NAZIS

SAMUEL HUNEKE—Socialism is not necessarily the best form of government for queer people. Stalin, after all, recriminalized sodomy in 1934 and sent an untold number of queer people to the Gulag. Nonetheless it is also true that queer people were sometimes better off under socialism. Just as other historians have begun to argue for a more nuanced picture of socialism—Kristen Ghodsee recently contended that “women have better sex under socialism”—this history shows that socialism is not inimical to gay rights. Neither is capitalism necessarily good for gay rights.Policies related to sexuality are poor prognosticators of other politics. Gay liberation is not always a result of liberal democracy, nor is its absence isometric with authoritarianism.

On October 13, 1943, the Italian government, led by King Victor Emmanuel and Premier Pietro Badoglio, declared war against its former ally, Nazi Germany, just three months after the fall of Mussolini and Italy’s surrender to the Allies. The United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union promptly recognized Italy as a co-belligerent state.

JOCHEN HELLBECK—Fought over a duration of six months, the battle of Stalingrad marked a tidal shift in the war. Both the Nazi German and the Stalinist regimes went to extremes to force the capture, or defense, of the city that bore Stalin’s name. Amidst such intense mobilization on both sides of the front, how did enemy soldiers make sense of the war? What animated them to fight, and to fight on against formidable military odds? How did their views of themselves and the enemy evolve during this critical moment in world history?

PHILIP A. FARRUGGIO—Anytime a person turns away from the crowd whenever that crowd is either misled or non caring, they really find the edge. It was heroes like Sophie Scholl who almost all of us could not even come close to emulating. She was inside the Nazi beast in Germany while her nation did such horrors. She risked her life, and literally ‘lost her head’ because of her need to speak ‘Truth to Power’.

STEVEN JONAS—ore important is the observation that in the United States there are rarely any  persons who are purely ‘black’ in skin color, like native Africans are. Virtually all  African-Americans are the product of, over the centuries, African women whose  ancestors had been brought to North America as slaves, being impregnated by white  men,  most often involuntarily. This practice continued down through the Jim-Crow  era. If  African-Americans are indeed ‘intellectually inferior’ due to their gene pool, this  must  mean that the countless white men who forcibly or otherwise impregnated  formerly  African women over the centuries were intellectually inferior too.