I know that movies "based on real events" typically take a great deal of artistic license.

in the film The Greatest Beer Run Ever, our main character witnesses a few things that really did happen in Vietnam, and really were kept secret at the time, such as military action occurring in places where the government said it wasn't, and some CIA war crimes.

but, one additional thing is that our main character sees the Americans blow a hole in the embassy wall after the attack on the embassy, I think it was a stray round from a tank or something. when the press shows up, they are all told that it was VC sappers who did it, and our main character tries to correct the record.

whenever I try looking this up, it's all references to this film, but all of the Rddit threads I can find about it have the responses deleted which is weird.

was this entirely fabricated for the film?

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/695985

Estimating the number of homosexual men in the SA or any right‐wing group is extremely difficult because as Theweleit so accurately determines, “In the absence of statements from fascist men directly involved in sexual relationships with other men — it is impossible to determine the nature of those relationships in any detail.” However, there is reason to believe that there was a notable amount of homosexual presence in Volkisch parties, including the NSDAP.

In a 1926 survey done by The League of Human Rights, a homosexual rights advocacy group based in Berlin, about 3% of the more than 30,000 male members of the League said they were members of far‐right völkisch parties (including the Nazis). 21% said they belonged to the conservative DNVP (Deutschnationale Volkspartei; originally a conservative monarchist party that in the later Weimar period aligned itself more closely to radical far‐right parties like the NSDAP).

Furthermore, there were some homosexuals in SA leadership whose sexual orientation was an open secret in the [NSDAP] for a long time, most notable of which were the SA co‐founder and commander Ernst Röhm, Edmund Heines (Röhm’s deputy), and Gerhard Rossbach (an associate of Röhm who supplied early SA troops with their signature brown shirts).

[…]

As demonstrated, the SA’s balancing act depended on its homosexual members keeping their proclivities a secret, giving the organization plausible deniability against accusations of harbouring homosexuals.

It is interesting to note that these men were critical of how activists such as Magnus Hirschfield promoted gay acceptance. On the contrary, gay fascists thought that they should earn heterosexuals’ acceptance by proving that they were just as manly — if not more so — than the ideal straight man. In short, whereas some gay men opposed the neopatriarchy, gay fascists sided with it.

As for queer women, I know only of the cases of Ruth Roellig and Violette Morris. The latter gained the Fascists’ interest as early as 1936 and later collaborated with the French Gestapo. She had access to black market goods and she transported Axis officials. There are also rumors that she committed her own atrocities, but these remain unconfirmed.

ETA: Quoting Régis Schlagdenhauffen in Queer in Europe during the Second World War, pages 32–34:

The enlistment of homosexuals in the Wehrmacht shows the régime’s ambiguous attitude towards homosexuals. We have very few eyewitness accounts of this matter to date. It was mainly from 1944 onwards that this recruitment took place, because of the considerable losses at the front. In his memoirs Pierre Seel (1994) was one of those detainees incorporated into the Wehrmacht by force after having spent time in a camp. He is no exception.

Several cases support the hypothesis that homosexuals were incorporated into the disciplinary units of the Wehrmacht or the Dirlewanger brigade of the SS (Ingrao 2006). Known for the cruelty of its members, this special unit was named after its commander, Oskar Dirlewanger. According to Christian Ingrao this SS unit committed the worst atrocities of the Second World War. As of 1943 it comprised five companies, two of which were made up of men recruited in the camps.³⁴

According to Klausch, homosexuals from the camps were used to flesh out the Dirlewanger brigade (1993: 75–6).³⁵ Apart from Dr. Pistor, a certain Anton V. who was released from Sachsenhausen on 31 May 1944 was enlisted in the Dirlewanger brigade (Müller and Sternweiler 2000: 51). So was a Hermann Fries, released on 15 March 1944 to be enlisted in a probation company of the Wehrmacht.

Some of the soldiers assigned to this type of army corps came from the police and the SS — particularly men who had been found guilty of homosexuality. This raises questions as to the official position of the army on the presence of known homosexuals within its ranks. As early as 1937 Himmler declared his intention to eradicate homosexuality from the SS. He ordered homosexuals to be publicly humiliated and thrown out of the SS, taken to court and then, once they had served their sentence, sent to a concentration camp.

In Sachsenhausen for example, eight detainees were registered under the code “SS‐SK 175”, which stood for SS assigned to a disciplinary unit for homosexuality. Although Himmler ordered men accused of homosexuality to be treated with the utmost severity, the practical application of that order was left to the discretion of the SS judges (Giles 2002).

Things changed from 15 November 1941, the date of application of a secret decree for the preservation of the SS and the police. Thereafter any agent found guilty of an “unnatural” relationship with another man was to be sentenced to death.³⁶ Historian Michael Schön (1996) has looked into the case of four police officers executed under this decree. They were arrested and put to death in the last days of the war.

According to the archives, on 24 April 1945 the police high command ordered the pardon and release of all prisoners in the Berlin‐Spandau police district because of the advance of the Red Army. All, that is, except the four police officers accused of homosexuality (ibid.). The order was to have them executed that very day, by virtue of the decree for the preservation of the police and the SS.

The precise reasons for such haste remain unclear, for according to Klausch (1993) this type of case is exceptional in so far as the judges of the court martial, since October 1943, had pronounced themselves in favour of incorporating police and SS officers found guilty of homosexuality into the Wehrmacht. The judges of the court martial distinguished three levels of homosexual offences:

• minor cases of homosexuality, where there was no likelihood of the offence being repeated: the guilty party was to be assigned to a special unit;
• slightly more serious cases, where a repeat offence could not be ruled out: the sentence could be served in the special Dirlewanger brigade of the SS;
• serious cases: the guilty party was to be sentenced to imprisonment and public humiliation.

In late 1943, when the Wehrmacht was suffering colossal losses, it was decided that men convicted of homosexuality in the SS would immediately be enlisted in the Wehrmacht (ibid: 96). As early as 1936, the Wehrmacht had found its own solution for recycling its homosexuals: they were incorporated in the disciplinary battalions, the 500th Probation Battalion (Bewährungstruppe). During the war these battalions numbered over 33 000 men, mostly enlisted by force, and men released from concentration camps.³⁷

According to Klausch, there are two explanations as to why homosexuals were enlisted in these troops — and more generally in the army. On the one hand, “it was considered that many of the men convicted under paragraph 175 could be cured of their homosexuality and brought back to heterosexual normalcy through reeducation” (ibid.: 24).

And secondly, to quote the surgeon‐general of the armed forces, if homosexuals were excluded from the army, “these psychopaths would see it as a gift and it would soon become an excuse for anyone who wanted to dodge their military obligations” (ibid.: 24).³⁸ This gives us a better idea why homosexuals were treated as they were, in the camps or the police forces, during the Second World War.

The eventual willingness to let queer men fight alongside straight ones coincided with the Axis’s eventual willingness to let women and children fight alongside men — who could now enlist regardless of age. This was by no means an act of compassion: the Axis was on its last legs, so Realpolitik became the order of the day.

In September 1935, the Nazi government in Germany passed two laws, the "Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour" and the "Reich Citizenship Law", that are together commonly known as the Nuremberg Laws. These laws are most well-known for forbidding marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and "Aryan" Germans; forbidding the employment of German females under 45 in Jewish households; and declaring that only those of German or related blood were eligible to be Reich citizens, with Jews reclassified as merely "state subjects" without any citizenship rights.

There is another thing that these laws did that has been less discussed, but really ought to be given more attention, especially in light of events that have transpired in the past year.

The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour banned Jews in Germany from flying or displaying the National flag (meaning the Nazi flag), but stated they were "permitted to display the Jewish colors". Several months later, the Nazi government issued a further statement clarifying that this language refers to the flag used by the Zionist movement at the time.

Per the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on January 2nd, 1936:

“It is up to the Jewish nation,” the decree states, “to decide for itself which are to be the colors of the Jewish national flag, but until then the Zionists’ blue-white flag, together with the symbols of all the different Zionist groups, is valid in the Reich as the Jewish flag and as such will be enjoying State protection.”

The "Zionists' blue-white flag" referenced here featured a white background with two blue stripes and a Star of David in between them. It is the same flag that is now used as the flag of Israel.

I learned this from reading Zionism During the Holocaust by Tony Greenstein. Positively eye-opening.

(edit: corrected a grammatical error)

I feel like I've heard quite a bit about Burkina Faso, Lamumba, and Egypt, but never anything about Ethiopia or Eritrea. What's a good place to start learning a bit more about these extremely large countries? I feel like most people memory hole these places like they do with Laos.

What are thr worst instances of this happening throughout history

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/460511

A few of many ways, to be precise. Quoting Christopher Simpson’s Blowback, page 15:

But inside the [Axis]‐occupied USSR there were not just one or two Lidices. There were hundreds. Mass killings of the Lidice type took place at Rasseta (372 dead), Vesniny (about 200 dead, mainly women and children), and Dolina (469 dead, again mainly women and children), to name only three. In the Osveya district in northern Belorussia alone, in the single month of March 1943, the Nazis and collaborationist troops devastated some 158 villages, according to Times of London correspondent Alexander Werth. “All able bodied men [were] deported as slaves and all the women, children and old people murdered,” Werth reports. This pattern of massacre and scorched earth warfare was repeated again and again throughout the war on the eastern front.

[Axis] warfare against partisans was consistently brutal throughout Europe, and the Germans and their collaborators committed numerous violations of the “laws and customs of war,” such as torture, mass killings of innocent persons in retaliation for guerrilla attacks, and murder of hostages across the Continent. It was in the East, however, that such killings reached a truly frenzied level. At Odessa, for example, the Nazis and their Romanian collaborators destroyed 19,000 Jews and other so‐called subversive elements in a single night in retaliation for a partisan bombing that had killed about a dozen Romanian soldiers. Axis troops rounded up another 40,000 Jews and executed them during the following week. The SS used gas wagons disguised as Red Cross vans to kill about 7,000 women and children in the south, near Krasnodar. At least 100,000 Jews and Slavs were slain at Babi Yar, near Kiev, and so on, and on, and on.

(Most emphasis added.)

I realize that this history is elementary, so what I’m sharing here is likely no news to you.

Nevertheless, between those who feel the need to repetitively equate Fascism with socialism in one country every chance that they get (which, taken to its logical conclusion, would imply that Operation Barbarossa was redundant), and those who have to blame Moscow or ‘the left’ as much as possible for antisocialist atrocities like these (quietly exonerating the actual perpetrators), I think that it’s all too easy for people to forget about this important history.

Throughout all of the time that I’ve been online and offline, I have seen far more Hitler/Stalin comparisons and equivalences than I have seen actual, direct references to these events from the Eastern Front…ponder that for a moment.

cross‐posted: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/787189

Episodes 4–6, 7–8, 9–10, 11–12, 13–14, 15–16, 17–18.

This is a series of (admittedly slightly liberal) documentaries on what Berlin termed Operation Barbarossa. It was the largest invasion in all of history. Most of the invaders were Germans (about three million), but what many neglect to mention is that they were joined by significant numbers of Austrians, Croatians, Czechoslovaks, Finns, Frenchmen, Hungarians, Iberians, Italians, Romanians, Scandinavians, Slovenes, and more.

Since the invasion is not a good example of horseshoe theory, and a neutral observer would naturally see the Soviets as the victims in the conflict, it generally isn’t one of antisocialists’ favorite topics. Nonetheless, when antisocialists do have to talk about it their strategy is to blame the Soviets for as much of the destruction as possible while exculpating the Axis as much as possible.

One such strategy is pointing out that Moscow did not immediately declare war on any of the Axis powers as soon as the western Axis launched the invasion. And of course there is always that ‘Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact’ dead horse that antisocialists never tire of beating, but the background and circumstances behind it are of no interest to them, so they usually go unmentioned. They have other reasons for shifting all of the blame onto the Soviets, but these are easily the most repetitive ones, and I am not using this topic to focus on them.

Instead, I would like to cordially invite you to learn more about this dark time in history, when anticommunist forces massacred at least twenty‐six million Easterners in various ways and an Axis victory looked like a very valid possibility until the Soviet victory ~~at Stalingrad in 1943~~ near Moscow in 1941.

Operation Barbarossa can very much be read—and probably should be read—as part of the continuity of the West’s colonial wars: not only did the Reich’s head of state refer on at least one occasion to the Soviets with a slur for Native Americans, but per Lebensraum German settlers were to occupy substantial portions of the former U.S.S.R., Fascist businesses were to join them, and the natives had to disappear. Quoting Casper Erichsen & David Olusoga’s The Kaiser’s Holocaust:

Hitler was adamant that [the Third Reich’s] task in Russia was not occupation but colonisation. In the privacy of his inner sanctum and in the company of the party élite, Hitler spoke with clarity and without rhetoric.

He began with a warning. ‘It is essential’, he said, ‘that we should not proclaim our aims before the whole world. Rather Germany should emphasise that we were forced to occupy, administer and secure a certain area […] we shall act as though we wanted to exercise a mandate only.’

With this veil in place the real work of colonisation could begin. ‘We can’, Hitler reassured his audience, ‘take all the necessary measures — shooting, resettling etc. — and take them we shall […] It must be clear to us’, he insisted, ‘that we shall never withdraw from these areas.’

I could recommend numerous books for this subject, such as Enemy in the East and Joining Hitler’s Crusade, but—aside from the fact that they should be read with caution (they’re of mixed quality)—I understand that not all of us have the time to plow through a book. Some of us likely don’t even have the time to watch a forty‐four minute documentary either, and that’s fine. Even if all that you can do is remember this event, I appreciate it.

Stay safe out there.

I found this article to be pretty interesting.

Modern nationalism valorises a people’s deep, primordial relationship with land. It also depends on enemies, outsiders and foreigners to help unite the members of the nation...

For much of Western history, however, claiming foreign ancestry was the key to political legitimacy. From the Roman Empire to the Renaissance, noble families across Europe insisted that they were not related to the populations they ruled. They traced their ancestry back to illustrious foreign powers, including figures of myth and legend. Among the most popular were the protagonists of the Trojan War....

...from the long view of European history, nationalist myths about indigenous peoples are a recent invention, a response to elites’ emphasis on their foreign origins.

The article doesn't mention it, but I think another good example of this would probably be the Jewish origin myth of the Exodus. The archaeological consensus is that it never happened, there was never any mass migration from Egypt to Palestine, nor was there any overthrow & expulsion of Canaanites. What most likely happened is that at some point, the Canaanite society experienced a political collapse, the local population started self-identifying differently, and a cohort of self-identified "Israelites" successfully took up the vacuum of power and formed a government. Then they invented an origin myth about how they were actually from the exotic land of the Nile, even though they were really just the same ethnicity as the Canaanite rulers of a generation or two earlier.

Helmeted demonstrators on a grassy bank, armed with flagpoles, c. 1970s. Photo credit Takashi Hamaguchi

On this day in 1966, the Japanese government announced the construction of an airport on farmland in rural Sanrizuka, without permission of displaced locals. The struggle was led by the Sanrizuka-Shibayama United Opposition League against Construction of the Narita Airport, which locals formed under the leadership of opposition parties the Communist Party and Socialist Party. The struggle resulted in significant delays in the opening of the airport, as well as deaths on both sides.

At its height, the union mobilised 17,500 people for a general rally, while thousands of riot police were brought in on several occasions.

The area around Sanrizuka had been farmland since the Middle Ages, and, prior to the 1940s, much of the land had been privately owned by the Japanese Imperial Household.

Many locals were economically reliant on the Imperial estate at Goryō Farm, and local farmers had a strong economic and emotional attachment to the land. After Japan's defeat in World War II, large tracts of royal land were sold off and subsequently settled by poor rural laborers.

In the 1960s, the Japanese government planned to build a second airport in the Tokyo area to support Japan's rapid economic development. After meeting resistance from locals on the site's first chosen location, the rural town of Tomisato, the government was donated remaining land in Sanrizuka by the Imperial Family.

Locals in Sanrizuka were outraged when the government announced its plans. The Sanrizuka-Shibayama United Opposition League Against the Construction of Narita Airport (or Hantai Dōmei) was formed in 1966, and began to engage in a variety of tactics of resistance, including legal buy-ups, sit-ins, and occupations.

Meanwhile, the Japanese radical student movement was growing, and the League soon formed an alliance with active New Left groups; one major factor drawing the groups the together was that, under the US-Japan Security Treaty, the US military had free access to Japanese air facilities. As a result, it was likely the airport would be used for transporting troops and arms in the Vietnam War.

The demonstrators built huts and watchtowers along proposed construction sites. On October 10th, 1967, the government attempted to conduct a land survey, backed by over 2000 riot police. Clashes quickly broke out, and Hantai Domei leader Issaku Tomura was photographed being brutalized by police, further inflaming anti-airport sentiment.

Protests further grew and intensified over the next few years as the state pressed on with attempts to build the airport. Protestors would dig into the ground, build fortifications, and arm themselves against police. Construction was delayed by years, and the conflict would cost the government billions of yen.

On September 16th, 1971, three police officers were killed during an eminent domain expropriation. Four days later, police forcibly removed and destroyed the house of an elderly woman, an incident that became yet another symbol of state oppression to the opposition.

One student committed suicide, saying in his suicide note that "I detest those who brought the airport to this land". In 1972, the protestors built a 60 meter-high steel tower near the runway in order to disrupt flight tests. Conflict continued through much of the 1970s.

In 1977, the government announced plans to open the airport within the year. In May, police destroyed the tower while demonstrators attempted to cling on to it, provoking a new wave of widespread conflict. One protestor was killed after being struck in the head by a tear gas canister. In March 1978, the first runway was set to open, but a few days prior, a group of saboteurs burrowed into the main control tower, barricaded themselves inside, and proceeded to lay waste to the tower's equipment and infrastructure, delaying the opening yet again to May 20th, 1978.

Resistance continued after the airport was opened. Although many locals began to accept the airport and leave the land, the focus of Hantai Dōmei shifted to opposing plans for additional terminals and runways, as the airport's current size still only reflected a fraction of initial plans.

Clashes continued through the 1980s - on October 20th, 1985, members of the communist New Left group Chukaku-ha broke though police lines with logs and flagpoles, successfully attacking infrastructure in one of the last large-scale battles of the resistance campaign. Guerilla actions and bombings continued as late as the 1990s.

Although this campaign of resistance has largely shifted out of public attention in Japan, its presence is still felt: until 2015, all visitors were required to present ID cards for security reasons, and the airport still remains only a third of its initially-planned size. The Sanrizuka Struggle has never completely ended, and the Opposition League still exists and holds rallies.

• Sanrizuka: The Struggle to Stop Narita Airport

• Takashi Hamaguchi "Horror of Narita Airport"

• Sanrizuka Struggle wikipedia

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View from the rear platform of the Simskaia Station of the Samara-Zlatoust Railway, Russia. Very early color photograph by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, made in 1910 on three glass plates, one for each of the colors red, green, and blue. Scanned and combined into a digital image in 2003.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4866651