I can see that you are somebody who takes the subject of fascism seriously. Have you considered subscribing to or lurking !capitalismindecay@lemmygrad.ml? Although it currently only has one regular contributor, I update it frequently and I am willing to answer whatever questions that you may have on the subject.
‘Serbia has never had only Serbs living in it. Today, more than in the past, members of other peoples and nationalities also live in it. This is not a disadvantage for Serbia. I am truly convinced that it is to its advantage. National composition of almost all countries in the world today, particularly developed ones, has also been changing in this direction. Citizens of different nationalities, religions, and races have been living together more and more frequently and more and more successfully.
‘Socialism in particular, being a progressive and just democratic society, should not allow people to be divided in the national and religious respect. The only differences one can and should allow in socialism are between hardworking people and idlers and between honest people and dishonest people. Therefore, all people in Serbia who live from their own work, honestly, respecting other people and other nations, are in their own republic.
‘After all, our entire country should be set up on the basis of such principles. Yugoslavia is a multinational community and it can survive only under the conditions of full equality for all nations that live in it.’ — Slobodan Milošević, 1987
This is a good article; almost like a condensed alternative to Kakel’s The Holocaust as Colonial Genocide. That said, I have to quibble with the title: Imperial America was an important source of inspiration, but it was not the only international influence, as the focus on it here implies. The Kingdom of Italy, for example, also served as an important source of inspiration and many German Fascists scoured it for models. Then there is the British Empire, and the Ottoman Empire’s violence against Armenians almost certainly influenced and encouraged the Third Reich’s own violence, but the author did not touch on any of these herein.
Don’t think that I’m trying to savage the article; it is still very much worth reading, but I have to be honest and say that it only scratches the surface.
To repeat something that I wrote a dozen days ago, it is good to see somebody acknowledging some of the Empire of Japan’s violence against civilians, but two wrongs don’t make a right. Most of the victims of the bombings were civilians who had no direct involvement in their government’s atrocities, and we’ve seen from the Axis’s reprisals how counterproductive it was to use the local civilians as whipping boys, so punishing them for ‘their’ military’s atrocities is not only grossly unfair but wasteful.
That said, I should get around to talking more about the Eastern Axis’s atrocities against other Asians. I already talked about the famines in Java and Vietnam, but that is far from enough.
Reading these horrific anecdotes I couldn’t help but be reminded of when I learned about the Third Reich’s abduction of Slavic children for Germanization. Doing some research, the similarities were striking: entrapment in unpleasant boarding schools, replacement of the original identities, lengthy separation from parents, punishments for speaking Polish, inadequate meals—the only obvious difference is that the German Fascists were pickier about the children’s ‘racial traits’.
…to give only one example. I know that this is a little off‐topic, but given that the conquest of the Americas was one of the Third Reich’s inspirations, it would be very surprising if the similarities between the “Indian boarding schools” and the “SS Home Schools” were entirely coincidental.
It may help to examine how the white petty bourgeoise is doing. From what I can tell, Europe’s small businesses are doing worse than usual, which would be unsurprising given the pandemic and the Russo‐Ukrainian war. Hence, petty bourgeois whites may be turning more and more to neofascism; they want to obstruct Arabic refugees and other potential competitors who may resort to starting microbusinesses in order to survive.
I learnt this from a commenter on Reddit’s Chapotraphouse when another user shared that same graph; the comment explained how the author miscalculated. Unfortunately, the comment vanished when Reddit deleted Chapotraphouse years ago, so now I don’t have the evidence.
However, one of the sources in that graph, The Crisis of the Late Tsarist Penal System, does not really support the miscalculation:
The number of tsarist executions is clearly minute in comparison with the later Soviet figures, and the scale of katorga and exile is also extremely low. While this is undeniable, it is important to stress the remarkable changes and deterioration in the tsarist prison systems that came about in the last decade of tsarist rule.
The word genocide was created in the 50s as a response to the holocaust. It was invented to create a specific method of opposition to ethnic cleansing.
Not really.
The Polish jurist Raphaël Lemkin invented the term "genocide" in a book published in 1944 - not to describe what was later called the Holocaust, but to present the grievances and claims of exiled national groups [6]. Although some of these groups called themselves "governments in exile", their status in 1940-45 was dependent on the Allies. In particular, the US and the USSR had the military power to re-allocate territory in Europe, and did, in 1945. Some nations disappeared in 1945: others might have. Lemkin's evident political concern was to establish the permanent existence rights of nations, and to redirect the horror at Nazi atrocities into support for nationalism in Europe. That is propaganda: nationalist propaganda, substituting pro-nationalism for anti-fascism.
The term populicide would be better and less ambiguous when referring to a series of massacres against the same people. Unfortunately, it’s a much less common term.
The author of that graph miscalculated and accidentally inflated the Tsarist era statistics. They were closer to this. (If I remember correctly, the original author might have misunderstood Wheatcroft when he wrote ‘These rates were extremely high in the 1880s, when they were more than five times the normal prison mortality rate[.]’)
The Tsars were still pretty awful, though, and were one of the reasons that made the October Revolution inevitable.
Opinion discarded!