!robeson-outrage

audio version (Robeson As interpreted by James Earl Jones):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhnCrHZkgNk

short about Paul Robeson:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PfhIeFf1-Ls

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Robeson

>After returning to the United States in 1939, Robeson supported the American and Allied war efforts during World War II. However, his history of supporting civil rights causes and Soviet policies brought scrutiny from the FBI. After the war ended, the CAA was placed on the Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations. Robeson was investigated during the McCarthy era. When he refused to recant his public advocacy of left-wing beliefs, the U.S. State Department denied his passport and his income plummeted. He moved to Harlem and published a periodical called Freedom,[4] which was critical of United States policies, from 1950 to 1955. Robeson's right to travel was eventually restored as a result of the 1958 United States Supreme Court decision Kent v. Dulles.

Extracts taken from: Musui's Story: The Autobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai by Katsu Kokichi (Author), Teruko Craig (Translator, Introduction) University of Arizona Press (July 1, 1991) https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/musuis-story

Jag må vara en enkel svensk kock men även jag vet att det är ruttet! Kom ihåg att antikommunism är nazism i förklädnad. Fall inte för det!

!

Human bones from the Early Neolithic period discovered in Spain's Sierra de Atapuerca cave system's Galera del Slex cave have been studied again by researchers at the Universidad de Alcala.

The team describes their examination of the site, fossils, and context of the remains in an article titled "Early Neolithic human remains from Galera del Slex in Sierra de Atapuerca, Burgos, Spain" that was published in Quaternary Science Reviews. This investigation was done to piece together the history of the people who were discovered there.

For thousands of years, people have used the Galera del Slex cave. Numerous human and animal remains, 53 panels of engravings and red and black cave paintings, dozens of fire hearth ruins, and pieces of ceramic vessels may all be found in the cave.

The cave entrance was sealed just as the Bronze Age was coming to an end, creating a time capsule that survived until its discovery in 1972. Over time, a more nuanced image began to emerge, but at first the objects and remains were all assumed to date from the Bronze Age.

In the decades following discovery, 2,700 human remains were gathered from various cave regions. In addition, several hearths, the remains of torches that were placed in strategic locations, more than 6,000 ceramic fragments (at least 336 containers), tools, flint, an axe that had been polished, and 341 animal bones, mostly rabbits, were also discovered.

The remains of five people were found in the cave's two deep chasms, Sima A and Sima B.

Sima B

Three people are found in Sima B's vertical shaft, and the positioning and surroundings of the remains imply intentional placement. One person (I-1) is discovered to have all of the skeleton remains present, showing that it was thrown into the chasm just after passing away.

The others could have been moved from another area to the shaft because they are not as complete. The authors note that using the pictures of the original excavation to rebuild this location presents significant challenges.

Sima A

From the depths of Sima A, two people and six pottery vessels that were later dated to the Early Neolithic were found. The two people were initially thought to be a tragic pair of Bronze Age cave explorers who became disoriented and fell into the 15-meter-deep crevice of the Sima A features. Neolithic ceramics, on the other hand, point to an older, deliberate placement. According to the authors, this intention is consistent with the custom of 5,000–6,000 years ago, when pottery vessels were frequently left as funerary offerings in Neolithic cemeteries.

According to forensic analysis, one of the people (I-5) was a female who was 13 years old when she passed away. Her full and assembled remains were discovered resting against the far wall of the chasm floor, close to the six porcelain urns.

The other bones (I-4) were of an adult guy who was found face down and without the lower half of his skeleton, indicating that he may have been a more unfortunate explorer than the others.

Three of the remains—one from the young girl (I-5) of Sima A and two from Sima B—have undergone radiocarbon dating, which dates them to the latter half of the 6th millennium BCE, or more than 7,000 years ago, making them some of the oldest Neolithic human remains ever discovered in the interior of the Iberian Peninsula. It is by more than 1,000 years the oldest Neolithic funeral site in the instance of the 13-year-old girl.

It's interesting to note that individual I-4 of the Sima A funeral site is significantly more modern, dating to just over 4,000 years old. This is consistent with the first excavation interpretation of a Bronze Age spelunker who ran into some terrible luck.

Source: https://phys.org/news/2023-08-year-old-girl-iberian-cave-early.html

“His zeal in the cause of my race was far greater than mine - it was as the burning sun to my taper light - mine was bounded by time, his stretched away to the boundless shores of eternity. I could live for the slave, but he could die for him.”

• Frederick Douglass, 30 May 1881

>If George was wrong in places, it was, I think, because he was too optimistic. He believed the United States would be more “settled” in 2022. The zeal that drove the pioneers across the continent would be exhausted. Instead of scrapping for wealth, Americans would put that energy toward producing art and literature.

>He predicted “a great liberalism of mind” and a sort of national homogeneity. “The American from Key West and American from Seattle will be much the same kind of man,” he wrote.

>There was a tinge of nostalgia in George’s prose, a nostalgia for a future he would not know. “The sad thing about discovery,” he wrote, “is that it works toward its own extinction, and that the more we discover the less there is left.”

This is your brain on Liberalism.

video: Futurist From 1922 Makes Weirdly Accurate Predictions For 2022

Heloise Ruth First (4 May 1925 – 17 August 1982) was a South African anti-apartheid activist and scholar. She was assassinated in Mozambique, where she was working in exile, by a parcel bomb built by South African police.

Journalist, academic and political activist, Ruth Heloise First was born on 4 May 1925. She was the daughter of Jewish immigrants Julius and Matilda (neé Levetan) First. Julius, a furniture manufacturer, was born in Latvia and came to South Africa in 1906 at the age of 10. Matilda came to South Africa from Lithuania when she was four years old. They were founder members of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA, later South African Communist Party [SACP]) in 1921. Ruth and her brother Ronald grew up in a household, in which intense political debate between people of all races and classes often took place.

After matriculating from Jeppe High School for Girls, First studied at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, from 1942 to 1946. She graduated with a BA (Social Studies), receiving firsts in sociology, anthropology, economic history and native administration. Her fellow students included Nelson Mandela, Eduardo Mondlane (Mozambican freedom fighter and the first leader of FRELIMO), Joe Slovo, JN Singh (executive member of both the Natal and South African Indian Congress), and Ismail Meer (a former secretary-general of the South African Indian Congress). First helped found the Federation of Progressive Students and served as secretary to the Young Communist League, and was active in the Progressive Youth Council and, for a short while, the Johannesburg branch of the CPSA.

In 1947 First worked, briefly, for the Johannesburg City Council, but left because she disagreed with the actions of the council. She then became the Johannesburg editor of a left-wing weekly newspaper. As a journalist she specialised in investigative reporting and her incisive articles about slave-like conditions on Bethal potato farms, the women's anti-pass campaign, migrant labour, bus boycotts and slum conditions remain among the finest pieces of social and labour journalism of the 1950s.

Having grown up in a politically conscious home, First's political involvement never abated. Apart from the activities already mentioned, she did support work for the 1946 mineworkers' strike, the Indian Passive Resistance campaign and protests surrounding the outlawing of communism in 1950. First was a Marxist with a wide internationalist perspective. She travelled to China, the Union Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) and countries in Africa, experiences that she documented and analysed. She was central to debates within the Johannesburg Discussion Club, which led to the formation of the underground SACP (of which First was a member) and to closer links between the SACP and the African National Congress (ANC).

In 1949, First married Joe Slovo, a lawyer and labour organiser and, like her, a communist. Throughout the 1950s their home in Roosevelt Park was an important centre for multiracial political gatherings.

Despite her public profile and wide contacts, First remained a private person. She had a brilliant intellect and did not suffer fools gladly. Her sharp criticism and her impatience with bluster earned her enemies and she was often feared in political debate.

In 1953, First helped found the South African Congress of Democrats (COD), the White wing of the Congress Alliance, and she took over as editor of Fighting Talk, a journal supporting the alliance. In 1956, both First and Slovo were arrested and charged in the Treason Trial. The trial lasted four years, after which, all 156 accused were acquitted on 29 March 1961.

First considered herself to be primarily a labour reporter, and during the 1950s she was producing up to 15 stories a week. Despite this high work rate, her writing remained vivid, accurate and often controversial. Her investigative journalism was the basis of her longer pamphlets and, later, her books. The transition to more complex writing came easily.

During the state of emergency following the Sharpeville shootings of March 1960, First fled to Swaziland with her children, returning after the emergency was lifted, six months later, to continue as Johannesburg editor of New Age (successor to The Guardian).

On 9 August 1963, First was detained at the Wits University library. This took place following the arrests of members of the underground ANC, the SACP and Umkhonto we Sizwe in Rivonia on 11 July. In the trial which followed, political leaders such as Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki were sentenced to life imprisonment. However, First was not among the accused.

After 90 days First was released but immediately re-arrested on the pavement outside the police station. She was held for a further 27 days, during which she attempted suicide. During this time her father fled South Africa. Soon after her release First left with her children to join her husband, Joe Slovo, who had already fled the country to Britain.

The family settled in North London and First threw herself into anti-apartheid politics, joining the Anti-Apartheid Movement, holding talks, seminars and public discussions in support of the ANC and SACP.

During the 1960s, First researched and edited Mandela's No Easy Walk to Freedom (1967), Govan Mbeki's The Peasant's Revolt (1967) and Oginda Odinga's Not yet Uhuru (for which she was deported to Kenya).

Following a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) conference at the centre on 17 August 1982, First was killed by a letter bomb, widely believed to have been the work of security agencies within South Africa. Until her death, she remained a ‘listed’ communist and could not be quoted in South Africa.

To read a collection of writings by Ruth First, visit The Ruth First Papers at http://www.ruthfirstpapers.org.uk/

Original article

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Article is from 1988 FYI, but more relevant than ever.

This Guardian piece has some clues if you read it critically.

>Gareth Jones's accounts of what was happening in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-33 were different from other western accounts. Not only did he reveal the true extent of starvation, he reported on the Stalin regime's failure to deliver aid while exporting grain to the west. The tragedy is now known as the Holodomar and regarded by Ukrainians as genocide.

>The story of Jones, a devout, non-comformist teetotaller from Barry, often has elements of Indiana Jones and Zelig.

>Rory Finnan, a lecturer in Ukrainian studies at Cambridge, called him "a true hero"."He is a remarkable historical figure and it is also remarkable that he is not well known. Jones was the only journalist who risked his name and reputation to expose the Holodomor to the world."

>But there is more to Jones's story and a Zelig-like quality to his life. For example, he was once on a 16-seat aircraft with the new German chancellor, Adolph Hitler, and Joseph Goebbels, on their way to a rally in Frankfurt. Jones wrote for the Western Mail that if the plane had crashed the history of western Europe history would have changed forever.

>Another time, outside the gates of the White House, he saw the one-time American president Herbert Hoover preparing to have his photograph taken with schoolchildren. Soon enough, somehow, Jones is in the photograph.

>After his Ukraine articles Jones was banned from the USSR and, in many eyes, discredited. The only work he could get was in Cardiff on the Western Mail covering "arts, crafts and coracles", according to his great-nephew Nigel Linsan Colley. But again his life changed. He managed to get an interview with a local castle owner: William Randolph Hearst who owned St Donat's Castle near Cardiff. The newspaper magnate was obviously taken by Jones's accounts of what had happened in Ukraine and invited the reporter to the US.

>Jones dutifully arrived at Hearst's private station – as Chico Marx was leaving the estate – and wrote three articles for Hearst and used, for the first time, the phrase "manmade famine".

!

a few bits about Hearst: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst

>After 1918 and the end of World War I, Hearst gradually began adopting more conservative views and started promoting an isolationist foreign policy to avoid any more entanglement in what he regarded as corrupt European affairs. He was at once a militant nationalist, a staunch anti-communist after the Russian Revolution, and deeply suspicious of the League of Nations and of the British, French, Japanese, and Russians.[2] Following Hitler's rise to power, Hearst became a supporter of the Nazi Party, ordering his journalists to publish favourable coverage of Nazi Germany, and allowing leading Nazis to publish articles in his newspapers.[3] He was a leading supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932–1934, but then broke with FDR and became his most prominent enemy on the right.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst#Anti-Communist_enthusiasm_for_Hitler

>With “AMERICA FIRST” emblazoned on his newspaper masthead, Hearst celebrated the “great achievement” of the new Nazi regime in Germany—a lesson to all “liberty-loving people”—the defeat of communism. In 1934, after checking with Jewish leaders to ensure a visit would be to their benefit,[57] Hearst visited Berlin to interview Adolf Hitler. When Hitler asked why he was so misunderstood by the American press, Hearst retorted: "Because Americans believe in democracy, and are averse to dictatorship."[58] William Randolph Hearst instructed his reporters in Germany to give positive coverage of the Nazis, and fired journalists who refused to write stories favourable of German fascism.[3] Hearst's papers ran columns without rebuttal by Nazi leader Hermann Göring, Alfred Rosenberg,[3] and Hitler himself, as well as Mussolini and other dictators in Europe and Latin America.[59] During that same year 1934, Japan / U.S. relations were unstable. In an attempt to remedy this, Prince Tokugawa Iesato travelled throughout the United States on a goodwill visit. During his visit, Prince Iesato and his delegation met with William Randolph Hearst with the hope of improving mutual understanding between the two nations.

A long and very comprehensive read about how the anti-communist Hearst propaganda was ultimately put into history books as 'fact':

https://www.villagevoice.com/in-search-of-a-soviet-holocaust/

This is also related to a CIA-funded publishing corp that help establish fascist-sympathizing literature to support the 'terror famine' propaganda:

>The CIA facilitated Lebed’s move to the US, getting asylum for him and his family in 1949 and helping him obtain citizenship in 1957. As head of a CIA operation called Project AERODYNAMIC, Lebed spent the next few decades in control of a Agency-funded non-profit publishing company, the Prolog Research and Publishing Association.

Prolog Research and Publishing went on to promote lots of anti-Soviet propaganda, including popularizing the 'terror famine' rhetoric.

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2018/sep/18/mykola-lebed-and-the-cia/

>Thanks to his collaboration with the CIA and their active shielding of him, Lebed was never tried for the war crimes he and his men had committed against Poles and Jews during WWII.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mykola_Lebed

The invention of the bicycle is hard to pinpoint exactly. What we understand now as a bicycle is closest to the rover safety bicycle, but it's not like people started there. Certainly our guy is the first we know of to invent sort of proto-bicycle, not quite a balance bike, certainly not a bicycle bicycle (even if you'd include penny farthings), the dandy horse.

Also where you get the draisine from, btw.

Now figures of history were complex, he was a civil servant for a colonizing state, but he did actually later lay down his title of nobility in the spirit of the french revolution. Bias is obvious here, but kind of nice to think one of the inventors of the bicycle was a class traitor (good version).

He would later die pennyless and being declared insane in a revenge act of the government.

So I was reading through @sunaurus@lemm.ee 's comment about Estonian demographic history and felt intrigued by some of the claims, so I did a teeny tiny bit of digging to see what I could find. So here goes:

1. The Estonian population expanded rapidly during the industrial revolution right up to the 1910s.

2. World War 1 and the Great Depression manage to suppress population growth for the next decade.

3. Nazi occupation of Estonia (marked RKO) coincides with WW2. The vast majority of ethnic Jews flee to the USSR, and those whl stayed behind were exterminated. The nazis and their Estonian collaborators built concentration camps. This coincides with a dip in the graph.

4. After WW2, Estonia is back under the USSR. The first Estonian SSR was established in 1940-1941 when nazi occupation started. After some lag, the population begins climbing on the same curve it did before. The population of the country peaks in 1989.

5. 20000 people were deported to Russia very early in the existence of the SSR

6. The nazis aimed to remove 50% of the population on paper but only had 4yrs to do so. This means using concentration camps on ethnic Estonians for germans to take their homes/land as in palestine today.

7. 20k is not the same as sunaurus's 20% claim, not even close. 20% does however match the proportion of modern estonians who are russian. The obvious conclusion one can gather from this comparison is that this is not dissimilar to Great Replacement propaganda. The assumption here is that ethnic Russians are taking up Estonian space, because the evidence points to massive population growth under the ussr rather than a contraction like the one that occurred with German occupation.

Immigration was highest during that huge growth period, so I'm curious where all those excess deaths and gulags occurred to have not slowed or stopped said growth. It sounds to me like this person is just intimidated by people they consider foreign.

>I remembered how each time that the democracies failed to act, it had encouraged the aggressors to keep going ahead. Communism was acting in Korea just as Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese had acted ten, fifteen and twenty years earlier…. If this was allowed to go unchallenged it would mean a third world war, just as similar incidents had brought on a second world war.

• Truman on Korea

>If I may refer again to history; we failed to halt Hirohito, Mussolini and Hitler by not acting in unity and in time. That marked the beginning of many years of stark tragedy and desperate peril. May it not be that our nations have learned something from that lesson?

• Eisenhower on Vietnam

>Nor would surrender in Vietnam bring peace, because we learned from Hitler at Munich that success only feeds the appetite of aggression. The battle would be renewed …bringing with it perhaps even larger and crueler conflict, as we learned from the lessons of history.

• Johnson on Vietnam

>We succeeded in the struggle for freedom in Europe because we and our allies remain stalwart. Keeping the peace in the Middle East will require no less. We're beginning a new era. This new era can be full of promise, an age of freedom, a time of peace for all peoples. But if history teaches us anything, it is that we must resist aggression or it will destroy our freedoms. Appeasement does not work. As was the case in the 1930's, we see in Saddam Hussein an aggressive dictator threatening his neighbors.

• George H. W. Bush on Kuwait

> We are not deceived by their pretenses to piety. We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions -- by abandoning every value except the will to power -- they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies

• George W Bush on Afghanistan

>The cause of peace requires all free nations to recognize new and undeniable realities. In the 20th century, some chose to appease murderous dictators, whose threats were allowed to grow into genocide and global war. In this century, when evil men plot chemical, biological and nuclear terror, a policy of appeasement could bring destruction of a kind never before seen on this earth.

• George W Bush on Iraq

>The U.S. assigned General Douglas MacArthur to oversee occupied Japan and designated him the Supreme Commander of Allies in the Pacific (SCAP). From his General Headquarters (GHQ) in Tokyo, MacArthur controlled SCAP, a massive bureaucracy of 6,000 people that dictated policy to the Japanese government. He commanded the occupying army of 430,000 soldiers to enforce his orders. MacArthur has gone down in mainstream history as an erratic but nevertheless heroic figure. He was nothing of the sort. MacArthur was a reactionary Republican who believed that the white man’s burden was needed to bring civilization, commerce and Christianity to Asia. He held his Japanese subjects in contempt, and he only spoke to a total of 16 Japanese people during his six-year rule. At the end of his reign, MacArthur summed up his attitude toward the Japanese: "If the Anglo-Saxon was say 45 years of age in his development, in the sciences, the arts, divinity, culture, the Germans were quite as mature. The Japanese, however, in spite of their antiquity measured by time, were in a very tuitionary [sic] condition. Measured by the standards of modern civilization, they would be like a boy of 12 as compared with our development of 45 years."

>For the first several years of the occupation, the Japanese were devastated and starving. A memo from General MacArthur’s command stated that Japan "can only be considered a vast concentration camp under the control of the allies and foreclosed from all avenues to commerce and trade."

>Not only did the U.S. impose Jim Crow segregation, it also collaborated with the Japanese regime in oppressing the women of Japan. The Japanese regime set up the Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA) which hired 70,000 poor women to work as prostitutes to serve the U.S. troops. The RAA ran government brothels around the U.S. military bases for the first two years of the occupation. In 1947, SCAP ordered the RAA privatized, but the brothels still operated in government approved red light districts surrounding the U.S. bases through 1949.

>The Pentagon ordered General Charles A. Willoughby, who oversaw the intelligence section of the SCAP, to develop a plan for eventually rebuilding a Japanese army. Willoughby opposed the New Deal reforms and befriended and protected a set of militarists at the core of the old order. He considered these reactionaries the real allies of the occupation and denounced all the attacks on them as plots by leftist infiltrators inside GHQ.

> [General Charles A.] Willoughby actually had fascist sympathies; he had served as the U.S. liaison to Mussolini, praised the dictator for "reestablishing the traditional supremacy of the white race" in Ethiopia and went on to work as an adviser to the fascist dictator Francisco Franco in Spain after he retired from the U.S. military.

>Willoughby took pride in his nickname "Little Hitler" and [General Douglas] MacArthur’s reference to him as "my lovable fascist."

>Confronted with this democratic uprising, the U.S. abandoned most of the reforms they had granted. The U.S. initiated what John Dower calls a soft Cold War policy from 1947 to 1949.53 They cancelled all the punitive attacks on the Japanese ruling class, whipped up anti-communism, repressed the labor movement and scapegoated the Koreans. Their goal was primarily defensive–to quell internal revolt.

>Many historians have wrongly described this new phase of the occupation as a "reverse course." This argument fails to understand the overall strategy of the U.S. and the different tactics it deployed to accomplish its goals. The U.S. strategy before, during and after the war was to establish its imperial domination over Asia and reform a subordinate Japanese capitalism firmly under conservative control. The American rulers that committed genocide in Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not somehow discover democratic values in 1945 and then lose them again in 1947. A changing situation compelled them to adopt different measures to accomplish the same goal, and those measure after 1947 were the rollback of the democratic movement from below and strengthening of the old order to save Japan from Russia’s sphere of influence and from revolt.

>Islamist group claims responsibility for attack on China's Tiananmen Square

>A radical Islamist group has claimed responsibility for an attack on Tiananmen Square last month and warned of future attacks in the Chinese capital, according to an eight-minute audio clip obtained by a US-based internet monitoring organisation.

>The Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) is the first group to claim responsibility for the attack on 28 October, when a four-wheel drive vehicle ploughed through a group of pedestrians near the iconic square in central Beijing, crashed into a stone bridge and caught fire, killing five people and injuring dozens. Chinese authorities quickly identified the driver as Uighur, a Muslim ethnic minority hailing from Xinjiang, a sparsely populated, restive region in the country's far north-west.

>"O Chinese unbelievers, know that you have been fooling East Turkistan for the last sixty years, but now they have awakened," the organisation's leader Abdullah Mansour said in the clip, which was posted online this weekend by the Search for International Terrorist Entities Institute (SITE), a Bethesda, Maryland-based website which monitors jihadist forums. Uighur separatists call the region East Turkistan.

The Uighur terrorist orgs have had close ties to Al Qaeda and ISIS in Syria just to name a few (and if you know the history of Afghanistan, it's kinda easy to see how US support for anti-communist terrorism is a go-to strategy).

more info on attacks, how the US held Uighurs at Gitmo for over 5 years, etc:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkistan_Islamic_Party#Attacks_and_incidents

>The military dictatorship in Brazil (Portuguese: ditadura militar) occasionally referred to as the Fifth Brazilian Republic, was a governmental structure established on 1 April 1964, after a coup d'état by the Brazilian Armed Forces, with support from the United States government, against President João Goulart. The Brazilian dictatorship lasted for 21 years, until 15 March 1985. The coup was planned and executed by the most senior commanders of the Brazilian Army and received the support of almost all high-ranking members of the military, along with conservative elements in society, like the Catholic Church and anti-communist civil movements among the Brazilian middle and upper classes. The military regime, particularly after the Institutional Act Number Five in 1968, practiced extensive censorship and committed gross human rights abuses, including institutionalized torture and extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances.

>Marketing analysts have noted Coca-Cola's strategy of marrying the idea of happiness and universal love of the product illustrated by the song.[16][17]

On 6 and 9 August 1945, the United States detonated two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively. The aerial bombings together killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians.

Eye-witness accounts of the bombing's aftermath depicted a kind of apocalyptic horror: Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German Jesuit priest, encountered a group of soldiers whose "faces were wholly burned, their eye-sockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks... Their mouths were mere swollen, pus-covered wounds, which they could not bear to stretch enough to admit the spout of the teapot."

Dr. Michihiko Hachiya, a survivor, spoke of "streetcars were standing and inside were dozens of bodies, blackened beyond recognition. I saw fire reservoirs filled to the brim with dead bodies who looked as they had been boiled alive".

President Harry Truman made the case to the public that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a necessary and humanitarian means of forcing Japan's surrender. This view was not held, however, by military commanders or leftist American dissidents.

Once American forces had Japan under military control, they imposed censorship on many images related to the U.S. bombing campaign. Among the images banned was a picture of a partially incinerated Nagasaki child, taken by Japanese photographer Yōsuke Yamahata. These restrictions were not lifted until 1952.

Among the first Americans to denounce the bombing were socialists such as the Trotskyist James P. Cannon, who publicly denounced the use of nuclear weapons as "an unspeakable atrocity".

The dissent of military commanders was not public, however. In 1950, Admiral William Leahy, Truman's chief of staff, wrote: "The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan". In his memoirs, President Eisenhower, then General of the Army, confessed that "dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary".

Dropping the Bomb: Hiroshima & Nagasaki - Shaun 💀

Barefoot Gen 1983

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The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was an independent federal socialist state from 1917 to 1922, and afterwards the largest and most populous Soviet socialist republic of the Soviet Union (USSR) from 1922 to 1991, until becoming a sovereign part of the Soviet Union with priority of Russian laws over Union-level legislation in 1990 and 1991, the last two years of the existence of the USSR. The Russian SFSR was composed of sixteen smaller constituent units of autonomous republics, five autonomous oblasts, ten autonomous okrugs, six krais and forty oblasts. Russians formed the largest ethnic group. The capital of the Russian SFSR and the USSR as a whole was Moscow and the other major urban centers included Leningrad, Stalingrad, Novosibirsk, Sverdlovsk, Gorky and Kuybyshev. It was the first Marxist-Leninist state in the world.

The economy of Russia became heavily industrialized, accounting for about two-thirds of the electricity produced in the USSR. By 1961, it was the third largest producer of petroleum due to new discoveries in the Volga-Urals region and Siberia, trailing in production to only the United States and Saudi Arabia. In 1974, there were 475 institutes of higher education in the republic providing education in 47 languages to some 23,941,000 students. A network of territorially organized public-health services provided health care.

On 7 November 1917 [O.S. 25 October], as a result of the October Revolution, the Russian Soviet Republic was proclaimed as a sovereign state and the world's first constitutionally socialist state guided by communist ideology. The first constitution was adopted in 1918. In 1922, the Russian SFSR signed a treaty officially creating the USSR. The Russian SFSR's 1978 constitution stated that "[a] Union Republic is a sovereign [...] state that has united [...] in the Union" and "each Union Republic shall retain the right freely to secede from the USSR". On 12 June 1990, the Congress of People's Deputies adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty, stated that the RSFSR shall retain the right of free secession from the USSR. On 12 June 1991, Boris Yeltsin (1931–2007), supported by both liberal and conservative movements, was elected the first and only President of the RSFSR, a post that would later become the Presidency of the Russian Federation.

The August 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt in Moscow with the temporary brief internment of President Mikhail Gorbachev destabilised the Soviet Union. Following these events, Gorbachev lost all his remaining power, with Yeltsin superseding him as the pre-eminent figure in the country. On 8 December 1991 against the will of the masses, the heads of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the Belovezha Accords. The agreement declared dissolution of the USSR by its original founding states (i.e., renunciation of the 1922 Treaty on the Creation of the USSR) and established the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) as a loose replacement confederation. On 12 December, the agreement was ratified by the Supreme Soviet (the parliament of the Russian SFSR); therefore the Russian SFSR had renounced the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR and de facto declared Russia's independence from the USSR itself and the ties with the other Soviet republics.

On 25 December 1991, following the resignation of Gorbachev as President of the Soviet Union (and former General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union), the Russian SFSR was renamed the Russian Federation. The next day, after the lowering of the Soviet flag from the top of the Senate building of the Moscow Kremlin and its replacement by the Russian flag, the USSR was self-dissolved by the Soviet of the Republics on 26 December, which by that time was the only functioning parliamentary chamber of the All-Union Supreme Soviet (the other house, Soviet of the Union, had already lost the quorum after recall of its members by the several union republics). After the dissolution, Russia took full responsibility for all the rights and obligations of the USSR under the Charter of the United Nations, including the financial obligations. As such, Russia assumed the Soviet Union's UN membership and permanent membership on the Security Council, nuclear stockpile and the control over the armed forces; Soviet embassies abroad became Russian embassies.

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Theory:

• ❤️Foundations of Leninism
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David McClellan - Karl Marx - A Biography.pdf

>The "Hand of Timba", erected to commemorate those killed during the Pidjiguiti Massacre

On this day in 1959, the Pidjiguiti Massacre occurred when Portuguese police (PIDE) fired on striking dock workers in Bissau, Portuguese Guinea, killing 50 people. The incident led anti-colonial activists (PAIGC) to abandon non-violence.

When dock workers went on strike to seek higher pay, their manager called the Portuguese state police (PIDE) to the scene, who fired into the crowd, killing at least 50 people.

The government blamed the anti-colonial group "Partido Africano para a Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde" (PAIGC) for the labor unrest, arresting several of its members. The incident caused PAIGC to abandon their campaign of non-violent resistance, leading to the Guinea-Bissau War of Independence in 1963, which culminated in independence for Cape Verde and all of Portuguese Africa.

Today, near the Pidjiguiti docks, there is a large black fist known as the "Hand of Timba", which commemorates those killed that day.

Review of A. Cabral, Unity & Struggle and J. Saul, The State and Revolution in East Africa !red-fist

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He had a habit of listing his Siamese cat Asya as a co-author to many of his works; however, his editors would always remove her. Knorozov would also use this photo with Asya as his official author photo and would get upset whenever his editors would crop her out.

Deciphering the Mayan script was extremely challenging because there was no Rosetta Stone to provide translations into other languages. The only clues that remained were from Mayan stelae (stone monuments) that were scattered throughout several different ruins.

Knorozov worked in isolation in the Soviet Union and was able to make major advancements without ever stepping foot in Central America. His breakthrough was rejecting the notion that the Maya glyphs were based on an alphabet but rather a syllabary (a set of written characters representing syllables).

When Knorozov published his work, he was attacked and dismissed by several prominent academics, most notably, J. Eric S. Thompson, a British scholar who believed that the Mayan script was anti-phonetic and based on ideographic principles. It also did not help that Knorozov published his research during the height of the Cold War when Western scholars were quick to dismiss the works of Soviet scholars as being tainted by Marxist ideology.

It took decades for Knorozov to finally receive the recognition he deserved. One of Knorozov's earliest supporters was an American Anthropology professor at Yale by the name of Michael D. Coe who would later go on to write, "Yuri Knorozov, a man who was far removed from the Western scientific establishment and who, prior to the late 1980s, never saw a Mayan ruin nor touched a real Mayan inscription, had nevertheless, against all odds, made possible the modern decipherment of Maya hieroglyphic writing."

A statue dedicated to him and his cat is located in the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico

!

Giving you options for links because I’m comradely like that:

• Invidious: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=DgAKjbuguHs

• Invidious: https://yt.artemislena.eu/watch?v=DgAKjbuguHs

• Invidious 🧅: http://kbjggqkzv65ivcqj6bumvp337z6264huv5kpkwuv6gu5yjiskvan7fad.onion/watch?v=DgAKjbuguHs

• Piped: https://piped.video/watch?v=DgAKjbuguHs

• Piped 🧅: http://piped2bbch4xslbl2ckr6k62q56kon56ffowxaqzy42ai22a4sash3ad.onion/watch?v=DgAKjbuguHs

On this day in 1905, Matumbi tribesmen in colonial German East Africa (modern Tanzania) destroyed cotton crops and a trading post in the city of Samanga, beginning the Maji Maji Rebellion. German repression killed 250,000-300,000 people.

The Maji Maji Rebellion (Swahili: "Vita vya Maji Maji"), was an armed rebellion of Islamic and Animist Africans against German colonial rule, triggered by a colonial policy designed to force the indigenous population to grow cotton for export.

In the days leading up to the rebellion, a spirit medium named Kinjikitile Ngwale developed a belief that the people of German East Africa had been called upon to eliminate the Germans. After the Matumbi tribesmen attacked Samanga, Kinjikitile was arrested. Before being executed, he stated that he had already spread the "medicine of rebellion" throughout the region.

The resulting war lasted two years, with the Germans successfully putting the rebellion down by force. As a means to weaken the rebellion, German soldiers deliberately orchestrated a famine by destroying available food sources, devastating the region and killing hundreds of thousands of people.

Such was the scale of this destruction that, in 1953, journalist John Gunther noted "even today the Southern Province of Tanganyika, the 'Cinderella Province,' has not fully recovered from the German terror half a century ago. The economy of the region has never been successfully rebuilt".

Although Tanzania demanded reparations from Germany for these atrocities in 2017, the German government has not paid them as of July 2021.

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> Communal granaries have disappeared across North Africa, but Amazigh villagers in Morocco are trying to preserve them.

...

> Inside, 76 cubicles are arranged in three levels around an open courtyard with a water cistern.

> The agadir has stocks of barley, dates and almonds, but it is also used to safeguard documents like marriage and birth certificates, religious texts and contracts, and recipes for traditional medicine inscribed on palm stems.

> Lahcen Boutirane, the guardian of the collective storeroom, said the village’s 63 remaining families use it.

> “Others have left, but they keep their archives here,” he said.

> Unwritten laws have kept these granaries sacred and inviolable spaces, not only storing crops to use in drought but also protecting them from attacks, said archaeologist Naima Keddane.

> Boutirane stressed the importance of preserving Ait Kine’s agadir, which “bears witness to our ancestors’ ingenuity”.

> Guardian Lahcen Boutirane walks at the ancient collective granary of Ait Kine village in Morocco's region of Tata

> Collective granaries can be found elsewhere in North Africa – in Algeria’s Aures mountains, Tunisia’s south and Libya’s Nafusa mountains – but they are most common in Morocco, though many are no longer in use.

> The kingdom has more than 550 ancient igoudar – the plural of agadir – according to the culture ministry, which is preparing a UNESCO World Heritage nomination.

> They are located primarily across central and southern Morocco, in caves or on cliff sides, on hilltops and in valleys.

> “The challenge is to save Morocco’s collective granaries, which have almost disappeared in Algeria, Tunisia and Libya,” said architect and anthropologist Salima Naji.

> Passionate about these “institutions of solidarity”, she had helped restore Ait Kine’s agadir, now an attraction for both researchers and tourists.

> A group of Italian visitors appreciated the carved wooden door, adorned with forged iron.

> “We are doing a tour of granaries,” said guide Emanuele Maspoli, describing them as “extraordinary places that attest to the historical wealth of Morocco’s oases”.

> “It’s a magical place,” said tourist Antonella Dalla.

Indus civilization, also called Indus valley civilization or Harappan civilization, the earliest known urban culture of the Indian subcontinent. The nuclear dates of the civilization appear to be about 2500–1700 BCE, though the southern sites may have lasted later into the 2nd millennium BCE. Among the world’s three earliest civilizations—the other two are those of Mesopotamia and Egypt—the Indus civilization was the most extensive.

The civilization was first identified in 1921 at Harappa in the Punjab region and then in 1922 at Mohenjo-daro (Mohenjodaro), near the Indus River in the Sindh (Sind) region. Both sites are in present-day Pakistan, in Punjab and Sindh provinces, respectively. The ruins of Mohenjo-daro were designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1980.

The Indus civilization is known to have consisted of two large cities, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, and more than 100 towns and villages, often of relatively small size. The two cities were each perhaps originally about 1 mile (1.6 km) square in overall dimensions, and their outstanding magnitude suggests political centralization, either in two large states or in a single great empire with alternative capitals, a practice having analogies in Indian history. It is also possible that Harappa succeeded Mohenjo-daro, which is known to have been devastated more than once by exceptional floods. The population was estimated to be 23,500–35,000 in Harappa and 35,000–41,250 in Mohenjo-daro. The southern region of the civilization, on the Kathiawar Peninsula and beyond, appears to be of later origin than the major Indus sites.

The Indus civilization apparently evolved from the villages of neighbours or predecessors, using the Mesopotamian model of irrigated agriculture with sufficient skill to reap the advantages of the spacious and fertile Indus River valley while controlling the formidable annual flood that simultaneously fertilizes and destroys. Having obtained a secure foothold on the plain and mastered its more immediate problems, the new civilization, doubtless with a well-nourished and increasing population, would find expansion along the flanks of the great waterways an inevitable sequel. The civilization subsisted primarily by farming, supplemented by an appreciable but often elusive commerce. Wheat and six-row barley were grown; field peas, mustard, sesame, and a few date stones have also been found, as well as some of the earliest known traces of cotton. Domesticated animals included dogs and cats, humped and shorthorn cattle, domestic fowl, and possibly pigs, camels, and buffalo. The Asian elephant probably was also domesticated, and its ivory tusks were freely used.

Society and political system

Despite a growing body of archaeological evidence, the social and political structures of the Indus “state” remain objects of conjecture. The apparent craft specialization and localized craft groupings at Mohenjo-daro, along with the great divergence in house types and size, point toward some degree of social stratification. Trade was extensive and apparently well-regulated, providing imported raw materials for use at internal production centres, distributing finished goods throughout the region, and arguably culminating in the establishment of Harappan “colonies” in both Mesopotamia and Badakhshan. The remarkable uniformity of weights and measures throughout the Indus lands, as well as the development of such presumably civic works as the great granaries, implies a strong degree of political and administrative control over a wide area. Further, the widespread occurrence of inscriptions in the Harappan script almost certainly indicates the use of a single lingua franca. Nevertheless, in the absence of inscriptions that can be read and interpreted, it is inevitable that far less is known of these aspects of the Indus civilization than those of contemporaneous Mesopotamia.

Excavations of Indus cities have produced much evidence of artistic activity. Such finds are important because they provide insights into the minds, lives, and religious beliefs of their creators. Stone sculpture is extremely rare, and much of it is quite crude. The total repertoire cannot compare to the work done in Mesopotamia during the same periods. The figures are apparently all intended as images for worship. Such figures include seated men, recumbent composite animals, or—in unique instances (from Harappa)—a standing nude male and a dancing figure. The finest pieces are of excellent quality. There is also a small but notable repertoire of cast-bronze figures, including several fragments and complete examples of dancing girls, small chariots, carts, and animals. The technical excellence of the bronzes suggests a highly developed art, but the number of examples is still small. They appear to be Indian workmanship rather than imports.

Decline

How and when the civilization came to an end remains uncertain, and no uniform ending need be postulated for a culture so widely distributed. The decline probably occurred in several stages, perhaps over a century or more: the period between about 2000 and 1750 BCE is a reasonable estimation. The collapse of the urban system does not necessarily imply a complete breakdown in the lifestyle of the population in all parts of the Indus region, but it seems to have involved the end of whatever system of social and political control had preceded it. After that date the cities, as such, and many of their distinctively urban traits—the use of writing and of seals and a number of the specialized urban crafts—disappear.

The end of Mohenjo-daro is known, however, and was dramatic and sudden. Mohenjo-daro was attacked toward the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE by raiders who swept over the city and then passed on, leaving the dead lying where they fell. Who the attackers were is matter for conjecture.

Uncovering the Secrets of the Indus Valley Civilization and Its Undeciphered Script :elephant-pog:

Megathreads and spaces to hang out:

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• 💙‎Comprehensive list of resources for those in need of an abortion -- reddit link
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Theory:

• ❤️Foundations of Leninism
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• ❤️Mega upload with theory for many tendencies

Remember nerds, no current struggle session discussion here to the general megathread, i will ban you from the comm and remove your comment, have a good day/night :meow-coffee:

Since old posts are no longer accessible, I will be posting the preface of Davies and Wheatcroft's The Years of Hunger, a scholarly work by mainstream historians, in the comments. The full work is available on Sci-Hub, but it isn't really about debunking the nazi's holodomor narrative. It covers the Soviet famine of the 1930's, the last in a long series of famines in that part of the world. The preface is the only part that is specifically dedicated to debunking, and the explanations for that are in the text of the preface. I found this work in an old post on here while debate-broing on Discord with a bunch of European liberals utterly convinced that Stalin had personally eaten all the grain with his giant spoon. Maybe this can help you when liberals try to label you a genocide denialist.

:soviet-chad: