AnarchoBolshevik

Stressing the importance of Orange Shirt Day, Mahtowin Munro, co-leader of UAINE, said: “We are here to support our Indigenous family across Turtle Island who have suffered trauma as a result of residential schools that tens of thousands of Indigenous children were forced to attend. In truth, we should not call these institutions ‘schools.’ Schools should not have graveyards and be places of horror for generations of children.”

The Catholic Church ran many of these institutions where staff beat, abused and murdered Indigenous children. Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee has estimated that at least 4,000 Indigenous children died at residential schools, but the real figure is likely much higher.

Related: Orange Shirt Day protests

I considered replacing my profile picture, so I went to my settings and tried to upload a new one. At first it looked like it was working, but when I refreshed the page after clicking ‘Save’, nothing happened.

So I turned off my content blocking extensions, allowed Opera to permit trackers, advertisements, and protected content, and I retried to upload my profile picture.

{"data":{"error":"rate_limit_error"},"state":"success"}

I decided to modify my browser to accept all cookies, and this time I tried browsing outside of private mode.

{"data":{"error":"rate_limit_error"},"state":"success"}

At this point I thought ‘fuck it’, switched to Microsoft’s awful Edge browser, and tried to upload my picture from there.

{"data":{"error":"rate_limit_error"},"state":"success"}

Piss, piss, PISS!

ETA: I figured out what the problem is. The page didn’t want to save because the description had too many characters in it.

Quoting Carl T. Schmidt’s The Corporate State in Action: Italy under Fascism, pages 135–6:

Yet despite the efforts of the Fascist régime to salvage property interests and promote recovery, Italy was in an unhappy condition at the end of 1934. For, after more than ten years of power. Fascism had been unable to solve Italy’s economic difficulties.

Mussolini was forced to admit: ‘We touched bottom some time ago. We shall go no farther down. Perhaps it would be hard to sink any lower. . . . We are probably moving towards a period of humanity resting on a lower standard of living. We must not be alarmed at the prospect. Humanity is capable of asceticism such as we perhaps cannot conceive.’^23^

Not long after, in inaugurating the Corporations, he announced: ‘One must not expect miracles.’^24^ Industrial production remained at low ebb, foreign trade still fell off, unemployment was at a distressingly high level and efforts to combat it had had little substantial effect. All this was very harmful to Fascist prestige.

Continued economic troubles and the inner pressures of Fascism impelled the Dictatorship to seek escape in foreign fields. War might be a kind of public works vastly more effective in reviving industry than anything tried before. With their attention focused on the glories of the battlefield, the people might be diverted from an uncomfortable concern over their domestic misfortunes. And certainly a military victory would solidify the Fascist movement and restore its fading glamour.

In this crisis, the rulers themselves would learn that the machine they had built under whose dominion men must live in constant spiritual tension, in fear and uncertainty is above all an engine of warlike enterprise.

(Emphasis added.)

For many Africans, this was the real start of World War II, and Fascism’s reputation in the liberal régimes would never be the same. Ethiopia was the only nation‐state in Africa to have successfully resisted European imperialism up until this point, and the invasion was so shocking to the world that even many otherwise profascist Japanese were appalled (for a while).

It cost the lives of at least 350,000 Ethiopians, involved numerous unpunished war crimes, and brought Europe’s two Fascist empires closer together, serving as an important inspiration to the Third Reich. Its importance can hardly be overstated, but I suspect that many of us know little to nothing about his tragedy thanks to Eurocentrist education.

Now, concerning the documentary: it is a bit crude and archaic at times, and being made for television it inevitably suffers from time constraints, but it is still quite good for beginners and anybody who is more orientated towards visual learning. It also provides examples of U.S. attitudes towards Mussolini pre‐1935, something that antisocialists rarely discuss.

Alternatively, Lion of Judah is an hour longer and is lush with precious archived footage, but it almost feels like a stereotypical nature documentary with its painfully long pauses between narrations, its lengthy shots of almost everything that the Italians and Ethiopians were doing (from dancing to pedestrianism), and the subtitles are difficult to read, but beggars can’t be choosers. (There are a few modern, amateur documentaries available, but I’m reluctant to recommend them given that the authors are centrist chumps.)

Further reading:

*The Invasion of Ethiopia – Mussolini’s […] Plan For Restoration of the Roman Empire*

Prelude to World War II

Click here for more.

My humblest request is that we not let the memory of this tragedy fade away. Where other educators have failed in their duty, we must not fail in ours.

Other events that happened today (October 3):

1894: Walter Warlimont, Deputy Chief of the Operations Staff of the Third Reich’s Armed Forces High Command, blighted the earth.
1904: Ernst‐Günther Schenck, SS doctor, joined him.
1940: The Vichy government promulgated the Law on the status of Jews, which reduced France’s Jews to second‐class citizens.
1942: An Axis V‐2 rocket reached a record 85 km (46 nm) in altitude.
1943: Axis forces massacred 92 civilians in Lingiades, Greece.

(Spotted here.)

Babi Yar is a giant, giant thing. It’s, you know… the Holocaust was essentially two parts: it was the death camps that’s represented by Auschwitz, and it’s the Holocaust by bullets which is just—it was just so often ignored, which is just taking Jews out in pits and shooting them, invariably with the help of local collaborators, and Babi Yar was when thirty‐three thousand Jews were killed in two days. In two days. Okay.

And, you know, there’s—Ukraine is filled with them. I mean, you know, my city Kharkiv has Drobytsky Yar, you know, fifteen‐thousand Jews in two days. It’s, it’s…it’s just, that’s how it is, and… but Babi Yar [is] the Auschwitz of the Holocaust by bullets. And it’s this giant, sprawling ravine—again, thirty‐three thousand bodies, you have to point [out], you know—um… and it has been the target of so much attempts at perversion from various sides.

In 2016, I believe, 2016 and 2017, um…during commemorations of Babi Yar, the Ukrainian government did this despicable thing, which is they put up a temporary display with the Ukrainian nationalists who assisted the [Wehrmacht] in killing the Jews. These people who ran newspapers with the most vile—that egged on Ukrainians to help with this [populicide]. […] It wasn’t enough to kill thirty‐three thousand people in two days. They, afterwards, they were running these […] newspapers saying, ‘Beware! There still may be Jews hiding in the city! Be vigilant for any survivors, lest there any who weren’t killed!’ Okay.

And these people—I mean, it just makes my blood boil—these people, you know, then listed them as victims, because eventually the [Axis] got tired of them and executed them too, these nationalists. And some people say [that] they were killed in Babi Yar, some people—there’s a lot of evidence that they weren’t actually killed in Babi Yar. But regardless of wherever they were killed, it would be like […] putting a memorial to the 9/11 hijackers at Ground Zero, ’cause technically they were killed there too. You know.

And the pain of it, and Jewish organizations stood there and they commemorated Babi Yar with this obscene, this obscene mockery, this perversion of a commemoration, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg, because Babi Yar does not have an actual museum complex, a comprehensive introduction: What is Babi Yar, what happened there, who killed who[m], who were the victims, who were the perpetrators.

At the National Press Club this week, Rosenworcel (9/26/23) said that the FCC will vote on a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking at its next meeting in mid-October. And they will center the role of Title II, the part of federal communications law that gives the agency the power to even go about overseeing corporate control of the internet: to push against price gouging, anti-privacy moves, access-throttling—the whole range of things that makes people hate their internet service providers, and makes it a less hospitable arena for activism and organizing. That’s before you even get to whether they are allowed to shut off service during crises like Covid.

The FCC, under the sway of corporations and their lobbyists, abandoned that responsibility years ago, under former chair Ajit Pai, appointed by Donald Trump based on his career as a lawyer for Verizon.

With Title II invigorated, the FCC can engage net neutrality rules—which prevent internet service providers from slowing access for those that don’t pony up, and speeding it along for those that do. All of which machinations we as end-users may not be aware of, but that will absolutely affect what we see and know and act on.

(Emphasis original.)

(Mirror.)

On April 23, 1940 no more than two weeks after the [Fascist] invasion of Denmark and Norway, Himmler ordered the establishment of a Waffen SS unit which was to include volunteers from these two countries: The SS Standarte Nordland. The recruitment of Scandinavians to Nordland was designed to overcome the strict limits imposed on the growth of the Waffen SS by the Wehrmacht. The Wehrmacht had established a near‐monopoly on recruiting in Germany, forcing the Waffen SS to look outside Germany in its search for manpower.

In the end around 13,000 Danish citizens volunteered for [Fascist] armed service during the Second World War, some 7,000 of whom enlisted. The vast majority — around 12,000 — volunteered for the Waffen SS and the organization admitted around 6,000. The greater part of these Danes served in three different formations: Frikorps Danmark (The Danish Legion), SS Division Wiking and, after the disbandment of the so‐called legions in 1943, in SS Division Nordland. Approximately 1,500 Danish volunteers hailed from the German minority in southern Jutland and served mainly in the Division Totenkopf and to some extent in the 1st SS Brigade.

(Emphasis added, because nobody can excuse these anticommunists by saying that somebody ‘forced’ them to serve.)

Up until June 1941 recruitment did not make serious progress, but the [Axis] assault on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 made hitherto politically sceptical groups potential volunteers. The anticommunist theme now became dominant in recruitment propaganda designed to appeal to right‐wing nationalist groups who were not necessarily [Fascists].

Furthermore, physical requirements for volunteers diminished in subsequent years, as the engagement at the eastern front took a heavy toll in human lives. Right‐wing nationalist, but non‐Nazi groups were encouraged to enlist on the grounds that the war against the Soviet Union was a crusade to “protect Europe against Bolshevism”.

[…]

With 1,200 men Frikorps Danmark was sent to Demyansk south of Novgorod in May 1942. In less than three months the corps experienced the loss of close to 350 men who were either killed or wounded.^10^ After a one‐month refreshment and propaganda leave in Denmark the corps returned to the front in November 1941. Originally, Frikorps Danmark was supposed to join 1st SS Brigade in Byelorussia in its indiscriminate killing of civilians in areas associated with Soviet partisans.^11^

However, due to the deteriorating situation at the front both the 1st SS Brigade and the Frikorps were instead sent to frontline duty at the Russian town of Nevel, some 400 kilometers west of Moscow. In the spring of 1943 — as a consequence of further losses and inadequate reinforcements — the corps was down to 633 men and was withdrawn from the frontline.^12^

[…]

Naturally education of the rank and file was on a different level but incorporated nonetheless an endless number of ideological elements, from ordinary lectures in Weltanschauung to bayonet practice on Jewish‐looking cardboard figures.^26^ Correspondence also illustrates how several Danish volunteers identified with [Fascist] values.

But whereas it is easily shown how many Danish volunteers became radical anti‐Semites and otherwise ideologically inflamed, it is less easy to document the extent to which the Danish Waffen SS soldiers were involved in criminal actions against civilians and enemy POWs. Unfortunately, only a limited number of official documents related to the Waffen SS field units in question (such as war diaries and orders‐of‐the‐day) are available today. […] Nevertheless we can document a number of incidents.

During Frikorps Danmark’s first frontline engagement in the so‐called Demyansk pocket near Lake Illmen in northwest Russia, a trooper tells his diary that a [Soviet] POW was shot by a Danish Waffen SS volunteer, apparently because he stole cigarettes from the troops.^28^ The diary also mentions that a [Soviet] boy soldier around 12 was sentenced to death because he attempted to escape a prison camp.

Furthermore, evidence from different sources suggests that in a specific attack that included most of Frikorps Danmark a number of Russian POWs were shot in retaliation for the death of Frikorps commander von Schalburg. Von Schalburg was killed during the early phase of the assault and this apparently enraged the Danes. A Danish officer wrote home, “no prisoners were taken that day”.^29^

One especially brutal description, concerning the killing of a civilian Jew, also dates from the Demyansk period. It is one of the very few clear‐cut illustrations of how ideology and war crimes could be directly related. Thus another diary‐writing soldier notes the following:

A Jew in a greasy Kafkan walks up to beg some bread, a couple of comrades get a hold of him and drag him behind a building and a moment later he comes to an end. There isn’t any room for Jews in the new Europe, they’ve brought too much misery to the European people.^30^

After the disbandment of the Frikorps Danmark the men were transferred to the newly established Division Nordland and sent to Yugoslavia during the fall of 1943. Here they became involved in a very brutal fight with local partisans. On at least one occasion Danes from “Regiment Danmark” burned down an entire village from which shots had been fired, and despite finding no adult men there they apparently killed the inhabitants.^31^

The Danish officer Per Sørensen relates a story that might be addressing the same situation or perhaps one like it. In a letter that escaped censorship by travelling with a colleague to his parents, he brags about having killed 200 “reds” without suffering a single casualty.^32^

[…]

Another Dane, the doctor Carl Værnet, was among the doctors in [Axis] service who conducted medical experiments on inmates in the camps. During autumn 1944 in the Buchenwald concentration camp Værnet implanted an artificial “sexual gland” in 15 homosexual or effeminate male inmates in order “to cure them” from their “wrong” sexuality. The experiments were authorized by Himmler personally.

Though some of the prisoners submitted to Værnets “treatment” died, Værnet managed to avoid a post‐war trial, despite undergoing short internment and investigation by the Danish authorities.^39^

(Emphasis added in all cases. As always, the examples included in this excerpt were by no means the only ones from which to choose.)

Events that happened today (October 2):

1847: Paul von Hindenburg, conservative who helped promote the NSDAP to institutional power, was born.
1935: Benito Mussolini announced amid a large gathering of ministers, state secretaries and specially selected foreign dignitaries that war with Ethiopia was imminent.
1938: Alexandru Averescu, profascist Romanian, dropped dead.
1944: The Wehrmacht terminated the Warsaw Uprising.

Despite the just struggle of the Ethiopians for their liberation and the enormous support they enjoyed from Diaspora Africans and the worldwide condemnation of the fascist atrocities, however, the Allied Forces were insensitive to the Ethiopian cause at least till 1940 when Italy declared war on Britain. The British then were compelled to become objective allies of Ethiopia, but not necessarily genuine supporters of the Ethiopian cause.

In January 1942, the Allied leaders labeled Hitler’s government as ‘régime of terror’ and supported the idea of trying the Nazi war criminals while they were shy in condemning the fascist régime in Italy. In point of fact, both Hitler and Mussolini founded […] governments of the fascist type, shared [the] same ideology of jingoism, and were menace[s] to world peace and as such should have been treated equally. The difference between the two was that Hitler was a menace to the very existence of European nations while Mussolini was engaged in destroying a black nation and an island of independence in colonized Africa.

Adding fuel to the fire, long after Mussolini was ousted from power and Badoglio was appointed as prime minister by King Vittorio Emanuele, the Allied leaders, particularly the British, continued to ignore all charges of war crimes against Badoglio. By some secret machinations, Badoglio, who seemed to have promised the British to keep the peace and preserve stability in Italy, had become the ‘good guy’ in the eyes of the Allied Powers.

When the War Crimes Commission was established under the auspices of Britain on October 1943, Ethiopia was deliberately excluded from the Commission, due to fear, perhaps, that Ethiopians will demand the trial of the fascist criminals. In fact, Britain’s Foreign Office made all efforts to frustrate Ethiopian demands and the lobbying efforts of friends of Ethiopia and Sylvia Pankhurst in London. The efforts of Ethiopian officials in London, for instance that of Blatta Ayale Gebre during the formative period of the Commission and later in 1949 of Ato Abebe Retta was also frustrated.

For all intents and purposes, the British Foreign Office and the War Crimes Commission wanted to confine crime charges to the wars they were engaged in, i.e. beginning 1939 and not the 1935–36 Italo‐Ethiopian war. Ultimately, however, the Foreign Office reconsidered its position and decided to include the Ethiopian demand in June 1945 and subsequently invited allies to sign the London Agreement on August of the same year.

At long last, i.e. ten years after Emperor Haile Selassie appealed to the League, Ethiopia was in a position to establish the Ethiopian War Crimes Commission on May 1946 but it had encountered two major hurdles: 1) the Allied leaders were not willing to prosecute the [Fascist] war criminals; 2) Ethiopia did not have enough professional personnel who could gather data in regards to the fascist crimes and coherently present them before the War Crimes Commission.

One factor that contributed to the second deficiency was the systematic killings of the Ethiopian educated élite of the 1920s and 1930s. Thus, after Ethiopia established its own Commission, it took another eight months when Ato Ambaye Woldemariam submitted a report to the UN War Crimes Commission on behalf of Ethiopia.

[…]

Sometimes, history is indeed cruel. Marshall Badoglio, who ordered the use of poison gas against Ethiopians, without encountering any prosecution lived honorably and dignified, and in fact rewarded, till he died in 1956. Marshall Graziani, responsible for the 1937 massacres in Addis Ababa was tried by the Italian government in 1950, not for his crimes in Ethiopia but for his collaboration with the [Third Reich]. He served less than a year in prison although the pretentious and theatrical Italian court sentenced him to 19 years behind bars.

(Emphasis added.)

Events that happened today (October 1):

1878: Othmar Spann, Austrian protofascist, stained the earth.
1936: Francisco Franco was named head of Spain’s Nationalist government. (Coincidentally, the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias of Catalonia dissolved itself, handing control of Catalan defence militias over to the Generalitat.)
1938: Pursuant to the Munich Agreement signed the day before, the Third Reich commenced the military occupation and annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland.
1939: After a month‐long siege, the Wehrmacht occupied Warsaw.
1942: USS Grouper torpedoed Lisbon Maru, not knowing that the ship was carrying British prisoners of war from Hong Kong.
1943: After the Four Days of Naples, Allied troops entered the city.
1945: Shizuichi Tanaka, the Axis’s Military Governor of the Philippines, took his own life.
1946: Nuremberg trials sentenced several leading German Fascists to death or imprisonment.
1959: Enrico De Nicola, President of Fascist Italy’s Chamber of Deputies in the early 1920s, expired.
1994: Paul Lorenzen, Fascist philosophist and mathematician, perished.

After bargaining all year with the unions, the city increased its offer for a cost of living wage from 1% to only 2.5%. Workers considered this offer a huge insult, as they suffered under a cost of living increase of 8.7% this year alone.

Billionaire bosses have opened up a huge wealth gap between the titans of finance and industry and the working class. The Chamber of Commerce members are the big bosses backing the mayor and City Hall. Some 42.9% of the workforce can’t afford to live in the city they serve, according to the CCU.

Among those who keep the city running are parks and recreation workers, transportation workers, librarians, City Light workers at Seattle’s electric utility, court workers, firefighters and many others.

After an hour of rallying, workers started taking over Fourth Avenue in front of City Hall. When the speakers finished, the workers marched down to City Center/Westlake Center, chanting, “Who’s got the power? We’ve got the power! What kind of power? Union power!”

Picketing has been suspended and writers are returning to work. The rank and file will be voting on the contract from Oct. 2 to Oct. 9.

While the language was being finalized, the union asked its members to join a picket line of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. The actors represented by SAG-AFTRA are still on strike.

The new agreement reportedly addresses writers’ demands for a livable income, minimum staffing levels and guarantees their jobs will not be eliminated by artificial intelligence.

As human beings, as workers and farmers, Venezuelans are no more or less deserving of the right to migrate and work than others. But Biden offered them TPS because the strategists directing U.S. foreign policy aim to weaken the Caracas government. If they don’t offer this to migrants from Guatemala or Ecuador, for example, it’s because the U.S. already dominates the regimes in those countries, regimes which are corrupt and brutal.

Biden may appear to be a kindly elder, but look closer. His offer of TPS is meant not to improve the lives of Venezuelans but to lure more Venezuelans to leave their home country. It’s aimed to make life more precarious in Venezuela and to overthrow the elected government of Nicolás Maduro.

The U.S. followed a similar policy of luring migrants from the socialist countries during the existence of the Soviet Union. Washington has done the same for over 60 years in its attempt to strangle socialist Cuba.

As recently as May 11, Menendez sent a vicious message to House Representatives who were calling on President Joe Biden to reverse sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela. He mislabeled the two governments “brutal dictatorships” and accused them of “mismanagement and graft.”

Then his charges of graft boomeranged. On Sept. 21, Menendez, his spouse, Nadine Menendez, and three New Jersey business people were indicted on charges that included conspiracy to commit bribery. Wael Hana and his two business partners allegedly bribed Menendez to accrue benefits for their business and for Egypt’s military government.

[…]

Offering up a crass anti-communist appeal as defense, the compromised politician stated that he was in the habit of withdrawing large (apparently very large!) sums of cash purportedly due to “the history of my family facing confiscation in Cuba.” A strange claim. Menendez was born in the U.S. to Cuban immigrants in 1954, five years before the Cuban Revolution.

Irizarry’s aunt, Zoraida Garcia, told CNN: “They said there was a lack of evidence. What more evidence do you want? You can see the video; the video was played in the court. The judge has seen the video. For her to drop all charges, she shouldn’t even be a judge. She dropped the charges, so it’s okay for you to murder someone and get away with it.”

The struggle for justice for Eddie Irizarry Jr, — affectionately called Junito by family members — is growing and will not stop until Dial and all killer cops are jailed.