‘Lemmygrad’s resident expert on fascism’ — GrainEater, 2024

‘The political desperadoes and ignoramuses, who say they would “Rather be Dead than Red”, should be told that no one will stop them from committing suicide, but they have no right to provoke a third world war.’ — Morris Kominsky, 1970

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Joined 6 years ago
Cake day: August 27th, 2019
  • Anarcho-Bolshevik@lemmygrad.mltoGenZedong@lemmygrad.ml•General Discussion Thread - Juche 114, Week 36English
    1·
    7 days ago

    “Everybody is saying that my Cossacks slaughtered peaceful residents, women, and children. This is nonsense! According to my orders, they only fought Bolsheviks. I gave a command to root out Bolsheviks. If Jewish women, children, and the elderly are Bolsheviks, it is their fault, not mine.”⁶⁴

    The blame for the violence, Semosenko continued, lay with the city council for having failed to stop the Bolshevik uprising and with the Jews for their Bolshevism.

    (Source.)

    Not that different from how Herzlians talk about Palestinians.

  • Anarcho-Bolshevik@lemmygrad.mltoGenZedong@lemmygrad.ml•General Discussion Thread - Juche 114, Week 36English
    9·
    12 days ago

    I decided to look on Walmartipedia to see what trouble Butch Hartman has been causing lately. He is working at an explicitly Christian network titled Great American Pure Flix. I went to the search function and entered this:

    ‘Armenian’

    Results:

    We’re sorry. We are having trouble finding a match to your search.

    …

    Okay, so much for finding a film on the Meds Yeghern. How about the Shoah? Many Evangelicals at least pretend to care about the Shoah, and some of the victims were either Judeo-Christians or at least legally ‘Jewish’. We’ll have a higher chance finding something therein.

    ‘Holocaust’

    Results:

    We’re sorry. We are having trouble finding a match to your search.

    Let’s try again.

    ‘Shoah’

    Results:

    We’re sorry. We are having trouble finding a match to your search.

    Okay, we can’t go wrong with this next one!

    ‘Nazi’

    Results:

    Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon

    Sabina: Tortured for Christ

    Hey, we got something! Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon has nothing to do with Christianity, but that other one should. Let’s look it up.

    https://www.sabinamovie.com/

    Sabina: Tortured for Christ, the Nazi Years is the story of how G-d’s love transformed an ambitious, worldly atheist into one of the greatest Christian women of the 20th century. The film opens with Sabina Wurmbrand risking her life to show Christ’s love to three Nazi soldiers. Why would a Christian from a Jewish background risk her life to help her enemies — members of the army that killed her entire family? Experience a true story of biblical love and forgiveness that has inspired millions around the world.

    I quickly notice that this website is heavily targeted at churches. This would explain the film’s limited reach or niche appeal. The website features brief biographies on Sabina and her husband Richard, ‘who suffered under Nazi and Communist oppression’. Remember: merely suffering under Fascist oppression = Snoozeville. But suffering under Fascism and a people’s republic? Jackpot!

    Anyway, I did some more research and was disturbed by what I found:

    Voice of the Martyrs’ founder Richard Wurmbrand has his own story in Jesus Freaks, though it’s not clear who authored it. I was surprised to read that his first infraction—the act that supposedly put a target on his back and led to his arrest and torture by the Communist government—was kind of in opposition to other Christians.

    It was a year after the Communists had seized power in Romania. The government had invited all religious leaders to attend a congress at the Parliament building over 4,000 attended. First, they chose Joseph Stalin as honorary president of the congress. Then the speeches began. It was absurd and horrible. Communism was dedicated to the destruction of religion, as had already been shown in Russia.

    Yet bishops and pastors arose and declared that Communism and Christianity were fundamentally the same and could coexist. Out of fear, these men of G-d were filling the air with flattery and lies.

    It was as if they spat in Jesus Christ’s face.

    Sabina Wurmbrand could stand it no longer. She whispered to her husband, “Richard, stand up and wash away this shame from the face of Christ.”

    Richard knew what would happen. “If I speak, you will lose your husband.”

    Sabina replied, “I do not wish to have a coward for a husband.”

    Pastor Wurmbrand took the stage. To everyone’s surprise, he began to preach. Immediately, a great silence fell on the hall.

    “Delegates, it is our duty not to praise earthly powers that come and go, but to glorify G-d the Creator and Christ the Savior, who died for us on the cross.” […] The atmosphere began to change. The audience began to applaud. He was saying what they had all wanted to say, but were afraid to.

    The book’s introduction claims that “Our culture understands heroism. But we don’t understand martyrs.” It’s true, there is something compelling about sacrifice, particularly if it is selfless. But this seems like an odd dichotomy—heroism versus martyrdom—for a book so hagiographically valorizing martyrs to set up.

    “I do not wish to have a coward for a husband,” Wurmbrand’s wife prompts. These ideas of cowardice and bravery flatten the martyr just as the role of evil persecutor flattens the enemy, preventing any cooperation or coexistence.

    Later in the story, after describing the tortures he faced while under arrest, Wurmbrand says that it was important for him to learn to pity and love his torturers—in fact, that he was divinely inspired to do so. “Only love can change the communist and the terrorist,” he says.

    But when I look at these stories, I don’t see any love. I see loopholes, ways out—ways to politicize faith without saying it, and ways for aggressors to feel like victims.

    If his tale about the SRR’s authorities torturing him is true (and who knows, maybe it is true) then I am unhappy that that happened. That being said, it was also unacceptable for him to tell his tale of oppression as if it were solely his Christianity that was to blame and not his anticommunism. I find that framing to be dishonest or at least highly misleading. Also, his wife sounded mean. ‘I do not wish to have a coward for a husband’…? Was that really the type of attitude that he needed from his wife of all people?

    Here is some more information on Voice of the Martyrs:

    VOM clearly distinguishes itself from its secular counterparts by working exclusively on behalf of Christians. Addressing the audience at Calvary Chapel in 2012, VOM board member Mark Shumaker explained, “We don’t let ourselves get off track by helping people who aren’t persecuted Christians.”

    This is one of the many reasons that Christian conservatives get on my nerves: they (almost) always prioritise the others in their sect first and foremost; everybody who turns down the offer to join their sect—even if they do it as politely as possible—can literally go to Hell. There is very little biblical basis for this principle; we therefore cannot reductively blame it on ‘religion’, but this phenomenon’s prevalence despite its lack of biblical support remains an important reason that I tend to keep my expectations low when I hear ‘Christian’. No offense to @mathemachristian@hexbear.net.

  • Anarcho-Bolshevik@lemmygrad.mltoGenZedong@lemmygrad.ml•General Discussion Thread - Juche 114, Week 34English
    16·
    25 days ago

    The ‘Winter War’ was famously a disaster for Soviet forces. […] The Finns […] faced an enemy whose war effort was so clumsy and disorganized, with inadequately clothed and armed troops forced to march in line abreast against fixed Finnish defences, that the failings encouraged confidence in German army circles that a future war with the Soviet Union was winnable. […] The Red Army losses have never been confirmed but are estimated at something between 230,000 and 270,000; Finnish losses amounted to some 24,923.¹⁹

    […]

    Norwegian resistance was sustained and on 15 April was joined by a British–French–Polish force which landed in northern Norway in an attempt to seize the port of Narvik. Despite difficulties of supply and severe losses of naval shipping, German forces succeeded in consolidating their position in Norway and after the outbreak of the campaign in the West on 10 May, the Allies gradually withdrew from Scandinavia, one of many British retreats over the next 2 years.³³

    (Source.)

    Notice how this writer, Richard Overy, shifts his tone when talking about Soviet losses and then the Western Allies’. He overstates the importance of Soviet losses and setbacks, probably overestimates them (I suspect), and ultimately suggests that they are both supremely shameful and consequential. Now look at how he talks about the Western Allies’ losses: ‘no biggie. Next!’

    Indeed, as far as I can tell, nobody seems particularly embarrassed about all of the liberal régimes’ risibly brief, piss-poor resistance to the Fascist invasions. Nobody attaches any special significance to the Luftwaffe’s bombing of the United Kingdom, or the fact that the Fascists seized one of its islands. And nobody would even dare joke about how maybe the liberal régimes’ weakness had something to do with their ideology. Do we get the same privileges when it comes to any of our imperfections…? I don’t think that I need to answer that question.

    It is hard to take Richard Overy’s writing on Scandinavia seriously when he still writes like a stereotypical Cold Warrior, which only makes me reluctant to cite him and writers like him: they constantly bury truths under layers of nonsense.

  • Anarcho-Bolshevik@lemmygrad.mltoMemes@lemmy.ml•O no! Not the nazisssEnglish
    4·
    1 month ago

    To be honest, when I first saw the claim about the Minsk radio station I immediately wondered if it was real, but The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, pg. 621 does briefly discuss it and the author cited the ‘German Foreign Office papers, […] p. 480’. Strangely, though, not that many sources discuss it, and the few that I did find had surprisingly little to say about it; finding in depth English information on this radio station is frustratingly uneasy. A couple sources (The Fate of Poles in the USSR and The Polish Review) specifically claim that this station helped the Luftwaffe bomb towns, villages, and cities: a serious accusation that has attracted suspiciously little attention and reeks of Cold War sensationalism. Now I’m starting to wonder: did the Soviets even make good on their presumable promise to help the Luftwaffe?

    Here is what pg. 480 of the German Foreign Office papers says:

    “The Chief of the General Staff of the Luftwaffe² would be very much obliged to the People’s Commissariat for Telecommunications if—for urgent navigational tests—the Minsk Broadcasting Station could, until further notice and commencing immediately, send out a continuous dash with intermittent call-sign ‘Richard Wilhelm 1.0.’ in the intervals between its programmes, and introduce the name ‘Minsk’ as often as possible in the course of its programme.”

    I don’t know if it’s because of my limited expertise in this particular subject or if there is some context that I am overlooking, but judging from this report alone, it really doesn’t sound that scandalous. It sounds downright boring, actually. What do you think: is sending out a continuous dash and repeatedly introducing a name in navigational tests a cause for concern…? Can you feel yourself sweating at all…? Do you think that you’ll lose any sleep tonight…? Even just a little bit…? Be honest.

    A funny thing, though:

    “One eve­ning a soldier came to the place where I lived and told us he’d heard on the radio that every­body who didn’t want to be under German occupation was welcome in the USSR: the borders ­were open for every­body.”²¹ As she has heard about the Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany, she says to herself: “Maybe ­there is a way. Maybe the USSR ­will save my life.” So together with some friends and her brother, she decides, as she puts it, to take up the “Rus­sian offer.”²² They leave Warsaw on foot on 28 September. She writes: “The next day we ­were refugees in the care of the Rus­sian Army in Bialystok. […] ​We were well treated and got some food and shelter.”²³

    (Source.)

  • Anarcho-Bolshevik@lemmygrad.mltoMemes@lemmy.ml•O no! Not the nazisssEnglish
    3·
    1 month ago

    Far from possessing a single will, the reaction of Communists to the [German]–Soviet Pact and Chamberlain’s declaration of war was confused and heterogeneous, for the war shattered the Party’s whole conception of international politics.

    (Source.)

    Campaigns to demand shelter facilities, directed by the Communist Party, were also mounted. The government feared that Communist agitation about poor shelter provision in the working-class areas of London might provide fertile ground for political subversion. One incident of this campaign for improved shelter facilities was a demonstration at the Savoy in London’s West End. This became the subject of Cabinet investigations. The minutes of the Cabinet meeting record the recommendation that:

    …strong action should, if necessary, be taken to prevent demonstrations by bodies of people purporting to seek better shelter accommodation…’

    (Source.)

    In January 1941, the central committee of the Communist Party of Belgium (Parti Communiste de Belgique, PCB) had started producing Le Drapeau Rouge (Red Flag) clandestinely. While formally supporting the [German–Soviet] pact and placing the blame for the war equally on Berlin and London, in its second edition proclaimed itself to be “against national-socialism, the agent of big business. The struggle for socialism continues.”

    The resolution of the central committee “accepts the patriotic character of the resistance developed by certain sections of the Anglophile bourgeoisie and recognises the necessity to create a parallel movement to avoid the working class being dragged along behind”.¹⁵ Although it is equally fair to say that the anti[fascist] sentiments that were widespread in the Belgian working class pushed the PCB into opposing the occupation more forcefully than the logic of their support for the [German–Soviet] pact would imply.

    (Source.)

    Albert Ouzoulias, commander of the Bataillons de la Jeunesse (Youth Battalions), armed wing of the Jeunesse Communiste said:

    "For us, even a Nazi was a human being. The discussions had centred on this question. The comrades refused to execute a German soldier who could have been a Communist comrade from Hamburg or a worker from Berlin. Even an officer could have been an anti-Nazi teacher. At least, everyone felt that killing a Gestapo officer was justified. But our comrades did not understand that the best way to defend our country during a war was to kill the maximum number of German officers. This would hasten the end of the war and the end of the misfortune that has affected many of the peoples of the world, including the German people. Internationalism at this time was to kill the largest possible number of Nazis".⁵⁵

    In fact, the majority of Communists were happy to be rid of the [German–Soviet] pact and were quickly comfortable with the combativity of the new line.

    (Source.)

  • Anarcho-Bolshevik@lemmygrad.mltoMemes@lemmy.ml•O no! Not the nazisssEnglish
    3·
    1 month ago

    Despite the [German–Soviet] pact, Communist resistance started very quickly in the Pas‐de‐Calais. The particular circumstances of the Forbidden Zone allowed for an independence of action that Auguste Lecœur and Julien Hapiot were able to take maximum advantage of. They decided, in August 1940, to begin organising illegal Communist activity against the occupying forces.⁷

    […]

    Thus, the Communists of the Pas‐de‐Calais began their anti‐[Reich] propaganda very early on. Nevertheless, the Communists of the region did not think of themselves as disloyal to their party and their confidence in the Soviet Union was as strong as ever, it was simply that the daily reality of the Forbidden Zone pushed then more rapidly to a more anti‐[Reich] position than their comrades elsewhere.

    (Emphasis added. Source.)