#Mussolini investigating the Italian army

[nando161mando]

Mussolini investigating the Italian army

[italeean]

Hi, would you mind sharing a little perspective about Benito Musolini (a prominant figure from Italy). I just learned about him at school, and when my teacher said he's from Italy, I immediately thinks of your account! Tbh My teacher haven't shared any facts about Musolini (He just mentioned that Musolini was a prominent figure from Italy w/o any further explanation). If you know something about him, please do share! I believe your explanation will be the most authentic (since you grew up and receive education in literally Italy) Thank you!! ... Also, Imagine if one day you stumbled upon a tickle fic with Musolini in it (as lee or ler) how would you feel about it? lol (this question is so random I'm sorry)

WARNING: SUPER LONG POST UNDER THE CUT

So... since you said you don't know any facts about this "person" and your teacher didn't do a great job at talking about him (he made him sound like a positive character from what you told me), I'll start with a little history lesson

WWI ended in 1918 with the victory of USA, England, France and Italy (who was initially allied with Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire). However, Italians didn't get what they wanted (like Istria) because they were labeled as "unreliable" for being allied with Austria and Germany before joining WWI on the other side. Basically, at the beginning, Italy "made friends" with Austria to get back the areas of Trento and Trieste from the Empire with diplomacy, but when the Great War broke out, they decided to take that land by force.

Anyway, being disrespected after winning the war caused a lot of discontent in the population, even among the younger ones (because yes, even 17-year-old guys had to go to war...). WWI was the first war to be fought with technological weapons and gas (mustard gas). Compared to the "romantic" kind of war, the one where there were heroes that distinguished themselves, this kind of war caused a much more significant psychological damage, also caused by the shell shock, and Italians felt like they were made fun of because they got injured, invalid or traumatized for nothing. This discontent is called "vittoria mutilata" (mutilated victory).

In this climate of economic crisis and deep instability, Benito Mussolini became popular with his complaints of how things were going and about the "vittoria mutilata". He even founded the movement of Fasci Italiani di Combattimento in 1919, which became PNF, or Partito Nazionale Fascista (Fascist National Party) in 1921, and the 28th of October 1922, he and his blackshirts (his followers, who got that name because they always wore black shirts) marched on Rome.

The king could have declared the state of siege and made the army intervene, but he let Mussolini do what he wanted, because he decided that Fascism was better than Communism (whose echoes were arriving from Russia, which would've officially become USSR 2 months later). However, dictatorship didn't arrive just like that. There were held elections... although they were basically not democratic and fascists "casually" won. Giacomo Matteotti investigated and was ready to present the evidence he had gathered to the Parliament, but the 10th of June 1924, the day before the scheduled presentation of said proof, he disappeared and was found dead.

I won't go into too much detail about his political maneuvers he took all the power with, I'll just focus on how his political choices affected the population.

1925: The government proclaims the Leggi Fascistissime (Ultra-Fascist Laws..?). With these laws, the President of the Council (Mussolini) became the Chief of the Government, every non-fascist political organization was disbanded, the police got more power and was free to act however they wanted (basically the George Floyd case was the normality here), censor was legalized and a Special Court was created to condemn people who were politically dangerous for the integrity of the government. Death penalty and exile were also reintroduced. The elections were extremely controlled: the government itself presented the list of candidates with no possibility of integration and the votes were made by applause in the squares (if it doesn't make sense, it's normal)

1926: Quota 90, it was an economic maneuver to give more value to Lira (Italian currency before Euro), which turned into a flop.

1929: Patti Lateranensi (Lateran Treaty). Basically it's an agreement between the Fascism and the Church to make sure religion doesn't intervene against Mussolini. In exchange, Catholicism becomes the State Religion and it also becomes a subject at school. This compromise with another authority and the presence of the king makes Fascism an imperfect totalitarianism because Mussolini, also known as Il Duce (The Leader, from Latin), wasn't the only authority in the country.

But what happens in the world? The crisis of 1929 hits the world and in 1933 Hitler wins the elections, democratically I think, and at Hindenburg's death in 1934 he also gets the position of President of Republic. The Nazi dictatorship begins.

In the beginning, Mussolini and Hitler aren't even interested in each other, they get closer only after some events.

1935: Italy invades Ethiopia with a scandalous war because Mussolini thinks Italy should have colonies as well, but the Society of Nations (UNO's ancestor) disapproves and Italy receives sanctions. In response to that, Il Duce decided to switch to the autarchic economy, which meant no more import-export and absolute self-sufficiency. Foreign words were banished from the vocabulary or were "italianized", and foreign drinks and foods were changed with Italian variations. For example, coffee was made with macerated chards. In this context of tensions with France and England, Mussolini got closer to Hitler.

1936: Civil war breaks out in Spain and Mussolini sends troops to help Francisco Franco, the soon-to-be dictator, take control of the nation.

1937: Italy joins the alliance between Germany and Japan (they became the Axis)

1938: The racist laws are proclaimed in Italy, following the example of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, and antisemitism spreads in the nation. Some ghettos and concentration camps are also built, and you can still visit Fossoli.

1939: WW2 breaks out, but Italy still doesn't participate; Mussolini will join only a year later because, according to him "we needed a few hundreds of corpses to throw on the peace table". (Which meant we needed to sacrifice some soldiers to say "Hey, we participated, too! We want our share of whatever there is to gain!"). Let me tell you all this: we weren't ready for that war. Our equipments had never been upgraded since WWI and Italy always needed Hitler's help to finish any kind of war campaign that was started. Many people also died during the russian winter, which was brutal, and in the end we sided with the Allies when the US started the invasion (or the liberation) of Italy in 1943, after the arrest of Mussolini.

25/04/1945: The Allies finally free Italy from the Nazi-fascists (yes, the nazists had started the invasion of Italy the 8th of September 1943)

28/04/1945: Mussolini is found by someone partigiani (the ones who always made resistance to the fascism and even helped the Allies during the occupation of Italy) and gets shot.

After this ✨️not-so-amazing✨️ history lesson based on my knowledge from my years of high school, I'll share my opinions

I'm a progressist, so I'm very far from the extreme right political orientation

People still complain about how we are still under the influence of the US... guess what? If our Duce hadn't joined the war in 1940, we would've come out of this as honorable winners

My great grandfather nearly lost both his feet due to gangrene caused by the serious burns during the war in Ethiopia, a war than gave Italy nothing more than a stupid title

The only decent thing Mussolini did was La Battaglia del Grano (The Wheat Battle). He reclaimed some marshy areas and made them cultivated, but it was still insufficient for autarchy

Mussolini supported racism, which I absolutely do not believe in, censorship, authoritarianism, he forced Italians to be catholic, he punished people publicly by making them drink castor oil (a very strong purge)

The police or the blackshirts could come at your place and beat you to a pulp or even kill you if you were suspected of being against the regime

Women were given an economic incentive if they had children. The more babies they had, the bigger the incentive became. It meant that women were only supposed to be mothers, without being able to choose to remain single.

Homosexuals were directly dragged to the concentration camps

I don't wanna think about what happened to disabled people and kids during those ages...

Would you really think I'd want a world like this?

And would you think I'd ever read a fanfiction about such a shitty man?

And that's all I have to say 😸 I hope I didn't bore you all with this talk, but I felt like this was the bare minimum to make you all understand what Italy went through all these years, in a dictatorship that lasted 20 years.

Guys, just remember one thing: if you're going through a crisis in your country and a candidate to the leadership or someone who claims to be a rebel makes promises of making your country great, putting your own country above any other nation, restoring the economy in a short time or anything that sounds dreamy, they're probably fooling you. And by the way, if every country thought only for themselves, the world and the global society would probably collapse; also, I don't wanna live in a world of egoists so please, let's choose cooperation and integration over autarchy. I can guarantee that it brings no good in the long term.

I know yours was just curiosity, and I'm happy you asked me about this. Don't take my final questions as a sign of anger, I just think they are a good conclusion to this kind of talk 🥰

[blackswaneuroparedux]

"He said 'I'm going on the Mississippi'. And I said: 'You must be mad to go on the Mississippi, it's not an adventure. There are houses everywhere.' Then he said: 'What about the Volga?' And I said: 'Well what are you exploring there? It's all built up, it's in Europe. Why don't you go on the Ganges.' And he said: 'That's a marvellous idea.'

"And we went."

- Wanda Newby (neé Skof)

The result was the classic Slowly Down The Ganges by famed British travel writer Eric Newby. To hear Wanda tell it, his Slovenian wife and constant travel companion, one imagines of taking a 1,200-mile boat trip through the heart of India was as straightforward as catching the tube from her home in Kennington to Waterloo. The reality is that the Ganges is even less conducive to comfort than the Northern Line. 

When the late, great travel writer Eric Newby was asked in a magazine article to name one thing he couldn't travel without, he said simply "my wife". Wanda Newby is such a commanding presence in his books that it's easy to see why. She was tough, practical and – most importantly – absolutely hilarious. Without her, he wouldn't have had half so much to write about. Indeed, when she stayed at home, his journeys didn't come off. Wanda herself once said: "He cycled 700 miles across England with somebody else because I didn't want to do it in the cold. But it didn't work. Eric said he couldn't write the piece without my dialogue."

In Newby's books, Wanda is combative, constantly argumentative, but thoroughly endearing. It's hard to convey just how marvellous she was in a few words, but you can get a flavour from the following curt note, which Newby quotes in Love and War in the Appennines, his autobiographical account of hiding out in the Italian mountains during the second world war. She sends it to Eric at a point of extreme personal stress into warn him that the Nazis are about to arrive and he must escape: "Get out! Tonight, 22.00, if not Germany tomorrow 06.00."

One of 11 children, she was born Wanda Skof in Kobjeglava, a small Slovenian village near the border with Italy, which was at that time under Italian rule. When she was 10, she was moved with her mother, Gizela (nee Urdih), and father, Viktor, a teacher, to Fontanellato, near Parma, under Mussolini’s Italianisation programme – an attempt to force assimilation on minority populations living within the dictatorship. She was educated in San Daniele del Carso (now Stanjel), Fontanellato and Parma, qualified as an accountant, and went to work for the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura.

Her family were determinedly anti-fascist. Her parents became involved with the resistance, and so it was that when Eric - a captured Special Boat Service officer - escaped from a prisoner of war camp near their house, Wanda’s family helped to hide him. She and Eric began to fall in love, but events got in the way. Realising that the German army were about to find him, Wanda sent Eric a typically direct message: “Get out! Tonight, 22.00, if not Germany tomorrow 06.00.”

Wanda’s father, Viktor, risked his life to drive Eric to safety, but he was eventually recaptured. It was not until after the war that he found Wanda again.

Eric Newby described how he went back to Italy to find Wanda, “After the war, I started to try and get in touch with her. One day I was in St James's walking past White's club and bumped into an acquaintance who'd just seen Wanda in Italy. He invited me into the club for a drink and announced to the assembled company that I needed to get to Italy, could anybody give me a lift? A man put up his hand, and it was generally agreed that the best way would be if I joined MI9. White's has always been a good place to get a job.

In 1945 she had started working for the Allied Screening Commission in Verona, which investigated and acknowledged Italians who had helped allied PoWs to escape. Eric managed to get a job in the same organisation.

Eric wasted no time in asking Wanda to marry him. As he put it, “I proposed to Wanda in the stables of a great medieval castle, and we were eventually married in the chapel of Santa Croce, Florence. But it was all quite difficult, as she was considered an enemy alien, and the Army was trying to discourage such marriages - extraordinary goings on, Neapolitan women arriving in Wales and having to cook Welsh food.“

Despite this they did get married in 1946. Eric told this love story in Love and War in the Apennines, which was made into a film of the same name (2001).

Wanda wrote her own account of her childhood and life under Mussolini, Peace and War: Growing Up in Fascist Italy (1991). She insisted that the book was “not very good”, but in fact it was a fine evocation of a lost time and place, as well as a funny and touching account of her falling for Eric.

The two stayed together until Eric’s death in 2006, travelling the world. In A Small Place in Italy (1994), he recalled their restoration of the ruined farmhouse they bought in 1967. She thought it rather embarrassing about her role in these adventures, she once said. “I don’t like it. But I was there. So of course, he had to mention me.”

Wanda died in 2015 at ripe ae of 93 years old. But she and Eric left behind a rich legacy of two children, two grand children, and three great grand children.

[unhistorical]

April 27, 1945: While fleeing the country, Benito Mussolini and his mistress are captured by partisans in north Italy. Both are executed the next day.

On a morning in late April 1945, a column of trucks, carrying German troops in retreat, made its way to the Swiss-Italian border. Allied armies had launched an offensive on Lombardy weeks earlier, and the German occupation of northern Italy, like Axis efforts across Europe, was still extant in name only. Soviet Army forces had begun to shell Berlin while Hitler wrung his hands in his Führerbunker, weighing the pros and cons of different methods of suicide; within two weeks the Soviets would wrest the capital from the tatters of the German military and militia.

The trucks passed outside Dongo, a township on the western shore of the glacial lake Lago di Como, nestled at the crook of the southern Alps. It was outside this peacetime vacation village that Italian partisans (‘patriots’ as described by The New York Daily News, with many communists among them) stopped this fleeing German entourage. The partisans looked only to check that there were no Italians hidden among the troops in retreat - the unit had been notified that Il Duce was somewhere in flight out of the country. One volunteer, Urbano Lazzaro, spotted an awkward figure wrapped in an overcoat and hiding his face behind sunglasses. Lazzaro grew suspicious, and he approached:

Urbano Lazzaro recalled, “I called out ‘excellency.’ But he didn’t reply. I also shouted ‘comrade.’ Still nothing. So I got into the lorry. I went up to him and I said: 'Cavaliere Benito Mussolini.’ It was as if I had given him an electric shock.”

Lazzaro’s instincts were right: here was his ‘excellency,’ father of Italian fascism, sitting in a vacation district in a truck surrounded by Italian antifascists. Mussolini was shocked, but so were they: “They had no idea what to do with him.” The partisans seized the disgraced dictator. The details of what happened next remain, to this day, and complicated by Lazzaro’s later investigations and revised accounts, fuzzy. Conspiracy theories, as with the death of Hitler, abound. But whatever happened over the next twenty-four hours, it ended in the execution of Mussolini and his mistress, and if their deaths were a private, understated affair - according to the traditional narrative, a simple death by firing squad against the wall of a secluded lakeside villa - then their fate after death was a wholly public event, in which every person in Milan had occasion to participate. 

The partisans loaded Mussolini, Petacci, and their companions, high-ranking party officials, in a van, which arrived in Milan on the morning of April 29. In the Piazzale Loreto, a mob of thousands, far too many for the partisans to hold back, began to trample and spit on the bodies. It was the same piazzale where, in 1944, Italian fascist police and the German army had executed fifteen members of the Italian resistance. 

One woman, reported The New York Times, “fired five shots into Mussolini’s body, according to Milan Radio, and shouted: ‘Five shots for my five assassinated sons!’” When the blood and dust cleared, the bodies were strung up, upside down, from the roof of a gas station. Reports of the morbid display reached Berlin the next day, hardening Hitler’s resolve to die quietly, and to die without ever having to face and to answer, dead or alive, the rage of the people. 

My men shot them all together… Among them was the brother of Mistress Petacci. When they were led out to be shot, Petacci tried to escape but he was shot down… These men died well. Mussolini died badly.

An Italian partisan describes the execution of Mussolini and co.

[tauers-go-dutch]

Italy: like putting on an old boot

Since losing my passport in Madrid, I had a two-week window before our next trip to get a new one. I ended up going to the US Consulate in Amsterdam, which was an adventure all in its own. If you picture the DMV, but on ‘roids, that is about the experience of applying for a passport abroad.  After getting a new passport photo, I got to wait outside the building on the literal coldest day of the year for an hour before being ushered through security in order to wait for another two hours interspersed with quick trips up to the counter to explain that I don’t know what happened to my passport because I lost it and then being chastised for losing my passport because I must look too young to possibly be able to comprehend the gravity of importance such a document.  Oh, and I had to pay $140.  But luckily the US is very efficient at printing rush order passports and it arrived the following Friday, just in time for our trip to Rome.  But of course, there would be one more hiccup in the story- the city lost power on Friday afternoon when I planned to pick up my passport.  So the Consulate did not have power… or at least the backup generator did not power the whole building.  Luckily, the guards were able to just grab the newly printed passports (I was not the only one trying to pick one up that day), and I was on my way.

Once we got into Rome, the same feeling of joy I had from my first visit washed over me, and I think I had a smile on the whole weekend. Rome is a huge city, so it is crowded, busy, smelly, full of trash, a bit rundown, etc.  However, I love it for the amazing art, culture, and food.  What can I say, Rome was the center of Western culture for much of history, and for much of my Catholic upbringing (and my brief stint as a Latin nerd), so it generates some degree of awe.

We threw in our coin, so I guess we’ll be back again

We checked into our hotel, which was across from some state building.  When checking us in, the clerk said if we take photos from the window, the state employees might think we are spies and send people over to the hotel to investigate. I’m pretty sure he was joking?  Mariah may have tested the theory the next evening after a few drinks.  

We went to dinner that evening and tried some authentic Roman dishes, including an artichoke sampler platter. To be honest, steamed artichokes and butter was one of my sister’s favorite meals growing up, but they were never one of mine. But the Roman style artichokes blew me away. They are originally prepared by Jewish immigrants, but were quickly adopted by the Roman locals, so much so that Rome is one of the largest artichoke producers in the world. The Jewish version is lightly battered and fried, while the Roman version is steamed, and both are incredible. I also had pasta al’amatriciana (tomato sauce with pork cheek) and Mariah had ravioli before we split an incredible tiramisu.  Before calling it a night we walked over to the Trevi fountain and threw in a coin.  I guess we’ll be back one day.

Magical artichokes

We had some super delicious pastries in our hotel the next morning before heading to St. Peter’s Basilica. After taking some initial photos, I was talked into upgrading our museum tickets to a guided tour.  While this is expensive, it is worth it- the guide is great, but you’re really paying to skip the 3+ hour line to see the basilica from the museum (and Sistine Chapel).  We learned why the Vatican is its own country (long, convoluted story short- the modern church never wanted to join the united Italy, and the arrangement stuck- helps when you have your own private army). The Vatican treasures are as incredible as they are extensive. We saw Greek/Roman gods, human personifications of the Tiber river, supposed tombs of Helena and Constantina (mother and daughter of Constantine), maps of the world, paintings and tapestries for days, and a Roman Zach Galifianakis. But this was all a lead in to the Sistine Chapel, of Michelangelo fame. Of course there are no photos, but the Creation of Adam and the Last Judgment are every bit as amazing as hyped. We then fast tracked to the staggeringly beautiful St. Peter’s basilica.  We saw the tombs of the popes (St. John Paul II has his own chapel on the main floor) and the Pieta, but my favorite is the altar from Bernini.  Just look at the pictures.

St. Peter’s Basilica

Is that you, Zach?

Pieta

Pope JPIII!

Bernini’s altar

After a lunch of arancini (rice balls- I might not be able to eat the ones at Cinzetti’s ever again) and cacao e pepe (literally cheese and pepper- basically Italian mac ‘n cheese for adults), we set out to explore the city.  We saw Castle Sant’Angelo (the pope fortress/Church of Illumination), Piazza Navona, The Pantheon, the Spanish Steps, and so much gelato.  Eventually, we met some friends who also happened to be in Rome, and had dinner and a shared a few bottles of wine.  

Gelato number two - sadly, we have no evidence of number one

The Pantheon

These two like their Italian wine

Brent and Christine happened to be in town

The next morning, we packed in some more sightseeing with the Altar of the Fatherland (Mussolini funded statue dedicated to the united Italy), Palatine Hill, the Capitoline Wolf, and Turtle Fountain (which does not have live turtles in the fountain). We ventured to the Jewish quarter of town, and had more marvelous artichokes, pasta, and possibly some of the best table bread ever (I had to take a picture it was so good).  We went to a beer bar and enjoyed some brews (Italy has some good breweries), before going over to the hip Trastevere neighborhood and having more food (including a tremendous prosciutto sandwich which I would not shut up about, more arancini and a pizza) and beers.  We needed to get back to the hotel, and decided to walk by the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus on the way.  Unfortunately, the sky opened up and we were drenched in ten minutes… so we made a quick pit stop for more gelato to let the rain pass.  There are worse things.

Remus and Romulus!

No live turtles

Mariah’s happy place (Gelato three of four?)

...and mine (prosciutto sandwich)

Sometimes I can get her to drink a beer

But it generally involves bribery with margherita pizza

Aaaaand it’s pouring outside

Rain keeps the tourists away - most of them, anyways

Are you not entertained?

All that’s left of the Circus Maximus

We packed a ton into our Rome weekend, so in Florence (the following weekend) we were a bit more relaxed. We arrived late on Friday so our adventure really just started on Saturday morning. Our first stop was to the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, which is better known for ‘il Duomo,’ or the massive dome that adorns the church and dominates the city skyline.  It was a fairly easy climb, but the vertigo is real when you are on the interior of the church and looking down. But you are rewarded with amazing art reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno (Florence is his home town, btw) and panoramic views of the city.  

I hope you’re not claustrophobic... or afraid of heights!

Afterwards, we put our name down at Trattoria Mario for lunch, and killed some time at the markets before our table was ready. I don’t think you can see more leather outside of a Vegas S&M convention, but to be honest it is really cool.  We stopped into a market and bought some pastries- creampuff for me and a chocolate cookie for Mariah- to hold us over. Luckily we did not have to wait for lunch long.  Trattoria Mario is regarded as the best restaurant in town, and is only open for lunch. The place is tiny, and you will be seated at a two-person table with two other people and sit on stools that are made for toddlers. The bread is disappointing, but the food is marvelous. The place is meat-centric, and their specialty is the classic bistecca alla fiorentina, which is a super thick, bloody porterhouse steak. The frites were good too.

After lunch, we crossed the famed Ponte Vecchio to the other side of the city.  We walked up to the Piazzale Michelangelo for more magnificent views of Florence.  We walked along the river and stopped by a small tea shop, and sampled some of their goodies. We walked out with some good stuff, and an aspiration to become a tea sommelier and to (keep) travel(ing) the world. We had a rest at a dessert shop before finding dinner (easier said than done, since our first choice for dinner just never opened the restaurant for service- no notice posted physically or online), and closed the night with more beers. It was a bit early, but we have been traveling a lot.  

It was a pretty creepy sculpture...

We slept in, but woke to go to the Galleria dell’Accademia, which is a museum that has nothing of much significance except for a little piece from Michelangelo called the David. Before seeing the main event, we did explore some of the other parts of the museum, including the musical instruments and some religious paintings.  Two asides- first, we saw a pair of little girls (say seven) on a private guide with their parents looking at the musical instruments and throwing out some serious knowledge of the Medicis and the Renaissance art movement (the girl was a self-proclaimed art history buff, and I believe it!). Second, some of the art made to explain the dogma of Christianity is as bizarre (though simultaneously stylish) as the Thai paintings we saw in Bangkok. Seriously, if I didn’t have knowledge of the immaculate conception, I would have thought Christians believed that an old cloud god shot pigeons at a sleeping woman while some creepy dude with wings looked on approvingly. 

But onto the David.  It is every bit as masterful as everyone says.  The story is unbelievable too.  Just think, some 27 year-old just said, ‘hey, can I use that chunk of marble over there? I wanna make something for you.’  And then the Florentine people were graced with one of the most incredible works of art in history is ridiculous.  Michelangelo was TWENTYSEVEN!!!  Oh, and he made the Pieta before that (pictured above, from Rome).

Just look at him! 

Afterwards we just relaxed. We had some pizza, coffee, macarons and beers. I did grab a snack- a lampredotto.  There was a stand just outside of our hotel which filled up during lunch with locals, so I figured I’d try it. The sandwich is made from spiced lamb intestine, and it’s pretty good. I mean, it’s no prosciutto sandwich, but its good. We did make our outside the Uffizi gallery before leaving, and took in some of the city’s most famous patrons before saying goodbye.

I throw my hands up in the air sometimes... singing ayo... 

NBD, just our country’s namesake

Last minute snack

Italy is superb.  It is a country with so many different layers of nuance and culture.  Sometimes I feel people boil it down to pizza and statues, but it’s so much more.  Each region, from Rome, Florence, Venice, Naples, Sicily, Milan, etc. is so different from the next. The food, outside of the tourist traps, is every bit of what makes Italian fare heralded as some of the world’s best. The culture and history is dense and rich- just think, Rome was the center of the western world through two different points of time for two different reasons. Sure, Italy has its problems and frustrations like we all do, but it is a country I will enjoy returning to time and time again.

[marginalgloss]

naples 44

In 1944, the writer Norman Lewis was sent to the south of Italy as an intelligence agent. Mussolini had fallen, an armistice had been signed, and the country was in a delicate state; the German army was still lingering, and the local population was desperately poor. Lewis went there after a few weeks of basic infantry and espionage training, with not much more than a revolver and the Italian language at his command; this book, Naples ’44, is his journal from that time. It is one of the most evocative, unusual and harrowing personal accounts of the second world war.

This wasn’t published until the late 1970s, perhaps for reasons of confidentiality, but perhaps also because it paints a distinctly unflattering portrait of the allied forces. Any tendency we might have today to cast this as a war of liberation against evil is quietly sidelined here as basically irrelevant. From the moment the British and Americans land in Italy, it is chaos. Rumours abound of torture and summary executions of German prisoners. ‘This afternoon distraught American ack-ack gunners brought down their third Spitfire,’ he writes, with the weary resignation of a man recalling a delayed train.

To the locals it seems they have merely swapped one occupying force for another. This is not to say they aren’t glad to be rid of the Germans: one Italian man offers the author a glass of wine before proudly inviting him into a back room to view the corpse of a Nazi soldier, recently poisoned. But the overriding concern is the lack of food, and the lack of work. Society has disintegrated to the extent that the world starts to resemble the Dark Ages. Prostitution, casual violence and sexual abuse are rife. Begging and scavenging and skirting or breaking the limits of the law are a fact of life because it is not possible to survive without them. Everything is eaten. Everything is stolen.

Everyone is involved and implicated in a comprehensive black market economy. The Allied forces are no exception, and despite this involvement, they can be relentlessly cruel. For many pages the author is embroiled in the case of a local man caught stealing copper wire: his excuse is that he shouldn’t be blamed for doing something which the Allies actually told the locals to do over the radio when the Germans were in charge. In the absence of any other logic this briefly becomes a compelling argument: the provenance of the wire itself becomes important, and the question of whether he stole it before or after the Americans arrived is suddenly paramount.

Women suffer worst of all. At one point I think Lewis estimates that as much as a third of the female population are involved with sex work of some kind. Even the relationships outside the brothels contain complex social transactions of honour, money, food, security. Part of his role becomes to investigate potential marriages between local women and occupying soldiers. He approaches this with the exasperated air of someone who has been given an impossible task: there may be something contrived about these arrangements, but if he breaks up the relationship, he leaves them with nothing.

Lewis sees it all with a faintly sarcastic despair. He is perhaps too astonished by everything around him to express much in the way of explicit condemnation. He’s a kind of glorified administrator — he’s not a spy, nor is he the secret police. He can’t do anything about most of the problems around him. A recurring theme is the requirement to investigate and report without the ability to meaningfully act. The best he can manage is occasionally to prevent the local authorities from executing someone for petty crime, even while his masters benefit from the black market facilitated by those criminals. He is notionally in charge of the security of a number of surrounding towns, but without the resources to manage this, he admits openly that they are quite lawless, given over to the bandits of the local Camorra.

It is sometimes very beautiful. The author has a genuine love and fascination for the local culture, and in particular the rituals of a region preoccupied with saving face even through the worst conditions imaginable. There are scenes here where everyday moments are punctuated with astonishing, surreal, haunting imagery. At one point, after a small eruption at Vesuvius, he visits a town where the locals linger as lava flows openly through the streets, confident in their saint that will arrest the destruction if only his statue is wheeled into place. 

Some of the characters here have a very real presence. The lonely old Italian lawyer, surviving on scraps of bread and olive oil, whose only vocation now is a professional mourner: showing up to funerals in his best suit posing as a fictional ‘uncle from Rome’. A small crowd of orphan girls, all blind, walking through a restaurant, all crying and begging, all ignored by the customers. ‘They would never recover from their pain, and I would never recover from the memory of it,’ he writes.

[thewrosper]

Cannes Film Festival flashback: Most memorable editions, from post-WWII beginnings to its 2009 pinnacle

May holds a special place in the calendar of film lovers across the world. It is when the privileged few of them gather at that most hallowed rendezvous on the Croisette for Cannes Film Festival — and it sure is a privilege to discover the best films of the year, before they are coated with all that promotional sheen. Sadly, Cannes 2020, originally scheduled to run from 12-23 May, will not be held in its "original form" this year due to the ongoing coronavirus crisis; but it was announced on Sunday that it will screen an official selection of its films at fall festivals like Venice. Meanwhile, all its parallel sections — Directors' Fortnight, Critics' Week, ACID — have been cancelled. With many other festivals also cancelled, cinemas closed, and productions on hold, the COVID-19 pandemic has paralysed the film industry.  It is unfortunate especially following the success of last year's edition, which proved exactly why Cannes is still considered the barometer of quality in cinema. Some of the most beloved films of 2019 began their journey at the festival: Beanpole, Bacurau, I Lost My Body, Invisible Life, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Pain and Glory, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, The Lighthouse and, not to mention, the eventually Oscar-winning Parasite. It was truly an exceptional line-up, in terms of scale, variety and substance. Turning back the clock, we time-travel to Cannes film festivals over the years with equally exceptional line-ups. End of a war, birth of a festival Highlights | Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau), Brief Encounter (David Lean), Gaslight (George Cukor), Gilda (Charles Vidor), The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder), Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock), Rome Open City (Roberto Rossellini)

Proposed as an alternative to Venice Film Festival (then politicised by Mussolini), the first edition of Cannes was initially supposed to be held in 1939. Louis Lumière, the man who gave us cinema, was announced as president. MGM had chartered an ocean liner to bring all the stars from Hollywood. Cary Grant, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Gary Cooper, James Cagney, Mae West, Norma Shearer, Spencer Tracy, and many more had arrived on the Croisette. Then, Germany invaded Poland and they all had to book return tickets. The world had to wait till the war ended for a taste of what Cannes had to offer — and boy, did they deliver. Alfred Hitchcock got everyone's hearts racing and adrenaline pumping with Notorious. Billy Wilder followed up Double Indemnity with a grim portrait of alcoholism in The Lost Weekend. David Lean served a romantic tearjerker for the ages in Brief Encounter. Italian neorealism began to take shape with Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City. Jean Cocteau crafted an anti-Disney treatment of Beauty and the Beast, where the surreal and real, the ugliness and beauty come together in a magic realist concoction. Out of the 44 feature films screened, 11 of them (one from each participating country) were awarded the top prize, Grand Prix (now called Palme d'Or), for reasons of diplomacy. This included India's sole Palme d'Or crown (till now) in Chetan Anand's Neecha Nagar.  However, it was anything but a smooth-running operation. In a comedy of errors, the reels of Hitchcock's Notorious were reversed, screened with the ending reel first, while the projection of George Sydney’s The Three Musketeers was turned upside-down. There was also tension brewing over the beginning of the Cold War. Russia blamed every technical issue on the US; the US cried sabotage over last-minute parties being scheduled at the same time as Hollywood films.  Despite reversed reels and upside-down projections, Cold War scandals and consolation awards, the inaugural edition proved it could only get better. Cannes 1946 helped France regain its status as an economic power in Europe post-WWII, also enhancing its cultural weight over the rest of the world — at least, in terms of cinema.  The glitz and glamour Highlights | Ballad of a Soldier (Grigori Chukhrai), La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini), L'avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni), The Virgin Spring (Ingmar Bergman), The Young One (Luis Buñuel)

Within a decade, Cannes had set a new precedent for other festivals. Call it a temple of cinema or a glamorous vanity fair, it was beginning to attract the best filmmakers in world cinema. It also became the new locus for the golden age of Italian cinema, as two of its canonical entries, Fellini's La Dolce Vita and Antonioni's L'avventura, were both screened at the festival. Not without controversy of course. La Dolce Vita and L'avventura divided the critics and the public, stirring the deepest admiration and aversion. The former ended up winning the Palme d'Or, the latter the Jury Prize. However, for a large portion of the public, La Dolce Vita was an overlong decadent affair intended to outrage all good taste and sensibilities. They also didn't care for the pacing or abstract narrative of L'avventura, having expected it to be a straightforward investigative thriller. The boos and barbs got so severe, lead star Monica Vitti left the screening hall in tears. Cannes has become a stage for glitz and glamour, parties and photo calls, and the army of paparazzi that comes with them. With La Dolce Vita, Fellini sums up the hope and despair, the beauty and ugliness to this superficial celebrity lifestyle, testifying to the social malaise underneath. In L'avventura, Antonioni created a new visual language of his own, one which reflected its synthetic nature while merging the realms of reality and abstraction. Before Come and See and Ivan's Childhood, Grigori Chukhrai gave us an equally lyrical meditation on war in Ballad of a Soldier. Also screened at the festival were Bimal Roy's Sujata and William Wyler's Ben-Hur (out of competition). With Marché du Film established just the previous year, Cannes had also set the stage to become the premier global film market we know it as today, giving film professionals the opportunity to shake hands with the best in the business. Pulp Fiction puts American indie films on the world cinema map Highlights | Exotica (Atom Egoyan), The Hudsucker Proxy (Coen Brothers), Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino), Three Colours: Red (Krzysztof Kieślowski), Through the Olive Trees (Abbas Kiarostami), To Live (Zhang Yimou)

Cannes 1994 will forever be remembered as the year Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction won the Palme d'Or, thanks to jury president Clint Eastwood. The film beat favourites like Krzysztof Kieslowsk's final feature, Three Colours: Red, and Nanni Moretti's Dear Diary, which was eagerly championed by jury vice-president Catherine Deneuve. The victories of Sex, Lies, and Videotape in 1989 and Pulp Fiction in 1994 gave American independent cinema global validation. Pulp Fiction of course benefited from producer Harvey Weinstein's "Iron Curtain Strategy" to increase the buzz with limited screenings, while targeting selected American critics to deliver glowing reviews. It began his enduring love affair with Cannes, as he returned as jury president 10 years later and delivered three more of his films (Death Proof in 2007, Inglourious Basterds in 2009, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in 2019) in the race for Palme d'Or.  The edition boasted a particularly rich line-up across the various sections. Un Certain Regard, the official selection which was created in 1978, and favoured atypical films and lesser-known filmmakers, included Olivier Assayas' Cold Water (L'eau froide), Pedro Costa's Down to Earth (Casa de Lava), Claire Denis' I Can't Sleep (J'ai pas sommeil) among others. Adding to the festival's scale and eclecticism were the parallel sections. Critics' Week featured Kevin Smith's Clerks, while Directors' Fortnight had a commendable line-up of films from Aki Kaurismäki (Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana), Ang Lee (Eat Drink Man Woman), Michael Haneke (71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance) and Shekhar Kapur (Bandit Queen). John Waters' hilariously absurd satire, Serial Mom, was also screened out of competition. The pinnacle of eclecticism Highlights | Palme d'Or: Antichrist (Lars von Trier), A Prophet (Jacques Audiard), Bright Star (Jane Campion), Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodóvar), Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé), Face (Tsai Ming-liang), Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold), Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino), Thirst (Park Chan-wook), The Time That Remains (Elia Suleiman), Wild Grass (Alain Resnais), Vincere (Marco Bellocchio), Vengeance (Johnnie To), The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke) Un Certain Regard: Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos), Father of My Children (Mia Hansen-Løve), Mother (Bong Joon-ho) Out of Competition: Drag Me to Hell (Sam Raimi), Pixar's Up (Pete Docter)

Andrea Arnold, Bong Joon-ho, Jane Campion, Gaspar Noé, Lars von Trier, Park Chan-wook, Quentin Tarantino, Michael Haneke, Pedro Almodóvar, Yorgos Lanthimos and more. Talk about an umissable festival line-up. But with this diversity came division, as some of the jury members ended up in a bitter battle. Jury President Isabelle Huppert and fellow juror James Gray reportedly fought over the former favouring Antichrist, and in the end, reached a compromise with The White Ribbon. The 2009 edition was also an example of how Cannes is a unique showcase for little-known filmmakers to introduce their films to larger audiences. It is hard to imagine if we would all have been raving about Lanthimos and the Greek Weird Wave, if Dogtooth hadn't won Prix Un Certain Regard. Ditto, with Mia Hansen-Løve. It is no wonder filmmakers and producers organise their production schedules in order to be able to present their films at Cannes. Cannes 2020 could have matched the 2019, if not 2009, edition with a line-up, which would have probably included Annette (Leos Carax), Bergman Island (Mia Hansen-Løve), The French Dispatch (Wes Anderson), Last Night in Soho (Edgar Wright), Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul), Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon (Ana Lily Amirpour), Peninsula (Yeon Sang-Ho), Pixar's Soul (Pete Doctor), Tenet (Christopher Nolan) and many more. We'll know more when Cannes chief Thierry Frémaux makes an announcement on the selection in June. Even if there's no physical or online edition of the festival, just imagining a "What if" wishlist makes for a comforting exercise in these strange times. Read the full article

[brajeshupadhyay]

How Sonia Gandhi has walked into a trap by going after Arnab Goswami

This piece is not about Arnab Goswami and his journalism. One journalist issuing a journalism certificate to another is vain.

Nor is it about television drama spilling on to streets and courts with real consequences, or a fading dynast’s desperate jabs at power and intimidation.

It is simply about the Congress party’s political wisdom in reacting the way it has to a news anchor’s provocation of calling its president Sonia Gandhi biased and silent on the lynching of two Hindu monks in Palghar.

It is also about how the party took Arnab calling Sonia by her maiden name ‘Antonia Maino’, dog-whistling about her being Italian, and thereby unboxing the baggage of old allegations.

Old questions tumbled out. Why did she take 16 years to become an Indian citizen after marrying Rajiv Gandhi in 1968? Has she ever been an Indian at heart, even while running the country as the power centre with Manmohan Singh as prime minister?

The episode is undoubtedly personal and sensitive for Sonia Gandhi. But those two are bad words in politics. Politicians train not to react in anger or hurt, and respond when waters of the mind are still.

Five blunders of Congress

First, reportedly attacking Goswami and his wife near their Mumbai home and filing a slew of cases against him in states like Chhattisgarh where it rules, the Congress has re-established itself in the nation’s mind as the party of Emergency. It has a distinguished record in quashing criticism and muzzling freedom of expression, captured in this Twitter thread by scientist and political commentator Anand Ranganathan.

From jailing actor Utpal Dutt to banning investigative journalist Jack Anderson’s documentary ‘Rajiv’s India’, to Kabil Sibal bringing the repressive Section 66A of the IT Act, Congress’ handiwork shines from Ranganathan’s thread (274 posts and counting).

It gently holds the mirror to the savagery the party is capable of on press and artistic freedom. The latest incident only acts as a national reminder of that.

Second, hounding a journalist brings under stage lights the Nehru-Gandhi family’s well-known intolerance to criticism. Scores of works like the movie Aandhi in which the protagonist resembled Indira Gandhi, or Xavier Moro’s book The Red Sari on Sonia, faced censure.

It was in under Congress rule in Bihar with Jawaharlal Nehru at the Centre that Kedar Nath Singh was slapped with sedition in 1962 for saying, “Today the dogs of CID are loitering around Barauni…today these Congress goondas are sitting on the gaddi.”

In the UPA years, there was an unwritten diktat in newsrooms to not openly criticise the family; one could take on its minions, if at all. The incidents over Palghar have proved that the much-weakened Congress has not changed.

Golden gift to the enemy

Third, the reckless aggression somehow gives one the sense that mentioning her roots gets Sonia very uncomfortable and defensive. The moment the BJP tasted blood, it pounced more fiercely on her father Stephano Maino’s story, who reportedly had served in Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini’s army. Discrepancies about her university education, citizenship, name on electoral rolls and even alleged KGB links are being dug up.

Fourth, it puts the Congress’ senior partner in the Maharashtra coalition, Shiv Sena, in a bind. Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray is constantly being chided by his core Marathi-Hindutva constituency for actions of the NCP and the Congress, or the ones Sena is taking to keep the alliance alive. The Congress’ brashness makes his position weaker.

Fifth and last, this gives potent ‘what about’ ammunition to the BJP. Every sin of the Congress in the past 70 years has come to the BJP’s rescue each time it got cornered in the last six years. From allowing communal violence to toppling governments, the Congress has a much better record to show. And the latest one, even with crippled power, paves the road for the BJP to travel with fresh precedence as a weapon.

This violence and vengeance is an opportunity worth in gold for the BJP. It won’t let it go.

via Blogger https://ift.tt/3cOIA34

[bountyofbeads]

Italian Cops Raid Neo-Fascists And Find Air-To-Air Missile That France Had Sold To Qatar

The operation targeted individuals over links to Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine and also netted various guns and Nazi memorabilia.

BY JOSEPH TREVITHICK | Published JULY 15, 2019 | The Drive | Posted July 15, 2019 |

Italian police have seized a French-made Matra Super 530F air-to-air missile in the course of raids to arrest multiple individuals allegedly linked to far-right extremist groups and Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine. Authorities also uncovered a large cache of automatic rifles, submachine guns, and other small arms, as well as Nazi paraphernalia, during one of the arrests involving an individual linked to Italy's neo-fascist Forza Nuova political party.

A regional special police force, also known by the Italian acronym DIGOS, in the Northern Italian city of Turin  headed up the operation on July 15, 2019, but authorities in the cities of Milan, Varese, Forli, and Novara also took part. Police found the Matra missile, which is reportedly live, in a hangar at Forli airport. Fabio Del Bergiolo, one of three individuals that Italian authorities arrested, was a former customs official and had run for a seat in Italy's Senate as a member of Forza Nuova in 2001. Alessandro Monti, a Swiss national, runs the company that owns the hangar where the missile was located. There do not appear to be any additional details on Fabio Bernardi, another Italian, who was the third individuals swept up in the raids.

Pictures and video that authorities released of the items seized show a wide array of contemporary and more dated European, American, and Eastern European small arms, including AK- and AR-15/M16-type rifles of unknown origins, Austrian and Czech submachine guns, and more. This is "a seizure with few precedents for the quality of the weapons and their violent potential," Turin Police Chief Giuseppe De Matteis said, according to Italian newspaper la Repubblica.

But, by far, the most curious item was the Super 530F. Matra first introduced the medium-range, semi-active radar-seeking Super 530F in 1979 specifically for the Dassault Mirage F1 fighter jet. The missile was an evolution of the short-range R.530, which first entered French service in 1962 and used a mix of infrared and semi-active radar guidance.

The missile's transit case has markings that say it was originally sold to Qatar as part of a contract signed in 1980. It's not clear when Matra manufactured this particular missile or where and how the arrested individuals acquired it.

Qatar bought 14 F1s, along with weapons to go with them, in 1980. The missile reportedly remains in Qatari inventory, along with the Super 530D, though the country's newer Mirage 2000fighter jets, which it obtained in the 1990s, now primarily carry  newer MICA missiles from European missile consortium MBDA.

There's no indication that the arrested individuals intended to use the missile in any way. La Repubblica reported that police had been tipped off the weapon after intercepting calls to and from Del Bergiolo about selling it. The group reportedly was offering it for 470,000 Euros – just over $529,100 at the rate of exchange at the time of writing – and that one of the buyers included "a foreign government official."

It's not clear what government entity might be in the market for a single air-to-air missile that is compatible only with a limited number of aircraft. After 40 years and numerous export sales around the world, the Super 530F is likely of diminished intelligence value. 

One possibility might be Libya's Government of National Accord (GNA), the internationally recognized government in that country, which operates a very small number of Mirage F1s. The GNA has been in desperate need of weapons and other military equipment to stave off the advances of rogue General Khalifa Haftar, who, along with his Libyan National Army (LNA), is trying to seize control of the country. 

In May 2019, the LNA shot down one of the GNA's F1s near Tripoli and captured its pilot, who turned out to be a U.S. Air Force veteran. The details about how Jamie Sponaugle, who had been a maintainer during his service, but earned a private pilots license after leaving the Air Force, came to be an apparent mercenary pilot in Libya remain murky. Haftar's forces released him in June 2019 as part of a deal that Saudi Arabia reportedly helped broker.

Another potential customer might be Iran, which also has a small fleet of Mirage F1s it captured as they fled Iraqduring the first Gulf War in 1991. The Iranians have a noted history of acquiring missiles and other weaponry on the black market and then reverse-engineering them for their own use or for export to regional proxies. Iran, as well as its regional allies, have also repurposed locally-built clones of various missiles for new roles, including as land-based surface-to-air weapons, and could potentially do the same to the Super 530F design. 

There could be secondary market beyond foreign governments for the missile, including certain specific components, such as its radar seeker. The weapon does also contain a roughly 70-pound high-explosive warhead.

Beyond the missile and the guns, Italian police also put various Nazi paraphernalia on display, including various items that appear to be artifacts from Nazi Germany. Italy's parliament tried to ban fascist symbols, as well as the Roman salute, in 2017, but faced opposition from various political parties, including the populist Five Star Movement (M5S), which is now part of the country's governing coalition.

Far-right neo-fascist political parties in Italy are a small, but still notable force in Italian politics. They have also seen something of a resurgence in recent years, latching onto popular discontent surrounding various issues, particularly immigration and a growing influx of refugees, especially from North Africa and the Middle East.

There have also been concerns about increasing links between Russia and right-wing groups with similar agendas across Europe. Recently, a tape recording emerged of Italy's Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini during a visit to Moscow in 2018 discussing ways to secretly funnel Russian oil money into the coffers of his own right-wing Lega Nord party.

For years already, Italian authorities have also been investigating far-right groups for sending individuals to fight alongside Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine, as well as other aid, which was the reason Police were investigating Del Bergiolo, Monti, and Bernardi in the first place. Just on July 3, 2019, Italian authorities jailed three other men after a court in Genoa found them guilty of fighting in Ukraine.

There is no clear indication that these two cases are directly linked to each other. Separate reports suggest this latest series of raids may have stemmed from searches of Forza Nuovo's offices in Turin in June, which led to the arrest of the party's top regional official, Luigi Cortese, on charges of "apologizing for fascism," that is to say publicly lauding the World War II-era regime of Benito Mussolini, which is banned under Italian law. DIGOS raided the homes of other Forza Nuovo members last week.

It's unclear what will happen now to any of the items Italian authorities seized. So far, there are no reports that Qatar has asked for its missile back.

[1baddmouthcrown]

Marcus Ethiopia.

1910 March 3 Dejazmatch Tafari is finally given governorate of Harar. 1916 May 16, 18 and 20 8 P. M. Du Bois’s “The Star of Ethiopia” portrayed by 1010 Actors in Costume 53 Musical Numbers Full Brass Band is performed at the 100th General Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church held in the CONVENTION HALL BROAD AND ALLEGHANY AVENUE, Philadelphia. Lucien B. Watkins publishes his “The Star of Ethiopia” poem. September 27 the day of the feast of Masqal, nobles, army, the Archbishop Abuna Mettewos, Etchage Walda Giyorgis and priests assemble at Palace disposing of Emperor Lij Iyasu of Ethiopia and proclaim Zawditu his aunty, Menelik’s daughter as Empress with her cousin Dejazmatch Tafari assuming the rank of Ras, Crown Prince and hier to the throne as well as Regent Plenipotentiary. 1921 December Garvey makes his “Christmas message to the Negro Peoples of the World” speech. 1922 January 1 Garvey makes his Emancipation day speech at Liberty Hall in New York city. Garvey quotes verse 31 of Psalm 68 in both of these speeches. August Trinidadian pilot Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, dubbed "the Black Eagle of Harlem" by H. Allen Smith because of his parachute jumps, flys a biplane over UNIA parade and is appointed head of the organization’s new Aeronautical Department. 1923 Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey by Amy Jaques Garvey 1923 Chapter 3 The Image of God If the white man has the idea of a white God, let him worship his God as he desires. If the yellow man’s God is of his race let him worship his God as he sees fit. We, as Negroes, have found a new ideal. Whilst our God has no color, yet it is human to see everything through one’s own spectacles, and since the white people have seen their God through white spectacles, we have only now started out (late though it be) to see our God through our own spectacles. The God of Isaac and the God of Jacob let Him exist for the race that believes in the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. We Negroes believe in the God of Ethiopia, the everlasting God — God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, the One God of all ages. That is the God in whom we believe, but we shall worship Him through the spectacles of Ethiopia. Earnest Alfred Wallace Budge sometime scholar at Christ College Cambridge University and Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities in the British Museum publishes his first edition of the Ethiopic "Book of the Glory of Kings/Kebra Negast". 1924 July 4 Julian to make transatlantic flight from New York to Liberia via Atlantic city, New Jersey and the West Indies. Julian purchases a seaplane which he christens "Ethiopia I", which he crashes into Flushing Bay after one of the planes pontoons comes off. 1930 Julian at the Emperor Haile Selassie’s pre coronation show, parachutes landing in front of the Emperor, the Emperor grants him citizenship, the rank of colonel as well as the highest honour in Ethiopia, the order of Menelik. Julian at the Emperors coronation dress rehearsal crashes the Emperors personal plane de Havilland Gipsy Moth into a Eucalyptus tree, the plane was given to the Emperor as a gift from Selfridge’s department store in London. May International Organiser M. L. T. De Men's replaces Knox as first assistant president general and representive in charge of American field of UNIA. August 18 Garvey’s play "Coronation of an African King", which tells the story of a fictional King of Sudan whos name is Cudjoe is performed. 1932 December Mittie Maud and Gordon found Peace Movement of Ethiopia in Chicago. 1934 November 3 Garvey praises New York UNIA division president A. L. King for his work in movement and informs him that he is trying to make arrangements to move the UNIA HQ from Kingston to London. 1935 January 7 Ethiopia Christmas Day The Swedish H. R. H Crown Prince Gustaf Adolph hier to the throne arrives in Addis with his wife Princess Louise, his daughter Princess Ingrid and his son Prince Bertil. The French foreign minister Pierre Laval and Italian Prime Minster Benito Mussolini sign the Franco Italian agreement giving Italy a part of bordering French Somliland (now Djibouti) as part of Eritrea as well as the Aouzou strip in French Chad as part of Italian Libya. January 19 The League of Nations Council at session decide that the Wal Wal clash should be resolved by arbitration arbitrators should examine the interpretation of the frontier treaty of 1908 May 16 by investigation as according to articles 5 and 7 of the 1928 treaty as to wither Wal Wal is part of Ethiopia or Italian Somaliland. Du Bois publishes his Black Reconstruction in America. March 16 Garvey travels to London on the SS Talapa. March 17 Ambassador Takla Howargat makes submission to the League invoking Article 15 of the covenant. March 28 General Emilio De Bono is named commander in chief of Italian armed forces in East Africa and force invading from Eritrea. April Britain, France and Italy sign the Stresa. May 16 The Emperor sends message to Geneva ‘We request that, if Italy refuses to accept that the arbitration should examine and adjudicate upon all the attacks that have been made in the vicinity of the Somali-Ethiopian border since last December and should pronounce upon the interpretation of the treat of 1908 May 16, the Council itself will take the investigation in hand and resolve matters by a full examination on basis of article 15 of the covenant.’ May 25 As a result of the Emperor’s second submission the League decides arbitrators should be chosen. ‘Because it was Ethiopia’s desire that the judgement to be pronounced should be impartial and on an absolutely legal basis, she on her part chose arbitrators two men who were legal experts, one French Albert de Geouffre de La Pradelle, professor of law in the University of Paris, and one American Pitman B. Potter professor at the Graduate Institute of International Studies at Geneva who were very well known for their knowledge and refinement in international law.’ ‘Italy on her part selected two Italians from among Italy’s government officials.’ Ethiopia’s clear conscience was aware of the rights due to her and We, therefore, submitted immediately our request to Italy to settle the matter on the basis of the text of the treaty, referring to the treaty concluded in 1928, by which Italy had undertaken that peace and friendship should forever persist between us and that, if a quarrel arose between us, this quarrel should have a peacful outcome on the authorative verdict of arbitrators. To this request, which we had presented, the reply was an absolute refusal, and Italy revealed her inflexible resolve to have the demands which she had submitted fulfilled in their entirety without investigation and without adjudication in the proper manner. The Emperor on July 18 of the same year. May Robinson arrives in Ethiopia. Garvey speaks at Hyde Park speakers corner. Garvey publishes Black Man monthly magazine from 2 Beaumont Crescent, West Kensington with Una Marson who would later work for the BBC Caribbean service as his personal secretary. Seay becomes the second woman in awarded member of the Order of the British Empire presented to her by Governor Burns and agrees with Womans League and Labourers and Unemployment Association on womens suffrage for voting age to be lowered to but proposes unemployed women rather than to be given suffrage be given land grants. June 25 Joe Louis Detroit’s Brown Bomber, scores a decisive technical knockout over the Italian Primo Carnera in the sixth round of their bout at the Yankee Stadium. Here is Louis standing over the bleeding, fallen Carnera, during one of the three knockdowns in the sixth round. June When the danger became more urgent, being aware of my responsibilities towards my people, during the first six months of 1935 I tried to acquire armaments. Many Governments proclaimed an embargo to prevent my doing so, whereas the Italian Government through the Suez Canal, was given all facilities for transporting without cessation and without protest, troops, arms, and munitions. From the Emperors speech to the League on June 30 of the following year. 3000 white and black men volunteer through the UNIA to fight. Garvey cautions Mossolini against aggressive action towards Ethiopia. Bayen graduates from Howard University medical school. July 8 Garvey in the Black man. July 10 Bayen leaves the U. S. for Ethiopia. July 18 The Emperor delivers speech to parliament. During the Ethiopian Crisis people from all other the world rallied support for the Emperor. July 23 The members of the International African Friends of Ethiopia with their various roles including C. L. R. James as Chairman, Amy Ashwood Garvey as Treasurer and Jomo Kenyatta as secretary hold their first meeting. July 28 Sunday The International African Friends of Ethiopia hold meeting at Faringdon Street, Memorial Hall. August 18 I.A.F.E. hold meeting at Conway Hall Treaty and lift arms embargo. August 26 IAFE hold rally at Trafalgar Square. THE DEFENCE OF ETHIOPIA The International African Friends of Ethiopia. (Formerly The International African Friends of Abyssinia) If devilish force prevails and causes a war then Abyssinia will arise; and, with its Emperor leading, followed by his people, whose courage and valour are known, will defend its country against the invader to the last drop of its blood. Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, at Addis Ababa, August 12th 1935. THAT IS THE POSITION WE ADOPT. Come to THE CONWAY HALL, Sunday August 18th, 1935 at 8 p.m. Resolutions demanding that the British Government keep their Treaty obligations by (a) Supporting Ethiopia in its struggle against Italian Fascism. (b) Raising the embargo on the export of Arms to Ethiopia will be moved. SPEAKERS: Dr. WILLIS N. HUGGINS, Ph.D., from America who has carried the protest of 40 organisations, both black and white, to Geneva, and will tell of the efforts of the Friends of Ethiopia in the United States of America. Mr. C. L. R. JAMES Mr. J. M. KENYATTA Chief TUFUHIN MOORE Dr. SANDRO MAGRI, An Italian Anti-Fascist. AN ETHIOPIAN. August 12 Ethiopia also pleads for the embargo to be lifted. August Garvey praises the Emperor as a gentleman and calls Mussolini a barbarian guilty of savagery. September 2 Amy Ashwood and the International African Friends of Ethiopia held a rally in London at Trafalgar Square. Afterwards, Amy posed for a photograph with two of the sons of the Ethiopian Minister Dr. Warqenah Eshete (aka Dr. Charles Martin), Benyam and Yosef (2nd and 3rd from the right). Both sons were Co-Founders of the radical and militant Black Lion Organization that was involved in liberating Ethiopia from Italian occupation and tyranny. Unfortunately, shortly after taking this photo the two were arrested in Ethiopia and summarily executed for the attempted assassination of the Italian Viceroy Marshall Rodolfo Graziani. — at Trafalgar Square. August Garvey praises the Emperor as a gentleman and calls Mossolini a barbarian guilty of savagery. September 3 The Wal Wal clash is adjudicated by arbitration niether Ethiopia or Italy responsible for the clash, Italy stops compensation. September 4 Italy submits memorandum of complaints to the council of the League of Nations. September 11 The Emperor makes radio broadcast. September 11 The Jamaica Gleaner The Honorable Amy Ashwood Garvey speaks before a London crowd at Trafalgar Square, denouncing the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. “No race has been so noble in forgiving, but now the hour has struck for our complete emancipation. We will not tolerate the invasion of Abyssinia.“ Mrs. Garvey said: “In this struggle, the black women are marching beside the men. You white people brought us out of Africa to Christianize us and civilize us, but all the Christianity and civilization you gave us for 320 years was slavery. You have talked of ‘The White Man’s burden.’ Now we are carrying yours and standing between you and Fascism.” She warned the British Government that if this became a struggle between the “Blacks” and the “Whites” that three quarters of the people of the Empire are colored. September 15 Nuremberg laws in Germany October 3 5:00 AM General Emilio De Bono, without a declaration of war, advances into Ethiopia from Eritrea crossing the Mareb river in the north by plane. Graziani implements the Milan plan all along the southern front to remove Ethiopian forces from various frontier posts and to test the reaction of a series of probes there. The Emperor orders a general mobilization. October 5 Italian I Corps take Adigrat and the League’s Committee of 13 report on the details of events occurred after the month of December of the previous year and up to October 3 of the present year. October 6 Italian II Corps take Adwa where the Italians were defeated 40 years ago in 1896 on March 1. Robinson witness’s the bombing’s of both Adigrat and Adwa. The Emperor orders Ras Seyoum Mangasha commander of the army of Tigre to withdraw a days march away from the Mareb river. The Emperor orders his son in law Dejazmatch Haile Selassie Gugsa to move back 89 and 56km (55 and 35 miles) from the border. October 10 The International African Friends of Ethiopia at a meeting at Clarks theatre in Castries, Saint Lucia protest the Foreign Enlistment Act and pass the following resolution in view of the provoked aggression of Italy against unarmed Ethiopia the penal clause of the above act be waived so far as it applies to west Indians to permit. October 11 Dejazmatch Haile Selassie Gugsa surrenders to the Italian commander with 1, 500 of his men at Adagamos the Italian outpost and defects to the Italian side leaving Makale, his capital in eastern Tigre at 1:00 am with 50 of his men meeting with the Italians. Bono at his HQ with Gugsa on the left. October 14 with De Bono proclaimed the end of slavery, with the livestock having been moved to the south to feed the army those no longer slaves were left with no other option but to loyal to the Italians. I am obliged to say that the proclamation did not have much effect on the owners of the slaves and perhaps still less on the liberated slaves themselves many of the latter the instance they were set free, presented themselves to the Italian authorities asking and now who gives me food. October 15 De Bono forces advance from Adwa occupy Axum, Bono loots Obelisk. October 19 The Bishop of Udine [Italy] writes, ‘It is neither timely nor fitting for us to pronounce on the rights and wrongs of the case. Our duty as Italians, and still more as Christians is to contribute to the success of our arms.' Ras Mulugeta is given orders and parades with army. October 21 The Bishop of Padua writes 'In the difficult hours through which we are passing, we ask you to have faith in our statesmen and armed forces.’ A. L. King and his Provisional Committee for the Defense of Ethiopia ship medical supplies to the Emperor. October 24 The Bishop of Cremona consecrated a number of regimental flags and said 'The blessing of God be upon these soldiers who, on African soil, will conquer new and fertile lands for the Italian genius, thereby bringing to them Roman and Christian culture. May Italy stand once again as the Christian mentor to the whole world.’ The Somali villages of Kelafo, Dagnerai, Gerlogubi and Gorahai in the Oganden are taken by the Italians. October 27 To His Excellency Graziani. The use of gas as an ultima ratio to overwhelm enemy resistance and in case of counter-attack is authorized. Mussolini. November The League of Nations places economic sanctions on Italy excluding oil. November 3 20 aeroplanes from the Regia Aeronautica drop bombs at Gorrahei the stronghold of Sayyid Mohammed Abdullah Hassan known to the British as Mad Mullah. Grazmatch Afawarq is hit on the leg by a bomb splinter whilst firing with a 37 mm Oerlikon named after the suburb of Zurich where these guns are made taking aim to bring down a plane. November 4 Waves of 20 Aeroplanes bomb Gorrahei. November 8 I Corps and Eritrean Corps take Makale. November 13 Graziani moves his headquarters to Baidoa. November 16 De Bono is promoted to the rank Marshall of Italy. November 19 The Emperor leaves for Jijiga the capital of Tigre. November 20 Grazmatch Afawarq is posthumously conferred upon with the rank of Dejazmatch. November 28 The Emperor leaves Addis for Dessie in the province of Wollo. November 30 The Emperor moves his HQ to Dessie. 20 killed 100 wounded. December 4 Ras Imru advances from Gojam, his forces are bombed. December 5 The Italians take Abbi Addi. December 6 Lethbridge Herald newspaper THIRTY ITALIAN BOMBERS RAIN DEATH ON CITY AS EMPEROR AND SON WATCH Incendiary Bombs Set Field Hospital Palace of Crown Prince Wrecked by Blasts from Air 200 Injured Protest Attack on Red Cross Hospital Death Stalks Ethiopian Hillsides War is never a pleasant thing, and the current Italo Ethiopian war is no exception. Here is a new photo that graphically illustrates the tragedy of war. Two native soldiers who will probably never be honored by burial shot down by Italian planes. Similar scenes were witnessed today in Dessye where Italian bombers wreaked havoc before the eyes of Emperor Haile Selassie. By CHRISTIAN OZANNE (Copyright, 1935, by the Havas New Agency) ADDIS ABABA Dec 6 (C.P. Havas) Thirty two persons were killed and more than 200 injured when 30 Italian planes bombed Dessye today before the eyes of Emperor Haile Selassie and his, 11 year old second son, Prince Makonnen. Protests To League By JOSPEH E. SHARKEY (Associated Press Foreign Staff) GENEVA, Dec. 6 (A.P.) Emperor Haile Selassie, who escaped death in an Italian air bombing raid on his headquarters at Dessye today, protested directly to the League of Nations a few hours later against the bombing of Red Cross hospital.) Emperor Haile Selassie, who escaped death in an Italian air bombing raid on his headquarters at Dessye today, protested directly to the League of Nations a few hours later against the bombing of Red Cross hospitals and the killing of women and children. The Ethiopian monarch declared the American hospital at Dessye which was struck by bombs had displayed the authorized insignia of the Red Cross. Emperor’s protest The emperors protest stated (Continued on Page Two.) Ethiopian Emperor Fire Machine Gun Himself During Bombardment Of Dessye By Italian Squadron By James A. MILLIS (Copyright. 1935, the Associated Press.)WITH EMPEROR HAILE SELASSIE AT DESSYE, ETHIOPIA.Dec. 6 Italian war planes struck at Emperor Haile Selassie’s headquarters today, bombing and machine gunning troops, civilians, the emperor’s palace, and hospitals indiscriminately.The emperor himself fough against the attack which lasted 17 minutes while more than 1000 bombs were dropped and at least 12 persons were killed and 200 wounded,The little, bearded man was talking to Dejazmatch (general) Birru and a doctor named Zeryos when the thunder of the bombing planes was heard (Continued on Page Two) December 10 The British and French foreign ministers Samuel Hoare and Pierre Laval Pact make an underhand agreement to sign Ogaden Tigray and Southern parts of Ethiopia away to Mussolini, the pact is leaked by a French newspaper and the foreign ministers are forced to resign. December 15 The Emperor launches the Ethiopian Christmas Offensive/Counteroffensive also refered to as the Dolo offensive. December 15 Ras Seyoum Mangasha and his army of Tigre with 30, 000 men Abiy Addi Beles River the Ethiopian center, Ras Kassa Haile Darge and his army of Beghemder province in Gondar with 40, 000 advance from Dessie to join Mangasha in the center, Ras Mulugeta Yeggazu Minister of War advances from Dessie with 80, 000 to Amba Aradam the steep sided flat topped mountain on the right of the Ethiopian center blocking the Italian advance to Addis Ababa, the Emperor with 40, 000 men advance from Gojjam towards Mai Timket to the left of Mangasha and Darge, the Ethiopian center. 1,000 Ethiopians cross the Tekeze river and advance toward the Indabaguna Pass. The Ethiopians attack the Italian commander Major Criniti’s forces composed of 1, 000 Eritrean infantry and L3 tanks, the Italians fall back to the the Indabaguna pass where 2, 000 Ethiopian soldiers are already waiting, the Ethiopians then encircle Criniti’s force. The Ethiopians kill two Italian officers and Criniti is left wounded. The Italians try to break out using their tanks which are immobilized by the terrain, the Ethiopians kill the infantry and rush the tanks killing their two man crews. The Ethiopians ambush the Italian relief column of ten tanks, two trucks and infantry sent to Criniti. The Ethiopians roll boulders infront and behind several of the tanks to immobilize them and then pick off the Eritrean infantry and the tanks. More tanks are immobilized by the terrain and two are set on fire. Criniti breaks out in a bayonet charge. There were 31 Italian casualties, 370 Askari were killed and five Italians were taken as prisoners, the Italians claim that there were 500 Ethiopian casualties which is a figure believed to have been much exaggerated. Next the Ethiopians plan for Ras Kassa and Ras Seyoum to split the Italian army in two and isolate the Italian I Corps and III Corps in Mekele and for Ras Mulugeta to Amba Aradam to crush both Corps. After Ras Imru retook Adwa he would invade Eritrea. December 17 De Bono recieves state telegram 13181, and is replaced as Marshall of Italy by Pietro Badoglio. December 18 Harvest of Gold. December 19 Thursday Daily Mirror SIR S. HOARE RESIGNS. December 21 Friday morning 21 aeroplanes bomb Dessie. December 22 Ras Seyoum retakes Abbi Addi. December 30 Red Cross unit at Dolo is bombed, Egyptian ambulance at Bulall attacked and Egyptian medical unit at Daggah Bur. December Julian arrives back in New York on the Cunard liner Aquitania. The Emperor attends a church service after the bombardment of Dessie The Emperor is named man of the year by TIME weekly magazine. 1936 February Peace Movement of Ethiopia, Inc., rival wing of unincorporated movement of the same, formed in Illinois under direction of Garvey’ites Charles Watkins and Ethel Waddel, Waddel accuses movement founder Mittie Mord Lena Gordon of incompetence and hostility toward Garvey. April A. L. King endorses racially integrated demonstrations in support of Ethiopia cause 1937 January Garvey blasts Haile Selassie in editorials; blames Emperor for Italian defeat and praises Mussolini as “an astute diplomat and statesman.” March UNIA members express criticism of Garvey for his negative statements about the Emperor and some refuse to continue supporting the UNIA. May 30 Garvey calls the Emperor a dumb trickster. Randolph Bunche dairy entry. May Garvey is heckled off the platform at Hyde Park by students angered over his criticism of the Emperor. October 17 Garvey visit’s St. Lucia.

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Trumps War on the Press Follows the Mussolini and Hitler Playbook

Beneath the madness and the lies of The Year of Trump there remains a constant drumbeat, unyielding and determined. It broke cover on Jan. 22, 2017 when Kellyanne Conway introduced the term alternative facts.

The abasement of language by Donald Trump and his assorted flacks began long before, but this concept was so naked, so novel and so unblinkingly forthright that it established the rules for the assault to come, just as the first salvo of an artillery barrage signals the creation of a new battlefield where there will be many casualties.

And lets face it, the English language has taken a real pounding since then. Lies have poured forth from the White House at an astonishing rate: The Washington Post estimated that in Trumps first 355 days he made more than 2,000 false or misleading claims, averaging five a day.

Trump has spent two years vilifying the dishonest media (including The Daily Beast), even invoking the Nazi chant of enemies of the people. Aided by the alt right zealots at Breitbart, he has successfully persuaded millions of Americans that The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC are seditious forces bent on denigrating and destroying the man they elected.

It is dismaying that it was so easy for him to do this, dismaying that independent journalism of quality is so easily discredited and dismaying that none of this seems to trouble the Republican Party.

And lets be clear: The protection of independent journalism isnt something that a lot of politiciansor a good number of the populationreally care about. Yet, in the end, it has really been a strong year for journalism. In particular, two papers, The New York Times and Washington Post, have re-established themselves as bulwarks against abuses of power, as they were at the time of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate.

Why have these two newspapers in particular once more demonstrated the best of American journalism? Its partly luck. The Post was basically saved by Jeff Bezos whose deep pockets have restored the resources of the newsroom. Under the editorship of Marty Baron they were positioned to seize the Trump moment and rediscovered the art of investigative reporting. Similarly the Times passed through a period in which it struggled to find a new business model for the digital age and eventually found it, enabling its Washington newsroom to become competitive again.

This underlines the fragile dependency of journalism on enlightened patronageon who owns a newspaper and particularly who owns the two papers that are regarded as national in prestige and potency together with the editorial independence and authority that that position requires. For all its fine reporting over the last year The Wall Street Journal does not have that kind of reputational backbone because it is owned by Rupert Murdoch, blatantly a Trump stooge.

But the battle is not yet won, and will not be without eternal vigilance. To realize the gravity of where we are now we need more context than is provided by recent history, we need to look at the history of Italy in the 1920s and Germany in the 1930s. In both nations tyrants arose who on the way to seizing power found it remarkably easy to denigrate and destroy independent journalism.

In Italy, Benito Mussolini came to power in October 1922. At the age of 39 he was the youngest ever prime minister, charismatic and full of energy. He was also careful to move slowly as, almost by stealth, he built a new illiberal state. In a country that for years had lacked unity he proposed a new focus for nationalism: himself. He was Italy. He described a parliament made impotent by its own factionalism a gathering of old fossils. Parliaments powers and the rights of a free press were stripped away.

The people, Mussolini said in July 1924, on the innumerable occasions when I have spoken with them close at hand have never asked me to free them from a tyranny which they do not feel because it does not exist. They have asked me for railways, houses, drains, bridges, water, light and roads. In that year the fascists won more than 65 percent of the vote in national elections.

Mussolinis absolute hold on power was made clear on Jan. 3, 1925, when he said: I and I alone assume the political, moral and historic responsibility for everything that has happened. Italy wants peace and quiet, work and calm. I will give these things with love if possible and with force if necessary.

As the editor, successively, of two newspapers in Milan and with a talent for populist polemic Mussolini had skillfully used the press for his own ends. Now he made sure nobody else would follow his example. Within a few years most of Italys newspapers were suppressed or put under party control. Some smaller newspapers claiming to be independent were still tolerated to give the appearance of freedom of opinion but they were a fig leaf to cover the end of press freedom. Without any effective challenge Mussolinis megalomania flourished. The crowds who gathered for his speeches cried Duce, Duce, Duce! We are yours to the end.

None of the ministers, officials and party secretaries around him were safe from his caprice. He was always right and anyone who contradicted him was fired. Mussolini was, simultaneously, prime minister, foreign minister, minister of the interior, commander in chief of the militia, and minister for the whole military, army, navy, and air force.

Some smaller newspapers claiming to be independent were still tolerated to give the appearance of freedom of opinion but they were a fig leaf to cover the end of press freedom.

These flagrant excesses of the founder of European fascism were later to seem buffoonish against the cold-blooded terror machine that Adolf Hitler built, just as rapidly, in Germany. But there was nothing comical about the 1920s for Italians: they had succumbed very readily to a maniac, and a maniac who understood that the state should control all propaganda (which is, after all, an Italian word) down to details such as decreeing that the national tennis team should wear black shirts.

In Germany the man who would go down in history as the evil genius of alternative facts, Joseph Goebbels, was appointed Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda on March 14, 1933little more than a month after Hitler came to power in Berlin.

Goebbels said he wanted a ministry that was National Socialist [Nazi] by birth.

To staff it he was smart enough to tap into one of the most corrosive influences on the national mood at the time: a grudge, widely held, that Germanys descent into economic chaos had left many of the countrys best educated young people out of well-paid government jobs. From this group Goebbels recruited party zealots who were notably younger and smarter than other Nazi officialshe specified that he wanted those who displayed ardor, enthusiasm, untarnished idealism. (Watching the instant classic encounter between CNNs Jake Tapper and Trumps senior adviser for policy, Stephen Miller, suggests that Miller would have been a perfect recruit.)

Goebbels priority was to exert immediate control of the pressthe press, he instructed his staff, had to be a piano, so to speak, in the hands of the government. Germanys newspapers had been messengers of decay that were harmful to the beliefs, customs and national pride of good Germans.

Within a year all of Goebbels goals were achieved. Three previously independent news services were merged into one state-directed national news agency, the German News Service. All journalism was subjected to the policy of Gleichschaltungmeaning that they had to toe the party line on all issues.

A piano, so to speak, in the hands of the government.

Joseph Gobbels on the press

Previously newspaper publishers had been the legal entity responsible for everything that was published. Goebbels issued the Editor Statute that made editors equally accountable and any editor who resisted Gleichschaltung could be removed and, if particularly recalcitrant, would be sent to a concentration camp.

However, as had Mussolini, Goebbels recognized that the German press should be left with a fig leaf of apparent independence. One great liberal newspaper that happened to have an international following, the Frankfurter Zeitung, was allowed to remain publishing until 1943. Its editors grew expert at a kind of coded reporting with a semblance of neutrality that allowed experienced readers to sense what was really going on.

Two new and growingly important news outlets, radio and cinema newsreels, were put totally under Goebbels control: We make no bones about it, he said, the radio belongs to us, to no one else! And we will place the radio at the service of our idea, and no other idea shall be expressed through it.

The collapse of media independence was rapid and complete. But, as with all historical comparisons, this one can be pushed either too far or too little. Plainly America in 2018 is not the Europe of the 1930s and liberal paranoia in itself is not a sound basis for assessing just how dangerous an assault on journalism may turn out to be.

In 1933 Hitler was at the threshold of creating the instruments of a terror state. We are nowhere near that point. But what is striking now is how friendless the press was. Nobody fought the Goebbels takeover. Mussolini had identified and seized the same opportunity, finding it easy to issue edicts that closed down critical newspapers on the grounds of sedition.

This might seem astonishing in a country like Germany that had one of Europes most deeply rooted intelligentsias. But the universities were quiescent, the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy and the barons of industry were all tired of the Weimar Republics violent polarization between the fascists and the communists and for them press freedom was secondary to personal interests like jobs and, for the industrialists, to the fortunes to be made from re-armament.

Of course Trump has little if any grasp of European history and probably only the vaguest idea of who Goebbels was but his use of tweets reflects one of Goebbels basic tenets about propaganda: Berlin needs sensations as a fish needs water. Any political propaganda that fails to recognize that will miss its target.

So it happens that when it comes to news management Trump has pulled off something that Goebbels would applaud. He has made himself the Great Dictator of the news cycle. To do this he didnt need to knowingly emulate anyone in the propaganda arts because he is directed by his two dominant personal traits: narcissism and paranoia.

Almost every event is refracted through his own response to it, its media lifespan no longer than can be held in his own gnat-like attention span. His tweets are so bizarre, unhinged and frequent that they effectively confuse and distract much of the competing daily coverage. What seems aberrant at 6 p.m. suddenly seems the new normal by 7 p.m. (As Ron Rosenbaum powerfully demonstrates writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, getting people to readily accept the aberrant as normal was one of Hitlers most effective early tactics.)

He has made himself the Great Dictator of the news cycle. To do this he didnt need to knowingly emulate anyone in the propaganda arts because he is directed by his two dominant personal traits: narcissism and paranoia.

And when Trump faces a news narrative that he cant derail, like the Mueller investigation, he sees it as a violation of his own powers, as he imagines them to be rather than as they really exist under the constitution.

Mussolini, very early in his rule, did the same thing, equating himself with the nation and regarding any insult to him as an insult to Italy. In Trumps mind it his base that exclusively represents the nationa belief constantly reinforced by Fox News for whom that base is a ratings gold mine. Trump and his lackeys on Fox have succeeded in equating respect for the kind of truth-telling that is built on learning and the ability to marshal facts with a simple demographic: its the exclusive province of metropolitan elites.

This tactic is based, at least in part, on a condition described by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist. He calls it cognitive ease in which humans tend to avoid facts that are uncomfortable or require work to understand.

Goebbels understood that the reinforcement of prejudice was an intoxicating weapon of propaganda. Fed the right message, aggrieved and resentful minorities could be made to coalesce into a critical mass of activists. The Trump base has been built on this principle, and feels grateful to be led by such a man with whom they readily identify, even though his real interests (personal enrichment) are the opposite of theirs.

But perhaps the weirdest side of Trumps perception of his role and office is that in his mind his fate and that of the mainstream media are locked together in a life or death embrace. This is new. No demagogue in recent history has seen the effectiveness of his role being interdependent with a force that for most of the time he purports to despise.

Consider how he framed this belief when Michael Schmidt of The New York Times recorded one of the most bizarre interviews with him in the Grill Room of his West Palm Beach golf club during the holidays:

Were going to win another four years for a lot of reasons, most importantly because our country is starting to do well again and were being respected again. But another reason that Im going to win another four years is because newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if Im not there because without me their ratings are going down the tubes. Without me, The New York Times will indeed be not the failing New York Times, but the failed New York Times. So they basically have to let me win. And eventually probably six months before the election theyll be loving me because theyre saying, Please, please, dont lose Donald Trump.

Most of the rest of that interview was delusional drivel that provided an alarming insight into his mental processesin fact, it served as a kind of impromptu warm-up for the revelations of Michael Wolffs book, a kind of journalistic bomb cyclone.

What Wolff delivered between the covers of a book was an explosive concentration of reporting that isnt achievable through the daily news cycle. His method is really no different than that used by Bob Woodward in his books, notably on the origins of the Iraq war, where whole scenes are reconstructed with dialog without attribution, but carry the ring of authenticity. The difference in public impact is that Woodward was reporting after the event whereas Wolff delivers as, so to speak, the crime is still in progress.

Some sniffy journalists, David Brooks surprisingly among them, have complained that Wolff doesnt operate according to their understanding of journalistic standards. Well, for one thing he doesnt have the resources of a paper to support him. And he also demonstrates another vital point about the scope of journalism: sometimes the force of one is equal to the force of hundreds. At this moment we need both kinds of consequential reporting, the collective effort of a newsroom and the disruptive brilliance of the loner.

Calling out the lies hasnt stopped Trump. His motives may differ from those of Mussolini and Hitler. Hes not ideological. In his case autocratic instincts come as a psychological motor in the pursuit of greed and the protection of his unbridled and ludicrous ego. The lack of ideology doesnt make him any less dangerous, though.

Trump has no time for scruples. With his lawyers unable to kill Wolffs book (can book burning be far off in his mind?) he once again threatened to ramp up the libel laws to prevent the defamation of people like him. Hes trying to block the merger of AT&T and Time Warner in the hope that Time Warner will be forced to divest itself of his bte noir, CNN, hoping that someone more sympathetic to him will take it over, although Rupert Murdoch, the obvious candidate, says hes not interested, and he has been clearly looking for ways to punish Jeff Bezos for his re-arming of The Washington Post in changes to the tax code that would hit Amazon.

No demagogue in recent history has seen the effectiveness of his role being interdependent with a force that for most of the time he purports to despise.

All this should be very alarming, but Trump is operating in a worryingly permissive arena. There isnt, it seems, a stable public standard of truth in todays America. This is a culture where scientific truths are dismissed if inconvenient and ignorance is nourished. (Forty-three percent of Republicans believe that climate change is not happening.) One of the foundations of secular Western polities is that truth can be sustained only by honesty in language, that language must be used to interrogate information critically, no matter what its source.

In this struggle journalism is our last dependable line of defense. Its no exaggeration to say that the health, security, and integrity of the republic is at stake. History is an unforgiving judge and, just as the history of Europe in the 1920s and 30s reveals shameful failures in democratic institutions Americas current crisis will be judged by how effectively, or otherwise, the institutions designed to protect democracy worked.

No institution can achieve this without being able to operate on a generally agreed foundation of facts, of which the single most consequential fact is that the president is patently unfit for office. The second is that he is being kept in office by the obsequious Republican leadership who remain supine even after the outrage of the shithole outburst.

Principal among these are toadies like Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina who, rather than pursue the investigation of Trump would rather pursue the whistleblower, the British former spy Christopher Steele. Other Republicans are calling for Muellers investigation to be purgedusing a term that Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin all employed to protect themselves. Then there is Ayn Rands posthumous wrecking ball, House Speaker Paul Ryan, who delivered a groveling encomium when Trump signed the so-called tax reform bill, thanking him for exquisite presidential leadership.

There is a word for people like these. Its a word that needs to be revived from earlier use: Quisling. It was first used as a general pejorative early in 1933 as Hitler came to power, identifying a Norwegian fascist named Vidkun Quisling who modeled his party on the Nazis and, when the Nazis invaded Norway in 1940, urged collaboration with them.

As is so often the case it was Winston Churchill who gave it a permanent meaning when, in 1941, he said: A vile race of Quislingsto use a new word which will carry the scorn of mankind down the centuriesis hired to fawn upon the conqueror, to collaborate in his designs and to enforce his rule upon their fellow countrymen while groveling low themselves.

Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-war-on-the-press-follows-the-mussolini-and-hitler-playbook

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In Case You Thought This Couldn't Happen... Here's a List Just for You

http://uniteordiemedia.com/in-case-you-thought-this-couldnt-happen-heres-a-list-just-for-you/ http://uniteordiemedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/North-Woods-600x319.jpg In Case You Thought This Couldn't Happen... Here's a List Just for You The Ever-Growing List of ADMITTED False Flag Attacks | Zero Hedge Presidents, Prime Ministers, Congressmen, Generals, Spooks, Soldiers and Police ADMIT to False Flag Terror In the following instances, officials in the government which carried out the attack (or seriously proposed an attack)...

The Ever-Growing List of ADMITTED False Flag Attacks | Zero Hedge

Presidents, Prime Ministers, Congressmen, Generals, Spooks, Soldiers and Police ADMIT to False Flag Terror

In the following instances, officials in the government which carried out the attack (or seriously proposed an attack) admit to it, either orally, in writing, or through photographs or videos:

(1) Japanese troops set off a small explosion on a train track in 1931, and falsely blamed it on China in order to justify an invasion of Manchuria. This is known as the “Mukden Incident” or the “Manchurian Incident”. The Tokyo International Military Tribunal found: “Several of the participators in the plan, including Hashimoto [a high-ranking Japanese army officer], have on various occasions admitted their part in the plot and have stated that the object of the ‘Incident’ was to afford an excuse for the occupation of Manchuria by the Kwantung Army ….” And see this, this and this.

(2) A major with the Nazi SS admitted at the Nuremberg trials that – under orders from the chief of the Gestapo – he and some other Nazi operatives faked attacks on their own people and resources which they blamed on the Poles, to justify the invasion of Poland.

(3) The minutes of the high command of the Italian government – subsequently approved by Mussolini himself – admitted that violence on the Greek-Albanian border was carried out by Italians and falsely blamed on the Greeks, as an excuse for Italy’s 1940 invasion of Greece.

(4) Nazi general Franz Halder also testified at the Nuremberg trials that Nazi leader Hermann Goering admitted to setting fire to the German parliament building in 1933, and then falsely blaming the communists for the arson.

(5) Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev admitted in writing that the Soviet Union’s Red Army shelled the Russian village of Mainila in 1939 – while blaming the attack on Finland – as a basis for launching the “Winter War” against Finland. Russian president Boris Yeltsin agreed that Russia had been the aggressor in the Winter War.

(6) The Russian Parliament, current Russian president Putin and former Soviet leader Gorbachev all admit that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered his secret police to execute 22,000 Polish army officers and civilians in 1940, and then falsely blamed it on the Nazis.

(7) The British government admits that – between 1946 and 1948 – it bombed 5 ships carrying Jews attempting to flee the Holocaust to seek safety in Palestine, set up a fake group called “Defenders of Arab Palestine”, and then had the psuedo-group falsely claim responsibility for the bombings (and see this, this and this).

(8) Israel admits that in 1954, an Israeli terrorist cell operating in Egypt planted bombs in several buildings, including U.S. diplomatic facilities, then left behind “evidence” implicating the Arabs as the culprits (one of the bombs detonated prematurely, allowing the Egyptians to identify the bombers, and several of the Israelis later confessed) (and see this and this).

The U.S. Army does not believe this is an isolated incident. For example, the U.S. Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies said of Mossad (Israel’s intelligence service):

“Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act.”

(9) The CIA admits that it hired Iranians in the 1950′s to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected prime minister.

(10) The Turkish Prime Minister admitted that the Turkish government carried out the 1955 bombing on a Turkish consulate in Greece – also damaging the nearby birthplace of the founder of modern Turkey – and blamed it on Greece, for the purpose of inciting and justifying anti-Greek violence.

(11) The British Prime Minister admitted to his defense secretary that he and American president Dwight Eisenhower approved a plan in 1957 to carry out attacks in Syria and blame it on the Syrian government as a way to effect regime change.

(12) The former Italian Prime Minister, an Italian judge, and the former head of Italian counterintelligence admit that NATO, with the help of the Pentagon and CIA, carried out terror bombings in Italy and other European countries in the 1950s through the 1980s and blamed the communists, in order to rally people’s support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism.

As one participant in this formerly-secret program stated: “You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security” … so that “a state of emergency could be declared, so people would willingly trade part of their freedom for the security” (and see this) (Italy and other European countries subject to the terror campaign had joined NATO before the bombings occurred). And watch this BBC special. They also allegedly carried out terror attacks in France, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the UK, and other countries.

The CIA also stressed to the head of the Italian program that Italy needed to use the program to control internal uprisings.

False flag attacks carried out pursuant to this program include – by way of example only:

The murder of the Turkish Prime Minister (1960)

Bombings in Portugal (1966)

The Piazza Fontana massacre in Italy (1969)

Terror attacks in Turkey (1971)

The Peteano bombing in Italy (1972)

Shootings in Brescia, Italy and a bombing on an Italian train (1974)

Shootings in Istanbul, Turkey (1977)

The Atocha massacre in Madrid, Spain (1977)

The abduction and murder of the Italian Prime Minister (1978) (and see this)

The bombing of the Bologna railway station in Italy (1980)

Shooting and killing 28 shoppers in Brabant county, Belgium (1985)

(13) In 1960, American Senator George Smathers suggested that the U.S. launch “a false attack made on Guantanamo Bay which would give us the excuse of actually fomenting a fight which would then give us the excuse to go in and [overthrow Castro]”.

(14) Official State Department documents show that, in 1961, the head of the Joint Chiefs and other high-level officials discussed blowing up a consulate in the Dominican Republic in order to justify an invasion of that country. The plans were not carried out, but they were all discussed as serious proposals.

(15) As admitted by the U.S. government, recently declassified documents show that in 1962, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up AMERICAN airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes), and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil, and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. See the following ABC news report; the official documents; and watch this interview with the former Washington Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.

(16) In 1963, the U.S. Department of Defense wrote a paper promoting attacks on nations within the Organization of American States – such as Trinidad-Tobago or Jamaica – and then falsely blaming them on Cuba.

(17) The U.S. Department of Defense also suggested covertly paying a person in the Castro government to attack the United States: “The only area remaining for consideration then would be to bribe one of Castro’s subordinate commanders to initiate an attack on Guantanamo.”

(18) A U.S. Congressional committee admitted that – as part of its “Cointelpro” campaign – the FBI had used many provocateurs in the 1950s through 1970s to carry out violent acts and falsely blame them on political activists.

(19) A top Turkish general admitted that Turkish forces burned down a mosque on Cyprus in the 1970s and blamed it on their enemy. He explained: “In Special War, certain acts of sabotage are staged and blamed on the enemy to increase public resistance. We did this on Cyprus; we even burnt down a mosque.” In response to the surprised correspondent’s incredulous look the general said, “I am giving an example”.

(20) A declassified 1973 CIA document reveals a program to train foreign police and troops on how to make booby traps, pretending that they were training them on how to investigate terrorist acts:

  The Agency maintains liaison in varying degrees with foreign police/security organizations through its field stations ….

[CIA provides training sessions as follows:]

  a. Providing trainees with basic knowledge in the uses of commercial and military demolitions and incendiaries as they may be applied in terrorism and industrial sabotage operations.

  b. Introducing the trainees to commercially available materials and home laboratory techniques, likely to he used in the manufacture of explosives and incendiaries by terrorists or saboteurs.

  c. Familiarizing the trainees with the concept of target analysis and operational planning that a saboteur or terrorist must employ.

  d. Introducing the trainees to booby trapping devices and techniques giving practical experience with both manufactured and improvised devices through actual fabrication.

  ***

  The program provides the trainees with ample opportunity to develop basic familiarity and use proficiently through handling, preparing and applying the various explosive charges, incendiary agents, terrorist devices and sabotage techniques.

(21) The German government admitted (and see this) that, in 1978, the German secret service detonated a bomb in the outer wall of a prison and planted “escape tools” on a prisoner – a member of the Red Army Faction – which the secret service wished to frame the bombing on.

(22) A Mossad agent admits that, in 1984, Mossad planted a radio transmitter in Gaddaffi’s compound in Tripoli, Libya which broadcast fake terrorist transmissions recorded by Mossad, in order to frame Gaddaffi as a terrorist supporter. Ronald Reagan bombed Libya immediately thereafter.

(23) The South African Truth and Reconciliation Council found that, in 1989, the Civil Cooperation Bureau (a covert branch of the South African Defense Force) approached an explosives expert and asked him “to participate in an operation aimed at discrediting the ANC [the African National Congress] by bombing the police vehicle of the investigating officer into the murder incident”, thus framing the ANC for the bombing.

(24) An Algerian diplomat and several officers in the Algerian army admit that, in the 1990s, the Algerian army frequently massacred Algerian civilians and then blamed Islamic militants for the killings (and see this video; and Agence France-Presse, 9/27/2002, French Court Dismisses Algerian Defamation Suit Against Author).

(25) In 1993, a bomb in Northern Ireland killed 9 civilians. Official documents from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (i.e. the British government) show that the mastermind of the bombing was a British agent, and that the bombing was designed to inflame sectarian tensions. And see this and this.

(26) The United States Army’s 1994 publication Special Forces Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces – updated in 2004 – recommends employing terrorists and using false flag operations to destabilize leftist regimes in Latin America. False flag terrorist attacks were carried out in Latin America and other regions as part of the CIA’s “Dirty Wars“. And see this.

(27) Similarly, a CIA “psychological operations” manual prepared by a CIA contractor for the Nicaraguan Contra rebels noted the value of assassinating someone on your own side to create a “martyr” for the cause. The manual was authenticated by the U.S. government. The manual received so much publicity from Associated Press, Washington Post and other news coverage that – during the 1984 presidential debate – President Reagan was confronted with the following question on national television:

At this moment, we are confronted with the extraordinary story of a CIA guerrilla manual for the anti-Sandinista contras whom we are backing, which advocates not only assassinations of Sandinistas but the hiring of criminals to assassinate the guerrillas we are supporting in order to create martyrs.

(28) A Rwandan government inquiry admitted that the 1994 shootdown and murder of the Rwandan president, who was from the Hutu tribe – a murder blamed by the Hutus on the rival Tutsi tribe, and which led to the massacre of more than 800,000 Tutsis by Hutus – was committed by Hutu soldiers and falsely blamed on the Tutis.

(29) An Indonesian government fact-finding team investigated violent riots which occurred in 1998, and determined that “elements of the military had been involved in the riots, some of which were deliberately provoked”.

(30) Senior Russian Senior military and intelligence officers admit that the KGB blew up Russian apartment buildings in 1999 and falsely blamed it on Chechens, in order to justify an invasion of Chechnya (and see this report and this discussion).

(31) As reported by the New York Times, BBC and Associated Press, Macedonian officials admit that in 2001, the government murdered 7 innocent immigrants in cold blood and pretended that they were Al Qaeda soldiers attempting to assassinate Macedonian police, in order to join the “war on terror”. luring foreign migrants into the country, executing them in a staged gun battle, and then claiming they were a unit backed by Al Qaeda intent on attacking Western embassies”. Macedonian authorities had lured the immigrants into the country, and then – after killing them – posed the victims with planted evidence – “bags of uniforms and semiautomatic weapons at their side” – to show Western diplomats.

(32) At the July 2001 G8 Summit in Genoa, Italy, black-clad thugs were videotaped getting out of police cars, and were seen by an Italian MP carrying “iron bars inside the police station”. Subsequently, senior police officials in Genoa subsequently admitted that police planted two Molotov cocktails and faked the stabbing of a police officer at the G8 Summit, in order to justify a violent crackdown against protesters.

(33) The U.S. falsely blamed Iraq for playing a role in the 9/11 attacks – as shown by a memo from the defense secretary – as one of the main justifications for launching the Iraq war.

Even after the 9/11 Commission admitted that there was no connection, Dick Cheney said that the evidence is “overwhelming” that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein’s regime, that Cheney “probably” had information unavailable to the Commission, and that the media was not ‘doing their homework’ in reporting such ties. Top U.S. government officials now admit that the Iraq war was really launched for oil … not 9/11 or weapons of mass destruction.

Despite previous “lone wolf” claims, many U.S. government officials now say that 9/11 was state-sponsored terror; but Iraq was not the state which backed the hijackers. (Many U.S. officials have alleged that 9/11 was a false flag operation by rogue elements of the U.S. government; but such a claim is beyond the scope of this discussion. The key point is that the U.S. falsely blamed it on Iraq, when it knew Iraq had nothing to do with it.).

(Additionally, the same judge who has shielded the Saudis for any liability for funding 9/11 has awarded a default judgment against Iran for $10.5 billion for carrying out 9/11 … even though no one seriously believes that Iran had any part in 9/11.)

(34) Although the FBI now admits that the 2001 anthrax attacks were carried out by one or more U.S. government scientists, a senior FBI official says that the FBI was actually told to blame the Anthrax attacks on Al Qaeda by White House officials (remember what the anthrax letters looked like). Government officials also confirm that the white House tried to link the anthrax to Iraq as a justification for regime change in that country. And see this.

(35) According to the Washington Post, Indonesian police admit that the Indonesian military killed American teachers in Papua in 2002 and blamed the murders on a Papuan separatist group in order to get that group listed as a terrorist organization.

(36) The well-respected former Indonesian president also admits that the government probably had a role in the Bali bombings.

(37) Police outside of a 2003 European Union summit in Greece were filmed planting Molotov cocktails on a peaceful protester.

(38) In 2003, the U.S. Secretary of Defense admitted that interrogators were authorized to use the following method: “False Flag: Convincing the detainee that individuals from a country other than the United States are interrogating him.” While not a traditional false flag attack, this deception could lead to former detainees  attacking the country falsely blamed for the interrogation.

(39) Former Department of Justice lawyer John Yoo suggested in 2005 that the US should go on the offensive against al-Qaeda, having “our intelligence agencies create a false terrorist organization. It could have its own websites, recruitment centers, training camps, and fundraising operations. It could launch fake terrorist operations and claim credit for real terrorist strikes, helping to sow confusion within al-Qaeda’s ranks, causing operatives to doubt others’ identities and to question the validity of communications.”

(40) Similarly, in 2005, Professor John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School – a renowned US defense analyst credited with developing the concept of ‘netwar’ – called for western intelligence services to create new “pseudo gang” terrorist groups, as a way of undermining “real” terror networks. According to Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh, Arquilla’s ‘pseudo-gang’ strategy was, Hersh reported, already being implemented by the Pentagon:

“Under Rumsfeld’s new approach, I was told, US military operatives would be permitted to pose abroad as corrupt foreign businessmen seeking to buy contraband items that could be used in nuclear-weapons systems. In some cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could be recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or terrorists…

The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls ‘action teams’ in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. ‘Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?’ the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. ‘We founded them and we financed them,’ he said. ‘The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it.’ A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon’s commando capabilities, said, ‘We’re going to be riding with the bad boys.’”

(41) United Press International reported in June 2005:

U.S. intelligence officers are reporting that some of the insurgents in Iraq are using recent-model Beretta 92 pistols, but the pistols seem to have had their serial numbers erased. The numbers do not appear to have been physically removed; the pistols seem to have come off a production line without any serial numbers. Analysts suggest the lack of serial numbers indicates that the weapons were intended for intelligence operations or terrorist cells with substantial government backing. Analysts speculate that these guns are probably from either Mossad or the CIA. Analysts speculate that agent provocateurs may be using the untraceable weapons even as U.S. authorities use insurgent attacks against civilians as evidence of the illegitimacy of the resistance.

(42) In 2005, British soldiers dressed as Arabs were caught by Iraqi police after a shootout against the police. The soldiers apparently possessed explosives, and were accused of attempting to set off bombs. While none of the soldiers admitted that they were carrying out attacks, British soldiers and a column of British tanks stormed the jail they were held in, broke down a wall of the jail, and busted them out. The extreme measures used to free the soldiers – rather than have them face questions and potentially stand trial – could be considered an admission.

(43) Undercover Israeli soldiers admitted in 2005 to throwing stones at other Israeli soldiers so they could blame it on Palestinians, as an excuse to crack down on peaceful protests by the Palestinians.

(44) Quebec police admitted that, in 2007, thugs carrying rocks to a peaceful protest were actually undercover Quebec police officers (and see this).

(45) A 2008 US Army special operations field manual recommends that the U.S. military use surrogate non-state groups such as “paramilitary forces, individuals, businesses, foreign political organizations, resistant or insurgent organizations, expatriates, transnational terrorism adversaries, disillusioned transnational terrorism members, black marketers, and other social or political ‘undesirables.’” The manual specifically acknowledged that U.S. special operations can involve both counterterrorism and “Terrorism” (as well as “transnational criminal activities, including narco-trafficking, illicit arms-dealing, and illegal financial transactions.”)

(46) The former Italian Prime Minister, President, and head of Secret Services (Francesco Cossiga) advised the 2008 minister in charge of the police, on how to deal with protests from teachers and students:

He should do what I did when I was Minister of the Interior … infiltrate the movement with agents provocateurs inclined to do anything …. And after that, with the strength of the gained population consent, … beat them for blood and beat for blood also those teachers that incite them. Especially the teachers. Not the elderly, of course, but the girl teachers yes.

(47) An undercover officer admitted that he infiltrated environmental, leftwing and anti-fascist groups in 22 countries. Germany’s federal police chief admitted that – while the undercover officer worked for the German police – he acted illegally during a G8 protest in Germany in 2007 and committed arson by setting fire during a subsequent demonstration in Berlin. The undercover officer spent many years living with violent “Black Bloc” anarchists.

(48) Denver police admitted that uniformed officers deployed in 2008 to an area where alleged “anarchists” had planned to wreak havoc outside the Democratic National Convention ended up getting into a melee with two undercover policemen. The uniformed officers didn’t know the undercover officers were cops.

(49) At the G20 protests in London in 2009, a British member of parliament saw plain clothes police officers attempting to incite the crowd to violence.

(50) The oversight agency for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police admitted that – at the G20 protests in Toronto in 2010 – undercover police officers were arrested with a group of protesters. Videos and photos (see this and this, for example) show that violent protesters wore very similar boots and other gear as the police, and carried police batons. The Globe and Mail reports that the undercover officers planned the targets for violent attack, and the police failed to stop the attacks.

(51) Egyptian politicians admitted (and see this) that government employees looted priceless museum artifacts 2011 to try to discredit the protesters.

(52) Austin police admit that 3 officers infiltrated the Occupy protests in that city. Prosecutors admit that one of the undercover officers purchased and constructed illegal “lock boxes” which ended up getting many protesters arrested.

(53) In 2011, a Colombian colonel admitted that he and his soldiers had lured 57 innocent civilians and killed them – after dressing many of them in uniforms – as part of a scheme to claim that Columbia was eradicating left-wing terrorists. And see this.

(54) Rioters who discredited the peaceful protests against the swearing in of the Mexican president in 2012 admitted that they were paid 300 pesos each to destroy everything in their path. According to Wikipedia, photos also show the vandals waiting in groups behind police lines prior to the violence.

(55) A Colombian army colonel has admitted that his unit murdered 57 civilians, then dressed them in uniforms and claimed they were rebels killed in combat.

(56) On November 20, 2014, Mexican agent provocateurs were transported by army vehicles to participate in the 2014 Iguala mass kidnapping protests, as was shown by videos and pictures distributed via social networks.

(57) The highly-respected writer for the Telegraph Ambrose Evans-Pritchard says that the head of Saudi intelligence – Prince Bandar – recently admitted that the Saudi government controls “Chechen” terrorists.

(58) Two members of the Turkish parliament, high-level American sources and others admitted that the Turkish government – a NATO country – carried out the chemical weapons attacks in Syria and falsely blamed them on the Syrian government; and high-ranking Turkish government admitted on tape plans to carry out attacks and blame it on the Syrian government.

(59) The Ukrainian security chief admits that the sniper attacks which started the Ukrainian coup were carried out in order to frame others. Ukrainian officials admit that the Ukrainian snipers fired on both sides, to create maximum chaos.

(60) Burmese government officials admitted that Burma (renamed Myanmar) used false flag attacks against Muslim and Buddhist groups within the country to stir up hatred between the two groups, to prevent democracy from spreading.

(61) Israeli police were again filmed in 2015 dressing up as Arabs and throwing stones, then turning over Palestinian protesters to Israeli soldiers.

(62) Britain’s spy agency has admitted (and see this) that it carries out “digital false flag” attacks on targets, framing people by writing offensive or unlawful material … and blaming it on the target.

(63) The CIA has admitted that it uses viruses and malware from Russia and other countries to carry out cyberattacks and blame other countries.

(64) U.S. soldiers have admitted that if they kill innocent Iraqis and Afghanis, they then “drop” automatic weapons near their body so they can pretend they were militants.

(65) Similarly, police frame innocent people for crimes they didn’t commit. The practice is so well-known that the New York Times noted in 1981:

In police jargon, a throwdown is a weapon planted on a victim.

Newsweek reported in 1999:

Perez, himself a former [Los Angeles Police Department] cop, was caught stealing eight pounds of cocaine from police evidence lockers. After pleading guilty in September, he bargained for a lighter sentence by telling an appalling story of attempted murder and a “throwdown”–police slang for a weapon planted by cops to make a shooting legally justifiable. Perez said he and his partner, Officer Nino Durden, shot an unarmed 18th Street Gang member named Javier Ovando, then planted a semiautomatic rifle on the unconscious suspect and claimed that Ovando had tried to shoot them during a stakeout.

Wikipedia notes:

As part of his plea bargain, Pérez implicated scores of officers from the Rampart Division’s anti-gang unit, describing routinely beating gang members, planting evidence on suspects, falsifying reports and covering up unprovoked shootings.

(As a side note – and while not technically false flag attacks – police have been busted framing innocent people in many other ways, as well.)

(66) A former U.S. intelligence officer recently alleged:

Most terrorists are false flag terrorists or are created by our own security services.

(67) The head and special agent in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles office said that most terror attacks are committed by the CIA and FBI as false flags. Similarly, the director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan – Lt. General William Odom said:

By any measure the US has long used terrorism. In ‘78-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism – in every version they produced, the lawyers said the US would be in violation.

(audio here).

(68) The Director of Analytics at the interagency Global Engagement Center housed at the U.S. Department of State, also an adjunct professor at George Mason University, where he teaches the graduate course National Security Challenges in the Department of Information Sciences and Technology, a former branch chief in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, and an intelligence advisor to the Secretary of Homeland Security (J.D. Maddox) notes:

Provocation is one of the most basic, but confounding, aspects of warfare. Despite its sometimes obvious use, it has succeeded consistently against audiences around the world, for millennia, to compel war. A well-constructed provocation narrative mutes even the most vocal opposition.

  ***

  The culmination of a strategic provocation operation invariably reflects a narrative of victimhood: we are the victims of the enemy’s unforgivable atrocities.

  ***

  In the case of strategic provocation the deaths of an aggressor’s own personnel are a core tactic of the provocation.

  ***

  The persistent use of strategic provocation over centuries – and its apparent importance to war planners – begs the question of its likely use by the US and other states in the near term.

(69) Leaders throughout history have acknowledged the “benefits” of of false flags to justify their political agenda:

“Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death”. – Adolph Hitler

  “Why of course the people don’t want war … But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship … Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” – Hermann Goering, Nazi leader.

  “The easiest way to gain control of a population is to carry out acts of terror. [The public] will clamor for such laws if their personal security is threatened”. – Josef Stalin

Postscript: The media plays along as well. For example, in 2012, NBC News’ chief foreign correspondent, Richard Engel, was kidnapped in Syria. NBC News said that Engel and his reporting team had been abducted by forces affiliated with the Syrian government. He reported that they only escaped when some anti-Syrian government rebels killed some of the pro-government kidnappers.

However, NBC subsequently admitted that this was false. It turns out that they were really kidnapped by people associated with the U.S. backed rebels fighting the Syrian government … who wore the clothes of, faked the accent of, scrawled the slogans of, and otherwise falsely impersonated the mannerisms of people associated with the Syrian government. In reality, the group that kidnapped Engel and his crew were affiliated with the U.S.-supported Free Syrian Army, and NBC should have known that it was blaming the wrong party. See the New York Times and the Nation’s reporting.

Of course, sometimes atrocities or warmongering are falsely blamed on the enemy as a justification for war … when no such event ever occurred. This is sort of like false flag terror … without the terror.

For example:

The NSA admits that it lied about what really happened in the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 … manipulating data to make it look like North Vietnamese boats fired on a U.S. ship so as to create a false justification for the Vietnam war

One of the central lies used to justify the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq after Iraq invaded Kuwait was the false statement by a young Kuwaiti girl that Iraqis murdered Kuwaiti babies in hospitals. Her statement was arranged by a Congressman who knew that she was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the U.S. – who was desperately trying to lobby the U.S. to enter the war – but the Congressman hid that fact from the public and from Congress

Another central lie used to justify the Gulf War was the statement that a quarter of a million Iraqi troops were massed on the border with Saudi Arabia (see also this article)

Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind reported that the White House ordered the CIA to forge and backdate a document falsely linking Iraq with Muslim terrorists and 9/11 … and that the CIA complied with those instructions and in fact created the forgery, which was then used to justify war against Iraq. And see this and this

Time magazine points out that the claim by President Bush that Iraq was attempting to buy “yellow cake” Uranium from Niger:

had been checked out — and debunked — by U.S. intelligence a year before the President repeated it.

Everyone knew that Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. More

The entire torture program was geared towards obtaining false confessions linking Iraq and 9/11

CIA agents and documents admit that the agency gave Iran plans for building nuclear weapons … so it could frame Iran for trying to build the bomb

The “humanitarian” wars in Syria, Libya and Yugoslavia were all justified by exaggerated reports that the leaders of those countries were committing atrocities against their people. And see this

Read More: www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-03-07/ever-growing-list-admitted-false-flag-attacks

[brajeshupadhyay]

This piece is not about Arnab Goswami and his journalism. One journalist issuing a journalism certificate to another is vain. Nor is it about television drama spilling on to streets and courts with real consequences, or a fading dynast’s desperate jabs at power and intimidation. It is simply about the Congress party’s political wisdom in reacting the way it has to a news anchor’s provocation of calling its president Sonia Gandhi biased and silent on the lynching of two Hindu monks in Palghar. It is also about how the party took Arnab calling Sonia by her maiden name ‘Antonia Maino’, dog-whistling about her being Italian, and thereby unboxing the baggage of old allegations. Old questions tumbled out. Why did she take 16 years to become an Indian citizen after marrying Rajiv Gandhi in 1968? Has she ever been an Indian at heart, even while running the country as the power centre with Manmohan Singh as prime minister? The episode is undoubtedly personal and sensitive for Sonia Gandhi. But those two are bad words in politics. Politicians train not to react in anger or hurt, and respond when waters of the mind are still. Five blunders of Congress First, reportedly attacking Goswami and his wife near their Mumbai home and filing a slew of cases against him in states like Chhattisgarh where it rules, the Congress has re-established itself in the nation’s mind as the party of Emergency. It has a distinguished record in quashing criticism and muzzling freedom of expression, captured in this Twitter thread by scientist and political commentator Anand Ranganathan. From jailing actor Utpal Dutt to banning investigative journalist Jack Anderson’s documentary ‘Rajiv’s India’, to Kabil Sibal bringing the repressive Section 66A of the IT Act, Congress’ handiwork shines from Ranganathan’s thread (274 posts and counting). It gently holds the mirror to the savagery the party is capable of on press and artistic freedom. The latest incident only acts as a national reminder of that. Second, hounding a journalist brings under stage lights the Nehru-Gandhi family’s well-known intolerance to criticism. Scores of works like the movie Aandhi in which the protagonist resembled Indira Gandhi, or Xavier Moro’s book The Red Sari on Sonia, faced censure. It was in under Congress rule in Bihar with Jawaharlal Nehru at the Centre that Kedar Nath Singh was slapped with sedition in 1962 for saying, “Today the dogs of CID are loitering around Barauni…today these Congress goondas are sitting on the gaddi.” In the UPA years, there was an unwritten diktat in newsrooms to not openly criticise the family; one could take on its minions, if at all. The incidents over Palghar have proved that the much-weakened Congress has not changed. Golden gift to the enemy Third, the reckless aggression somehow gives one the sense that mentioning her roots gets Sonia very uncomfortable and defensive. The moment the BJP tasted blood, it pounced more fiercely on her father Stephano Maino’s story, who reportedly had served in Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini’s army. Discrepancies about her university education, citizenship, name on electoral rolls and even alleged KGB links are being dug up. Fourth, it puts the Congress’ senior partner in the Maharashtra coalition, Shiv Sena, in a bind. Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray is constantly being chided by his core Marathi-Hindutva constituency for actions of the NCP and the Congress, or the ones Sena is taking to keep the alliance alive. The Congress’ brashness makes his position weaker. Fifth and last, this gives potent ‘what about’ ammunition to the BJP. Every sin of the Congress in the past 70 years has come to the BJP’s rescue each time it got cornered in the last six years. From allowing communal violence to toppling governments, the Congress has a much better record to show. And the latest one, even with crippled power, paves the road for the BJP to travel with fresh precedence as a weapon. This violence and vengeance is an opportunity worth in gold for the BJP. It won’t let it go.

http://sansaartimes.blogspot.com/2020/04/how-sonia-gandhi-has-walked-into-trap.html

[1baddmouthcrown]

1935

1935 January 7 Ethiopia Christmas Day The Swedish H. R. H Crown Prince Gustaf Adolph hier to the throne arrives in Addis with his wife Princess Louise, his daughter Princess Ingrid and his son Prince Bertil. The French foreign minister Pierre Laval and Italian Prime Minster Benito Mussolini sign the Franco Italian agreement giving Italy a part of bordering French Somliland (now Djibouti) as part of Eritrea as well as the Aouzou strip in French Chad as part of Italian Libya. January 19 The League of Nations Council at session decide that the Wal Wal clash should be resolved by arbitration arbitrators should examine the interpretation of the frontier treaty of 1908 May 16 by investigation as according to articles 5 and 7 of the 1928 treaty as to wither Wal Wal is part of Ethiopia or Italian Somaliland. Du Bois publishes his Black Reconstruction in America. March 16 Garvey travels to London on the SS Talapa. March 17 Ambassador Takla Howargat makes submission to the League invoking Article 15 of the covenant. March 28 General Emilio De Bono is named commander in chief of Italian armed forces in East Africa and force invading from Eritrea. April Britain, France and Italy sign the Stresa. May 16 The Emperor sends message to Geneva ‘We request that, if Italy refuses to accept that the arbitration should examine and adjudicate upon all the attacks that have been made in the vicinity of the Somali-Ethiopian border since last December and should pronounce upon the interpretation of the treat of 1908 May 16, the Council itself will take the investigation in hand and resolve matters by a full examination on basis of article 15 of the covenant.’ May 25 As a result of the Emperor’s second submission the League decides arbitrators should be chosen. ‘Because it was Ethiopia’s desire that the judgement to be pronounced should be impartial and on an absolutely legal basis, she on her part chose arbitrators two men who were legal experts, one French Albert de Geouffre de La Pradelle, professor of law in the University of Paris, and one American Pitman B. Potter professor at the Graduate Institute of International Studies at Geneva who were very well known for their knowledge and refinement in international law.’ ‘Italy on her part selected two Italians from among Italy’s government officials.’ Ethiopia’s clear conscience was aware of the rights due to her and We, therefore, submitted immediately our request to Italy to settle the matter on the basis of the text of the treaty, referring to the treaty concluded in 1928, by which Italy had undertaken that peace and friendship should forever persist between us and that, if a quarrel arose between us, this quarrel should have a peacful outcome on the authorative verdict of arbitrators. To this request, which we had presented, the reply was an absolute refusal, and Italy revealed her inflexible resolve to have the demands which she had submitted fulfilled in their entirety without investigation and without adjudication in the proper manner. The Emperor on July 18 of the same year. May Robinson arrives in Ethiopia. Garvey speaks at Hyde Park speakers corner. Garvey publishes Black Man monthly magazine from 2 Beaumont Crescent, West Kensington with Una Marson who would later work for the BBC Caribbean service as his personal secretary. Seay becomes the second woman in awarded member of the Order of the British Empire presented to her by Governor Burns and agrees with Womans League and Labourers and Unemployment Association on womens suffrage for voting age to be lowered to but proposes unemployed women rather than to be given suffrage be given land grants. June 25 Joe Louis Detroit’s Brown Bomber, scores a decisive technical knockout over the Italian Primo Carnera in the sixth round of their bout at the Yankee Stadium. Here is Louis standing over the bleeding, fallen Carnera, during one of the three knockdowns in the sixth round. June When the danger became more urgent, being aware of my responsibilities towards my people, during the first six months of 1935 I tried to acquire armaments. Many Governments proclaimed an embargo to prevent my doing so, whereas the Italian Government through the Suez Canal, was given all facilities for transporting without cessation and without protest, troops, arms, and munitions. From the Emperors speech to the League on June 30 of the following year. 3000 white and black men volunteer through the UNIA to fight. Garvey cautions Mossolini against aggressive action towards Ethiopia. Bayen graduates from Howard University medical school. July 8 Garvey in the Black man. July 10 Bayen leaves the U. S. for Ethiopia. July 18 The Emperor delivers speech to parliament. During the Ethiopian Crisis people from all other the world rallied support for the Emperor. July 23 The members of the International African Friends of Ethiopia with their various roles including C. L. R. James as Chairman, Amy Ashwood Garvey as Treasurer and Jomo Kenyatta as secretary hold their first meeting. July 28 Sunday The International African Friends of Ethiopia hold meeting at Faringdon Street, Memorial Hall. August 18 I.A.F.E. hold meeting at Conway Hall Treaty and lift arms embargo. August 26 IAFE hold rally at Trafalgar Square. THE DEFENCE OF ETHIOPIA The International African Friends of Ethiopia. (Formerly The International African Friends of Abyssinia) If devilish force prevails and causes a war then Abyssinia will arise; and, with its Emperor leading, followed by his people, whose courage and valour are known, will defend its country against the invader to the last drop of its blood. Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, at Addis Ababa, August 12th 1935. THAT IS THE POSITION WE ADOPT. Come to THE CONWAY HALL, Sunday August 18th, 1935 at 8 p.m. Resolutions demanding that the British Government keep their Treaty obligations by (a) Supporting Ethiopia in its struggle against Italian Fascism. (b) Raising the embargo on the export of Arms to Ethiopia will be moved. SPEAKERS: Dr. WILLIS N. HUGGINS, Ph.D., from America who has carried the protest of 40 organisations, both black and white, to Geneva, and will tell of the efforts of the Friends of Ethiopia in the United States of America. Mr. C. L. R. JAMES Mr. J. M. KENYATTA Chief TUFUHIN MOORE Dr. SANDRO MAGRI, An Italian Anti-Fascist. AN ETHIOPIAN. August 12 Ethiopia also pleads for the embargo to be lifted. August Garvey praises the Emperor as a gentleman and calls Mussolini a barbarian guilty of savagery. September 2 Amy Ashwood and the International African Friends of Ethiopia held a rally in London at Trafalgar Square. Afterwards, Amy posed for a photograph with two of the sons of the Ethiopian Minister Dr. Warqenah Eshete (aka Dr. Charles Martin), Benyam and Yosef (2nd and 3rd from the right). Both sons were Co-Founders of the radical and militant Black Lion Organization that was involved in liberating Ethiopia from Italian occupation and tyranny. Unfortunately, shortly after taking this photo the two were arrested in Ethiopia and summarily executed for the attempted assassination of the Italian Viceroy Marshall Rodolfo Graziani. — at Trafalgar Square. August Garvey praises the Emperor as a gentleman and calls Mossolini a barbarian guilty of savagery. September 3 The Wal Wal clash is adjudicated by arbitration niether Ethiopia or Italy responsible for the clash, Italy stops compensation. September 4 Italy submits memorandum of complaints to the council of the League of Nations. September 11 The Emperor makes radio broadcast. September 11 The Jamaica Gleaner The Honorable Amy Ashwood Garvey speaks before a London crowd at Trafalgar Square, denouncing the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. “No race has been so noble in forgiving, but now the hour has struck for our complete emancipation. We will not tolerate the invasion of Abyssinia.“ Mrs. Garvey said: “In this struggle, the black women are marching beside the men. You white people brought us out of Africa to Christianize us and civilize us, but all the Christianity and civilization you gave us for 320 years was slavery. You have talked of ‘The White Man’s burden.’ Now we are carrying yours and standing between you and Fascism.” She warned the British Government that if this became a struggle between the “Blacks” and the “Whites” that three quarters of the people of the Empire are colored. September 15 Nuremberg laws in Germany October 3 5:00 AM General Emilio De Bono, without a declaration of war, advances into Ethiopia from Eritrea crossing the Mareb river in the north by plane. Graziani implements the Milan plan all along the southern front to remove Ethiopian forces from various frontier posts and to test the reaction of a series of probes there. The Emperor orders a general mobilization. October 5 Italian I Corps take Adigrat and the League’s Committee of 13 report on the details of events occurred after the month of December of the previous year and up to October 3 of the present year. October 6 Italian II Corps take Adwa where the Italians were defeated 40 years ago in 1896 on March 1. Robinson witness’s the bombing’s of both Adigrat and Adwa. The Emperor orders Ras Seyoum Mangasha commander of the army of Tigre to withdraw a days march away from the Mareb river. The Emperor orders his son in law Dejazmatch Haile Selassie Gugsa to move back 89 and 56km (55 and 35 miles) from the border. October 10 The International African Friends of Ethiopia at a meeting at Clarks theatre in Castries, Saint Lucia protest the Foreign Enlistment Act and pass the following resolution in view of the provoked aggression of Italy against unarmed Ethiopia the penal clause of the above act be waived so far as it applies to west Indians to permit. October 11 Dejazmatch Haile Selassie Gugsa surrenders to the Italian commander with 1, 500 of his men at Adagamos the Italian outpost and defects to the Italian side leaving Makale, his capital in eastern Tigre at 1:00 am with 50 of his men meeting with the Italians. Bono at his HQ with Gugsa on the left. October 14 with De Bono proclaimed the end of slavery, with the livestock having been moved to the south to feed the army those no longer slaves were left with no other option but to loyal to the Italians. I am obliged to say that the proclamation did not have much effect on the owners of the slaves and perhaps still less on the liberated slaves themselves many of the latter the instance they were set free, presented themselves to the Italian authorities asking and now who gives me food. October 15 De Bono forces advance from Adwa occupy Axum, Bono loots Obelisk. October 19 The Bishop of Udine [Italy] writes, ‘It is neither timely nor fitting for us to pronounce on the rights and wrongs of the case. Our duty as Italians, and still more as Christians is to contribute to the success of our arms.' Ras Mulugeta is given orders and parades with army. October 21 The Bishop of Padua writes 'In the difficult hours through which we are passing, we ask you to have faith in our statesmen and armed forces.’ A. L. King and his Provisional Committee for the Defense of Ethiopia ship medical supplies to the Emperor. October 24 The Bishop of Cremona consecrated a number of regimental flags and said 'The blessing of God be upon these soldiers who, on African soil, will conquer new and fertile lands for the Italian genius, thereby bringing to them Roman and Christian culture. May Italy stand once again as the Christian mentor to the whole world.’ The Somali villages of Kelafo, Dagnerai, Gerlogubi and Gorahai in the Oganden are taken by the Italians. October 27 To His Excellency Graziani. The use of gas as an ultima ratio to overwhelm enemy resistance and in case of counter-attack is authorized. Mussolini. November The League of Nations places economic sanctions on Italy excluding oil. November 3 20 aeroplanes from the Regia Aeronautica drop bombs at Gorrahei the stronghold of Sayyid Mohammed Abdullah Hassan known to the British as Mad Mullah. Grazmatch Afawarq is hit on the leg by a bomb splinter whilst firing with a 37 mm Oerlikon named after the suburb of Zurich where these guns are made taking aim to bring down a plane. November 4 Waves of 20 Aeroplanes bomb Gorrahei. November 8 I Corps and Eritrean Corps take Makale. November 13 Graziani moves his headquarters to Baidoa. November 16 De Bono is promoted to the rank Marshall of Italy. November 19 The Emperor leaves for Jijiga the capital of Tigre. November 20 Grazmatch Afawarq is posthumously conferred upon with the rank of Dejazmatch. November 28 The Emperor leaves Addis for Dessie in the province of Wollo. November 30 The Emperor moves his HQ to Dessie. 20 killed 100 wounded. December 4 Ras Imru advances from Gojam, his forces are bombed. December 5 The Italians take Abbi Addi. December 6 Lethbridge Herald newspaper THIRTY ITALIAN BOMBERS RAIN DEATH ON CITY AS EMPEROR AND SON WATCH Incendiary Bombs Set Field Hospital Palace of Crown Prince Wrecked by Blasts from Air 200 Injured Protest Attack on Red Cross Hospital Death Stalks Ethiopian Hillsides War is never a pleasant thing, and the current Italo Ethiopian war is no exception. Here is a new photo that graphically illustrates the tragedy of war. Two native soldiers who will probably never be honored by burial shot down by Italian planes. Similar scenes were witnessed today in Dessye where Italian bombers wreaked havoc before the eyes of Emperor Haile Selassie. By CHRISTIAN OZANNE (Copyright, 1935, by the Havas New Agency) ADDIS ABABA Dec 6 (C.P. Havas) Thirty two persons were killed and more than 200 injured when 30 Italian planes bombed Dessye today before the eyes of Emperor Haile Selassie and his, 11 year old second son, Prince Makonnen. Protests To League By JOSPEH E. SHARKEY (Associated Press Foreign Staff) GENEVA, Dec. 6 (A.P.) Emperor Haile Selassie, who escaped death in an Italian air bombing raid on his headquarters at Dessye today, protested directly to the League of Nations a few hours later against the bombing of Red Cross hospital.) Emperor Haile Selassie, who escaped death in an Italian air bombing raid on his headquarters at Dessye today, protested directly to the League of Nations a few hours later against the bombing of Red Cross hospitals and the killing of women and children. The Ethiopian monarch declared the American hospital at Dessye which was struck by bombs had displayed the authorized insignia of the Red Cross. Emperor’s protest The emperors protest stated (Continued on Page Two.) Ethiopian Emperor Fire Machine Gun Himself During Bombardment Of Dessye By Italian Squadron By James A. MILLIS (Copyright. 1935, the Associated Press.)WITH EMPEROR HAILE SELASSIE AT DESSYE, ETHIOPIA.Dec. 6 Italian war planes struck at Emperor Haile Selassie’s headquarters today, bombing and machine gunning troops, civilians, the emperor’s palace, and hospitals indiscriminately.The emperor himself fough against the attack which lasted 17 minutes while more than 1000 bombs were dropped and at least 12 persons were killed and 200 wounded,The little, bearded man was talking to Dejazmatch (general) Birru and a doctor named Zeryos when the thunder of the bombing planes was heard (Continued on Page Two) December 10 The British and French foreign ministers Samuel Hoare and Pierre Laval Pact make an underhand agreement to sign Ogaden Tigray and Southern parts of Ethiopia away to Mussolini, the pact is leaked by a French newspaper and the foreign ministers are forced to resign. December 15 The Emperor launches the Ethiopian Christmas Offensive/Counteroffensive also refered to as the Dolo offensive. December 15 Ras Seyoum Mangasha and his army of Tigre with 30, 000 men Abiy Addi Beles River the Ethiopian center, Ras Kassa Haile Darge and his army of Beghemder province in Gondar with 40, 000 advance from Dessie to join Mangasha in the center, Ras Mulugeta Yeggazu Minister of War advances from Dessie with 80, 000 to Amba Aradam the steep sided flat topped mountain on the right of the Ethiopian center blocking the Italian advance to Addis Ababa, the Emperor with 40, 000 men advance from Gojjam towards Mai Timket to the left of Mangasha and Darge, the Ethiopian center. 1,000 Ethiopians cross the Tekeze river and advance toward the Indabaguna Pass. The Ethiopians attack the Italian commander Major Criniti’s forces composed of 1, 000 Eritrean infantry and L3 tanks, the Italians fall back to the the Indabaguna pass where 2, 000 Ethiopian soldiers are already waiting, the Ethiopians then encircle Criniti’s force. The Ethiopians kill two Italian officers and Criniti is left wounded. The Italians try to break out using their tanks which are immobilized by the terrain, the Ethiopians kill the infantry and rush the tanks killing their two man crews. The Ethiopians ambush the Italian relief column of ten tanks, two trucks and infantry sent to Criniti. The Ethiopians roll boulders infront and behind several of the tanks to immobilize them and then pick off the Eritrean infantry and the tanks. More tanks are immobilized by the terrain and two are set on fire. Criniti breaks out in a bayonet charge. There were 31 Italian casualties, 370 Askari were killed and five Italians were taken as prisoners, the Italians claim that there were 500 Ethiopian casualties which is a figure believed to have been much exaggerated. Next the Ethiopians plan for Ras Kassa and Ras Seyoum to split the Italian army in two and isolate the Italian I Corps and III Corps in Mekele and for Ras Mulugeta to Amba Aradam to crush both Corps. After Ras Imru retook Adwa he would invade Eritrea. December 17 De Bono recieves state telegram 13181, and is replaced as Marshall of Italy by Pietro Badoglio. December 18 Harvest of Gold. December 19 Thursday Daily Mirror SIR S. HOARE RESIGNS. December 21 Friday morning 21 aeroplanes bomb Dessie. December 22 Ras Seyoum retakes Abbi Addi. December 30 Red Cross unit at Dolo is bombed, Egyptian ambulance at Bulall attacked and Egyptian medical unit at Daggah Bur. December Julian arrives back in New York on the Cunard liner Aquitania. The Emperor attends a church service after the bombardment of Dessie The Emperor is named man of the year by TIME weekly magazine.

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Trumps War on the Press Follows the Mussolini and Hitler Playbook

Beneath the madness and the lies of The Year of Trump there remains a constant drumbeat, unyielding and determined. It broke cover on Jan. 22, 2017 when Kellyanne Conway introduced the term alternative facts.

The abasement of language by Donald Trump and his assorted flacks began long before, but this concept was so naked, so novel and so unblinkingly forthright that it established the rules for the assault to come, just as the first salvo of an artillery barrage signals the creation of a new battlefield where there will be many casualties.

And lets face it, the English language has taken a real pounding since then. Lies have poured forth from the White House at an astonishing rate: The Washington Post estimated that in Trumps first 355 days he made more than 2,000 false or misleading claims, averaging five a day.

Trump has spent two years vilifying the dishonest media (including The Daily Beast), even invoking the Nazi chant of enemies of the people. Aided by the alt right zealots at Breitbart, he has successfully persuaded millions of Americans that The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC are seditious forces bent on denigrating and destroying the man they elected.

It is dismaying that it was so easy for him to do this, dismaying that independent journalism of quality is so easily discredited and dismaying that none of this seems to trouble the Republican Party.

And lets be clear: The protection of independent journalism isnt something that a lot of politiciansor a good number of the populationreally care about. Yet, in the end, it has really been a strong year for journalism. In particular, two papers, The New York Times and Washington Post, have re-established themselves as bulwarks against abuses of power, as they were at the time of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate.

Why have these two newspapers in particular once more demonstrated the best of American journalism? Its partly luck. The Post was basically saved by Jeff Bezos whose deep pockets have restored the resources of the newsroom. Under the editorship of Marty Baron they were positioned to seize the Trump moment and rediscovered the art of investigative reporting. Similarly the Times passed through a period in which it struggled to find a new business model for the digital age and eventually found it, enabling its Washington newsroom to become competitive again.

This underlines the fragile dependency of journalism on enlightened patronageon who owns a newspaper and particularly who owns the two papers that are regarded as national in prestige and potency together with the editorial independence and authority that that position requires. For all its fine reporting over the last year The Wall Street Journal does not have that kind of reputational backbone because it is owned by Rupert Murdoch, blatantly a Trump stooge.

But the battle is not yet won, and will not be without eternal vigilance. To realize the gravity of where we are now we need more context than is provided by recent history, we need to look at the history of Italy in the 1920s and Germany in the 1930s. In both nations tyrants arose who on the way to seizing power found it remarkably easy to denigrate and destroy independent journalism.

In Italy, Benito Mussolini came to power in October 1922. At the age of 39 he was the youngest ever prime minister, charismatic and full of energy. He was also careful to move slowly as, almost by stealth, he built a new illiberal state. In a country that for years had lacked unity he proposed a new focus for nationalism: himself. He was Italy. He described a parliament made impotent by its own factionalism a gathering of old fossils. Parliaments powers and the rights of a free press were stripped away.

The people, Mussolini said in July 1924, on the innumerable occasions when I have spoken with them close at hand have never asked me to free them from a tyranny which they do not feel because it does not exist. They have asked me for railways, houses, drains, bridges, water, light and roads. In that year the fascists won more than 65 percent of the vote in national elections.

Mussolinis absolute hold on power was made clear on Jan. 3, 1925, when he said: I and I alone assume the political, moral and historic responsibility for everything that has happened. Italy wants peace and quiet, work and calm. I will give these things with love if possible and with force if necessary.

As the editor, successively, of two newspapers in Milan and with a talent for populist polemic Mussolini had skillfully used the press for his own ends. Now he made sure nobody else would follow his example. Within a few years most of Italys newspapers were suppressed or put under party control. Some smaller newspapers claiming to be independent were still tolerated to give the appearance of freedom of opinion but they were a fig leaf to cover the end of press freedom. Without any effective challenge Mussolinis megalomania flourished. The crowds who gathered for his speeches cried Duce, Duce, Duce! We are yours to the end.

None of the ministers, officials and party secretaries around him were safe from his caprice. He was always right and anyone who contradicted him was fired. Mussolini was, simultaneously, prime minister, foreign minister, minister of the interior, commander in chief of the militia, and minister for the whole military, army, navy, and air force.

Some smaller newspapers claiming to be independent were still tolerated to give the appearance of freedom of opinion but they were a fig leaf to cover the end of press freedom.

These flagrant excesses of the founder of European fascism were later to seem buffoonish against the cold-blooded terror machine that Adolf Hitler built, just as rapidly, in Germany. But there was nothing comical about the 1920s for Italians: they had succumbed very readily to a maniac, and a maniac who understood that the state should control all propaganda (which is, after all, an Italian word) down to details such as decreeing that the national tennis team should wear black shirts.

In Germany the man who would go down in history as the evil genius of alternative facts, Joseph Goebbels, was appointed Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda on March 14, 1933little more than a month after Hitler came to power in Berlin.

Goebbels said he wanted a ministry that was National Socialist [Nazi] by birth.

To staff it he was smart enough to tap into one of the most corrosive influences on the national mood at the time: a grudge, widely held, that Germanys descent into economic chaos had left many of the countrys best educated young people out of well-paid government jobs. From this group Goebbels recruited party zealots who were notably younger and smarter than other Nazi officialshe specified that he wanted those who displayed ardor, enthusiasm, untarnished idealism. (Watching the instant classic encounter between CNNs Jake Tapper and Trumps senior adviser for policy, Stephen Miller, suggests that Miller would have been a perfect recruit.)

Goebbels priority was to exert immediate control of the pressthe press, he instructed his staff, had to be a piano, so to speak, in the hands of the government. Germanys newspapers had been messengers of decay that were harmful to the beliefs, customs and national pride of good Germans.

Within a year all of Goebbels goals were achieved. Three previously independent news services were merged into one state-directed national news agency, the German News Service. All journalism was subjected to the policy of Gleichschaltungmeaning that they had to toe the party line on all issues.

A piano, so to speak, in the hands of the government.

Joseph Gobbels on the press

Previously newspaper publishers had been the legal entity responsible for everything that was published. Goebbels issued the Editor Statute that made editors equally accountable and any editor who resisted Gleichschaltung could be removed and, if particularly recalcitrant, would be sent to a concentration camp.

However, as had Mussolini, Goebbels recognized that the German press should be left with a fig leaf of apparent independence. One great liberal newspaper that happened to have an international following, the Frankfurter Zeitung, was allowed to remain publishing until 1943. Its editors grew expert at a kind of coded reporting with a semblance of neutrality that allowed experienced readers to sense what was really going on.

Two new and growingly important news outlets, radio and cinema newsreels, were put totally under Goebbels control: We make no bones about it, he said, the radio belongs to us, to no one else! And we will place the radio at the service of our idea, and no other idea shall be expressed through it.

The collapse of media independence was rapid and complete. But, as with all historical comparisons, this one can be pushed either too far or too little. Plainly America in 2018 is not the Europe of the 1930s and liberal paranoia in itself is not a sound basis for assessing just how dangerous an assault on journalism may turn out to be.

In 1933 Hitler was at the threshold of creating the instruments of a terror state. We are nowhere near that point. But what is striking now is how friendless the press was. Nobody fought the Goebbels takeover. Mussolini had identified and seized the same opportunity, finding it easy to issue edicts that closed down critical newspapers on the grounds of sedition.

This might seem astonishing in a country like Germany that had one of Europes most deeply rooted intelligentsias. But the universities were quiescent, the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy and the barons of industry were all tired of the Weimar Republics violent polarization between the fascists and the communists and for them press freedom was secondary to personal interests like jobs and, for the industrialists, to the fortunes to be made from re-armament.

Of course Trump has little if any grasp of European history and probably only the vaguest idea of who Goebbels was but his use of tweets reflects one of Goebbels basic tenets about propaganda: Berlin needs sensations as a fish needs water. Any political propaganda that fails to recognize that will miss its target.

So it happens that when it comes to news management Trump has pulled off something that Goebbels would applaud. He has made himself the Great Dictator of the news cycle. To do this he didnt need to knowingly emulate anyone in the propaganda arts because he is directed by his two dominant personal traits: narcissism and paranoia.

Almost every event is refracted through his own response to it, its media lifespan no longer than can be held in his own gnat-like attention span. His tweets are so bizarre, unhinged and frequent that they effectively confuse and distract much of the competing daily coverage. What seems aberrant at 6 p.m. suddenly seems the new normal by 7 p.m. (As Ron Rosenbaum powerfully demonstrates writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, getting people to readily accept the aberrant as normal was one of Hitlers most effective early tactics.)

He has made himself the Great Dictator of the news cycle. To do this he didnt need to knowingly emulate anyone in the propaganda arts because he is directed by his two dominant personal traits: narcissism and paranoia.

And when Trump faces a news narrative that he cant derail, like the Mueller investigation, he sees it as a violation of his own powers, as he imagines them to be rather than as they really exist under the constitution.

Mussolini, very early in his rule, did the same thing, equating himself with the nation and regarding any insult to him as an insult to Italy. In Trumps mind it his base that exclusively represents the nationa belief constantly reinforced by Fox News for whom that base is a ratings gold mine. Trump and his lackeys on Fox have succeeded in equating respect for the kind of truth-telling that is built on learning and the ability to marshal facts with a simple demographic: its the exclusive province of metropolitan elites.

This tactic is based, at least in part, on a condition described by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist. He calls it cognitive ease in which humans tend to avoid facts that are uncomfortable or require work to understand.

Goebbels understood that the reinforcement of prejudice was an intoxicating weapon of propaganda. Fed the right message, aggrieved and resentful minorities could be made to coalesce into a critical mass of activists. The Trump base has been built on this principle, and feels grateful to be led by such a man with whom they readily identify, even though his real interests (personal enrichment) are the opposite of theirs.

But perhaps the weirdest side of Trumps perception of his role and office is that in his mind his fate and that of the mainstream media are locked together in a life or death embrace. This is new. No demagogue in recent history has seen the effectiveness of his role being interdependent with a force that for most of the time he purports to despise.

Consider how he framed this belief when Michael Schmidt of The New York Times recorded one of the most bizarre interviews with him in the Grill Room of his West Palm Beach golf club during the holidays:

Were going to win another four years for a lot of reasons, most importantly because our country is starting to do well again and were being respected again. But another reason that Im going to win another four years is because newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if Im not there because without me their ratings are going down the tubes. Without me, The New York Times will indeed be not the failing New York Times, but the failed New York Times. So they basically have to let me win. And eventually probably six months before the election theyll be loving me because theyre saying, Please, please, dont lose Donald Trump.

Most of the rest of that interview was delusional drivel that provided an alarming insight into his mental processesin fact, it served as a kind of impromptu warm-up for the revelations of Michael Wolffs book, a kind of journalistic bomb cyclone.

What Wolff delivered between the covers of a book was an explosive concentration of reporting that isnt achievable through the daily news cycle. His method is really no different than that used by Bob Woodward in his books, notably on the origins of the Iraq war, where whole scenes are reconstructed with dialog without attribution, but carry the ring of authenticity. The difference in public impact is that Woodward was reporting after the event whereas Wolff delivers as, so to speak, the crime is still in progress.

Some sniffy journalists, David Brooks surprisingly among them, have complained that Wolff doesnt operate according to their understanding of journalistic standards. Well, for one thing he doesnt have the resources of a paper to support him. And he also demonstrates another vital point about the scope of journalism: sometimes the force of one is equal to the force of hundreds. At this moment we need both kinds of consequential reporting, the collective effort of a newsroom and the disruptive brilliance of the loner.

Calling out the lies hasnt stopped Trump. His motives may differ from those of Mussolini and Hitler. Hes not ideological. In his case autocratic instincts come as a psychological motor in the pursuit of greed and the protection of his unbridled and ludicrous ego. The lack of ideology doesnt make him any less dangerous, though.

Trump has no time for scruples. With his lawyers unable to kill Wolffs book (can book burning be far off in his mind?) he once again threatened to ramp up the libel laws to prevent the defamation of people like him. Hes trying to block the merger of AT&T and Time Warner in the hope that Time Warner will be forced to divest itself of his bte noir, CNN, hoping that someone more sympathetic to him will take it over, although Rupert Murdoch, the obvious candidate, says hes not interested, and he has been clearly looking for ways to punish Jeff Bezos for his re-arming of The Washington Post in changes to the tax code that would hit Amazon.

No demagogue in recent history has seen the effectiveness of his role being interdependent with a force that for most of the time he purports to despise.

All this should be very alarming, but Trump is operating in a worryingly permissive arena. There isnt, it seems, a stable public standard of truth in todays America. This is a culture where scientific truths are dismissed if inconvenient and ignorance is nourished. (Forty-three percent of Republicans believe that climate change is not happening.) One of the foundations of secular Western polities is that truth can be sustained only by honesty in language, that language must be used to interrogate information critically, no matter what its source.

In this struggle journalism is our last dependable line of defense. Its no exaggeration to say that the health, security, and integrity of the republic is at stake. History is an unforgiving judge and, just as the history of Europe in the 1920s and 30s reveals shameful failures in democratic institutions Americas current crisis will be judged by how effectively, or otherwise, the institutions designed to protect democracy worked.

No institution can achieve this without being able to operate on a generally agreed foundation of facts, of which the single most consequential fact is that the president is patently unfit for office. The second is that he is being kept in office by the obsequious Republican leadership who remain supine even after the outrage of the shithole outburst.

Principal among these are toadies like Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina who, rather than pursue the investigation of Trump would rather pursue the whistleblower, the British former spy Christopher Steele. Other Republicans are calling for Muellers investigation to be purgedusing a term that Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin all employed to protect themselves. Then there is Ayn Rands posthumous wrecking ball, House Speaker Paul Ryan, who delivered a groveling encomium when Trump signed the so-called tax reform bill, thanking him for exquisite presidential leadership.

There is a word for people like these. Its a word that needs to be revived from earlier use: Quisling. It was first used as a general pejorative early in 1933 as Hitler came to power, identifying a Norwegian fascist named Vidkun Quisling who modeled his party on the Nazis and, when the Nazis invaded Norway in 1940, urged collaboration with them.

As is so often the case it was Winston Churchill who gave it a permanent meaning when, in 1941, he said: A vile race of Quislingsto use a new word which will carry the scorn of mankind down the centuriesis hired to fawn upon the conqueror, to collaborate in his designs and to enforce his rule upon their fellow countrymen while groveling low themselves.

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A Cycling Legends Secret War Mission: Saving Italys Jews

Italy and bicyclesthe first thing they bring to mind is likely the neo-realist masterpiece The Bicycle Thieves, which will soon celebrate its 75th anniversary. But theres another story thats even more powerful and all the more remarkable for being true: the tale of Gino Bartali, Italys wartime cycling champ andunbeknownst to all but a fewsecret agent for the Italian Resistance who saved hundreds of Jews from the Holocaust.

Gino Bartali was born in 1914, the son of a laborer and an embroiderer, in Ponte a Ema, a village along the Arno River a few miles outside Florence. When he turned 11, Bartali had to commute to school and bought a used bicycle to make the trip. As he rode, he discovered an unusual talent for cycling: He regularly blew past other riders, despite his poor equipment. At first, even I was astounded and embarrassed by this discovery, Bartali wrote in his memoirs. When he took a part-time job as a bike mechanic in town, his ability was spotted by his boss, who convinced Bartalis reluctant parents to let him pursue the sport competitively. By the time he was 17, he had won his first race; he turned pro at 21, catching a wave of intense interest in cycling among Italian sports fans who followed the champions and their lives in the greatest of detail. In 1936, Bartali won the Giro dItaliaItalys version of the Tour de Franceand became a national hero. Even the pope became a bartalini, as his fans were called.

His victory brought him to the attention of Benito Mussolini, who had made physical fitness and sports a centerpiece of his political program. I dont want a nation of mandolin players, Il Duce famously quipped. I want a population of fighters. Italians had claimed the heavyweight boxing championship, the World Cup, and second place in the medal count at the Los Angeles Olympics. Now Mussolini wanted a victory in the Tour de Franceto prove the racial superiority of the Italian people. Bartali would represent his nation at the 2,740-mile race across the Pyrenees and Alps in 1938. In an epic performance in which he displayed what he viewed as critical to a cyclists successa profound capacity for suffering; at one point he began coughing up bloodBartali wore the race-leader yellow jersey through the streets of Paris to victory at the Parc des Princes velodrome.

With the win, Bartali became the most celebrated athlete in Europe. The international press swarmed him. Triumphant Italians were expected to dedicate their victory to Il Duce, as boxer Primo Carnera had done. But Bartali was a devout Catholicand the church was the only force strong enough to counter the Fascists, who were militantly anti-religious. Bartali was an active member of Catholic Action, an association of laypeople with such powerful support that Mussolini, who had shut down the YMCA and the Boy Scouts, could never seriously attack it.

Bartali refused to be used for Fascist propaganda, and so thanked only his fans for their support and then laid his victory wreath before a Madonna at the Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. The snub to Mussolini did not go unnoticed. Plans for him to present Bartali with a medal were canceled, and newspapers were instructed to ignore his homecoming. One French journalist was stunned: Not a cat at the train station. No organized reception. Nothing. I dont understand. And the risk of isolation and ostracism was not the only one Bartali faced for his bravery. The only other Italian to win the Tour, Ottavio Bottecchia, had also spoken out against the regime. He had died nine years earlier under mysterious circumstances during a training run.

The year 1938 was also a dark turning point for the Jews of Italy. Their community in Rome was the oldest in the world and Jews had been well-integrated into Italian society for centuries. But seeking to move closer to Nazi Germany, Mussolini played host to Hitler and enacted anti-Semitic laws, banning Jews from certain professions, from schools, and depriving them of key rights, such as the right to own property. Foreign-born Jews were stripped of their citizenship and placed in internment camps.

Although most Italian Jews were physically unharmed, the persecution continued until the Allied invasion of Italy in the summer of 1943 toppled Mussolini and an armistice was declared. Within days, however, German forces occupied the north of the country and reinstated Il Duce, dividing Italy in two as fierce fighting continued. The threat became dire as the Nazis took immediate action more deadly than the legalization of discrimination under Mussolini. The Germans and their Fascist allies began arresting Jews and sending them east to death camps. On Oct. 16, 1943, even the Jews of Rome were rounded up.

This black event pushed another prominent anti-Fascist into action. The cardinal of Florence, Elia Angelo della Costawho had pointedly refused to participate in festivities held for Hitlers visitsummoned Bartali to the citys storied Duomo. Della Costa, in collaboration with a local rabbi and the underground Jewish Desalem agency, was developing a network of hiding places in convents, monasteries, and other church properties, including the basilica of St. Francis at Assisi, where the bishop protected some 300 Jews seeking to escape the Nazis. The 71-year-old cardinal was a spiritual mentor of Bartalis and had presided over his wedding and baptized his son. Now he had a special mission for him.

When Italy had declared war on France and Britain three years earlier, Bartali had been drafted but spared front-line duty due to an irregular heartbeat. Instead, he was assigned to be a messenger for the army, a stroke of luck that allowed him to continue to use his bicycle and to race. Della Costas clandestine network was working to help Jews escape to safety in the south or into neutral countries. Crucial to its success was the ability to get forged identity papers and other false documents to the terrified refugees in hiding. As one of the only men in Italy with a legitimate excuse to bike long distances and official permission to do so, Bartali wouldDella Costa saidbe the perfect courier. The cyclist accepted the assignment.

Clad in his national racing uniform, Bartali hid forged visas underneath his seat in his bicycle frame, often unbeknownst to his training partners. He rode thousands of miles from Rome to Venice to Genoa, delivering his lifesaving contraband, often without meeting its ultimate recipient. On his rides, Bartali was also able to obtain forward intelligence and coordinate with smugglers working to move Jews across the border. At police checkpoints, the conversation inevitably turned to cycling and Bartali would ask the guards not to touch his bike, explaining that all the parts had been adjusted precisely to maximize his speed. Had his cargo been discovered, Bartali could have been executed on the spot.

In an even more dramatic ploy, Bartali would sometimes arrive in his national racing colors at the train station at Terantola, a major transit point. Without fail, a large crowd of admirers would notice the champion and surround him, distracting the police, who headed into the mix to maintain order. In a well-coordinated action, underground partisans would simultaneously move Jews to a different train with lightning speed, sending them south to freedom instead of north to concentration camps. And Bartali not only delivered documents and created diversions. He once personally brought a group of refugees to safety in the Swiss Alps by concealing them in a wagon behind his bicycleunder the pretense that it was an endurance-training technique.

Bartali also did his part in hiding his Jewish neighbors. When he was a young mechanic in Florence, he had met a a Jewish lumber importer from Moldova named Giacomo Goldenberg, who was a friend of his cousin. After the passage of the anti-Jewish laws, Goldenberg had quietly lived with his family in a villa in the hills above Florence. The cousin had visited him often and Bartali had on one occasion even brought Goldenbergs son Giorgio a blue bicycle. Following the Nazi occupation, Bartali hid Goldenberg and his family in an apartment he owned in the city, soon moving them to a hidden basement where they sheltered until the liberation the next year. He not only saved our lives but he saved the lives of hundreds of people, recalled Giorgio Goldenberg. He put his own life and his familys in danger in order to do so.

By 1944, with the Second World War raging, sporting events were largely canceled, and Bartalis cover began to look suspicious. He was hauled in for interrogation at the infamous Villa Tristethe House of Sorrow in Florence where Major Mario Carita, sadistic head of Mussolinis feared Department of Special Services, tortured prisoners and extracted confessions to real or imagined crimes (often with Neopolitan music playing on a piano). Carita was convinced Bartali was helping the Vatican in anti-Fascist activities despite his denials. By coincidence, one his questioners, Olesindo Salmi, had been his commanding officer during Bartalis wartime service. Salmi was the cycling fan who had allowed Bartali to ride a bicycle instead of a scooter to stay in condition. Now, the interrogator vouched for the prisoner: He doesnt lie, Salmi declared. Carita let Bartali go without further investigation.

After the war, an exhausted Bartali returned to competition. The Iron Man of Tuscany went on to win the Tour de France again in 1948, becoming the oldest man to do sodramatically surging ahead of the pack at the Catholic pilgrimage town of Lourdes. His victory, occurring during a period of dangerous civil strife in post-war Italy, united Italians and helped diffuse somewhat a political powder keg.

Bartali rarely talked about his work during the war, sharing stories with his son Andreabut swearing him to secrecy. On occasion, he would visit paintings by Giotto at a monastery at Assisi, one of the focal points of the Underground, for a quiet moment of reflection. Do good, but dont talk about it, he told his son. I dont want to talk about it, or act like a hero. Heroes are those who died, who were injured, who spent many months in prison. When Bartali died, his obituary mentioned the unifying effect of his Tour de France victory in 1948 and in passing his work with the partisans. It made no mention of his aid to his Jewish countrymen. His headstone does not even mention his athletic achievements. He was very modest about it, noted another friend. He held a profound sense that so many had suffered in much greater capacity than he had. He didnt want to be in the spotlight or diminish the contributions of others.

It is estimated that Bartali was responsible for saving 800 people and that the network he was a part of rescued 9,000. In 2013, 14 years after his passing, Bartali was given the honor of being named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel. His son spoke at the ceremony. I want to be remembered for my sporting achievements, Andrea Bartali recalled his father telling him. Real heroes are others, those who have suffered in their soul, in their heart, in their spirit, in their mind, for their loved ones. Those are the real heroes. Im just a cyclist.

This May, for the first time, the Giro dItalia will start outside of Europe. The race will begin in Jerusalem and the first three stages will be held throughout Israel before moving on to Italy. Bartali, no doubt, would have been proud that a race that defined his life and gave him the opportunity to save so many would bring its message of peace to the Holy Land that united him and those he rescued.

At a time when so many in the world are turning on each other in anger, Bartalis actions deserve to be recognized. Good is something you do, not something you talk about, he said. Some medals are pinned to your soul, not to your jacket.

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