Capitalism in Decay

On September 1, 1939 the United Kingdom and France declared war against [the Third Reich] for its invasion to Poland. […] In May, 1940, [the] battle started on the western front. [The Third Reich] brought under its control Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France in a very short period. Ford Germany had accounted for about one fourth, or the second largest share, of production of army and transport trucks in [the Third Reich]²⁵). It is estimated that of the 350,000 trucks held by the [Wehrmacht] in 1942, about 120,000 were made by Ford Germany²⁶). We will later discuss in detail the company’s war production. First, however, we should have a look at changes in Ford Motor’s European organizations necessitated with the escalation of war.

Ford Belgium (Antwerp) had been under control of Ford Britain with a 60% interest. On May 29, 1940, [Berlin] appointed Ford Germany president Robert H.Schmidt to be Kommisar (trustee) for Ford Belgium²⁷). Also, on June 12 and on June 24 he was appointed to be Verwalter (trustee) for Ford Holland (Amsterdam), which was owned 60% by Ford Britain, and to be Kommisar for Ford France (Paris), which was under control of Ford Motor Co., having a dominating 80% stake, respectively. Likewise, Vitgar, a German Ford director of Danish nationality, was sent to Ford Denmark to serve as a coordinator, and so forth. For each of these, R.H. Schmidt wrote to the American headquarters²⁸).

(Emphasis added.)

Quoting Eric Lichtblau’s The Nazis Next Door, chapter 1:

At Allied‐run camps reserved for [Axis] prisoners of war, ex‐[Axis] officers watched movies, played soccer, even took college courses. At Jewish [displaced person] camps, meanwhile, the Holocaust survivors fought merely to get extra rations of soggy black bread and coffee to make up for the starvation of the war years.

American officials resisted; they complained that the Jews were getting “preferential” treatment and were using black‐market systems at the camps to violate limits on food rations. The situation became so volatile that German police—with the consent of American officials—staged a raid on black‐market activities in the Stuttgart and Landsberg camps in early 1946; rioting broke out, with police killing one [displaced Jew]. He had survived the Holocaust, but not its aftermath.

With word of the survivors’ conditions filtering back to Washington, President Truman sent a special emissary, Earl Harrison, a former immigration commissioner who was dean of the University of Pennsylvania law school, to inspect the DP camps and assess the plight, in particular, of the Jewish refugees.

The World Jewish Congress and other humanitarian organizations were protesting “conditions of abject misery.” The reports seemed unbelievable. Could these horrific accounts of squalor, desperation, and mistreatment among the survivors—all in the wake of the Allied victory—really be true? Harrison was told to find out.

Harrison’s blistering conclusions cast a pall over America’s postwar euphoria. His findings were an indictment of the United States’ refugee effort in the harshest terms he knew. “As matters now stand,” Harrison wrote to Truman after touring the [displaced person] camps, “we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them.” The [Axis’s] victims, the dean found, were being victimized once again—but this time by the Americans.

General George S. Patton, the gruff war hero whose soldiers ran the American DP camps, fumed over Harrison’s findings. Publicly, the general—Old Blood and Guts, as he was famously known—had adopted a posture of shock and revulsion that spring over the Allies’ discovery of the [Axis] death camps, and he urged journalists to see for themselves the horrors inflicted on the victims. Privately, however, General Patton held the surviving Jews in his camps in utter contempt.

“Harrison and his ilk believe that the Displaced Person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals,” Patton wrote in his diary after learning of the scathing report to Truman. Laying bare the rabid anti‐Semitism that infected the American refugee effort, Patton complained of how the Jews in one [displaced person] camp, with “no sense of human relationships,” would defecate on the floors and live in filth like lazy “locusts.”

He told of taking General Eisenhower to tour a makeshift synagogue that the Jews in the camp had set up to celebrate the holy day of Yom Kippur. “We entered the synagogue which was packed with the greatest stinking mass of humanity I have ever seen.” This was Eisenhower’s first glimpse of the [displaced people], Patton wrote, so it was all new to him. “Of course, I have seen them since the beginning and marveled that beings alleged to be made in the form of God can look the way they do or act the way they act.”

Sadly, Patton’s contempt for the Jews—from the man responsible for overseeing the survivors of the biggest [extermination] in world history—was not that unusual among Washington’s élite. The Jews “do not desire to work, but expect to be cared for,” one Senate lawyer wrote in seeking to limit the number allowed into the country after the war. “It is very doubtful that any country would desire these people as immigrants.”

President Truman’s wife, Bess, did not welcome Jews in her home, and the president himself was known privately to deride “[insert slur here]” and “Jew boys.” Still, with Britain blocking Jews from going to Palestine and the United States closing its own doors for the most part, Truman agonized over the situation in the [displaced person] camps. “Everyone else who’s been dragged from his country has somewhere to go back to,” Truman said, “but the Jews have no place to go.”

(Emphasis added.)

(Mirror.)

It was a widespread belief at the beginning of the 1930s that competition between firms was one of the causes of the slow recovery of the economy, in that it kept wages and prices down, discouraged optimistic business expectations, and consequently reduced investment, demand, and employment. Hence a common action undertaken by most industrialized countries at the time was the implementation of cartelization policies to fight deflation.¹⁷

[Fascist] Italy was no exception. The powerful Confindustria (Confederation of Italian Industry), in fact, fought for a price-raising and wage-cutting policy in order to increase industrialists’ profits and to avoid a further drop in production, as can be seen from documents preserved in the Confederation’s historical archives.¹⁸ The Fascist régime strongly supported this view and favored the creation of obligatory cartels (consorzi obbligatori) by passing a first procollusion law on 16th June 1932.¹⁹ These cartels were considered an emergency measure.²⁰

However, as such, they could only be created if requested by a high percentage of firms of a particular sector and if deemed to be “necessary” by the government. Alongside these obligatory cartels, voluntary ones (consorzi volontari) were also highly encouraged by the same law.

The former cartels were necessarily extended to the remaining firms of the sector, whereas the voluntary cartels only included the firms which willingly adhered to them. Confindustria was against a generalized policy of obligatory cartels, but favored the voluntary ones [Confederazione Generale Fascista dell’Industria Italiana (1933, p. 463)].

Therefore, apart from three obligatory cartels in the cotton, rice, and sulfur industries,²¹ which actually were a result of specific legislation and not of the general law of 1932, all other cartels were created on a voluntary basis. Another noteworthy law was that of 12 January 1933, № 141, which required a mandatory government authorization to be able to enlarge existing industrial plants or to create new ones.

This law was an obvious extension of the previous one: after having successfully eliminated all competition in a given sector, it was natural to attempt to block its return with the creation of new firms. This second law therefore helped guarantee the integrity, and the effectiveness, of the existing cartels.²²

The advantages adduced in Confindustria’s documents for introducing cartel legislation were the following: (a) cartels adjust production to consumption and to the absorbing capacity of the market, thereby guaranteeing the correct quota of work force to each firm, eliminating stockpiles, and stabilizing prices and sales; (b) they centralize the purchase of raw materials and the sale of the goods produced, lowering costs and simplifying the two processes; (c) they ensure that the risk in production is shared between all the firms; (d) they organize exports more efficiently; (e) the higher prices that cartels guarantee to the producers allow firms to have greater revenues and to be able to invest in new technologies.

Just as the flourishing of cartels in the United States was a direct consequence of the NIRA, the [Fascist] consorzi too significantly increased in number after the enactment of the corresponding legislation, as Table 2 clearly shows. Nearly half of these cartels operated at the national level. Initially, the consorzi were created in order to reduce competition and to fight deflation, but after the war in Ethiopia in 1935 they were used to help tackle the problems of building up stocks of provisions, of distributing raw materials imported from abroad, and of rationalizing domestic inputs, hence changing their function.

However, most of the 498 cartels existing in 1942 had been created specifically to raise prices and to reduce competition: “… with regards to the cartels’ functions, it must be underlined that most of the cartels created disciplined the market and production […] Not only was there a higher number of cartels with these functions, but they were formed before the others. We can thus conclude that cartels [under Fascism] were mostly stimulated by the necessity of reducing competition rather than by the desire to improve production” (Confindustria document, 1942, p. 3, translation from Italian).²³

(Emphasis added. Click here for more.)

Another crucial set of legislation passed by the Fascist régime concerned Italy’s labor markets. Since the Patto di Palazzo Vidoni of 1925, strongly supported by the then head of Confindustria, Antonio Stefano Benni, only one workers’ trade union was allowed to negotiate workers’ contracts with the industrialists’ union (Confindustria).

Workers could in principle decide not to join the union, but this was a highly unrealistic possibility, in that they were forced to pay fees to the union and to adhere to its rules and decisions in any case. The union leaders were not democratically elected, and often came from the upper classes of society, close to the Fascist régime. The right to strike was abolished and punished with imprisonment after 1925.³²

Finally, the Fascist contracts further eradicated the possibility of creating a national workers’ movement by fixing different salaries across regions and across industries.³³

The original feature of Italy’s labor market was its direct and coercive control by the Fascist régime, which set wages exogenously. In particular, the 1930s labor policies aimed at keeping wages, deflated by consumer prices, constant at a subsistence level corresponding to around 15 lire (1938 prices) [Zamagni (1976, p. 337)].

Therefore, initially as a consequence of the massive deflation due to the return to the gold standard, the government enacted a series of wage cuts in order to maintain this target, but also to accommodate the industrialists’ requests to keep their profits unvaried, notwithstanding the fall in prices.

When the Great Depression then broke out, the new reason for introducing these measures was that, to keep employment levels constant, the workers’ purchasing power had to be sacrificed. In the industrial sector, the first cut, introduced by law, was by 20% in 1927 with further cuts undertaken in 1930 (8%), 1933, and 1934 (cumulatively, another 10%). Table 7 presents data on hourly average wages for different industries, in which the effect of the enforced wage cuts can be seen in all sectors.³⁴

The Fascists’ money supply grew when they prepared for war:

A further cause of the slow recovery could be the tight monetary policy [that the Fascists] pursued. The money supply did fall in those years, a fact which could justify, in a Friedman and Schwartz (1963) framework, the concurrent fall in output. However, from 1935, the money supply began to grow once more [under Fascism] in order to finance the war in Ethiopia.

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

1863: Werner Sombart, ex‐socialist turned fascist economist, existed.
1883: Hermann Abendroth, the Third Reich’s Kapellmeister of the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, was created.
1932: Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Schicklgruber travelled to Munich, Germany together; en route, Goebbels attempted to convince Adolf Schicklgruber to run for the office of the President of Germany.
1939: The Fascists launched T10 at the F. Schichau yard in Elbing, Germany (now Elblag, Poland).
1940: Fascist submarine U‐9 torpedoed and sank Swedish(!) merchant ship Patricia, massacring nineteen folk but leaving four alive. Fascist submarine U‐55 sank Norwegian vessel Telnes off the Orkney Islands, Scotland, slaughtering eighteen folk, and submarine U‐59 torpedoed and sank French steamer Quiberon off Great Yarmouth, England, exterminating the crew. Fascist submarine U‐44 began tracking Greek steamer Ekatontarchos Dracoulis in the Bay of Biscay. Around midnight, U‐44 fired a torpedo at the Greek ship, but the torpedo detonated prematurely before reaching the target.
1941: Benito Mussolini visited Adolf Schicklgruber at Berchtesgaden, accepting Reich assistance in North Africa, but not Albania. The Chancellor noted that he would launch an invasion of Greece if British troops there began to threaten the oil refineries at Ploiesti, Romania. The Axis lost the railway junction at Kassala, Sudan, on the border with Axis‐occupied Eritrea to the Allies, and it lost its submarine Neghelli along with its entire crew to Allied depth charges. Luftwaffe Stuka dive bombers assaulted Valletta Harbour, Malta for the fourth consecutive day, damaging a couple Allied ships but losing an aircraft in the process. Lastly, Luftwaffe aircraft bombed RAF Feltwell in England.
1942: The Axis commenced its conquest of Burma; it captured the airfield at Tavoy (now Dawei). Axis troops landed at Sandakan, British North Borneo unopposed and an Axis air raid took out the headquarters of the Indian 45th Brigade in Malaya. Tōkyō named Rensuke Isogai Hong Kong’s new Governor‐General.
1943: Axis troops landed at Wewak, New Guinea, but the Empire of Japan lost a cargo ship off Honshu to Allied torpedoes.
1944: Although the Wehrmacht managed to avoid being encircled at Novgorod, the Axis had to cancel a motor torpedo boat raid on Allied‐held Naples. The Axis likewise lost the Usines Ratier airscrew works, in southwestern France; the resistance wrecked it so thoroughly that it never resumed production in wartime. The charges with 30‐minute fuses, laid while Axis guards patrolled the yards outside, detonated with such force that one 30‐ton press was sent twenty‐five feet into the air.
1945: Adolf Schicklgruber ordered that any attacks or retreats by divisions or larger units must be approved by him beforehand. The Reich commenced evacuating settlers from Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland) as the Axis lost the Łódź ghetto to the Soviets. Of the ghetto’s more than 200,000 inhabitants in 1940, fewer than 900 had survived the Axis occupation. Later, an Axis V‐2 rocket hit Town Quay, Barking, London.
1979: Moritz Jahn, Fascist principal, died.
1983: The authorities arrest Axis war criminal Klaus Barbie in Bolivia.

During the interview, Shields wore a hooded sweatshirt depicting Anne Frank in a keffiyeh with the caption “Free Palestine.” Shields likely purchased the shirt from an online store which offers Holocaust denial merchandise and which is owned by a Neo-Nazi named Cyan Cruz.

(Hopefully this goes without saying, but the intention in this context is to be provocative, not supportive.)

Shields began the interview by asking Stein if he’s Jewish. Stein responded that his paternal grandfather was but that he himself was raised Christian, and jokingly called himself a “Jew for Jesus.” Stein then lamented that they can’t make fun of Jews because of political correctness.

“It just sucks that we live in this politically correct world where we can’t even — we can make fun of Haitians, Venezuelans, you can make fun of any — but if you make fun of Jewish people you’re an antisemite, and you deserve to be debanked, deplatformed, de-everything,” Stein complained.

(Apparently Stein has never listened to a Lewis Black skit, or a Bad Hasbara episode, or has any familiarity with the phenomenon of Jewish self-deprecating humor.)

Stein also railed against vaccines, particularly the COVID-19 vaccine, which he insisted was ineffective. Stein, whose teeth were stained by methylene blue, said that “the most evil part of the [COVID-19] vaccine” was that it was approved for emergency usage on the grounds that no other remedies were available.

Proponents of using ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine have often claimed that alternative treatments to COVID-19 were suppressed because the vaccine received emergency use authorization. However this is false.

Stein accused the “medical community” of “hid[ing] medicine that could help us in order to give us a free vaccine,” which he called “just disgusting.” But he added that there “was some good stuff” about the pandemic, namely that it’s “more socially acceptable to be questioning the, you know, efficacy of vaccines.”

Shields replied that this applies to “all vaccines,” and that he personally knows people who are refusing to get their children vaccinated now. “I’m still doing research on it because I don’t wanna jump to conclusions but I’m very skeptical of all of them,” he added.

Stein also recounted the time a chihuahua bit him after he picked it up, which prompted Shields to joke about chihuahuas being “demons” and the “Jews of dogs.” Stein then compared racial groups to different dog breeds based on their behavior, and likened Black people to pit bulls.

“Chihuahuas are Mexican because ‘Yo quiero Taco Bell,'” Stein explained. “And then Golden Retrievers are white people because they’re the best behaved. And then pit bulls are Black people because pit bulls are 14% of the dog population but they commit 70% of the dog assaults.”

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

1868: Kantarō Suzuki, Axis admiral and politican, was created.
1880: Alfredo Ildefonso Schuster, Fascist sympathizer, was born.
1892: Paul Rostock, Axis physician, official and university professor, was unfortunately allowed to exist.
1945: The Axis lost Kraków to the Red Army, but the Axis still transferred 66,000 prisoners from the Auschwitz Concentration Camp into Germany, and executed the last of the Jewish forced laborers at Chelmno Concentration Camp in occupied Poland; 15‐year‐old Simon Srebnik was the only survivor. Axis forces launched an offensive from around Lake Balaton, aimed at relieving the Budapest encirclement in Hungary, but they lost the Budapest ghetto thanks to the Red Army.
1969: Hans Freyer, Fascist sympathizer and the German Institute for Culture in Budapest’s head, expired.
1995: Adolf Friedrich Johann Butenandt, Axis biochemist, died.
2012: Georg Lassen, Axis U‐boat commander, left the world.

New evidence of Nazi crimes during World War II has been released by the Public Relations Center (PRC) of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). Thus, on January 16, the testimony of Wehrmacht executioner Martin Feuerbach was published.

In August 1935, Feuerbach joined a regiment of storm troopers in Vienna, at that time the Austrian National Socialist Party was operating illegally in the country. In 1937 he was sentenced to seven years in prison for organizing a meeting of Austrian Nazis in his shoemaker's shop, but he was released from prison as early as March 1938, after Austria was incorporated into Germany, and continued to serve in the storm troop of the National Socialist German Workers' Party.

He was captured by the Soviets in March 1944 during the fighting for the liberation of Kerch. At the interrogation in the intelligence department of the seaside army headquarters, Feuerbach tried to pass himself off as a member of the Austrian Communist Party repressed by the German authorities, but his captured fellow soldiers told other information about him.

During interrogations, it turned out that the military man personally hanged 120 people, beheaded 80 people, executed 10 of them by cutting off limbs, and nailed two of them by their hands and feet.

"At home I have a pocket calendar where I used to write down the number of people I executed. These records I used to reread every evening, whether in the company or at home. Thanks to this I was able to memorize most of the numbers," the executioner said.

The investigation established Feuerbach's involvement in crimes in Austria, where he killed anti-fascists, in Poland, Yugoslavia and the USSR.

"In 1939, the most characteristic cases were: the case that took place in July in Brader, where up to 200 communists were executed in total, of whom people 20 were not executed at once, but first the right hand was cut off, then the left hand, then the left hand, the left leg, the right leg and finally the head. <...> I personally cut off the limbs of seven Communists," the document cites a fragment of a Wehrmacht military interrogation report.

Earlier, on December 10 last year, the Donetsk People's Republic (DNR) declassified documents with evidence of massacres of civilians by the Nazis on the territory of Donbass in the period from 1941 to 1943. At that time, the occupiers established punitive bodies on the territory of Donbas, which were engaged in the extermination of communists, Soviet activists, partisans and civilians.

Schaffer and the hosts were playing a game in which an image or word would appear — like watermelon, Popeyes fried chicken, slavery, etc. — and Schaffer had to say who enjoys it more, white people or Black people. One of the images that appeared was that of a Planned Parenthood clinic.

“Oh, Planned Parenthood,” Schaffer said. “You know what’s weird is that it’s the only place where there’s no planning of parenthood there. It’s a — I believe firmly that if you get an abortion, you should be put to death.” Co-host Jonathan Shelley, of the militantly anti-LGBTQ Stedfast Baptist Church, agreed, saying, “That sounds great.”

Schaffer told the hosts that there is a “real question to be asked about the evilness in a woman’s heart that these women are killing their kids, particularly in the Black community.” However, he said that “one could argue that there’s a good side” to “just keeping that population from, you know, causing more crime and stuff.”

He added that he wasn’t “arguing that myself,” but simply repeating “what people argue.”

Schaffer then jokingly called on the show’s viewers to bomb Planned Parenthood facilities. “And, you know, while I’m not gonna tell everyone to go blow up the Planned Parenthood Center, I’m gonna say it,” he said. “Go blow up the Planned Parenthood Center in a video game, in Minecraft. Don’t do that. I’m kidding.”

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

1857: Wilhelm Kienzl, fascist composer, existed.
1871: Nicolae Iorga, antisemitic fascist, was sadly born.
1937: With the arrival in Spain of the Fascist volunteers the Spanish Nationalists now felt confident to mount an offensive on the southern provinces of Republican Spain. Three Nationalist columns converged on Málaga; the Army of the South (General Gonzalo) advanced from the west, whilst from Grenada, to the north of the city, advanced Colonel Antonio Muñoz Jiménez. The third column, attacking from the north, consisted of General Mario Roatta’s soldiers.
1941: Vichy forces inflicted a decisive defeat over the Royal Thai Navy.
1942: Walter Karl Ernst August von Reichenau, Generalfeldmarschall, died.
1945: The Axis lost Warsaw and had to abandon Auschwitz because of the Red Army.
2012: Julius Meimberg, Luftwaffe advisor and ace, expired.

(This is another examination that I had saved on my hard drive for a few months. Although I try to keep these excerpts at manageable lengths, I have to admit that I still might have gone too far with this one.)

Quoting Paul Preston’s The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth‐Century Spain, pages 471–472:

That Franco had no inclination to magnamity and saw the repression as a long‐term undertaking was made clear by his speech on 19 May 1939, the day on which he presided over the spectacular Victory Parade in Madrid. ‘Let us not deceive ourselves: the Jewish spirit, which permitted the alliance of big capital with Marxism and which was behind so many pacts with the anti‐Spanish revolution, cannot be extirpated in a day and still beats in the hearts of many.’¹ The belief that the war had been against the Jewish–Bolshevik–Masonic conspiracy was reiterated in his end‐of‐year message on 31 December 1939. Franco praised German anti‐Semitic legislation, declaring that the persecution of the Jews by the fifteenth‐century Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabel had shown the [Third Reich] the way:

Now you will understand the reasons which have led other countries to persecute and isolate those races marked by the stigma of their greed and self‐interest. The domination of such races within society is disturbing and dangerous for the destiny of the nation. We, who were freed of this heavy burden centuries ago by the grace of God and the clear vision of Ferdinand and Isabel, cannot remain indifferent before the modern flourishing of avaricious and selfish spirits who are so attached to their own earthly goods that they would sacrifice the lives of their children more readily than their own base interests.

Quoting Paul Hanebrink’s A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo‐Bolshevism, pages 93–96:

The […] end of the monarchy had energized separatist movements in Catalonia and the Basque region that threatened the historical unity of Spain; the Catholic Church feared a wave of secularization; plans for land reform threatened the power of wealthy landowners; monarchists hated the Republican government on princi­ple; and all feared the power of a united Republican Popu­lar Front, which had won a huge electoral victory earlier in 1936.

But across the anti-­Republican, or nationalist, co­ali­tion, one belief was common: the civil war that soon consumed the entire country was a “crusade” against a “Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevist” conspiracy. For all parties in the nationalist coali­tion, the idea of the Jewish Bolshevik threat crystallized long-­held antipathies to liberalism and republicanism into a clearly “vis­i­ble” ­enemy. General Miguel Cabanellas, president of the military junta, denounced “freemasons, Jews, and similar parasites.”

Falangists told the readers of their party newspaper that they “had the obligation to persecute and destroy Judaism, Masonry, Marxism, and separatism.” And in his first statement after the civil war began, Cardinal Isidro Gomá, archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain, asserted that “Jews and masons had poisoned the national soul with absurd doctrines.”¹⁹

The ubiquity of Judeo-­Bolshevism talk among Spanish nationalists is remarkable, since ­there ­were only perhaps 6,000 Jews living in Spain in the 1930s. The number of Jews in the Spanish protectorate of Morocco was somewhat larger, about 13,000.²⁰

In addition, some German Jews found their way to Spain after the [German Fascists] seized power. And when the danger to the Republican government became an international cause, antifascists from around the world came to fight for it. Some, like the photographer Robert Capa, who produced some of the most enduring images of the conflict, came from Jewish families; ­others, like writer George Orwell, did not.²¹ All in all, however, the number of Jews in Spain in the years before and during the Spanish Civil War was tiny indeed.

None of that mattered. For nationalists, the specter of a Judeo-Masonic-­Bolshevik conspiracy was so power­ful precisely because it effectively demonized both their internal and their external enemies. Republican and Catalan leaders alike ­were portrayed in the pages of the nationalist press as Jews.

Nationalists also saw Jewish Bolsheviks as controlling the Soviet Union, which was supplying the Republic with arms and military advisers. Marcel Rosenberg, the Soviet ambassador to the Republic, was a popu­lar target, frequently derided as the “real dictator of Spain.” Fi­nally, nationalists denounced France as a country controlled by Jews, after a Popu­lar Front government led by the socialist Léon Blum came to power there in 1936.

Although right-­wing opposition forced Blum’s government to maintain a noninterventionist stance, this fact did not prevent Spanish nationalists from accusing the Blum government of funneling arms to Republicans. In the words of one: “The national uprising [i.e., the anti-Republican war] is bound to be a ruthless war, a heroic crusade against what is ­going on in France ­under Mr. Léon Blum.” Facing an array of enemies both within and without, Spanish nationalists saw themselves as fighting a holy war to preserve the true nature of Spain as a Catholic monarchy.²²

The idea of Judeo-­Bolshevism that circulated among the dif­fer­ent parties to the nationalist co­ali­tion in Spain was not identical to the image of the Jewish Bolshevik demonized in [Germanic Fascism]. ­There ­were impor­tant points of comparison. German veterans of the postwar paramilitary vio­lence on the Baltic borderlands had come to identify Jews with the revolutionary dangers they had fought against during the war and ­ after. The [Third Reich’s] fusion of anti-­Communism, antisemitism, and colonialism in Eastern Eu­rope had an obvious appeal for them.²³

Similarly, accounts of Jewish conspiracy circulated especially widely among military officers, most notably among the so-­called Africanistas who manned the garrisons in Spanish Morocco, who believed in Spain’s colonial mission in North Africa and who played a central role in Franco’s coup d’état in 1936.²⁴ But the Jewish Bolshevik menace perceived by Spanish nationalists was profoundly ­ shaped by Catholic traditions of anti-­Jewish thought that fused Latin Christian ideas about monarchy, nationalism, and the state with Catholic traditions of anti-­Freemasonry, antisecularism, and antisemitism.²⁵

For this reason, Spanish nationalists invariably described Communism as a Jewish-­Marxist-­Masonic plot with an emphasis on all three parts of an unholy trinity that would have sounded strange in the German context, even if [other fascist] ideologues did also vilify Freemasonry.²⁶

And Spanish anti-­Communists invested the Judeo-­Bolshevik ­enemy with meaning by embedding it in a distinctly Spanish narrative of national history. Many Spanish nationalists believed that the Popu­lar Front and the Republican government that preceded it ­were a conspiracy to punish Spain for expelling the Jews and defeating the Moors in 1492, and then upholding a traditional Catholic monarchy in the centuries that followed.

As General Emilio Mola, a chief plotter of the 1936 coup, had written as early as 1922, Jews hated Spain “­because they blame it for their dispersion throughout the world.”²⁷ Vanquished in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, this age-old ­enemy of all Spaniards had returned […] in the guise of Communism. Needless to say, this account held no significance at all for Hitler and his colleagues in [the Third Reich].

(Emphasis added in all cases. Click here for more.)

Quoting Isabelle Rohr’s The use of antisemitism in the Spanish Civil War:

Even though there was no systemic persecution of this dwindling Jewish community, aggressive acts occasionally took place. In Seville, General Queipo declared in one of his nightly radio broadcasts that ‘Jews of the whole world are subject to a supreme council known as the Kahal […] Since time immemorial, for forty centuries, every Jew had given 10 per cent of all his earnings’ to this organization. Altogether Queipo declared the Kahal had received over 4 trillion pesetas.⁴³ The supposed existence of the Kahal was used as an excuse to fine the Jewish community of Seville the sum of 138,000 pesetas.⁴⁴

In Saragossa the Nationalists closed a department store that had been founded by Jewish refugees. The firm’s entire property was confiscated.⁴⁵ In Barcelona, where there remained about 800 Jews, agents of the Gestapo broke into the synagogue shortly after the Nationalist troops entered the city in January 1939. They committed a number of desecrations, destroying the vestments used in worship and carrying off the silver vessels. A delegation of the Jewish community, which presented itself at police headquarters to make a formal complaint, was refused a hearing and told that the police were already aware of the matter.⁴⁶ At the same time several German Jews living in Barcelona were arrested on the orders of the German consulate.⁴⁷

The situation in Morocco

The situation in Spanish Morocco was quite different from that in the Peninsula. This was not only because the Nationalists had established control over the protectorate at the onset of the rebellion but also because there was a larger Jewish community of about 13,000 people. One factor that affected these Moroccan Jews was the Nationalists’ reliance on Regulares, Moroccan mercenaries, to fight the Republicans.

To recruit indigenous units the Nationalists used a combination of bribery and propaganda. They tried to get the backing of the Berber tribesmen by offering large subsidies of silver and grain to their chieftains. The attractions of food, money and fighting appealed to the Moroccans and 50,000 of them enlisted in the Nationalist army. The Nationalists also obtained the support of the rural Moroccan nationalists by making vague promises of future autonomy and granting some concessions, such as freedom of the press, the Arabization of indigenous education and a limitation on the land that non-Moroccans could purchase. At the same time, the Spanish insurgents tried to channel Moroccan nationalism against the common enemy, France.⁴⁸

The Nationalist efforts to enlist the support of the Muslim population had an adverse effect on the Jews living in the protectorate. In the spring of 1937 the Spanish authorities promulgated a law that forced the Jews of the zone to lower the rents on their properties by 35 per cent. Although the decree’s aim was to gain the sympathy of the Muslims, it had, in fact, the opposite effect. The houses belonging to the Arabs or the Spaniards stood empty whereas the Jewish properties, being much cheaper, were let [alone].⁴⁹

In the same vein, on the occasion of the Muslim feast of Korban, the Jewish community of Tetuán was forced to give 50,000 pesetas to purchase sheep for the enlisted Moroccans.⁵⁰

[…]

Axis propaganda inflamed the antisemitism of the Falangists and Carlists who resented the Jews’ privileged economic position in the protectorate. When the rebellion broke out, these fascist youths victimized the Jews by boycotting their businesses and confiscating their properties on the grounds that they were sympathetic to the Republican government.⁵⁷ In Tetuán the Falangists decided on their own authority to establish their headquarters in the house of a Jewish notable.⁵⁸

In Xauen, Larache and Melilla they extorted money from members of the Jewish communities by forcing them to swallow castor oil. These excesses prompted the British consul of Tangier, Edward Keeling, to complain to the High Commissioner of Morocco, General Luis Orgaz, who harangued the Falange.

The reprimand, however, proved ineffective and the abuse continued. By 1937 the situation of the Jews living in the protectorate was precarious. Rumours abounded that definite action against them was being prepared.⁵⁹

On the evening of 1 April, two Moroccan mercenaries entered the Jewish club, the Circulo Israelita. They began insulting and threatening those present, with cries of ‘Down with the Jews’, ‘Death to the Jews’, ‘We will burn the club down’. The two Regulares destroyed the Portuguese passport of a Jewish man.⁶⁰ In June, the victory of the Franco forces in Bilbao gave rise to anti-Jewish and anti-French demonstrations in Tetuán.⁶¹

In August, twenty-three Jews—principally women and children—were wounded during a riot of Moroccan soldiers in El Ksar. The Nationalist authorities fined the city’s Jewish community 1,800 pesetas a month for ‘having failed to avoid trouble’.⁶²

In September, the Falange gave instructions that all Jews working for Spaniards be dismissed and replaced by Spaniards and Moroccan Arabs. The High Commissioner rescinded the order.⁶³

Worse treatment was reserved for the Jews affiliated to the Republican organizations or to Freemasonry. As the incarnation of the ‘Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik’ conspiracy, they were tortured and forced to kiss the cross before being shot. About twenty of them were killed in the cities of Melilla and Ceuta.⁶⁴ In October, Albert Saguès, the director of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Tangier, wrote the following:

The Jews residing in the Spanish zone live in a climate of definite insecurity and terror. The fact that those who have been able to leave the zone to take refuge in Tangier never mention the incidents that they might have observed is itself very significant. They remain terrified despite the distance.⁶⁵

While trying to restrain the Falangists’ and Carlists’ excesses, the military authorities, needing to finance the war effort but reluctant to raise taxes, also fined the Jews large sums. In August 1936 the Tetuán Jews had to pay 500,000 pesetas as ‘voluntary contributions’ to the rebels’ treasury. In May 1937 they were again compelled to give 60,000 pesetas to the Nationalist cause.⁶⁶ The Jews were also forced to hand over their merchandise, especially foodstuffs, but also their jewellery and gold. Those who refused to do so were subject to arbitrary arrests, forced to drink castor oil or had their estates confiscated.

[…]

Meanwhile the Civil War was ruining the Jews of Morocco. In Arzila, two-thirds of them lived on charity.⁶⁹ They found themselves in a vicious circle, for those who wanted to leave the protectorate faced a number of impediments. Not only did they have to ask for special permission, but the Falangists also confiscated the property of those who did not come back within an allotted time.⁷⁰

Although a wave of antisemitism was sweeping through the protectorate, the Moroccan Jews realized that it was not comparable to that occurring [under German Fascism]. They kept a low profile and hoped that the hostility would disappear with the end of the Civil War.⁷¹

While there was a spike of patent antisemitism during World War II (1931–1945), in other instances the Spanish parafascists toned it down for opportunistic purposes. Now, do not misunderstand me: the point here is certainly not that any benevolence somehow cancels out the damage, or that there were ‘good and bad parts’ about Spanish parafascism for everybody involved, as if it were a ‘mixed bag’ overall, but rather that it was a complex phenomenon where its harmfulness was in some respects far from obvious. This is not trivia: it is important to recognise the strengths and harmless aspects of our enemies in order to continue identifying them and how they succeed with others.

Quoting Isabelle Rohr’s The use of antisemitism in the Spanish Civil War:

Franco’s […] régime contributed to the rescue of European Jews during the Holocaust by allowing about 40,000 of them to transit through Spain, granting various forms of diplomatic protection to 3,235 others and repatriating 800 Jews from France and the Balkans who were Spanish citizens.⁷⁴

Although the Franco régime did not discriminate against [all] the Jews who found shelter in Spain, it did not allow them to settle in the country. The Jews who reached Spain illegally during the first years of the war, and those whose transit arrangements failed, were imprisoned in the concentration camp of Miranda de Ebro or even turned back to the frontier.

Eric Calderwood’s Moroccan Jews and the Spanish colonial imaginary, 1903–1951:

The survival of Philo-Sephardism is paradoxical, since it persisted in the face of the Franco régime’s anti-Semitic rhetoric.¹⁹ […] Yet the spectre of the ‘Judeo-Masonic’ enemy did not prevent people closely aligned with the Franco régime from pursuing a Philo-Sephardic programme in Spain and Morocco, especially in the academic institutions created under Francoism. As in the case of Pulido’s Philo-Sephardic campaign, the Francoist brand of academic Philo-Sephardism garnered the support of many Moroccan Jews.

[…]

In January of 1938, in the middle of the Spanish Civil War, a group of Jewish leaders in Tetouan sent a letter to Juan Beigbeder, the High Commissioner of the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco, in the name of the ‘Israelite Community of Tetouan.’²² The letter expresses support for a proposal to establish a centre for Talmudic studies in Tetouan, justifying the proposed centre by casting Tetouan and its Jewish inhabitants as the heirs to the cultural splendour of Sepharad. […] Franco’s régime received early and significant support from [some] Moroccan Jewish leaders, and this support was often framed as a manifestation of the Moroccan Jewish community’s historical links to Sepharad.

Whether this attempt to appeal to the Spanish parafascists was itself a form of opportunism, or these Jews sincerely appreciated parafascism, I leave that up to you. We must not deny, though, that many Jewish adults have willingly supported wrongful causes before.

Whatever the case may be, it is worth noting that Moroccan Jews were in a Spanish colony rather than in Spain proper, and there does not seem to have been an especially aggressive campaign to settle Spaniards in Morocco. Because of this separation, I can imagine that many Iberian antisemites found these Jews easier to tolerate than the Jews in Iberia. Hence:

On November 24, 1939, a few months after the end of the Spanish Civil War, Franco created the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), which still serves today as Spain’s primary national research organisation. The CSIC was organised into various schools and institutes, one of which was the School for Hebraic Studies.²⁴ The school published Spain’s first academic journal of Hebrew studies, Sefarad. […] The prologue then describes the new journal’s aims and scope, which include the Hebrew Bible, Hebrew philology, archaeology, and (crucially) Sephardic culture. On this last topic, the editors say:

Another goal of the activities of the School of Hebraic Studies is the study of Hebraic-Spanish culture. Hispanic Judaism, throughout its trajectory, moved, in general, in a spiritualist environment […] We must keep in mind that Spanish Judaism offered the highest values in religious poetry, Biblical exegesis, Hebrew philology, philosophy, and pure and experimental sciences.

[…]

Bensabat notes that members of Tangier’s Jewish community have accused the Maimonides Institute ‘“of being a Hispanophile propagandist,” as if this were a crime, when it makes us proud to be considered that way’ (1951, 2). The comment, made in passing, highlights Bensabat’s complicity with Spain’s colonial mission in Morocco. More broadly, the case of the Maimonides Institute and its director Bensabat illustrates the migration of the Philo-Sephardic programme from early-twentieth-century liberal circles in Spain to Francoist academic culture and also to some elite Jewish intellectuals and professionals in the Spanish Protectorate zone.

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Click here for events that happened today (January 16).

1908: Günther Prien, Axis U‐boat commander, came into existence.
1941: Eighty Luftwaffe Stuka dive bombers attacked Valletta Harbor, Malta, trying to finish off damaged Allied aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious. HMS Illustrious, destroyer HMS Decoy, and cruiser HMAS Perth, and ship Essex took damage, but none sank, and the Axis lost ten flightcraft.

Additionally, Axis submarine U-96 sank Allied troopship Oropesa with three torpedoes 150 miles northwest of Ireland at 0616 hours, causing 106 deaths. Survivors drifted in six lifeboats, but only five lifeboats, containing 143, were found and rescued. Coincidentally, Axis submarine Luigi Torelli attacked an Allied convoy 350 miles west of Ireland, sinking Greek ship Nicolas Filinis and causing three deaths.

Lastly, Hans-Joachim Marseille began a period of rest at home in Berlin.
1942: The Axis commenced deporting Jews from the Łódź Ghetto to the Chełmno extermination camp… on a less tragic note, Ernst Scheller, Fascist politician and captain, died.
1945: The Third Reich’s head of state moved into his underground bunker, the so‐called Führerbunker.
1988: Andrija Artuković, Ustaše Minister of Internal Affairs and Minister of Justice who contributed to the Samudaripen, did what he should have done long ago and dropped dead.
2014: Hiroo Onoda, Imperial intelligence office who fought for the Axis until March 1974 (seriously), and was therefore easily one of the longest serving Axis soldiers (second only to Teruo Nakamura), finally left the world.

Keenan also claimed that the Altadena fire was likely started by homeless people. “So until we see Gavin Newsom actually, like, rescind those laws, the sanctuary city laws, and frankly cracking down on the homeless, because as we know, 80% of the fires in SoCal are arson, and a lot of that is the homeless camps all up and down these hills,” Keenan told MacIntyre.

She added that she’s “pretty sure that when they investigate the Altadena fire,” it will be traced back to a “homeless camp in the Eaton Canyon,” and that “these schizophrenic, these drug addicts” “think it’s fun to light something on fire.”

The cause of the fires is under investigation, and there is currently no evidence that arson was involved. Investigators are looking into the Eaton Canyon electrical tower as a possible source of the Altadena fire, however. Of the 20 most destructive California wildfires, 8 — including 2018’s Camp Fire — had power-related causes according to the New York Times.

Admittedly, the two events are more different than they are similar, but I could not help but remember the time when the Fascists blamed the Reichstag fire on us.

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Click here for other events that happened today (January 15).

1885: Lorenz Böhler, Fascist physician, was born.
1890: Michiaki Kamada, Axis vice‐admiral, came into existence.
1919: The protofascist Freikorps killed Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, dealing a massive blow to the Spartacist uprising and paving the way for Fascism.
1933: Heinrich Prinz zu Sayn‐Wittgenstein became a group leader (Kameradschaftsführer) in the HJ.
1937: As the Nationalists and Republicans both withdrew after suffering heavy losses, ending the Second Battle of the Corunna Road, Hermann Göring met Benito Mussolini; when Göring brought up the topic of Berlin’s wish to annex Austria, Mussolini showed disapproval.
1940: Fascist submarine U‐44 sank Norwegian steamer Fagerheim in the Bay of Biscay at the early hours of the day, massacring fifteen but leaving five alive. Later, U‐44 fired shots at Netherlandish merchant freighter Arendskerk; realizing his ship could not out run the Fascists, Arendskerk’s captain gave the abandon ship order, but the Fascists sank it. Nevertheless, all sixty‐five of the crew lived; the Italian streamer Fedora rescued them. Meanwhile, Kapitän zur See Ernst Kretzenberg took command of cruiser Köln and U‐23 completed her sixth war patrol.
1941: Axis merchant raider Pinguin captured Norwegian whalers Star XIX and Star XXIV in the South Atlantic north of the Azores, and the Axis submarine Luigi Torelli assaulted an Allied convoy west of Ireland, sinking Norwegian ship Brask and Greek ship Nemea.
1942: In Poland, Axis authorities commenced deporting Jews from the Łódź ghetto to the Chelmno Concentration Camp. In Asia, Axis troops crossed the Gemencheh Bridge over the Kelamah River in British Malaya to assault Australian‐held positions at Gemas; although the initial attack failed with the loss of six tanks, subsequent attacks and flanking maneuvers forced the Allies to fall back to the Gemas River. Elsewhere, the 4th and 5th Imperial Guard Regiments wiped out forward positions held by elements of the Indian 45th Brigade north of the Muar River, and the Axis’s Armeegruppe Mitte began to fall back from the Kaluga area, forming a new defensive lines twenty miles to the west.
1943: Axis aircraft raided Telepte Airfield in Tunisia three times and Youks‐les‐Bains Airfield in Algeria once, but lost a total of fifteen aircraft during these assaults. Elsewhere, two companies of ‘Loreto’ combat engineers battalion of the Italian Air Force transferred by ship from Sicily to Tunis, Tunisia; the remaining two companies of the 1st Air Force Assault Regiment ‘Amedeo d’Aosta’ would remain in Sicily to repair airfields.
1944: The XIV Panzer Corps abandoned Monte Trocchio, Italy and fell back across the Rapido River; the Axis subsequently lost both Monte Trocchio and Monte Santa Croce to the Allies.
1945: A report noted that the total number of prisoners in concentration camps was 714,211; there were about 40,000 guards at the camps. The Greater German Reich’s head of state departed the Adlerhorst headquarters in Wetterau, returning to Berlin, which ordered Panzerkorps Grossdeutschland to move from East Prussia, Germany to Poland to counter the Soviet Vistula‐Oder Offensive. An Axis V‐2 rocket hit Rainham, London, massacring fourteen folk and seriously injuring four, but Axis shipping in Hong Kong and rail facilities at Freiburg both suffered Allied assaults.
1950: Axis commanding officer turned Allied traitor, Petre Dumitrescu, expired. He captured 15,565 Soviet prisoners of war at the cost of 10,541 casualties, but when Bucharest surrendered to the Allies in 1944 he helped capture of 6,000 Wehrmacht members. Make of that what you will.
1951: The Allies found Ilse Koch guilty of incitement to murder, incitement to attempted murder, and incitement to the crime of committing grievous bodily harm. They gave her life imprisonment and forfeiture of civil rights. On the other hand, the Western Allies released Axis war criminal Hellmuth Felmy early.
1965: Winston Churchill suffered a stroke, which caused a severe cerebral thrombosis… okay, I know that this event’s relevance to fascism is arguable, but I’m including it here anyway because it’s too funny.

Quoting Tony Greenstein’s Zionism During the Holocaust: The Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State and Nation, pages 155–156:

The most puzzling question concerns the economics of the Final Solution. Reliance on Jewish skills and expertise was considered to be ‘a potential obstacle.’²²⁴ Himmler emphasised that ‘the argument of war production, which nowadays in Germany is the favorite reason for opposing anything at all, I do not recognize in the first place.’²²⁵

Nonetheless the ghettos became integral to the [Axis] war economy and this caused considerable friction between the SS and the Wehrmacht.²²⁶ Their dissolution and the deportation of their Jews ‘led to serious conflicts, especially with the Wehrmacht, which was interested in keeping ‘its’ Jewish workers in the ghetto workshops.’²²⁷ There was also an unsuccessful attempt, on 19 August 1941 at Belaya-Tserkov to prevent the murder of young children and infants by the Wehrmacht.²²⁸

On 25 July 1942 in Przemyśl, a Lieutenant Battel took his army unit and closed the bridge over the San River to stop Jews being deported to Bełżec. 2,500 Jews had their deportation stayed and 240 were installed in the basement of the local Army HQ.²²⁹ Przemyśl had been the subject of expulsions over the San River by Einsatzgruppe z.b.V. under Obergruppenfuhrer Udo von Woyrsch at the beginning of the invasion.

On 19 September trainees from the SiPO Border Police School at Pretzch gathered 102 men in the marketplace before taking them to a killing site. This and the murder of another 500 Jewish men caused unrest among the [Wehrmacht] because ‘instead of fighting at the front, young [SS] men were proving their courage against defenseless civilians.’ In one case the Wehrmacht roughed up SS personnel.²³⁰

Heinrich Lohse, Reichskommissar, asked the Ministry for the East whether all Jews in the Ostland were to be liquidated without regard to economic interests. The reply was that ‘in dealing with this problem, economic interests are to be disregarded.’²³¹

Armament Inspector Hans Leykauf was so worried at the consequences of extermination that he commissioned a report for the Army’s Economic Department. The report asked, ‘Who in all the world is then supposed to produce something of value here?’ For over seven months the SS delayed any more shootings.²³² Economically the Final Solution was a parasitical non-productive form of capitalism, consisting of primitive plunder.

Fritz Sauckel, the [Reich] Labour Plenipotentiary, shipped Poles and Ukrainians as [neo]slave labour to [the Third Reich] and the army hoped to replace them with Jews. At the same time the SS and Order Police were killing hundreds of thousands of Jews. There was a clear conflict between the annihilation of the Jews with the economic exploitation of the conquered territories.

There was a struggle by the army to preserve the Łódź ghetto, which largely succeeded until August 1944.²³³ Himmler ruled that the July 1942 agreement between Os[k]ar Schindler and Higher SS Police Leader Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger that Jewish workers were to be held in SS labour camps for the purposes of armaments production was not to be repeated.²³⁴

(Emphasis added.)

The examination reveals to us that the Fascist bourgeoisie considered Jews valuable only insofar as laborers. Throughout Jewish history (especially in Europe), ruling-class goyim had similar incentives to protect or tolerate Jews: not love or compassion, but because Jewish men excelled in trades that gentiles were more reluctant to embrace.

White capitalists in Imperial America have a similar ambivalence towards adults of color: on one hand these capitalists see their work as less valuable and easily replaceable, on the other hand they need these people to take on jobs that upper-class whites are loath to do themselves, so it creates a contradiction. True, only a small minority of capitalists see these people as in need of imminent annihilation, but the need to protect them is not a widespread opinion of white capitalists either, otherwise Black Lives Matter would have never existed.

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

1939: The Spanish Nationalists captured Tarragon.
1941: Axis armed merchant cruiser Pinguin captured almost an entire Norwegian whaling fleet (whale oil tanker Solglimt, factory ships Ole Wegger and Pelagos, and eleven of their attendant whalers) without firing a shot in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica; three whalers escaped and provided warning to another whaling fleet nearby. Pinguin captured 20,000 tons of whale oil and 10,000 tons of fuel oil with this success.

Likewise, Axis submarine Cappellini and Allied auxiliary cruiser Eumaeus engaged in a gun fight for three hours 100 miles west of Freetown, West Africa. Cappellini suffered three casualties and was badly damaged, but was able to sink Eumaeus, massacring twenty-seven Allied employés.
1942: Axis forces advanced into Burma, and Axis troops on bicycles, supported by tanks, crossed the Gemencheh Bridge over the Kelamah River in Negeri Sembilan, Malaya at 1600 hours into an Allied ambush, which killed somewhere between 140 and 700 Axis troops while the Allies lost only one life and six became captives (who would later be executed); the Axis would return after dark to successfully secure and repair the bridge. Elsewhere, the Axis captured Malacca on the west coast.
1943: The Eastern Axis commenced Operation Ke, the successful operation to evacuate its forces from Guadalcanal during the Guadalcanal Campaign.

Quoting Tony Greenstein’s Zionism During the Holocaust: The Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State and Nation, pages 156–157:

About the ICRC, little good can be said. They refused to provide any protection for Jews since they accepted the [Axis] designation of them as stateless criminals.²³⁵ According to ICRC President Max Huber they could not be seen to be ‘intruding into the domestic policy’ of the [Axis].²³⁶

There were discussions throughout August 1942 about the murder of Jewish civilians yet at the ICRC executive of 14 October 1942 the pro-[Axis] former foreign minister of Switzerland, Philip Etter, ‘opposed even the anodyne Huber draft’ calling for the humane treatment of civilians, not even Jews, ‘arguing that it could be interpreted as a violation of neutrality.’ Etter’s view prevailed.²³⁷

In the Netherlands the Dutch Red Cross made no effort to communicate with deported Jews although they did send an ambulance to the Eastern front ‘to comfort the Dutch Waffen-SS volunteers.’²³⁸

The attitude of the ICRC only changed at the very end of the war in Hungary. Louis de Jong condemned the ICRC for its ‘almost total lack of concern for the Jews’ disasters.’²³⁹

Click here for the citations.

235 Arthur Morse, p. 38, While Six Million Died, London: Secker Warburg, 1968
236 Ibid., pp. 325–8.
237 Laqueur, The Terrible Secret, pp. 62-3.
238 Mason, Testing Human Bonds Within Nations, p. 338.
239 Louis de Jong, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog, pp. 862–4 cited by Mason, Imponderables of the Holocaust, p. 105.

That really is all that I wanted to share with you today.

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

1935: A plebiscite in Saarland shows that 90.3% of those voting wish to join the Third Reich: an early success that the German Fascists made in their quest for empire.
1940: The Reich’s Navy Operations Division reported that while Norway presented strategic importance, the Wehrmacht should not invade the neutral country if there was little risk of a British violation of Norwegian neutrality. Berlin postponed the attack on France and the Low Countries, and Fascist submarine U‐20 torpedoed Swedish(!) steamer Sylvia northeast of Aberdeen, Scotland, sinking it within a minute and massacring all twenty of the crew.
1941: An Axis submarine base at Lorient, France suffered an Allied bombing, and the Kingdom of Bulgaria stalled in response to Berlin demand’s that it officially join the Axis.
1942: First use of an aircraft ejection seat by an Axis test pilot in a Heinkel He 280 jet fighter. As well, Tirpitz passed through the Kiel Canal and arrived at Brunsbüttel at the canal’s western end to refuel, departing for Wilhelmshaven later. Axis bombers attacked Lowestoft, Suffolk and Redcar, Yorkshire in England during daylight hours; they also conducted minor attacks over Aberdeenshire, Scotland and the Shetland Islands.

Likewise, the Third Reich’s 18th Motorised Division at Staraya and the Third Reich’s 9th Army at Rhzev duelled with the Red Army, maybe around the same time that Axis aircraft struck Ambon or Imperial Naval General Staff arranged a meeting with the Bureau of Naval Construction to discuss the construction of submarines capable of carrying attack aircraft.
1943: Three transports arrived at Auschwitz Concentration Camp, each containing 1,210 Jews from Berlin (1,083 of whom the Axis quickly massacred), 750 Netherlandish Jews (88 men and 101 women were registered, and the remaining 561 exterminated), and two thousand Jews of Zambrów ghetto in Poland (148 men and 50 women were registered, and the remaining 1,802 exterminated)… I have no words.
1944: U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. received the ‘Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of the Jews’, exposing U.S. State Department’s efforts to avoid directly helping Jewish refugees. I can only assume that the Axis appreciated having more targets sent their way. On a less unpleasant note, the Axis lost the high ground north of Cervaro, and Essen, Duisburg, Aachen, and Koblenz all suffered an Allied assault, but the Empire of Japan launched landing ship № 127.
1945: The 3rd Panzer Army in Pillkallen struggled against the Allies while S‐13 patrolled off the coast of Kolberg, and the Axis’s Armeegruppe E finished its withdrawal from Greece and Albania. The Axis also lost at least seventy Germans when Norwegian saboteurs destroyed the Jørstad Bridge near Snåsa.
2012: Guido Dessauer, Axis aerospace engineer, expired.
2014: Waldemar von Gazen, Axis general and lawyer, died.

This is an extract that I meant to share on December 16, the 82nd anniversary of the Schutzstaffel’s order to deport Roma and Sinti to Auschwitz. However, because my last computer broke down and I had to wait a few weeks before receiving a new one, it was too late for me to time this with the anniversary.

As I lack a good idea for today’s topic, I have decided to share this one now as a substitute. Besides, the white supremacist rhetoric may look familiar, reminding you of a certain apartheid régime that is not yet officially defunct.

Judging by the place assigned to them in the newspapers, the conclusion can be drawn that the Roma articles were not viewed as the most important information. However, in Lemberger Zeitung the pieces on Roma appeared on a page dedicated to inquiring into important issues concerning the war effort and connected topics.³⁴

This placed them in the focus of the readership. In Gazeta Lwowska, all pieces on Roma appeared on pages dedicated to local developments and history. This was likely to illuminate “the [insert slur here] problem” as a direct concern and a challenge to the readership.

[…]

The first mention of Roma in the [Axis] occupation press in Lviv aimed at showing the readership that Roma were put under firmer control than during the Soviet occupation. Among the news on local developments, one finds that Roma have “again appeared on the streets, market squares, and in tramways of Lviv”. Their “screams and clamor” filled the streets, as they “obtrusively clung to passers‐by in order to tell them their fortune”. Still, Roma were far fewer than “during the Bolshevik times”, when “whole camps” of them lived on Lviv’s streets and squares.⁵³

Thus, the reader learns that Roma brought trouble while constituting an alien body of visitors, and being a nuisance to the town’s permanent inhabitants. Therefore, the reference to their supposedly lower numbers is supposed to bring about a sense of relief and improvement. The last‐mentioned was one among many supposed improvements, be it the tidying up of the town (after the [Fascist] offensive) or barring Jews from public parks.

[…]

In September 1942, Stanislavske Slovo informs readers that “Yugoslavia begins a campaign of struggle against [insert slur here]‐wanderers”, who are not only thieves, but also “carriers of infectious diseases, particularly typhoid fever”.⁵⁷

The name of (by the time) a defunct state shows that propagandists would not go into the technical niceties and realities of the [Axis] occupation and the Ustaša régime, but rather mention a place that the readership could put on a map. [Axis] propaganda programmatically accused Jews of spreading diseases, particularly typhoid fever.⁵⁸ However, it is unlikely that the readers knew what measures were being undertaken: mass murder of segments of the Roma population in the so‐called Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, the NDH).

[…]

The Lemberger Zeitung article “Die Zigeunerfrage im europäischen Südosten” (The [insert slur here] question in South‐Eastern Europe) published in June 1943 drew parallels between “solving” the Jewish and “the [Romani] question”. The readers were informed that Roma had been undermining the societies “they have haunted”, and constituted “a plague”.

It was not a coincidence, the author continues, that the peoples of the Balkans required a solution to “the [Romani] question” at the same time as the Jewish question was being solved on “the basis of race”. After all, Roma were “an equally important issue for a healthier population policy in South‐Eastern Europe [as Jews]”. They once poured into Europe, and had “haunted” Germany, “seldom ready to work, but always inclined to earn a living by theft, robbery and deceit”. Only after [Fascism’s] accession to power, the author finds, were convincing measures taken against them.

Roma were declared an inferior race. Since they were idlers, they were expelled from the body of [Fascist] German people, “and officially treated accordingly”. Today, as the peoples of the South‐Eastern Europe were striving towards the victory, it was an obligation, “to enforce the settlement and solution of the [Romani] problem with all means, just as with the Jewish question, so the creative European people would be liberated from those parasites”.

According to the author, no further proof was needed that Roma were a “parasitic people” (Schmarotzervolk). Unlike Jews, Roma engaged in deceit and criminal activities only to scrape a living, and did not strive after prosperity and riches. However, they refused “any scheduled work”, unlike “the native cultural peoples”. By doing so while the peoples were working hard for the new order and the victory, Roma “as a race and as humans” put themselves outside “the European community”.

No nation could allow itself the luxury of nurturing such subversive elements at the time when strengthened discipline was needed, the author summarized.⁶¹ Thus, one learns that Roma constituted a natural disaster of sorts and a contagion, as they “poured” into the continent, “haunting” its societies, constituting a “plague”, and being “parasites”. As they were rootless, one could not expect loyal and productive behavior from them, but merely “theft, robbery and deceit”.

In addition, Roma had deliberately put themselves outside the community of peoples in order to carry on with their life. While the [Fascist] measures against Roma in the Reich were positive steps, they did not suffice in the era of the life and death struggle against Bolshevism. With wording recalling medical science, the indirect suggestion is made that the infected part of the body be removed, and not merely by means of legal discrimination.

“The national body” should be cleansed, given the decay Roma brought into the society. Recurring references to Jews make the necessary measures clear. Roma must disappear physically.

[…]

When presenting anti‐Roma measures in [the Kingdom of] Hungary, Ridna Zemlia wrote that separating Roma from the rest of the population and putting them in labor camps was “due to the high number of criminals among [them]”, among several other reasons.⁶⁴ In 1944, in a piece entitled “The biggest free‐loaders”, Ridna Zemlia claimed that Hungarian statistics mirrored “the criminal behavior” of Roma, who also regularly came into conflict with the law.⁶⁵

(Emphasis added. Click here for more.)

Roma wedding parties went on for three days, with an abundance of food and alcohol brought in by Roma women. The passers‐by enjoyed the music streaming out of the windows. . Turn away from the main Nowozniesieńska Street, the author instructed, and walk to Kardynał Trąba (Cardinal Trąba) Street. There, “impoverished and dirty” girls sit on the ground and play — “light‐haired indigenous ones and black‐haired [insert slur here]”; “they grow together, they play together, they know how to communicate with each other”.

The author concludes that “righteous and brave” people, citizens of Lviv, inhabited Zniesienie with its orderly flower and vegetable gardens.⁶⁷ One reads that Roma are loud in a way similar to Tartars (the symbol of pillage and destruction in Polish historical imagination) in the past.

[…]

The reference to wedding parties with plentiful food and drink going on for days were intended to upset readers who were likely to be worn out by malnutrition due to high food prices; general public health was declining.⁶⁹ It likely alluded to goods supposedly brought to the parties as obtained in illicit ways.

The daily rather correctly described the ways the Roma women moved in the city center — in pairs, or in slightly bigger groups, as cases from the local courts from 1943 show.⁷⁰ The passage about the citizens of Lviv and orderly gardens of inhabitants of Zniesienie probably referred to the need to solve the mingling of peoples that could prove disastrous for the non‐Roma population, in terms of mutually exclusive polarities of order (the non‐Roma population) and disorder (Roma).

The latter were bringing noise, dishonesty, and potential insecurity to the otherwise calm and orderly suburb.⁷¹

[…]

While the articles in Gazeta Lwowska stand out as full of double meanings, and as somewhat more sophisticated when it comes to the message, the point was still that Roma could not be trusted. Under the neighborly façade, the criminal dwelled. By putting Roma in the local setting of Lviv and the vicinity, the articles in Gazeta Lwowska also brought “the [insert slur here] problem” into the direct environment of the readership, and provided it with a face, a location, and even an address.

[…]

Ridna Zemlia […] claim[ed] that “if all […] romanticism is put aside […], the [insert slur here] problem reveals a picture of deep social degeneration”. The common view of Roma culture as containing romantic elements was in fact a result of “sentimental films and operettas”, and “a consequence of Jewish profiteering”. The result of this process was “glorification of the [insert slur here] ideal”.⁷⁹

In those two articles, one finds a departure from the dichotomy of Roma as a potential criminal and an alien on the one hand, and as a “noble savage”/“operetta [insert slur here]” (stereotypical but with positive elements) on the other. It turns out that predilection for even most selective and stereotyped parts of Roma culture was mistaken, as those were a smoke screen for social and moral deviance. In the latter article, one also learns that the pre‐war popularity of Roma/Roma influenced music was due to Jewish interests in show business.

Here, two negative narratives interact. The profiteering Jews employ the deviant and morally corrupt Roma culture in order to facilitate the decay of society and to make a profit. The “operetta [Roma]” was no more.

---

Click here for events that happened today (January 12).

1893: Alfred Rosenberg and Hermann Göring, Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories and Minister President of Prussia, respectively, were unfortunately both born. (Yes, they shared the exact same birthday.)
1901: Karl Künstler, SS officer, rudely imposed his presence on the earth.
1935: Berlin named SS‐Oberführer Heinrich Deubel the Dachau Concentration Camp’s commandant, replacing Berthold Maack.
1940: Berlin relieved Hellmuth Felmy of command of Luftflotte 2 as the result of the Mechelen Incident, and Fascist submarine U‐23 torpedoed and sank Danish oil tanker Danmark in Inganess Bay, eliminating 14,000 tons of fuel for the Allies in the process.
1941: The Axis airbase at Catania, Sicily suffered an Allied assault, and the Fascists in Norway began recruiting for the Nordland Regiment of 5.SS‐Wiking Division.
1942: George von Küchler replaced Wilhelm von Leeb, who resigned after the Chancellor refused his request to withdraw behind the Lovat River to prevent II Corps being cut off. Meanwhile, Luftwaffe group I./KG 100, with 28 He 111 bombers, arrived at Focsani, and Axis troops continued to attack the Abucay‐Mauban line on Bataan Peninsula, Luzon. The Imperialists also executed various allied POWs, but on the bright side, Walther von Reichenau suffered a stroke in Poltava.
1943: The Wehrmacht withdrew from the Caucasus region in southern Russia to the Kuban bridgehead, and Irako transited the Bungo Strait between Shikoku and Kyushu around the same time that Zuikaku, Mutsu, and Suzuya arrived at Kure.
1944: One thousand Jews from Stutthof Concentration Camp arrived at Auschwitz Concentration Camp; Axis officials registered 120 men and 134 women into the camp but exterminated 746 upon arrival.
1945: The Imperial Japanese Army launched its final special attack mission in the Philippine Islands area, and Axis V‐2 rocket hit a row of cottages in Ilford, London, massacring seventeen folk and wounding sixty.

In a Jan. 5, 2025 post, Musk embedded a video originally shared by an X (formerly known as Twitter) account with the handle @BGatesIsaPsycho. The 39-second video shows Ken O’Keefe calling Starmer a “bastard who excused Jimmy Savile.” The video is captioned “Future prime minister Keir starmer [sic] said there was no evidence against Jimmy Savile.”

Starmer was the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) and Head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) from 2008 until 2013. However, Starmer was reportedly not informed when a CPS investigator decided to drop a case against Savile, who may have abused up to 1,000 children over several decades.

O’Keefe is a Gulf War veteran-turned peace activist [read: isolationist] who later became a close friend of former Klan leader David Duke. In 2014, O’Keefe railed against “fucking Jews” during a speech at the IONA London Forum, which the SPLC described as “a gathering of academically oriented white supremacists and anti-Semites.”

After some internal infighting between the Reich’s Foreign ministry and the head of the Reich Main Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA), [Berlin’s] request for the preparation of deportations was made explicit in mid-October 1942 through the [Reich’s] Legation in Sofia.¹¹ The Bulgarian authorities granted their approval by mid-November, provided that a section of the Jews would remain in Bulgaria for forced labor, and that a [Reich] advisor would assist in the process.¹²

SS Hauptsturmführer Theodor Dannecker, infamously known for his rôle in the deportation of Jews from France, took up the part. One month after his dispatch to [the Tsardom of] Bulgaria (January 21, 1943), he concluded with Commissioner Belev an agreement pertaining to the deportation of 20,000 Jews from the “new” territories: since the number of Jews in occupied Yugoslavia and Greece did not exceed 12,000, this accord opened the way for the deportation of about 8,000 “undesirable” Bulgarian Jews. The arrests, deportations, and appropriation of Jewish properties were authorized by a series of decrees adopted by the council of ministers at the beginning of March 1943.

At this point, however, the destinies of Bulgarian and non-Bulgarian Jews bifurcated. In early March 1943, the Bulgarian authorities organized round-ups and the temporary internment of Jews from northern Greece (March 4), Vardar Macedonia (March 11) and Pirot (March 12), with the support of the Bulgarian police, army and administration. Deported by train (from Skopje) and by boat (from Lom, along the Danube) — together with the German police — an estimated 11,343 Jews were later exterminated in Treblinka. Their properties were subsequently confiscated, and liquidated.

In the “old” kingdom, by contrast, the public protests of elected officials, orthodox dignitaries and notables, coupled with [Axis] military defeats in the East, convinced the authorities to suspend, postpone and finally renounce the deportations of Bulgarian Jews.

In May 1943, Commissioner Belev submitted a new deportation plan. When the government and King Boris III refused to apply the plan and “contented themselves” with authorizing the expulsion of Jews living in Sofia and other Bulgarian cities into the provinces, [Berlin’s] demands were not considered sufficiently pressing by the Bulgarian executive to move ahead with the deportation of Jews of Bulgarian nationality.

Thus, in the last resort about 48,000 Bulgarian Jews were not deported; 11,343 Jews from the occupied territories were exterminated. Such was the toll in the fall of 1944 when the Red Army invaded/liberated (the wording depends on the political views of the observer) Bulgaria and helped a communist led coalition, the Fatherland Front, to overthrow the wartime régime.

Trying to make sense of Jewish experiences during the world conflict represents a daunting task — all the more as, in these multicultural regions long part of the Ottoman empire, many a Jewish lineage extended beyond recently created nation-state borders. The descendants of those who survived the war and those who did not grew up with painfully divided memories and knowledge of World War Two.

[…]

The transport of Jews from the occupied territories is readily presented as the sine qua non condition of the “rescue of the Bulgarian Jews,” and as a concession intended to preserve as many lives as the unequal power relations between [the Tsardom of] Bulgaria and the Reich would allow. Not only does this representation of the events fail to properly account for the destruction of the Jews living in areas occupied by [the Tsardom of] Bulgaria.

It also casts a shadow upon anti-Jewish policies in the “old” kingdom: aside from the Jewish expulsions from Sofia and other cities in May 1943, the enforcement of anti-Jewish policies – identification of the Jews; professional exclusions and Aryanization of property; political, economic, and social marginalization; detention and internal exile; forced labor, et cetera – remains a territory almost uncharted by public historians and state-sponsored commemorative initiatives.¹⁶

(Emphasis added.)

See also: The Stolen Narrative of the Bulgarian Jews and the Holocaust

---

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

1891: Heinrich Behmann, Fascist mathematician, was born.
1932: Chancellor Heinrich Brüning met with Adolf Schicklgruber again regarding the upcoming re‐election and President Paul von Hindenburg's old age. Brüning continued to argue for keeping Hindenburg in power without an election, and he still failed to recruit Schicklgruber to his cause.
1935: Paul Wenneker toured light cruiser Tama, battleship Kongo, and submarine I‐2 at Yokosuka, whereas the Reich laid down the keel of fleet escort ship F7 at the Blohm und Voss yard in Hamburg.
1938: Imperial Special Naval Landing Force troops landed in and near Qingdao, Shandong Province to reinforce the Imperial Army and Navy personnel already in the city.
1939: Imperial bombers attacked Chongqing.
1940: Berlin set the start date for Fall Gelb, the invasion of France and the Low Countries for January 17, but an Axis aircraft with plans aboard (against orders) crashed in Belgium, and Belgian intelligence recovered some of the papers. Berlin postponed the invasion indefinitely in light of this breach. Meanwhile, Masaichi Kondo engaged Chinese fighters above Guilin, Guangxi Province.
1941: Axis torpedo boats Vega and Circe assaulted the Allied convoy Excess in the Strait of Sicily at dawn, and three hundred Axis bombers attacked Portsmouth, England overnight, massacring 171 and wounding 430, but the Axis lost Klisura Pass to the Greeks. All Netherlandish Jews were legally required to confirm their heritage. Berlin and Moscow agreed on some protocols on the Baltic states.
1942: Tōkyō declared war on the Netherlands. Wilhelmshaven also suffered an Allied bombing.
1943: Axis troops once more halted an Allied assault at Donbaik, Burma.
1944: Count Ciano and seventeen of the other Fascist ministers were found guilty and sentenced to death. Deported Libyan Jews (mostly from Bengazi) arrived at the Fossoli di Carpi transit camp in Italy, and Department 7 of the Department for Public Security of the Hungarian Interior Ministry ordered foreigners to be held at the border. The Axis assembled the last of the Jewish patients in Berlin psychiatric clinics for deportation to the east, and a transport of 259 Jews from Stutthof Concentration Camp departed for Auschwitz Concentration Camp.
1945: The Axis exterminated female prisoners of Uckermark Concentration Camp who were unable to work. Meanwhile, 7.Gebirgs Division retreated from Lätäseno, Finland, and Kamikaze completed a period of refitting at Ominato, Aomori Prefecture, attaching to the Combined Fleet.
1951: Yoshio Nishina, Axis nuclear physicist, expired.

Webbon introduced Charles Haywood, stating that Jan. 6 should be treated as an “informal national holiday” and asking him for his thoughts on the matter. Haywood agreed, referring to the insurrection as an “electoral justice protest” — a phrase he says “never really caught on” — and dubbing it “Patriot’s Day.”

Haywood called for everyone who was convicted of crimes related to Jan. 6 to be pardoned, including leaders of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who were convicted of seditious conspiracy, which he called a “crime that had literally never been charged in American history before” despite having “been on the books for 200 years or 200 plus years.”

He also called on President-elect Trump to “issue significant compensation to everybody who was either imprisoned or persecuted or investigated” — to the tune of millions or tens of millions of dollars — as well as “medals, rewards, commendations” in order to show the “desire of the people in charge to applaud rather than to persecute behavior.”

Haywood said the “second half” of what should occur is “the punishing of everyone involved in the persecution of these people.” He suggested “Nuremberg-style” tribunals, and said that the police officer who fatally shot Ashli Babbitt “should be in jail for the rest of his life” alongside former congresswoman Liz Cheney, whom he accused of “suborning perjury.”

After the interview with Haywood, Webbon asked for final thoughts about Jan. 6. Wesley Todd admitted that he attended President Trump’s rally that day, but claims that he “left the city” at 1:30 p.m., and denied entering the building or trespassing on restricted grounds.

“It was in between semesters in school, and Trump said ‘Hey, I want everyone to be there, as constituents, as citizens of America, to come support me,'” Todd said. “And so I was there. I showed up. I left the city about 1:30. I didn’t go to the Capitol. I didn’t trespass. There was nothing illegal.”

But Todd reminisced about the “Christian music” that played at Trump’s rally, and praised the rallygoers as “the salt of the Earth, SBC [Southern Baptist Convention] type of people.” He added that they “loved their nation” and “gathered because a legitimate injustice had been done to them.”

Guests on Fight Back have included:

• Lucas Gage (formerly Angelo John Gage), a white nationalist and military veteran who has been suspended from Twitter/X several times for antisemitic hate speech.

• Nazi sympathizer and Holocaust denier Stew Peters. Peters has called Adolf Hitler a “hero,” said that undocumented immigrants should be murdered, and blamed Jewish people for hurricanes.

• Holocaust-denying white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who reacted to the reelection of Donald Trump by declaring “Your body, my choice. Forever.” Shields had dinner with Fuentes last year, and was a VIP guest at his AFPAC conference in June.

• Arthur Kwon Lee, an artist and self-described “racist” who has repeatedly praised Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, boasted that Hitler considered East Asians to be “honorary Aryans,” and referred to Black people as “mnkeys” and Jews as “demns.”

• Former Ku Klux Klan leader and longtime white supremacist David Duke.

• Thomas Rousseau, leader of the white nationalist hate group Patriot Front.

Quoting Steve Cushion in On Strike Against the Nazis, pages 52–54:

The mass arrests of June 1941, Operation Sonnenwende, do not seem to have greatly intimidated the Belgian miners and metalworkers. Five thousand miners in the Borinage held a two day strike on 17–18 July and 1,500 miners in the Charleroi region struck on 5 August. The Liège region was back in militant action in October with strikes of both miners and the Cockerill steel workers who had played so prominent a rôle in the May 1941 events.

Strikes in various industries, mainly in the French-speaking south of Belgium, continued throughout the autumn and winter of 1941–42. The main grievances were over food and coal rations and heating in workplaces. Le Drapeau Rouge reported around half dozen important strikes every month.¹⁰¹

One area with a particularly militant record was Verviers in Liège province, with strikes in April 1942 starting in the textile industry, then spreading to engineering workers and the railway. There was inevitably widespread industrial action on May Day.

One group of workers who were noted for their early strike action were the postal workers in Brussels. Action in September 1941 resulted in a 10% wage increase and a bonus of 150 francs for the married men. Another strike over Christmas and New Year was also settled to the workers' satisfaction. August 1942 saw another postal strike, this time winning a shoe allowance and a loan of 1000 francs.¹⁰²

July 1942 was particularly active. The strike started in the Basse-Sambre mining basin with 35 pits striking for 10 days losing 200,000 tons of coal production. The action spread to 8 pits in the Charleroi coalfield and several engineering factories in the Centre province.

The Fédération des Métallurgistes de Liège (FML, Metalworkers Federation of Liège), the engineering workers federation of the pre-war CGTB, had fallen into decline and was nearly wiped out by a series of arrests on 23 March 1942.

With the old leaders arrested, a young militant, André Renard, took the lead. He already had a good local reputation from his militancy in the 1936 strikes and he managed to rebuild the FML from the base, encouraging the formation of works committees and distributing a regular stencil duplicated bulletin, Le Métallurgiste. Deportations for forced labour in [the Third Reich] gave the FML its first real test.¹⁰³

In March 1942, the occupying authorities started to recruit forced labour to work in factories in [the Third Reich] as the losses on the Eastern Front led to a labour shortage when German workers were drafted into the Wehrmacht.

Working class opposition to these deportations came to a head in November 1942, starting in Cockerill near Liège again, with a strike against the deportation of workers from the factory. This spread to other local factories and mines and the Verviers rail workers joined the action. The occupation forces took hostages from among the workers, but when this had no effect on the strike, they released them and put back the deportations to February 1943.

The experience of joint action between the Fédération des Métallurgistes de Liège and the Comités de Lutte Syndicale des métallurgistes (CLS) in Liège led first to the CLS being given delegates on the action committee of the FML and eventually to a joint organisation. This fusion gave an impetus to the clandestine workers' organisation in the region and workplace committees were formed in many new factories. By the end of 1943, the FML had 12,000 dues paying members.¹⁰⁴

Strikes against forced labour in [the Third Reich] spread to other regions. At the Fabelta factory in Brussels, [Axis] recruiters demanded thirty women to work in an aircraft factory in Leipzig. All the women went on strike enabling the women who had been designated to flee.

There were reports of a number of other strikes against forced labour in [the Third Reich] in December and January 1943, including tramway and railway workers refusing to transport the deportees. In February, at the ACE factory in Charleroi, 4,500 workers went on strike against the threat to deport 1,200 of them. Also in February there are reports of 60,000 metalworkers on strike in Liège province, the third strike in 3 months.¹⁰⁵

May Day 1943 was again widely celebrated, but this was the last of the large-scale, almost general, strikes. Thereafter sporadic action continued over the summer of 1943 in the mines and engineering, mainly short stoppages, go-slows and delegations to management, normally over wage demands, frequently successful. While the action was mainly concentrated in the more industrial French speaking south, there was a level of militancy in the ports and dockyards of Antwerp and Bruges/Zeebrugge.

The final widespread action started in October 1943 with a campaign for a 2000 franc bonus. This seems to have struck a chord with many workers and Le Drapeau Rouge has a significant list of workplaces involved, including the inevitable Cockerill, but also in workforces not previously much involved, including the Flanders textile industry and the railways. This campaign had mixed results but with some reported successes.

In 1944, the massive aerial bombardments by the Allied air-forces disrupted production more or less completely and forced the workers' organisations onto the defensive, mainly pushing demands for pay for time spent in air-raid shelters. During this period, the PCB seemed to lose touch, concentrating on calls for the formation of Milices patriotiques and for L'Insurrection nationale, calls which did not elicit a great response. Those workers who were likely to take up arms seem to have done so already.

(Emphasis added.)

After asking how U.S. involvement in Israel and Syria helps “your average American,” Rousseau claimed that “a lot” of people “who run the government” are Jews. Shields interrupted, referring to Jews as “dual citizens” and falsely claiming that “if you’re Jewish you’re automatically a dual citizen of Israel.”

While Jewish people have a right to immigrate to Israel and become citizens under the Law of Return, Jews are not “automatically” citizens of Israel.

After Shields complained that U.S. taxpayer money was being used to fund foreign wars instead of disaster relief, Rousseau bragged about his organization’s efforts to help people impacted by Hurricane Helene. Patriot Front was one of several explicitly white supremacist and [neo]fascist groups which attempted to co-opt Hurricane Helene for their own propaganda purposes.

When Rousseau accused the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) of “mishandling the issue,” Shields claimed that a “dual citizen was the head of that.” Shields was most likely referring to FEMA’s director of public affairs who became a target of antisemitic rhetoric and conspiracy theories in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

Shields praised Rousseau and Patriot Front for its work, but asked if they “help all races.” Rousseau replied that they “prioritize, almost to the exclusion of all others — practically to the exclusion of all others — our own people.”

[…]

Rousseau told Shields this proved that the ADL will “side with Jews no matter what they do. They could be the most despicable man in the world, which Leo Frank is certainly in the running if he isn’t number one. They’ll side with them and they’ll call anyone who disagrees that you’re an antisemite.”

On the contrary, I am pretty sure that the ADL won’t side with the many lower-class Jews in North America, let alone the anticolonial ones. It is almost a meme organization.

It is no small task and I know that readers of my blog will be sensitive as to how enormous this undertaking is. Because of Yad Vashem's determination to ensure that Holocaust history fits their preconceived ideological framing, Yad Vashem has had to reject a number of books that they might have published which any holocaust institute worthy of the name would have grasped with 2 hands.

The first such was Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews. First published in 1961 and updated since it remains the most comprehensive history of the holocaust. Even Yad Vashem's academic advisor, Professor Yehuda Bauer was forced to admit it is 'unsurpassed'. It is not for nothing that Yad Vashem is incapable of producing a general and comprehensive history of the Holocaust.

Hilberg, who became the Professor of Holocaust History at Vermont University, saw the Judenrate as an instrument of the Nazis who were essential to the implementation of the Final Solution. Yad Vashem didn't appreciate such an analysis since two-thirds of the Judenrate were Zionists!

Polish [neo]fascist Michal Kaminski who justified the murder of Polish Jews in Jedwabne visits Yad Vashem

Likewise Yad Vashem didn't appreciate Hilberg's dismissal of Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust as minor as Zionist history consciously magnifies it and on occasion invents it in order to provide itself with a retrospective justification and back story.

When it came to the escape of Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler from Auschwitz in April 1944 Yad Vashem decided that the best thing to do was to ignore them. Not only were they not Zionists but they came into conflict with Zionist collaborator, Rudolf Kasztner who, in the words of Israeli Judge Benjamin Halevi in 1955, 'sold his soul to Satan' when he agreed a deal with Eichmann for a train out of Hungary for 1684 of the Zionist/Jewish elite in return for silence about where the deportation trains were heading.

Kasztner, who was the plaintiff in a libel trial in Israel in 1954 when accused of collaboration, rapidly turned into the de-facto defendant. When Israel's second government led by Moshe Sharrett decided to appeal the verdict of the first trial, that Kasztner was a collaborator, it promptly fell. Kasztner has nonetheless been rehabilitated by Yad Vashem.

No matter that Kasztner’s deal with Eichmann led to the truth of Auschwitz being kept from Hungary’s 700,000 Jews resulting in nearly ⅔ of them being deported to their deaths. This is a minor matter. What is important is that his deal with Eichmann saved 1600 Zionist and Jewish leaders. The fact that he went to Nuremberg after the war to provide testimony for major [Axis] war criminals is erased from history.

Suffice to say YV wouldn't publish Vrba's memoirs 'I cannot forgive'. In fact they were determined to erase Vrba and Wetzler's very names from Yad Vashem. It is with difficulty that one could find any mention of them until, the late 1990's when Ruth Linn, Professor of Education at Haifa University, began a campaign in their favour. At one point Yehuda Bauer called Linn an 'anti-Zionist'. There is no worse insult in the Zionist dictionary than that!!

Suffice to say Yad Vashem weren't interested in the history of the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt by its last Commander, Marek Edelman. Edelman's misfortune was being a member of the anti-Zionist Bund and a supporter of the Palestinian resistance.

In the words of Daniel Blatman, an Israeli holocaust scholar, Yad Vashem is a 'diplomatic laundromat for every fascist and anti-Semite who darkens its doors.' And there have been a lot of them – Trump, Brazil’s Bolsonaro, the Philipenes Duterte and assorted neo[fascists] from Germany and Austria.

In 1976 South Africa’s Prime Minister, John Vorster, who had been interned during the war because he was a member of the neo[fascist] Afrikaner Broederbond and Ossewa Brandwag, visited Israel as a guest of the Israeli Labor Party government. Naturally he was taken on a tour of Yad Vashem.

Israel Shahak, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and Bergen-Belsen wrote

Of the Yad Vashem… theatre, I do not wish to speak, at all. It, and its vile exploiting, such as honouring South Africa collaborators with the Nazis, are truly beneath contempt.

In recent months, a remarkable development in the Empire’s decline has gone almost entirely unnoticed. The National Endowment for Democracy’s grant database has been removed from the web.

Of course, despite NED brazenly purging evidence of its vast operations from the web, that conniving continues apace regardless, covertly. One might even argue the Endowment’s chicanery is all the more dangerous now, given individuals and organizations can conceal their funding sources. But the move amply shows NED today cannot withstand the slightest public scrutiny, which its existence was intended to exemplify. It also demonstrates that “overt operations” with open US funding are now the very “kiss of death” the Endowment was meant to replace. The Empire is on the run.

The impending availability of the material has been controversial in the Netherlands because relatively few of the people in the database were ever formally charged with crimes. Not all even faced formal investigations.

The Dutch government investigated 300,000 people for collaborating with the [Axis] and more than 65,000 of them stood trial in a special court system in the years after World War II.

Collaboration enabled the [Axis] to murder an estimated three quarters of Dutch Jews, including their most famous victim, Anne Frank, and her family. The identity of the person who exposed Frank’s hiding place has been a matter of debate.

It was not until 2020 that the Dutch government apologized for failing to protect Jews during the Holocaust, long after other European leaders and after local Jews had requested an apology.

More recently, some institutions in the Netherlands have sought to make amends for their rôle in the Holocaust locally. The Dutch public tram company GVB, for example, sought compensation after the war for having transported Jews to their deaths; earlier this year, it announced that it would place memorials at three deportation hubs, and the city of Amsterdam pledged 100,000 euros — and potentially more in the future — to local Jewish groups to divest itself of its revenue from collaborating with the [Axis].

With all of the numerous literature on the Shoah, it is surprisingly difficult to find (English) works focussing on the Fascist assault on Jewish cultures; most barely touch on the subject. Many sources (such as this one) are content to simply remind us of the Shoah’s death toll as if that automatically does all of the explaining for them, but the Western Axis’s incomplete annihilation of Yiddishists only tells us half of the story.

As I’ll soon show you, the Fascist approach to Jewish cultures was actually less straightforward than you might expect, but there was certainly an element of annihilation involved:

In Poland, in both Bedzin and Poznan, special German “Brenn-Kommandos” (arson squads) were assigned to burn the Jewish synagogues and books.¹¹ The destruction of Torah scrolls and other religious books was especially difficult for the religious Jewish community, since according to orthodox religious law, it is imperative that these materials be treated with the utmost respect and reverence, and those who destroy such sacred documents are considered in violation of a divine command. It is stated: “The sefer torah, or any sacred book or writing, or anything which has served a holy purpose, which has become worn out, must not be burned but secreted.”¹²

Some Jews attempted to save Torah scrolls and other materials from the burning buildings but were either shot or thrown into the flames.¹³ In such a way the Great Talmudic Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Lublin burned while [Fascists] cheered and Jews wept.¹⁴ [Fascist] correspondents stated:

For us it was a matter of special pride to destroy the Talmudic Academy […] which was known as the greatest in Poland […] We threw the huge Talmudic library out of the building and carried the books to the market-place, where we set fire to them. The fire lasted twenty hours. The Lublin Jews assembled around and wept bitterly, almost silencing us with their cries. We summoned the military band, and with joyful shouts the soldiers drowned out the sounds of the Jewish cries.¹⁵

[…]

In the Vilna ghetto […] the books read there were in Polish (70.4 percent) and Yiddish (17.6 percent), with Russian, Hebrew, and other languages making up the rest. Within four months circulation increased to about 140,000 and the library was “full of readers.” However, by September of 1943 the ghetto was liquidated and along with it much of the material from the ghetto library, which was used by the janitor to heat the furnace of the house.⁵⁶

Nonetheless, the incendiary method, as far as I can tell, was exceptional rather than standard. The Axis had more ‘refined’ ways of dealing with Jewish literature:

Dr. Pohl arrived in Vilna in January 1942 together with four assistants (two of whom had academic training), Drs. Miller, Wulf, Sparkett, and Gimpel. He ordered that all the Jewish book collections should be gathered at the Yiddisher Visenshaftlikker Institut (YIVO) building at 18 Wiwulski Street.

Books soon began to arrive and included materials from more than 300 synagogues as well as private collections. In addition to books, Pohl also disposed of the plates of the Romm publishing house, noted for its editions of the Talmud.⁴⁰ The remains of the Kletzkin publishing house were also brought to YIVO but were sent mainly for pulping.⁴¹

The Jewish Council (Judenrat) in Vilna was ordered to provide twenty workers, five of them experts in Judaica, to select, catalog, and ship the books. One hundred thousand volumes were arranged by century of publication; 20,000 of these in seventy-four cases were then shipped to [the Third Reich] with the rest being sold to a paper mill for pulp at nineteen Reichsmark per ton.⁴² Pulping was a widespread practice and initially there were few guidelines to determine what should be saved.

Now this is when things become complicated. Long-term readers are surely familiar with how the Fascists destroyed synagogues (e.g. Rashi Shul), yet you might have never particularly noticed the inconsistency where they sometimes let others (e.g. Altneuschul) simply gather dust. A similar inconsistency towards Jewish literature existed:

However, in February 1943, Dr. Cruse of the ERR issued the following directive: “Books in Hebrew script of recent date (later than 1800, insofar as this can be determined) may be turned over for pulping; this applies to prayerbooks, Memorbuecher and other religious works in the German language. On the other hand, please send here all writings which bear on the history of culture and the nature of Judaism, as well as the works of Jewish authors.”⁴³

From my research, it looks like most Third Reich officials preferred to stop, but not exactly annihilate, Jewish cultures. What I mean by this is that in many cases they were content to merely seize Yiddish and other Jewish works as trophies, not always with an intent to destroy them, but without expecting a future for Yiddish either:

In December 1939 [Berlin] decreed that all book collections in Poland, other than those owned by German natives, were to be confiscated and so ordered them to be surrendered.¹⁷ In Warsaw the great library of the Synagogue and of the Institute of Jewish Studies, with its collections related to the Near East and rare manuscripts from the tenth century, was taken away to Berlin by a special unit led by Professor Paulsen. Other Jewish libraries from Warsaw were sent to Vienna.¹⁸ Jewish libraries from Łódź and other areas were relocated to St. Michael's Church in Poznan, which was unused because of the transfer of the entire Polish population.¹⁹

In 1941 the [Axis] founded a Reichsuniversität in Poznan with a professorship for Jewish history and languages and a library of about 400,000 volumes in Judaica confiscated from Jewish libraries. Jewish books were also transferred to other [Fascist] institutes in Poland, including the Institut für deutsche Ostarbeit in Cracow, founded in 1940 as a research division on East European Jewry and a branch of the Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage of Frankfurt in Łódź.²⁰

It is possible that books from Poland and other areas of the East were sent to other large libraries of the Reich but there is no definitive evidence of this. There is, however, a letter from the Prussian State Library in 1943 expressing an interest in approximately 30,000 materials that had been collected in Vilna. Other materials found their way informally to institutions and individuals.²¹

A few Jewish adults noticed the paradox of the Axis preserving certain Jewish works. Quoting Elisabeth Gallas's A Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the Holocaust, page 59:

The survival of a collection was rarely coincidental or arbitrary: The [Fascists] themselves had determined whether it was destroyed or confiscated. Joshua Starr, chief executive of the JCR in New York who worked at the Offenbach Depot from June 1948 to April 1949 on behalf of his organization, described this phenomenon: “Today when one handles a book stamped Sichergestellt durch Einsatzstab RR, he holds a mute witness of the final phase of a program designed to concentrate staggering facilities for the investigation of the Jewish past and present. […] It is, as we shall see, largely to this bizarre program that we owe credit in the grim sense, for the survival of portions of Jewish property in central Europe.”¹³⁴

Hannah Arendt later refers to the same paradox in her famous report Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she describes the German authorities' painstaking approach to the looting and amassing of Jewish cultural property: “Incidentally, an eagerness to establish museums commemorating their enemies was very characteristic of the Nazis. During the war, several services competed bitterly for the honor of establishing anti-Jewish museums and libraries. We owe to this strange craze the salvage of many great cultural treasures of European Jewry.”¹³⁵

Lastly, there is a certain Herzlian fascist whom I would like to cynically thank for inspiring me to research this subject. Quoting Dan Tamir’s Hebrew Fascism in Palestine, 1922–1942, pages 146–147:

Having read that members of a Yiddish speaking socialist group had sent to their colleagues in Vilnius some of the stones which were thrown on them, together with their blood-stained shirts, Aḥime’ir joyfully promised them that

if they continue to spread here their Ashdodian language, then the empty museum of “Culture for the Wearies” in Vilnius will soon be filled with shirts and stones from our country. And if they continue importing Yiddish to our country, then they will also find themselves exporting more shirts, stones, shards of glass and broken skulls…¹⁷

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

Further reading: Stolen Words: The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books & Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish.

Earlier in 2024, Azov’s openly neo-Nazi brigade in the Ground Forces of Ukraine announced that a handful of its fighters were launching a summer tour of Europe. Apparently they were expecting to be treated like rock stars. This unit, the 3rd Assault Brigade, is not to be confused with Azov’s other (more famous) brigade in the National Guard, which has made an effort to refine its image for Western liberals.

Much of the tour was cancelled, a month before the “Nation Europa” event, and not long after yours truly revealed that a decorated 3rd Assault fighter visited Auschwitz to mock the Holocaust. He went there wearing a shirt from the Russian-Ukrainian neo-Nazi band “M8L8TH” with a quote attributed to Hitler on the back. Thanks to Dreznica Goat, readers of this blog already learned that the bass guitar player in M8L8TH is a medic in the 3rd Assault Brigade who represented the Nation Europa network at a roundtable of neo-Nazis on Ukraine’s Independence Day.

On the left, from the “Nation Europa” conference, a slide says “Solidarity with Mr. Bond!” referring to an Austrian neo-Nazi sentenced to 10 years in prison. On the right, a picture from the Auschwitz stunt.

My article about the conference failed to identify several of the participants, most importantly Andriy Malkov, an organizer of the event, who made multiple speeches and moderated the roundtable discussion. He also appears to have served in the 3rd Assault Brigade, which is commanded by Azov leader Andriy Biletsky.

Malkov was once part of the “Rodychi” (Relatives) gang of white supremacist football hooligans in Kyiv, from which an important clique in the Azov movement — and a rival splinter group — emerged. For more than half a decade, his old friend Serhii Filimonov has led the militant organization “Gonor” (Honor), which essentially “sold out” as the [neofascist] [neo]pagan stormtroopers of the Western-funded NGO complex in Ukraine. Apparently they are no longer friends. It’s easy to imagine that the future organizer of “Nation Europa” found himself at a crossroads.

“Nation Europa” organizer Andriy Malkov, seen above-right with Ulana Suprun, former Healthcare Minister of Ukraine (2016–19)

A coalition of neo-Nazi hipster hooligans, radical NGO activists, far-right influencers and military fundraisers is apparently being groomed for the big stage by powerful interests, if only to ride the coattails of a potential successor to Volodymyr Zelensky.

Serhii Filimonov, in his younger days on the right. On the left, his tattoos include a Nazi Totenkopf above his knee, neo-pagan symbols on his shoulders, and between them it says, “Victory or Valhalla.”

Over ten years ago, Andriy Malkov commented on a picture of Serhii Filimonov, 19, wearing the same shirt from the “White Boys Club” that we’ve already seen on Malkov. The White Boys Club is an umbrella of hooligan firms that support FC Dynamo Kyiv and the Azov movement. In 2014, Filimonov joined the Azov Battalion with the call-sign “Son of Perun,” referring to the Slavic god of war that neo-Nazi [neo]pagans tend to worship. In a 2022 interview, Filimonov said, “those who are interested know that ‘Gonor’ are pagans. And many [far-right/neo-Nazi] symbols that can scare people are actually related to our religion.” In fact, “We look after the temple on Lysa Hora.”

Serhii Filimonov and friends from Gonor at the Perun shrine on Lysa Hora (Bald Hill) in Kyiv. “Son of Perun” apparently edited the picture on the right to remove Sashko Vovk’s openly neo[fascist] tattoos.

Malkov and Filimonov fought in the Azov Battalion a decade ago, when it had a reputation for being an openly neo[fascist] unit. Subsequently, they joined the nascent Azov movement’s Civic Corps, a forerunner to its political party, the National Corps. “Son of Perun” led the Kyiv branch of both organizations. The journalist Oleksiy Kuzmenko tells us, “Filimonov’s old social media posts from his days in the Azov include a 2014 post seemingly honoring Adolf Hitler’s birthday with thematic songs and a commentary ‘I regret that you won’t rise up like Jesus, grandpa’, etc. Filimonov’s VK also links to ‘SoberNazi’ Twitter handle.”

Left to right at a 2015 meeting of the Azov Civic Corps: Serhii Filimonov, Andriy Malkov, “Sashko Vovk”

After Dynamo Kyiv won the 2015 Ukrainian Cup final, fans swarmed the field and Malkov’s friend Rostislav Karpich ran onto the pitch with a swastika on his shirt. Malkov had the same one. Later that year, Rodychi hooligans from the Civic Corps — including Filimonov’s close friend Ihor Potashenkov, or “Malyar” (Painter) — viciously attacked black soccer fans at a European Champions League match in the Ukrainian capital.

Clockwise from top-right: Ihor Potashenkov attacking a black soccer fan (2015), Potashenkov and Malkov at a Dynamo Kyiv game (2017), Rostislav Karpich and Malkov in Vienna (2018), and Karpich with his swastika shirt (2015)

Filimonov’s gang of [neofascist] hooligans went unpunished for these high-profile hate crimes, despite an international media spotlight and consequences for Dynamo Kyiv. Oleksiy Kuzmenko noted in 2018, Potashenkov was an “active participant of some of Ukraine’s iconic and more controversial moments during the [2013–14] Euromaidan demonstrations.” Kuzmenko reported that in 2016, this notoriously violent neo[fascist] with “clearly visible swastika tattoos” on his head nevertheless received “sophisticated training” from the European Security Academy based in Poland.

Evolution of Ihor Potashenkov, aka “Malyar” — from attacking riot police in Kyiv (2013) to wearing a neo[fascist] shirt while undergoing his training at the European Security Academy in Poland (2016)

From 2015–18, Andriy Malkov appears to have grown as close as ever with Filimonov’s circle of Azov veterans, in particular Ihor Potashenkov and Nazarii Kravchenko, who was the deputy head of the National Corps. In 2018, the State Department’s annual report on human rights practices in Ukraine described the National Corps as a “nationalist hate group.” That year there was a series of neo-Nazi attacks on Romani people and settlements in Ukraine. Filimonov led a group of Azov militants that perpetrated at least one of these “pogroms.”

In the coming weeks, Kateryna Handziuk, an “anti-corruption activist” in Kherson, was attacked with sulfuric acid. Later that year, Handziuk died of complications from the severe injuries that she suffered, and Filimonov’s crew supported the protest campaign, “Who Killed Katya Handziuk?” This appears to have forged an alliance between the Rodychi hooligans and leaders of Ukrainian civil society™ which probably encouraged Filimonov to spearhead an Azov splinter group in 2019. As a project manager for the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union once said,

I had a very cautious optimism when some of the not-so-recent people from the National Corps moved away from Biletsky, created their own civilized NGO, and began to cooperate with healthy civil society forces. In fact, Nazarii Kravchenko, Serhii Filimonov, Igor Malyar [Potashenkov] and all of Gonor became the “security service” during peaceful actions, in which everyone participated: right-wing, left-wing, human rights defenders, veterans… And it was a process of unification that made me very happy.

Nazarii Kravchenko, neo[fascist] former leader of the National Corps (Azov political party), with former CIA director David Petraeus (left, 2019) and Andriy Malkov (right, 2017)

Perhaps the “best man” in this marriage, Serhiy Sternenko is a nationalist influencer in Ukraine, and former leader of the extremist Right Sector in Odessa who rebranded as a radical anti-corruption activist. Under Sternenko’s local leadership, Right Sector helped to perpetrate the May 2014 massacre of anti-Maidan activists in Odessa. His friend Kateryna Handziuk was among those who praised the far-right “patriots” that instituted “Ukrainian order” in this Russian-speaking city of southern Ukraine (and poured gasoline on the fire in eastern Ukraine).

Kateryna Handziuk at a nationalist march

Serhii Filimonov’s dramatic falling out with Azov leader Andriy Biletsky was related to his budding alliance with Serhii Sternenko. Biletsky and other Azovites reportedly beat up Filimonov and his right-hand man Nazarii Kravchenko in 2020, and “demanded to know who ordered the media support for Sternenko.”

Two months before Handziuk was viciously attacked with acid outside her home in Kherson, another man assaulted Sternenko in Odessa and wound up dead. To hear it from Christopher Miller, now the Financial Times correspondent in Ukraine, “Sternenko chased the attacker down and sliced his gut open, spilling out his intestines. He posted a video of it and has boasted about chasing the guy down after he was attacked.”

Sternenko subsequently acquired hero status among Rodychi hooligans and radicalized NGO liberals. According to the sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko, “Sternenko is an especially notorious case of a criminal who found a way to avoid punishment for many years via switching from far-right to a pro-Western liberal. I don’t understand why he should be allowed to do this. The civil society that applauded this is very sick.” Katherine Quinn-Judge, a former senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, explained in 2021, “A critical mass of young Ukrainian liberals consider Sternenko A-OK, because a) he’s anti-Russian, b) he’s said that beating up gays isn’t compulsory, c) he has opposed genuine corruption in Odesa, and d) he’s started wearing glasses and whatnot.”

Serhii Sternenko (and Filimonov on the left)

The campaign to “Free Sternenko” gave these nationalist bedfellows another cause to rally around (typically with flares, supplied by the Nazi protest experts), which culminated in a riot outside of the presidential office building on his 26th birthday. In the meantime, Sternenko’s friends from the NGO complex grew closer to Gonor. A perfect example is Melanie Podolyak, the daughter of a former deputy minister of culture.

Melanie Podolyak, with Sternenko on the right, wearing a Gonor shirt on the left

Sternenko and Podolyak were apparently both friends of Kateryna Handziuk, and by 2021 some people speculated that they were dating. From roughly 2016–19, Podolyak worked as a project manager for the Lviv Media Forum and later the Lviv Security Forum, in which capacity she repeatedly brushed shoulders with retired US general Ben Hodges, a major cheerleader of proxy warfare in Ukraine.

By 2019, Podolyak became an assistant to Oksana Syroyid, a leader of the “Samopomich” (Self Reliance) party and deputy chair of the Ukrainian parliament. Melanie Podolyak reportedly also advised the international department of this pro-Western political party, which was wiped out in the 2019 parliamentary elections. “Low polling doesn’t stop Self Reliance from being every allied embassy’s reform favorites,” observed Jonathan Brunson, a “political warfare analyst” with an eye on the far-right in Ukraine.

Later that year, Podolyak probably took part in Gonor’s new “Academy of Street Protest” featuring Sternenko, Filimonov, and Potashenkov. In any case, she started to wear a shirt from the Gonor “Academy,” the symbol of which is a Molotov cocktail. “Son of Perun” and “Malyar” then visited Hong Kong in December 2019 to engage in “protest tourism.” Filimonov shared a picture of himself at a demonstration wearing his “Who Killed Katya Handziuk” shirt. He captioned his Instagram post in English: “Fight for Freedom!! Stand with Hong Kong!!”

Filimonov in Hong Kong. “What the Hell Are Ukrainian Fascists Doing in the Hong Kong Protests?” asked Vice News. “Far-right hooligans from Ukraine at the Hong Kong protests,” reported the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. Apparently these outlets did not yet receive the memo about Gonor’s “evolution.”

In 2019, the Ukrainian School of Political Studies (USPS) created an annual scholarship to honor the memory of its 2015 graduate Kateryna Handziuk. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, “Son of Perun” had to wait until 2021 to become the second recipient of the Handziuk scholarship. According to the USPS, “Filimonov’s activity matches Ukrainian School of Political Studies values. By his work, Serhiy, like Katya Handziuk, defends the interests of the democratic state of Ukraine.” The Council of Europe, “the continent’s leading human rights organization” — not to be confused with the EU’s European Council — funds the USPS, which is proud to be associated with several people in Filimonov’s orbit.

Filimonov at a session of the Ukrainian School of Political Studies

The USPS awarded Filimonov the scholarship in July 2021, evidently for a summer program. Earlier that year, Filimonov was detained for “hooliganism,” and placed under house arrest, after a mob of Sternenko supporters assaulted the presidential administration building, to protest a prison sentence of seven years for their hero’s kidnapping of a local politician in 2015. Later that year, a court commuted this sentence, and according to Sternenko, the president even offered to make him the head of the Odessa department of the Security Service of Ukraine.

Filimonov after Sternenko supporters attacked the presidential office building. [The 'C' in 'ACAB' there does not necessarily refer to either cops or capitalists.]

“Happy birthday Serhii Sternenko,” Melanie Podolyak captioned a Facebook post with her pictures from the incident. The day before Sternenko supporters smashed the front doors, heavily graffitied the facade, and burned the entrance sign to the presidential administration building, she promoted the insurrection with a long Facebook post accompanied by an illustration of a flamethrower. Filimonov reportedly gave the signal for the mob to attack the building by lighting a flare. “Serhiy is ‘guilty’ only because in 2014 he decided that he was ready to spend his youth not just having fun and hanging out,” insisted Podolyak.

Podolyak’s photos from the riot, and the image she used to promote the event

Volodymyr Ishchenko commented on the situation a couple days later, “Western officials and embassies still have not condemned the far-right assault on Ukraine’s presidential office by Sternenko supporters. A reason for this is that the West has supported some of the coordinators of the rally and many of the participants, including financially.”

Filimonov and Sternenko were both represented in court by Masi Nayem, “the lawyer for Ukraine’s national patriotic revolutionary far right,” whose elder sibling Mustafa is a “top Sorosite” credited with launching the “Euromaidan” protest movement in 2013. These Afghan-Ukrainian brothers also have a sister, Mariam, who claims to be “decolonizing the discourse about Ukraine.” As someone on Twitter/X once said, “her whole shtick is diversitywashing Ukrainian nationalism and denying racism exists in Ukraine because she’s never personally experienced it.”

United24 Media

Yaroslav Yurchsyhyn, the former executive director of Transparency International Ukraine (2016–19), is another “anti-corruption activist” and radical liberal-nationalist who came to the rescue of the Sternenko rioters and Gonor hooligans. He participated in the rally and offered to bail out its arrested leaders. Yurchyshyn graduated from the USPS alongside Kateryna Handziuk, and championed the campaign to bring her killers to justice. In 2018, he posed for a picture with Angela Merkel, both of them holding up a shirt that said “Who is Behind the Assault on Kateryna Handziuk?” Since 2019, Yurchsyhyn has been a prominent member of the “Holos” (Voice) party in the Ukrainian parliament, in which it apparently replaced Self Reliance as the “embassy’s favorite.”

(I think that this is as good a spot as any to end this excerpt.)

Carl claimed that “every single one of the founders” except Thomas Jefferson “would be a right-wing Christo-fascist,” that the Supreme Court “radically inverted the fact that Christianity and religion had always been in the center of American public life,” and that the idea that “invoking the Christian God in a public context could be unconstitutional” is “just risible.”

He then went on to say that “what you see right now in the public square is a different religion. It’s the religion of transgenderism. It’s the religion of homosexuality.”

“Abortion rights,” Andrew Isker interrupted.

“Yeah,” Carl replied. “I mean that’s the god — or secularism, you know, quite frankly. That’s the god that we need to worship right now. It is not that a public square with no god. It’s a public square with a god that is antithetical to the god of the Founders. You know, for the country that they thought they were founding.”