I’m surprised that nobody defended the Western Allies’ takeover of former Axis empires yet. I am going to write this to prevent any attempts:

The Western Allies reused the Empire of Japan’s system of forced prostitution.

Italian anticommunists pardoned Fascists while punishing thousands of partisans; there was no equivalent to the Nuremberg Trials for the Italian Fascists; the liberal bourgeoisie refused to prosecute Fascists for their atrocities in Ethiopia; and there were continuities between Fascism & the post‐1945 Italian police.

When the Western Allies took Algeria from the Axis, they let the fascists continue running the internment camps; important elements of the Fascist era survived in postwar France.

The U.S. Army continued keeping Jews in the Axis’s concentration camps (‘We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them.’ — Harry Truman, Sept. 1946); West Germany’s régime was polluted with surviving Axis personnel; fascist elements survived in West Germany.

Somebody could argue that there was no alternative to the Western Allies, but plenty of partisans were active in France, for example, and the Eastern Allies could have reached every Axis‐occupied region given enough time.

I’ll freely concede that the Western Allies were better than the Axis… but that’s not exactly saying much.

Among the atrocities committed by the Portuguese, it is possible to list the massacres in Xinavane, Mueda, Mucumbura, Wiriyamu, Chawole, Inhaminga, among others. University of Coimbra’s Documentation Center “25 de Abril” has a rich collection about what happened in Wiriyamu, with a hundred articles and newspaper clippings from the most diverse countries that participated in spreading information about the acts of the Portuguese in the region. On Saturday, December 16, 1972, Portuguese soldiers killed approximately 400 Mozambicans in Wiriyamu. Today, in the old village of Wiriyamu, there is a monument with the bones of the victims.

Furthermore, there is evidence published by Le Monde Diplomatique (1972) that two South African pilots were hired as mercenaries by Portugal, and carried out secret chemical warfare missions against nationalist fighters in northern Mozambique. The operation was aimed at destroying the crops that would feed FRELIMO guerrillas, using the substance 2,4‐D, Dichlorophenoxyacetic Acid, which was among those used by the U.S. in Vietnam and World War II.

(Source.)

As a complement to the concentrationary policy of interning the African populations in large villages, the military hierarchy would use, from 1971 onward, the desperate option of “cleanup” operations, already largely implemented in Northeast Mozambique and on the eastern shore of Lake Malawi. These were meant to eradicate villages, exterminating all their inhabitants and emptying the territory to block the path of the guerrillas.

By the end of 1972 the “cleanup” operations along the Zambezi, from Mucanha and Mucumbura to Inhaminga, started to prefigure a wider genocidal strategy. […] Soon […] the 6th Commando Group arrived in helicopters, surrounded Wiriyamu and entered it. The people were lined up, men in one group, women in another. For the most part they were then shot, but others were herded into houses which were set on fire, while some of the children were kicked to death and other individuals were murdered in various atrocious ways. […] At the same time, the rural areas were bombed, eventually with napalm, before the launching of “cleanup” operations to exterminate the remaining populations, supposedly in contact with the guerrillas.

(Source herein.)

And the Estado Novo’s colonies were all in Afrasia (not merely Africa as such).

It really bums me out seeing somebody deny that the Iberian parafascists engaged in white supremacist violence. I am guessing that that is a product of the Portuguese education system rather than a conscious distortion, but still it really depresses me. It’s like nobody cares that the Iberian parafascists massacred Afrasians.

Why are you always posting propaganda from all of these obviously Russian‐backed sources?

I shouldn’t have chuckled at this.

Cut an anticommunist and an anticommunist bleeds?

Agreed. I know that the original poster isn’t siding with the Herzlians, but this is still in questionable taste.

Oh man, it’s been so long and I tried so many that I can’t possibly offer a certain answer… but a good candidate is JumpStart Preschool, which I (barely) remember playing on a Windows computer. Otherwise, it could have been The Busy World of Richard Scarry Busytown, Richard Scarry’s How Things Work in Busytown, Gus Goes to Cyberopolis, Fisher-Price Ready for School: Kindergarten, Fisher-Price Learning in Toyland, Fisher Price Great Adventures: Pirate Ship, or Nick Jr Play Math!

There are many more that I could name, like Oddballz, Pajama Sam in No Need to Hide When it’s Dark Outside, Ozzie’s World, Sesame Street: Numbers, Mr. Potato Head Activity Pack, Play-Doh Creations, and Candy Land Adventure, but I am less sure of those. Finally, there are those titles that I simply can’t find again. There was a point‐and‐click program that mainly took place in a spaceship, and another one where a character said ‘I brush my teeth before I go to bed every night!’, but I’ll be damned if I can find videos of those.

I’m surprised that they made handhelds! I was always under the impression that Soviet video games were more like experimental curiosities than a visible industry. The situation was similar in the Anglosphere back in the 1950s and ’60s: there was not much of a market for them, so they were hard to find (unless you were a computer scientist).

Tut‐tut, I see that Clinton’s electoral failure in spite of winning the popular vote hasn’t moved somebody’s faith in the pseudodemocracy. Let’s briefly review the circumstances, shall we?

Starting with the national elections of 2000:

• Democrats have received more popular votes in 4 out of the past 5 presidential elections, yet only gained office 2 times. Despite winning the popular vote only once in the past 5 elections, a Republican has taken office 3 times.
• Democrats have received 24 million more votes for Senate than Republicans, yet have held a majority in the Senate in only 3 out of the last 9 sessions, while Republicans have had a majority in 4 out of the past 9 sessions.
• Democrats have received over 500,000 more votes for seats in the House of Representatives, yet have held a majority in that body for only 3 out of the past 9 sessions, while Republicans have held a majority in 6 of those sessions.

(Source and more evidence here.)

Trust me, an overglorified public opinion poll isn’t going to stop neofascism should the ruling class deem its institutionalization necessary. The Fascists ascended to power in the Kingdom of Italy and the Weimar Republic in spite of their want of votes.

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 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. More than this, the agreement was in the last resort anti‐German: it limited the German advance eastwards in case of war, as Winston Churchill emphasized. […] [With the pact, the Soviets hoped to ward] off what they had most dreaded—a united capitalist attack on Soviet Russia. […] It is difficult to see what other course Soviet Russia could have followed.

— A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, pg. 262

When [the Fascists] attacked Poland, the Soviets moved into Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, the Baltic territories that had been taken from them by Germany, Britain, and Poland in 1919. They overthrew the [anticommunist] dictatorships that the Western counterrevolutionaries had installed in the Baltic states and incorporated them as three republics into the USSR. The Soviets also took back Western Byelorussia, the Western Ukraine, and other areas seized from them and incorporated into the Polish [anticommunist] dictatorship in 1921 under the Treaty of Riga.

This has been portrayed as proof that they colluded with the [Fascists] to gobble up Poland, but the Soviets reoccupied only the area that had been taken from them twenty years before. History offers few if any examples of a nation refusing the opportunity to regain territory that had been seized from it. In any case, as Taylor notes, by reclaiming their old boundaries, the Soviets drew a line on the [Fascist] advance which was more than what Great Britain and France seemed willing to do.

— Michael Parenti, The Sword and the Dollar, pgs. 144–145

@freagle@lemmygrad.ml and others are ‘simping’ for the USSR because that is the price that you have to pay for capitalism’s structural defects: it leaves us, the lower classes, in such destitute positions that we have nothing to lose by seeking alternatives.

Washington’s intentional support for antisocialist autocracies isn’t something under dispute among professional historians. There is an abundance of evidence for this in works such as Killing Hope and Thank God They’re on Our Side: The United States and Right‐Wing Dictatorships (to name only a few). Here is a quote from Gian Giacomo Migone’s The United States and Fascist Italy, pages xxv–xxvi:

As Arnold Offner pointed out, the roots of appeasement were by no means confined to the European side of the Atlantic.¹⁵ David Schmitz, without taking the trouble to quote me or any other author or document in a language other than English, has confirmed my analysis in this regard and rightly linked the American attitude toward the Fascist dictatorship to a subsequent trend in the history of U.S. foreign policy.¹⁶

Even FDR would call a convenient dictator “an s.o.b., but our s.o.b.” And on at least one occasion he called Mussolini “that admirable Italian gentleman” but was otherwise far more receptive to any critical analysis of European dictatorships than were the professional diplomats in the State Department, before and during his administration. Unfortunately, there were never any Dodds or Messersmiths posted in Rome!¹⁷

Plenty of anticommunists already acknowledge Washington’s support for autocracies. They just shallowly brush off it by saying ‘at least they weren’t communist’.

For the record, I am guessing that you probably aren’t a neofascist, but I don’t need to accuse you of being one when carelessly overlooking the Ukrainian régime’s atrocities already makes you look awful.

Good luck convincing any anticommunist to read one of those links, let alone all of them.

Normally I try to limit myself to a maximum of three. Anything more than that and it’s a guaranteed ‘tl;dr’ from them.

It’s funny that you should mention that, because the main reason that I educated others on the subject was that I saw a Polish anticommunist trivializing the Fascist occupation just to make the Communists look worse.

https://lemmy.ml/post/14133689

I have never seen any outspoken anticommunists make an effort to properly educate others on the Fascist occupation. You just mention the ‘splitting of Poland’ over and over again like that’s good in its own right and we’ll automatically download all of the details from that fact alone. This isn’t how education works.

https://hexbear.net/post/2409833

Apart from driving over and crushing their victims, the practice that earned the Blackshirts notoriety in Italy during Mussolini’s rise to power in the early 1920s had been the killing of opponents by dragging them to their death. Given the numerous lorries available to them in Addis Ababa, both from the military and the [Fascist] government transport company, it was perhaps inevitable that they would use the same method during the massacre of Addis Ababa.

Kirubel Beshah, an Ethiopian witness who had been a student at the Teferi Mekonnin School and who after Liberation would teach mathematics there, reported, ‘Ethiopian blood flowed like water everywhere. Saddest of all was that at first they tied dead bodies to the back of their trucks, and pulled them along the road while shouting and singing, but later, they also started to tie the living to their trucks, so as not to waste bullets. It was very disturbing to see human bodies being torn to pieces alive, by stones and bushes.’²⁹

(Emphasis added. Source.)

Finland.

Finland.

In a statement to the JTA, the ADL said the Wikipedia decision was part of a “campaign to delegitimize the ADL.”

How amusing, as if there were some shadowy cabal masterminding a coordinated attempt to bring down their memetic organization.

The only ‘campaign to delegitimize the ADL’ is its own kamikaze mission to mindlessly recategorize all opposition to a crappy régime as antisemitism while leaving actual victims of white supremacy in the dust. I predict that the ADL is either going to fall into obscurity or outright vanish after the last apartheid régime collapses.

ONE HUNDRED
MILLION
STRAIGHT
WHITE
CAPITALIST
MEN!

The reason that MovingThrowaway said ‘Almost none of us were alive when Khrushchev rolled tanks into Hungary’ is that certain British socialists coined the pejorative ‘tanky’ to nickname communists who approved of the Warsaw Pact intervention in the Hungarian People’s Republic (and later, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic), but hardly anybody uses the pejorative this way anymore.

In practice, application now varies widely, from approving of the Bolsheviki to opposing the Ukrainian government to suggesting that maybe North Korean politicians think and behave like ordinary human beings. The contemporary criteria are so variable that many would argue that the term is too vague to be useful.