AnarchoBolshevik

The following appeal was issued by a coalition of grassroots, anti-war organizations including the ANSWER Coalition involved in organizing the People's Assembly for Peace and Justice

[Tomorrow], politicians from NATO countries will gather in Dayton to plot their next wars. For over 75 years, NATO has been a dealer of destruction in place like Afghanistan and Libya and threatened the entire world with devastating global conflict.

On May 25, people from across the country will gather for a protest and counter-summit — the the People's Assembly for Peace and Justice. Bus tickets from cities across the Midwest are now available!

Register for the People's Assembly here

Pittsburgh, PA
Bus departs at 6:00 a.m.
East Liberty, exact location TBD
Buy your ticket here

Louisville, KY
Car caravan departs at 8:00 a.m.
Meeting point: 236 Woodbine St
Contact to reserve a seat: louisville@pslweb.org

Columbus, OH
Car caravan departs at 9:30 a.m.
Location: Mayme Moore Park, 867 Mount Vernon Ave
Contact to reserve a seat: pslcolumbus@proton.me

Chicago, IL
Bus departs at 5:30 a.m.
140 S. Columbus Dr. in downtown Chicago
Buy your ticket here

Cincinnati, OH
Car Caravan departs 9:30 a.m.
5033 Glencrossing Way
Contact to reserve a seat: psl.swohio@gmail.com

Please make an urgently-needed contribution today to help cover the costs of this demonstration and conference. If you are not able to attend the protest, your generous donation can help cover the costs of other attendees' bus tickets.

(Taken from an email sent to me two weeks ago by the ANSWER Coalition. Emphasis original.)

To better understand how the Italian economic connections with [the British Empire] affected those with [the Third Reich] and vice versa, the period analysed in this section is reduced to the months of Italian non-belligerency, from 1 September 1939 to 10 June 1940.

The events of these 9 months in fact show with greater clarity — actually, in some cases, they bring to light — many of the dynamics that were previously hidden. The [A]llied maritime blockade was certainly the element, that added new important and delicate issues to the general relations and particularly to the economic talks that Italy had with Great Britain — that was, de facto, the only manager of the block.

A few days after the beginning of the [Wehrmacht’s] attack on Poland, in fact, the Italian Foreign Minister had urged his London embassy to ask the competent authorities to allow the Italian ships that were in German ports on 1 September to return home without undergoing the controls of British patrols at sea.

The answer was not only a positive one, but Italian ships were even offered to be escorted by the British fleet across the North Sea. The political meaning of such an offer was not underestimated by Rome, so that Ciano ordered that “the issues of an economic nature that up to now have been dealt directly with the technical departments from today must be exclusively forwarded and managed by this Ministry”.⁶⁹

In early October, then, the Italian competent authorities started to meet the naval attaché at the British embassy in Rome on a weekly base, in order to smooth possible frictions in the controls of the maritime blockade. These meetings turned out to be the starting point for the creation at the end of the month of a permanent Anglo-Italian joint standing committee.⁷⁰

The purpose of the latter would have been not only to deal with all the issues of the blockade, but also to draft a possible commercial agreement, that, given the circumstances, was perceived immediately by both parts as a possible strategical step in the relations between the two countries. Perhaps to give more importance to this — after all — unexpected event, London decided to issue an order according to which the British would have provided assurances to their companies for the payments of Italian buyers.

[Fascist] Italy, in fact, was not only lacking foreign currency reserves to liquidate purchases abroad but had also a significative passive disbalance in the clearing with the United Kingdom.⁷¹ Showing such a trustful position, London hoped to get the negotiations off to a good start.

[…]

Coming to the British, it should be said that the already mentioned division about the position that had to be taken with [Fascist] Italy, together with the eventual unwillingness of Mussolini to send war material to London were ultimately the elements that influenced the negotiations for the commercial agreement, bringing them to a failure.

A memorandum drafted in February 1940 by the Italian Economic War Office outlined the main stages of Anglo-Italian economic relations since the outbreak of the war, and let us know that a preliminary agreement for commercial exchange was signed in November 1939 and that specific negotiations also started for the supply by [Fascist] Italy to Great Britain of other goods for military use.⁸¹

In early January Sir Wilfrid Greene, Master of The Rolls and president of the British delegation in the Joint Standing Committee, was sent to Rome as the person in charge of the negotiations, carrying tangible proposals for a radical solution to the issue of control over smuggling.⁸² Before leaving London, Greene attended a meeting at the MEW “to discuss plans for the Italian negotiations”,⁸³ but when he arrived in [Fascist] Italy he immediately understood that the problem of economic agreement with the Italians was to be treated as a political problem.

In a letter to the Foreign Secretary, in fact, he wrote clearly that the consequences of the [A]llied blockade of German coal exports departing from neutral ports (Rotterdam in primis), had gone far beyond the purely economic and commercial domain.

With this measure, the British had effectively forced the Italians to buy a much higher share of coal in Great Britain and this, while Rome’s deficit in clearing continued, inevitably implied a reduction in the amount of other commodities that the fascist government could at that point buy, as well as the danger of German reprisals.

(Emphasis added.)

Mohsen Mahdawi is a legal permanent resident of the United States. In April Mahdawi went to his naturalization interview in Vermont, the final step on his path to obtaining U.S. citizenship. But instead of receiving his citizenship, Mahdawi was kidnapped by armed and masked DHS agents in plain clothes who prevented him from interacting with his lawyer. DHS had planned to fly him to Louisiana, but he missed the flight and was instead held in a prison in Vermont, which he credits with his speedy legal process compared to students who have been held in similar situations for months.

In this, his first interview since being freed from prison, Mahdawi goes into detail about his ordeal at the hands of ICE and his family and friends’ suffering in Palestine, and it is well worth watching the full interview to hear Mahdawi speak about his life in his own words.

His final message is: “The same message that the Gazan people have been sending to us, we’re gaining strength from them… No more universities for students to attend or to graduate from in Gaza, a painful reality. They are sending us a message that there is so much more to hope for than giving up on the idea of justice and surrendering to fear and to violence. So, I say, stay strong, and we will celebrate under the sun in a matter of a very short time.”

(Taken from an email sent to me by Never Again Action.)

Momodou Taal, who left the U.S. in March rather than allow the current administration to deport him, speaks to In These Times about a wide range of topics, including his lawsuit against the current administration’s executive orders targeting international students.

Taal articulates one of the many connections between the targeting of immigrants and the administration’s attempts to silence the pro-Palestine/anti-genocide movement: “On the campaign trail, Trump said, if you were seen at these 'pro-Hamas’ protests, we will find you and we will deport you. So Trump is making good on his promise… what we’re essentially saying in this country now is we cannot critique another government anymore, let alone the American government.”

Taal sees the current repression, however, as a sign of weakness rather than strength: “the fact that we have the largest empire in history, the most militarized empire in history, fighting against students, repressing students and compelling and forcing universities to clamp down on students, for me, that’s not a sign of strength on their part. It’s a sign that they’re losing their ideological battle.”

There is far more in this interview than will ever fit into a short blurb—check out the rest at the link above.

(Taken from an email sent to me by Never Again Action.)

“The guards don’t just walk up to people and be abusive, but if you annoy a guard or something they’ll threaten to send you to Guantanamo or El Salvador.”

This is a quote from a Venezuelan man being held at the El Paso Service Processing Center, an ICE prison in El Paso that Amnesty International has been investigating. Along with local legal aid and service providers, whose funding has been cut in the past few months, Amnesty International has written a full report on EPSPC, and it’s a harrowing tale filled with abusive prison guards, rotten food and contaminated water, lack of legal services, and a myriad of other human rights abuses.

Amnesty investigators who visited the prison also heard stories of family separation and children being left alone without supervision or support. Prisoners have been denied legal representation and access to the law library inside the prison, as well as due process. Read more from Amnesty’s report at the link above.

(Taken from an email sent to me by Never Again Action.)

Since 2021, the state of Texas, under Republican Governor Abbot and a pliant legislature, has been running their own, state-level far-right anti-immigration machine. They call this expensive, dangerous boondoggle “Operation Lone Star.” You may recall the floating death buoys in the Rio Grande, the deployment of National Guard soldiers, the construction of a border wall, and other dangerous, expensive stunts that serve only to put lives at risk on both sides of the border.

Turns out, building a round the clock hate machine is expensive, and even though the state has taken in over $50 million in donations, the money collected from yearning fascist sympathizers has barely put a dent in the $11 billion these Texas xenophobes have spent since 2021.

The House of Representatives is now considering a bill that would reimburse Texas for this costly boondoggle. The House of Representatives is considering paying them back at a time, it should be noted, when Congress is considering deep cuts to Medicaid and SNAP. Priorities, priorities.

(Taken from an email sent to me by Never Again Action.)

In a two paragraph order lacking any justification, the U.S. Supreme Court granted a stay of a district court order which sought to challenge DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s reckless cancellation of Temporary Protective Status for 350,000 Venezuelan refugees on the basis of racial bias. On Monday, the Supreme Court condoned this racist discrimination which Ahilan Arulanantham, co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) at UCLA called “the largest single action stripping any group of non-citizens of immigration status in modern US history.” This will result in the nullification of work permits and the devastating threat of detention and deportation to a country from which these children and adults fled in fear of their lives.

Of course, this decision also co-signs immunity for the Trump administration’s racist and illegal actions and undermines the Court’s own authority and responsibility to keep in check the discretion of the executive branch. TPS grants humanitarian protection to individuals when it is unsafe for them to return to their countries of origin. In the 35-year-history of the statute, TPS status has never previously been revoked.

(Taken from an email sent to me by Never Again Action.)

I have occasionally said before that the reason that I study Fascism is to educate other socialists about the subject, but that is only partially true. The other reason is that antisocialists (and sometimes even novice socialists) dish out half‐baked Reich–Soviet analogies so repetitively and tiresomely that it is nearly enough to make me lose whatever sanity that I have left, so I have to read various books and scholarly articles on Fascism to explain why the constant analogies are bullshit. Nicolas Werth—in a rare example of anticommunist honesty—said it best: ‘The more you compare Communism and Nazism, the more the differences are obvious.’

Possibly nothing illustrates this better than the relations between German and Italian Fascism. I have discussed before that Benito Mussolini would be a far more logical analogue to Adolf Schicklgruber than either one of them would be to Joseph Stalin, but relations between Fascist Italy and the Third Reich are of very little interest to presumably “antifascist” anticommunists. Perhaps somebody is afraid that a careful examination of the matter would make the German–Soviet Pact of 1939 look incredibly shallow by comparison? Who knows.

Whatever the case, it would hardly be an exaggeration to describe Mussolini and Schicklgruber as friends. As a matter of fact, they met in person more than any of the Allied leaders did! While there were, of course, bouts of relationship drama, much like in many ordinary friendships, it only took a short while before crybaby time was over and those were all water under the bridge (also like in an ordinary friendship).

Benjamin G. Martin’s The Nazi–Fascist New Order for European Culture, only one of the many books on interfascist relations, sums up the Rome–Berlin Axis in particular nicely. Page 74:

On November 1, 1936, Mussolini announced the birth of the “Rome–Berlin Axis.” This announcement marked the culmination of a process of behind‐the‐scenes negotiations between representatives of Hitler and Mussolini that had begun in the summer of 1935. Both [anticommunists] sought an ally to help them escape their international isolation and to offer cover for their expansionist projects.

The turning point had come in December 1935, when [Rome’s] military campaign in Ethiopia ran into unexpected trouble and Mussolini, hoping to distract and divide the British and French, reached out to Hitler’s Germany in an effort to redraw the balance of forces in Europe. [Rome] abruptly called off [its] earlier diplomatic overtures to the French and the Soviets, and Mussolini let [Berlin] know that he would not object if a formally independent Austria were in reality to become a [Reich] satellite.

German–Italian rapprochement accelerated in the summer of 1936 with the outbreak of Spain’s civil war, as Italian and German intelligence officials coordinated their support for Francisco Franco’s nationalist rebellion against Spain’s democratic republic. For Hitler, peeling [Fascist] Italy away from her ties to France and Britain marked a victory in his effort to undermine unified European opposition to [the Fascist bourgeoisie’s] plans for war and conquest.¹

This arguably marks the point of no return for the two Fascist régimes, if not November 1936 then 22 May 1939, at which point the alliance became de jure. If we mark mid‐ or late 1936 as the start of a de facto alliance (a perfectly valid interpretation, given the Reich and Fascist Italian collaboration in the Spanish Civil War), then we can say that the Third Reich and the Italian Fascists were effectively allied for 8 years.

For how many years was the German–Soviet Pact effective? 1.8. 1.8 years. Yes, under certain criteria somebody can argue that the alliance between the Third Reich and Fascist Italy lasted for fewer than eight years, but even if you apply the most absurdly strict criteria it still outlasted the German–Soviet Pact. Yet which one do you find “antifascist” anticommunists discussing more? Which one do you think is more important to them?

The following are only a few examples of official Fascist propaganda and photographs demonstrating the close ties between German and Italian Fascism, close ties that horseshoe theorists almost always have to scribble themselves for their lazy comparisons. Since I cannot possibly provide every example without testing your patience, I’ll limit myself to twenty items:

Parade of Wehrmacht divisions under the Brandenburg Gate decorated with Fascist flags on the occasion of a speech by Schicklgruber and Mussolini at the Olympic Stadium. Dated 28th September 1937.

Italians showing their support for the Third Reich during Adolf Schicklgruber’s visit to Fascist Italy in 1938.

German press photograph of Benito Mussolini receiving a big send‐off in Berlin. Probably from the 1940s.

Members of a Fascist youth organization talking to members of the HJ on the ‘day of fascist youth’ in Padua, 1940.

Adolf Schicklgruber, Hermann Göring, Benito Mussolini, and Galeazzo Ciano.

Another combination of the fasces and the swastika, this time in the form of a solidarity pin. Probably from the mid‐1940s.

A medal that high‐ranking officials presented to Fascist cannon fodder for their action in North Africa.

Photograph of a mass meeting between the Western Axis powers.

Fascist standards at a maneuver, 1937.

Fascist flags fly side‐by‐side in Rome. Dated 1937

A German post stamp featuring Schicklgruber and Mussolini, between a fasces and a German eagle perched on a swastika. It is captioned, ‘Two peoples and one struggle.’

A Spanish postcard featuring Adolf Schicklgruber, Francisco Franco, and Benito Mussolini.

More fascist artwork featuring Schicklgruber, Franco, and Mussolini. It reads, ‘The three great defensive military leaders of peace and civilisation.’

The big three again. Dated 1938.

Neapolitan anticommunists welcoming Adolf Schicklgruber’s visit to Fascist Italy in May 1938.

French propaganda depicting fourteen European flags, among them Fascist Italy’s and the Third Reich’s, against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Operation Barbarossa inspired a great deal of Axis artwork such as this.

Croatian propaganda depicting seven European flags, among them Fascist Italy’s and the Third Reich’s, heading to Victory.

‘Cheerful comrades in arms outside Tobruk in May 1941. ‘German and Italian soldiers’, Leutnant Wilfried Armbruster penned in his diary, ‘just light up when Rommel comes.’ Luftwaffe Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring wrote that the ‘comradeship existing between Italian and German troops can be classified as good, even though at times honest embitterment at the attitude of Italian command and troops clouded the existing friendship.’ According to Rainer Kriebel, ‘It must be stressed that during the fighting around Tobruk not only German, but Italian troops as well, fought with great courage and persistence.’’ (Source.)

Fascist cannon fodder in Athens. Dated 1941.

Another Fascist propaganda poster. It reads, ‘Two people, one war.’

And keep in mind, this brief selection is just photographs and artworks that I’ve found. Examples in audio include how the PNF’s anthem Giovinezza inspired the German song In dem Kampfe um die Heimat, and how the Third Reich’s anthem Horst Wessel Lied in turn inspired the Italian song È l’ora di marciar, but these are only the aesthetics. We must not overlook how the Italian Fascists tutored their German counterparts (in policing and elsewhat). Quoting from Patrick Bernhard’s Borrowing from Mussolini: Nazi Germany’s Colonial Aspirations in the Shadow of Italian Expansionism:

At an early stage, in fact, Hitler maintained that the Jews were a foreign, non‐European element not only in German but also in Italian society. The triumph of fascism in Italy had been a victory for the Italian Volk, Hitler repeatedly said.⁴⁴ It was in Italy that the struggle for racial ‘supremacy’ had been decided: the Jews had lost the battle ‘in Italy as well’. Not least for this reason, there was ‘not another state like Italy today’ so well‐suited to be Germany’s ally. Based on Hitler’s statements, it is clear that the fated fascist alliance also had a racist ideological foundation, and that it should not be understood — as earlier research has so often suggested — as a purely tactical alliance between two major powers that fundamentally mistrusted each other.⁴⁵

Christian Goeschel’s Mussolini and Hitler: The Forging of the Fascist Alliance, page 71:

[Fascist] Italy had become more and more economically dependent on [the Third Reich]. By 1936, 20 per cent of [Fascist] Italy’s exports went to [the Third Reich], a huge increase from the 11 per cent of 1932. German imports, especially coal and other raw materials, to [Fascist] Italy also rose dramatically, from 14 per cent in 1932 to 27 per cent in 1936–8, increasing to 40 per cent in 1940.³⁸ In the wake of the October 1936 announcement of the Four‐Year Plan, [Fascist] Italy began to deploy its workers to the Reich. After negotiations in 1937, more than 30,000 Italian agricultural labourers, most of them jobless at a time of high unemployment in Italy, were sent north.

From their humble beginnings in 1922, to the Four Powers Pact of 1934, the Anti‐Comintern Pact in 1936–7, the German–Italian Cultural Accord of 1938, the Pact of Steel of 1939, the Tripartite Pact in 1940, and their bitter ends in 1945, the German and Italian Fascists—not the Soviets—were useful allies to each other. In the words of Adolf Schicklgruber:

In enumerating these factors, Duce, I should like to begin with what for me, through her people, her system and especially her leader, has always been our foremost friend, and always will remain our foremost friend: Italy!

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

It is no wonder, then, that the German and Italian Fascists fought side‐by‐side in Spain, the Balkans, North Africa, and the Eastern Front!

Consider this my not nearly harsh enough revenge for dullards like Timothy Snyder, Anne Applebaum, Roger Moorhouse, and other antisocialist hacks inflating the hell out of the German–Soviet Pact’s importance while reducing the Rome–Berlin Axis to a footnote—if anything at all, that is. Thanks to them, the ‘European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism’ is a thing whereas nobody remembers names like Galeazzo Ciano, Rodolfo Graziani, Pietro Badoglio, or Mario Roatta, let alone their atrocities in Eurafrica.

Pictured: Joseph Stalin beating an Axis dictator.

I am new to Paganism, so maybe this a very common question with an incredibly simple answer, but from my brief research I found nothing.

The numerous branches of Paganism have different beings who serve identical or very similar functions. Take thunder, for example. Celtic Pagans say that thunder’s god is Taranis. Norse Pagans believe that it’s Thor. Greek Pagans have a hunch that it’s Zeus. Roman Pagans suspect that it’s Jupiter. Slavic Pagans suggest that it’s Perun. And so on.

I am presuming that the various alternatives are never sources for heated arguments (correct me if I am wrong). So my question is, how do you reconcile a multitude of beings who all share the same job?

When people said that the NGU Azov unit “shed any far-right associations,” that included the Azov movement led by Andriy Biletsky, who now commands the 3rd Army Corps in the Ground Forces. From 2023 until recently, Biletsky led the Azovite 3rd Assault Brigade, which will continue to exist in the new corps, like the NGU Azov Brigade.

Certain “experts” argued before the war, such as Anton Shekhovtsov in 2020, that “the toxic far-right leadership formally left the [Azov] regiment and founded what would become a far-right party called ‘National Corps.’” The journalist Oleksiy Kuzmenko refuted this, also in 2020: “the available evidence indicates that the regiment remains joined at the hip to the internationally active National Corps party it spawned, and the wider Azov movement associated with the regiment.”

Shekhovtsov, a far-right activist turned “far-right expert,” was responding to an op-ed in the New York Times by then-Congressman Max Rose (D-NY) and former FBI agent Ali Soufan, in which they called for the U.S. government to designate the “Azov Battalion” as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

In the spring of 2022, the Soufan Group, led by Rose and Soufan, made a U-turn and published a special report on Ukraine that claimed, “Azov has been largely regularized under the command and control of the Ukrainian armed forces, which has worked to winnow extremists from its midst. […] According to experts on the European far-right like Anton Shekhovtsov, the Azov of 2022 is nothing like the group from eight years ago.” Mollie Saltskog, a senior intelligence analyst at the Soufan Group, told the Washington Post that the National Guard “had to purge a lot of those extremist elements.”

Vyacheslav Likhachev is another “expert” cited by the media to downplay the far-right in Ukraine. He has echoed Shekhovtsov’s claim that Biletsky and the National Corps retained no more than a symbolic link with Azov, having tried and failed “to exploit the Azov ‘trademark’ in political life.” To be fair, the NGU Azov unit, wanting U.S. support, has paid lip service to this narrative. In a March 2022 statement to CNN, the Azov Regiment said it “appreciates and respects Andriy Biletsky as the regiment’s founder and first commander, but we have nothing to do with his political activities and the National Corps party.” However, as Oleksiy Kuzmenko wrote in 2020,

the role of the far-right leadership in the regiment remains evident. Both the National Guard unit and the political party admit to being part of the wider “Azov movement” led by the regiment’s first commander and current National Corps party leader Andriy Biletsky. The unit routinely hosts Biletsky (and other former commanders) at its bases and welcomes his participation in ceremonies, greeting him as a leader. Biletsky positions himself as the curator of the regiment, and has claimed to deal directly with Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov on related matters — a claim that Avakov appeared to confirm in early 2019.

Shekhovtsov describes the regiment as a regular unit of the National Guard, but it is not. Regimental commanders have said that their unit owes its special status to being shielded from government interference. In 2019, the head of Azov’s military academy claimed Biletsky protected Azov from being “destroyed” by Ukraine’s leaders, while another commander described Biletsky as someone who “finds sponsors that really invest money.” Furthermore, Azov’s Kyiv recruitment center and military academy share a location with the offices of the National Corps.

The NGU Azov Brigade might have distanced itself from Andriy Biletsky in the past few years, but as deputy commander Illia “Gandalf” Samoilenko admitted in 2023, “Soldier to soldier and officer to officer, we have good relations with the 3rd Brigade [led by Biletsky].” In addition to the Yevhen Konovalets Military School, which unites the Azovite units and salutes Biletsky as their collective leader, the NGU Azov Brigade has a “standard-bearer school” named after Mykola Stsiborskyi, a fascist OUN ideologue who drafted an explicitly totalitarian constitution for Ukraine on the eve of World War II.

The Azovites have also called this their “Natiocracy School,” named for Stsiborskyi’s concept of nationalist dictatorship. Kuzmenko observed several years ago, this school trains “political-ideological officers” for the NGU Azov unit, and was “tied to the far-right National Corps party” since its establishment in 2017. He called this “another strong link between AR [the Azov Regiment] and the larger Azov movement.”

(Mirrors.)

Despite the brutality and atrocious nature of the crimes carried out at Hadamar, American authorities could not prosecute Hadamar defendants as a violation of international law since it was German nationals mistreating German citizens with disabilities as directed by the German head of state.

However, the [Axis] kept meticulous records, and investigators found [that] Polish and Russian nationals were among the victims. International law agreed upon at the 1907 Hague Convention protected civilians during wartime. This agreement, along with the Geneva Convention and Moscow Declaration, allowed U.S. authorities to prosecute Hadamar defendants for war crimes.

The jurisdiction of the U.S. military commission trying the Hadamar defendants was challenged immediately and throughout, but in the end, the commission relied on the absence of regulation to prove jurisdiction.

All seven Hadamar defendants were found guilty, but only three received death sentences. The remaining four received prison sentences based on their involvement, but in the ensuing years, many of these sentences were reduced. By 1951, not one surviving Hadamar defendant remained in prison.

Anonymous, a “hacktivist” group who have orchestrated cyber attacks on a broad range of organizations, from the Church of Scientology to the Minneapolis police department in the wake of the George Floyd murder, has claimed responsibility for breaching the website of an airline carrying out deportation flights of immigrants under the Trump administration.

Hackers released flight data and internal documents as well as breaching the website of Global Crossing Airlines, a U.S. based charter airline responsible for several chartered flights to Venezuela that are now being challenged in court by a class action lawsuit. This is a developing story from Migrant Insider and 404 Media.

(Taken from an email sent to me by Never Again Action.)