A dark and cold death...

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3177738

Pictured: ‘Italian troops after their catastrophic defeat at Caporetto in 1917. Both the Italian Fascists and the German [Fascists] contrasted the ‘heroism’ of the frontline soldiers with the ‘treacherous’ and ‘mercenary’ behavior of the politicians, whom they blamed for military disasters like this one. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)’ — Paul Jackson

There is a short way and a long way to explain this. The short way:

No other event in the twentieth century was more important to shaping Fascism than the First World War. I am not referring to the technologies, strategies, and aesthetics inherited from that conflict (though they did play a part), but to how it affected the petty bourgeoisie, leaving it feeling largely unrewarded, and thereby giving it new goals: most of the Fascists were petty bourgeois and fought in World War I. Why did the Fascists gain a reputation for being so obnoxiously strict? Because they inherited this strictness from their military training.

Pictured: Benito Mussolini in 1917.

The desire to acquire more land was critical to Fascism’s success in Europe. Although technically the Kingdom of Italy won the First World War, it received very little of the land that the Entente promised it. Italian nationalists felt cheated. In the German Reich’s case, the loss of land was obvious: the German bourgeoisie essentially lost its empire as a consequence of losing WWI.

Pictured: Adolf Schicklgruber (far right) and some of his brethren in arms in 1914.

Most other fascist movements shared this correlation. For example, many Ukrainian nationalists (e.g. Riko Iaryi) served in WWI and turned to fascism when their dream to realise an independent Ukrainian state came to naught. Some Zionists (e.g. Zeʻev Jabotinsky) also served in WWI but became frustrated when London declined to establish a Zionist régime on both banks of the Jordan River, resulting in Hebrew fascism. (An exception to this trend was Oswald Mosley, who served in WWI but already had his empire.)

Pictured: One of Schicklgruber’s several paintings depicting World War I, most or all of which he drew as he was in the middle of that very conflict.

World War I acted as Fascism’s soil: it provided petty bourgeois anticommunists with the military training that they needed, resulting in paramilitaries like the Freikorps, the squadristas, the szabadcsapatok, and the Whites; it instilled the petty bourgeoisie with ultranationalist sentiments, consecrating sacrifice for the ‘Fatherland’ and belief in one’s nation’s supposed superiority; and it encouraged anticommunism, as lower‐class rebels in Russia, Germany, and elsewhere impeded the war effort with their socialist activism.

Click here for the long way.

Quoting Paul Jackson in World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia, pages 729–732:

World War I led to a number of factors that, together, contributed to the growth of fascist ideology in Europe. Most important, the war placed enormous pressure on all the political systems of the belligerent countries, creating a mass politicization of society and a polarization of left‐ and right‐wing politics that undermined European liberal–democratic traditions.

In Britain and France, well‐established liberal–democratic systems were able to cope with the war crisis through “national union” governments. That was not the case in Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe, however, where such traditions were far weaker.

Germany’s younger and more fragile democratic system was placed under strain, and the country was effectively under military command by 1916. Italy was forced into combat by the “interventionist campaign,” which lacked widespread support and undermined the Giolittian liberal parliamentary system. Autocratic Russia was torn apart by the conflict and in 1917 collapsed into successive revolutions, communist one‐party rule, and then civil war.

And this was not true only for the Great Powers. For example, both the government and the monarchy in Greece were overthrown before she joined the Allies in 1917. After Portugal entered the war, political instability led to the formation of a semiauthoritarian charismatic leadership under Sidonia Pais, portending future fascist régimes. Neutral Spain had to put down three attempted uprisings in 1917 alone, highlighting the war’s impact on nonbelligerent European nations.

This political instability continued after the war, and it was not ameliorated by the reordering of Europe at Versailles. The Habsburg Empire was transformed from a multiracial kingdom with a tradition as a key European power into the emasculated rump state of Austria.

The breakup of Austro‐Hungary led to the further division of the Balkans and Eastern Europe into unstable nation‐states, which included the creation of Yugoslavia, a considerably enlarged Romania, and the formation of Poland as an independent state; the latter also divided Germany from East Prussia.

The German defeat and revolution in 1918 ended the Second Reich and the Hohenzollern monarchy and brought the ultimately unworkable Weimar Republic into being. Italy felt betrayed by the agreement because she did not receive all of the European land promised upon her entry into the war; although she ended up on the winning side, many Italians saw it as a “mutilated victory.” This widespread sense of experiencing a national humiliation was inflicted on many European states by the peace settlement.

Much of postwar Europe was made up of a number of nation‐states at fundamentally different stages of development toward liberal parliamentary systems, and many of these nations—Germany, Austria, Finland, Lithuania, Poland, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Romania—were operating with new and seemingly alien liberal–democratic constitutions.

Furthermore, it is difficult to overstate the importance of the emergence of [Bolshevism] in describing the postwar European political dynamic. That system presented a highly desirable alternative to capitalism for many on the European Left, while materializing the worst fears of the European Right. Also of great importance were the ways in which wartime experiences had fundamentally altered the way in which “ordinary people” of Europe viewed themselves in relation to the state.

World War I was the first “total war,” requiring the mobilization of the productive and human resources of entire countries. Consequently, the war politicized national populations through extreme propaganda campaigns that increasingly demonized the Other and exposed citizens to new state bureaucracies that augmented the populist nationalism increasingly “in the air” across Europe in the run‐up to 1914.

This encouraged the postwar construction of identities conceived on populist and nationalized “us versus them” dichotomies, and this “nationalization of the masses” also created a greater expectation and dependency on the state. The wartime model of a powerful executive power coupled with an effective bureaucracy that intervened in economic affairs and civil rights in order to protect national interests was seen by many as still desirable in the postwar crisis years, when liberal political élites seemed so weak and out of touch.

The war had opened up a new sociopolitical space whereby contingent factors such as economic crisis coupled with the sense of social anomie were highly conducive to the development of radical ultranationalist political ideologies.

Further strains were created as each nation had to demobilize hundreds of thousands of troops and reintegrate them into civil societies across Europe. After the war that led to the development of networks of civilian veterans groups, and consequently to a widespread “paramilitarization” of European society. This was to become a major characteristic of interwar fascist movements, and was a factor that arose directly from the experiences of the trenches.

After the war had ended, political violence thus often seemed a natural solution and even became normalized. Further, the trench experiences had helped to forge a psychological dynamic whereby significant sections within European societies developed an interest in chauvinistic and egoistical fantasies that were bolstered with sense of mission, sacrifice, and duty to the national cause.

This predisposed many of the war generation to be vulnerable to appeals to view themselves as vanguards of new political élites capable of forging new political orders. Mussolini dubbed the Italian permutation of this phenomenon “trenchocracy.”

The Enlightenment idea of the “progress” of humanity from savage ancestors to civilized Europeans was shattered, and European culture and society began to labor under a widespread sense of crisis and decline—though shot through with new visions of hope. A text such as Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West was typical of that form of discourse.

The whole Enlightenment tradition of the progressive elimination of the irrational by the advance of “reason” was felt to be in crisis, and a new politics of emotion and action was often perceived as required in response to the contingency of postwar Europe’s political crises. Sometimes this was imbued with a renewed sense of the sacred and desire for rebirth, a mind‐set that Roger Griffin has identified as fascism’s palingenetic quality.

The new mass propaganda—which always contained the subtext “Once the suffering of today is over, a better world will come tomorrow!”—allowed ideologues to exploit the general sense of unrealized hopes that resulted from the war and that were often assumed to be symptomatic of the incapacity of liberal–democratic politics to deliver. In this context, radical authoritarian alternatives could appear to be genuinely progressive in comparison to liberal democracy or communism.

The war was also crucial in turning myriad protofascist movements into unified ideological forces that could exercise a genuine influence over political events, transforming them from esoteric and sometimes conservative forces into radically modern ideologies. For example, in Italy the various protofascist intellectuals and movements became unified around Italian intervention in the war as a means for Italy to secure new territories, gain international prestige, and establish authoritative political leadership that would kill off revolutionary socialism.

This “interventionist campaign” consisted of a highly diverse grouping of organizations such as the Associazione Nazionale Italiana; periodicals such as La Voce and L’Idea Nazionale; elements of the revolutionary Left, especially the neosyndicalist movement; politicians, including Prime Minister Antonio Salandra; and key intellectuals such as Filippo Marinetti, Gabriele D’Annunzio, and Benito Mussolini.

This campaign was also marked by many key tropes of fascist politics, “piazza politics” and crowd power, the glorification of violence and of the heroism of war, and a commingling between utopian visions of a “new Italy” with a pragmatic agenda in an ideological synthesis that rejected “rational” for charismatic politics. Despite a lack of mass popular support, Italy entered the war in 1915 to a war fever dubbed “the radiant days of May.”

The war did gain popular support, paradoxically, after the defeat at the Battle of Caporetto in 1917. Across Italy local patriotic groupings (Fasci) emerged, generated widespread animosity against neutralists and socialists, and promoted the patriotic cause. This new populist–nationalist fervor was also reflected on a national level, and a prowar lobby consisting of a cross‐party selection of deputies was formed.

By this time Mussolini’s nationalist organ, Il Popolo d’Italia, had established itself as the primary journal of the interventionist movement. After the war he sought to build on the new nationalistic and belligerent political dynamic, combattentismo, and the “spirit of the trenches,” trincerismo, with his new organization, Fasci di combattimento.

Other Fasci included those of the Political Futurists, the ANI’s Sempre Pronti, and Captain Vecchi’s Arditi. Thus in Italy the war not only gave birth to the budding ideology of Fascism but also unified and radicalized the “protofascist” elements in Italy, and forged a political and social dynamic highly conducive to Fascist politics.

Many arguably protofascist currents existed in Germany before the war, this time drawing on völkisch tradition of an “organic” nation and radicalized by war experiences. The outbreak of the war led to hopes of a rebirth of a healthy German Kultur triumphing over the degenerate Zivilisation, which in turn would result in a “reawakened” German Volksgemeinschaft.

The fact that, even in the summer of 1918, Germany was still expecting victory in the war only enhanced the terrible shock and humiliation felt across Germany when Friedrich Ebert unconditionally surrendered in November of that year. This in turn led to the Dolchstoss, or “stab in the back,” myth, which became a central aspect of many postwar German nationalisms and which was absolutely central to [German Fascism’s] propaganda.

The myth claimed that the peace‐mongering socialist politicians who negotiated the end of the war were essentially national traitors, and further that Germany had not actually been defeated on the battlefield but simply betrayed by left‐wing politicians.

Also of significance during the war was a growing perception that associated “Jewishness” with safe bureaucratic positions rather than military rôles (and therefore with cowardice), and also with left‐wing politics in general. This forged a widespread misconception of a lack of German–Jewish patriotism and commitment to the war, on which could be erected myriad racist constructions.

In the immediate postwar milieu the socialist coalition government faced attack from communist revolutionaries and relied on paramilitary squads, Freikorps, to prevent the very real threat of revolution. This demonstrates not only the postwar dynamic of paramilitarized politics but also the significance of the Russian Revolution of 1917—lighting beacons of left‐wing revolutionary hope across Europe and also fermenting equally radicalized right‐wing responses to the threat.

After German emasculation was enshrined in the Versailles Treaty and the Weimar Republic, völkisch movements proliferated in German civil society. These often glorified in the war, fostered the Dolchstoss myth, and developed the Los‐von‐Weimar, or “out of Weimar,” mood. This attitude was key to [German Fascism’s] success.

Hitler often drew on his own war experiences—for example, in Mein Kampf he described that on hearing of the outbreak of war he was overtaken “by stormy enthusiasm, I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time. […] There now began the greatest and most unforgettable time of my earthly existence” (Kershaw 1998, 70).

Once in power the [Third Reich] also repeatedly played on the power of World War I in its attempts to generate a “new man,” drawing on a semiotic of war that formed what G. L. Mosse has dubbed a “civic religion” of heroism and faith in the nation.

Finally, the Armenian Massacres (1915–1923) were another significant event that emerged from the war and also one that directly impacted upon the history of fascism, and especially the Holocaust. The murder of some 1 million Armenians by the [Ottoman ruling class] was the [short] twentieth century’s first great genocide, and the event set a grisly precedent for future “projects” of systematic mass murder. Hitler was alleged to have said on the eve of [the Fascist invasion of Poland]: “Who now remembers the massacre of the Armenians?”

(Emphasis added.)

Further reading: Hitler’s First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War.

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.

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

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.