AnarchoBolshevik

In socialist Cuba, it is a different story. There are enough doctors, nurses and other medical workers, psychiatrists and psychologists to cover the entire Cuban population. “The physician to citizen ratio in Cuba is the world’s highest, with 8 physicians to every 1,000 citizens, more than double the ratio of physicians to citizens in the U.S. (Gonzalez Mendez, 2005; Campion & Morrissey, 2015)

In Cuba, “Mental and medical healthcare are free and fully integrated. Early diagnosis and intervention are standard, as each patient is known by their community doctor/nurse team from infancy through old age and by yearly home visits.” (“Learning about mental healthcare in today’s Cuba: An interview with the president of the Cuban society of psychology,” — Linz, Sheila J & Ruiz, Alexis Lorenzo, 2020)

If informed by a family member of a psychiatric problem, an intervention in Cuba can occur early before the mental health problem becomes a crisis. Doctors and nurses have established relationships with their patients, and usually live in the same community with government-supported, rent-free housing to foster long-standing relationships (“Briefing on the Cuban Mental Health System,” Jeffrey Kleinberg, 2018).

If the profit motive is removed, a “cure” for the dreaded mental ‘diseases’ of schizophrenia, paranoia, bipolar disorder or any of the diagnoses contained under the rubric of SMI is relatively simple and effective, as is demonstrated in Cuba. This occurs despite the crippling sanctions imposed by the United States.

While Biden said he would “stand in solidarity with the men and women of UAW,” in the same tweet he called for “a win-win agreement.” But in the struggle between labor and capital over the wealth created by labor, there is no “win-win.” One side’s gain is the other side’s loss. The less the bosses pay the working class, the more they keep for themselves in the form of profits. Any gain for workers cuts into the bosses’ profit-taking.

Neither Biden’s appeal to the UAW nor Trump’s demagogy will help autoworkers win a decent contract. It’s by weaponizing their power to withhold their labor that autoworkers can make good the slogan, “When we fight, we win.”

Pictured (from left to right): Neville Chamberlain, Édouard Daladier, Adolf Schicklgruber, Benito Mussolini, and Galeazzo Ciano before signing the Munich Agreement. Standing behind them are one unknown (possibly British) man, Henri Fromageot, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Freiherr Ernst von Weizsäcker, and Alexis ‘Saint‐John Perse’ Leger. Click here for more photographs.

Quoting A.J.P. Taylor’s The Origins of the Second World War, page 262:

It was no doubt disgraceful that Soviet Russia should make any agreement with the leading Fascist state; but this reproach came ill from the statesmen who went to Munich. […] [The German–Soviet] pact contained none of the fulsome expressions of friendship which Chamberlain had put into the Anglo–German declaration on the day after the Munich conference. Indeed Stalin rejected any such expressions: “the Soviet Government could not suddenly present to the public German–Soviet assurances of friendship after they had been covered with buckets of filth by the [Fascist] Government for six years.”

The [German–Soviet] pact was neither an alliance nor an agreement for the partition of Poland. Munich had been a true alliance for partition: the British and French dictated partition to the Czechs. The Soviet government undertook no such action against the Poles. They merely promised to remain neutral, which is what the Poles had always asked them to do and which Western policy implied also.

Andrew Rothstein’s The Munich Conspiracy is the perfect resource for learning more about this. Pages 70–2:

On September 26 [Adolf Schicklgruber] prepared the way for this by a speech at the Sportpalast in Berlin, in which raving abuse of Czechoslovakia and Beneš, with denunciations of the U.S.S.R. and threats of war, was interspersed with assurances that this was “the last territorial claim which I have in Europe”, expressions of friendship for Britain, France and Poland, and of personal gratitude to Chamberlain.

This was well calculated to impress: since the British Ambassador in Berlin, at any rate, had freely revealed the same train of thought passing through his mind for many months, and Hitler knew from many sources that Nevile Henderson was not alone.

He followed up the speech with a personal letter to Chamberlain on the 27th (which the Prime Minister received the same evening), arguing in the most reasonable tones against various criticisms of his terms, offering to guarantee the independence of the remainder of Czechoslovakia once the German, Polish and Hungarian minorities had gone, and finishing with an invitation to Chamberlain to “continue your effort, for which I should like to take this opportunity of once more sincerely thanking you”—in order to prevent “Prague” from bringing about a general war.^72^

The calculation was correct. Chamberlain snatched at the opportunity, and telegraphed next day to Hitler proposing an immediate Four‐Power Conference (i.e. including Italy). He had already informed the French Government, whose leaders were mainly concerned to get in ahead of Chamberlain (on the morning of the 28th) with an even more eager offer of co‐operation against Czechoslovakia—that it should be required to agree (on pain of losing any French support) to the immediate occupation by German troops of “all four sides of the Bohemian quadrilateral”.^73^

Hitler had only to choose: and he preferred the British precisely because it involved the public participation of Britain and France in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, at his dictation. Mussolini, who feared that a war might end in disaster, supported Chamberlain in a series of messages to Hitler.^74^

He sent the necessary invitations on the morning of the 28th; and the conference—Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain and Daladier—met on the afternoon of the 29th, sitting until the early hours of the morning of the 30th. Mussolini already had the draft of a settlement, which had been drawn up the previous day by the Germans, and passed on to him by the Italian Ambassador at Berlin: and at a suitable moment, after a preliminary statement by Hitler on the usual lines, Mussolini produced it as his own.

The draft provided for evacuation of the “Sudeten–German” territory, according to a map drawn up by the Germans, between October 1 and 10 and without the destruction of any existing installations: an international commission (of the four Powers with Czechoslovakia) to supervise the evacuation: a plebiscite to be held in “doubtful territories”, which until then would be occupied by international forces: and German troops to begin occupying “predominantly German territory” on October 1.^75^

After argument about the drafting of various passages, with intervals for meals, these points became the essential features of the Munich Agreement, signed on September 30. There were several additional points, designed to make the document more palatable to the public in Britain and France—since none of those present could have supposed that they would make the “carve‐up” more acceptable to Czechoslovakia.

Such were the provisions that the international commission should determine one particular zone which was to be occupied, the boundaries of which were doubtful at Munich: that there was to be the right of option for individuals: that Britain and France maintained the offer of an international guarantee of the new boundaries, made on September 19, and that [the Third Reich] and [Fascist] Italy would join it once the Polish and Hungarian minority questions were settled.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

Other events that happened today (September 30):

1883: Bernhard Rust, Reich Minister of Science, Education and Culture, was unkind enough to exist.
1939: General Władysław Sikorski became the Polish government‐in‐exile’s prime minister.
1941: The Babi Yar massacre ended.
1942: Hans‐Joachim Marseille, Axis pilot, died.
1944: The Third Reich commenced a counteroffensive to retake the Nijmegen salient, this having been captured by the Allies during Operation Market Garden.
1946: A Chinese firing squad executed Takashi Sakai, the Axis’s governor of Hong Kong.

Moss: So, today, apologists and supporters of Bandera would say that this was totally just a strategic thing, but the fact is that they were very much ideologically — or, at least, became so by the time that World War II started, that the OUN was ideologically aligned with Nazi Germany. Just to give one example — one of the leaders of the OUN, which, he goes over to the OUN‐M camp, but, regardless — in the fall of 1938, he was in Canada, and he’s saying the world is divided into two different camps: one led by, quote, “the communist international Moscow under the control of international Jews,” and the other is the nationalist camp, including Fascist Italy and [the Third Reich].

And he even says, in 1938, “Our Canadian–Ukrainian democrats are afraid that Hitler will invade the Ukraine and that the Ukrainian fascists are in close alliance with Germany and Hitler. Actually, we Ukrainian nationalists will ally ourselves not only with Germany, but with the Devil himself as long as the Devil will help us.” And so Hitler was that Devil that they were perfectly willing to go along with. If the whole thing was to be strategic, that doesn’t really make sense because, obviously, Hitler had no intentions to liberate Ukraine, and there were signs of that at the time.

[…]

Moss: It gets worse when you consider that, about a week after [the Western Axis] invades the Soviet Union and OUN‐B tries to declare its own independent state without [Berlin’s] permission and Germany — the Gestapo — arrests Bandera and his first deputy, Yaroslav Stetsko, and brings them to Berlin. And the thing is, there’s this myth that, because they refused to retract their declaration of independence, they wound up in a concentration camp.

That doesn’t happen for months, until the end of the summer — Bandera and Stetsko are initially placed under house arrest, and then they’re allowed, actually, that’s even loosened and they’re just restricted to Berlin. So there’s this sort of ambiguous relationship over that summer, and the militias that the OUN‐B created, that they thought would be the nucleus of this revolutionary army or whatever, ends up becoming subordinated to the SS and plays a serious rôle in the mass shooting of Jews that summer as [Axis forces] push east into the Soviet Union and, particularly, Soviet Ukraine.

And so it’s actually only after the OUN‐B assassinates two key OUN‐M leaders just before [Axis troops] reach Kyiv that, I think it’s Heydrich orders, as a result of this assassination of these rival OUN leaders, that the [German Fascists] actually now finally come down pretty hard on the OUN‐B. And yet the leaders of the OUN‐B, Bandera and Stetsko and others who wind up in concentration camps, are treated as political prisoners, as are — I think there was a similar thing with Romanians and, essentially, these other [Axis] collaborators who got a little out of hand and were put in these concentration camps as privileged political prisoners.

And then, in the case of the OUN‐B and other OUN leaders, they’re released in the autumn of 1944. So, it’s all part of this myth that the OUN (and, particularly, the OUN‐B) only briefly had the strategic alliance with [the Third Reich], but then, once it became clear that the [German Fascists] weren’t going to support them, that they launched this big anti‐Nazi resistance. And it’s just simply not true because, even when Bandera is under arrest in Germany (or held under, basically, de facto arrest), he’s still encouraging his followers to collaborate with [the Third Reich].

The more you look into it, the more you can see that these myths about the OUN‐B being an anti‐Nazi resistance movement is just patently wrong.

(Emphasis original.)

Events that happened today (September 29):

1881: Ludwig von Mises, Austrofascist turned neoclassical liberal, rudely burdened us all with his presence.
1912: Michelangelo Antonioni, Axis journalist and draftee, was born.
1941: The Wehrmacht, with the aid of Ukrainian anticommunists, commenced the two‐day Babi Yar massacre.
1998: Bruno Munari, Axis artist, expired.

This is from an email that Grover C. Furr (whom many consider a ‘pro‐Soviet’ historian) sent to me in January 2020:

After World War 2 the study of the specifically anti-Jewish aspect of German massacres was not emphasized. Soviet Jews were targeted, but so were all communist party members. The Soviet government had a policy not to emphasize the sufferings of any one national group over others. They emphasized that every group, all Soviet citizens, were massacred by the Nazis. And that is true, of course.

The Soviet writer Vassily Grossman and others composed a "Black Book of Soviet Jewry" about Nazi targeting of Jews. Soviet authorities refused to publish it because it singled out Jews, as opposed to other Soviet peoples. (Grossman was a communist who later, after Khrushchev's "Secret Speech," became an anticommunist because he believed Khrushchev's lies).

The Soviets also had a big problem with Zionism, particularly after the formation of the State of Israel in 1948. However, the Soviets also set up the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, to raise awareness of the Nazis' attacks specifically on Jews. This was certainly acknowledgement of the specifically anti-Jewish aspect of Nazi policy.

The problem was that the JAFC morphed into a Zionist organization. And Zionism was hostile to the concept of Soviet citizenship and internationalism. A dozen leaders of the JAFC were arrested in 1948-9, and tried for treason as American spies in 1952. All but one were executed.

Once Stalin died, they were exonerated — by Lavrentii Beria! (assuming the documents we have now are genuine). But Beria evidently did not think that Stalin had anything to do with this. Beria blamed an anti-Semite who was a high-ranking officer[.]

In 1948 Il'ia Erenburg, a famous Soviet Jewish writer (and one who did not like Stalin) published "Answer to a Letter" in Pravda. It's an affirmation of the USSR as the only real homeland for Jews and other national groups, and a critique of Zionism. Some years ago I translated it and put it on line: https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/pol/erenburganswer.pdf

One more point: The concept of "genocide" as we understand it today was invented by Raphael Lemkin in the mid-1940s. But Lemkin was just as anticommunist and anti-Soviet as he was anti-Nazi. Consequently, for a long time the concept of Nazi genocide was associated with anticommunism.

So! Should the Soviets, during the Stalin period, have published The Black Book and, in general, encouraged or at least permitted study and publication about the specifically anti-Jewish aspect of Nazi mass murder? In my opinion, sure they should have! "Hindsight is 20/20!" But I understand why they did not.

After Stalin's death, and especially after Khrushchev's lying "Secret Speech," the campaign to get Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel got under way in a big way. I haven't studied this period. It's quite different from the earlier period.

(Emphasis added.)

In sum, the Soviets were usually shy about discussing the Shoah because they were worried about accidentally coming across as chauvinistic. It was almost certainly not, as some historians (including the otherwise respectable John-Paul Himka) have suggested, the result of antisemitism.

It is worth noting that despite their general timidity about the subject, the Soviets were also among the first to document and portray the Shoah. Quoting Rich Brownstein’s Holocaust Cinema Complete, pages 21 and 44:

Surprisingly, half of the first Holocaust films came from behind the “Iron Curtain” […] Over 40 percent of the Post-War Era Holocaust Films (38) were produced by Soviet or [other] Eastern Bloc countries.

See also: First Films of the Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938–1946 and The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe.

Description:

This week on the “Bandera Lobby Show” I was honored to be joined by John-Paul Himka, a leading historian of Ukraine, and the author of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: OUN and UPA’s Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry, 1941–1944. We scheduled this interview before the outbreak of “NaziGate,” but spent some time talking about the recent scandal in Canadian parliament and the Ukrainian Waffen-SS Galicia Division. If you haven’t already, consider buying Dr. Himka’s book(s) and check out his Academia website!

(Source.)

P.S.

Wanted to highlight this: Dr. Himka shares his opinion that concentration on veterans of Waffen-SS Galicia Division since the 1980s has "rather misled people... & in the meantime the 🇨🇦 government, 🇺🇸 government has been supporting OUN fronts for years in large amounts of money."

Events that happened today (September 28):

1937: The Boletín Oficial del Estado officiated the ‘Fiesta Nacional del Caudillo’, the first time that somebody referred to Francisco Franco as the Caudillo. Meanwhile, Mussolini and Schicklgruber spoke together at a famous rally in Berlin. While the League of Nations officially condemned the Imperial bombing of Chinese cities that day, two of the League’s members, Britain and France, balked at the Spanish Republic’s demand to condemn Germany and Italy as aggressors and allow arms exports to the Spanish government, fearing it would worsen the general situation in Europe.
1939: The siege of Warsaw ended. Coincidentally, Berlin and Moscow renegotiated their Spheres of Influence.
1941: The Drama uprising against the Bulgarian occupation in northern Greece commenced.
1944: The Red Army liberated the Klooga concentration camp in Estonia.

Pictured: ‘Representatives of the governments of Italy, Germany, and Japan sign the Three Power Pact, establishing the Rome–Berlin–Tokyo Axis. Seated left to right are: Galeazzo Ciano (Italy), Joachim von Ribbentrop (Germany), and the Japanese ambassador, Kurusu.’ (Source.)

Quoting Christian Goeschel’s Performing the New Order: The Tripartite Pact, 1940–1945:

On 27 September 1940, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan signed the tripartite pact in Berlin. The signatories committed to ‘assist one another with all political, economic, and military means when one of the three Contracting Parties is attacked by a power at present not involved in the European war or in the Sino‐Japanese conflict’. The pact was a warning to the USA not to enter the wars in Europe and China. But [Washington] immediately saw the pact as the formal confirmation of Japan’s belligerence and so increased its military involvement in the Pacific.^1^

The tripartite pact built on existing treaties, including the military alliance between Italy and Germany, formalized in the 1939 Pact of Steel, and the German–Japanese Anti‐Comintern pact, concluded in 1936 and joined by Italy in 1937. Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia (the latter country albeit only for twelve days) and then the Independent State of Croatia joined the tripartite pact subsequently, but the three main signatories denied the accessory states equal rank, thereby perpetuating their idea of a strictly hierarchical world order.^2^

[The Third Reich’s] non‐aggression pact with the Soviet Union in late August 1939 had greatly upset [Tōkyō]. But as the June 1940 defeat of France by [the Third Reich] had demonstrated, the defeat of liberal democracy seemed within reach of the Axis powers.^3^

At first the alliance with Imperial Japan may looking puzzling, especially given that the German Fascists had mixed feelings on the Japanese, but given Imperial Japan’s fierce competition with liberal colonialism and its militant anticommunism, an alliance was too good to pass up:

Germany and Italy had previously maintained close links with China, but Japan’s increasing undermining of the liberal–internationalist order helped raise the possibility for the [Fascist] dictatorships to expand their territories.^5^

Pictured: ‘German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop (standing at right), addresses the audience gathered to witness the signing of the Three Power Pact, establishing the Rome–Berlin–Tokyo Axis. Seated from left to right are: the Japanese Ambassador Kurusu, Galeazzo Ciano (Italy), and German Chancellor Adolf Hitler.’ (Source.)

The signing of the pact was a triumph for Hitler. While he regarded the Japanese as racially inferior, he admired Japanese military achievements such as the 1905 victory over Russia. He saw an alliance with Nippon in strategic terms, or at least that is what he told his entourage in May 1942 when Germany, Japan and Italy dominated large swaths of Europe, East and Southeast Asia and North Africa.^23^ Moreover, because of his racist views, he did not agree with Japan’s aim to drive European colonial powers from Asia; yet in this case he was prepared to subsume his racist principles to strategic considerations.^24^

The pact’s signing in Berlin underlined Germany’s preponderant position in the alliance at the time. Despite the fanfare, reactions in Britain and the United States were cool overall. Joseph C. Grew, the U.S. ambassador to Tokyo, drily stated that the pact ‘may be a diplomatic success for Germany’, but he could not see how Tokyo would benefit from it.^25^

Soon afterwards, in January 1941, the American historian A. Whitney Griswold commented on the pact in Foreign Affairs. For him, the pact had been Germany’s brainchild. Europe still held the reins over East Asian matters. The Times, while warning against the tripartite powers’ aggression to conquer living space, judiciously commented that in ‘political geometry, the Axis is an unstable figure’.^26^

One conclusion that I find disagreeable—and I am well aware that I’m being iconoclastic for saying this—is that the Axis had ‘no common military strategy’. Even overlooking theaters such as North Africa, Greece, Yugoslavia, and the Eastern Front, the unimplemented invasions Kantokuen and Operation Orient suggest that that is at least questionable.

Quoting James William Morley in Deterrent Diplomacy: Japan, Germany, and the USSR, 1935–1940, pages 182–3:

On [Tōkyō’s] intent in signing the pact, […] Konoe as well as senior Foreign Ministry and navy officials were sincere in not wanting war with the United States. At the same time, especially after Germany’s victories in Europe, they were not prepared any more than were the army or the right wing radicals in the media and elsewhere in the bureaucracy to defer to American opposition or possible German greed and let China or the former European colonies in Southeast Asia slip from their grasp.

The pact was designed to solve this problem, that is, to confirm [Berlin’s] lack of ambition in these areas and, without war but by presenting an appearance of a formidable German–Japanese military combination, to dissuade the United States from pushing its opposition to Japan to a military showdown.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

The most important lesson that we should draw from this is that the Axis’s creation was not purely a matter of choice. Nobody coerced another power into agreeing to the alliance, but that is beside the point: the Axis was a consequence of capital’s need to expand. When the Great Depression devastated Imperial Japan’s economy, warfare was the escape hatch. Thus:

The organic weaknesses inherent in Japanese capitalism have made its life span particularly violent and explosive; have driven it to a continuous series of wars since the first Sino‐Japanese war in the 1890s; have driven it far along the road of economic autarchy and [militarism].

These weaknesses and contradictions are primarily four in nature: (a) Necessity of seeking all vital raw materials beyond its natural frontiers (Japan, up to 1941, had to import 80 per cent of the twenty‐five strategic raw materials listed by Fortune as necessary for modern war; one‐half its copper, zinc, tin and scrap iron had to be imported; one‐fourth its pig iron; one‐third its aluminum; three‐fourths of its iron ore; 90 per cent of its lead and all its mercury and nickel). (b) A weak economic base at home, lacking heavy industries (iron and steel, chemicals, etc.). (c) A dependency on its export trade abroad out of which to accumulate profits to purchase the needed raw materials. (d) An inability to accumulate surplus capital with which to develop and exploit foreign conquests and for foreign investment.

In order for [Imperial] Japan to survive at all it was necessary to take certain measures, both industrial and political, to overcome the weight of these initial handicaps. It is our ignoring of the important industrial changes that largely accounts for the underestimation of [Imperial] Japan’s power.

(Emphasis original. Source.)

While the author did not comprehensively address the problem of war, Daniel Guerin’s Fascism and Big Business gives us clues. Page 330:

Export industry complains that it has been sacrificed. In spite of subsidies from the dumping fund, [Fascist] exports are declining in all the foreign markets, and this is aggravated by the circumstance that world economy is itself in decline. In a memorandum addressed to Chancellor Hitler in June, 1937, the spokesmen of the export industry, particularly of the Rhenish‐Westphalian coal barons, state their grievances.^140^

Exports are strangled by all sorts of formalities that “transform the exchange of goods into a purely bureaucratic activity.” Export industry lacks raw materials: these are reserved almost exclusively for the armament industry. It lacks labor: “They insist on borrowing the best workers from certain branches of industry” in order to assign them to war or synthetic products industries. It lacks capital: it is unable to grant foreign customers the big credits made necessary by increasing competition. It lacks markets: the result of autarky is to isolate [the Fascist] economy from the world market.

“It has been shown,” the memorandum sadly notes, “that the foreign trade of the principal countries in the world does not necessarily depend on the German market.…” So the export industry demands that engines be reversed and contact resumed with world economy.

But—and they do not mince words—it is impossible “to bring back into the orbit of world economy an economy functioning to the detriment of the domestic value of its currency and carrying on solely such activities as rearmament and autarky.”

Thus, the additions of Ethiopia, the Saar Basin, the Rhineland, Austria, and Sudetenland could not possibly have satiated Fascist capital forever, and when the fascists won the Spanish Civil War on April 1939, there was nowhere else to turn but total war.

Other events that happened today (September 27):

1864: Andrej Hlinka, Slovakian fascist, was born.
1940: Julius Wagner‐Jauregg, Fascist eugenicist, dropped dead.
1942: Last day of the Matanikau action on Guadalcanal as United States Marines barely escaped after Axis forces surrounded them.
1944: The Kassel Mission (which aimed to destroy the factories of the engineering works of Henschel & Sohn, which built tracked armoured vehicles and their associated infrastructure) resulted in the largest loss by a USAAF group on any mission in World War II.
2006: Helmut Kallmeyer, a chemist involved in Action T4, took a long overdue dirt nap.

Such decorations seem to materialize expressions of prisoners’ attempts to maintain a distinct identity in the dehumanized cosmos of the camp or a way of recreating a kind of “self.” But what kind of “self”? Most decorative elements refer to characteristics to which prisoners could relate, such as nationality or their place of imprisonment. Except for the initials, inscriptions are mostly not of a very personal nature but refer to the experience of internment or even directly to the racist categories that the SS used for classifying the inmates.

The triangle, for instance—a paradigm symbol for the labeling of concentration camp prisoners—was omnipresent inside the camp, sewn on to every inmate’s shirt and usually combined with a letter referring to the prisoner’s nationality that pushed him/her into the Nazi racial categorization. It is one of the most frequently occurring symbols on altered or handcrafted tags (n = 16).

While it is difficult to determine why prisoners more often employed signs of the oppressive system they had fallen victim to than very specific personal details, the actual act of decorating a tag nevertheless constitutes an act of appropriation and personalization of an item that was originally conceived to mark the owner as non‐person without a name (Sofsky 1997:84).

I refrain from arguing that the decorations embody a conscious and deliberate counteraction by the prisoners in an attempt to recreate their destroyed identities—the psychological distress and disintegration have been comprehensively described by psychologist and Holocaust‐survivor Frankl (2004). However, I do think that these handcrafted items may constitute a probably unconscious re‐appropriation of the self.

Being reduced to a number, deprived of all personal belongings and being humiliated on a daily basis might have triggered in some prisoners acts of resistance. Against all intentions of the SS, some prisoners deployed their tags—maybe the only item they could call their “own”—to distinguish themselves from the dehumanized mass of numbers by connecting it to their pre‐camp lives (e.g., through their initials), or to strengthen a sense of belonging to a specific group of inmates by referring to a shared set of symbols (e.g., the abbreviation of the nationality).

This might not be so far‐fetched when considering the prominent place the prisoner number occupies in survivors' memoirs about recovering their identities in and after the camp (Graf 2015:249–250).

(Emphasis added.)

Events that happened today (September 26):

1877: Ugo Cerletti, Axis neurologist, was born.
1889: Martin Heidegger, Fascist philosophist, was delivered to the world.
1895: Jürgen Stroop, SS commander who led the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, made the mistake of living.
1942: Senior SS official August Frank issued a memorandum detailing how Jews should be ‘evacuated’.

Bertelsen, a former research fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, has in recent years cited Holocaust deniers to clear the name of Ivan Demjanjuk, the infamous Ukrainian [Axis] death camp guard.

According to historian Per Rudling, on page 296 of Shkandrij’s latest book, he also “insinuates that the convicted Sobibor death camp guard Ivan Demjanjuk (1920–2012) was framed by the German courts on the basis of ‘forged documents.’ Remarkably, considering that the study is published by a reputable academic publisher, Shkandrij lends credence to the evidently false claims of notorious Holocaust deniers in the Journal of Historical Review, which, Shkandrij maintains has ‘convinced some researchers that Demjanjuk was neither at Sobibor nor at Trawniki’.”

[…]

The last speaker needed no introduction for the CUSUR audience, and neither for many Bandera Lobby Blog readers. The “Last Word on the Matter” went to Lubomyr Luciuk, a Banderite professor at the Royal Military College of Canada, who got his blog deleted from the Times of Israel website after he publicly fantasized about throwing soup at the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa. Like the Scottish OUN‐B leader Peter Kormylo, he is a Fellow of the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto.

Last year, Luciuk self‐published a book, Operation Payback: Soviet Disinformation and Alleged Nazi War Criminals in North America, which his bio on the CUSUR program hailed an “instant classic.” This year, McGill‐Queen's University Press published a book on “Soviet Counterinsurgency Operations and the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement” that Luciuk co‐edited with Volodymyr Viatrovych, the OUN‐B’s former “memory czar” of Ukraine.

In his lecture, Luciuk of course did not talk about the role of OUN‐B and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in the Holocaust, but made sure to mention “the Soviet agents” that “disguised themselves on false‐flag operations, pretended to be UPA, went in the villages, killed people, and then the UPA got blamed.”

In other words, “some of the stories you hear about villages being attacked by UPA, killing people, and innocents and so on, are true, except that they weren’t really members of UPA. They were Soviets in disguise.” In fact, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army butchered countless numbers of Poles, Jews, and other “innocents and so on.”

These people are essentially Holocaust deniers. For years, historians like Per Rudling have had these Banderites increasingly flailing, and on the defensive. To hear it from Lubomyr Luciuk, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has given them “the best chance ever to tell our story… so now is the time for us to win the memory war.”

Around this time, an old friend of Zaryckyj’s stepped outside to smoke several cigarettes, and among other things insisted to me that the KGB paid off John‐Paul Himka, the leading historian who wrote Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust, a must‐read book published by Columbia University Press in 2021.

Events that happened today (September 25):

1937: The Chinese Eighth Route Army gains a minor, but morale‐boosting victory in the Battle of Pingxingguan.
1944: Surviving elements of the British 1st Airborne Division withdrew from Arnhem via Oosterbeek, escaping Axis forces.
1946: Hans Eppinger, Jr., Axis physician who joined the NSDAP (despite his Jewish ancestry) and performed experiments on concentration camp prisoners, took his own life.
1968: Hans Friedrich Karl Günther, the only leading racial theorist to join the NSDAP before 1933, was kind enough to drop dead.
1991: CIA asset and the Butcher of Lyon, Nikolaus ‘Klaus’ Barbie, finally kicked the bucket.
2005: Friedrich Peter, active Fascist, finally hit the dirt.

The elderly veteran, Yaroslav Hunka was honored during a session in which President Volodomyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine addressed the lawmakers to thank them for their support since Russia invaded his country, saying Canada has always been on “the bright side of history.” The Speaker of the House of Commons, Anthony Rota — who had compared Zelenskyy to Winston Churchill — recognized a “veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians and continues to support the troops today even at his age of 98.”

The assembly then rose to applaud a man in a khaki uniform standing on the balcony, who saluted, according to this screenshot from Canadian television.

The man was identified as Hunka by the Associated Press, which published a photograph showing Zelenskyy smiling and raising a fist during the ovation.

The AP caption described Hunka as having “fought with the First Ukrainian Division in World War II before later immigrating to Canada.” The First Ukrainian Division is another name for the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, the military wing of the [NSDAP]; the unit was also called SS Galichina.

The comparison to Winston Churchill is actually quite suitable, but not for the reasons that they had in mind.

Related: Leader of Canada’s House of Commons apologizes for honoring man who fought for Nazis. Quote:

“I particularly want to extend my deepest apologies to Jewish communities in Canada and around the world. I accept full responsibility for my action,” Rota said. […] Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office said in a statement that Rota had apologized and accepted full responsibility for issuing the invitation to Hunka and for the recognition in Parliament. “This was the right thing to do,” the statement said. “No advance notice was provided to the Prime Minister’s Office, nor the Ukrainian delegation, about the invitation or the recognition.”

Make of that what you will.

ETA: ‘His Waffen SS unit bombed children at Toronto's largest Ukrainian community center on Canadian Thanksgiving back in 1949. Few days on the front page, then never spoken of again.’

Just three days after release of the video footage, on Sept. 14, hundreds of people from the neighborhood where Kandula went to school came out in a multinational protest. They took to the streets and went to the downtown police station. People came out of their apartments to join them. The crowd’s signs read “Jail killer cops!” “End police terror!” and, of course, “Justice for Jaahnavi!”

TouthliRt Williams, a wood carver from the Nuu-Chah-Nulth First Nation, spoke to the crowd about the injustice done to his brother, John T. Williams, also a wood carver, who was killed by Seattle cops in 2010. He urged the people there to keep pushing for justice. The march was called by the Seattle Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression.

Two days later, on Sept. 16, members of the Indian and South Asian community held a rally at the scene where the police car crashed into Kandula. They ended with a call for justice. After a meeting with the mayor and police chief, community members sent a clear message that they wouldn’t back down until the police are held responsible and justice is obtained.

Meanwhile, the coffins and headstones were once again hoisted and maneuvered through the crowd as the protesters outside headed toward the performance stage area to distribute informational flyers to the public. The portable speaker continuously blasted the sounds of the incarcerated banging on the cells inside the ACI. An artist performing on the stage, moved by the demonstration, paused and declaratively encouraged the audience to listen to what the protesters were saying and take their flyers.

With bullhorns in hands and surrounded by police officers, the procession advanced militantly across the street to solidify the group’s presence with those who were inside the CIC. They explicitly demanded action from Gov. Daniel McKee.

As the demonstration culminated, mYia X of WWP and SWI shared words of solidarity and remembrance of the Attica Uprising that happened 52 years ago on Sept. 9, 1971. She read an excerpt of the fiery rallying cry, “What has happened here is but the sound before the fury of those who are oppressed!” spoken by Eliot “LD” Barkley, one of the 29 Attica martyrs. mYia X bridged it with, “The sound of the people pounding on the doors for help at the ACI,” calling for these words to be a reminder cemented across the U.S. and around the globe that, “We must continue the struggle to abolish this system because it cannot be reformed!”