AnarchoBolshevik

The 1919 law established the minimum requirements for all white‐collar contracts, both on an individual basis, and, potentially, for collective agreements. This law was further amended in 1924 with decree‐law number 1825, and later converted into law 562 of 1926.^9^ Private sector white‐collar employment, therefore, saw substantial continuity between the Liberal Age and the fascist period — a continuity that found no correspondence in any other category of employment.

[…]

In collective bargaining, white‐collar workers represented a weak counterparty. They were unable to manifest adequate autonomous trade union strength and not particularly willing to ally themselves as a subordinate component with the workers’ movement, given that they could not identify with the latter’s prevalently class‐based values.

From these factors emerges one of the specific reasons for white‐collar interest in fascist trade unionism: the 1924 law confirmed and restructured for the better the minimum guarantees for private white‐collar workers, and the union laws of 1926^17^ established a new top‐down solution for collective bargaining and gave legal value to collective agreements. This solution best responded to the traditional needs and attitudes of the white‐collar class in general.

[…]

Overall, the industrialists behaved in the same way towards white‐collar workers as they had towards labourers, but following a formally contrary course. While the rapid establishment of contracts for manual labourers in the late 1920s had sanctioned a change in the balance of power, following the period of salary increases and regulatory victories of 1919–1920 (the ‘red biennial’), for white‐collar workers, it was the very absence of national contracts that allowed the erosion of the post‐war salary increases to take place.^28^

The Confederation of industrialists had also sought the abolishment of the white‐collar law of 1924, accusing it of being a product of class struggle and as such incompatible with the new régime^29^; this venture did not, however, meet with success.

(Emphasis added.)

Events that happened today (September 9):

1908: Shigekazu Shimazaki, Axis career officer, was born.
1936: The crews of Portuguese Navy frigate NRP Afonso de Albuquerque and destroyer Dão mutinied against the Salazar régime’s support of General Franco’s coup and declared their solidarity with the Spanish Republic.
1939: The Battle of Hel commenced, and became the longest‐defended pocket of Polish Army resistance during the Fascist invasion of Poland. (Coincidentally, Burmese national hero U Ottama starved in prison after a hunger strike to protest Britain’s colonial government.)
1940: The Hungarian Army perpetrated the Treznea Massacre in Transylvania.
1941: Hans Spemann, Fascist embryologist, expired.
1942: An Imperial floatplane dropped incendiary bombs on Oregon.
1943: The Allies landed at Salerno and Taranto, Italy. Coincidentally, Reich bombers killed the former Axis admiral Carlo Bergamini.
1944: The Axis lost the Kingdom of Bulgaria because of the armed rebellion throughout the country and specifically the military coup in the capital.
1945: The Empire of Japan officially surrendered to China.

Kangoku-beya were prison-like hanba which used violence and debt-bondage to retain labour. Working hours at work sites with kangoku-beya were often between 13 and 16 hours a day, and food at these worksites was invariably of poor quality, often with nothing more than rice gruel, miso and perhaps a few pickles for most meals. Despite the poor quality of food and accommodation, the hanba head subtracted a large hanba fee from labourers’ salaries, which covered food and board.

Moreover, hanba heads ran small stores, overcharging labourers for a number of daily essentials, and goods necessary for use in the workplace, which were again subtracted from labourers’ salaries. As mentioned previously, some contemporary social commentators referred to kangoku-beya as a ‘modern slavery’ system, and described conditions within them as ‘a living hell’.^39^ They were poorly constructed, filthy places, where riots, fights, intimidation, injury and cruelty were commonplace, and in some cases labourers were murdered for attempting to run away.

Events that happened today (September 8):

1941: Axis forces commenced the Siege of Leningrad.
1943: The Allies proclaimed the Armistice of Cassibile by radio; OB Süd immediately implemented plans to disarm the Italian forces.
1944: For the first time a V-2 rocket hit London.
1949: Richard Georg Strauss, who briefly (and unhappily) served as Reichsmusikkammer, left the world.
1965: Hermann Staudinger, patron member of the SS, expired.
2003: Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl, Reich propagandist, had the decency to finally drop dead.

The strikers were joined by the Washington Education Association union president, Larry Delaney, who said, “These are people who put their heart and soul into their work, and they just want to be respected. … The organization that (the union) has shown is off the charts,” he said. “There have been some strikes in the past where we’ve been building the plane in the air, but this union put weeks of work into this to make sure they were ready to stand up.” (tinyurl.com/4vxwbp2j)

Groups of banner-carrying workers from Brazil, India, Ital Pakistan, South Korea, Tunisia and other countries joined the march. They were in Philadelphia for the World Congress of UNI Global Union, “a global union federation for the skills and services sectors.” This international federation “has affiliated unions in 150 countries representing 20 million workers.” (uniglobalunion.org)

UNI’s presence and solidarity demonstrated that the fight for workers’ rights knows no borders.

Pictured: “Black and Jew: Two typical American types.” (Reproduced from the Fascist periodical La difesa della raza, September 5, 1939, p. 7. Courtesy of Karen Pinkus’s Bodily Regimes.)

Quoting Why Didn’t the Press Shout?: American & International Journalism During the Holocaust, page 341:

On September 1, 1938, citing public safety, the government forbade “foreigners of the Jewish race to establish permanent residence on Italian soil, in Libya, on it Italy’s Aegean possessions” and on September 7 revoked the “concession of Italian citizenship to Jews contracted after January 1, 1919,” and gave them six months to leave the country.

(Confusingly, some sources such as Katy Hull’s The Machine Has a Soul: American Sympathy with Italian Fascism conflate these days and suggest that Rome issued the time limit on ‘foreign’ Jews on September 1st, but apparently it was really September 7th; you can see from the above how the confusion resulted.)

The law applied to at least 7,000 people (possibly as many as 10,000), but only 3,720 of them had left by March 1939.

Quoting Gene Bernardini’s 1977 article The Origins and Development of Racial Anti‐Semitism in Fascist Italy:

[Mussolini’s] decision to formulate a policy which would weld together racism and anti‐Semitism was purely voluntary and flowed naturally from the confluence of Italy’s imperial policies, the ideological tenets of fascism, and Italian national interests as enunciated by the Duce. It was not, as some observers believed, imposed upon Mussolini by official German pressure.^10^

From Klaus Voigt in Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, page 185:

Until the enactment of the racial laws, Fascist Italy had granted admission to Jewish refugees from territories under Nazi rule. Their situation then suffered a drastic setback with the decree of September 7, 1938, which threatened with expulsion the great majority of Jews who had entered Italy as immigrants or refugees after 1918 if they did not leave the country within six months.

The expulsion, however, proved impracticable: by the time the deadline expired, approximately one half of the 9,000 Jews affected by the decree, 4,500 of whom were refugees from Germany and Austria, were as yet without visas to another country and therefore unable to leave Italy. Until August 1939, Jews could still enter Italy with a tourist visa, which enabled them to remain in the country up to six months. When authorities realized that 5,000 mostly destitute people had used this kind of visa only to flee [the Third Reich’s] persecution, it was suspended.

After that, and until May 1940, entry into the country was allowed only on a transit visa in order to board a ship in an Italian harbor. When Italy entered the war in June 1940, the border was closed to Jews. After Yugoslavia’s defeat, this ban was extended to include the territories annexed by Italy.^11^

I would like to talk more generally about antisemitism in Fascist Italy. Many summarize Fascist Italy pre‐1938 was a period of ‘relative tolerance’ for Jews, but this summary leaves a lot unsaid. Benito Mussolini made antisemitic remarks even before the 1930s (though he was usually careful when and where to say them). For example, quoting from Giorgio Fabre in Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, page 60:

Mussolini in Il Popolo d’Italia on June 4, 1919, published his famous piece (“The Accomplices,” “I complici”) against Jewish Bolshevik leaders whom he claimed had been financed by Jewish American bankers[.]

Other Fascists were also quite tolerant of antisemites. Pages 60–1:

Preziosi’s magazine, La Vita Italiana, was transformed into an anti‐Semitic publication, this took on for the Fascist movement and then for the National Fascist Party (PNF) a heavily anti‐Jewish significance, which was reinforced when the magazine was joined by another anti‐Semitic periodical, the Rivista di Milano. Robert Michels, sharp‐eyed as usual, pointed this out immediately in December 1922.^19^ Nor was he the only one to do so.

The newspaper of the small and democratic Republican Party (the party inspired by Giuseppe Mazzini) made a very similar comment.^20^ The symbolic climax in this anti‐Jewish operation came a little later, on March 1, 1923, when the anti‐Semite Pantaleoni was appointed senator under the first Mussolini‐led government and at Mussolini’s wish.^21^ For the very first time in Italy, a party had an official or semiofficial anti‐Semitic wing.

When something similar had happened before the war in the Nationalist Association — a small “nationalist association” which, after the war, set up a real influent party — the “association” had split in two.^22^

Mussolini himself impressed a personal anti‐Jewish mark upon Fascism: his devastating hostility against the Jewish political élite, first and foremost against the élite of the socialist or communist “enemy.” Michels’s intuition, that anti‐Semitism was the result of a struggle within the socialist leadership, was borne out by Mussolini’s course of action after he left the socialist party and founded a movement that was in some respects a competitor of the former.

Take heed to the following! Pages 61–2:

Although this article is similarly anonymous and is not included in his Opera Omnia (Collected Works), it can nevertheless be attributed to Mussolini.^24^ It is dated September 1, 1921, and in it Mussolini commented on the Zionist conference at Karlsbad, which had been attended by Dante Lattes and other Italian delegates. Alluding to them, Mussolini wrote that there were “Jews who are fed up with living [in Italy], which is something that does not trouble us in the least.”

The “anonymous” writer of Il Popolo d’Italia then added, “If Italian — so‐called Italian! — Zionists were to move elsewhere and take with them the whole pack of Treveses, Modiglianis, Musattis, Momiglianos, Sacerdotis (Genosse), Passiglis and that fine Mr. Ottolenghi who has regaled Italy with several strikes of the postal service, it would afford us great pleasure to expedite this ‘exodus.’”^25^

For us anti‐Zionists, the fact that Fascist Italy initially supported Zionism while also tolerating antisemitism is unsurprising. After all, surely any fervent antisemite would prefer that Jews leave his country as soon as possible rather than stay in it!

True, both Fascist Italy and the Third Reich would later oppose mainstream Zionism, but it was not so much Zionism per se that bothered them as it was the British Empire, which held Palestine at that time and came increasingly in conflict with the Fascist empires. Thus the Fascists later suggested alternatives to Palestine, most infamously Madagascar, but also Ethiopia. Keep in mind that the original Zionists themselves proposed their own alternatives to Palestine, such as Patagonia and Uganda.

It is also helpful to examine the Jews who joined the PNF (the subject of the book Italy’s Fascist Jews: Insights on an Unusual Scenario), as this helps illuminate how Fascist antisemitism manifested in subtler ways. Page 63:

[A]s a matter of fact, no Jew had ever held a truly leading post in the party. Gino Arias, the famous nationalist economist, who was a Jew and would receive the party membership card on May 1, 1923, was in fact invited to the momentous Fascist congress held in Naples on October 25, 1922.^30^ But he was quite definitely only a guest. Mussolini himself wrote an extremely chilly and disconcerting letter concerning his invitation, saying that his participation was “not impossible.”^31^

Margherita Sarfatti’s situation, around that time, was in many ways similar. Maybe she was indeed Mussolini’s mistress. And in any case, her being a woman complicated things. In January 1922, when she had in fact a post of some importance, as the editor of the cultural review Gerarchia (of which Mussolini was the editor in chief), her name did not appear. She officially appeared as “direttore responsabile” (that is solely as the person legally responsible in front of authorities) only in February 1925.

(Emphasis added in all cases. It may be useful to compare this to the Nixon régime: a Zionist circle that had some token Jews but manifested antisemitism anyway.)

Thus we see that antisemitism was present in Fascist Italy even before it evolved into a systematic phenomenon in the late 1930s. Indeed, one could argue that Fascism, even at its most tolerant, could not help but be antisemitic, because it was an ultranationalist phenomenon whereas Jews have almost always been a very international people. There is more that I want to say about antisemitism in Fascist Italy, but for the sake of brevity I’ll have to discuss that another day.

Other events that happened today (September 7):

1923: Fascist Italy cofounded the International Criminal Police Commission along with over a dozen other anticommunist countries.
1940: As the Kingdom of Romania returned Southern Dobruja to Bulgaria under the Treaty of Craiova, the Luftwaffe began the Blitz, bombing London and other British cities for over 50 consecutive nights.
1942: Axis marines were forced to withdraw during the Battle of Milne Bay.
1943: The German 17th Army began its evacuation of the Kuban bridgehead (Taman Peninsula) in southern Russia and moved across the Strait of Kerch to the Crimea.
1945: Axis forces on Wake Island, which they had held since December 1941, surrendered to U.S. Marines, and around the same time that the Berlin Victory Parade of 1945 was held.

The names of the other four people who died in August in the Fulton County Jail are Montay Stinson, 40 years old, on Aug. 1, who had been held since Oct. 2022 without charges; Christopher Smith, in jail since Oct. 2019 with no bond, found “unresponsive” in the medical unit on Aug. 11; Alexander Hawkins, 66 years old, found “unresponsive” in the medical unit on Aug. 17; and on Aug. 31, 23-year-old Dayvion Blake was killed in a knife attack which injured three others.

Most officials, including Fulton County Sheriff Patrick Labat, claim the solution is to build a new jail at the cost of $1.7 billion and in the meantime transfer 700 inmates to the Atlanta City Detention Center, which has its own history of neglect, human rights violations and deaths.

In fact, it had been slated to be closed and refigured as a community resource center until Mayor Andre Dickens and the Atlanta City Council reneged on their prior vote and promise.

The people who have been named in this article were Black and poor and were challenged in some cases with mental health issues that this profit-driven system provided no care or solutions. Their unnecessary deaths underscore the truth of the abolitionist slogan, “Prisons are concentration camps for the poor.”

The march through the [indigenous] community that followed grew to around 200 participants, many carrying white flowers and Puerto Rican flags. They stopped on East Willard Street where Irizarry Jr. was killed. A prayer was led by the pastor who presided over his funeral, and rally members paid respects to the family. Participants laid white roses at a temporary memorial set up at the site.

Chanting “No justice, no peace” and “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido” (the people united will never be defeated), demonstrators marched to the 24th District police headquarters, where they held a concluding rally, chanting, raising fists and calling out their demands before a group of lined-up police officers. Only bike lane posts separated them.

Brochures supporting the “No New Jail!” campaign explained that $2 billion would be better spent on jobs, education, mass transit and other community benefits. The Coalition calls for “Care Not Cages” — offering individuals in crisis the care they need and creating alternatives to incarceration. Money bail has been criticized for the way it keeps low-income people, especially people of color, in jail because they can’t afford bail.

Public pressure led the Cuyahoga County Council to scrap plans to build a new jail on a toxic site in Cleveland, but the latest plan is to go ahead with building a new jail in a “cleaner, greener” location in the suburb of Garfield Heights. Bringing the struggle against any new jail to the Labor Day Parade was an important contribution.

(Mirror.)

During the Civil War, dehumanising the enemies and treating them as invaders was a key strategy that was used in a contradictory way in the Spanish case. Having learned from other tribal conflicts at home and the previous colonial war against Spaniards—during which, according to military archives, chemical weapons were used by Spain in the Rif’s war (Stenner 2019)—some Moroccan soldiers were encouraged by high‐ranking officers to use violence against women.

Mechbal (2011) highlighted how Moroccan soldiers were thought of as naturally or intrinsically violent, corresponding to a tribal structure prone to anarchy and revenge. Some authors have suggested that they might have enjoyed the context of war and brutality; however, this idea should be revised using historical evidence and from an anti‐colonial perspective.

As previously quoted, Franco’s General Queipo de Llano contrasted the brutality of Moroccans against the ‘sissy character’ of Republicans. This brutality was particularly described in relation to sexual violence against women (Bolorinos Allard 2016).

Again, it was part of a political and psychological strategy to spread terror using the ancestral fear of ‘Moors’ that had recently been experienced in the 1934 repression of the miners in Asturias. That terror was particularly focused in small towns, against rural women, as Moroccan soldiers were predominantly deployed in the countryside and rarely fought in cities.^9^

Events that happened today (September 6):

1915: Franz Josef Strauss, former Axis soldier and educator, was born.
1917: Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager, Wehrmacht Major who conspired to murder the Third Reich’s head of state, was born.
1939: South Africa declared war on the Third Reich (around the same time that friendly fire at the Battle of Barking Creek resulted in the British Royal Air Force suffering its first WWII fighter pilot casualty).
1940: King Carol II of Romania abdicated and was succeeded by his son Michael; General Ion Antonescu became the Conducător of Romania.
1944: The Axis lost the cities of Ypres, Belgium and Tartu, Estonia to Allied forces.
1978: Adolf Dassler, bourgeois Fascist, dropped dead.

In industries covered by the Railway Labor Act, federal regulations hostile to labor unions require mediators to rule that there is no point to further negotiations before mediators give the go-ahead for a strike. A 30-day cooling off period is then required. Additionally, the president or Congress can step in and block or delay a work stoppage.

However, the flight attendants’ willingness to strike for their rights takes place at a time when 88% of young workers in the U.S. support labor unions, according to @GBAOStrategies. The pro-union sentiments of most workers can be seen on the streets and in workplaces in many U.S. cities. Workers at unorganized shops, such as Starbucks, Amazon, Jollibee and other corporations are fighting for union recognition and contract agreements are at the highest rate in decades.

Encouraged by an unprecedented contract victory by Teamsters at UPS, 97% of workers in the United Auto Workers voted to authorize a strike. The union’s demands include a 46% wage increase, restoration of traditional pensions for all workers, return of the cost-of-living allowance, reducing the workweek to 32 hours from 40 and increasing retiree pensions.

The NLRB Cemex ruling throws out the ill-gotten election — borne of blatant lies, fearmongering and intimidation — and orders Cemex to recognize and bargain with the Teamsters. Ornelas is to be reinstated with full back pay and benefits, upholding a previous judge’s order.

The decision also overturns corporate-backed NLRB decisions which had systematically negated the 1935 National Labor Relations Act’s (NLRA) original intention and practice. The Labor Board’s 1949 “Joy Silk doctrine” required that, in order to be recognized, unions show by a signed card checkoff that a majority of workers wish to join the union. The burden of demonstrating the need for an election was put on the employer.

(Mirror.)

Along with harming millions of humans who were indisputably Jewish, the Third Reich’s antisemitism also harmed a significant number of people who either never or no longer identified as ‘Jewish’, in any meaning of the word. The German Fascists were well aware of these people, mentioning them in, for example, the children’s book Der Giftpilz, and they didn’t care; they treated them as Jews all the same.

Although there were certainly some commonalities, such as the ‘Aryanization’ of their businesses, the experiences of people who were legally ‘Jewish’ still differed quite substantially from those of Judaists and other self‐identified Jews:

Thus, by the late 1930s, the Eisigs, like all other ‘full Jews,’ had lost most of their ‘Aryan’ friends, and were practically alone, apart from several private relationships. Yet—and this is the primary focus of this article—unlike self‐identifying ‘Jews,’ they could not turn to their ‘fellow Jews.’ […] Self‐identifying Jews constructed a semblance of normality amidst the abnormality, through their interactions with one another.

On the other hand, non‐Jewish ‘Jews’ [meaning individuals who were ‘Jewish’ only according to the Nuremberg laws] like the Eisigs became truly isolated. Exceptional in their interpersonal relations within the ‘Aryan’ sphere, the Eisigs, like other non‐Jewish ‘Jews,’ could not maintain ‘normality.’

[…]

Yet, as can be seen through the examples of the Eisigs, Klemperers, and of Walter Blumenthal (discussed below), these patterns of interactions of non‐Jewish ‘Jews’ (including marriage choices and Lekebusch’s findings), combined with the reasons inherent to leaving the Jewish community entirely, support the claim that there existed a cohort of non‐Jewish ‘Jews’ which was minimally socially connected to self‐identifying Jews and was often uninvolved in Jewish organizations.

All these factors taken together suggest that the social loss experienced by all ‘Jews’^81^ was worse for non‐Jewish ‘Jews’ because the latter had a smaller pool of Jewish friends to turn to or, at least, were of a social disposition that inclined them toward shunning communal Jewish activities.

Integrating into a Jewish community was not an easy fix, and relatively few people attempted to do so, since it basically meant starting life all over:

Thus, even if some did attempt to take part in Jewish communalism after 1933, perhaps for pragmatic reasons, our starting points when analyzing their actions should be entirely different. Living an intentionally non‐Jewish life before 1933 would make any transition into a Jewish world after 1933 exceedingly difficult, regardless of the willingness of the individual.

An example of this was the difficulty that Judeo‐Christians (if you’ll allow me to use the term) had in adjusting to a Jewish school, where they felt incongruous:

[W]hile the Jewish school system was already in existence, it took time for the disparate collection of schools for the children of ‘Christian Jews’ to be set up.^92^ Equally, the Jewish community provided more than just schooling [but] for the majority of non‐Jewish ‘Jewish’ children who were forced to attend Jewish schools, the (inconsistent) provision of Christian lessons was no protection from the associated separation from the surrounding school. Where Jewish children finally found themselves in an environment in which they were not treated as different to their peers, non‐Jewish ‘Jewish’ children were segregated, yet again.

Jewish schools simply did not specialize in accommodating children of other faiths, for obvious reasons. While the placement in Jewish schools might have been better than nothing, it was still an awkward fit for Judeo‐Christian students who must have come across as incompetent and they likely did not wish to be there at all. Try to imagine forcing a neoclassical musician to attend heavy metal lessons (or vice versa) and hopefully you’ll understand the ordeal.

Sadly, few outsiders were interested in accepting legally ‘Jewish’ immigrants:

[A]s Kevin Ostoyich’s research on the Catholic St Raphael Society’s attempts to help non‐Jewish ‘Jews’ reveals, and as the society’s emigration representative in Germany, Johann Friedrich, realized: ‘no one wanted the Jews … the Catholic Church was mistaken if it believed the outside world would look past race and accept these persons as Catholics.’^101^ Even when Friedrich was finally able to help 3,000 Catholic ‘non‐Aryans’ escape to Brazil, this was in the context of repeated rejections from other consulates.

In the Eisig family memoirs, there is no evidence of international organizations proactively seeking to help them emigrate. Rather, Ludwig and Amalie managed to emigrate with the assistance of individual contacts. Gerhard was helped by an English Quakers group and their ‘Germany Emergency Committee.’ However, he only connected with them through his friendship with an individual he had met during his time studying in Manchester.^102^

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

Unmentioned in Legg’s research is how some legal ‘Jews’ took their own lives, heartbroken that all of their hard work at assimilation had been for naught. Quoting Christian Goeschel’s Suicide in Nazi Germany, pages 110–1:

Take the case of the pensioner Dora G from Prenzlauer Berg, a working‐class district in the centre of Berlin. She gassed herself in her kitchen on 4 March 1943. She was due for deportation and announced her suicide to her non‐Jewish husband and her neighbours. She left a suicide note, written under great stress and almost unreadable, on the kitchen table. In it, she declared:

For forty long years I have been married to Aryans, in my first marriage in America […] For 34 years married to an Aryan, had no contact to Jews, brought up the children in an Aryan way and took them to holy Communion, exercised no Jewish influence on them […] did not marry according to Jewish faith, 1905 in America, married according to Protestant rituals […] never did any harm to anyone, always worked (as a girl and as a woman) […] I am only sorry for my dear ill husband, I like to die, there I am safe.⁶⁵

Events that happened today (September 5):

1876: Wilhelm Josef Franz Ritter von Leeb, Axis field marshal and war criminal, stained the world with his life.
1919: Elisabeth Volkenrath, SS officer, arrived to burden humanity.
1937: Llanes fell to the Spanish fascists following a one‐day siege.
1938: Chilean officials executed a group of youths affiliated with the fascist National ‘Socialist’ Movement of Chile after they surrendered during a failed coup.
1941: The Axis absorbed Estonia.
1942: The Empire of Japan’s high command ordered withdrawal at Milne Bay, the Eastern Axis’s first major defeat in land warfare during the Pacific War.
1943: The Axis lost the Lae Nadzab Airport (near Lae in the Salamaua–Lae campaign) to the Western Allies’ 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment.
1953: Richard Walther Darré, Reich Minister for Food and Agriculture as well as Chief of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office, expired.