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thexphial · 9 months ago

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An excellent rundown from The Stranger on JKR's Holocaust denial. As a Jewish woman who lost actual family in the Holocaust, her twisting of the narrative is genuinely offensive and harmful.

Hey all, it’s Vivian. If you've freed yourself from wandering the wasteland of weirdos and robots on x.com, you may not have seen a series of tweets from JK Rowling about trans people and the Nazis. Rowling first questioned if Nazis ever burned research on trans people (they did) and then linked a thread excoriating problematic grandaddies in the field, implying that trans medicine carried on a eugenic or Nazi legacy of human experimentation (it doesn't). I really hate inaccurate history, so I called someone who actually knows what the hell they're talking about, University of Washington's Laurie Marhoefer, the leading expert on trans people and the Nazis. You just can't unpack this complicated, nuanced bit of history in a tweet.

A memorial in Tel Aviv dedicated to the LGBTQ victims of the Holocaust. URIEL SINAI / GETTY

Yes, JK Rowling, the Nazis Did Persecute Trans People

We Asked the Leading Expert on the Topicallot Initiative Success in Western VIVIAN MCCALL Last week, children's book author JK Rowling tweeted some more nonsense about transgender people. In this case, she disputed the fact that Nazis destroyed early research on the community:

Despite Rowling’s dismissal, it is an established fact–not a fever dream–that the Nazis persecuted transgender people. And it’s not the first time this debate has come up on social media. Denying this history is part of an overall effort to discount the discrimination trans people still face in their pursuit of fundamental rights today. It is important to remember the truth and to evaluate what research we have, especially at a time when far-right attacks against trans people are increasing in the United States and elsewhere.

The Looting and Burning

In 1933, the Nazi-supporting youth with the German Student Union and SA paramilitary looted the Institute for Sexual Science (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft) in Berlin. The institute collected the earliest known research on gay and transgender people, and it helped people obtain legal name changes, medical treatments, and “transvestite certificates” from local police that allowed them legally to present as their gender.

Days after the looting, Nazis took to the streets to burn the 20,000 books looters found inside the building, and they placed a bust of the institute’s founder, Magnus Hirschfeld, on the pile in effigy. Hirschfeld was out of the country at the time, but he later died in exile in 1935.

In the years that followed, trans people were busted under German laws criminalizing sodomy and wearing clothes associated with their birth sex. They were imprisoned in concentration camps before and after the start of World War II. Some were murdered there. Others escaped with their lives.

We’ve Been Here Before

Since Rowling posted about the subject on x.com, misinformation about trans people in Nazi Germany has circulated widely. Some people have also claimed that the discussion of trans victims of Nazi violence distracts from the “real victims” of National Socialism. In light of this discourse, I called the leading researcher studying trans people and the Nazis, University of Washington professor Laurie Marhoefer.

“My first reaction was, they’re totally wrong,” Marhoefer said of the posts. “They’re not even in the ballpark. My reaction 1.5 was, ‘Oh this is eerie, the same thing happened in Germany two years ago.’”

Back in July of 2022, a graduate biology student named Marie-Luise Vollbrecht, who was known for her “gender critical” anti-trans views, made headlines in Germany.

She tweeted that the Nazis had never targeted trans people, and to say they did “mock[ed] the true victims of the Nazi crimes.” People responded with a hashtag that claimed she denied Nazi crimes. Vollbrecht filed a lawsuit against some of them, claiming their hashtag violated her rights and basically called her a holocaust-denier, which is a crime in Germany. She lost her case, and, after parsing the historical facts, the court officially recognized trans people as Nazi victims. A few months later, Germany’s parliament issued a statement recognizing the queer victims of Nazis and of post-war persecution.

We Don’t Know Much, but What We Do Know Is Grim

That ruling aside, this history is by no means complete. Scholars still don’t know much about the lives of trans people in Nazi Germany. Researchers have only recently started to study the subject and to undo false assumptions that cis gay men and transgender women were essentially viewed as the same in the eyes of their oppressors.

Through years of research and the review of published literature, Marhoefer has identified 27 criminal cases involving trans men, women, and gender nonconforming people in Nazi Germany. Locating them is hard work, and it requires parsing heaps of documents in non-keyword-searchable archives to find police files on a very small group of people that did everything in their power to avoid police detection. Marhoefer has 30,000 Gestapo files on their laptop alone. The little we do know, so far, is grim.

According to research from Marhoefer, beginning in 1933, Hamburg police were instructed to send “transvestites” to concentration camps. A person named H. Bode lived in the city, dated men, dressed in women’s clothes, and once held a “transvestite” certificate. After multiple public indecency and public nuisance convictions, she was sent to Buchenwald, where she died in 1943. Liddy Bacroff, a trans sex worker in Hamburg, died at Mauthausen the same year. Officials sent her there because she was a “morals criminal of the worst sort.”

Essen police ordered Toni Simon to stop wearing women's clothes, as she had done for years. She served a year in prison for disrespecting police officers, hanging out with gays, and speaking against the regime. The authorities called Simon a “pronounced transvestite,” and a Gestapo officer said placement in a concentration camp was “absolutely necessary.” She ultimately survived.

Unlike today, Marhoefer said, trans people were never a front-and-center political issue for the Nazis, nor were they rounded up in the same systematic way as Jews or the Roma. Nevertheless, the Nazis did specifically target them for their gender identities. On a fundamental level, transness was incongruous with Nazi ideology, a hyper-masculine fascism that emphasized purity and traditional gender roles.

The enforcement of moral laws prevented them from living as they did in the Weimar Republic era, the democratic government in power before Adolf Hitler and a time of limited acceptance. Magazines, nightclubs such as the Eldorado, and nascent organizations for trans people were shuttered. The state forced detransition, revoking a permit from at least one person named Gerd R. and driving them to suicide.

“I think we expect the crackdown, and then it’s all over their media, but it’s quiet,” Marhoefer said. “How many in a camp do we have to find before people will be like, ‘Okay, there was persecution?’”

While the Nazis did not often discuss transness much, at least one 1938 book, Ein Beitrag zum Problem des Transvestitismus, provides some idea of how party officials thought about trans people.

Author Hermann Ferdinand Voss described trans people as “asocial” and likely criminals, which justified “draconian measures by the state.” Nazi rhetoric also linked trans women and pedophilia, which mirrors the contemporary allegations from conservative Republicans about trans and queer people “grooming” children.

When they came after Hirschfeld, who was gay and Jewish, propagandists also framed homosexuality as a Jewish plot to feminize men and to destroy the race. Years before Nazis stormed his institute, the pro-party newspaper Der Stürmer labeled him the most dangerous Jew in Germany, which brings us to another point Rowling shared in a thread on X.

Problematic Granddaddies

After x.com users told Rowling that Nazis did, in fact, persecute trans people and burn research about them, she accused people who corrected her of valorizing Hirschfeld, rather than doing what they were actually doing, which was simply correcting the record.

Indeed, Hirschfeld, the granddaddy of the gay rights movement and a pioneer for trans health care, was a eugenicist. Furthermore, the early practitioner of vaginoplasty, Erwin Gohrbandt, who operated on Lili Elbe of The Danish Girl fame, was a Nazi collaborator connected to Dachau.

History rightly doesn’t look back on eugenicists and Nazi collaborators fondly, but those facts have nothing to do with whether or not Nazis persecuted trans people or burned research.

Apparently unsatisfied with spreading historical misinformation in one instance, Rowling followed-up with a tweet that directed users to a “thread on the persistent claims about trans people and the Nazis.” The thread implies that trans medicine is eugenic or Nazi in some way, and it draws a false connection between gender-affirming care and tortuous human experiments in the camps.

Broadly, the thread argues that early trans medical care constituted medical malpractice and the development of a new kind of sterilization in the form of gender-affirming genital surgery, and it contends that Gohrbandt performed his early vaginoplasties with the same regard for humanity as he displayed in his later work with the Nazis.

But the beliefs of these flawed medical pioneers have no bearing on trans people or trans politics, and conflating modern gender-affirming care with this early experimental treatment ignores the state violence trans people faced at the hands of the Nazis.

Despite Hirschfeld’s contributions to the field, people are right to criticize him for seeing the world through the lens of eugenics, even if that view was common in the 1930s.

Marhoefer literally wrote the book on his eugenic beliefs. Hirschfeld thought that gayness was eugenically beneficial because queer people did not reproduce, but he made no eugenic arguments for or against his work with trans people. He dedicated one of his books to eugenics, and he believed they sat at the heart of the science of sexology. And while he was critical of scientific racism, you can find anti-Black statements in his work, too, Marhoefer said.

Moreover, while Hirschfeld’s writings suggest he empathized with trans people and wanted to alleviate their suffering, he still staked a career on them. He photographed trans people in demeaning ways and trotted them out for demonstrations in front of other doctors.

It’s important to remember that Hirschfeld did not invent or create transness. The community existed before he discovered it, and the trans people themselves were not advocating for eugenic sterilization. The man was a trailblazer, not a saint. In fact, his approach to trans medicine laid the foundation for a system that forces people to jump through hoops for medical care. To this day, the majority of people who do trans medicine are not transgender themselves, and they do not always have the best interests of trans people at heart, Marhoefer said.

Gohrbandt would certainly make a list of medical practitioners who did not always have the best interests of trans people at heart. The pioneering plastic surgeon’s career bloomed along with his field, which quickly advanced to treat disfiguring battlefield injuries from World War I. He did not work at the institute, and because the surgeries were still very rare, he didn’t make a living performing them, Marhoefer said. We can count on one hand the number of gender-affirming surgeries he performed.

Unlike the Jewish and leftist doctors he worked with, Gohrbandt did not have to flee Germany. He endorsed the regime and later became the chief medical advisor for the Luftwaffe’s sanitary services division. In 1942, he participated in a secret conference on the results of fatal hypothermia experiments performed on Holocaust victims, and later reported the results in a German surgical journal.

Marhoefer said it is not strange that a future Nazi worked with progressive Jews on gender-affirming care in the 1920s. Many German doctors backed the regime and committed atrocities because they wanted careers.

There’s no defending Gohrbandt, but his path does not suggest anything unique and nefarious about gender-affirming care. It says more about the heartbreaking situation these trans people found themselves in when even the few doctors they could turn to for medical care treated them with disdain.

Marhoefer said doctors of the day took advantage of desperate women such as Elbe, Dora Richter, and Charlotte Charlaque, who was Jewish and fled the Nazis. They endured experimental surgeries with no oversight before antibiotics, patients’ rights, or ethics protections. Many doctors saw them as a means to an end in the overall development of plastic surgery.

What All of This Is Really About

Trans persecution is simply one story in a much larger one about the Holocaust. Trans people today who point out this history as right-wing attacks against them intensify around the world are not erasing the murder of Jews and Roma in concentration camps, or the extermination of disabled people, or the deaths of millions of Soviet POWS in Nazi Germany’s murderous campaign to seize eastern territory and farmland.

But this conversation is not really about Nazis any more than constant squabbles over gender-affirming care are about children. Nor does it honor victims of Nazi crimes.

No information, scholarship, or detailed account of a complicated history can satisfy someone who is fundamentally opposed to a person existing as they do. No number of mainstream medical organizations that again and again defend the efficacy of gender-affirming care can assuage their doubts. The benchmark for correctness is constantly moving and shifting, and the argument has no logical endpoint.

Meanwhile, ordinary trans people who rise to their own defense are labeled activists and needled for their wording, or their temperament, or their appearance, or the smallest misstatement.

At the same time, people like Rowling expect transgender laypeople to possess the knowledge of Holocaust researchers, of doctors, of psychologists, and of public policy experts. Every week, it seems, anti-trans interests push out another poorly researched hit meant to undermine the community’s existence in some way. It is trolling, and it is exhausting, and that’s all it is.

#jk rowling #jkr #holocaust denial #book burning #magnus hirschfeld #anti-trans rhetoric

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savefilescomng12 · 8 months ago

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On This Day, April 26: 16 killed in German school shooting

1 of 5 | On April 26, 2002, a German youth who had been expelled from the Gutenberg school in Erfurt, Germany, returned to the school and shot 16 people to death. File Photo by ASK/Wikimedia April 26 (UPI) -- On this day in history: In 1607, the first British colonists to establish a permanent settlement in America landed at Cape Henry, Va. In 1933, Nazi Germany's secret police, better known as the Gestapo, is formed by Hermann Goering. The Allies declared the Gestapo a criminal organization during the Nuremberg trials and sentenced Goering to die. In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, German-made planes destroyed the Basque town of Guernica, Spain. In 1964, Tanganyika and Zanzibar merged, forming the country of Tanzania. In 1982, Argentina surrendered to British forces on South Georgia Island amid a dispute over the Falkland Islands. In 1986, a fire and explosion at the Soviet Union's Chernobyl nuclear reactor north of Kiev, Ukraine, resulted in the world's worst civilian nuclear disaster. About 30 deaths were reported in the days following the accident. It is believed that hundreds of people eventually died from high doses of radiation from the plant and that thousands of cases of cancer could be linked to the crisis.

File Photo by Sergey Starostenko/UPI In 1993, Indian Airlines Flight 491 slammed into a parked truck during takeoff and crashed minutes later near the western Indian city of Aurangabad, killing 56 people. In 1994, South Africans began going to the polls in the country's first election that was open to all. Four days of voting would elect Nelson Mandela president. In 2002, a German youth who had been expelled from the Gutenberg school in Erfurt, Germany, returned to the school and shot 16 people to death. In 2005, the last of Syria's troops left Lebanon, ending a 29-year military presence. In 2010, longtime Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir, sought by the International Criminal Court in connection with reputed crimes against humanity in the Darfur section of western Sudan, was re-elected president in a controversial vote.

File Photo by Abderaouf Ubgadar/UPI In 2012, a U.N.-backed court convicted former Liberian President Charles Taylor of war crimes, including murder, acts of terrorism, rape, sexual slavery and use of child soldiers, for aiding rebels in neighboring Sierra Leone. He was sentenced to 50 years in prison. In 2018, a Pennsylvania jury found actor Bill Cosby guilty on charges he drugged and sexually assaulted Andrea Constand in 2004. He was sentenced to three to 10 years in prison. In 2020, the 23rd victim of the Aug. 3, 2019, shooting at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart died from his injuries. In 2021, Kanye West's Nike Air Yeezy 1 Prototype shoes sold for a record-breaking $1.8 million through a private sale facilitated by Sotheby's. It was the first recorded sneaker sale for more than $1 million.

File Photo by Richard Ellis/UPI Source link Read the full article

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weimarlesbianisms · 2 years ago

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Paragraph 175

Paragraph 175—the German legal code’s provision against homosexuality—was initially passed in 1887, during the German Empire or Kaiserreich.1 This law did not criminalize identity, but rather specific actions that fell under ‘unnatural fornication.’2 When the Weimar constitution was signed into effect, many Germans embraced a democratic ideas which included viewing variant sexualities as personal liberties which shouldn’t be infringed upon. As this new era continued, there were growing calls to repeal the law entirely; one such attempt went up for vote in October 1929 but the global economic crisis forced the vote to take place earlier than expected and it failed.3 After the Nazi party ascended to power in 1933, they increased persecution of homosexuals and other queer identities (see Paragraph 183 and Magnus Hirschfeld). During the Night of Long Knives, the party purged members who were know to be dissident voices or those who had been accused of homosexuality, such as Ernst Röhm. After this, their propaganda began to characterize homosexuality as a threat to the state itself—seen in figure 2.4 As such, the acts criminalized under Paragraph 175 expanded, the wording became more vague, and less evidence was needed to convict those accused.5 Before this change, two men had to be caught in the act, often by police; some were able to still evade conviction by pretending to not remember the instance, making it their word against the accuser’s.6 After 1935, however, no other evidence was needed to convict.7 Approximately 30% of Paragraph 175 cases in lower courts were civil denunciations, indicating that an increasing number of civilians took up the charge of persecution.8

1. Newsome, Pink Triangle Legacies, 22.

2. Newsome, Pink Triangle Legacies, 22.

3. Newsome, Pink Triangle Legacies, 22-23.

4. Newsome, Pink Triangle Legacies, 37.

5. Newsome, Pink Triangle Legacies, 38.

6. Newsome, Pink Triangle Legacies, 36.

7. Newsome, Pink Triangle Legacies, 36.

8. Newsome, Pink Triangle Legacies, 36.

Figure 1: Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code. Image via Wiener Holocaust Library on Twitter. https://twitter.com/wienerlibrary/status/1144627543229816834

Figure 2: March 1937 edition of Das Schwarze Korps proclaiming homosexuals as enemies of the state (Staatsfeinde). Via Wikimedia Commons.

#historical background #paragraph 175

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biglisbonnews · 2 years ago

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The Feminist History Behind the Ladies' Entrance THIS ARTICLE IS ADAPTED FROM THE MARCH 11, 2023, EDITION OF GASTRO OBSCURA’S FAVORITE THINGS NEWSLETTER. YOU CAN SIGN UP HERE. In the 1970s, Shirley MacLaine strode up to the bar at Farrell’s Bar & Grill in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, and demanded a drink. The other patrons paused to stare—not so much because she was a famous actress, but because she was a woman. From 1933 up until that point, the bar had a strict policy against “unchaperoned ladies.”That’s not to say women weren’t allowed in the bar at all. “It used to be that they would serve women, but they had to sit in the back and the men had to order their drinks,” says cocktail historian Amanda Schuster. MacLaine, who was there with journalist Pete Hamill, would have none of it. “Shirley was like, ‘Hey, Pete, what do you want?’” Schuster says. “And everybody was just kind of watching her, slack-jawed. And from then on, they allowed women.”Bars may be societal watering holes, but they have rather famously not always been for everyone. Public spaces are often inherently political and, for much of history, there were strict social rules—or even laws—about where women were and were not welcome. Some bars also still carry physical markers of times when women weren’t allowed. In honor of Women’s History Month, Gastro Obscura would like to encourage you to visit the secretive rooms, side entrances, and formerly men-only bars where women can now drink freely. Snugs For much of the 19th century in the United Kingdom, the local pub was no place for a well-to-do lady. Yet Victorian women, even those in the middle and upper classes still found ways to frequent them. In order to keep women away from prying eyes—particularly if they happened to be somebody’s mistress—pubs installed small, often well-decorated private rooms known as snugs attached to the rest of the bar. Snugs weren’t just for women, of course. Plenty of people, from politicians holding clandestine meetings to local vicars, had reasons for wanting to drink a pint without an audience. For women, however, snugs offered a reprieve from social judgment and constraints. And while some female patrons visited a snug with a male suitor, others went just to have a moment of peace with other women.Pubs across the U.K. and Ireland may be very much co-ed affairs these days, but many of the historic ones have kept their old snugs. Today, it’s still possible to enjoy an ale in a space that once offered social refuge. Ladies' Entrances Across the pond in the U.S., patrons in bars from Madison, Wisconsin, to Philadelphia may notice the occasional “Ladies’ Entrance” signs hanging over side doors leading to backrooms. These were once the only ways for women to slide in with less public observation. Plenty of American men of the mid-1800s to early 1900s saw the local bar or saloon as the place to get away from their spouses. Leading up to Prohibition, “there was a proliferation of these gentlemen-only clubs,” Schuster says. Many of these establishments would be associated with a particular type of activity, be it cards or cigars. In other words, where, and with whom a woman could drink became more tightly controlled. It didn’t help that across much of the United States around the turn of the 20th century, moral panic still reigned. Unaccompanied women were liable to be seen as loose, and bars where genders fraternized freely became associated with a kind of societal decay.In some cases, women who broke the rules faced more than just social stigma. As Sascha Cohen writes in JSTOR Daily, police departments in Los Angeles, Portland, and Atlanta, among other cities, targeted, surveilled, and criminalized women who appeared in drinking establishments without a chaperone around the turn of the 20th century. In short, they prosecuted those who refused to play by the rules—to enter through the back door or sit where they were told to. Surprisingly Recent History So how did all this change?Prohibition shook up a lot of things in American drinking culture, including some of the gender segregation. After all, if bootleggers and their customers were already breaking the law, there wasn’t much point in worrying about respectability. But after World War II, a number of American bars stubbornly remained boys’ clubs. “In New York, you had these places that very famously did not let women in. They were well known for it,” Schuster says. In 1969, Betty Friedan stormed into a men-only lunch service at the Oak Room in New York's Plaza Hotel, flanked by more than a dozen angry feminists. “This is the only kind of discrimination that's considered moral—or, if you will, a joke,” she told Time magazine, which declared that the action “shook the very foundations of the fortress.”In 1970, a New York City ordinance forced bars to cease this form of gender-based discrimination. Barbara Shaum, a resident of the East Village, became the first woman to walk into McSorley’s Old Ale House, which had been strictly male-only since it opened in 1854. Even as late as 1982, a British bar called El Vino prohibited women from standing at the bar, supposedly as a form of “chivalry.” When two women journalists violated the rules, the owners barred them for life. It took a court case to overturn the decision.Being allowed to order a drink might seem like a small thing, but visibility matters, as does the right to move unimpeded through a space. It’s worth remembering the women who spoke up to make that happen. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/feminist-history-saloon-pub-ladies-entrance

#Diana Hubbell #Atlas Obscura

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xtruss · 2 years ago

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From Reichstag Fire to War Criminal Colin Powell's Anthrax Vial: Top 8 False Flags in History

The alleged chemical attack in the Syrian city of Douma on April 7 served as a pretext for US, French and British airstrikes against the Middle Eastern country on April 14. Sputnik France contributor Irina Dmitrieva decided to look back at a few other incidents which led to wars in the decades, centuries and millennia past.

The suspected Douma attack prompted the US and its allies to fire over 100 missiles into Syria, just hours before the arrival of a fact-finding mission by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Days earlier, Russian chemical warfare specialists visited the site of the alleged attack, finding no traces of chemical weapons use. Furthermore, the video evidence purporting to show the fallout from a chemical attack at a Douma hospital has come under intense scrutiny amid eyewitness testimony suggesting that no chemical attack had taken place.

Sputnik contributor Irina Dmitrieva outlined eight other egregious cases of false flag attacks used to serve some political or military goal.

Reichstag Fire

On the night of February 27, 1933, Reichstag Palace, the seat of the German parliament in Berlin, was ravaged by fire. Police arrived on the scene and arrested Marinus van der Lubbe, an unemployed Dutch communist. Germany's fledgling Nazi authorities used the fire for political purposes, presenting it as a criminal act by Germany's then-powerful communist opposition. The fire put an end to personal freedom in the Weimar Republic, and marked the beginning of the campaign to crush all opposition to the Nazis.

Reichstag fire. Archive photo. CC0/Record Group 208: Records of the Office of War Information, 1926 — 1951/Firemen work on the burning Reichstag

"There are several versions about what happened that night, from an act of an individual to a Nazi conspiracy," Dmitrieva wrote. "Subsequent investigations found that the building was already burning in several areas by the time the Dutch communist arrived. French historian Jacques Delarue believes that the act of arson was committed by a Nazi stormtrooper on the initiative of Hermann Goering."

Vial of Anthrax in the Lead-up to Iraq War

On February 5, 2003, US Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered a speech at the UN, waving a prop vial of anthrax, meant to represent Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's supposed efforts to hide his weapons of mass destruction. The UN Security Council refused to support US-led intervention. However, a month and a half later, the US and the UK started a military operation anyway.

The image seen round the world of War Criminal Secretary of State Colin Powell (Now Staying, Resting, Rotting, and Burning 🔥 in Hell Forever) and his mock vial of anthrax,which he held up during a presentation before the UN on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction program, February 5, 2003. © AP Photo/Elise Amendola

The Iraq War cost the coalition thousands of military casualties, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed. The war also led to the near collapse of the state of Iraq, and the rise of Daesh (ISIS).* No substantial evidence of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons were never found.

A year after the war began, War Criminal Boak Bollocks Powell admitted (After Killing Millions of Innocents in an Illegal War) that he had been misinformed, and that the details in his UN presentation were "WRONG." WTF?

Mukden Incident

The Mukden Incident, also known as the Manchurian Incident, took place on the night of September 18, 1931, and marked the beginning of the Second World War in Asia. The incident saw soldiers of Japan's Kwantung Army laying a bomb near the railway track at the Japan-leased South Manchuria Railway near the city of Mukden, on the border with Japanese-controlled Korea. Tokyo blamed the incident on China, thus justifying its invasion of Manchuria. The invasion succeeded, and Japan's occupation lasted until August 1945. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East established in Tokyo after the war under the Potsdam agreements concluded that several senior Japanese officers were responsible for the plot.

Japanese troops enter Manchuria following the Mukden incident. CC0//Japanese cavalry entering Mukden (Shenyang) Gulf of Tonkin Incident

The incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin on August 2nd and 4th, 1964 triggered the American war in Vietnam. According to the version long adhered to by the United States, North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the US Navy destroyer USS Maddox on August 2nd in international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin, prompting a skirmish.

Photograph taken from the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Maddox (DD-731) during her engagement with three North Vietnamese motor torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin, 2 August 1964. The view shows one of the boats racing by, with what appears to be smoke from Maddox' shells in its wake. CC0/U.S. Navy - Official U.S. Navy photo USN 711524 from the U.S. Navy Naval History and Heritage Command / the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Maddox (DD-731)

Following the incident, President Lyndon Johnson ordered the destroyer USS Turner Joy to support the Maddox, and on the night of August 4, they made their way back to the Gulf of Tonkin, where they were again 'attacked' by unidentified enemies and returned fire. US aviation deployed to the area did not manage to find the 'enemy ships', but Washington was informed.

The incident prompted Congress to authorize President Johnson to start a military operation in Vietnam on August 7, 1964. By 1965, the US had sent over 200,000 troops to the country, with the number going up to over 500,000 by 1968. The Vietnam War lasted a decade, and led to the deaths of over 58,000 US servicemen, and up to 3.1 million Vietnamese, as well as 300,000 Cambodians and 62,000 Laotians.

In 2003, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara admitted that the attack on the Maddox on August 4 and used to justify the war never took place. Two years later, documents declassified by the NSA confirmed that doubts about the Tonkin attack were raised from the very beginning of the investigation.

USS Maine Explosion

On February 15, 1898, an explosion took place on the battleship USS Maine in Havana harbor, killing 260 men, or two thirds of the ship's crew. Washington immediately blamed Spain, which controlled Cuba at the time, for the attack, with US media presenting Spain's guilt as an established fact despite a lack of evidence.

USS Maine (archives photo) CC0/Detroit Publishing Co., Copyright Claimant, Publisher/U.S.S. Maine.

On April 19, Congress passed a resolution demanding that Spain leave Cuba. Days later, US forces opened fire on Spanish emplacements in Havana. By mid-August 1898, Madrid lost the war. Under the peace treaty, Spain was forced to transfer its colonies in Asia and Latin America, including the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico and Cuba, to the United States.

A 1976 investigation by US Admiral Hyman G. Rickover conducted an investigation, concluding that the sinking of the Maine may have been caused a spontaneous combustion in the ship's coal bins, an issue which afflicted other ships at the time.

Mainila Incident

The shelling of Mainila, the incident which led to the Soviet-Finnish Winter War, took place on November 26, 1939. The same day, the Soviet government sent a note of protest to the Finnish government, accusing Finnish forces of firing seven artillery shells into Soviet forces, which led four dead and nine injured. Moscow demanded that Finland withdraw its troops 20-25 km from the border. Helsinki demanded that Moscow do the same.

Red Army troops in Karelia during Winter War. ©Sputnik/Go to the mediabank

Moscow refused, since this would mean withdrawing into Leningrad. Red Army commanders were ordered to initiate return fire to any attacks along the border. Four days later, Soviet forces began an invasion of Finland. For decades afterward, Soviet historians argued that Finland was to blame for the incident. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, new theories arose in Russia, including that the incident was staged by the NKVD, precursor to the KGB, or that the November 26 incident did not lead to any Soviet losses in the first place. In 1994, Russian President Boris Yeltsin denounced the Winter War as a war of aggression.

Gleiwitz Incident

The Gleiwitz incident was organized by the Nazis in Gleiwitz, eastern Germany (now Poland) on August 31, 1939.

The Gliwice radio tower. CC BY-SA 3.0/Smerus/The Gliwice Radio Tower

On the night of August 31, German soldiers dressed in Polish military uniforms seized a radio transmitter at Gleiwitz, calling on the Polish minority in Silesia to rise up and overthrow Adolf Hitler.

The false flag attack, dubbed Operation Himmler, was intended to legitimize the Nazi German invasion of Poland. Details of the false flag attack were revealed by the confession of SS functionary Alfred Naujocks at the Nuremberg Trials in 1945.

On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. On September 3 and 4, France and Britain joined the war, prompting the start of the Second World War in Europe.

Great Fire of Rome

False flags are by no means just a product of the last two centuries. On July 18, 64 BC, Rome, one of the largest cities of Antiquity, was struck by a fire which raged six days and seven nights, completely destroying three of the city's fourteen districts and damaging seven others, and leading to thousands of deaths.

Emperor Neuro among the ruins of Rome. Painting by Carl Theodor von Piloty. CC0/Carl Theodor von Piloty (1826-1886)/Nero Views the Burning of Rome

Emperor Nero took immediate steps to restore the city, but this did not silence rumors that he was responsible for the blaze. This prompted the emperor to blame Christians. Roman historian Tacitus emphasized that the persecution of Christians began immediately after the fire.

"Any resemblance between these historical provocations and current events is accidental," Dmitrieva wrote. However, "just as the Great Fire of Rome led to atrocities against civilian populations, any provocation today can lead to violence and even war. Let's hope that no country in the world will compel humanity to pay this price in the name of its national interests," the journalist concluded.

— Ilya Tsukanov | April 20, 2018 | Sputnik international

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raeynbowboi · 4 years ago

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Hazbin Hotel Theory: Alastor’s Death

Due to his deer-like traits, there being a small x on his forehead covered by his hair, and the fact that the creators have stated his death involved dogs, the prevailing theory has been that Alastor died when a deer hunter shot him by accident. However, I do not believe this to be the case. Alastor in life was a serial killer radio host in Louisiana who died in 1933. It’s also confirmed that Alastor hates the way he died, and doesn’t like talking about it, meaning it was a very unpleasant experience for him. While death is never pleasant, this rules out a quick sudden death as from a simple accident, especially if the bullet went into his forehead which would result in an instant death.

So then, how did Alastor die? Why does he have the deer associations? They aren’t always so literal. For example, Angel Dust is a spider because he’s “tangled up” in his family's “web” of mafia criminal activities. So, Alstor doesn’t need to be an actual deer to have deer associations. Rather, I believe he was hunted like an animal. Another piece of the puzzle is that Alastor did not chase, follow, or stalk his victims, and won’t kill a child.

It is my belief that Alastor was discovered to be a serial killer. One of his victims managed to flee before he killed them, or a child witnessed a murder of his and his moral code prevented him from killing the witness. However it got out, Alastor’s secret was found out, and a statewide manhunt for him began. I suspect he spent days on the run with bloodhounds tracking him. He did his best to evade arrest. His clever mind helped him give the police the slip multiple times, but eventually those bloodhounds chased him down. Starved, tired, filthy, likely with more than one bite mark from police hounds, the police finally cornered him and shot him in the forehead. With such a dragged out, messy, and gruesome death, it’s not hard to believe he hates the way he died. Being hunted like an animal, hiding out in the woods, and evading arrest like a nimble deer may also be part of why he’s manifested a deer aesthetic in Hell.

#hazbin hotel #alastor #radio demon #fan theory #hazbin hotel theory #hazbin hotel alastor #hazbin hotel radio demon #the radio demon #happy hotel

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meinkampfortzone · 3 years ago

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Third Reich Biographies: SS-Standartenfuhrer Karl Koch (part 1)

The Early Life of Karl-Otto Koch

Karl-Otto Koch was born in Darmstadt on February 8th, 1897. His father was Killian Koch, who worked as a registrar; Koch was one of his father’s children by his second marriage. Koch had a brother, Rudolf Koch, with whom he maintained the closest relationship, five stepbrothers, and one stepsister. Rudolf Koch served in the Foreign Legion, and was later on an SS soldier before he became a paid police spy. As this was considered to be criminal activity in the Third Reich, he was sent to a concentration camp, and later drafted and sent to Norway, where he was at the time of Karl’s trial in 1944.

Koch’s life before Nazism showed no indications of the cruel, heartless person he was to become under the Third Reich. From 1911 to 1914 he worked at the Gandenberg machine factory, and from 1914 to 1916, after the outbreak of the first World War, he worked in the German arms and munitions factory in the bookkeeping and correspondence department. In 1916, he was drafted into the 153rd Infantry Regiment, and was active mostly in recruiting and reserve units. He saw combat in mid-1916 throughout August of that year, and from May to July in 1917. In July, he was wounded, and received the Iron Cross Second Class (EKII) in December of that year. His final period of action on the battlefield was in October 1918, and it ended in him being taken prisoner by the British and released in October the following year.

Karl Koch’s life after his release from prison can only be described as one failure after another. From 1919 to 1920, he worked as a tradesman in the comb and hair ornaments factory in Erbach as a General Manager. From 1920 to 1922 he was the manager of the Current Accounts Department at the Darmstadt National Bank. From 1923 to 1924, he held various agricultural jobs and financial jobs, all which lasted a relatively short time, before remaining for a very long time without any work.

In 1924, Koch married a woman named Kaete Mueller, and they had a son named Manfred, who was born in 1925. The marriage did not last long; the couple were dissolved in 1931, and, according to SS judge Konrad Morgen’s trial notes, “SS-Standartenfuhrer Koch (was) alone to blame.” Manfred Koch was diagnosed with severe mental issues (referred to as “exceptional stupidity” by the documents of the time) and as a result was transferred to a mental home to be put under observation. During his father’s trial, he was a student at the Music School of the Waffen-SS in Brunswick, and was said to have stolen a cigarette ration card, a silver cigarette case, and a radio. The relationship between Karl Koch and his son was anything but a good one. One day in 1939, when Manfred was about 12 years old, he came to live with Karl and his new wife, Ilse, at their mansion in Buchenwald. Manfred talked back to Ilse at some point, and Karl’s response was to take his son to the special detention cells, one of the most feared places in the entire Buchenwald camp, and lock him in an empty cell. “You will stay in this cell,” he told him, “until you learn not to be impudent to your stepmother.” Later on, Manfred, (in a way following in his father’s footsteps) became a petty thief, and was diagnosed with severe emotional problems as an adult, resulting in him being confined to mental institutions.

In 1931, Koch joined the NSDAP with a party number of 475 586, and he also joined the SS, with the SS number 14 830. He was transferred to the command staff of the 35th Standarte in Kassel, where he worked first as an SS-Paymaster, and then as the leader of the motor-section. In 1933, he was ordered to form an SS-Unit in Kassel, and later on that year, he was transferred to Dresden, where he formed the Sonderkommando Sachsen.

This would be the first step that Karl Koch would take on his road to becoming one of the most brutal and infamous concentration camp commandants of the Third Reich.

TBC In Part Two!

Sources Used:

1- Nazi Investigation of SS-Standartenfuhrer Koch (Georg Konrad Morgen)

2- The Beasts of Buchenwald: Karl and Ilse Koch (Flint Whitlock)

#third reich history #wwiihistory

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woman-loving · 4 years ago

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Lesbian Literature and International Networks in 1950s-70s Australia

Selection from Unnamed Desires: A Sydney Lesbian History, Rebecca Jennings, 2015.

I included two passages here, one about lesbian literature and the other about engagement with overseas lesbian magazines, namely the US The Ladder and British Arena Three. Both touch on how customs/censorship laws restricted lesbian connections. (Compare with the importance of media freedom for lesbian subcultures in Weimar Berlin; for more on how lesbians can be affected by anti-gay laws absent direct criminalization, see how lesbians were policed in 1950s-70s Sydney.) I also appreciated the description of how engagement with literature can be a form of lesbian expression.

For those women who lived discreet lives or who were unable to locate other lesbians in this period, literature and other cultural representations of same-sex desire played an important role in alleviating their sense of isolation. Novels with lesbian characters or themes enabled women both to find a language for their own desires and to realise that they were not alone. Their significance to women in this period is testified to by the frequency with which lists of lesbian literature appeared in early issues of lesbian and feminist journals. Although identifying and obtaining lesbian-themed literature could be problematic without the assistance of such lists, reading these works offered women the opportunity to engage with a discourse of same-sex desire without the risks of exposure inherent in reaching out physically to other lesbians. In an article entitled ‘On the Virtues of Remaining in Your Closet!’, contributed by ‘a gaygirl’ to lesbian and gay paper Campaign in the 1970s, one discreet lesbian drew on a rich array of cultural sources to reinforce her impassioned plea for the right to conceal her sexuality.[17] The author attached no personal details to the article and observed that she planned to ‘post this anonymously from a suburb I don’t live in’. Her family, she claimed, was hostile to homosexuality and unaware of her own same-sex desires, as were her friends and work colleagues. Nevertheless, she noted that ‘about the time I discovered I was gay, I read everything I could on the subject of homosexuality.’ The article demonstrated that, while maintaining a ‘closet’ identity in everyday life, she had been able to actively participate in a discursive lesbian and gay community through the medium of the press, the theatre and Campaign itself. In assembling her arguments, she referred to a letter to the editor of an Australian newspaper by a gay man; an article in Time Magazine entitled ‘Gays on the March’; and a performance of Peter Kenna’s play Mates at the Nimrod Theatre in Sydney. Her consumption of cultural representations of homosexuality had helped to shape her own sense of gay identity and community, and ultimately enabled her to enter into dialogue with that community without conflicting with the need for concealment.

In earlier decades, however, women’s need for such literature, and the difficulties of locating it, were correspondingly increased. The cultural imperative to silence desire between women and to conceal it from families and society at large was reinforced for much of the mid-twentieth century by the paucity of literary and media portrayals of the subject. Margaret commented that books were neither accessible nor relevant in her attempt to make sense of her same-sex desires in the late 1950s[...]. As Margaret noted, literary representations of desire between women were extremely limited prior to the 1970s and were rendered largely inaccessible by the difficulties of locating them. For working-class women such as Margaret, who had not been raised in a culture of reading, literature did not in any case represent an obvious source of information. Strict censorship laws further restricted access to such works in Australia.

The importing of books and written materials deemed indecent or obscene was banned under the Trade and Customs Act 1901, and thereafter many of the decisions regarding which titles should be banned were taken arbitrarily by individual Customs officials who seized books at the point of entry into Australia. In 1933, the Book Censorship Board (renamed the Literature Censorship Board in 1937 and ultimately disbanded in 1967) was established to consider those books which were deemed marginal or literary.[19] The presence of homosexuality as a theme was accepted as grounds for censorship and Nicole Moore argues that:

“Censors actively targeted the expression of same-sex desire, descriptions of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, and cross-dressed sexual practice, the elaboration of gay and lesbian identities as identities, agitation against restrictions on the expression of same-sex themes, as well as many other forms of meaning moving beyond a straight, reproductive model for intimacy and sexual life. Until late in the twentieth century, homosexuality was seen as a pornographic and perverted form of obscenity where present in literary or popular novels, avant-garde poetry or films of all kinds, magazines or postcards. From the earliest moments of government censorship in Australia, and increasingly as an explicit priority, the erasure of homosexual meaning from as many public fora and discourses as possible was achieved to a significant degree.”[20]

A number of notable lesbian novels were banned, several limiting the availability of literary representations of female same-sex desire. Radclyffe Hall’s controversial British lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness, was banned in 1929, following its obscenity trials in the UK and US. Moore claims that Australian censors attempted to obtain a copy of the novel following its prohibition in England in 1928. However, they were unable to locate one as such copies as had been circulating in Australia had apparently been sent to England in the wake of the trail to be sold on the lucrative black market there. In the absence of a review copy, Customs officials banned it sight unseen on the basis of English law. The ban was lifted in Australia some time between 1939 and 1946, unusually prior to the UK release date of 1949. However, the absence of a high-profile obscenity trail like that which occurred in the UK, Moore argues, meant that lesbian identity was not publicly debated in Australia in the same way. [...] The secrecy surrounding The Well’s subsequent Australian release further limited its availability in Australia, where many booksellers remained unaware that it was now legally possible to order copies and offer the novel for sale. It was not until the mid-1960s that US lesbian pulp fiction, such as Tereska Torres’ Women’s Barracks, was allowed through Australian Customs and it was a further decade before the first Australian lesbian novel, Kerryn Higgs’ All That False Instruction, was published.[22]

Despite the difficulties of locating literary representations of female same-sex desire in mid-twentieth century Australia, however, some women clearly managed to do so. By the 1960s a number of international lesbian novels were officially available in Australia, but even a generation earlier, despite strict censorship, women were able to obtain a limited range of lesbian-themed literature. Beverley recalled buying a copy of The Well of Loneliness in ‘one of the big bookshops in Sydney’ immediately after the war while ‘C.P.’ told British lesbian magazine Arena Three about her experience borrowing the novel from a Sydney library in 1950[...]. In the 1950s, Georgie came across The Straggler by Danish novelist Agnete Holk.[24] The Straggler was passed by the Literature Censorship Board in 1954, and board member Kenneth Binns noted: ‘this is the first time, to my knowledge, that a novel dealing seriously with the subject of lesbianism has been submitted to the board.’[25] Even when women were able to locate lesbian-themed books in bookshops or newsstands, purchasing such a book often proved a challenge for women accustomed to a life of concealment. Kerryn Higgs recalled the difficulties a friend of hers had experienced in attempted to buy The Well of Loneliness:

“I remember a friend telling me the story that she was unable to buy The Well of Loneliness even though it had no subtitle [identifying it as lesbian] for she was afraid of what the cashier would think, so she pinched it instead.”[26]

Higgs was concerned that her publisher’s decision to append the subtitle ‘A novel of Lesbian Love’ to her own novel, All That False Instruction, would create similar obstacles for women who wished to obtain the book discreetly.

The impact of lesbian literature on women who had encountered few, if any, depictions of desire between women varied considerably. Deborah described her discovery of Violette Le Duc’s novel La Batarde in 1965 as a revelation, it being her first encounter with representations of lesbianism. [...] For Deborah, the experience had a profound effect on her understanding of her own sexuality. She recalled: ‘So I read the book, and then I thought “Wow! This is me, this explains how I feel.”‘[28] Other women, however, felt that literary portrayals of lesbianism simply reinforced broader cultural messages about silence and isolation. Laurie complained that the cheap paperback novels she read in the 1960s and early 1970s were ‘so depressing, there was never a happy ending. They [the lesbian characters] either got killed, or went straight and saw the errors of their ways and all that sort of shit.’[29] When Robyn told her mother that she was a lesbian in the early 1970s, her mother was concerned about the risk of loneliness and Robyn connected the fear with Radclyffe Hall’s novel, The Well of Loneliness[...].

When Kerryn Higgs’ semi-autobiographical novel All That False Instruction was published in 1975, its reception was an indicator of how much, and how little, had changed. Despite the author having been awarded a publisher’s prize to develop the book, when the lesbian content of the novel became known, familial disapproval and threats of legal action forced the publisher (Angus & Robertson) to delay publication and the author to publish under the pseudonym Elizabeth Riley.[31] Reviewers in the Melbourne Age and The Australian objected to the novel’s lesbian theme and its depiction of men. [...] However, the existence in 1975 of a flourishing feminist and gay press meant that the novel was also received into an appreciative political environment and it was widely reviewed in lesbian and feminist circles. Sue Bellamy, reviewing the novel for feminist journal Refractory Girl, described it as an ‘exceptional piece of work’. Her engagement with the novel derived to a considerable extend from her identification with the experiences of the lesbian central character and, by extension, the author. [...]

For lesbian readers, and particularly those outside of the feminist community addressed by Sue Bellamy, this familiarity could be a source of both comfort and discomfort. While for Bellamy and others, reading from the relative safety of 1975, the sense of shared experience was validating, the setting of the book in the different cultural context of 1960s New South Wales could be unsettling. Escaping a rural working-class upbringing, the novel’s heroine, Maureen Craig, wins a scholarship to attend university in Sydney, where she embarks on a succession of relationships with other women. however, social disapproval from home and at college constrains these relationships, prompting the women to conceal their feelings for each other. [...] Despite Maureen’s fantasies of escape, fear of exposure is ultimately too much for all three of Maureen’s lovers, who in turn abandon Maureen in search of social conformity. Her story reflected the experience of many women who desired other women in this period but whose relationships were constrained by the pressures of secrecy.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Early encounters with lesbian-themed literature and film afforded some women a point of introduction into a language and cultural framework for thinking about same-sex desire, but the passive and solitary nature of reading could also leave women feeling more isolated, with no one to discuss their impressions with. However, by the late 1950s the beginnings of an international homosexual movement offered new opportunities for Australian women to reach out to others and especially seek discursive lesbian networks overseas without revealing their same-sex desires to family and friends in Australia. Rachel recalled that in the early 1960s: ‘I think people were sending off subscriptions to American magazines even in those days’ and this is confirmed by letters which appeared in a number of overseas magazines from Australian readers.[45] The Ladder, produced by US lesbian organisation Daughters of Bilitis from 1956 onwards, clearly had an Australian readership. The magazine’s round-up of international news frequently referred to stories in Australian and British newspapers, which were derived from clippings sent in by an Australian reader, and from 1970 onwards letters and magazines were received from Marion Norman of the Melbourne Daughters of Bilitis chapter.

British lesbian magazine Arena Three also had at least two contributors from New South Wales and potentially many more subscribers and readers. First published in 1964 by Londoner Esme Langley with the support of three or four other women, Arena Three provided a combination of articles, sketches, news items and a letters page for ‘homosexual women’ readers.[46] In 1964, Kate Hinton contributed two articles, including ‘The Homophile Down Under’, which offered a sketch of lesbian life in NSW and reported on broader social attitudes to lesbianism in Australia.[47] The following year G Mackenzie of Sydney wrote a number of times, enclosing donations to assist the magazine in continuing its work. She congratulated the editor: ‘You are doing a wonderful service to homosexual women. I hope you can keep it going. I look forward each month to receiving A3 and only wish we had something like it out here.’ This, she felt, was an idle hope, and she complained: ‘I guess we are never likely to see an ad in or paper like those you put in “New Statesmen” etc. I guess our mob would have pups on the spot.’[48] Her wish was apparently echoed by other Australian subscribers as in July 1968 the editor advised readers that ‘two Australian girls have recently written from New South Wales to say that, inspired by the example of A3, they would like to start a publication in the Antipodes, and would like our expert advice.’[49] Perhaps discouraged by the rather disheartening advice offered by the Arena Three editor, they did not, however, start an Australian magazine.

For Australian subscribers in the 1950s and 1960s, American and British lesbian magazines offered opportunities to feel part of a lesbian community which were not available to them elsewhere. For some, they were invaluable in demonstrating the existence of other lesbians and the range of communities and identities which existed. [...] Letters often expressed the profound loneliness which women who were not pat of lesbian social network experienced in mid-twentieth century NSW. In 1958 Miss S. from Sidney [sic], Australia wrote to One magazine, based in Los Angeles:

“I know your magazine is not a lonely hearts magazine, but it seems my only hope. I am very unhappy. I’m desperate to write to a lady who will write to me. I am 26 and I don’t like men.”[51]

Seven years later, an Australian reader placed a classified advertisement in Arena Three stating, ‘Lonely Dutch migrant wants correspondence with lady 25/35 interested in migrating to Australia.’[52] while simply reading such magazines helped to alleviate the isolation engendered by the cultural silence around same-sex desire, some women saw these networks as a potential introduction to more personal and intimate relationships. They also provide occasional insights into existing social networks and their role in transmitting information. In 1970, an Australian reader enquired of The Ladder:

“I am twenty and my girlfriend (I’ll call her Sadie) is twenty-two. We have been sharing an apartment for a year, going to bars, and all that stuff. Yesterday a friend of Sadie’s asked her what I was like in bed. When she said I wore striped pajamas and slept like a log, the friend laughed. Now we think maybe we are missing out on something. Could you fill us in?”[53]

In the context of scarce cultural representations of lesbianism, it is possible to read this letter as evidence that overseas magazines provided an invaluable source of information, even to women who were part of a wider lesbian network in Australia. However, it is perhaps more likely that this reader, who was part of a more knowing lesbian subculture centred on public bars, was poking fun at the discreet representations of lesbianism typical of US and British lesbian magazines in this period, which avoided direct references to sexual activity between women out of a concern not to offend either the censors or a sensitive middle-class readership.

While overseas lesbian magazines offered a lifeline to women in mid-twentieth century NSW, as with other literary representations of same-sex desire, access was limited by strict censorship laws. Several Australian readers of One magazine, which catered to both homosexual men and lesbians in the 1950s and 1960s, complained that their copies had been seized by Customs, while readers of Arena Three experienced similar difficulties. Such seizures were apparently sporadic and often dependent on Customs building up a gradual awareness of the content of overseas journals. In September 1966, G Mackenzie of Sydney told Arena Three:

“I got Bryan Magee’s book, ‘One in Twenty’, but in a way I think it is a pity that he gives publicity to MRG and Arena Three, because I suppose that will be the next thing to be stopped by Customs out here.

I noticed after the ‘Grapevine’ came out for sale in Australia giving publicity to DOB and ‘The Ladder’, it was after that time that Customs started to confiscate my copies of ‘The Ladder’ --they didn’t seem to know of its existence before that. ‘The Grapevine’ was reviewed by Customs in late 1965, before it was allowed to be sold to the public, and in 1966 they confiscated my January and February ‘Ladder’ and have got 4 more since then. So the publicity for A3 was no good, as far as I am concerned.”[54]

G Mackenzie’s comment reflect the ambivalence felt by some lesbian readers in this period toward open discussion of lesbianism and lesbian communities. Although a degree of publicity was necessary to enable women to locate resources such as Arena Three, increased discussion carried its own risks. Letters to Arena Three and The Ladder in the 1950s and 1960s indicate that readers used these magazines in different ways. While some women undoubtedly read them in the privacy of their own home, as a means of seeking input from other lesbians without compromising their discreet way of life, others wished to be a more active member of a discursive community, contributing articles and letters in order to enter a dialogue with other readers. For others still, these magazines offered a potential route to a material community of other lesbians, which might be reached either by placing lonely hearts advertisements or by requesting information about lesbian social networks based in bars or private homes.

In 1968, the editors of Arena Three put two readers from NSW in contact with another from Melbourne, enabling the women to meet directly with each other.[55] A small number of Australian women also travelled to the US and Britain to participate in the social networks attached to lesbian magazines: In 1969 Arena Three thanked Rene Vi, an Australian woman who had been organising the magazine’s London social group, for all her work for the magazine, on the occasion of her return to Australia. The editorial team at that time also included another Australian, Carol Potter.[56] While these women lived for some time in the UK and became embedded in British lesbian social networks, other made contact with overseas lesbian groups while travelling. Margaret described a visit she made to the offices of the Daughters of Bilitis while on a trip to San Francisco in the early 1960s. Margaret was staying with friends on a naval camp, and these circumstances shaped her encounter with the Daughters of Bilitis women:

“[T]hey were in an office building, it was just their office where they published that magazine called The Ladder. And it was the third floor or something in an office building on Market Street, so I just thought I’d just go up there and see what was happening. But I was dressing in the manner befitting a visitor from abroad staying with a Lieutenant-Commander and his wife and I got there, introduced myself, I was from Australia and one little dyke said ‘Are you really a lesbian?’ I can see why she asked that question because I looked like some respectable housewife ... And then they said there were all sorts of events and dances and things and could I, would I go with them, but of course I could not, well unless I’d have to make some silly excuse and where would I say that I was going to my hosts?”[57]

Encounters with overseas lesbians could be positive and welcoming, offering openings into the vibrant lesbian subculture which existed in some cities in the US and elsewhere. On this occasion, Margaret felt unable to incorporate this social scene into the respectable parameters of her visit to a naval camp, but, on her return to Australia she did begin to explore the possibilities of lesbian bar culture in Sydney.

#lgbtq history #lesbian history #australia #rebecca jennings #the ladder #arena three #lesbian literature

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if-you-fan-a-fire · 2 years ago

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"Convicts Have Own Ideas of Life's Values," Montreal Star. June 7, 1933. Page 3 & 11. ---- Words Of Wit And Wisdom Are Gleaned From Evidence In Recent Trials ---- THE trials of various St. Vincent de Paul convicts, in connection with last November's rioting at that institution, which have just been completed before Mr.Justice Wilson, in the Court of King's Bench, were not without their words of wisdom and various offering of humor and sarcasm from various prisoners from the great convict station heard in the witness-box.

One after another they took the oath and told their respective stories, either for the Crown or for the defence. Some of them appeared to be human derelicts indeed, but others, either by smart bearing, a flashing smile, a turn of phrase or evident ambition to ingratiate themselves, gave proof of light undimmed by long years of imprisonment.

To begin with, they are not "convicts"; the word is never used. They are "Inmates" to officialdom and "cons" to one another. There are some 1,100 of them in the great penitentiary just outside Montreal and it is very evident that social scale exists within its four grim walls, in just as marked a degree as "outside."

The "stool," or stool-pigeon, for whom the "con" has a name not used in polite society, bears the brand of Judas among his fellows. Then,too, your ordinary, common-or-garden criminal, thug, stick-up man, burglar, thief or what have you, has a bitter contempt for the man committed for statutary offences and unnatural crimes. A man with a long record, even among hardened criminals, stigmatized one of these degenerates from the witness-box.

CHESTER Crosley, with 10 previous prison and penitentiary terms to his discredit and self-admitted ringleader of part of the trouble, who pleaded guilty to setting fire to the trades' building of the penitentiary, provided the court with a bright 20 minutes while he told his own story of the affair. He gave his crime record with pride, but staunchly insisted that he had never committed perjury and did not intend to.

Asked by the Court what had happened to him after the fire broke out and he had seen to its spreading by sprinkling gasoline, Crossley said: "Then I got cut off. I was taken out of there two hours later, with my body all burned. The remains stand before you now!" "Pretty solid remains," said Mr. Justice Wilson, when the laughter had subsided.

Incidentally, "Jazz" Crossley, as his fellow-prisoners call him because there is always a song on his lips, lays all his troubles at the feet of fate. "You have not been very lucky," said the Court when the negro's history had been told.

"That's what comes of being born at midnight," answered the witness, showing two perfect rows of teeth. GEORGES BOIVIN, serving life term for manslaughter, star witness for the Crown in several cases, came under fire of defence counsel for his very apparent willingness to help the authorities. He had just finished a somewhat dramatic recital of one of the incidents of the trouble and of his own share in it. "You read detective stories; Sherlock Holmes and that sort of thing?" suggested the lawyer. "Oh no, Sir," retorted the "lifer" fixing his interrogator with a knowing eye, "I would not go as far as that!"

A BURLY negro, who, according to his own evidence was beset with "breakin' an' enterin'" was being loaded into the patrol wagon of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for the ride from the penitentiary to the court house. He lagged in the line. "Come on, Rastus! Get a move on!" said the red-coated corporal in charge of the party. "Who is you callin' Rastus?" was the smiling retort.

When the party unloaded at the court house cells, the police officer asked the convict "What is your name, anyway?" The answer came in the same clear, slow modulated voice in which the man later gav eevidence in court. "Ma name is Arthur Morton an' I may tell you that I was very much offended when you call me Rastus!"

Another bright spot in a sordid business was Howard Macdonald, who began a considerable career of crime in Calgary, some years ago. He broke out of Burwash and in prepared to "argue the point" with almost anyone who wants to discuss his affairs; even judges. But there is something about this 6 foot 1 3.4 ins. giant that catches the eye and the sympathies. Here is a bad lad, but with the indefinable "some-thing," which one saw in "king's hard bargains" overseas: the same "something" which brought them from detention to be star performers in tight corners. "Mac" will be heard from, yet!

#montreal #court of king's bench #prison riot #st vincent de paul penitentiary #sentenced to the penitentiary #1933 prisoner trials #chester crossley #black canadians #words from the inside #long criminal record #prisoner autobiography #great depression in canada #crime and punishment in canada #history of crime and punishment in canada #1932 laval pen riot

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krinsbez · 3 years ago

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Random Pulp Hero Thought

Got my stack of library books down to a level where I was comfortable dipping into Wave IV of the Books That I Bought.

Specifically, I read the one that took longest to arrive, a facismle reproduction by Adventure house of the Feb. 1933 issue of The Phantom Detective magazine, aka the first issue, and the first appearance of the character that the work refers to as The Phantom, but we pulp fans call The Phantom Detective, so as to distinguish him from Lee Falk’s Ghost Who Walks (which is a tad unfair, since this guy came first). The volume contained the “full book length-novel“ (about a hundred pages or so) “Emperor of Death“, wherein Our Hero is summoned to a secret meeting by The President of the United States and asked to help capture the criminal mastermind who has united all of American crime under his leadership.

We quickly learn that said villain is one Alexis Hesterberg, a Russian (why the author decided to give his Russian villain an obviously German surname puzzles me, but then again, I suppose we’re operating on As Long As It Sounds Foreign rules) agent who is using the aformeentioned army of criminals in a scheme to A: blackmail America’s wealthiest men and also the American government into sending funds to the Soviets, and B: starting a second Great War. The plot requires copious Idiot Balls.

The volume also contains three short stories not featuring The Phantom Detective, a short introduction to the character, and a two page illustrated spread of random trivia dubbed “True Phantom Facts“. Being a facsimile of the original (though obviously made of higher quality materials), it also includes the ads, of which there were a lot fewer than I imagined (fewer than in an average comic book), which were asking you send away for various things, mostly various forms of snake oil; iron pills to make you stronger without excercise, some thingummy that’ll help your hair go, a series of lessons to learn any instrument, etc.

Some random notes:

-So, on the cover, and in popular imagination, the Phantom Detective is always pictured with a top hat, but the interior illustrations depict him wearing a fedora.

-I’m not the biggest fan of Pulp Heroes killing people, but the hoops this thing goes through to avoid Our Hero killing Hesterberg before the story ends are ludicrous.

-The story constantly hypes the Our Heroes skills as a detective (an informed attribute) and as a master of disguise. It doesn’t mention his combat prowess all that much, though.

-There’s a subplot about The Phantom Phantom pretending to be a junkie and getting himself recruited as a police informant, for reasons that don’t really make much sense, and has the cop running him pay him in drugs. The story doesn’t seem to find anything wrong with this which...what?

-Anyways, the TPD story is bananas. The three shorts are would-be gritty, hardboiled tales of two-fisted cops battling murderous gangsters. There’s no actual realism in either case, of course, but the tone is radically different and thus startling.

-One of the True Phantom Facts is about fingerprinting being invented in Bengal. For some reason, the illustration depicts several “natives“ as being African. Another is about one of the Czars having thousands of children kidnapped and drafted into his army, but leaves out the pertinent detail that they were Jewish.

@skjam You’ve read more of these than I, do they get better?

#Phantom Detective #Pulp Heroes

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elitesummit481 · 3 years ago

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Dating Law Chatham Illinois

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lesdoublesll · 5 years ago

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Pink Triangle Part One

Hey hey hey ! I said it, I do it: here is the first part of my translated notes of Pink Triangle ! Today we will talk about the beginning of the destruction of homosexual culture in Nazi Germany. Later, I will continue with the conditions of homosexuals in Germany and KZ. Have a good day !

INTRODUCTION:

Before 1970: a victim of the nazism was "a person persecuted by the Nazi regime for racial, religious or political reasons" : there wasn't any criterion to represent homosexuality. Besides, at the time in Germany, homosexuals were considered as criminals by the law, and in France, homosexuality was seen as an illness. In other countries, when they weren't seen as criminals or ill ppl, they were seen as "perverts" and "misfits". In 1970, new claims, beliefs, and homosexual movements took place in Germany, France and Netherland, the three countries directly concerned by the homosexual deportation. The pink triangle, signs that were pinned to the inmate's chest, became then the sign of homosexual empowerment, of recalling and transmission.

I-The History of homosexual persecution (1933-1945).

In Germany, article 175 of the penal code declared that homosexuals should be considered as criminal. Before Hitler, those who violated the article were sent to jail, but under the Nazi regime, homosexuals were progressively sent to concentration camps (KZ). They had to wear a green triangle, like any other criminal at the time. After a few years, internment took place without justice : homosexuals were arrested, forced to wear a pink triangle, and sent to KZ. Under the third Reich, tens of thousands of men were suspected and recorded. A lot of men and some women were then deprived of freedom. Some of them, considered as redeemable, were put into psychiatric units, in order to "cure" them, others seen as "Irredeemable" had to suffer a "willful emasculation". They were after that sent to jail or KZ. This process worked with a labelling system : "abnormal", "deviant", "dangerous", 'criminals". With the apparition of the pink triangle, they were mostly send to KZ. Thanks to the records and the labelling system, authorities were able to represent the homosexual community network and arrest a lot of homosexuals and allies.

1-The destruction of homosexual subculture.

In 1933, when Hitler was at the head of the power, Berlin was still the capital of homosexuality (clubs, organizations, associations, and activists...). Himmler (at the head of the police and the SS) decided to annex and destroy this culture. Knowing that, some homos with enough money and contacts tried to flee. The first denunciations and stalks began this exact year.

A-The German homosexual movement

Germany was the birthplace of homosexual activism ( with a scientific and humanitarian committe, founded by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld in 1897). There were a lot of petitions against article 175, flyers, and real homosexual networks. 1920: first homosexual associations, and films about homosexuality. The homosexual community was really organized. Socialists and communists wanted to erase article 175. In 1927, the government saw this as a "judeo-homosexual conspiracy" because Hirschfeld was jewish.

B-How the nazis fought homosexuality

homosexual repression with Hitler in 1933. Slowly: no more gay clubs (which were for "unnatural" ppl), no more male prostitution, no more "gay" books (book-burning of course). Destruction of the sexology institute. The first victims in 1933 were feminine men and transvestite (gay or not). 1934: Röhm was killed by the government because of his sexuality: he was the chief of staff of the assault sections. From this moment, not a single homosexual felt safe in Germany. 24th of october 1934: every police station had to pass homo files to the headquarters. Assassinations and tortures in KZ since 1933. In 1934: homosexual stalks in bars, clubs, coffees; thanks to the gradual discovery of the homo network + first propaganda : "homosexuality corrupts our youth". Some institutions had the duty to expose homos: the party, SS, and the Hitler Youth (formed to recognize jews, homos, criminals, and to report them). Snowb all effect : thanks to one suspect, SS were able to find other suspects (friends, lovers, community, associations...) + amendment in 1935 : there's no need to find signs of ejaculation anymore to determine if someone is homo or not. In 1936: particular headquarters of the third Reich against homosexuality and abortion : the situation got worse. In 1940: decree : men having seduced more than one man will go to KZ.

For Himmler, homos are dangerous because:

-they are a community, therefore they are a threat for national utopia

-their feminity is a threat for the "manly state of Germany"

-they are a danger for population growth

Policing terms: "Unzucht" = an homosexual act. When a man had several, he was seen as "dangerous". Preventive struggle: stalks in homosexual places of sociality, every man who went to jail because of his homosexuality was transferred to KZ.

C- Homosexual women VS the Third Reich

0 penal sentence against homosexual women. A lot of lawyers were against this sentence because :

-women are flexible: they can be reeducated, they can changed, by making them have relationships with men : there aren't a danger for population growth

-it was complicated to know when women were "friends" and when they were "lovers". Besides, without sperm, it's more difficult to have a proof of the crime.

-they aren't a threat for the nazi order: they're still women, they're still inferior.

Some thesis were against lesbianism, wanted to have the same rules that there were in Austria.

There still were denonciations, trials, and sometimes jail, in some cases, but most of the homosexual women that were arrested weren't arrested because of their sexuality, but because they were jewish, or were openly anti-Nazis.

D-Situation of occupied or annexed countries

Occupied countries (Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Yugoslavia, Greece, and France) : if in those countries, homos were considered as criminals, they were sent to german camps.

Annexed countries: Every discovered homos were sent to KZ. (Alsace-Lorraine for example) (yes I am from Lorraine, and I find this terrifying, because well, it is, but we never talked about that in our history classes.)

E- Solutions.

emigration: not legal and complicated. Paris became the new capitale of homosexuality for richer homos who could get out.

wedding in order to show that you were hetero.

In 1936 : only homosexuals are allowed to defend homos that are confronted to a trial. It then became more and more complicated to be defended, because no one wanted to say they were homo.

F- Homosexuality concerning SS and soldiers in the Wehrmacht.

For the SS: some really privileged SS could be openly gay. Most of the time, if an homosexual SS was discovered, he was transferred to the Wehrmacht.

For the Wehrmacht :

-some of them were sent to KZ to "clean" the german army.

-most of them were sent, since 1936, to a particular disciplinary battalion :the "Bewährungstruppe 500" (~33 000 men), a battalion charged with the more dangerous missions : they were sent to die on the battlefield : real slaughters. Some of the homos in this battalion came from KZ and were sent here " as a reward" : army was seen has a way to educated them in order to make them “manly” again. If homosexuals aren't expelled from the Wehrmacht for being homos, it's because it would allow them to avoid their military duties, it would be “a gift”. (so yes, go die with your brothers instead, homo.)

I just want to say that THIS is what would have happened to Finkeldorf if they were ever discovered, and in general if they were seen as a threat to nazi germany (and honestly K could have ended up here because of all the sarcastic hate he throws at the system...).

Oh and I wanted to add that K and Finkel had to teach "how to recognize homos and arrest them" to the youth ! (In Jojo rabbit the youth failed, thats for sure 😂😂😂)

There that’s all for today ! See you later !

#ww2 #nazi #homosexuality #lgbt community #concentration camps #homophobia #war crime #pink triangle #history #finkeldorf #freddy finkel #captain klenzendorf #alfie allen #sam rockwell #hitler youth

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lgbtrussia · 4 years ago

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History of LGBT+ Persecution and Protest

The history of gay rights in Russia has been a rocky one. After the Bolsheviks gained control in 1917, they rewrote many of the country’s laws, including Criminal Codes in 1922 and 1926. Both revisions excluded a previous article which forbid homosexual relations, and thus the Russian gay community was granted a brief period of tolerance (in the eyes of official law, at the very least). They still faced plenty of social discrimination and violence, and though the October Revolution sought to eliminate class divisions, in the Russian gay community there emerged two distinctly separate groups which did not often intermingle—“aristocrats” and “the simple” (Khoroshilova). It is interesting to note hierarchy within the gay community, as though they both faced discrimination, the aristocrats seemed to have more freedom to enjoy watching or performing in what has been traditionally deemed high culture, such as travesti theatre. However, in 1934, after Joseph Stalin rose to power, an anti-homosexuality article was re-added to Russia’s Criminal Code, and thus homosexuality was once again made illegal (Khoroshilova). It’s important to note that this only applied to men, though, as sexual relations between women had never been criminalized prior to or in 1934 (Mole). Instead, “Lesbians and bisexual women were treated not as criminals but rather as mentally ill and often subjected to medical and psychiatric interventions” (Mole).

The hasty re-inclusion of Stalin’s anti-homosexuality article could be seen as an early example of Russian leaders using homosexuality as a political scapegoat, as the decision was linked to the Case of the Leningrad Homosexuals in 1933, where over a hundred gay men were arrested for accusations of being “counter-revolutionary” and encouraging moral corruption among members of the Soviet Union’s military (Khoroshilova). The main source of Russia’s anti-LGBT persecution actually stems from its politicization of homosexuality. Even prior to 1934 in Soviet Russia when homosexuality was not illegal, ideology was still prioritized over sexuality, where Bolshevik intellectuals insisted on the “wholesale subordination of sexuality to the proletariat's class interests … for the sake of the Soviet state and Communist Party” (Mole). Because homosexuality was seen as going against the collective good, despite its decriminalization, it “was soon reconceived as abnormal, deviant, decadent and—in that it could not produce children—contrary to the public good” (Mole). Russia thus chose to criminalize homosexuality in 1934 as a way to preserve its statehood. This is characteristic of most modern nations. As V. Spike Peterson explains in her article from Gendered Lives, “The Intended and Unintended Queering of States/Nations (2013),” “Once states are successfully ‘made,’ to ensure in-tergenerational continuity they monitor biological and social reproduction. This has historically featured instituting a heteropatriarchal family/household as the basic socioeconomic unit, regulating women’s biological reproduction, and policing sexual activities more generally” (172). Russia’s history of criminalizing homosexuality is therefore political in nature, tied into the preservation of the nation, explaining why Russian homophobia is so deeply rooted.

But despite their best attempts, naturally, homosexuality remained prevalent in Russia. The government therefore chose to ignore it all together. There was no reference to same-sex desire at all in the Soviet press—it was removed entirely from all translations of foreign literature—and public gatherings of LGBT people were forbidden (Mole). Brian Baer argues that, as a result of this erasure, “Soviet culture offered little ontological basis for the representation of homosexuality as an identity, as a stable subject position through which one might assume a voice in the Russian public sphere” (Mole). Baer’s argument could explain why protests by Russian LGBT activists didn’t really begin until after the collapse of the USSR. Protesting is mainly motivated by two factors: collective identity, meaning that “the more strongly people identify with the group, the stronger may be their motivation to protest in support of this group;” and grievances, where “people view a situation as unjust and want to improve it through protesting” (Buyantueva). Because Soviet Russia almost completely erased the existence of homosexuality in their nation, Russian LGBT people lacked a collective idenitity around which to fight. The story of Nikita Andriyanov, a gay Russian activist, best summarizes this dilemma, as he explains, “when I first realised I was attracted to men, I didn’t really know what ‘gay’ meant. There has never been anyone on Russian TV that is openly LGB or T and the word ‘gay’ was mainly used as a way to describe effeminate or flamboyant men. So, I ended up thinking ‘being gay’ had nothing to do with sexual orientation (and I don’t think I’d ever heard of lesbians, bisexuals or trans people back then either)” (Andriyanov). So effective was the Soviet Union’s erasure of gay people that gay people themselves didn’t even know they were gay. Thus, it was only after the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and the subsequent decriminalization of homosexuality following Russia’s liberalization in 1993 that Russian LGBT identity began to develop (Buyantueva).

LGBT protests still didn’t start until the mid-2000’s, though, because after the 1993 decriminalization, there weren’t many significant grievances (Buyantueva). This gave them the time to develop their collective identity instead. However, starting in the mid-2000’s, Russia’s gradual retreat from the advancements made in LGBT rights has since increased activists’ motivation to protest (Buyantueva). These grievances include pressure “from the state (policy changes, pressure from the political elite, and pressure from the police), pressure from the religious elite (the Orthodox Church and Muslim clergy), and pressure from homophobic members of society” (Buyantueva). President Vladimir Putin, inaugurated in 2000, is mainly to blame for the re-adoption of these anti-LGBT policies. In 2013, his administration put into place an anti-LGBT “propaganda” law, which “put strict restrictions on information regarding LGBT topics that could be potentially accessed by children” (Buyantueva). This can be regarded as a reemergence of the Soviet-era LGBT erasure, as it directly relates to the visibility of queer Russians. This homophobic law and the topic of queer visibility have been the main rallying points for gay Russian activists thusfar. While the government has tried to put restrictions on activists’ abilities to protest, LGBT Russians remain devoted to their fight for justice.

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chiseler · 5 years ago

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Glad Rags: Fashion and the Great Depression

Some years ago, in a breathtaking lapse of taste, The New Yorker published a fashion spread that aped iconic photographs of Dust Bowl migrants. I was as appalled as the next right-thinking person by the pouting models in $400 distressed cardigans pretending to thumb rides along desert highways. But if the charge is infatuation with the aesthetics of the Great Depression, I am guilty, guilty, guilty. Throw me in the clink—just so long as it resembles the hoosegow that Barbara Stanwyck saunters around in Ladies They Talk About (1932).

Why was everything, from automats to automobiles, from nightclubs to radios, from skyscrapers to bus stations, from cocktail shakers to the battered hats on homeless men, so elegant in the thirties? Why did bums back then look better than bankers today? Why are the movies and music, the clothes and every aspect of design from typefaces to elevator panels, so intoxicatingly stylish?

The easy answer is that art deco glamour was a form of escapism, a consolation to the down-and-out, and an expression of irrational optimism. Cruise ships, trains, office towers, mechanized restaurants: art deco was all about speed and modernity, the thrill of zooming into the future. (Then why does deco still look modern and alluring, while the space-age design of the sixties just looks dated and silly?) If cynicism was society’s ballast during the Depression, style was the kite-string tugging upward, the flag that kept flying.

It’s not the swells in their glad rags that I admire most, or even the bootleggers in silk shirts, but the wardrobes of working girls. Take the plain, slinky black dress that Stanwyck, as an ambitious office worker in Baby Face, accessorizes with a series of different detachable white collars and cuffs. Those starched cuffs and collars—chic, yet as humble as table-napkins—are perfect, almost poignant symbols of Stanwyck’s determination to better herself with the small means at her disposal. In Golddiggers of 1933, out-of-work chorus girls draw lots for the privilege of wearing a gorgeous, borrowed outfit to an audition. The little hats that hug one side of the head, the soft dresses molded to the hips, the scarf collars and pleated hems, create a look that collapses the two meanings of “smart.” Neither frivolous nor utilitarian, it’s a neat, streamlined look that is still seductive; it signals quiet confidence and also wit, the sort of wisecracking verbal self-defense these girls mastered.

Movies like Baby Face tell their stories largely through their heroines’ clothes and belongings: they climb from cotton frocks to furs, from paper matchbooks to jeweled cigarette cases. (Clothing is no less crucial to the gangster’s rise; tailored shirts and luxurious overcoats are almost the point of his law-breaking.) Like Stanwyck in Baby Face, Joan Blondell in Blondie Johnson starts out in the drab, shapeless clothes of the down-trodden. Alight with anger after her mother dies, denied aid by a sanctimonious government official, she vows to get hold of dough, “and plenty of it.” Next we see her, she’s wearing a snazzy velvet suit that fits like a glove and conning suckers out of ten dollar bills by pretending to be a damsel in distress. She’s willing to bat her eyelashes and exploit her curves, but it’s really her brain she uses to get ahead, rising to become the head of a criminal “corporation,” and fiercely defending her virtue, even while clad in diaphanous pajamas. In Hold Your Man, Clark Gable calls attention to the warmth of the room, trying to talk Jean Harlow into doffing her coat. She complies, but when he suggests she remove her hat as well, she quips, “I’m pretty cool about the head.”

It’s this sense of wit and sass that’s often missing from latter-day reconstructions of the thirties, making people in period pieces appear overly formal. Current actors, looking embalmed in handsome clothes and make-up, fail to capture the way Cagney in his pin-striped suits was always poised on the balls of his feet, ready to crack into a tap dance; or the stunning bodily freedom with which women wore their thin, fluid, backless gowns, somehow never looking unduly exposed. Carole Lombard in shiny satin wide-legged lounging-pajamas and high heels furiously riding an exercise bicycle: there is the deco spirit in a nutshell. I sometimes wonder if it was the sheer delight of wearing such flattering clothes that gave women in thirties movies their unequaled zing.

Their sleek clothes don’t hide the female form the way dresses of the 1920’s did with their dropped waists and bosom-flattening bands. Neither do they exaggerate it with structured undergarments like those abandoned after the first world war and re-introduced after the second. It takes little insight to observe that the times when fashion has been most extreme in its devotion to the hourglass figure have been repressive eras for women, and periods when their clothes were more androgynous have been times when women made strides toward equality. In the early thirties, however, fashions were feminine without being cartoonishly so; they simply revealed the way women really look. The ideal of beauty was slender but not boyishly skinny, effortlessly athletic without gym-workout muscles.

Thirties dames look sexy on their own terms, not trussed up for male consumption like women of the fifties in their waist-cinching girdles, teetering stilettos and torpedo bras (often filled out with falsies on actresses of the fifties.) Many women in the early thirties wore very little under their clothes, as pre-Code movies prove with their obligatory lingerie shots. One almost feels sorry for pre-Code men faced with gals like Blondell, who in Blonde Crazy allows Cagney to inspect her flimsy underwear but repels his every advance with a slap that sends his head snapping back against his spine.

It is surely no coincidence that the interwar period was perhaps the only time when fashion was dominated, or at least heavily influenced, by women designers. Chanel borrowed from men’s tailoring to make women’s clothes simple, comfortable and sporty, without making them mannish. Madeleine Vionnet pioneered the bias cut, constructing garments so the grain of the fabric ran diagonally across the body, creating that smooth, clinging drape that defines feminine style of the thirties. Stanwyck’s lithe, bold stride wouldn’t be the same without the skirts that show off her beautiful hips and just enough of her killer gams. The jazzy, diagonally-striped ensemble that Claudette Colbert wears in It Happened One Night—something she has apparently purchased with the proceeds from pawning her wrist-watch—is the sartorial equivalent of her cocked eyebrow and throaty, sarcastic delivery.

These are Hollywood movies, of course, in which actresses often wore dresses so tight they couldn’t sit down between shots. But there’s plenty of documentary evidence that ordinary women, while they made have had less perfect figures, had just as much stylistic sass. Inept, small-time criminals Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow might never have become folk heroes if police hadn’t found a roll of undeveloped film in their hideout in Joplin, Missouri in 1932, and if the pictures hadn’t shown Bonnie wearing a snug beret, a skirt and sweater as jazzy as Colbert’s, and standing with her high-heeled foot hiked saucily on the bumper of a Ford V-8.

Or consider the stout matron in Walker Evans’s 1935 photograph of a New Orleans barbershop, sporting a blouse with sizzling concentric stripes, a jaunty black tie and a black hat with a rakish white feather. Men were no slouches either. Evans’s 1936 pictures of street scenes in the “negro quarter” of Vicksburg, Mississippi feature men lounging idly in shirtsleeves, unbuttoned vests and felt hats, each one a fashion plate. Lined up in a row in the wood-frame buildings behind them are hand-painted signs for the Savoy Barber Shop, the New Deal Barber Shop, and the Brother In Law Barber Shop. These men may not have jobs, but at least they have well-trimmed hair.

One can always ask, was there really such an epidemic of elegance in the thirties, or did photographers just seek out images of dignity? In the same way, one can look at the photographs of Robert Frank or the documentary footage of Los Angeles in The Savage Eye (1960) and wonder if there was really an epidemic of ugliness and vulgarity in the late fifties and early sixties, or whether artists just emphasized it. But the question is moot: either way, the images reveal how Americans—or at least their professional observers—saw themselves. Struggling against deprivation and anxiety, they were proud, stoic and stripped to their lean, essential spirit. Prosperous and secure, they were hapless victims of an aesthetic crash. A movie like Murder by Contract (1958), about a hit man killing time in L.A., staying in suffocatingly tacky motel rooms, seems to be the portrait of a man sleepwalking through a society where taste has flatlined.

Fifties style was artlessly boastful; its ideals were plastic mannequins of happiness, innocence and surfeit. This is why when it failed it failed so hideously: the old, the poor, the ugly, the lonely look caught in a pitiless glare, all their shortcomings exposed. The beehive hair, bouffant skirts, school-girl necklines and cat’s-eye glasses made young women look stodgy and matronly, and older women look grotesquely girlish. In the thirties, haute couture expressed sublime hauteur, but it was based on aesthetic principles so sound that even when they trickled down to the cheapest knock-offs and most threadbare hand-me-downs, they still looked good. And so we come to the paradox of men in breadlines, women in migrant camps, whose je-ne-sais-quoi can inspire fashion spreads.

I am haunted by a bit of archival footage from the superb documentary Riding the Rails (1997), which shows a group of teenage hobos gathered on an open flat-car. Their elegance is unforgettable. It’s partly that their ragged clothes are so well-cut—in those days before baggy, one-size-fits-nobody garments—and partly that they’re worn with such an air. One boy wears an overcoat that’s too big for him and a handkerchief knotted on his head; he looks like a Napoleonic soldier retreating from Moscow. Men today who affect newsboy caps tend to wear them as though they were balancing a plate on their heads, but these boys wear their soft caps pulled down low over one eye, making them look at once tough and shy. They also seem, like everyone Dorothea Lange photographed, to stand and move with uncommon, easy grace: idle, but charged with contained energy. Their faces are wary, reticent and disillusioned. In another archival clip, boys sitting around a fire in a hobo jungle respond to a reporter who asks them why they are on the road. “Out here for my health,” one deadpans. “Just riding,” another tersely shrugs.

These are the real-life versions of the characters played by Frankie Darro and the Warners juveniles in Wild Boys of the Road (1933). Several things about that film are startling. One is how the kids dress and act like grown-ups (at a school dance, they wear evening clothes and circle the floor to “The Shadow Waltz”), as opposed to today, when grown-ups dress and act like kids. Another is how quickly and completely two middle-class boys turn into outcasts, panhandlers, embittered scavengers living in a garbage dump. But most startling of all is the way stoicism and dignity are taken for granted, the universal determination not be a burden or feel sorry for oneself. The elderly interviewees in Riding the Rails are candid, matter-of-fact, wry and compassionate. There is more to elegance than dressing well, than being tasteful or—that overused and inelegant word—“classy.” There is an intangible quality, a kind of mental and moral grace. Elegance has spine, but it’s not rigid; it bends but doesn’t break. It is understated; it is reserved. It knows the virtue of holding something back—some strength, some anger, some sense of irony—because there is more than one rainy day.

by Imogen Sara Smith

#The Chiseler #Imogen Sara Smith #Fashion #Great Depression

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marcjampole · 5 years ago

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Are the George Floyd riots the American Reichstag Fire?

I have to admire the thousands of people protesting the awful death of George Floyd and the unredeemable racism in the criminal justice system that it represents. Even wearing masks, the protestors are risking their lives to show that they are both sick to their stomachs and exhausted by the centuries of racism that have poisoned the United States. Young and old, protestors are more likely to be hurt or die as a result of contracting Covid-19 at the rallies than from police brutality or getting run over by an uncontrollable mob. As is typical, the overwhelming majority of protestors have been peaceful, despite the rage boiling inside them. Congratulations to the thousands of peaceful protestors for their bravery and dedication to the cause.

There should be no prize or nod of recognition to those who predicted that we would once again see a national series of marches protesting police violence. It was bound to happen again as long as police departments don’t do a good job weeding out racists, as long as police recruitment ads focus on military adventurism and not peace-keeping skills, as long as police unions keep protecting bad apples, as long as we have an administration in Washington that is both racist and brutal and encourages both racism and brutality. It would have also been easy to predict that some demonstrations might lead to violence, because violence will occasionally break out at even a well-organized protest.

Keeping in mind that we don’t know yet how many of the incidences of violence at Floyd protests were large enough to be called riots and the broader question of what constitutes a riot, let’s consider how riots start. At the heart of the riot dynamic is the simple fact that most people are followers and conformists. Most people look to others to set the tone. One trivial example: In the late 1970’s in Candlestick Park, there were more people in the stands passing a doobie than standing up with their right hand at their hearts during the singing of the Star Spangle banner. Post 9/11, if you don’t put your hand to your heart and sing, people give you dirty looks. A less trivial example: tattoos. Thirty years ago, tattoos were an expression of rebellion; but nowadays, most people below 50 consider it a lifestyle decision.

A riot consists of two kinds of people: Those who start it and everybody else. Imagine being in a swarm of people that breaks off from a march or has been herded into a relatively confined space by the police and/or urban geography. Three people break the glass of a storefront and start looting. The entire crowd moves that way, sweeping individuals along with it. A few other people—let’s call them early adopters—start taking things. All of a sudden, what was once taboo is now being done by everyone. Keep in mind that everyone there—the good, the bad, the blessed and the cursed—is angry, frustrated and tired of the constraints of quarantine. Many are quite poor and long past disgusted at getting exploited, demeaned and paid poorly by the wealthy.

Or imagine that the same three people set fire to a car. A protestor’s better self knows it’s wrong, but the same primitive instinct that has you yelling for a defensive lineman to cripple the opposing quarterback kicks into high gear, so you start cheering. Your cheers and those of all the other basically good people around you are part and parcel of the start of a riot.

Keeping the three or four riot starters from activating the crowd is the key to making certain that a peaceful demonstration doesn’t steer into violence. Now at this point in history, virtually every group involved in organizing demonstrations for civil rights, criminal justice reform, LGBTQ rights, immigrants, the poor or any other cause under the banner of progressives and the left knows how to keep protests nonviolent. Additionally, the accurately named incident called a “police riot” really doesn’t happen in much of the country any more, even if individual instances of police brutality are frequent and ubiquitous. Good planning by organizers and police restraint explain why protests usually lead to very few altercations nowadays.

So why have the George Floyd protests been different? Do we blame the added frustration of the Covid-19 quarantine? Were there too few march monitors because of the relative spontaneity of the actions? Did the mix of responsible versus irresponsible people skew too much to the irresponsible, because the responsible ones stayed home to avoid the crowd?

Early evidence is suggesting another, more nefarious reason for the riots: They were started by white, right-wing provocateurs interested in stirring up a race war in America.

Already the police in Pittsburgh, Nashville, and Minneapolis suspect that riots in these cities were started by white nationalists. Mayors from all over the country report that a larger than usual number of riot participants have come from out of town.

What we may be experiencing is an American reboot of the 1933 arson attack on the German parliament building, called the Reichstag, that was perpetrated by Nazis, but blamed on the communists by the recently elected Nazi government. Now I’m not saying that Trump or the Trump campaign is directly or even indirectly paying white supremacists to start riots at George Floyd protests. It could be someone else. For example, we know that Koch-sponsored organizations are financing the anti-Covid 19 protests around the country—you know, the ones in which oversized, evil-looking dudes carry large weapons and are allowed to menace everyone around them.

But even if Trump had nothing to do with setting up these riots, he certainly is using the Nazi playbook following the Reichstag fire: labelling the protestors and rioters as terrorists and calling for the police to crack down with heavy boots and blazing firearms against rioters, and by implication, against protestors, too.

Motive is an important element in proving any criminal case, and there can be no doubt that Trumpites have more of a motive to start a riot than do #Blacklivesmatter, Antifa or other social justice and civil rights movements and organizations. As New York Governor Andrew Cuomo pointed out in a magnificent speech at today’s daily press conference (June 1), Trump and the conservatives are delighted to change the topic from the institutional racism that led to George Floyd’s murder to rioters creating mayhem in the streets and threatening our way of life. By contrast, it was and is in the best interest of those protesting to keep things peaceful.

The facts are slowly falling into place and so far, it looks as if white racists and not legitimate protesters who started many if most of the violence. Expect a white wash from the Barr Justice Department, but a thorough investigation by a number of state governments.

By the way, it’s easy to separate racists from non-racists among so-called friends of social justice by how they react to the violence. The non-racists like Cuomo focus on how the violence helps the right-wing narrative. The racists insist that the rioters have undercut their case for change. That case has not changed. Probably at the instigation or white provocateurs, a few people did some stupid stuff. As some have pointed out, their looting is peanuts compared to the $600 billion large corporations and banks have looted from the American people in the form of Covid-19 financial help, while individuals, small business, states and municipalities have been largely ignored.

#georgefloyd #protests #riots

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