Under Dalai Lama’s rule over Tibet

• 80-95% of the population were serfs, some monasteries owned thousands of serfs
• Disobedient serfs endured torture including having their eyes being gouged out
• The 14th Dalai Lama’s family owned 27 manors and 6000 serfs
• 95% of the population were illiterate
• Tibet had a life expectancy of just 35 years
• No modern roads, railways, or electricity infrastructure

Contrast this to modern Tibet after liberation

• Extreme poverty eliminated by 2020
• Literacy rate: 95%+
• Life expectancy: 72-74 years
• Universal primary education, with expansion of universities
• Railway infrastructure to the rest of China, with airports, highways and electrification

An overview of the Hannibal Directive policy used on Oct 7th, 2023 that resulted in the IDF killing hundreds of Israelis and other civilians.

Yoav Gallant, who was Israel’s Defense Minister at the time of the attacks, said, “Israeli troops were ordered to shoot and kill captive Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023…”

Here's my old effort post about Hannibal and Oct 7th (includes lots of links): https://hexbear.net/post/1609134

"I don’t see why a German who eats a piece of bread should torment himself with the idea that the soil which produced this bread has been won by the sword. When we eat wheat from Canada, we don’t think about the despoiled Indians"

(This takes 5¼ minutes to read.)

Although I have occasionally touched on this in comments, I should have made a topic about this stereotype much earlier than I did, since Western conservatives along with other antisocialists are fond of stressing the presumed omnipresence and omnipotence of enemy states. (In actuality, antisocialists are nowhere nearly as opposed to ‘big government’ as they pretend, but that is a discussion for another time.) Basically, their idea is that if you have read George Orwell’s perpetually overrated 1984, then you already know how the Fascist states operated.

For the record, I can understand how somebody could arrive at this conclusion in good faith. I myself noted the common practice of Fascist Italy’s police disciplining suspects with little evidence needed, as well as Fascist Italy spying on Italians both within and beyond the fatherland, but perhaps I should have urged caution when interpreting such evidence, for reasons which I am about to give.

Many scholars, whether they realize it or not, exaggerate or oversimplify how the Fascist state intruded into private life, and it is easy for the less circumspect learners to extrapolate that the Fascist states must have had comedically large police forces that obsessively monitored everybody twenty-four hours a day and instituted Draconian punishments for even the pettiest offenses.

Can you imagine a police squad spying on a high-ranking general like Rodolfo Graziani around the clock and then arresting him on suspicion of rolling his eyes at the Duce?

In reality, no state — not even a fascist one — would have wasted anywhere close to the amount of resources needed for such an absurdly ambitious task; it is neither possible nor desirable.

Quoting Joshua Arthurs’s, Michael Ebner’s, and Kate Ferris’s The Politics of Everyday Life in Fascist Italy: Outside the State?, pages 1–2:

“Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” In an October 1925 speech marking the third anniversary of his party’s accession to power, Benito Mussolini presented Fascism’s “formula” for the transformation of Italian society.¹

The announcement arrived at a pivotal juncture in the development of his régime. The dictatorship had been proclaimed the previous January and by October was in the midst of dismantling all vestiges of civil society, including opposition ­parties, the independent press, and autonomous associational life.

Under the aegis of an all-encompassing “Ethical State” and guided by its omniscient Leader, the nation would be regenerated and revolutionized. Minds and bodies would be rendered muscular and steadfast, disciplined at home and aggressive abroad; families and farmland alike would be fertile and plentiful; Italy’s endemic discord, corruption, backwardness, and self-interest would all be overcome, relegated to a bygone era.²

Much of this grandiose vision was, of course, belied by reality. Mussolini’s proclamation notwithstanding, many aspects of Italian life remained stubbornly outside, and not inside, the state. Despite the régime’s best efforts, for example, Catholicism was never supplanted by a new “political religion”³ nor did Fascism eradicate deeply rooted traditions of working-class sovversivismo (subversivism).⁴ Even the Fascist Party itself remained largely “outside” the state, having failed in its attempts to wrest political and economic power from the monarchy, the military, and the industrial establishment.⁵

Italian Fascism therefore poses a conundrum to scholars of twentieth-century totalitarianism. On the one hand, Mussolini’s 1925 formulation remains one of the pithiest, and most enduring, definitions of the phenomenon. His régime was the first to identify itself explicitly with this new conception of the body politic and to attempt to put this totalizing vision into effect.

On the other hand, Fascist Italy was at best “imperfectly” totalitarian or, in the words of no less an authority than Hannah Arendt, “just an ordinary nationalist dictatorship.”⁶

Quoting Roberta Pergher’s and Giulia Albanese’s In the Society of Fascists: Acclamation, Acquiescence, and Agency in Mussolini’s Italy, pg. 1:

Over time, […] historians started to discover consensus where once they saw only terror. For Fascist Italy, the historiographical shift came relatively early, prompted by Renzo de Felice’s path‐breaking work in the late 1960s, claiming [that] Fascism had enjoyed widespread consent. At the same time the discovery of Palmiro Togliatti’s prewar notes revealed his reading of Fascism as a reactionary régime of the masses rather than a ruthless imposition from above.

For [the Third Reich], the move has been more piecemeal and, as we will see, has responded to a different intellectual and moral framework, but now the idea that the [German Fascists] created a genuine “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft) and represented a “dictatorship by acclamation” (Zustimmungsdiktatur) has become a dominant motif among a new generation of German historians of the Third Reich.

Pg. 6:

Some Italian historians, true enough, were conscious that Mussolini himself had presented his state as “totalitarian” and now asked how far his ambitions had been realized. But according to Alberto Aquarone, Mussolini’s totalitarian objective of “the complete integration of society into the State” was never fully attained. De Felice, too, felt that the Italian case could not be subsumed under totalitarianism and described Fascism as a “missed totalitarianism,” based on the régime’s own definition of a totalitarian state.

Stephen G. Gross’s Export Empire: German Soft Power in Southeastern Europe, 1890–1945, pg. 251:

[The Third Reich] was not totalitarian and Hitler did not control all aspects of foreign policy: infighting between government ministries shaped Germany’s foreign relations throughout the 1930s.

Quoting Elizabeth Harvey’s, Johannes Hürter’s, Maiken Umbach’s and Andreas Wirsching’s Private Life and Privacy in Nazi Germany, pg. 6:

The […] dictatorship and war made private life and pleasures all the more prized, and […] the régime knowingly channelled and manipulated Germans’ aspirations to a ‘normal private life’, even as it destroyed, for millions, the chances of achieving it. Indeed, by holding out the prospect of private life as a privilege for those deemed politically worthy and racially acceptable, the régime underscored its promise of integration into a newly cohesive national community.

Hence, state interference in Fascist-occupied Eritrea was quite modest, the Gestapo left many ordinary Germans unbothered, and many ordinary citizens under Fascism continued embracing their individuality, to name only a few examples that complicate the ‘totalitarian’ model. Listing all of the examples, such as the Kingdom of Italy firing as well as arresting its Duce in July 1943, or the Führer’s highest-ranking officials disobeying him in 1945, would take hours to read.

Thus, the terms ‘totalitarian’ and ‘totalitarianism’ are either too vague or too subjective to be useful. Only sporadically did the Fascists refer to theirselves as ‘totalitarian’, and the infamous ‘Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State’ quote was a slogan, not an observation. People take it too seriously.

Now, make no mistake: liberating ourselves from the ‘totalitarian’ model does not mean seeing the Axis powers in a more positive light. On the contrary, if we want to identify and then defeat institutionalized neofascism, we have to accept that it is going to be more mundane than the totalitarian theorists’ cartoon caricatures would have us believe.

State intrusion is a phenomenon that long predates fascism: Karl Marx hisself was a victim of police surveillance, and as in his time the intrusion’s usual victims are not going to be ordinary people minding their own business but anybody whom the bourgeois state deems a threat or a nuisance. This intrusion is going to be imperfect: not every potential threat is going to become a victim, nor is every intrusion going to be severe. Nevertheless, the bourgeois state shall, as always, remain an obstacle to our emancipation, and the lower classes shall overthrow it for that reason alone.

Further reading: Hitler’s Compromises: Coercion and Consensus in Nazi Germany

(This takes approximately nine minutes to read. Yes, I am afraid that it is going to be one of those threads.)

The European pogroms from 1917 to 1923 were the deadliest series of antisemitic massacres until the Shoah, and somewhere from 115,000 to perhaps even 200,000 people died from them. While most Herzlians insist that the Shoah was so unique that it was incomparable to anything else in history, it would be utterly baffling if they explicitly included this catastrophe as something else incomparable to the Shoah, which is possibly another reason that they almost never discuss it.

This violence, which I have termed the proto-Shoah, has a good deal in common with its successor and most likely influenced it to some degree, hence why a few writers have called it a ‘dress rehearsal’ therefor. That being said, the two tragedies have some significant differences. Some of them are obvious: the Shoah was much wider in scope, involved more participants, involved millions more deaths, and involved more killing methods (most infamously chemical weapons). However, in comparison with its successor, the proto-Shoah was more informal, more disorganised, and it is less clear if any large businesses profited directly from it.

While anti-Jewish violence was already phenomenal in Eastern Europe long before 1917, it is clear that there was a spike in such during and a little after the late 1910s, which is why I set 1917 as the starting point even though there is some continuity between the anti-Jewish violence from then and earlier.

Symon Petliura, the head of one of the several anti-Jewish armies polluting the East, peddled a legend that bears an almost striking resemblance to the hypothesis that the Germanic folks were descended from Aryans. Quoting Jeffrey Veidlinger’s In the Midst of Civilized Europe: the Pogroms of 1918–1921, pages 50–51:

Petliura skillfully deployed the “Cossack” myth—the idea that modern Ukrainians were descendants of the freedom-loving horsemen of the steppe who had overthrown the Polish magnates in the seventeenth century and established their own independent state, known as the Hetmanate. This state ultimately merged with the Russian Empire, and the Cossacks themselves were recruited into the tsar’s service, where they were recognized as among the most lethal forces in the Russian military.

Petliura dressed his peasant soldiers in the papakha, the fur Astrakhan hat of the Cossacks, and named his military units after Cossack bands or historical heroes. He adopted the Cossack title otaman (also seen as ataman or hetman) as a military rank, called his soldiers “Haidamaks” after the eighteenth-century Cossack insurgents, and would later crown himself the “Chief Otaman.”

It would be all too easy to liken this to referring to an anticommunist dictator as Führer, who issued his troops to wear helmets loosely based on sallets, and whose chief of police remodelled the Schutzstaffel after the Teuton Knights, but these are all arguably superficial similarities rather than significant ones.

On the other hand, one indisputably important similarity was the tendency to go after passersby who merely ‘looked Jewish’: a phenomenon that sometimes occurred in Germany before the Judenstern’s introduction. Page 193:

According to the final report on the pogrom prepared by the Red Cross, “they killed not only Red soldiers, but anybody who looked like a Jew. The Jews who were taken in the field were immediately shot.”²¹

As with the Fascists, many of Eastern Europe’s protofascists were petty bourgeois goyim eager to enrich themselves by despoiling Jews. Page 195:

Throughout the pogrom, as Grigoriev’s men arrested and shot Jewish men, they encouraged onlookers—Christian women and children—to raid the apartments of their victims and scavenge for any goods left behind. Nunia Krasnopolsky, who was mistaken for a Christian, described how one soldier handed her a sack and said, “Go and loot.” V. Petrov, the former chair of the city council, noted that “the local petty bourgeoisie, women and children, readily took part in the plundering, pointed out Jewish houses to the soldiers, etc.”³⁰

Marusya Ukrainskaia, who was at the station, also recognized locals mingling with the drunken soldiers: “Boys and girls from the Cherkasy high school, officers, and people who had social standing. All this assembly was dancing to the sound of a gramophone. Shouts, tumult, and the most unrestrained merriment.”³¹ Several witnesses noted in their testimonies that many members of the professional classes who joined the insurgents had parents and relatives who had been arrested by the Cheka.³²

Many early anticommunists also misappropriated Bolshevist recommendations, slogans, and occasionally even aesthetics, not out of any solidarity with us, but as a means of hoodwinking and confusing the lower classes, as well as appealing to other petty bourgeois who had ‘anticapitalist’ sentiments. Page 54:

In Kyiv, the Central Rada refused to recognize the [October Revolution] and responded on November 20 with its “Third Universal,” proclaiming the establishment of a Ukrainian People’s Republic still within a “democratic” and “federated” Russia. The new republic claimed for the Rada all power to establish order and promulgate laws within the Ukrainian provinces until the promised convocation of the Constituent Assembly.

The proclamation adopted many aspects of the Bolshevik program—it declared all land the property of the working class and the peasants, introduced the eight-hour workday, declared the nationalization of industry, and promised an end to the war—but sought to implement them through a democratic process rather than dictatorial fiat. It accused the Bolsheviks of hurling the country into an “internecine and bloody struggle” and of spreading “chaos, disorder, and ruin.”

Page 106:

Freshly armed with equipment foraged from the retreating [Central Powers], forces from this disorganized local garrison now had the run of the town.³ These peasant soldiers had only the vaguest notions of what they were fighting for: some called themselves Revolutionaries instead of Republicans, not fully understanding the difference, but latching on to whatever slogan they had last heard.

Many were inspired by the Bolshevik slogan of “peace, land, bread,” but also understood from their officers that the Bolsheviks were the enemy. Bolshevik ideas were fine, some believed, but the Bolsheviks themselves were Jewish traitors.

Page 209:

Struk’s anti-Jewish rhetoric […] now branded Jews as capitalists and speculators, and at times accused them of being both Bolshevik and bourgeoisie, capitalist and communist simultaneously. In Hornostaipil, in April 1919, he issued an appeal to “those villages, towns and cities where Communist-Capitalist Jews and their dishonest servants and employees hold power and authority.”¹⁰³

Such incoherence is typical of the petty bourgeoisie, which sometimes proclaims anticapitalism but often wastes everything fighting serious anticapitalists: lower-class rebels.

That being said, it is also true that many Jewish adults were stuck operating microbusinesses (as was true before and during the Shoah). For byspel, page 218:

Before the war, the Jews of Slovechno were mostly petty traders, leather workers, or small shop owners.

This provoked resentment among petty bourgeois goyim, who hated their competition and used the proto-Shoah as an opportunity to devastate it. This undoubtedly drew many formerly petty bourgeois Jews into the arms of the Bolshevists, now that they no longer had anything to lose.

Now, keep in mind that no Jew is born with an instinct to start a microbusiness. The main reason that this was common among Jews was so that they could set their own schedules and always take Saturdays off, thereby not having to violate the Shabbat. In contrast, capitalist goyim never cared about Shabbat; they wanted their employés to work as often as possible.

Of course, that was not the sole reason; there are other traditions in Jewish cultures that Gentiles ignore, and starting a microbusiness was a way to circumvent those. For example, the main reason that tailoring has always been a popular profession among Jews has to do with the Pentateuchal commandment to avoid wearing wearing mixed fibres, a rule that we never cared to follow as it never applied to us. Thus, Jewish tailors could make their own clothes, knowing with certainty that it was kosher.

I could spend several more paragraphs explaining the Jewish attraction to tailoring and other stereotypical professions, but I digress. The point here is that it was the need to respect sacred Jewish traditions (and not ‘race’) that lead so many Jews to start microbusinesses, where they could set their own rules. Unfortunately, analysts tend to skip over the explanation for the correlation between these people and microbusinesses when they note it, which has undoubtedly lead some readers to wonder about said analysts’ racial prejudices.

Unfortunately, I cannot possibly hope to adequately convey the sheer scale of carnage without testing your patience, so I shall limit myself to three examples. Pages 146–147:

In a few cases, Jews seem to have been targeted for religious reasons. In a house on Sobornaya Street where twenty-one people were massacred, for instance, a survivor reported that “before the murder, the Cossacks demanded that the Jews cross themselves. In the event of a refusal or indecision, they killed with the cry, ‘Die, Jew!’”⁴¹

Soldiers also massacred some Jews at prayer. About twenty people were in the synagogue later in the day for a study session when soldiers barged in. Leyb Kozovy, who was present, described how the worshippers insisted that they were simple pious Jews at prayer and had no interest in politics. “The soldier near me smiled,” Kozovy recalled, “and drove his bayonet into my neighbor.” Kozovy was wounded in the back and survived by pretending to be dead; all the other worshippers were killed in the attack. Kozovy spent the next six months in the hospital.”⁴²

Pg. 191:

Rousing anti-Jewish hatred was Grigoriev’s most potent weapon. Along the railway lines, his troops singled out Jewish passengers, robbed and stripped them, and threw them off moving trains. As his men moved through the districts of Cherkasy and Elizavetgrad, they massacred the Jewish populations they encountered; nearly sixty incidents were documented in approximately forty villages and towns. The total death toll in these encounters has been estimated at six thousand.¹²

Pgs. 214–215:

At dusk, a couple of mounted men entered the home of the local rabbi, Pinkhos Rabinovich, and shot him dead. The memorial book explains: “People think that the bandit leader had heard from the local gentiles that the presence of this righteous leader protected the town. For that reason, the murderers were sent to eliminate the rabbi before they attacked the town.”¹²³ With the rabbi out of the way, Zelenyi’s fighters began plundering the village.

The next morning, they rounded up 143 young Jewish men, locked them inside the synagogue, and demanded the sum of one million rubles to release them. Terrified representatives of the Jewish community went door-to-door to collect money.

When they were unable to come up with the funds after two hours, the insurgents took ten men out of the synagogue and shot them, promising to repeat the action every hour. By late afternoon, when it became clear that the ransom was not forthcoming, Zelenyi’s men took the hostages to a bridge on the outskirts of town, shot them all with machine guns, and tossed their bodies into the river.

Although the intensity of the anti-Jewish violence wound down substantially in 1923, it still cropped up in certain spots such as Livorno, Trieste, Tripoli, Bucharest and Scheunenviertel. Needless to say, the violence did not cease completely after 1923 either, but the later incidents’ links to the 1917–1923 ones are somewhat tenuous, hence my choice of range.

Now the question is, how do we prevent this tragedy from falling back into obscurity? What can we do to promote this catastrophe from a historic curiosity to a catastrophe with a lasting impression in public memory?

The most effective means would be to publishing either a wildly successful film or a miniseries like NBC’s Holocaust: The Story of the Family Weiss, which had one hundred twenty million viewers. It is no exaggeration to say that without that series, Shoah memorialization would not be where it is today. Of course, since none of us has either the budget or the time to make a production like that, we have no choice but to rely on grassroots methods.

If your friends or loved ones don’t mind the occasional history discussion, you could mention this topic in a conversation starting out with something like, ‘Have you ever wondered what the worst anti-Jewish incident was before the Holocaust?’ or maybe ‘I was reading a topic the other day about this little-known series of horrific pogroms…’ It would be awkward to bring this up with an acquaintance whom you barely know or an outright stranger, but bringing it up with people whom you trust to be nonjudgemental is safe and can have a lasting impact.

A good day to remember the proto-Shoah would be March 26, which was possibly the deadliest day from that era. I am taking this as another opportunity to discuss it with some of my colleagues, but either way I’ll be mentioning this disaster—every once in a while—because I can’t let my inability to create media or monuments prevent me from spreading awareness.

Further reading: The Pogroms in Ukraine, 1918–19: Prelude to the Holocaust

‘Ukrainian Neighbors: Pogroms and Extermination in Ukraine 1919–1920’ (mirror)

‘Frontiers of Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Revolutionary Ukraine, Belarus, and Western Russia, 1918–1922’

‘Bodies as Battlefields: Gendered Violence during the Russian Pogroms’

‘100 Years After Genocide, Mongolia’s Jewish Community Is Tiny’

When the Bronze Age ended, it didn't go quietly. Between 1200 and 1150 BC, nearly every major civilization around the Mediterranean — the Mycenaeans, the Hittites, the Canaanites, the Cypriots — collapsed within decades of each other.

Eric Cline has spent his career reconstructing what actually happened, and why it matters so much to our globalized world today.

Dr. Eric H. Cline is Professor of Classics and Anthropology, the former Chair of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and the current Director of the Capitol Archaeological Institute at The George Washington University, in Washington DC. He is a National Geographic Explorer, a Fulbright scholar, a Getty scholar, an NEH Public Scholar, and an award-winning teacher and author. He has degrees in archaeology and ancient history from Dartmouth, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania; in May 2015, he was awarded an honorary doctoral degree (honoris causa) from Muhlenberg College.

Timestamps:

(This takes 3¾–8 minutes to read.)

Before I continue, I want to remind you that the Federal Republic of Germany was riddled with former Axis employés, and the Estado Novo was a parafascist dicatorship that lasted from 1933 to 1974 and provided assistance to the Axis. We don’t have many topics on either the FRG or the Estado Novo here as I think that classifying either as ‘fascist’ is a slight exaggeration, but I think that one can draw a line from the Twoth Reich to the Third Reich to the FRG when it comes to colonial violence in Africa, and we can clearly see here that defascistization in the FRG was a failure.

Quoting Luís Nuno Rodrigues’s “The International Dimensions of Portuguese Colonial Crisis,” in The Ends of European Colonial Empires: Cases and Comparisons (ed. Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and António Costa Pinto), pages 257–258:

One of the most important Portuguese diplomatic triumphs in the early 1960s was the development and reinforcement of the relationship with the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). West Germany gradually became one of Portugal’s most important allies, and to the dismay of the U.S. government the Portuguese consciously played the German card when they faced the international difficulties of the early 1960s. Franco Nogueira justified the support Portugal received from FRG in this delicate context.

First of all, the Germans were exempted from the debates in the UN and therefore from defining a clear position regarding Portuguese colonialism. Second, German commercial and economic interests in Portugal and in Africa were also considerable[,] and FRG was interested in developing training facilities for aviation in southern Portugal. Finally, according to Nogueira, German politicians — such as Adenauer, Erhard, and Strauss — had a genuine admiration for Salazar.

Therefore, during the 1960s, West Germany maintained a friendly policy towards Portugal, opening financial credits in favourable conditions and increasing German imports from Portugal. The Germans also supplied, ‘many times at symbolic prices [...] appropriate planes for the fight in Africa, telecommunications equipment, war material, military vehicles and others’. Nogueira emphasized the rôle of the German ambassador in Lisbon, Schaffarzyk, who ‘believed in Portuguese policy’ and whose ‘reports and informations encouraged the German government’.⁶⁴

The FRG government never criticized Portuguese colonial policy in public, especially after the beginning of the war in Angola. The official position of the Germans was one of ‘total discretion’. But West Germany was equally cautious in not assuming a position of open support that might have caused some kind of embarrassment in its relations with the emerging third-world countries, where FRG had growing economic interests.

Therefore, the West German government went so far as to authorize the creation, on German territory, of the Union of Students from Black Africa under Portuguese Colonial Domination, in September 1961, and the Committee for Angola, in March 1964.⁶⁵

This was largely compensated for, however, by the establishment and maintenance of a high level of military co-operation with Portugal. German military support was indeed crucial for the Portuguese war effort in Africa. It should be noted that at least since 1959 the Germans had enjoyed special training facilities in Portugal at the Ota airbase, some 25 miles north of Lisbon.⁶⁶ In early 1960, following the visit to Portugal of West Germany’s defence minister Franz Joseph Strauss, FRG expressed an interest in acquiring landing rights in the Beja area. The project for the construction of an airbase in Beja developed over the next three years.

In January 1962, the U.S. ambassador in Lisbon, Charles Elbrick, reported Strauss ‘motoring in the neighbourhood of Beja,’ and noted that for the second successive year the Portuguese budget ‘contained an item of 50 million escudos (US $1.75 million) for the acquisition of lands for this base’.⁶⁷ Strauss himself reported his visit to the American embassy in Bonn, indicating he had met Salazar and discussed the ‘bilateral question of Beja air base and small naval harbour that Germans desire to develop for joint use with Portuguese’.⁶⁸

A few months later the Portuguese press announced the bidding on the construction of eight hangars to be built at airbase 11, Beja, Portugal, would begin on 18 September. Reporting this information, Elbrick added that ‘although it had been known for some time that the airfield facilities at Beja would be constructed, this is the first evidence that these plans were about to be carried out’. Elbrick recalled that ‘the financing of this construction is being borne by the Federal German Republic, whose air force will enjoy facilities there’.⁶⁹

More importantly, West Germany was also the main vendor of military equipment to Portugal during the 1960s. Luc Crollen noted that ‘immediately after the beginning of the insurgency in Angola’, West Germany had delivered ‘tanks, machine guns and broadcasting equipment to Portugal with a total value of US $55 million’.⁷⁰

In terms of aircraft, FRG sold dozens of Dornier DO-27s and Harvard T-6s that would be used by the Portuguese armed forces in Africa. German technicians from the Dornier aircraft company were in Luanda in April 1961 to assemble the first aircraft to arrive in Angola. By October 1961 there were 16 DO-27s operating in Angola and 24 more were negotiated and sold by September 1962.

In November 1963, the Portuguese minister of defence signed an agreement with his German colleague for the acquisition of 46 DO-27s and 70 Harvard T-6s. This last group of aircraft was partly paid for by providing maintenance services for German aircraft in Portuguese facilities. In 1966, 40 Fiat G-91s were also sold to Portugal and promptly transported to Portuguese Guinea.⁷¹

Yugoslav government records tallied 1,200–2,500 civilians killed and 5,000 wounded. Key strikes: passenger train at Grdelica Gorge (April 12); RTS Belgrade headquarters where at least 14 journalists killed (April 23); Niš market cluster bomb strike with 14–16 dead; Savine Vode bus with 17 dead. Human Rights Watch documented 90+ civilian casualty incidents. NATO has compensated no one.

NATO fired 15 tons of DU munitions. Four zones in southern Serbia were confirmed contaminated, with projectiles buried 1.5–2 meters deep. Former Health Minister and neuro-oncologist Danica Grujičić reported a dramatic post-1999 rise in aggressive cancers with unofficial estimates citing 18,000 malignancies, including pediatric medulloblastoma. A peer-reviewed study confirmed a statistically significant thyroid cancer spike between 1999–2008. Italy compensated 181 soldiers who developed cancer after Kosovo deployment. Serbia's civilians received nothing.

78 industrial sites and 42 energy installations destroyed. Pančevo alone: 1,500 tonnes of vinyl chloride, 15,000 tonnes of ammonia, 100 tonnes of mercury, and 250 tonnes of liquid chlorine released necessitating 80,000 residents to be evacuated. The UN Environment Program named Pančevo the worst environmental hot spot of the campaign. Novi Sad's refinery burned 50,000 tons of crude; the city lost all three Danube bridges and water services for two years. The Council of Europe concluded the environmental destruction was a deliberate breach of the Geneva Convention's Additional Protocol.

Strobe Talbott later acknowledged Yugoslavia's resistance to Western economic restructuring, not only Kosovo, which drove the war. Former Czech presidents Klaus and Zeman, on the 25th anniversary of NATO membership, called the bombing a serious mistake.

The ICTY reviewed NATO's conduct and declined to prosecute. This is the same tribunal that indicted Milošević saw nothing worth investigating on the other side. No international court has established a final civilian death toll. No NATO state has paid reparations. The contaminated soil around Vranje, Preševo, and Bujanovac still holds DU rounds buried two meters deep. Children in Serbian cancer wards have no idea why they are sick. The bridges, the factories, the TV tower, the market in Niš was never accounted for. NATO called it a humanitarian intervention.

Serbia calls it what it was: 78 days of unpunished war crimes against a sovereign people.

sauce

The March 22, 1943, massacre at Khatyn (pronounced HA-teen) left 149 villagers from the Eastern European community, then part of the Soviet Union, dead. Just six people—five children and one adult—survived. Ostensibly in reaction to Belarusian partisans’ ambush killing of German Olympic shot putter Hans Woellke, [Axis] soldiers and their collaborators converged on the village and enacted total warfare on its civilian inhabitants.

As described so vividly by Zhelobkovich, the attackers herded all of the villagers into a large barn, set the building on fire and then waited outside with machine guns. Those who managed to escape the inferno were quickly mowed down. Before departing, the [Axis] looted everything of value and burned Khatyn to the ground.

It was far from an isolated incident. By one historian’s count, occupying forces murdered all the inhabitants of 629 razed Belarusian villages, in addition to burning down another 5,454 villages and killing at least a portion of their residents.

As Peter Black, former senior historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, explains, these punitive operations paved the way for the planned repopulation of Soviet territory with German settlers. The [Axis], he says, hoped to conquer, secure and exploit the Soviet Union’s resources, “both natural and human, […] for the benefit of the German Reich.”

Though it looms large in the Belarusian cultural consciousness, Khatyn—and the scope of devastation it speaks to—is relatively unknown in Western Europe and the United States. Per Anders Rudling, a historian at Lund University in Sweden, notes that [Axis] reprisals at Lidice and Oradour-sur-Glane, villages in Czechoslovakia and France, respectively, “are rather well known in the West because [they] took place in a Western setting.” But the fact that massacres of this kind, isolated incidents within their countries, took place “on a scale incomparably greater” in the Soviet Union is largely overlooked, he says.

[…]

“It cannot be emphasized strongly enough that what happened on the Eastern Front was a war of racial extermination,” says Rudling. “And [the Fascist bourgeoisie] made it very clear that it was a different conflict than what they called the European ‘normal war’ in the West,” where the [Axis] were more concerned with keeping conquered countries dependent on Germany than in waging a campaign of total annihilation.

Unfortunately, the author could not resist both‐sidesing this tragedy, but I do not know of a better article on this subject in English.

(This takes 2.25 minutes to read.)

Quoting Steve Cushion in On Strike Against the Nazis, pages 17–22:

After the [Fascist] invasion, the mining companies took their revenge for the defeats they had suffered at the hands of the miners during the period of the Popular Front, 1936–38. Even before the occupation authorities demanded it, the mine owners stopped recognising the socially progressive legislation of 1936 and set about restoring “a taste for work and discipline”.²⁷ The mine engineers, who had abandoned the good veins of coal during the Popular Front, quickly reopened then for the benefit of the [Fascists].

However, even though the extraction machinery was old and worn out, OFK 670 demanded a 25% increase in productivity over the 1938 average. Piecework rates were cut back and the working day was lengthened by half an hour. Despite the decree of 28th June 1940 which froze wages and prices, there was a vast increase in the rate of inflation, while wages remained the same.²⁸

The workers’ response started very quickly in the Pas‐de‐Calais mining basin, with short wildcat strikes in August, September, October and November 1940. In January 1941, at pit number 7 of the Escarpelle mine, all the workers arrived half an hour late. The [Axis] responded by arresting two Communists from each pit.²⁹

[…]

Traditionally, the vast majority of miners in the Nord‐Pas‐de‐Calais had voted for the SFIO, but the anti[fascist] stance of the PCF publications in the region gave considerable credibility to the Communist agitation, while many of the social democratic trade union leaders became detached from the mass of workers because of their support for the collaborationist Vichy régime of Marshal Pétain. At the national level, the trade union official, René Belin, who was a member of the SFIO and who had been appointed Minister of Labour in the Vichy government, signed the decree which dissolved the trade unions.

[…]

In addition to the problems caused by the food shortages, the employers were also trying to use the [Fascist] occupation to organise a productivity offensive. The Bedaux system consisted of “scientifically” breaking down the work of a miner into units of production. An average worker produced 60 units. If he exceeded this number, he was paid more but if he failed to achieve it he was penalised. This meant that wages were individually calculated.

The discipline in the mines was hard and the companies had their own police forces, the équipes de surveillance³³. The foremen played an essential rôle in fixing wages as they were responsible for organising the distribution of tasks. In order to assert their authority, they had a range of penalties at their disposal, ranging from a simple fine through to dismissal.³⁴ The method used in the Nord‐Pas‐de‐Calais differed from the classic Bedaux system in that work was organised in small teams of 4 rather than individual payments.

The Vichy government and the occupation created an environment that was extremely favourable for the implementation of the new system.³⁵ However, this productivity offensive started a revolt among the mineworkers as they struggled to defend their working conditions.

[…]

The difficulties of organising a strike under the noses of the [Fascist] occupation forces and the French Police were enormous. Strikers from one pit would picket another where they were not known in order to avoid being denounced by scabs or informers. Militants from the Jeunesse Communiste were present with their revolvers to reinforce the picket lines and to deter the French police.⁴⁰

(Emphasis added.)

At 10 o'clock Moscow time, the spacecraft "Vostok-2" with cosmonauts Pavel Belyayev and Alexei Leonov successfully launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

At 11:34:51 Leonov went into outer space. He was connected to the spacecraft only by a 5.35-meter-long tether, which included a steel cable and electrical wires for transmitting medical observation and technical measurement data to the ship, as well as for telephone communication with the ship's commander Belyayev.

Leonov spent 12 minutes and 9 seconds in space.

All this time, a comfortable temperature was maintained in the spacesuit, and its outer surface heated up in the sun to +60°C and cooled down in the shade to -100°C.

Lá Fhéile Pádraig sona daoibh! // Happy St. Patrick's Day in Irish Gaelic (when addressing the group)

Newspaper "Rabochiy Kray", Sunday January 8th 1928.

When the United States need oil, they send forward soldiers.
The interests of capitalists are above all.
The whip is stronger than "democracy".

2013

(This takes 3.75 minutes to read.)

Fiume, for those of us unaware, was a disputed territory from 1918 to 1920, then a microstate under League of Nations and Italian supervision starting in November 1920.

On September 1919, Gabriele D’Annunzio and various other Italian ultranationalists (legionnaires) entered the territory and established a protofascist state, with the ultimate goal of making Fiume a territory of the Kingdom of Italy.

Here are a few glimpses of this rule:

Fiumian workers — both pro and anti‐annexationist — submitted a set of requests to D’Annunzio, which ranged from economic claims to the withdrawal of politically motivated expulsions, the re‐employment of dismissed workers and the right to opt for Fiumian pertinenza for those who were already residents before the war. […]

D’Annunzio was initially open to negotiation, siding with the workers against the National Council and proposing to limit expulsions to individuals regarded as “anti‐Italian,” rather than those promoting “socialist propaganda.”

However, no compromise could be achieved and the workers proclaimed a general strike based on claims regarded as political on April 20. The repression was harsh; hundreds of nonpertinent workers were to be expelled, including the leaders of the Socialist Party.

[…]

On July 11, a list of over one hundred shop owners, who were members of a pro‐Yugoslav League of the Fiumian Industrials, was circulated by D’Annunzio’s command. As had already happened in February, expulsions were preceded by an investigation that aimed to detect their target.

The next day several shops owned by pro-Yugoslav merchants were plundered and the boats anchored in the Dead Channel that flowed between Fiume and Sušak were set on fire. These attacks were followed by expulsion orders against pro‐Yugoslav nonpertinents.

[…]

However, formal expulsion orders were not the only measures that pushed Croats to leave. D’Annunzio’s command reported that legionnaires or civilians disguised as soldiers threatened Croats, telling them to leave if they wanted their life to be spared.

Legionnaires later settled in the houses of evicted families. The image of luxury apartments destroyed by Italian soldiers further fueled frustration and led some expellees to resort to corruption to avoid having their apartment confiscated.

The Regio Esercito evicted D’Annunzio in January 1921, and most of his legionnaires followed. But not to worry, there were others to continue his glorious legacy of freedom:

During a long phase of instability that ran from D’Annunzio’s eviction to the annexation to Italy in 1924, expulsions never ceased to play a rôle in the political struggle.

While the Free State of Fiume was officially established by the Rapallo Treaty in 1920, it was in power only for a couple of months. Before and after this, the city’s reins of power lay in the hands of temporary bodies that increasingly pursued Fiume’s annexation to Italy.

Those bodies continued to use expulsions to get rid of political and social undesirables, as did many of their predecessors. Similarly, implementing the expulsions was more wishful thinking than reality.

(Source.)

And of course (quoting Dominique Kirchner Reill’s The Fiume Crisis, pgs. 226–7):

[The Fascist bourgeoisie’s] official annexation of the city to Italy in 1924 instigated a remaking of Fiume along textbook nationalist, Italian centralist lines. Gone were programs aimed at making Fiume look and feel Italian while keeping it functioning much as it had before the war. The pragmatic exceptionalisms Fiumians had hoped would give them a leg up once they were reabsorbed into a big state never came to pass.

Crown‐lire exchange rates never arrived at the 1 to 1 everyone had hoped for; by 1924 the now meek and exhausted Fiumians gratefully accepted the 2.5‐to‐1 rate Italy offered. Laws were no longer a mash‐up of Hungarian priors, Italian additions, and Fiume‐only innovations: now the laws enforced from Palermo to Venice were instated en masse in Fiume, regardless of community wishes.

Women lost the vote, divorce became illegal, and tax codes benefited Rome, not Fiume’s regional trade. Pertinency disappeared from the citizenship rolls: with the 1924 annexation, Fiume pertinents had to opt for Italian, Serb‐Croat‐Slovene, or some other citizenship, with nothing in between except statelessness. Fiume pertinents who chose not to become Italian lost the right to state employment.

Under these conditions, many Croatian‐ and Slovene‐speaking Fiumians moved across the river to Sušak, where their ethnic identification bolstered their rights instead of impeding them. Name changes were no longer voluntary—there were specific Fascist protocols about how they were enacted. Fiume’s textbooks and geography lessons were replaced by the national curriculum.

Under Mussolini, Habsburg Fiume was decisively annulled in a way it had not been at any of its earlier crisis points—not the dissolution of Austria–Hungary, the arrival of Inter‐Allied troops, Woodrow Wilson’s diplomatic pronouncements, the takeover of the Italian National Council, the arrival of D’Annunzio and his followers, the Christmas of Blood, or the international recognition of the Free State of Fiume.

Though the majority of locals remained, the contours of their world now reflected the desires of their new empire in formation, the Fascist one, and not the old one, the Habsburg one, whose legacy had lived on for so long.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

Per The Adriatic Sea Encyclopedia, representatives from the Kingdoms of Italy and Yugoslavia convened on January 27, 1924 and agreed to the Treaty of Rome — a.k.a. Italy-Yugoslavia Treaty — which partitioned(!) the microstate, assigning the City of Fiume to the Fascists and the City of Sušak to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia; the border between the countries passed along the river Rječina. The International League of Nations recognized the partition as legal on April 7, 1924.