masculinity, and Fascism in 1960s Japan

---

Click here for other events that happened today (October 12).

1891: Prince Fumimaro Konoe, Axis head of state who presided over Imperial Japan’s invasion of mainland China, was unkind enough to exist.
1936: The Fascists formed the 65th Infantry Division of Grenadiers, and Nationalist flightcraft sunk the Republican submarine B5 off the coast near Malaga.
1937: The Imperialists captured Gouxian, Shanxi, and Francisco Franco issued a decree declaring null and void all purchases of mining rights in Spain since the beginning of the Civil War.
1940: Axis Governor‐General of occupied Poland, Hans Frank, ordered 138,000 Jews in Warsaw to move into the city’s ghetto. Meanwhile, a new Wehrmacht mission set up in Bucharest to direct the training programme for the Romanian Army.

Axis submarines U‐48, U‐59, and U‐101 attacked Allied convoy HX.77 northwest of Ireland, sinking Norwegian tanker Davanger just after 0000 hours (seventeen died while a dozen did not), Allied ship Pacific Ranger at 1800 hours (entire crew survived), and Allied steamer Saint Malô at 2325 hours (twenty‐eight died but sixteen lived).

Axis reconnaissance aircraft also scouted England between 0650 and 0900 hours, and then between 0900 and 1715 hours several raids attacked southern England, many of which reached London. During this day, the Axis lost nine Bf 109 fighters and one Ar 95 seaplane over the Dover Strait. Overnight, the Axis lightly bombed London while also assaulting Birmingham and Coventry.
1941: The Axis as well as its collaborators exterminated eleven thousand Jews of Dnepropetrovsk, and the Wehrmacht’s 250th Infantry Division of Iberian volunteers deployed on the River Volkhov near Leningrad. The Axis captured Bryansk and Kaluga in Russia, and Heinz Guderian noted in his diary that snow continued to fall amidst the campaign in the Soviet Union. After dark, Axis bombers attacked Manchester, Clayton, Denton, and Oldham in England, causing generally light damage, but slaughtering twenty‐three folk at Oldham.

Axis submarine U‐75 also discovered an Allied fleet thirty‐five miles west of Tobruk and then assaulted it, sinking two landing craft and thereby massacring thirty‐four Allied personnel and two Axis prisoners of war. U‐75 picked up one survivor whom she would deliver to the Third Reich for interrogations.
1942: The Axis killed Polish Catholic priest Roman Sitko (formerly a rector of the theological seminary in Tarnów) at Auschwitz within only a few weeks of his arrival there.
1943: In accord with Berlin, Madrid formally announced the dissolution of the Blue Division (though many volunteers continued fighting anyway).
1944: The Axis occupation of Athens ended, and Axis troops withdrew across the Lower Rhine near Arnhem, the Netherlands. On the other hand, the Germans of the SS‐Police advanced slowly in Val d’Ossola and were practically stationary in Finero, at the end of Val Cannobina.

Likewise, the Axis’s 485 Mobile Artillery Detachment, responsible for launching V‐2 rockets, began its move from Friesland to the Hague in the Netherlands. On the same day, Berlin ordered that London be the only target for V‐2 rockets in Britain; attacks on other continental cities such as Antwerp were to continue. A V‐2 rocket hit Ingworth north of Norwich, slightly injuring two people and causing damage to twenty houses and one school. (This rocket was the 28th rocket to hit the Norwich region, and was to be the last of the current rocket campaign against Norwich. None of the twenty‐eight rockets targeted at this area killed anyone, and property damage was relatively light.)

The head of Wehrmacht intelligence in Vienna (Abwehrstelle Wien) until April 1944, Colonel Rudolf von Margona‐Redwitz, received the death penalty in connexion with the July Plot against his head of state. Lastly, the Axis lost one Me 262 jet fighter which was escorting bombers of Kampfgeschwader 51. This was the first victory of a jet aircraft by a Tempest fighter. The Axis pilot, Unteroffizier Edmond Delatowski, bailed out and survived.
1957: Lev Rebet, leader of the OUN‐z, died.
1973: Peter Aufschnaiter, Fascist mountaineer, departed from the world.

On his Rumble show, Peters continued promoting these conspiracy theories with Jeff Berwick, [a neofeudalist] and cryptocurrency promoter.

“For people out there who have still not caught on, that the globalists and whatever you wanna call them — the Jews, the globalists, whatever you wanna call them — the CIA, all these people, they have this technology and they are using it full force now in so many different ways,” Berwick told Peters.

Berwick added that people who “wanna look into weather weapons” should look at Acapulco, where he’s lived for many years, because “it’s now been hit by three hurricanes in less than a year.” And he called the “secret ingredient” to these hurricanes “HAARP and the weather weapons stations that they’ve got all over the world now.”

Peters responded by saying that “the secret weapon is somebody with the last name ‘Stein’ or ‘Cohen’,” and that Jewish people have the “technology to destroy the United States in so many ways.”

Berwick agreed with Peters, saying that he wrote about “how they’re going to be destroying the West.”

He added that “they’re doing it now” by “sending that hurricane up there” to North Carolina and blowing up a chemical plant in Atlanta, GA, calling it “World War III.” In actuality, water from a malfunctioning sprinkler system reacted with chemicals in the plant, which caused the release of chlorine gas and ignited a fire.

But Peters critiqued Berwick’s frequent use of the term “globalist,” saying that he prefers to “call ’em Jews.”

“Everywhere I look it’s a Jewish person,” Peters complained. “I can’t help it. I’m not gonna deny that that’s a fact. A lot of other platforms — maybe you’re being cautious with your speech because a lot of other platforms wanna refer to them as ‘Frankists’ or ‘globalists’ or ‘communists’ or whatever. Communism, by the way, also Jewish.”

---

Click here for events that happened today (October 11).

1879: Ernst Mally, Axis philosophist and educator, was delivered to the world.
1884: Friedrich Karl Rudolf Bergius, Axis chemist who worked for I.G. Farben, started his life.
1901: Masanobu Tsuji, Axis army officer and politician, was born.
1937: The Duke and Duchess of Windsor toured the Third Reich for twelve days and met Adolf Schicklgruber on 22 October.
1940: In a series of policies with the goal of boosting birth rate, Vichy passed the Married Women’s Work Act, which forbade a wife from public sector employment if her husband could provide for the family. Likewise, Axis submarine U‐48 attacked Allied convoy HX‐77 northwest of Ireland in the evening; at 2150 hours, the Axis sunk Norwegian ship Brandanger (causing six deaths but leaving two dozen alive), then at 2209 hours it sunk the Allied ship Port Gisborne (26 killed when lifeboat capsized, 38 survived).

While small Axis raids of ten or fewer flightcraft harassed southern England all day, a number of larger raids, with 25–90 flightcraft, attacked larger towns. The larger raids were composed mostly of fighters as the Axis continued to try to wear down British fighter strength. That day, the Axis lost one Do 17 bomber and four Bf 109 fighters. Then, the Axis bombed London, Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol, and the Tyne and Tees areas overnight, but lost three Do 17 bombers over Anglesey after attacking Liverpool. Werner Mölders claimed his 43rd victory over Canterbury, England. Lastly, Axis bombers attacked Allied convoy BS.6 in the Red Sea fifty miles off of AOI, damaging escorting vessel Allied sloop HMS Auckland.
1941: Axis‐occupied Macedonia faced a war of liberation.
1942: Off Guadalcanal, United States Navy ships intercepted and defeat an Axis force.
1943: Axis antisubmarine flightcraft in Soya Strait (La Pérouse Strait) sunk USS Wahoo between Hokkaido and Karafuto (Sakhalin), massacring everybody aboard, including Vern Skjonsby and commanding officer Dudley Morton. Additionally, the Axis commissioned U‐821 into service with Ludwig Fabricius in command, and assigned her to the 4th Submarine Flotilla.
1944: An Axis V‐2 rocket hit Rockland St. Mary six miles southeast of Norwich, England, and was the second rocket to hit the village during the war (first being from seven days earlier). It damaged fourteen houses.
2013: Erich Priebke, SS commander who was responsible for the Ardeatine massacre, finally dropped dead after obstinately living long enough to become a centenarian.

Quoting Hayek: A Collaborative Biography: Part III, Fraud, Fascism and Free Market Religion, page viii:

Lieutenant Ludwig ‘von’ Mises (1881–1973), free marketeer; aristocrat; […] employee of the Foundation for Economic Education; Austro‐Fascist (Vaterländische or Patriotic Front) member № 282632; Austro‐Fascist social club (Werk Neues Leben) member № 406183; co‐leader of the third‐generation Austrian School of Economics, known to his disciples as ‘The Last Knight of Liberalism’. In his defining work, Liberalism in the classical tradition, he declared:

It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.

According to The Last Knight of Liberalism, Mises was FEE’s ‘spiritus rector’ — literally: ‘Führer’ or ‘ruler’.

Some capitalist apologists have claimed that Mises was forced to join the Austrofascists, but we have no good reason to believe this. As much as propertarians may grumble about ‘state interference’ and how it contradicts their idealistic redefinition of capitalism, they have demonstrated time and again that they have no issue with the state when it is oppressing undocumented immigrants, massacring or torturing (suspected) communists in Chile, and protecting private property, to name but a few examples. Hence, the pipeline between propertarianism and fascism is hardly a lengthy one.

Robert Leeson goes on, pages 5–6:

The ‘similar movements’ of ‘bloody counteraction’ that Mises referred to included the French anti‐Semitic Action Française plus ‘Germans and Italians’. ‘Italians’ obviously refers to Mussolini’s 1922 March on Rome; Mises’ (1985 [1927], 44) reference to ‘Ludendorff and Hitler’ means the 1923 Ludendorff‐Hitler‐Putsch (or Munich Beer Hall Putsch).

Mises (1985 [1927], 49) predicted that:

The deeds of the Fascists and of other parties corresponding to them were emotional reflex actions evoked by indignation at the deeds of the Bolsheviks and Communists. As soon as the first flush of anger had passed, their policy took a more moderate course and will probably become even more so with the passage of time.

Misesian liberals and Fascists were allies, but differed in tactics:

What distinguished liberal from Fascist tactics is not a difference of opinion regarding the use of armed force to resist armed attackers, but a difference in the fundamental estimation about the role of violence in a struggle for power.

Violence was ‘the highest principle’ and must lead to

civil war. The ultimate victor to emerge will be the faction strongest in number […] The decisive question, therefore always remains: How does one obtain a majority for one’s own party? This however is purely an intellectual matter.

Fascism would have to embrace Mises’ (1985 [1927], 50) liberalism to achieve their common aims; if Fascism ‘wanted really to combat socialism it would oppose it with ideas.’ Mises would provide these ideas: ‘There is however only one idea that can be effectively opposed to socialism, viz, liberalism.’ Mises provided an historicist inevitability justification: ‘Fascism will never succeed as completely as Russian Bolshevism from freeing itself from the power of liberal ideas […] The next episode will be the victory of communism.’

Mises’ political activity was consistent with his ideology: on 1 March 1934, he joined the Austro‐Fascist Patriotic Front and their Werk Neues Leben social club (Hülsmann 2007, 677, n149). Mises may also have been a victim of propaganda: his justification for this tactical embrace was that fascists would protect property — the protection of which he saw as the very essence of liberty.

Meanwhile, tax‐evading fascist kleptocrats were eying Jewish property; in the Anschluss of March 1938, Austria was reunited with Austrian‐led Germany, and the Austrian Adolf Eichmann opened the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. The decree on the Declaration of Jewish Assets revealed fascism to be a conveyor belt along which Jews had their property confiscated before being exterminated or driven abroad.

As The Last Knight of Liberalism bemoaned: ‘Mises family property had become free booty’ (Hülsmann 2007, 728, 677, n149). The Jewish‐born Mises was lucky to escape with his life; he devoted much of the rest of it to describing his opponents as ‘Fascists’.

I’ve noticed that anticommunists who have displayed respect for fascism or neofascism (Winston Churchill, A. James Gregor, Timothy Snyder, Anne Applebaum & alia) seem to be especially fond of trying to equate us with fascists, usually by focussing on whatever superficial and petty similarities that they can find while completely omitting any and all similarities between liberal régimes and fascist ones.

The blockheadedness in these false equivalences should be especially obvious here: if communism was equal to fascism, yet these anticommunists sympathized with fascism or neofascism anyway, then logically they might as well have sympathized with communism since fascism was equal to that according to their half‐baked analyses. Perhaps these anticommunists think that if they keep repetitively equating communism with fascism, no‐one will ever suspect them of sympathizing with the latter and then dig into their embarrassing histories? Who knows.

In any case, Mises’s ties to fascism did nothing to impede his career. Ronald Reagan, who has his own ties to fascism and neofascism, eulogized him four decades ago. Returning to page 6:

Subsequently, U.S. presidents and presidential hopefuls embraced the Austrian School of Economics. President Ronald Reagan (1984, 198) wrote:

von Mises […] rekindled the flames of liberty in new generations of thinkers […] we owe an incalculable debt to this dean of the Austrian school of economics for expanding our knowledge and inspiring a new vision of liberty in our age.

Of course, as we know looking at Timothy Snyder, Jordan Peterson & alia, anticommunist hacks don’t need to accomplish much to be praised to the high heavens by the rest of the upper classes. For example, Robert Leeson describes on pages 141–142 how ‘Mises had a tendency to make stark — and false — predictions’, and his alleged prediction of the Great Depression had nothing to do with the U.S. stock market at all. Hardly impressive.

If it weren’t enough that Mises was an Austrofascist hack, the way that he treated his lover and her young daughter was disturbing. Page 165:

According to Mises (1951 [1922], 87, 104, n1), ‘Waking and dreaming, man’s wishes turn upon sex.’ His fiancée (1976, 28, 23) recalled:

Sometimes I did not see him for weeks. But I knew very well that he was in town. At least twice daily the telephone rang, and when I answered there was silence at the other end of the line — not a word was spoken. I knew it was Lu […] I was so tormented, so torn to pieces that the children must have felt it.⁵⁴

Mises also gratified himself by feeling Margit’s six‐year‐old daughter: ‘I wanted to touch Gitta’s hair and think of you.’

While arguably no fault of Mises’s own, we should be unsurprised that an Austrofascist’s works would become popular in the Empire of Japan. Quoting Osamu Yanagisawa’s The impact of German economic thought on Japanese economists before World War II in The German Historical School: The Historical and Ethical Approach to Economics, page 179:

Accepting the opinion of Sombart and Schmalenbach on the development of capitalism, Mukai and Hon‐iden concluded that a reasonable future system would be a partly organized economy, somewhere between socialism and laissez‐faire capitalism. [sic]

On the other hand, they regarded socialism (perfect planning of the economy without money) as difficult and inhuman, paying special attention to the criticism of Ludwig von Mises, who had believed that a socialist system of planning, which lacked a market price system based on private ownership, could not work. Mukai (1933:276–86) summarized von Mises’s Kritik des Interventionismus (1929), which attracted many contemporary [Imperial] intellectuals.⁶

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

---

Click here for events that happened today (October 10).

1895: Wolfram Karl Ludwig Moritz Hermann Freiherr von Richthofen, Axis field marshal, was born.
1935: A parafascist coup d’état terminated Greece’s Second Hellenic Republic and replaced it with the Kingdom of Greece (again).
1938: Abiding by the Munich Agreement, Czechoslovakia completed its withdrawal from the Sudetenland, now property of the Third Reich.
1940: Berlin initiated the Führer‐Sofortprogramm, an emergency programme to build shelters for the Third Reich’s urban populations. Between 1824 and 1844 hours, eighteen shells from Axis guns at Calais struck Dover, then the Axis bombed London, Manchester, and various airfields overnight.
1941: Reinhard Heydrich ordered the town of Terezín (German: Theresienstadt) to be converted into a camp–ghetto for deported German, Austrian, and Czechoslovakian Jews. He placed Adolf Eichmann and Rolf Günther in charge of establishing this abomination. To make matters worse, the 1.Panzergruppe reached the Sea of Azov, and Axis Field Marshal Walther von Reichenau issued the ‘Severity Order’ in which he ordered the annihilation Bolshevism and the extermination of Jews.

Apart from that, the 250.Infanterie Division, also known as the Blue Division, entered service on the Eastern Front, and Berlin ordered a stop to night intruder operations over RAF airfields in eastern England; 1/NJG2 who have been conducting successful harrying of returning RAF bombers consequently transferred to the Mediterranean. Lastly, the 4th Panzer Division reached Mtsensk, Russia in Oryol Oblast, yet it would stay there for many days because of Soviet resistance.
1942: The major Axis air offensive against Malta commenced, the Third Reich increased rations by 10% for all foreign workers, and Sigmund Rascher reported from Dauchau his findings from experiments involving putting concentration camp prisoners in full flight suits and placing them in freezing conditions, concluding that the warming of the subjects’ heads and necks were vital for the subjects’ survival… on the bright side, Arnold Majewski, Axis cavalry officer, died immediately after receiving a bullet from a Soviet sniper.
1943: Franco ordered the 250th Spanish ‘Blue’ Division back to Spain from Wehrmacht service. A few thousand disobeyed this order and stayed behind, attached to either the 121.Infanterie Division or the Waffen‐SS.
1944: Armeegruppe E started its final retreat from Greece, and the Axis put down the antifascist rebellion in Slovakia.
1945: After Indonesian forces took control of much of Bandung, Java, nearby Axis forces, not having officially surrendered yet, counterattacked and took back the city, preventing the Indonesians from capturing a weapon factory.
1957: Karl August Genzken, Axis physician who committed numerous atrocities against concentration camp prisoners, was kind enough to drop dead.