On April 12, 2026, it was the 65th anniversary of the first space flight of the Earth's first cosmonaut, Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin, whose name is known to all of humanity.

The first manned flight into outer space in the world. The "Vostok 8K72K" launch vehicle with the "Vostok-3A" spacecraft, serial number 3, was put into orbit with the following parameters: orbit inclination - 64.95 degrees; orbital period - 89.34 minutes; minimum distance from the Earth's surface (at perigee) - 181 km; maximum distance from the Earth's surface (at apogee) - 327 km.

The flight lasted 1 hour and 48 minutes. After making one orbit around the Earth, the spacecraft's descent module landed in the USSR in the Saratov region. 108 minutes - one orbit around the Earth - heralded the beginning of manned space flights.

Full archive link

https://archive.is/wEQDH

Imagine a culture that celebrates a writer and encourages kids to read. In the meantime, check out these sick agitprop merchs and public murals

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/11277151

This is a section of Chapter 1 from the memoir My Life and Faith by Ri In Mo, which I am currently proofreading for the ProleWiki library. Ri In Mo was a war correspondent in the Korean People's Army and an unconverted long-term prisoner who was imprisoned in south Korea for 34 years. The work spans his youth during the last years of Japanese colonial rule in Korea, to the early years of the DPRK, to his decades of imprisonment in south Korea, and his eventual repatriation to DPRK in the 1990s. This excerpt is from when he was 13, in the year 1930, describing the incident which sparked his interest in joining the liberation struggle. I thought it was an interesting section to share.

The Mt. Paektu Armed Unit Which Implanted the Anti-Japanese Fighting Spirit in My Young Mind

When I reached school age I entered Phabal Primary School in Ansan Sub-County.

There was a man who had been teaching at the school since graduating from Hamhung Normal School. He came from Anbyon (in today’s Kangwon Province) where most of the believers in the Chondo faith in South Hamgyong Province lived. He was also a believer in Chondo and taught us its doctrines. And we followed him well under its influence.

In 1926 Choe Rin from the new faction of Chondoism extracted from the Japanese imperialists a promise to allow the establishment of a Korean parliament in exchange for giving up the independence of Korea and launched a “self-government movement”.

In the 1930s believers in Chondo formed the Chondo Faith Youth Party and launched zealously a youth movement, an enlightenment movement and other campaigns devoid of any political character, in opposition to the revolutionary peasant movement led by socialists.

At that time I was only a little over ten years old and was not aware of this situation. As our teacher taught us, I believed that our country was badly off because Koreans were ignorant and lazy, and that only when the national character was changed could we be better off.

Around that time a young man called Jong Un Gil returned to his native village. According to a rumour, he had attended Pukchong Agricultural School but been expelled on the grounds that he had been the mastermind behind a student strike. In the evening he used to gather village children and teach them anti-Japanese patriotic ideas. Learning of this, our teacher who believed in the Chondo faith spoke ill of him, saying, “That person was expelled from his school because he led a student strike. He is a bad fellow who is disloyal to the Japanese emperor", and prevented us from approaching Jong Un Gil.

One day an unexpected incident took place, which awoke us to the fact that the teachers behaviour was a traitorous act of defending Japanese imperialism and abusing patriots.

One August day in 1930 my aunt sent me to buy noodles for lunch. She gave me a large brass bowl and a five-jon coin. At that time a bowl of oats noodles cost one jon, so for five jon I could buy more than enough noodles for our four family members—my grandmother, uncle, aunt and I—to eat.

Phabal-ri was by the Phabal Stream, a tributary of the Hochon River and on the road linking Pukchong with Phungsan, and a rather busy place of semi-agricultural and semi-commercial character. Fruit, rice and fish from the Pukchong area were transported to Phungsan and its surrounding area via Phabal-ri across the Huchi Pass, and potatoes, starch and hops produced in the area north of Phungsan were sent to Pukchong through Phabal-ri. Therefore, in Phabal-ri as well as the houses of slash and-burn farmers, there was a large market area full of pedlars’ stalls and inns.

The Japanese kept a tight guard over this busy place. They set up a police station near the market place, headed by a vicious inspector named Matsuyama. He so harassed the local Koreans that he went by the nickname of “Opasi” (digger wasp). He was so hated that boys like myself used to throw stones at him whenever he washed himself in the Pabal Stream.

Let me continue the story.

When I was going out of the gate, taking the large brass bowl and money with me, there sounded a thunderous “Bang!” from the direction of the police station, which was 13 or 14 houses away. Phabal-ri was a secluded mountain village where gunshots were never heard, so the unexpected sound of a gun being fired was enough to start my heart thumping.

When I looked in the direction of the police station I saw people trooping toward it from the market place, and other people looking out of the windows of their houses. Others were fleeing toward the mountains behind the Phabal Stream. They were those who used to drink wine with policemen in ordinary times and were pointed at with scorn for informing the police of what the village people said. They seemed to have apprehended danger.

The thought occurred to my young mind that something serious had happened.

I threw the bowl back into the house and ran like an arrow in the direction of the police station, clenching my fists.

Thirty or so people were already gathered in front of it. All of them were poor people who had been slighted and tormented by the Japanese. The adults as well as the children were excited.

They seemed to believe that the men who had fired the rifle were protecting them.

I forced my way through the crowd and peered into the police station. A person in the police station who looked refined and gentle beckoned me to come in. Prompted by curiosity and his beckoning, I quickly entered. I unexpectedly found there Jong Un Gil talking with him about something.

Looking around the main room, I saw that “Opasi” had been shot and was writhing around on the floor, bleeding. I trembled all over. I was scared at the sight, but at the same time felt great satisfaction. So, there is no need to mention the feelings of the adults who had been harassed by "Opasi".

The person who told me to come in asked me if I was afraid. When I replied that I was not, he patted me on the shoulder and said that only when all such rascals were disposed of could the Korean people be better off.

Looking round the room, I found and picked up two spent cartridges.

Going out, I saw three men, including the one who had called me into the police station and who seemed to be their leader, wearing straw sandals and hemp clothes and each holding a Mauser rifle. I remember that they all had the same kind of hair style.

Their appearance seemed to be dignified and imposing, even to a youngster like myself. Kneeling before them, a Korean policeman kowtowed and pleaded with them for his life, rubbing his hands in supplication. There was none of his usual swaggering and shouting on that occasion!

One of the three said to him, “I should like to shoot dead right away you and your like who act as cat’s-paws of the Japanese imperialists, who invaded our country. But I will spare your life, believing that you have a bit of a conscience left, as you are a Korean. Stop being a policeman serving the Japanese and go back to your farm as an honest Korean.”

The policeman gratefully agreed to do this.

At that moment the wife of the hated “Opasi” ran out of a nearby house, barefoot, and fled toward the hill behind the house. One of the three men levelled his rifle at her, but the man who seemed to be the leader pulled his comrade’s arm down.

Frankly speaking, we were all hoping that the woman would be shot, but the leader said, “Esteemed people, you have had a hard time. We are the revolutionary army of Mt. Paektu, which fights to drive out the Japanese and win back the country. Our people are badly off and suffer misfortune because of the Japanese. We cannot become better off without smashing the Japanese. We have disposed of the police chief here to avenge the people on our way to Tanchon to help the patriotic struggle of the peasants who are fighting barehanded against the heavily armed Japanese forces. However, we cannot stay to protect you here. So, please return home.”

They then went to a sweet shop near the police station, and asked the owner for money to help them with their travel expenses. But the shopkeeper offered them only two copper coins worth one jon each. The armed men returned the coins in disgust and went on their way.

At that moment the sight of the owner of the shop became hateful to me. To think that he could maltreat in such manner patriots who were fighting to drive out the Japanese and win back our country! I thought: The rich people are blinded by money. They have no patriotism in their hearts and seek only their own interests. If I had been one of the guerrillas I would have shot the greedy shop owner. I wondered why they had left so meekly. From that time on I hated the like of that shopkeeper and began to think that I should stand by the poor people.

That night I lay in bed, tightly gripping the two empty cartridges I had picked up in the police station, and for a long time pictured myself holding a Mauser like the guerrillas and wreaking vengeance for the Korean people by shooting the Japanese. A bold idea to emulate them seized my mind. This was the first anti-Japanese idea implanted in my heart.

The impressive figures of the anti-Japanese revolutionary fighters who operated on the Kaema Plateau in those remote days and kindled the flame of the anti-Japanese national liberation struggle in the heart of a 13-year-old boy there still dimly appear in my memory. I often wonder what would have become of me if it had not been for them.

The shot they fired in Pabal-ri was a fateful one which led me to the front of the anti-Japanese struggle; otherwise I might have led a life in poverty and ignorance or become a devout follower of the Chondo faith.

(This takes 4½ minutes to read.)

The fates of these Iranians were diverse: some were students who came to study in Germany or another European country before or during the war; some might have been workers in German industry, though it is likelier that they were forced laborers; a few were undoubtedly victims of [anticommunism] and were arrested, imprisoned, or detained in concentration camps.

Most of these individuals were not Jewish but they came from a variety of religious and ethnic backgrounds: Azeri, Armenian, Christian, Muslim, Baháʼí. Many of the people only appear as names on official lists—hospitalization records, displaced person (DP) camp counts, and censuses of the foreign nationals living in various occupation zones shortly after 1945.

Of others we only know from search inquiries of relatives who tried to find their loved ones in the postwar chaos. While we’re not always able to reconstruct the details that are missing from the paper trails, we do know that those Iranians who were in Europe during the war, were deeply affected by this history.

Even though they might appear to be just piles upon piles of paperwork, the archives reveal the human side of history, and tell stories about resistance, migration, love, and death. Here, we note some examples of Iranian individuals who found themselves in [Fascist] concentration camps or were otherwise victims of the war and its vicissitudes.

Aga Hassan’s journey stretches across physical and historical grounds, and sheds light on what Iranian victims of [Fascism] endured. He was born in 1916 in Khoy, an Azeri‐majority city in northwestern Iran and worked in the same city as a typographer.

In 1941, as Iran was occupied by Britain and the Soviet Union, Khoy fell to the latter. The [Allies] demanded manpower from the Iranian authorities and Aga Hassan was among those deported to the USSR. Together with about 200 others, he [had to work] in a port in Crimea, then part of Soviet Russia. His conditions took a turn for the worst when Crimea fell to [the Axis] in July 1942, after an eight month campaign[.]

Many Soviets were taken as POWs and Hassan and other laborers were sent to the […] concentration camp Majdanek in [Axis] occupied Poland. Some in Hassan’s group were killed in the camp as, according to his testimony, the [Axis] mixed up non‐Jewish Iranians with the Jewish prisoners who were being killed on a mass scale. But Hassan survived. From Majdanek, he was transported several times to different camps in occupied Poland, Germany, and Austria as a forced laborer.

[…]

Others, like Magammed, were already in Europe or even Germany itself as workers or students, and became forced laborers under [Fascism]. While many of the documents tell little about individual stories and fates, they often point to companies and organizations that were part of the [Fascist] operation, many of which exist till today, like Siemens and Demag.

Those companies notoriously used forced labor to their benefit during the war, and while it’s impossible to say how an Armenian man from Iran’s Tabriz, ​​Aghbekian Hartoun, found his way to [the Third Reich] during WWII, it’s safe to assume that he ended up as a forced laborer since his name appears in records of Organisation Todt, a civil engineering organization run by [Fascists] that folded in 1945.

Some other victims are thought to have been involved in anti[fascist] activity. Emir Farrokh Granmayeh was born in Berlin, the son of the Iranian ambassador to Germany, Reza Moayed al‐Saltanah. He grew up and lived in between Germany and Iran. By the 1940s, he was married to a German woman and had a family in Berlin.

In his postwar application for assistance by the PCIRO to be repatriated to Iran, he describes himself as a Prisoner of War. During the war, [the Axis] attempted to use prominent Iranians in Berlin as part of its efforts to broadcast propaganda to Iran. Some notable figures were successfully recruited for this effort including Bahram Shahrokh, son of a prominent Iranian MP and head of the Zoroastrian community in Iran, who became the main Persian voice of Radio Berlin.

The [Axis] wanted Granmayeh to also join these efforts but he refused and had to pay a high price for his refusal. In 1944, he was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Granmayeh deserves to be remembered as a case of a hitherto little‐known story: an Iranian who braved political opposition to the [Axis] and thus found himself in a concentration camp.

We don’t know much about the reason why Maxud Miridzianian, an Iranian innkeeper living in Paris, was sent to Buchenwald and Mittelbau Dora. His Häftligs‐Personal‐Karte–prisoner ID–from the concentration camps list him as an Iranian political prisoner.

Many Iranians of the time were partisans of socialist, communist or other anti‐fascist tendencies that would have deemed them politically unacceptable to the [Fascists]. He did not survive to tell his story, and died in the concentration camp Nordhausen in March 1945, just a month before it was [captured] by American forces.

[…]

According to his testimonies, Abilsofl served as a spy during the war, working for Switzerland. In this work, he “betrayed his country people,” according to him, though the nature of his service remains in large part a mystery. One detail that is mentioned in his correspondences is that he was tasked with gathering information on an Iranian Jewish man named Haim Askenassi.

Askenassi lived in Paris, was detained in the internment camp Drancy, and then deported to Auschwitz where he died. […] Stories such as those of the individuals above reminds us that the Holocaust, i.e. the systematic murder of six million Jews by [the Axis] and its collaborators, also left its marks on other nations, including Iran: whether through the Iranians who were persecuted by the [Fascists] due to their politics or to those who simply found themselves victims of the adverse conditions of the Second World War. Much more research needs to be done to achieve a fuller picture.

(Emphasis added.)

I am loath to rely on a neoimperialist source (IranWire dedicates itself to alienizing the Islam Republic of Iran), but if I knew of a better one, I’d share that instead. I have to admit, though, that I couldn’t help but chuckle at this apparent faux pas:

We are proud to be the only media outlet in the Middle East to regularly produce articles, videos, and other types of content about the crimes of the Nazi regime and its allies and their victims.

In other words, there are no media outlets under the Zionist régime (the so‐called ‘Jewish state’) that regularly produce articles, videos, and other types of content about the crimes of the Axis and its victims. That’s exactly right. I’m glad that we finally agree on something, anticommunists.

The original text in Chinese with no translation: https://idp.bl.uk/collection/1F1EA364F38E4EBD9B1C55C82F86887C/

A reddit comment that autotranslated it, as I can't find any kind of proper translation:

Rare Usa-China w.

(This takes 6⅓ minutes to read.)

The Jew in Germany is regarded as only a guest of the people; he has offended by trying to turn himself into the host. […] Thoughtful Germans hold that it is impossible for a Jew to be a patriot […] What will happen in Germany is not now known. Some regrettable things have already happened. But the Germans will doubtless prove themselves equal to the situation by devising methods of control at once unobjectionable and effective.

These words come not from a fascist in the German Reich nor even one elsewhere in Eurasia, but from the beloved American capitalist Henry Ford, who wrote this in his 1920 work The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem. He is the only American mentioned positively in My Struggle.

To classify Henry Ford as a fascist would be only a slight exaggeration. His Masonic membership and particularly his professed pacifism were both highly unusual for any fascist. Yet neither of those prevented him from receiving awards from the Fascists, nor did they prevent his business from accounting for the second largest share of army and transport trucks in the Third Reich, nor did they prevent both his business and General Motors from supplying Fascist Italy with vehicles — to say nothing of how Ford Werke AG used neoslaves from Auschwitz. Curiously, despite having little positive to say about Zionism, Ford’s business also distributed one thousand products to Palestine; the Ford Motor Co., Ltd. and subsidiaries had some operations there. (It is highly unlikely that the indigenous or ‘Arab’ population was the largest market for these products, given that the Middle East’s indigenous populations favoured riding camelback or horseback whereas the settlers favored machines.)

The origins of Ford’s antisemitism have long puzzled historians, especially since he was on good terms with a few individual Jews (e.g. Rosika Schwimmer). It is unclear if it originated from an unpleasant incident, parental advice, miseducation, or some other typical source.

We know, however, that antisemitism is useful to capitalist goyim since it harms economic competition. It is in the very first chapter of The International Jew that Ford claimed that ‘most of the big business, the trusts and the banks, the natural resources and the chief agricultural products, especially tobacco, cotton and sugar, are in the control of Jewish financiers or their agents.’ Ford’s problem was not with businesses, trusts, banks, or even monopolies, but with the Jewish presence in these phenomena, which supposedly worsened all of them. He portrayed Jews as unworthy competitors, unfair in business, and blamed them for class struggle. Like the Fascists, he believed that it was possible to harmonize labour with capital:

That, indeed, is one of the tragedies of these times, that “labor” and “capital” are fighting each other, when the conditions against which each one of them protests, and from which each one of them suffers, is not within their power to remedy at all, unless they find a way to wrest world control from that group of international financiers who create and control both these conditions.

Yet Ford circumspectly acknowledged (if only for a moment) that

all Jews are not rich controllers of wealth. There are poor Jews aplenty, though most of them even in their poverty are their own masters. While it may be true that the chief financial controllers of the country are Jews, it is not true that every Jew is one of the financial controllers of the country. The classes must be kept distinct for a reason which will appear when the methods of the rich Jews and the methods of the poor Jews to gain power are differentiated.

[…]

The rich German Jew could buy the recognition he desired by acquiring financial power over those interests which most directly affected the ruling class of Germany, but how was the poor Jew to gain the recognition he desired? — for all Jews are actuated by the same desire; it is in them; they feel the spur to mastery.

Thus, Ford hit two targets with one arrow by implying that even poor Jews can be sources of trouble, saying that they merely hunger for power (rather than wanting the power to end hunger). He even went so far as to claim that ‘the bond of sympathy between’ rich and poor Jews ‘never breaks’: a claim that is arguably even untruer today than it was a century ago.

It is unsurprising that Henry Ford was such a great inspiration to the Fascists. Quoting Susan Ronald’s Hitler’s Aristocrats: The Secret Power Players in Britain and America Who Supported the Nazis, 1923–1941, chapter 11:

In 1931, when a Detroit News reporter interviewed Hitler in his Munich office, he seemed surprised that a large picture of Henry Ford hung over the future leader’s desk. Hitler gazed reverently at the Ford portrait and said, “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration.”

Ford had used his Dearborn Independent for hundreds of articles, some of which were “repackaged into booklets and distributed around the world” to give Ford’s message: “The Jew has no civilization to point to […] no great achievement in any realm.” Ford, the king of mass production and assembly line manufacturing of cars, also mass-produced anti-Semitism for American and world audiences.³

Receiving endorsements from a Fascist head of state would normally discredit the recipient forever, but Ford, being an American capitalist icon, has yet to fall from grace. In his own time many ordinary Americans respected him regardless of his bigotry; his cult of personality has been so persistent that antisocialists have been falsely crediting him with the eight-hour workday as well as comparing Elon Musk favorably to him, a comparison that is more appropriate than they realize.

Should we respect Henry Ford in spite of his antisemitism? He did acquiesce to numerous worker demands, such as paying better wages and reducing working hours, but we do not applaud oppressors for softening their oppression. Henry Ford, even if one irresponsibly chooses to overlook or forgive his bigotry, was certainly an oppressor. Quoting but one brief example from Stephen Norwood’s ‘Ford's Brass Knuckles: Harry Bennett, The Cult of Muscularity, and Anti-Labor Terror—1920–1945’:

One of Perry’s lieutenants knocked Herbert Harris, the other CIO organizer, unconscious, and carried him out of the park to his automobile, where Ford Servicemen blindfolded him. They drove him to “one of the usual whipping places” at the Trinity River bottoms. They told Harris, as he regained consciousness in the car, that he would be burned at the stake. At the “whipping place,” “Fats” Perry ordered Harris to remove his clothing. Servicemen then applied two coats of tar from his neck to his ankles, and covered him with feathers.

They then drove the still blindfolded Harris back to Dallas and dumped him in front of the Morning News building, where they had arranged for a photographer to take his picture. The next morning the Servicemen presented their superintendent with a specimen of the tar and feathers they had used, and were congratulated for a “damn good job.”’ Harris had to be hospitalized for three days.⁸

Ford’s famous hiring of Black workers also came with a caveat. Per Christopher L. Foote’s, Warren C. Whatley’s, & Gavin Wright’s ‘Arbitraging a Discriminatory Labor Market: Black Workers at the Ford Motor Company, 1918–1947’:

How […] can Ford be viewed as an arbitraging firm? The answer lies in extending the analysis to nonwage features of the employment contract, and a prime example is working conditions. Though black [folk] were represented in most jobs at Ford, they were disproportionately assigned to the most distasteful jobs, such as those in the metal foundry, where workers were paid the same as co-workers who worked in less onerous jobs.

In a sense, Ford captured the negative wage differential that the outside market attached to black labor by masking it with a positive differential for difficult work. In this way, Ford could profit from discrimination elsewhere without generating major differences in the observed wages of its own black and white workers.

Like all other capitalists, Henry Ford received disproportionate amounts of money when homeless people were receiving (almost) none: the boneheadedness of this system should become apparent to anyone who thinks about it for a few minutes, unless you think that wasting money is a good idea. Now, you may disagree that one can waste money by leaving it unspent, but Ford also wasted money by spending it on a poorly planned Brazilian plantation that disrupted Aveiro’s wildlife, to name only the most obnoxious example from his monopolization of resources.

Between his antisemitism, union busting, casual White supremacy, resource mismanagement, and general wastefulness, it is easy to understand why the upper classes today consecrate this bourgeois paskudnyak. As for us, we’d be better off looking up to people such as these strikers:

See also: Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate

Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States

‘Ford and Hitler’ in Who Financed Hitler: The Secret Funding of Hitler’s Rise to Power, 1919–1933

Henry Ford's War on Jews and the Legal Battle against Hate Speech (review)

‘“Any color as long as it’s black”: Henry Ford and the ethics of business’

‘The Propaganda of Prejudice: Anti-Semitic Themes in Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent’

‘Pathway to the Shoah: The Protocols, "Jewish Bolshevism", Rosenberg, Goebbels, Ford, and Hitler’

‘Productivism in Henry Ford’s The International Jew’

‘The History of Antisemitism: Henry Ford’

caloriemaxxing to spike my nutrition levels, absolutely lifespanmogging tsaroids.

Original inaccurate title: Corn- Full speed!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/45348900

https://oll.libertyfund.org/quotes/thomas-jefferson-slavery-wrath-of-god

This is so true, that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion indeed are ever seen to labour. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.

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

"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"

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