Little initially differentiated Auschwitz, situated between Krakow and Katowice, from other concentration camps established during the war. On June 14, 1940, the day Paris fell, the first 728 inmates arrived, all of whom were Polish political prisoners. Housed in a nearby tobacco factory until the buildings and infrastructure were ready to absorb them, the camp was initially manned by thirty German criminal inmates imported from Sachsenhausen. Within ten months, 10,900 were imprisoned, and from October 1941 onwards a second complex was built to ease the congestion an anticipated influx of Red Army prisoners in Auschwitz I would cause. Auschwitz II-Birkenau absorbed the 10,000 Soviet prisoners that arrived in late 1941, with all but 945 perishing by early 1942.
NAZIS & FASCISTS
JOHN LAUGHLAND—The dangers of using legislatures to write history are even greater when, as in this case, the purpose of the resolution is polemical. The general idea of the text is that Europeans must remember their dreadful past in order not to repeat it in the future: everyone knows that the European project was born in the ruins of the Second World War. But the goal of this resolution is to recalibrate the usual memory of the Nazis and the Holocaust to put the memory of Communist totalitarianism on an equal footing with Nazism. Communism, the resolution says, was Nazism’s ideological twin, and the USSR shares equal guilt with Germany for starting the war.
WHAT is “BLOODLANDS” and WHY DO WE NEED to EXPOSE IT?
74 minutes readThe United States encouraged and aided the breakup of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc in an effort to weaken its main political and economic rival. An important ideological weapon in this effort was the demonization of the Soviet Union generally and especially of the Stalin era. Since then the United States and NATO have engaged in wars and killed civilians on a scale that no one could blame the Soviet Union for – a million civilians, mostly children, by the war and then boycott on Iraq from 1991-2003, and another several hundred thousand at least since then. This boycott and these invasions would have been impossible if the USSR and Soviet bloc had still been in existence.
Old and New Regimes in East Asia: Japan, Korea, and Okinawa
85 minutes readGAVAN McCORMACK—The six years of Abe Shinzo’s second term (from 2013) saw a steady rise in Japan’s defence expenditure, the relaxation of the ban on arms exports and, in March 2017, the scrapping of the long-standing self-imposed expenditure limit of 1% of GDP. In 2018, the LDP called on the government to double its defence expenditure to the (nominal) NATO level of 2% of GDP.[4]Japan is now committed to building its first aircraft carrier. It purchases large numbers of stealth F-15 fighters and missile and anti-missile units. It despatches the Maritime Self Defense Force (MSDF) to the South China Sea 3,000 kilometres away, and even to Japan’s first post-1945 overseas naval base, at Djibouti, located 10,000 kilometres away. It also builds and furbishes a lavish chain of bases for US forces and hosts 50,000 US troops.
Bibi in Banderastan, or the importance of words
THE SAKER—There are two phenomena which explain this gradual dissolution of meanings into meaningless and insipid categories: first, the correct meaning of many terms has been covered by a thick layer of ideological imperatives and, second, most 21st century politicians couldn’t care less what any word really means. All they care about is framing the discussion in a way which makes it easy for them to obfuscate their numerous crimes.
