AnarchoBolshevik

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, additionally, seeks to ban the opening of safe consumption sites anywhere in the state. A bill to ban the sites was passed in the state Senate with the support of every Republican and most Democrats. Due to the controversy of the sites among Democrats, however, it may not get through the state House of Representatives. Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro promised to support the ban and says he opposes the sites.

The importance of these sites cannot be overstated. Year after year, the number of fatal and non-fatal overdoses increases. While there are “mobile” and home-based safe consumption harm reduction groups — such as Never Use Alone, where drug users call in and can get help if they overdose — these are not enough. Statistics from all over North America have shown the usefulness of these sites and how they act to preserve life.

Harm reductionists, drug users, concerned friends and family members and revolutionaries need to get involved in the fight for safe consumption sites, in Philadelphia and the entire country. These sites do not attract crime (any more than any other public service does), they do not “encourage” drug abuse, and — unlike what the federal government has said — they do not act as “sanctioned suicide” facilities or crackhouses. There must be a concerted fight to save lives.

Recently, during the United Nations General Assembly, Burkina Faso’s Minister of State, Bassolma Bazie, denounced the fact that his country, like Mali and Niger, was involved in the Sahel “in a war dictated by imperialism” under the guise of “fighting terrorism.” He explained that the three countries, with common borders, have established a collective defense and mutual assistance pact, called the Alliance of Sahel States, “to take our destiny into our own hands.”

Bazie emphasized that, “We say no to all those so-called friends who claim to want our supposed well-being or who threaten us with war in order to impose their friendship.” The Burkinabe leader also expressed the opinion that ECOWAS, the African Union and the United Nations should act for the benefit of the peoples and not be structures controlled by a “global minority.”

Leaders of Steelworkers Local 8751, the Boston School Bus Drivers’ Union, including President André François and Recording Secretary Claude “Toutou” St. Germain joined Jacques Piquant and other leaders of Fanmi Lavalas of Boston in the demonstration. Fanmi Lavalas is the party of the only popularly elected president in Haiti’s history, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

[…]

Protesters spoke with great urgency about the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Ouanaminthe, a commune of 100,000 people in the region of Haiti’s Nord-Est Department, where the Massacre River forms a section of Haiti’s border with the Dominican Republic.

Luis Abinader, president of the Dominican Republic, has ordered the border totally closed to all Haitian nationals, suspended visa applications and initiated daily mass deportations of Haitian people who live, work and seek medical care there. Normally, the border is open without restriction at least two days per week.

Abinader’s lockdown tactic comes as the Biden administration has placed new restrictions on Haitian people wanting to travel or migrate to the U.S. Thousands of people line up daily under the guns of the U.S. Marines at the often-closed U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince, at barbed wire military checkpoints in El Paso, Texas, and now on both sides of the Massacre River. Many Haitians are drowning in the Gulf of Mexico due to these policies.

This gathering provided a platform for various anti-imperialist movements to be heard. The crowd had the privilege of listening to speakers from Bronx Boricua Resistance, a grassroots movement organizing for an independent and sovereign Puerto Rico, free from the chains of U.S. colonialism.

A representative of the Palestinian Youth Movement also addressed the crowd, calling for a liberated Palestine free from Zionist settler-colonialism. Another group that captivated the audience was PEX Semillas de Libertad, a Peruvian diaspora organization. PEX Semillas is struggling against the Dina Boluarte coup regime in Peru, and demands that the control of natural resources of Peru be in the hands of the workers, not U.S. and European corporations.

[…]

The Oct. 1 action was organized by the Bronx Antiwar Coalition, United National Antiwar Coalition, Workers World Party, and Peace in Ukraine Coalition. Endorsers and participants came from a diverse range of political groups, including International Acton Center, Veterans for Peace, Party for Socialism and Liberation, ANSWER Coalition, Struggle La Lucha, CUNY Internationalist Clubs, the DSA International Committee, National Lawyers Guild International Committee and others.

Similarly to how there were both good Christians and extremely sinful Christians in relation to the Shoah, there were both good Muslims and deeply sinful Muslims with regard to it as well. It was common (maybe less so now) for Islamophobes to emphasize the anti‐Jewish Muslims, for example the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar, but given the rise of the alt‐right it would be unsurprising if some Islamophobes would now prefer to emphasize the Jew‐friendly Muslims such as the Albanians.

In any case, while some ultranationalist Muslims did mistake the European Fascists for allies against colonialism, most Muslims didn’t want the snake oil that the Axis was offering. Many of them had the circumspection to tell that the Fascist colonialists were no better than their liberal counterparts, and Libya was a case in point.

What too many of us overlook is that the Western Allies weren’t the only ones holding colonies in North Africa. So was the Axis, giving many Muslims and Jews alike a common enemy:

France, an important colonial force in North Africa and Nazi Germany in Libya and later in Tunisia, enforced many anti‐Semitic laws against the Jews in 1940, including the Statut des Juifs, which was approved by Algeria and Tunisia, and in Morocco the Sultan Muhammad V approved the Moroccan version of Statut des Juifs. These laws forced Jews into labor, punishment, and isolation camps.

In 1942 at the Wannsee conference (Satlo, 2006: 26–27) plans for the final solution of the Jewish question exacerbated the situation for Jews all over the world, including northern Africa. The […] Fascist […] colonial takeover of Arab countries for strategic reasons also included the goal of exterminating Jews from these countries. Muslims, although generally unaware of the death camps in Europe, had the direct knowledge of Jews being interned in their own countries, but the Jews were perceived as the allies of the colonial forces and not necessarily Arabs.

[…]

However, the story of colonization reemerges when the discussion of Arab camps surface in Muslim and Jewish narratives, and the two minor narratives emerge within their own minority status in witnessing both the colonial forces and the [Fascist] campaign. In other words, Jewish and Muslim identity struggled immensely through the time of the Holocaust from the fall of the Ottomans 1922, colonialism, and the oppression and Holocaust of native Arab/Muslim/Jewish narratives.

The historical accounts of Jews from Europe or Arab lands who tried to escape ended up in many death camps, and the Arabs who fought against the colonists and attempted to overthrow the colonial forces landed in camps in the Sahara and in some cases with Jews. For example, many Jews who had fled Germany in 1938–1939 were later captured in France and interned in Arab camps.

The camp at Hadjerat‐M’Guil was opened on November 1, 1941, as a punishment and isolation camp. It contained 170 prisoners, nine of whom were tortured and murdered in conditions of the worst brutality. Two of those murdered were Jews, one of whom had earlier been in a concentration camp in Germany but had been released in 1939 and had fled to France. This young man’s parents had become refugees in London. On learning of their son’s murder in the Sahara, they committed suicide (Glibert, 1988: 56).

[…]

Berkani’s testimony says that he and the Jews in the camp understood that Deriko was trying to get the Arabs to fight with Jews:

He gathered the Jews of the camp, who were previously mixed with the Europeans, and separated them from the French, or rather from the Europeans. This cursed Dériko prepared further provocations once again. Europeans were separate, the Arabs were separate, and the Jews too were separate. Now the Jews were also gathered in the first section. (Berkani, 1965: 44)

Berkani, a Muslim, sees Deriko’s tactic and writes the following; he observes astutely that the [Fascists] (Vichy) were attempting to create tension but that the Jews and Muslims (he changes from Arabs) had caught onto his divisive tactic.

There is no doubt that Dériko did this with the intention of seeing the Jews cut down and killed by the Muslims, since the Jews were not numerous. But the Jews realized his goal; the Arabs too realized the same thing. Commander Dériko expected that there would be fights between Arabs and Jews, but the opposite occurred: a friendly understanding spread between the two communities. Never could one have believed that the Arabs and the Jews in the first section of the camp would become real friends, even brothers. Whether you wish to believe it or not, they were moreover brothers in hunger, in suffering, in misery, in punishment/pain etc. […] in Dériko’s camp. (Berkani, 1965: 45)

(Emphasis added.)

Related: Remembering the Muslims Murdered at Auschwitz

Events that happened today (October 8):

1884: Walter Karl Ernst August von Reichenau, Axis Field Marshal who was partly responsible for the Babi Yar massacre, polluted the earth.
1888: Ernst Kretschmer, Axis psychiatrist, was born.
1910: Helmut Kallmeyer, Axis chemist who was involved in Action T4, forced his existence on us.
1939: The Third Reich annexed western Poland.
1941: During the preliminaries of the Battle of Rostov, Axis forces reached the Sea of Azov with the capture of Mariupol.
1943: Friedrich Schubert's paramilitary group executed approximately thirty civilians in Kallikratis, Crete.

The Popular Front urges our heroic people across Palestine to actively participate in the Al-Aqsa Flood battle. Everyone from their respective positions and with the tools they possess, should attack the enemy’s army and its settlers, cut off its supply routes, sabotage its vital facilities, and pursue the terrified Zionist invaders in the face of resistance strikes, striking at them on every inch of Palestinian soil.

The Front emphasizes its call for everyone who bears arms, especially members of the [PA] Security Forces, to engage in the battle of the Palestinian people against their enemy and to take the natural position of every free Palestinian fighting for salvation from occupation, achieving the goals and rights of all our people.

The timing of the battle, coinciding with the glorious October War, is a call for the sons of the Arab nation and the peoples of the region to recognize their position in the overall conflict with the Zionist enemy and in this particular battle. They should carry out their duties alongside their fighting brothers in revolt in occupied Palestine.

In November 2022, the Ukrainian Youth Association, also known as “Soom,” (SUM—Spilka ukrayinsʹkoyi molod—or CYM—Спілка української молод) held its 20th World Congress in Hanover Township, New Jersey. Supposedly an “isolationist” attitude dominated: CYM, despite its plummeting membership, “should be for privileged people only.”

Well, they’re certainly right when they say that it’s for privileged people only, but not necessarily in the way that they had in mind. (I think that the photograph speaks for itself.)

Just over 50 delegates participated in the World Congress on behalf of CYM branches in Ukraine, Estonia, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Britain, Australia, Canada, and the United States. After years of singing, “now a SUMivtsya,” (member of CYM) “tomorrow a fighter,” CYM adopted a new slogan for the upcoming year: “now a fighter.” In 2023 the organization vowed to commemorate the 140th birthday of Dmytro Dontsov (1883–1973), a fascist ideologue who translated Mein Kampf.

[…]

Longtime readers of the Bandera Lobby Blog may remember that George Borec, a veteran of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the 1940s military wing of OUN-B, got a street in Penrith, Australia named after Stepan Bandera, and financed the construction of a nearby Banderite youth center in a suburb of Sydney. The local branch of CYM has since relocated to a newer building, where visitors are greeted at the front entrance by portraits of far-right OUN leaders (Bandera, Konovalets, Shukhevych, Stetsko) and Symon Petliura, a World War I-era figure whose military forces carried out pogroms against Jews.

I froze upon reading this.

According to historian Per Rudling, the “Roman Shukheyvch Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex” affiliated with CYM in Edmonton, Alberta was opened in 1973 with significant funding from the provincial government. In 2020, he explained, “The purpose of the complex, the OUN(b) press declared, was to ‘become a blacksmith’s forge, which will forge hard, unbreakable characters of the Ukrainian youth’ and to ‘raise and harden a new generation of fighters for the liberation of Ukraine…’”

Meanwhile, I reported that the federal government awarded the Banderites $279,138 to “repair” the complex in 2015, and CYM-Canada charged to the defense of the Ukrainian Waffen-SS monument in Oakville after it became the subject of an international news story.

They’ve been much more quiet about the recent “Nazigate” scandal…

CYM-Canada published this imagine in 2020 after the Ukrainian Waffen-SS monument in Oakville was vandalized with anti-Nazi graffiti.

‘KNOW THE FACTS, NOT THE ~~PROPAGANDA~~’. Finally we can agree with these anticommunists on something.

In 1991, SNUM was reformed as the official branch of CYM in Ukraine. From 2005 through 2016, it received over $400,000 in grants from the U.S. State Department via the National Endowment for Democracy. From 2016 until 2019, CYM and another, more radical OUN-B youth group in Ukraine were members of the Reanimation Package of Reforms Coalition, the “largest and most visible reform network” in the country, which has been funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and Global Affairs Canada.

The NED…we meet again.

Events that happened today (October 7):

1866: Włodzimierz Halka Ledóchowski, Fascist sympathizer, was born.
1900: Heinrich Himmler, Axis commander and politician, stained the human race for all time.
1904: Armando Castellazzi, one of Fascist Italy’s professional footballers and managers, started his life.
1920: Georg Leber, Luftwaffe member, was delivered to the world.
1923: Irmgard Ilse Ida Grese, SS officer and concentration camp guard at Ravensbrück and Auschwitz… I don’t even want to say it. Just thinking about her makes me mad.
1940: Arthur H. McCollum proposed bringing Imperial America into the war in Eurasia by provoking the Empire of Japan into assaulting one of the U.S. colonies.
1944: During an uprising at Birkenau concentration camp, Jewish prisoners burnt down Crematorium IV (as portrayed in the excellent motion picture, The Grey Zone). Meanwhile, Helmut Lent, Axis night‐fighter ace, died having suffered injuries in a crash landing two days earlier.
2014: Siegfried Lenz, Fascist and Kriegsmarine draftee, expired.

(Mirror.)

The statement from the Governor General — the representative of the British Monarchy in Canada — concerned Peter Savaryn, who served as chancellor of the University of Alberta from 1982 to 1986 and in 1987 was appointed to the Order of Canada. The award is akin to the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, and is considered the second highest distinction for Canadians, topped only by the Order of Merit available to all citizens of the British Commonwealth.

Responding to an inquiry from the Forward, the statement from Governor General Mary Simon expressed “deep regret” about Savaryn’s appointment. A spokesperson said the office is also now reviewing two other honors it gave Savaryn: the Golden Jubilee (awarded in 2002) and Diamond Jubilee (awarded in 2012) medals.

[…]

Hunka and Savaryn were both volunteers in the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, commonly known as SS Galichina or the Galicia Division. The unit, which was formed in 1943 out of recruits from the Galicia region in western Ukraine, was armed and trained by the Third Reich, and commanded by German SS officers. It’s accused of war crimes, including burning alive 500 to 1,000 Poles in 1944.

Related: Trudeau says Canada may finally make secret Nazi files public

Events that happened today (October 6):

1900: Willy Merkl, a mountain climber whom the Third Reich briefly sponsored, was born.
1916: Chiang Wei‐kuo, Japanese–Chinese Wehrmacht(!) officer candidate, was brought to the world.
1935: Fascist forces captured Adwa.
1939: The Battle of Kock became the final combat of the September Campaign in Poland.
1942: American troops forced the Axis from its positions east of the Matanikau River during the Battle of Guadalcanal.
1943: A paramilitary group in Crete burnt thirteen civilians alive during the Axis occupation of Greece.
1944: Units of the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps entered Czechoslovakia during the Battle of the Dukla Pass. (This later became Deň obetí Dukly or Dukla Pass Victims Day in Slovakia.)
1945: Leonardo Conti, SS‐Obergruppenführer who was involved in the massacre of hundreds of thousands of disabled people, hung himself in prison… no comment.

In attempting to achieve a united front among Germany, Poland and Japan against the USSR, the [Imperial] Japanese were frequently reminded by the Poles that they had reached their agreement with the USSR not out of any genuine friendship but rather of the need to protect their rear against a Germany that was growing stronger every day. The head of Polish military intelligence, for example, stated on 12 December 1933:

Germany has rearmed itself at the present moment to a far greater extent than anyone assumes. The Polish General Staff is better informed in this respect than France for example.^54^

Despite the complaints in the [Imperial] press about Polish betrayal of the old relationship against the USSR, the Polish government demonstrated its difficulties eloquently by reaching a parallel non‐aggression pact with [the Third Reich] in January 1934. When asked about the reasons that lay behind the Nazi view of this episode by Mussolini in Venice in June, Hitler replied:

Ten years ago, Poland had been militarily stronger than Russia. But now she no longer was. She had concluded the pact with us out of fear of Russia.^55^

For the [Imperial] Army, the year 1934 was regarded by many as a target date for [Imperial] Japan to be in a position to catch up with the Soviet union and challenge it. Decisions were taken in 1932 to strengthen the attaché bureaux in Paris, Berlin and Warsaw and this was followed in the spring of 1934 by the appointment of outstanding officers to the attaché posts, Major‐Generals Ōshima Hiroshi in Berlin and Yamawaki Masatake in Warsaw.^56^

Both officers pressed their hosts to support a deepening of bilateral relations with the [Imperial] Army. The press pointed to the ‘rumour of Japanese–Polish collaboration’ in the course of 1934 and to claims about the existence of ‘the closest collaboration between the Japanese and Polish intelligence services — at least so far as Russia is concerned’.

The [Third Reich’s] military attaché in Warsaw, Major‐General Schindler, noted that ‘the bureau of the Japanese military attaché here operates as a sub‐office of the Japanese Intelligence Division by assembling all information gathered in Europe about foreign armies, and especially about Russia’ and that Yamawaki was the driving force behind this. ‘If the information reaching me is correct,’ he continued, ‘not only Lieutenant‐Colonel Fujizuka, but also General Yamawaki himself has an office in the Intelligence Section of the Polish General Staff’.^57^

He then went on to report that Le Temps carried fresh allegations about the signing of an agreement in December 1934 for collaboration between the two general staffs that included arrangements to collaborate over military training, aviation and infantry equipment. It was also claimed that in the event of war, they would exchange raw materials and military equipment and that Poland would look after Japanese interests at the League, from which Japan was due to depart finally on 27 March 1935.^58^

Schindler accepted that it was quite evident that there was an existing arrangement over training in the sense that exchanges and secondments were already an established fact. However, he did not believe that any agreement extended beyond benevolent neutrality to mutual exchange of goods and equipment in wartime.^59^

The former Polish ambassador to Tōkyō and minister of foreign affairs, Tadeusz Romer, always denied the existence of any treaty with Japan, though it would not follow that the General Staff would necessarily think itself bound to disclose any technical military arrangements, particularly if these were not committed to paper and signed by both parties.^60^

[…]

This suggests, therefore, that there had at least been some kind of oral agreement between the Polish and Japanese General Staffs about the Soviet Union, but it is quite likely that it was not consigned to paper, or at least not signed and that it was something limited to the knowledge of the military — a situation permissible in the [Imperial] system, if not the Polish.

It is also very clear that there was informal co‐operation between Polish and [Imperial] military attachés in different capitals outside Warsaw and Tōkyō. Polish military relations with the general staffs and staff officers from Sweden, Finland, the Baltic States and Rumania permitted [Imperial] Army officers to obtain information indirectly and directly from them all in the inter‐war period, as can be seen in the co‐operation in Riga in the 1930s between Colonel Onodera and Major Brzeskwinski.^69^

Though collaboration extended to exchange of information on Soviet codes and cyphers, there is absolutely no evidence that anything was said to the [Imperialists] about the Polish successes in reading the cypher messages sent by means of Enigma machines by the [Wehrmacht].

While efforts to draw Poland into the anti‐Comintern arrangement succeeded in so far as police co-operation about Communists was concerned, all efforts to try to persuade the Poles to move into a more active role proved in vain, in spite of the efforts of [Imperial] personnel in Europe. Warsaw continued to function as a centre for intelligence‐gathering about the USSR until 1939, when the Polish leadership firmly rejected [Berlin’s] efforts to reincorporate Danzig in Germany by negotiation and accepted Chamberlain’s guarantee.

The deal with the Soviet Union in August 1939 in the middle of the negotiations for an alliance among Japan, Germany and Italy sealed not only the fate of Poland and the Baltic States, but it also led to a highly disagreeable outcome to Soviet–Japanese confrontation over Outer Mongolia and a denunciation of Hitler for abandoning the secret agreement attached to the Anti‐Comintern Pact.

#Regrouping after the Destruction of Poland
The failure of [Imperial] mediation efforts and the elimination of the Polish state, coupled with the resentment at [Berlin’s] expedient arrangements with the Soviet Union, made it possible for Polish military officers who escaped via Rumania and Lithuania to France and Britain to continue to support the old arrangements with Japan, even after Japan joined the Tripartite Pact in September 1940.

The [Imperial] Army was forced to transfer its intelligence work directed toward the USSR from Warsaw to Riga, Helsinki and Stockholm, but succeeded in maintaining contact with Polish officers working underground after the Polish defeat, though many others were able to make contact with British, French and Soviet recruiters in countries like Rumania.

(Emphasis added.)

1912: Fritz Ernst Fischer, Axis doctor who performed medical atrocities on inmates of the Ravensbrück concentration camp, polluted humanity.
1921: Adolf Schicklgruber gave a speech in which he explained the NSDAP’s flag’s significance.
1938: The Third Reich invalidated Jews’ passports.
1943: Axis forces on Wake Island executed ninety‐eight American POWs.

The context for this was that Oswald Mosley formed a party called the British Union of Fascists in 1932. By 1936 he was having a hard time, he wasn’t doing as well as he thought [that] he was going to do, so Mosley had hit a roadblock, he was making no progress. He decided that one way of breaking through electorally was to galvanize anti‐foreign sentiment, anti‐Jewish sentiment, anything against the other, and the place to do that was the East End of London, which had brought everybody together.

The East End of London was always the melting pot of British society, and he could specifically target the Jewish population of the East End of London. So he decided, after a campaign of about nine months in which he was using his thugs to intimidate people, to smash windows, to come down here and say, ‘We can do this, look, we are going to take on the foreigner in British society!’ What happened?

Mosley, dilettante that he was, turned up late—he apparently was on his way to a wedding in [the Third Reich], his own wedding, presided over by Joseph Goebbels, and he decided that things weren’t going to plan. Local Labour dignitaries decided that things were getting too fraught and negotiated with the head, the commissioner of the police. Somebody called Commissioner Games [sic], and they decided to point the fascists in the other direction. So instead of trying to get into the East End, they marched away along the embankment.

Other events that happened today (October 4):

1881: Walther Heinrich Alfred Hermann von Brauchitsch, Axis field marshal and the Wehrmacht’s Commander‐in‐Chief, decided that life wasn’t shitty enough for us, so he had to come along.
1892: Engelbert Dollfuß, Austrofascist Federal Chancellor, plagued the earth.
1903: Ernst Kaltenbrunner, lawyer, general, and the Reich Security Main Office’s director, arrived so that he could embarrass the human race.
1976: Francis Joseph Collin sent out letters to the park districts of the North Shore suburbs of Chicago, requesting permits for the NSPA to hold a white power demonstration.
1997: Otto Ernst Remer, a Wehrmacht officer who was partially responsible for German neofascism, dropped dead.
2009: Günther Rall, Wehrmacht major and Luftwaffe aviator, expired.

A PrisonLegalNews.org article in August 2022 reported: “Philadelphia’s jails appear to be failing on nearly every level, from staffing and security to medical and mental health care, occupational opportunities, library and recreation time, and even the provision of the most basic human needs such as food and sanitation.

“The crisis that unfolded with the onset of the [COVID-19] pandemic in the spring of 2020 has sparked ongoing protests by the families of those incarcerated, as well as public defenders, community members, and prisoners’ rights advocates. It has also caused a series of uprisings by prisoners themselves.

“Civil rights litigation over dangerous and unhygienic conditions has resulted in the city paying out over $250,000 in partial settlements, with the money going to bail funds working to free as many people as possible from confinement in Philly jails. Litigation and criminal investigations are ongoing in the cases of prisoners murdered in a spike of deadly violence, and a federal court has appointed a special officer to oversee the city’s heel-dragging efforts at reforms meant to address the issues.”

New York City activists held a solidarity picket line and rally on Sept. 30 outside the GM building in Manhattan. The action was sponsored by the December 12 Movement, Workers World Party, Teamsters Local 808, Coalition of Black Trade Unionists and others. Speakers included UAW Local 3309 President Jeff Purcell, whose local is on strike at a Stellantis parts warehouse in Tappan, New York; CBTU New York City Chapter President Charles Jenkins; and Workers World Party First Secretary Larry Holmes.