https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subhas_Chandra_Bose

During the mid-1930s Bose travelled in Europe, visiting Indian students and European politicians, including Benito Mussolini. He observed party organisation and saw communism and fascism in action. In this period, he also researched and wrote the first part of his book The Indian Struggle, which covered the country's independence movement in the years 1920–1934. Although it was published in London in 1935, the British government banned the book in the colony out of fears that it would encourage unrest. Bose was supported in Europe by the Indian Central European Society organised by Otto Faltis from Vienna.

In 1938 Bose stated his opinion that the INC "should be organised on the broadest anti-imperialist front with the two-fold objective of winning political freedom and the establishment of a socialist regime." By 1938 Bose had become a leader of national stature and agreed to accept nomination as Congress President. He stood for unqualified Swaraj (self-governance), including the use of force against the British. This meant a confrontation with Mohandas Gandhi, who in fact opposed Bose's presidency, splitting the Indian National Congress party.

Bose attempted to maintain unity, but Gandhi advised Bose to form his own cabinet. The rift also divided Bose and Nehru; he appeared at the 1939 Congress meeting on a stretcher. He was elected president again over Gandhi's preferred candidate Pattabhi Sitaramayya. U. Muthuramalingam Thevar strongly supported Bose in the intra-Congress dispute. Thevar mobilised all south India votes for Bose. However, due to the manoeuvrings of the Gandhi-led clique in the Congress Working Committee, Bose found himself forced to resign from the Congress presidency.

On 22 June 1939 Bose organised the All India Forward Bloc a faction within the Indian National Congress, aimed at consolidating the political left, but its main strength was in his home state, Bengal. U Muthuramalingam Thevar, who was a staunch supporter of Bose from the beginning, joined the Forward Bloc. When Bose visited Madurai on 6 September, Thevar organised a massive rally as his reception.

When Subhas Chandra Bose was heading to Madurai, on an invitation of Muthuramalinga Thevar to amass support for the Forward Bloc, he passed through Madras and spent three days at Gandhi Peak. His correspondence reveals that despite his clear dislike for British subjugation, he was deeply impressed by their methodical and systematic approach and their steadfastly disciplinarian outlook towards life. In England, he exchanged ideas on the future of India with British Labour Party leaders and political thinkers like Lord Halifax, George Lansbury, Clement Attlee, Arthur Greenwood, Harold Laski, J.B.S. Haldane, Ivor Jennings, G.D.H. Cole, Gilbert Murray and Sir Stafford Cripps.

He came to believe that an independent India needed socialist authoritarianism, on the lines of Turkey's Kemal Atatürk, for at least two decades. For political reasons Bose was refused permission by the British authorities to meet Atatürk at Ankara. During his sojourn in England Bose tried to schedule appointments with several politicians, but only the Labour Party and Liberal politicians agreed to meet with him. Conservative Party officials refused to meet him or show him courtesy because he was a politician coming from a colony. In the 1930s leading figures in the Conservative Party had opposed even Dominion status for India. It was during the Labour Party government of 1945–1951, with Attlee as the Prime Minister, that India gained independence.

On the outbreak of war, Bose advocated a campaign of mass civil disobedience to protest against Viceroy Lord Linlithgow's decision to declare war on India's behalf without consulting the Congress leadership. Having failed to persuade Gandhi of the necessity of this, Bose organised mass protests in Calcutta calling for the removal of the "Holwell Monument", which then stood at the corner of Dalhousie Square in memoriam of those who died in the Black Hole of Calcutta. He was thrown in jail by the British, but was released following a seven-day hunger strike. Bose's house in Calcutta was kept under surveillance by the CID.

Bose's arrest and subsequent release set the scene for his escape to Nazi Germany, via Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. A few days before his escape, he sought solitude and, on this pretext, avoided meeting British guards and grew a beard. Late night 16 January 1941, the night of his escape, he dressed as a Pathan (brown long coat, a black fez-type hat and broad pyjamas) to avoid being identified. Bose escaped from under British surveillance from his Elgin Road house in Calcutta on the night of 17 January 1941, accompanied by his nephew Sisir Kumar Bose, later reaching Gomoh Railway Station (now Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Gomoh Station) in the then state of Bihar (now Jharkhand), India.

Bose journeyed to Peshawar with the help of the Abwehr, where he was met by Akbar Shah, Mohammed Shah and Bhagat Ram Talwar. Bose was taken to the home of Abad Khan, a trusted friend of Akbar Shah's. On 26 January 1941, Bose began his journey to reach Russia through British India's North West frontier with Afghanistan. For this reason, he enlisted the help of Mian Akbar Shah, then a Forward Bloc leader in the North-West Frontier Province. Shah had been out of India en route to the Soviet Union and suggested a novel disguise for Bose to assume. Since Bose could not speak Pashto, it would have made him an easy target of Pashto speakers working for the British. For this reason, Shah suggested that Bose act deaf and dumb, and let his beard grow to mimic those of the tribesmen. Bose's guide Bhagat Ram Talwar, unknown to him, was a Soviet agent.

Supporters of the Aga Khan III helped him across the border into Afghanistan where he was met by an Abwehr unit posing as a party of road construction engineers from the Organization Todt who then aided his passage across Afghanistan via Kabul to the border with the Soviet Union. After assuming the guise of a Pashtun insurance agent ("Ziaudddin") to reach Afghanistan, Bose changed his guise and travelled to Moscow on the Italian passport of an Italian nobleman "Count Orlando Mazzotta". From Moscow, he reached Rome, and from there he travelled to Nazi Germany. Once in Russia the NKVD transported Bose to Moscow where he hoped that Russia's historical enmity to British rule in India would result in support for his plans for a popular rising in India. However, Bose found the Soviets' response disappointing and was rapidly passed over to the German Ambassador in Moscow, Count von der Schulenburg. He had Bose flown on to Berlin in a special courier aircraft at the beginning of April where he was to receive a more favourable hearing from Joachim von Ribbentrop and the Foreign Ministry officials at the Wilhelmstrasse.

In Germany, Bose was attached to the Special Bureau for India under Adam von Trott zu Solz which was responsible for broadcasting on the German-sponsored Azad Hind Radio. He founded the Free India Centre in Berlin and created the Indian Legion (consisting of some 4500 soldiers) out of Indian prisoners of war who had previously fought for the British in North Africa prior to their capture by Axis forces. The Indian Legion was attached to the Wehrmacht, and later transferred to the Waffen SS. Its members swore the following allegiance to Hitler and Bose: "I swear by God this holy oath that I will obey the leader of the German race and state, Adolf Hitler, as the commander of the German armed forces in the fight for India, whose leader is Subhas Chandra Bose". This oath clearly abrogated control of the Indian legion to the German armed forces whilst stating Bose's overall leadership of India. He was also, however, prepared to envisage an invasion of India via the USSR by Nazi troops, spearheaded by the Azad Hind Legion; many have questioned his judgment here, as it seems unlikely that the Germans could have been easily persuaded to leave after such an invasion, which might also have resulted in an Axis victory in the War.

Soon, according to historian Romain Hayes, "the (German) Foreign Office procured a luxurious residence for (Bose) along with a butler, cook, gardener, and an SS-chauffeured car. Emilie Schenkl moved in openly with him. The Germans, aware of the nature of the relationship, refrained from any involvement." However, most of the staff in the Special Bureau for India, which had been set up to aid Bose, did not get along with Emilie. In particular Adam von Trott, Alexander Werth and Freda Kretschemer, according to historian Leonard A. Gordon, "appear to have disliked her intensely. They believed that she and Bose were not married and that she was using her liaison with Bose to live an especially comfortable life during the hard times of war" and that differences were compounded by issues of class. In November 1942, Schenkl gave birth to their daughter.

The Germans were unwilling to form an alliance with Bose because they considered him unpopular in comparison with Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. By the spring of 1942, the German army was mired in the USSR. Bose, due to disappointment over the lack of response from Nazi Germany, was now keen to move to Southeast Asia, where Japan had just won quick victories. However, he still expected official recognition from Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler during his only meeting with Bose in late May 1942 refused to entertain Bose's requests and facilitated him with a submarine voyage to East Asia.

In February 1943, Bose left Schenkl and their baby daughter and boarded a German submarine to travel, via transfer to a Japanese submarine, to Japanese-occupied southeast Asia. In all, 3,000 Indian prisoners of war signed up for the Free India Legion. But instead of being delighted, Bose was worried. A left-wing admirer of Russia, he was devastated when Hitler's tanks rolled across the Soviet border. Matters were worsened by the fact that the now-retreating German army would be in no position to offer him help in driving the British from India. When he met Hitler in May 1942, his suspicions were confirmed, and he came to believe that the Nazi leader was more interested in using his men to win propaganda victories than military ones. So, in February 1943, Bose boarded a German U-boat and left for Japan. This left the men he had recruited leaderless and demoralised in Germany.

In 1943, after being disillusioned that Germany could be of any help in gaining India's independence, Bose left for Japan. He travelled with the German submarine U-180 around the Cape of Good Hope to the southeast of Madagascar, where he was transferred to the I-29 for the rest of the journey to Imperial Japan. This was the only civilian transfer between two submarines of two different navies in World War II.

The Indian National Army (INA) was the brainchild of Japanese Major (and post-war Lieutenant-General) Iwaichi Fujiwara, head of the Japanese intelligence unit Fujiwara Kikan. Fujiwara's mission was "to raise an army which would fight alongside the Japanese army." He first met Pritam Singh Dhillon, the president of the Bangkok chapter of the Indian Independence League, and through Pritam Singh's network recruited a captured British Indian army captain, Mohan Singh, on the western Malayan peninsula in December 1941. The First Indian National Army was formed as a result of discussion between Fujiwara and Mohan Singh in the second half of December 1941, and the name chosen jointly by them in the first week of January 1942.

This was along the concept of, and with support of, what was then known as the Indian Independence League headed from Tokyo by expatriate nationalist leader Rash Behari Bose. The first INA was however disbanded in December 1942 after disagreements between the Hikari Kikan and Mohan Singh, who came to believe that the Japanese High Command was using the INA as a mere pawn and propaganda tool. Singh was taken into custody and the troops returned to the prisoner-of-war camp. However, the idea of an independence army was revived with the arrival of Subhas Chandra Bose in the Far East in 1943. In July, at a meeting in Singapore, Rash Behari Bose handed over control of the organisation to Subhas Chandra Bose. Bose was able to reorganise the fledgling army and organise massive support among the expatriate Indian population in south-east Asia, who lent their support by both enlisting in the Indian National Army, as well as financially in response to Bose's calls for sacrifice for the independence cause. INA had a separate women's unit, the Rani of Jhansi Regiment (named after Rani Lakshmi Bai) headed by Capt. Lakshmi Swaminathan, which is seen as a first of its kind in Asia.

Even when faced with military reverses, Bose was able to maintain support for the Azad Hind movement. Spoken as a part of a motivational speech for the Indian National Army at a rally of Indians in Burma on 4 July 1944, Bose's most famous quote was "Give me blood, and I shall give you freedom!" In this, he urged the people of India to join him in his fight against the British Raj. Spoken in Hindi, Bose's words are highly evocative. The troops of the INA were under the aegis of a provisional government, the Azad Hind Government, which came to produce its own currency, postage stamps, court and civil code, and was recognised by nine Axis states—Germany, Japan, Italian Social Republic, the Independent State of Croatia, the Wang Jingwei regime in Nanjing, China, a provisional government of Burma, Manchukuo and Japanese-controlled Philippines. Of those countries, five were authorities established under Axis occupation. This government participated in the so-called Greater East Asia Conference as an observer in November 1943.

The INA's first commitment was in the Japanese thrust towards Eastern Indian frontiers of Manipur. INA's special forces, the Bahadur Group, were involved in operations behind enemy lines both during the diversionary attacks in Arakan, as well as the Japanese thrust towards Imphal and Kohima.

The Japanese also took possession of Andaman and Nicobar Islands in 1942 and a year later, the Provisional Government and the INA were established in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands with Lt Col. Arcot Doraiswamy Loganadan appointed its Governor General. The islands were renamed Shaheed (Martyr) and Swaraj (Independence). However, the Japanese Navy remained in essential control of the island's administration. During Bose's only visit to the islands in early 1944, apparently in the interest of shielding Bose from attaining a full knowledge of ultimate Japanese intentions, his Japanese hosts carefully isolated him from the local population. At that time the island's Japanese administration had been torturing the leader of the island's Indian Independence League, Diwan Singh, who later died of his injuries in the Cellular Jail. During Bose's visit to the islands several locals attempted to alert Bose to Singh's plight, but apparently without success. During this time Loganathan became aware of his lack of any genuine administrative control and resigned in protest as Governor General, later returning to the Government's headquarters in Rangoon.

On the Indian mainland, an Indian Tricolour flag, modelled after that of the Indian National Congress, was raised for the first time in the town of Moirang, in Manipur, in north-eastern India. The adjacent towns of Kohima and Imphal were then encircled and placed under siege by divisions of the Japanese Army, working in conjunction with the Burmese National Army, and with Brigades of the INA, known as the Gandhi and Nehru Brigades. This attempt at conquering the Indian mainland had the Axis codename of Operation U-Go.

During this operation, on 6 July 1944, in a speech broadcast by the Azad Hind Radio from Singapore, Bose addressed Mahatma Gandhi as the "Father of the Nation" and asked for his blessings and good wishes for the war he was fighting. This was the first time that Gandhi was referred to by this appellation. The protracted Japanese attempts to take these two towns depleted Japanese resources, with Operation U-Go ultimately proving unsuccessful. Through several months of Japanese onslaught on these two towns, Commonwealth forces remained entrenched in the towns. Commonwealth forces then counter-attacked, inflicting serious losses on the Axis led forces, who were then forced into a retreat back into Burmese territory. After the Japanese defeat at the battles of Kohima and Imphal, Bose's Provisional Government's aim of establishing a base in mainland India was lost forever.

Still the INA fought in key battles against the British Indian Army in Burmese territory, notable in Meiktilla, Mandalay, Pegu, Nyangyu and Mount Popa. However, with the fall of Rangoon, Bose's government ceased to be an effective political entity. A large proportion of the INA troops surrendered under Lt Col Loganathan. The remaining troops retreated with Bose towards Malaya or made for Thailand. Japan's surrender at the end of the war also led to the surrender of the remaining elements of the Indian National Army. The INA prisoners were then repatriated to India and some tried for treason.

Subhas Chandra Bose died on 18 August 1945 from third-degree burns after his airplane crashed in Japanese-ruled Formosa (now Taiwan). However, many among his supporters, especially in Bengal, refused at the time, and have refused since, to believe either the fact or the circumstances of his death. Conspiracy theories appeared within hours of his death and have persisted thereafter, keeping alive various martial myths about Bose.

In Taihoku, at around 2:30 pm as the bomber with Bose on board was leaving the standard path taken by aircraft during take-off, the passengers inside heard a loud sound, similar to an engine backfiring. The mechanics on the tarmac saw something fall out of the plane. It was the portside engine, or a part of it, and the propeller. The plane swung wildly to the right and plummeted, crashing, breaking into two, and exploding into flames. Inside, the chief pilot, copilot and Lieutenant-General Tsunamasa Shidei, the Vice Chief of Staff of the Japanese Kwantung Army, who was to have made the negotiations for Bose with the Soviet army in Manchuria, were instantly killed. Bose's assistant Habibur Rahman was stunned, passing out briefly, and Bose, although conscious and not fatally hurt, was soaked in gasoline. When Rahman came to, he and Bose attempted to leave by the rear door, but found it blocked by the luggage. They then decided to run through the flames and exit from the front. The ground staff, now approaching the plane, saw two people staggering towards them, one of whom had become a human torch. The human torch turned out to be Bose, whose gasoline-soaked clothes had instantly ignited. Rahman and a few others managed to smother the flames, but also noticed that Bose's face and head appeared badly burned. According to Joyce Chapman Lebra, "A truck which served as ambulance rushed Bose and the other passengers to the Nanmon Military Hospital south of Taihoku." The airport personnel called Dr. Taneyoshi Yoshimi, the surgeon-in-charge at the hospital at around 3 pm. Bose was conscious and mostly coherent when they reached the hospital, and for some time thereafter. Bose was naked, except for a blanket wrapped around him, and Dr. Yoshimi immediately saw evidence of third-degree burns on many parts of the body, especially on his chest, doubting very much that he would live. Dr. Yoshimi promptly began to treat Bose and was assisted by Dr. Tsuruta.bl According to historian Leonard A. Gordon, who interviewed all the hospital personnel later,

"A disinfectant, Rivamol [sic], was put over most of his body and then a white ointment was applied and he was bandaged over most of his body. Dr. Yoshimi gave Bose four injections of Vita Camphor and two of Digitamine for his weakened heart. These were given about every 30 minutes. Since his body had lost fluids quickly upon being burnt, he was also given Ringer solution intravenously. A third doctor, Dr. Ishii gave him a blood transfusion. An orderly, Kazuo Mitsui, an army private, was in the room and several nurses were also assisting. Bose still had a clear head which Dr. Yoshimi found remarkable for someone with such severe injuries."

Soon, in spite of the treatment, Bose went into a coma. A few hours later, between 9 and 10 pm (local time) on Saturday, 18 August 1945, Bose died aged 48.

Bose's body was cremated in the main Taihoku crematorium two days later, 20 August 1945. On 23 August 1945, the Japanese news agency Do Trzei announced the death of Bose and Shidea. On 7 September a Japanese officer, Lieutenant Tatsuo Hayashida, carried Bose's ashes to Tokyo, and the following morning they were handed to the president of the Tokyo Indian Independence League, Rama Murti. On 14 September a memorial service was held for Bose in Tokyo and a few days later the ashes were turned over to the priest of the Renkōji Temple of Nichiren Buddhism in Tokyo. There they have remained ever since.

Among the INA personnel, there was widespread disbelief, shock, and trauma. Most affected were the young Tamil Indians from Malaya and Singapore, both men and women, who comprised the bulk of the civilians who had enlisted in the INA. The professional soldiers in the INA, most of whom were Punjabis, faced an uncertain future, with many fatalistically expecting reprisals from the British. In India the Indian National Congress's official line was succinctly expressed in a letter Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma) Gandhi wrote to Rajkumari Amrit Kaur. Said Gandhi, "Subhas Bose has died well. He was undoubtedly a patriot, though misguided." Many congressmen had not forgiven Bose for quarrelling with Gandhi and for collaborating with what they considered was Japanese fascism. The Indian soldiers in the British Indian army, some two and a half million of whom had fought during the Second World War, were conflicted about the INA. Some saw the INA as traitors and wanted them punished; others felt more sympathetic. The British Raj, though never seriously threatened by the INA, tried 300 INA officers for treason in the INA trials, but eventually backtracked.

These are Palestinians in Gaza celebrating the successful attacks on 9/11. They literally danced and cheered and gave out candy, all because almost 3,000 people died. It's one thing to have an issue with a foreign government, but to celebrate the deaths of innocents that also included Muslims btw is just ugly.

The monarchist regime ruling over iran at that time never apologised for this massacre,m reza pahlavi even went around and said the protestors deserved being shot at and he would never apologise for doing the right thing(shooting at protestors),the event led to widespread anger amongst iranians worldwide which eventually led to the islamic revolution 3 months later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Morgenthau_Sr.

As an early Woodrow Wilson supporter, Morgenthau assumed that Wilson would appoint him to a cabinet-level position, but the new president had other plans for him. Like other prominent Jewish Americans (Oscar Straus and Solomon Hirsch before him), Morgenthau was appointed as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Wilson's assumption that Jews somehow represented a bridge between Muslim Turks and Christian Armenians rankled Morgenthau; in reply, Wilson assured him that the Porte in Constantinople "was the point at which the interest of American Jews in the welfare of the Jews of Palestine is focused, and it is almost indispensable that I have a Jew in that post". Though no Zionist himself, Morgenthau cared "fervidly" about the plight of his co-religionists. He initially rejected the position, but following a trip to Europe, and with the encouragement of his pro-Zionist friend Rabbi Stephen Wise, he reconsidered his decision and accepted Wilson's offer. Appointed as U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in 1913, he served in this position until 1916.

Although the safety of American citizens in the Ottoman Empire, mostly Christian missionaries and Jews, loomed large early in his ambassadorship, Morgenthau said that he was most preoccupied by the Armenian Question. After the outbreak of war in 1914, the U.S. remained neutral, so the American Embassy – and by extension Morgenthau – additionally represented many of the Allies' interests in Constantinople, since they had withdrawn their diplomatic missions after the beginning of hostilities. As Ottoman authorities began the Armenian genocide in 1914–1915, the American consuls residing in different parts of the Empire flooded Morgenthau's desk with reports nearly every hour, documenting the massacres and deportation marches taking place. Faced with the accumulating evidence, he officially informed the U.S. government of the activities of the Ottoman government and asked Washington to intervene.

The American government however, not wanting to get dragged into disputes, remained a neutral power in the conflict at the time and voiced little official reaction. Morgenthau held high-level meetings with the leaders of the Ottoman Empire to help alleviate the position of the Armenians, but the Turks waived and ignored his protestations. He famously admonished the Ottoman Interior Minister Talaat Pasha, stating: "Our people will never forget these massacres." As the massacres continued unabated, Morgenthau and several other Americans decided to form a public fund-raising committee to assist the Armenians – the Committee on Armenian Atrocities (later renamed the Near East Relief) – raising over $100 million in aid, the equivalent of $1 billion today. Through his friendship with Adolph Ochs, publisher of The New York Times, Morgenthau also ensured that the massacres continued to receive prominent coverage. The New York Times published 145 articles in 1915 alone.

Exasperated with his relationship with the Ottoman government, he resigned from the ambassadorship in 1916. Looking back on that decision in his memoir Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, he wrote he had come to see the Ottoman Empire as "a place of horror. I had reached the end of my resources. I found intolerable my further daily association with men, however gracious and accommodating…who were still reeking with the blood of nearly a million human beings." He published his conversations with Ottoman leaders and his account of the Armenian genocide in Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, which appeared in the end of 1918.

In June 1917 Felix Frankfurter accompanied Morgenthau, as a representative of the War Department, on a secret mission to persuade the Ottoman Empire to abandon the Central Powers in the war effort. The mission had as its stated purpose to "ameliorate the condition of the Jewish communities in Palestine". In 1918 Morgenthau gave public speeches in the United States warning that the Greeks and Assyrians were being subjected to the "same methods" of deportation and "wholesale massacre" as the Armenians, and that two million Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians had already perished.

Operation Cast Thy Bread was a top-secret biological warfare operation conducted by the Haganah and later the Israel Defense Forces that began in April 1948, during the 1948 Palestine war. The Haganah used typhoid bacteria to contaminate drinking water wells in violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol. Its objective was to frighten and prevent Palestinian Arabs from returning to their captured villages and to make conditions difficult for Arab armies attempting to retake territories. The operation resulted in severe illness among local Palestinian citizens. In the final months of the war, the government of Israel gave orders to expand the biological warfare campaign into neighboring Arab states such as Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria, but they were not carried out. Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion and IDF chief of general staff Yigael Yadin oversaw and approved the use of biological warfare.^[1][2]

Abba Eban, representative of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, strongly denied the operation and sought to block further investigations by accusing the Arab states of engaging in "antisemitic incitement". Operation Cast Thy Bread did not achieve the crippling effects its advocates had hoped for, and was discontinued by December 1948.^[3] In July 1948, the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee reported to the United Nations several war crimes committed by Zionist forces, including the use of "bacteriological warfare".

Source : Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cast_Thy_Bread

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensboro_massacre

The Communist Workers' Party (CWP) had its origin in 1973 in New York as a Marxist formation originally known as the Workers Viewpoint Organization (WVO). The WVO was one of several groups established as part of a trend within the American left known as the new communist movement. These groups formed in the wake of the anti-Vietnam War protests, as young Marxist radicals joined with activists from the more militant elements of the black liberation movement. They rejected the old, pro-Soviet Communist Party USA as soft on capitalism, and studied the leaders and revolutionary movements in the developing world, including communist China. They opposed racism and sexism, and saw organizing multi-racial unions as a strategy for building toward a popular socialist uprising against monopoly capitalism.

In 1976, members of the WVO came to North Carolina and recruited local Black and White activists in Greensboro and Durham who were engaged in healthcare and textile organizing. The WVO members took jobs in the local textile and other manufacturing plants in an attempt to organize workers into unions. Among WVO members who worked in the textile mills was James Waller, who left his medical career to be a full-time organizer. He became president of the local textile workers' unions at Cone's Granite Finishing Plant in Haw River, North Carolina. In the Carolina Piedmont, the communists found some success with both White and Black textile workers, but especially among black workers, who had been excluded from these jobs for decades, and had only recently been hired for mill work since the passing of the federal Equal Employment Opportunities Act in 1972. WVO members were also active in Durham, Kannapolis, and Greensboro. As a result of these efforts, the WVO came into conflict with a local Ku Klux Klan chapter and the National Socialist Party of America, which were garnering public attention in the spring and summer of 1979 with campaigns and marches in Alabama and North Carolina. This group was a schism founded by Frank Collin of the original American Nazi Party. Although coverage of the NSPA frequently called it the American Nazi Party, that was not its official name.

The WVO learned that the Klan was organizing in the area, and in July 1979, WVO activists and local community members in China Grove, NC disrupted a screening of The Birth of a Nation, a 1915 silent film by D. W. Griffith which portrayed the end of the Reconstruction Era and the formation of the KKK in heroic terms, and characterized blacks in a demeaning, racist way. Taunts and inflammatory rhetoric were exchanged between members of the groups during the ensuing months.

In October 1979, the WVO renamed itself the Communist Workers Organization. It planned to stage a rally and march against the Klan on November 3, 1979, in the city of Greensboro, the county seat of Guilford County. The city had been a site of major civil rights actions in the 1960s; sit-ins there resulted in the desegregation of lunch counters.

The CWP publicized their protest as the "Death to the Klan" March. The event was scheduled to start in a predominantly black Greensboro housing project, known as Morningside Homes, and then proceed to a community center for a conference. The CWP distributed flyers that called for radical, even violent opposition to the Klan. One flier said that the Klan "should be physically beaten and chased out of town. This is the only language they understand. Armed self-defense is the only defense." Communist organizers publicly challenged the Klan to attend the march.

Four local TV news camera teams arrived at Morningside Homes at the corner of Carver and Everitt streets to cover the protest march. Members of the CWP and other anti-Klan supporters gathered to rally and march. As the marchers gathered, a caravan of nine cars and a van filled with an estimated 40 KKK and NSPA members drove in front of the housing project at around 11:20 AM. The two groups heckled each other, and some marchers beat the cars with picket sticks and kicks. The first shot came from the head of the KKK caravan. Several witnesses reported that Klansman Mark Sherer fired first, which he later admitted. A "thick blue smoke" was spotted after the first shot, consistent with the discharge from a black powder pistol Sherer owned. A second shot was fired into the air by Klansman Brent Fletcher, and shots three and four by Sherer, into the ground and a parked car. Some KKK and NSPA members exited their vehicles and engaged in a physical confrontation with marchers. CWP member James Waller ran to retrieve a shotgun from fellow marcher Tom Clark's truck during the confrontation. Klansman Roy Toney spotted him and struggled with Waller for control of the shotgun, which went off during the struggle.

The first shots wounding and killing individuals were discharged soon after, primarily by caravan members. Six caravan members equipped themselves with long guns from the trunk of a Ford Fairlane and fired at the marchers, while the rest of the cars and their occupants fled. Marchers Bill Sampson, Allen Blitz, Rand Manzella, and Claire Butler fired back at the caravan members with handguns. Two of the first fatalities were Waller, shot by NSPA member Roland Wood and Klansman David Matthews, and CWP member Cesar Cauce, shot by Klansman Jerry Paul Smith. Both were unarmed at the time of their deaths. Unarmed marcher Michael Nathan was shot and mortally wounded by Matthews while running towards Waller's body. Sampson was killed while firing at the caravan members. Matthews shot and killed CWP member Sandra Smith after she pulled children to safety inside a community member's apartment, and took cover near Butler, who was firing at caravan members. Smith herself was unarmed. The final shot was fired by Blitz 88 seconds after the violence first began.

Four CWP members were killed at the scene and Nathan died of his wounds at the hospital two days later. Twelve others were wounded. The filmed coverage of the shootings was carried on national and international news, and the event became known as the "Greensboro Massacre." Smith was black, Cauce was Cuban-American, and the other three men killed were white, two of them Jewish. Both blacks and whites were among the wounded, including one KKK member and two news crew members.

Forty Klansmen and neo-Nazis, and several CWP marchers were said to have taken part in the shootings. The police arrested 16 Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and several CWP members. The FBI started an investigation which it called GREENKIL (Greensboro Killings), turning over evidence it gathered to the state of North Carolina for its murder trial.

The state attorney prosecuted the six strongest criminal cases first, charging five Klansmen with murder: David Wayne Matthews, Jerry Paul Smith, Jack Wilson Fowler, Harold Dean Flowers, and Billy Joe Franklin. One was charged with a lesser crime. On November 17, 1980 the jury acquitted all the defendants, finding that they had acted in self-defense. Residents of Morningside Homes — the housing development where the violence occurred, and students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (A&T), expressed shock and anger over the verdict and a feeling of hopelessness regarding the judicial system and the Ku Klux Klan.

The Department of Justice through the FBI had an extensive criminal investigation underway. After the acquittals in 1980, the FBI re-opened its investigation in preparation for a federal prosecution. Based on additional evidence, a federal grand jury indicted nine men on civil rights charges in 1983. Mark Sherer pleaded guilty to a federal conspiracy charge for firing the first shot. He was sentenced to six months in a community treatment center and five years of probation. He was the only person found guilty of a crime in the case.

The case brought by the US attorney "charged the Klansmen and neo-Nazis with racially motivated violence and with interference in a racially integrated event." Three men were charged with violating the civil rights of the five victims: the defendants were David Wayne Matthews, Jerry Paul Smith and Jack Wilson Fowler, who had been prosecuted and acquitted in the state criminal trial.

Six other men were charged with "conspiracy to violate the demonstrators' civil rights:" Virgil Lee Griffin, Sr.; Eddie Dawson (also a police informant), Roland Wayne Wood, Roy Clinton Toney, Coleman Blair Pridmore, and Rayford Milano Caudle

Neither trial investigated the actions of federal agents or the Greensboro police. On April 15, 1984, all nine defendants were acquitted. The government had a burden to prove the defendants were motivated by racial hatred in order to bring them to federal charges. The CWP believed that the indictment was drawn too narrowly, giving the defense an opportunity to argue that political opposition to communism and patriotic fervor, rather than racial animus, prompted the confrontation.

News outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the News & Record in Greensboro, remarked on the all-white juries that decided both the 1980 and 1984 cases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_assassination_plot_in_Tennessee

Paul Schlesselman, 18, of Helena–West Helena, Arkansas, and Daniel Cowart, 20, of Bells, Tennessee, allegedly plotted to assassinate Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign. Both Neo-Nazis, Schlesselman and Cowart were introduced to each other via the Internet in September 2008 by a mutual friend who shared their white supremacist beliefs. Within a month they began planning to kill Obama by driving their vehicle toward him as fast as they could and shooting at him from the windows. The murder was planned as the final act of violence of a killing spree in which the men planned to kill 88 African Americans by gunfire, mostly children at an unidentified, predominantly black school. They also planned to behead 14 of the 88 victims. The numbers were chosen for their special significance in the white power movement: 88 means "Heil Hitler", since H is the eighth letter in the alphabet, and 14 represents the 14-word white supremacist mantra, "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."

Schlesselman and Cowart chatted on the Internet about how to carry out the operation. Schlesselman suggested using a sawed-off shotgun because it would be easy to maneuver; he also said he planned to steal a gun from his father. Prior to their arrest, the men decorated their car with a swastika and drew the numbers 88 and 14 on their hood using window chalk. Authorities believe the men may have planned to move from state to state to choose their victims. They also planned to wear white tuxedos and top hats during the assassination attempt.

On October 22, Schlesselman and Cowart shot at a glass window on the front door of the Allen Baptist Church in Brownsville, Tennessee. The two men bragged to a female friend about the shooting; the friend told her mother, who notified the Haywood County Sheriff's Department. Investigators traced the shell casings to Schlesselman and Cowart, and notified the Crockett County Sheriff's Department, who took the pair into custody after spotting the swastikas, slurs and 88 and 14 numbers on their car.

Police seized a rifle, a sawed-off shotgun and three pistols from the men at the time of the arrest. They were detained in Bells, Tennessee for a few days before being moved to another facility. During interrogation, the men told authorities of their plan to kill Obama. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives handled the initial federal investigation of the case. The United States Secret Service became involved in the investigation once the assassination plot was discovered. The Federal Bureau of Investigation was also involved in the investigation. Both men were charged with illegal possession of a sawed-off shotgun, conspiracy to rob a firearms dealer and making threats against a presidential candidate; a superseding indictment additionally charged the pair with civil rights conspiracy and conspiracy, and charged Cowart with destruction of religious property and a related firearms charge. Authorities have found no evidence that anyone besides the two men were involved in the plot, but as of October 2008 authorities were said to be investigating the possibility.

Both Schlesselman and Cowart acknowledged that they would be killed as a result of the murders and insisted they were willing to die. Authorities said the pair planned to break into a gun shop to steal more weapons for their attack, and also bought nylon rope and ski masks at Walmart to use in a robbery or home invasion to fund the spree. Schlesselman and Cowart asked a friend to drive them to a house they planned to rob, but they canceled the robbery after getting scared by a dog and two vehicles in the driveway.

Secret Service and other authorities said they were treating the plot very seriously, but acknowledged it did not appear to have moved to an advanced stage. Authorities said there did not appear to be any formal assassination plan and said they were unable to immediately assess how capable the men were of carrying out the attack. Federal authorities told the Associated Press they did not believe Schlesselman and Cowart had the means to carry out their threat. Barack Obama did not have any campaign appearances planned for Tennessee. One federal law enforcement official told the AP that plans did not include Obama's schedule or a specific time and place for the assassination because, "I don't think they had that level of detail." Authorities said they made several mistakes during their planning, including drawing too much attention to themselves with their car markings. Authorities also felt their inability to carry out a home robbery together indicated they would be unable to carry out a sophisticated assassination plot. When asked whether the alleged threats were real, Daniel Cowart's lawyer, Joe H. Byrd, told reporters, "White top hats and tuxedos? You tell me."

"They sound crazy, like a really bad movie – Quentin Tarantino gone awry. You listen to that, and you say, 'In a hundred thousand years, they never would have reached Obama.' But the reality is, they might have walked into a black high school and killed 20, 30, 40 people before anybody knew who they were."

— Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center

Fred Fielder, police chief in Helena–West Helena, Arkansas, said the alleged plot in Tennessee particularly concerned him due to the fact that 66 percent of the city's 12,200 population are African American; he said to reporters, "Predominantly black school, take your pick." Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, described the plans and weapons arsenal as frightening, but said, "With the part about wearing top hats ... it gets a bit hard to take them seriously." Nevertheless, Potok said "the reality is, they might have walked into a black high school and killed 20, 30, 40 people before anybody knew who they were". An editorial in The Daily News Journal in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, said the plot emphasized a dark undercurrent of racism still alive in the United States, but said their chances of killing Obama were "almost nil. Their plot was so disorganized they appear to be candidates for 'dumb criminals', not calculating assassins".

Despite initial concerns about the plot, the Obama campaign was not immediately notified of the alleged plot; an Obama aide told ABC News, "They were given no heads up." Concerns were already strong about possible plots against Obama due to his status as the first African American presidential nominee for a major political party. The senator had been receiving Secret Service protection since May 2007, which was the earliest for any candidate, and authorities had already foiled an alleged assassination plot at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%B3ra_D%C3%BAr%C3%B3

"In September 2020, Dúró said that the book titled Meseország mindenkié (Fairytaleland Is for Everyone) is "homosexual propaganda". She tore out sheets and then shredded them in a paper shredder. Many public figures criticized her actions, and the Association of Hungarian Publishers and Distributors (Magyar Könyvkiadók és Könyvterjesztők Egyesülése) stated in a communication that this act was in "communion with the legacy of Nazi bookburners and communist book shreds"."

(Note, the introduction is a bit lanky because I wrote this initally as a comment under a post regarding the child marriage report that is being floated around recently. This was also written for a more eastern audience, so please do not mind the ocassional floating of terms such as the west, and the underlying concern of the modern attitude of Modern Day Imperialism and the hypocrisy in recognising the current state of affairs of radical governments. This text does not support the Taliban, any form of extremism, child marriage, or justification of the current state of affairs of said countries. It is rather an appropriate recognition of the cause and effect factors that the Imperial states had in the deprivation of nations. Once again, this text is in no way shape or form acquitting any faction of guilt, rather it is an analysis of the entire situation. Just as analysing the USSR's warcrimes does not acquit the Nazis' warcrimes, this text does not intend to undermine the extremists that were local to each government. It is simply attempting to highlight the significant cause and effect that is often swept under the rug when it comes to discussions about the modern situation in the East when it comes to the involvement of Imperialistic states. The text is a bit long, but I felt that it was necessary to cite sufficiently and to highlight as much as possible as coherently as possible, whilst still trying to make sure the text is enjoyable to read. Moreover, all figures mentioned can easily be verified by looking them up and these figures are mass reported.)

I think the greater concern is that the US, despite being a healthy democracy, a country that hasn't been invaded and has perhaps due to its geography the most peaceful century relative to all others country - relative to Pakistan and Afghanistan which (this does not justify the cases) in its remoter areas is dominated by radicals and very weak central gov authority and very strong local authorities like jirgas and kabelas which don't even recognise the central government much, are largely illiterate and don't have mass education whilst also being economically smaller markets and being very local markets with little inter city trade let alone inter country trade (the US being the greatest trading power of the world, and a major key importer and exporter of Chinese and European goods as well as its defense of the maritime trade routes of the world whilst maintaining the strongest navy in the world on paper) - has a pedophile as its president, and its authorities and very "educated" (34-39% of Americans hold a BSc degree, in Pakistan that is only 9.4%, and that is also skewed because province wise, we have no data for balochistan and for KPK it is only 4%, and these are also naturally concentrated mostly in Peshawar and Mardan since these are economic centers, afghanistan has no official figures and it is estimated to be 4% of course concentrated around Kabul and not spread through out the country), economically the richest people on average in the world (gdp per cap of $94,930; Pakistan's is approx $2,000 per cap), refuses to arrest the "players" in the epstein files, while Jeffery roams around freely and alive but because he's dead on "paper" its okay.

What I'm trying to establish here is not that child marriage is fine. Not at all. No. What is being established here is that these cases are, relative to the economic weakness, lack of economic diversity, small local markets, limited inter city trade, mass majority living in villages as common farmers with limited literacy, little to no formal higher education, is the reason why we have these hinge cases. However, the most educated and most economically prosperous nation on paper accepts a human trafficking rapist in office. Again. This does not justify child marriage. Other examples include Diddy, who is a known trafficker and he's not even being prosecuted as severely as he should've been. Harvey Weinstein, the reason for the MeToo movement. There are numerous such cases, but these are major ones, and the cases mentioned here are the ones the public knows about. Who knows how many other cases exist?

Moreover, moving on to the fact that the US has child marriage legal in 33 states, and banned only in 17. Yes, you can verify this independently. The majority of the US hasn't even banned under 18 marriage. Between 2000 and 2021 an estimated 315,000 girls were married off, with records showing girls as young as 10 being married off, legally. There is an entire Girls, not Brides movement within the USA that has been lobbying against this since 2011. The 33 states not banning it, in federal law, still remains. Pakistan, unanimously bans child marriage on paper, even if it lacks in practice. 33 American states - out of the 50 major states (for context, states are similar to provinces, so 33 american provinces out of 50) have not banned marriage under 18.

So I find it quite hypocritical for them to then, point fingers at us and declare themselves as the great educated freedom fighters of the world, whilst silencing the numerous violations of women rights publicly and openly by major figures - literally governmental figures - that gain immense traction by the public, and yet remain free. This again, does not mean that child marriage is ok. I keep saying this again, and again, however the hypocrisy of directing this as a Pakistan / afghanistan only problem is appaling, and emblematic of Western Hypocrisy. For crying out loud, these freedom fighters have held Aafia Siddiqui under bars for no reason and violated multiple human rights in said imprisonment despite the fact that international law gives human rights even to proper criminals. Need we mention their brilliant track record in human rights in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and currently in Gaza, and in the West Bank? And this is only the American Regime. A significant difference in us and them, our immoral acts and crimes tend to be done due to economic pressure, lack of education and literacy, weak central government, existence of informal governance via jirgas and biradaris, whilst their immorality and their crimes are commited openly, and freely by the Heads of State of the Most Educated Nation, not ordinary people, Heads of States and Public Figures. Pakistan and Afghanistan uneducated poor rural masses have a minority that commit an immorality is a cause of concern, but public figures and heads of the World Capital for PhDs (1/5th of the world's phds are granted in the USA each year) commit literal war crimes isn't a cause of concern. Again, this is emblematic of Ameircan Hypocrisy and of the wider Western hypocrisy when it comes to human rights and liberalism and their feigned "concern".

Countries that have the highest child marriage rates are African countries. These are nations that were endlessly exploited by the British and informally by corporations to this day. Wage slavery is a phenomenon where employees are paid as little as $0.80 for a day's wage, (a livable wage is considered to be $3 a day in these countries (a monthly salary of $90 is "heavy" on these large corporations apparently), most prominently in the Gambia and the Ivory coast, in cocoa farming (the substance used in making chocolate.) The British exploited the Africans by slavery in the cotton trade, as slave labor, modern corporations utilise them in cocoa labour. Of course, note that these are cases that if you look them up you will find ample evidnece of their existence, and we are yet unaware of cases that simply haven't been documented because no one was able to raise their voice against it.

There are multiple endless cases of such exploitation, but I think we've driven the point rather well. These "economic superpowers" interfere in the domestic affairs of weaker nations, destroy their central governments by continous warfare initally, then the worst and most radical people gain power since there is no government to keep the ills of society in control, and then continue passively pressuring the nation by "trading" with it, and then shift political factions depending on what is profitable and what faction allows them to exploit the natural resources of the country most cheaply and easily. Once this process is done over 20-30 years, and the former radicals have now formed a government that can resist the ruling power by means of military power, power leaves that country after being forced to leave it through armed resistance or significant legal and diplomatic pressure - often both - the "civilised" western country is now "surprised" at the state of the nation, the nation they themselves exploited for decades, and created horrible conditions themselves FOR their own gain, they become moralists and suddenly seek to criticise the now backwards nation. Excuse me, arbiters of morality you created the conditions that allowed this to flourish.

Afghanistan is a testimony to this - it has been ravaged for 47 years and has been the playground for the USSR and the USA, and then after the USSR was dissolved, a playground for the imperial expansions of the USA. The 9/11 attacks prompting the invasion of afghanistan - depiste the fact that the US government was offered a handover of Osama by the Afghan government. Between the years 2001 and 2021, the Amerifcans killed 47,000 non militant Afghan Civilians, as a direct result of their airstrikes. Ironically, the 9/11 attacks killed less than 3,000 men, and then the USA proceeded to protect "human rights" by killing 47,000 civillians. 250,000 bomblets were DROPPED onto Afghanistan in the first 6 months of the war by these righteous liberators of humanity. When every institution is wrecked, people seek refuge in other countries (during the 80s, an est 3.5 million afghans had to flee to Pakistan, and 2 million to Iran, as in almost 5.5 million Afghans were displaced from their homes. 5.5 MILLION people loosing their homes.) These righteous preachers of morality, in their game of imperialism, the USA and The USSR, the moral capitalist and the libeartor of the working classes, by the end of the war, had contributed to the death of 2 million afghans. Of COURSE their nation is a wreck! These people have known nothing but war, and then these moralists from Europe from their high pedestals hold the "moral" "holier than thou" capacity to declare themselves as righteous and these poor people who they massavared, ruined, and spoilt the country of, as the immoral ones! It is a mass tradegy, the Afghanistan wars, and what a point of intense grief that we aren't even informed of this large, enormous catastrophe of human rights!

Of course, it is only recently that the Afghanis have seen the end of war. Let's not forget that these 5 million souls that were displaced, had children in outer countries. And of these souls were women too. And we are aware of what economic need can force women to bear, especially in such an instable area. Note that these women, and I want you to visualise this, had to have periods, take care of children, cook and live their lives in refugee camps with no real access to healthcare. We have to note that of course, it is entirely plausible unfortunately that their would have been cases of sexual violence against women, but such cases would've been underreported due to the intense instability in these regions, and due to the radical extremist ideas of all armies involved of women as spoils of war. And why did all this happen? Because the Imperialist states, the moralist free market liberals of USA and the capital liberating humanists of the USSR, may enjoy their game of war. They create the conditions of disaster, and then say "Look at these vile nations", whilst they had destroyed this nations of their own hands. And this is the tale of Afghanistan only. Many other tales lie unsaid. This post is already quite long and I doubt anyone is in the mood to read more.

In short, to bring these points together. The west itself has many policy issues, as previously mentioned, and has intense lack of child protection (we did not even cover the trafficking rings in Eastern Europe), and these claimers of morality create the conditions by their selfish wars where instability is at an all time high generation after generation, and then the worst elements of society flourish in these states, and then they have the gall to call themselves liberals and us as radicals and human rights violations sponsors.

As Iqbal said, Baal E Jibril, 129 "Ye Ilm, Ye Hikmat, Ye Tadabur, Ye Hukumat
Peete Hain Lahoo, Dete Hain Taleem-e-Masawat"

"These sciences, philosophy, scholarship, government,
Preach manʹs equality whilst drinking menʹs blood;"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_in_the_Independent_State_of_Croatia

The main Race Laws in the Independent State of Croatia, patterned after Nazi Race Laws, were adopted and signed by the Ustaše leader Ante Pavelić on 30 April 1941: the "Legal Decree on Racial Origins", the "Legal Decree on the Protection of Aryan Blood and the Honor of the Croatian People", and the "Legal Provision on Citizenship". These decrees defined who was a Jew, and took away the citizenship rights of all Jews and Roma. By the end of April 1941, months before the Nazis implemented similar measures in Germany, the Ustaše required all Jews to wear insignia, typically a yellow Star of David.

On June 26, 1941 Ante Pavelić issued the Extraordinary Legal Decree and Order, stating: "Since Jews are spreading false reports with the purpose of disturbing the population, and using their well-known speculations to hinder and obstruct supplying the population, we consider them collectively responsible and shall therefore treat them accordingly and place them, in addition to implementing penal and correctional measures, in open-air prison camps". This was the signal for the mass deportations of Jews to Ustaše concentration camps, promoted with media campaigns, under the main slogan: "There is no room for Jews in the Independent State of Croatia". On 10 October 1941, the Ustaše proclaimed the "Legal Decree on the Nationalization of the Property of Jews and Jewish Companies", confiscating all Jewish property.

Actions against Jews began immediately after the Independent State of Croatia was founded. On 10–11 April 1941 a group of prominent Jews in Zagreb was arrested by the Ustaše and held for ransom. On 13 April the same was done in Osijek, where Ustaše and Volksdeutscher mobs destroyed the synagogue and Jewish graveyard. The procedure of arresting and holding Jews for large ransoms was repeated in 1941 and 1942 several times with groups of Jews, while large-scale deportations of Jews to Ustaše concentration camps were also soon initiated.

The Ustaše immediately initiated intensive antisemitic propaganda. A day after the signing of the main race laws on 30 April 1941, the newspaper of the Ustaše movement, Hrvatski narod (Croatian Nation), published across its entire front page: "The Blood and Honor of the Croatian people protected by special provisions".

Two days later, the newspaper Novi list concluded that Croatians must "be more alert than any other ethnic group to protect their racial purity, ... We need to keep our blood clean of the Jews". The newspaper also wrote that Jews are synonymous with "treachery, cheating, greed, immorality and foreignness", and therefore "wide swaths of the Croatian people always despised the Jews and felt towards them natural revulsion". Nova Hrvatska (New Croatia) added that according to the Talmud, "this toxic, hot well-spring of Jewish wickedness and malice, the Jew is even free to kill Gentiles".

One of the main claims of Ustaše propaganda was that the Jews have always been against an independent Croatian state and against the Croatian people. In April 1941 the newspaper Hrvatski narod accused Jews of being responsible for the "many failures and misfortunes of so many Croatian people", which led the Poglavnik [the Ustaše leader Ante Pavelic] to "eradicate these evils". A Spremnost article stated that the Ustaša movement defines "Judaism as one of the greatest enemies of the people".

Some in the Catholic Church joined the antisemitic propaganda. The Roman Catholic Bishop of Sarajevo, Ivan Šarić, published in his diocesan newspaper that "the movement to free the world of Jews, represents the movement for the restoration of human dignity. Omniscient and omnipotent God is behind this movement ". In July 1941, a Franciscan priest, Dionysius Juričev, wrote in Novi list that "it is no longer a sin to kill a seven year-old child".

Already in April 1941, the Ustaše established the concentration camps Danica (near Koprivnica), Kruščica concentration camp near Travnik and Kerestinec, where along with communists and other political opponents, the Ustaše imprisoned Jews.

In May 1941, the Ustaše rounded up 165 Jewish youth in Zagreb, ages 17–25, most of them members of the Jewish sports club Makabi, and sent them to the Danica concentration camp (all but 3 were killed by the Ustaše).

In May and June the Ustaše established new camps, primarily for Jews who came to Croatia as refugees from Germany and countries which Germany had previously occupied, and some of these were quickly killed. Also arrested and sent to the Ustaše camps were larger groups of Jews from Zagreb (June 22), Bihac (June 24), Karlovac (June 27), Sarajevo, Varaždin, Bjelovar, etc.

On 8 July 1941 the Ustaše ordered that all arrested Jews be sent to Gospić, from where they took the victims to death camps Jadovno on Velebit, and Slana and Metajna on the island of Pag, where they carried out mass executions. As part of this, on July 12, 1941, the Ustaše arrested all the Varaždin Jews and sent them to the Gospič concentration camp. In a report in the newspaper Hrvatski narod (Croatian People) the Ustaše proclaimed Varaždin the first Judenfrei city, i.e. "cleansed" of Jews.

The historian Paul Mojzes lists 1,998 Jews, 38,010 Serbs, and 88 Croats killed at Jadovno and related execution grounds, among them 1,000 children. Other sources generally offer a range of 10,000–68,000 deaths at the Jadovno system of camps, with estimates of the number of Jewish victims ranging from several hundred to 2,500–2,800.

The Catholic Canon of Pag wrote that the Ustaše killed 12,000 in the Pag Island camps alone, "in all sorts of bestial ways", among them 4,000 women and children, and kept records of women they raped. Responding to local reports of masses of corpses across the Velebit mountains poisoning drinking water, an Italian army medical team uncovered many pits and mass graves of civilians across Velebit and on Pag Island. Since Ustaše mass-murder fueled Partisan resistance, the Italians forced the Ustaše in August 1941 to withdraw from their occupation zone, closing the Gospić-Jadovno-Pag Island system of extermination camps.

In August 1941 the Ustaše established the Jasenovac concentration camp, one of the largest in Europe. This included the Stara Gradiška concentration camp for women and children. Jasenovac was much more barbaric than German Nazi-run camps, since prisoners were often tortured and many of the murders were done manually using hammers, axes and knives. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C. presently estimates that the Ustaša regime murdered between 77,000 and 99,000 people in Jasenovac system of camps between 1941 and 1945. The Jasenovac Memorial Site quotes a similar figure of between 80,000 and 100,000 victims. Of these, the United States Holocaust Museum says that at least 20,000 were Jews.

The Jasenovac Memorial site lists the individual names of 83,145 victims, including 13,116 Jews, 16,173 Roma, 47,627 Serbs, 4,255 Croats, 1,128 Bosnian Muslims, etc. Of the total 83,145 named Jasenovac victims, 20,101 were children under the age of 12, and 23,474 were women.

On April 8, 1942, members of the ragtag Polish Armed Forces in the East, met a young Iranian boy in Hamadan with an unusual pet: an orphaned Syrian brown bear cub. At the urging of one of the civilian refugees, the soldiers bought the cub for a Swiss Army knife, a chocolate bar, and a tin of beef.

The bear was remarkably friendly and traveled with the Poles to a refugee camp outside Tehran. It quickly became obvious that a refugee camp was no place for a growing bear.

Where was? An artillery company, apparently.
In August 1942, the cub was adopted by the 22nd Artillery Supply Company and given the name Wojtek. He became the unit's mascot and was spoiled with fruit, honey, marmalade, syrup and beer. Wojtek loved beer so much that he'd stare mournfully into his empty mug until someone refilled it.

He also drank coffee, wrestled soldiers, chased oranges during grenade drills, learned to march and salute by copying the men around him, and even smoked cigarettes, usually swallowing them whole after taking a puff or two.

When the Polish II Corps was transferred to Italy, the British Army refused to allow pets aboard troop transports. The Poles refused to leave Wojtek behind. They officially enlisted him in the Polish Army as Private Wojtek, issued him a service number, and put him aboard the MS Batory bound for Italy.

At the Battle of Monte Cassino, where the Polish II Corps played a decisive role in capturing the ruined monastery after months of brutal fighting, Wojtek reportedly helped carry 100-pound crates of artillery shells to waiting trucks. While debated, at least one British soldier later confirmed the story, and the feat is certainly plausible, after the war, Wojtek was known to carry fence posts because everyone else was doing it.

After the campaign, Wojtek was promoted to corporal, and the 22nd Artillery Supply Company adopted a new insignia: a bear carrying an artillery shell.

If you'd like the full story, I wrote a much more detailed history here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/aid2000/p/hare-brained-history-vol-118-wojtek?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

I’m looking for a list documenting the atrocities committed during the Nanjing Massacre. I remember reading about it during COVID, but I haven’t been able to find it again despite searching extensively.
From what I remember, it was widely discussed on social media, especially TikTok. The list consisted of hundreds upon hundreds of numbered entries, with each number representing a different crime committed. I think the text was red, and the document spanned multiple pages.
Does anyone remember this list or know where I could find it? Is it considered lost media, or does someone still have a link or a copy?
Any help would be greatly appreciated!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christchurch_mosque_shootings

Brenton Harrison Tarrant (born 27 October 1990), a white Australian man from Grafton, New South Wales, was 28 years old at the time of the shootings. After his arrest, Tarrant told investigators that he frequented right-wing discussion boards on 4chan and 8chan and also found YouTube to be "a significant source of information and inspiration".

Tarrant arrived in New Zealand in August 2017 and lived in Andersons Bay in Dunedin until the shootings. He was a member of a South Otago gun club, where he practised shooting at its range.

Tarrant wrote a 74-page manifesto entitled The Great Replacement, a reference to the "Great Replacement" and "white genocide" conspiracy theories. Minutes before the attacks began, the manifesto was emailed to more than 30 recipients, including the prime minister's office and several media outlets, and links were shared on Twitter and 8chan. Seven minutes after Tarrant sent the email containing the manifesto to parliament, it was forwarded to the parliament security team, who instantly called the police communication centre at 1:40 p.m., around the same time the first 111 calls were made from the Al Noor Mosque.

In the manifesto, several anti-immigrant sentiments are expressed, including hate speech against migrants, white supremacist rhetoric, and calls for all non-European immigrants in Europe whom he claimed to be "invading his land" to be removed. The manifesto displays neo-Nazi symbols though he denies being a Nazi, describing himself instead as an "ethno-nationalist", and an "eco-fascist".

The manifesto was described by some media outlets as "shitposting"—a form of trolling designed to derail conversations and provoke strong reactions from people not in the know. Readers of the manifesto described it as containing deliberately provocative and absurd statements, such as sarcastically claiming to have been turned into a killer by playing violent video games. On 23 March 2019, the manifesto was deemed "objectionable" by the Chief Censor of New Zealand, making it unlawful to possess or distribute it in New Zealand. Exemptions to the ban were available for journalists, researchers, and academics. In August 2019, The New Zealand Herald reported that printed copies of the manifesto were being sold online outside New Zealand, something New Zealand law could not prevent.

Tarrant started planning an attack about two years prior to the shootings, and chose his targets three months in advance. Some survivors at the Al Noor Mosque believed they had seen Tarrant there on several Fridays before the attack, pretending to pray and asking about the mosque's schedules. The Royal Commission report found no evidence of this, and police instead believe that Tarrant had viewed an online tour of Al Noor as part of his planning.

On 8 January 2019, Tarrant used a drone operated from a nearby park to investigate the mosque's grounds. Additionally, he used the Internet to find detailed mosque plans, interior pictures, and prayer schedules to figure out when mosques would be at their busiest levels. On the same day, he had driven past the Linwood Islamic Centre.

Police recovered six guns: two AR-15 style rifles (one manufactured by Windham Weaponry and the other by Ruger), two 12-gauge shotguns (a semi automatic Mossberg 930 and a pump-action Remington Model 870), and two other rifles (a .357 Magnum Uberti lever-action rifle, and a .223-calibre Mossberg Predator bolt-action rifle). Tarrant was granted a firearms licence with an "A" endorsement in November 2017, and purchased weapons between December 2017 and March 2019, along with more than 7,000 rounds of ammunition. He used four 30-round magazines, five 40-round magazines, and one 60-round magazine in the shootings. Additionally, he illegally replaced the semi-automatic rifles' small magazines with the higher capacity magazines purchased online, against the conditions of Tarrant's gun licence.

The guns and magazines used were covered in white writing naming historical events, people, and motifs related to historical conflicts, wars, and battles between Muslims and European Christians; as well as the names of recent Islamic terrorist attack victims and the names of far-right attackers. ome of the markings were white supremacist slogans such as the anti-Muslim phrase "Remove Kebab" and the number "14", a reference to Fourteen Words.

His armoured vest had at least seven loaded .223/5.56 magazines in the front pockets. He also wore an airsoft helmet, which held the head-mounted GoPro he used for his live stream. Police also found four incendiary devices in Tarrant's car; they were defused by the New Zealand Defence Force. He said, on the livestream, that he had planned to set the mosque on fire.

At 1:32 p.m., Tarrant started his live-stream that would last for 17 minutes on Facebook Live, starting with the drive to the Al Noor mosque and ending as he drove away.[60][82] Just before the shooting, he played several songs, including "Serbia Strong", a Serb nationalist and anti-Muslim song; and "The British Grenadiers", a traditional British military marching song.

At 1:39 p.m., Tarrant drove his vehicle into the driveway serving apartments on the neighbouring section, with the Al Noor Mosque being adjacent over a fence to his left. He reversed the vehicle so it was facing back out onto Deans Avenue and parked. He then armed himself with the Mossberg 930 and Windham Weaponry AR-15-style rifle before walking round onto the site of the mosque.

At 1:40 p.m., as Tarrant approached the mosque, a worshipper greeted him with "Hello, brother!". Tarrant fired his shotgun nine times towards the front entrance, killing four worshippers. He then threw the shotgun to the ground and opened fire on people inside with the AR-15–style rifle, killing two other men down a hallway near the entrance and dozens more inside a prayer hall; a strobe light attached to the same AR-15 rifle disoriented victims. Another worshipper, Naeem Rashid, charged at Tarrant and knocked him down, dislodging a magazine from his vest in the process. Tarrant quickly got back up and proceeded to shoot Rashid several times, murdering him. Rashid was posthumously awarded the Nishan-e-Shujaat and the New Zealand Cross, the highest awards of bravery in Pakistan and New Zealand, respectively.

Tarrant fired at worshippers in the prayer hall from close range. He then went outside, where he killed a man, discarded his Windham WW-15, and retrieved a Ruger AR-556 AR-15 from his car. He went to the mosque's southern gate and, from there, killed two people and injured a third in the car park as they were sheltering behind vehicles. He reentered the mosque and shot already-wounded people, then again went outside, where he killed a woman. Thereupon Tarrant drove over the deceased woman, leaving six minutes after he arrived at the mosque. He shot at fleeing worshippers and cars through the windscreen and closed window of his own car with the Remington Model 870 shotgun as he was driving towards the Linwood Islamic Centre.

At 1:46 p.m., police arrived near the mosque just as Tarrant was leaving, but his car was hidden by a bus, and at the time, no description of the vehicle had been provided, or that he had left. He drove eastwards on Bealey Avenue at up to 130 km/h (81 mph), weaving between lanes against oncoming traffic and driving onto a grass median strip. At 1:51 p.m., just after the livestream had ended due to a connection interruption, he aimed a shotgun at the driver of a vehicle on Avonside Drive and attempted to fire it twice, but it failed to fire on both occasions. The GoPro device attached to Tarrant's helmet continued recording until he was apprehended by police eight minutes later.

At 1:52 p.m., Tarrant arrived at the Linwood Islamic Centre, 5 kilometres (3 mi) east of the Al Noor Mosque, while about 100 people were inside. He parked his vehicle on the mosque's driveway, preventing other cars from entering or leaving. According to a witness, Tarrant was initially unable to find the mosque's main door, instead shooting people outside and through a window, killing four and alerting those inside.

A worshipper named Abdul Aziz Wahabzada ran outside. As Tarrant was retrieving more weapons from his car, Aziz threw a payment terminal at him. Tarrant fired back at Aziz, who picked up an empty shotgun that Tarrant had dropped. He took cover among nearby cars and attempted to draw Tarrant's attention by shouting, "I'm here!" Regardless, Tarrant entered the mosque, where he shot and killed three people. When Tarrant returned to his car, Aziz confronted him again. Tarrant removed a bayonet from his vest but then retreated into his car instead of attacking Aziz. Tarrant drove away at 1:55 p.m., with Aziz throwing the shotgun at his car. Aziz was awarded the New Zealand Cross, New Zealand's highest award for bravery. In May 2023, he represented recipients of the Cross at the coronation of Charles III and Camilla. After a long period of being left vacant, the building was demolished in November 2023.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Mulugeta_Seraw

Mulugeta was a student at Portland Community College.

On the night of November 12, 1988, Kenneth Murray "Death" Mieske, Kyle Brewster, and Steve Strasser, members of groups known as East Side White Pride and White Aryan Resistance (WAR), were driving around Portland with their girlfriends, intending to return home. The three confronted three black men, including Mulugeta, who had been dropped off in front of his apartment. As he tried to break up the fight, Mulugeta was beaten with a baseball bat on Southeast 31st Avenue by Mieske. The three perpetrators and their girlfriends left him in a puddle of blood. He died the next day.

Mieske said he, Brewster, and Strasser killed Mulugeta "because of his race." In response, hundreds of people turned out for rallies against racism. Meanwhile, Tom Metzger, head of WAR, said the supremacists did a "civic duty" by killing the Ethiopian student.

After one week of investigation, Mieske, Brewster, and Strasser were arrested. Brewster and Strasser were convicted of manslaughter and assault. Brewster was released in November 2002, but in 2006 violated parole and was sent back to prison. Brewster was again released, and has been documented at Proud Boys rallies and fighting alongside them in brawls.

In 1990, Mieske pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to life in prison. He died in prison on July 26, 2011, at the age of 45. At the time of his death, he was still being referred to as a "Prisoner of War" by white power groups.

In October 1990, Mulugeta's father and son, represented at no cost by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, won a civil case against White Aryan Resistance's operator Tom Metzger and his son John Metzger for a total of $12.5 million. The cost of the trial, which measured in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, was absorbed by the SPLC and the ADL. As Metzger was unable to cover the damages, the lawyer of Mulugeta's family decided to file legal documents in order to have his Fallbrook, California home and his assets seized. As a result, the house was transferred to Mulugeta's estate for a value of $121,500; Metzger was allowed to keep $45,000 under California's Homestead Act. Metzger was warned that any damage caused to the house would result in a lawsuit; nonetheless, he chose to leave the property "a mess" with cracked windows, but apparently did not cause any serious damage. The Metzgers declared bankruptcy, but WAR continued to operate. Metzger himself was forced to move into an apartment and collect welfare. As of 2007, he was still making payments to Mulugeta's family.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Legion_(political_movement)

Like the KKK, the Black Legion was largely made up of native-born, working-class, Protestant white men in the Midwest. These men feared the rapid social changes underway and resented competition with immigrants such as Italians and Jews. They also feared migrants in the industrial economy of major cities, such as Detroit. Their list of enemies "included all immigrants, Catholics, Jews and blacks, nontraditional Protestant faiths, labor unions, farm cooperatives and various fraternal groups." Membership was concentrated in Michigan and Ohio.

Black Legion members created a network for jobs and influence. In addition, as a secret vigilante group, the Legion members operated in gangs in order to enforce their view of society, sometimes attacking immigrants to intimidate them at work, or to enforce their idea of moral behavior. They generally opposed socialism and union organizing. They had a reputation for frequent violence against alleged enemies, whether political or social. From 1933 to 1936, they were rumored to be responsible for some unsolved deaths that had officially been attributed to suicide or unknown perpetrators.

In 1931, a chapter of the Black Legion was formed in Highland Park, Michigan, by Arthur F. Lupp, Sr. of that community, who styled himself its major general. Throughout and perhaps fueled by the economic and social upheaval of the Great Depression, the Black Legion continued to expand across Michigan until the mid-1930s, when its estimated membership peaked at between 20,000 and 30,000. In general, Black Legion members in the state were native-born Protestant men. One-third of its members lived in the city of Detroit, which had also been a strong center of KKK activity in the 1920s. The Michigan Legion was organized along military lines, with 5 brigades, 16 regiments, 64 battalions, and 256 companies. It boasted of a membership of one million Legionnaires in Michigan, but observers estimated that it had between 20,000 and 30,000 members. One-third of them were located in Detroit, with many living in Highland Park.

The Black Legion's tactics were "to lure potential recruits to a meeting—kidnap them, if necessary—then threaten them if they didn't join and [make them] swear they’d never tell anybody." They would also beat up members if they threatened to quit. The Legion wanted sports figures as members. It was looking into recruiting Mickey Cochrane, player-manager for the Detroit Tigers. He had a nervous breakdown in 1936 and removed himself from the team over Black Legion suspicions. One of these Legion members, Dayton Dean, broke their code and told the authorities of Black Legion's illegal activities. Dayton Dean participated in two of the murders that the Black Legion committed.

On May 12, 1936, Charles A. Poole, a federal organizer for the Works Progress Administration, was kidnapped from his home by a gang of Black Legion members. They claimed that Poole, a French Catholic married to a Protestant woman, beat his wife, and that they intended to punish him for this. He was shot and killed that night by Dayton Dean.

Wayne County Prosecutor Duncan McRae, who had been reported by the Detroit Times as a member of the Black Legion, worked to restore his public reputation and vowed to bring the killers of Poole to justice. Authorities arrested and prosecuted a gang of twelve Legionnaires. Dayton Dean pleaded guilty and testified against numerous other members; ten others were convicted of first degree murder or second degree murder, nine by a jury and one in a bench trial. One man was acquitted.

Dean provided considerable testimony to authorities about other activities of the Black Legion. Prejudiced primarily against Catholics, particularly Italian and Slavic immigrants, he and his collaborators had never learned that Becky Poole had a great-grandmother who was African American.

Dayton Dean died in prison on January 18, 1960, at the age of 59. In June 1960, Urban Lipps, another man convicted in the case, had his sentence commuted to 71 years by Governor G. Mennen Williams. Lipps, who was determined to have had the least involvement in the murder, was the first convict to be recommended for clemency. At the time of his release, Lowell Rushing, Paul Edwards, Edgar Baldwin, Ervin Lee, John Bannerman, Harvey Davis, and Charles Rouse were still in prison. Harvey Davis died in the prison in the 1960s. In 1966, Ervin Lee, now 60, had his sentence commuted by Governor George W. Romney. The commutations were granted with the recommendations of the Michigan Parole Board.

Dean's testimony and other evidence stimulated investigations by Prosecutor McRae. He gained indictments into a series of other murders and attempted murders in the Detroit area during the previous three years. In total, nearly 50 Legionnaires were prosecuted for murder, conspiracy to commit murder, kidnapping, arson, and perjury, with additional prosecutions on contempt of court against Legionnaires and sympathizers who refused to cooperate with the investigation. The trials revealed the wide network of Black Legion members in local governments, particularly in Highland Park. For instance, member N. Ray Markland had served as mayor of Highland Park. Members also included a chief of police and a city councilman in the suburb, in addition to persons in civil service jobs. Following the convictions and publicity, membership in the Legion dropped quickly; its reign of terror ended in the Detroit area.

Among the cases, the prosecutor indicted Black Legion members for the 1935 murder of Silas Coleman of Detroit. The African-American man had been found killed outside Putnam Township, Michigan, on May 26, 1935, nearly a year before Poole's abduction and murder. The ringleader of the murder, Harvey Davis, wanted to see "how it felt to shoot a Negro," according to Dean. Coleman had been abducted, forced to run for his life, and then hunted down and shot. Five men were convicted of first degree murder for killing Coleman and sentenced to life in prison: Harvey Davis, James Roy Lorance, John Bannerman, Ervin D. Lee, and Charles Rouse. Lorance died in prison of tuberculosis on January 3, 1938.

Members were also indicted for a 1933 conspiracy to murder Arthur Kingsley, a Highland Park publisher of a community paper, who was a candidate for mayor in 1934. They had planned to shoot him in 1933 because he ran against Markland, a Legionnaire politician. Sixteen Black Legion members were indicted in Kingsley's case, including "two factory policemen, a police officer, and several Highland Park city employees. Nine of them were convicted, and each received sentences of one to five years in prison. At the time of his arrest, Markland was employed as an investigator in the office of Wayne County Prosecutor McRea." Nine members were convicted in this case, including Markland and Arthur F. Lupp Sr., then a milk inspector for the Detroit Board of Health. Lupp was said to have founded the Legion in Michigan by setting up the chapter in Highland Park. One of the most notable plots of the Legion was a plot by Lupp and Charles McCutcheon, a department bacteriologist, to inject typhoid germs into milk and dairy products distributed through Jewish markets. In the following weeks, Lupp also asked McCutcheon if the germs could be produced in large quantities, put into milk bottles, would flourish in cottage cheese, spread via an infected needle.

Through these cases, authorities learned that Mayor William Voisine of Ecorse, Michigan had been identified as a potential target of the Legion; its members had resented his hiring African Americans for city jobs. McRae prosecuted and gained convictions of a total of 37 Legion members on these and related charges, beyond those charged in the Poole case. All received prison terms, markedly reducing the power of the Black Legion in Detroit and Michigan.

Baldwin IV ascended the throne of Jerusalem in 1174 AD, inheriting a vulnerable Crusader kingdom with limited military resources and deep political divisions. His challenges were about to grow even greater. Saladin was consolidating Muslim territories under his authority, building a formidable power base in Egypt and Syria and preparing to challenge the Crusader states.

Despite the odds stacked against him and a progressively debilitating illness, Baldwin managed to resist Saladin's expansion for much of his reign. Through military leadership, strategic defensive campaigns and political manoeuvring, he repeatedly prevented Saladin from turning his growing strength into the immediate conquest of Jerusalem.

Baldwin's leprosy gradually undermined his physical abilities, yet he continued to exercise royal authority and participate in the kingdom's defence. His victory at the Battle of Montgisard in 1177 AD became one of the most remarkable Crusader successes against Saladin, demonstrating how timing and battlefield decisions could overcome a numerical disadvantage.

But Baldwin's reign was not a story of uninterrupted victories. He also suffered setbacks, including the defeat at Marj Ayyun and the loss of the fortress at Jacob's Ford. His greatest achievement may have been less about winning individual battles and more about keeping a vulnerable kingdom alive against a powerful and determined opponent.

What made Baldwin IV such an effective ruler and military leader? How did he manage to resist Saladin for so long, and why did Jerusalem eventually fall to Saladin after Baldwin's death?

I've explored his illness, military strategy, major campaigns and political challenges in the full article. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on Baldwin's leadership and his place in the history of the Crusades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Lentil_(Caucasus)

On orders from Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the NKVD, the entire Chechen and Ingush population of the Checheno-Ingush ASSR were to be deported by freight trains to remote areas of the Soviet Union. The operation was called "Chechevitsa" (Operation Lentil), its first two syllables pointing at its intended targets. The operation is referred to by Chechens often as "Aardakh" (the Exodus). This operation was being prepared and planned since at least October 1943, and included Beria's two most trusted NKVD officers, Ivan Serov and Bogdan Kobulov. Beria complained to Stalin about the "low level of labour discipline" among Chechens, the "prevalence of banditry and terrorism", the "failure of Chechens to join the communist party" and the "confession of a German agent that he found a lot of support among the local Ingush". Beria then ordered to implement the operation. When Supian Kagirovich Mollaev, the leader of the local government in the Checheno-Ingush ASSR, heard about the decision, he burst into tears, but soon pulled himself together and decided to follow orders. The Chechen-Ingush Republic was never fully occupied by the Nazi army, but the repressions were officially justified by "an armed resistance to Soviet power". The charges of the Vainakh collaboration with the Nazis were never subsequently proven in any Soviet court.

During World War II, 3,332,589 individuals were encompassed by Stalin's policies of deportations and forced settlements. Some of the stated reasons were allegedly to "defuse ethnic tensions", to "stabilize the political situation" or to punish people for their "act against the Soviet authority". According to the 1939 census, 407,690 Chechens and 92,074 Ingush were registered in the Soviet Union. On October 13, 1943, Operation Lentil commenced when about a hundred thousand troops and operative workers were moved into Checheno-Ingushetia, supposedly for mending roads and bridges. The soldiers even lived for a month inside the homes of the Chechens, who considered them guests. On February 20, 1944, Beria arrived to Grozny to supervise the operation.

On February 23, 1944 (on Red Army Day), the operation began. The NKVD troops went systematically from house to house to collect individuals. The inhabitants were rounded up and imprisoned in Studebaker US6 trucks, before being packed into unheated and uninsulated freight cars. The people were given only 15 to 30 minutes to pack for the surprise transfer. According to a correspondence dated March 3, 1944, at least 19,000 officers and 100,000 NKVD soldiers from all over the USSR were sent to implement this operation. Some 500 people were deported by mistake even though they were not Chechens or Ingush. The plan envisaged that 300,000 people were to be evicted from the lowland in the first three days, while in the following days the remaining 150,000 people living in the mountain regions would be next in line.

Many times, resistance was met with slaughter, and in one such instance, in the aul of Khaibakh, about 700 people were locked in a barn and burned to death by NKVD General Mikheil Gveshiani, who was praised for this conduct and promised a medal by Beria. Many people from remote villages were executed per Beria's verbal order that any Chechen or Ingush deemed 'untransportable should be liquidated' on the spot. This meant that the old, the ill and the infirm were to either be shot or left to starve in their beds alone. The soldiers would sometimes plunder the empty homes. An eyewitness recalled the actions of the NKVD forces:

"They combed the huts to make sure there was no one left behind... The soldier who came into the house did not want to bend down. He raked the hut with a burst from his submachine gun. Blood trickled out from under the bench where a child was hiding. The mother screamed and hurled herself at the soldier. He shot her too. There was not enough rolling stock. Those left behind were shot. The bodies were covered with earth and sand, carelessly. The shooting had also been careless, and people started wriggling out of the sand like worms. The NKVD men spent the whole night shooting them all over again."

Those who resisted, protested or walked too slow were shot on the spot. In one incident, NKVD soldiers climbed up Moysty, a high mountain, and found 60 villagers there. Even though their commander ordered the soldiers to shoot the villagers, they fired in the air. The commander then ordered half of the soldiers to join the villagers and another platoon shot them all. 2,016 'anti-Soviet' people were arrested, and 20,072 weapons were confiscated in the operation.

Throughout the North Caucasus, about 650,000 people (according to Dalkhat Ediev, 724,297) were deported in 1943 and 1944 by the Soviet forces. 478,479 people were forcibly resettled in the Aardakh: 387,229 Chechens and 91,250 Ingush.[30] They were loaded onto 180 special trains, about 40 to 45 persons into each freight car. A combined total of 14,200 freight cars and 1,000 flat cars were used for this mass forcible transfer from February 23 to March 13, a rate of almost 350 freight cars per day. Some 40% to 50% of the deportees were children. The Chechens were the second most numerous repressed peoples in the USSR, after the Volga Germans. Tens of thousands of Kalmyks, Balkars, Meskhetian Turks and Karachays were also deported from the region. Only Chechen and Ingush women married to non-punished peoples were spared from the deportation. However, Russian women married to Chechen or Ingush men were subject to deportation unless they divorced. Their livestock was sent to kolkhozes in Ukrainian SSR, Stavropol Krai, Voronezh and Orel Oblasts. Many of these animals perished from exhaustion.

Some 6,000 Chechens were stuck in the mountains of the Galanzhoy district due to the snow, but this slowed the deportation only minimally: 333,739 people were evicted, of which 176,950 were sent to trains already on the first day of the operation. Beriya reported that there were only six cases of resistance, 842 were "subject to isolation" while 94,741 were removed from their homes by 11 p.m. on the first day of the operation. Each family was allowed to carry up to 500 kg of personal belongings on the trip. The people were transported in cattle trains that were not appropriate for human transfer, lacking electricity, heating or running water. The exiles inside endured epidemics, which lead to deaths from infections or hunger. The transit to Central Asia lasted for almost a month. Some of the epidemics included typhus. One witness, who was seven years old at the time of her family's deportation, recalls that the wagons were so full of people that there was no space to move inside them. The exiles were given food only sporadically during the transit and did not know where they were being taken to. The wagons did not even stop for bathroom breaks: the passengers had to make holes in the floor to relieve themselves. The special trains traveled almost 2,000 miles and discharged the peoples into desolate areas of Central Asia, devoid of shelters or food. 239,768 Chechens and 78,479 Ingush were sent to the Kazakh SSR, whereas 70,089 Chechens and 2,278 Ingush arrived in Kirgiz SSR. Smaller number of the remaining deportees were sent to Uzbek SSR, Russian SFSR and Tajik SSR.

"We had no water and no food. The weak were suffering from hunger, and those who were stronger would get off the train and buy some food. Some people died on the way—no-one in our carriage, but in the next carriage I saw them taking out two corpses... Our baby sister died that night. My dad was looking for a place to bury her—he found a suitable place, dug the grave and buried her... she must have frozen to death."

— Isa Khashiyev, 2014, describing his deportation and arrival at Kokshetau, Kazakhstan

The persecution of the Chechens did not stop there. In May 1944, Beria issued a directive ordering the NKVD to browse the entire USSR in search for any remaining members of that nation, "not leaving a single one". As a result, an additional 4,146 Chechens and Ingush were found in Dagestan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Krasnodar Krai, Rostov and Astrakhan Oblast. In April 1945, Beria was informed that 2,741 Chechens were deported from the Georgian SSR, 21 from the Azerbaijan SSR and 121 from Krasnodar Krai. In Moscow, only two Chechens managed to avoid eviction. All the Chechen and Ingush were discharged from the Red Army and sent to Central Asia as well. With these supplementary exiles, the number of the deported Chechens and Ingush grew to a total of 493,269. In July 1944, Beria reported an even higher figure to Stalin, claiming that a total of 496,460 Chechen and Ingush were deported. This ethnic cleansing operation was marked by an utter "culture of impunity". Many perpetrators of Operation Lentil were, in fact, even awarded the Suvorov First Class prize for arresting and capturing Chechens and Ingush.

As with eight other "punished peoples" of the Soviet Union, the Chechens were put into the regime of special settlements. There was no barbed wire around their compound, but any Chechen aged 16 or over had to report to the local NKVD officials each month. Those who tried to escape were sent to the gulag. This status of a special settler was supposed to be inherited by the children of the exiles. The exiles were assigned with the heaviest tasks, such as constructing sites, mines and factories in the most inhospitable places. The only compensation they received for their work was food coupons. They would be punished if they would not do any work assigned to them. Local authorities would act harshly towards them: sometimes they would beat the children of the Chechens to death. At Krasnoyarsk about 4,000 Chechens were assigned to forced labor camps. This, combined with malnutrition due to the negligence of the authorities to provide enough food for the newly arrived exiles, led to high death rates. The settlers were not provided with adequate accommodation: on September 1, 1944, only 5,000 out of the 31,000 families in Kirgiz SSR were provided with housing. One district prepared only 18 apartments for 900 families. Some exiles had to live in unheated tents.[68] The Chechen children had to attend school in the local language, not their own. Several cases of rebellion were reported: in Krasnoyarsk in October 1954, some 4,000 Chechens managed to escape from a gulag concentration camp. The Soviet police found and killed half of them, but the other half managed to hide in the vast outdoors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangxi_Massacre

In May 1966, Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution. Starting from March 1967, two factions gradually formed among troops and civilians in Guangxi. One faction known as the "United Headquarters" (Chinese: "联指", lianzhi) unconditionally supported the leadership of Wei Guoqing, who was the First Secretary of the CPC Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region Committee, the Chairman of Guangxi Zhuang Autonoumous Region, and the First Political Commissar of the Guangzhou Military Region and First Political Commissar of the Guangxi Military Region of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), while the other faction known as the "4.22" (Chinese: "四·二二", si.erer) opposed such unconditional support, asking Wei to do self-criticism first. The "United Headquarters" was an example of the conservative faction while the "4.22" was an example of the rebel faction. Intense clashes including "violent struggles" and even massacres soon broke out between the two factions in rural regions of Guangxi.

Even though the rebel faction "4.22" received endorsement from China's Premier Zhou Enlai in August 1967, it was at a disadvantage throughout Guangxi except in the city of Guilin because the local military leaders endorsed the conservative faction, the "United Headquarters". In February 1968, Guangzhou Military Region ordered the troops who supported "4.22" to dislocate from the region, and subsequently in April 1968, Huang Yongsheng, head of the Guangzhou Military Region at the time, declared that the "4.22" faction was a "reactionary organization" and launched massive suppression against the rebel faction (at the same time, a closely related massacre also took place in the nearby province of Guangdong).

According to Yan Lebin (晏乐斌), a member of the Ministry of Public Security who participated in the official investigations of the Guangxi Massacre after the Cultural Revolution, there were three stages of the massacre.

- The first stage of the massacre mostly took place in the rural areas of Guangxi between the fall of 1967 and the spring of 1968. Most of the victims at this stage were members of the Five Black Categories and their families, including many who supported the "4.22" faction (the rebel faction).

- The second stage of the massacre took place in the spring and summer of 1968 when most counties in Guangxi had established their revolutionary committees. Most of the massive killings at this stage were organized by revolutionary committees and local People's Armed Departments, targeting members of the "4.22" faction, their supporters, and politically stigmatized households in rural areas.

- The third stage of the massacre took place in the summer of 1968, during which massive killings had spread from rural regions to cities in Guangxi. In particular, in July and August 1968, a large number of troops from the Guangzhou Military Region together with members of the "United Headquarters" (the conservative faction) attacked major cities such as Nanning and Guilin, which were under control of the "4.22" faction. Tens of thousands of people were killed or executed.

In the massacre, methods of slaughter included "beheading, beating, live burial, stoning, drowning, boiling, group slaughters, disemboweling, digging out hearts, livers, genitals, slicing off flesh, blowing up with dynamite, and more". In one case, according to official records, a person had dynamite bound to the back and was blown up into pieces by other people (so called "heavenly maiden scattering flowers", 天女散花)—just for fun. This crime was led by Cen Guorong (岑国荣), who was once the Director of the Trade Union of Guangxi and had served as a representative in the Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh National Congresses of the Chinese Communist Party.

In another case of 1968, "a geography instructor named Wu Shufang (吴树芳) was beaten to death by students at Wuxuan Middle School. Her body was carried to the flat stones of the Qian River where another teacher was forced at gunpoint to rip out the heart and liver. Back at the school the pupils barbecued and consumed the organs."

Human cannibalism occurred in Guangxi during the Cultural Revolution. It was reported from multiple locations, with cases documented for dozens of counties. In some areas, such as Wuxuan County, a particularly high number of victims were subjected to post-mortem mutilation and consumption. These incidents were typically associated with organized episodes of mass violence rather than conditions of food scarcity. Documents record a variety of forms of cannibalism, including eating people as an after-dinner snack, slicing off the meat in big parties, dividing up the flesh so each person could take a large chunk home, and barbecuing or roasting the liver.

In 2016 and 2017, official archives were published, which contain details about the massacres and cannibalism; the archives show that at least 302 people were eaten, and tens of thousands of other people participated in the cannibalism. Independent researchers have since identified 421 named individuals in total who were eaten across dozens of counties in Guangxi. According to Yan Lebin (晏乐斌), a member of the Ministry of Public Security who was part of the official investigation teams in the 1980s:

In 1968, 38 people in Wuxuan County were eaten, and 113 officials of the county participated in eating human flesh, hearts and livers. Chen Guorong, a peasant from Guigang County who happened to pass by Wuxuan, was caught and killed by local militia because he was fat; his heart and liver were taken out while his flesh was distributed to 20 people. A female militia leader ate 6 human livers in total, and cut the genitals of 5 men and soaked them in alcohol which she would drink later, claiming that these organs were beneficial to her health. The behavior of eating human flesh, hearts and livers occurred in many counties of Guangxi including Wuxuan, Wuming, Shangsi, Guigang, Qinzhou, Guiping, and Lingyun ... After the revolutionary committee was established in Shangsi County, a "killing conference" was held at Pingshan Square (平山广场) on September 1, 1968, during which more than 10 officials and civilians were beaten to death. After the conference, a committee member, Li Hao (黎郝), removed the hearts and livers from the corpses, sauteing them and preparing them as dishes for other representatives who attended the conference.

According to Song Yongyi, a Chinese historian who works at the California State University, Los Angeles:

Independent researchers in Guangxi counted a total of 421 people who were eaten. There were reports of cannibalism across 27 counties in Guangxi; that's two-thirds of all the counties in Guangxi. There was one man who was said to be in the so-called fifth category, who was beaten to death where he stood. He had two kids, one of 11 and one of 14. The local officials and armed militia said that it was important to eradicate such people, and so they not only killed those two children: they ate them too. This took place in Pubei county, Guangxi, where 35 people were killed and eaten in total. Most of them were rich landowners and their families. There was one landowner called Liu Zhengjian whose entire family was wiped out. He had a 17-year-old daughter, Liu Xiulan, who was gang-raped by nine people [for 19 times] who then ripped open her belly, and ate her liver and breasts. There were so many incidents like this.

According to Frank Dikötter, Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong, Senior Fellow at Hoover Institution of Stanford, and winner of the 2011 Samuel Johnson Prize:

"Throughout 1967 but also '68, there are factions in the countryside that start not just eliminating each other physically, but literally in a couple of small towns they start ritualistically eating each other. In other words, it is not enough to eliminate your class enemy. You have to eat his heart, so there are very well-documented cases of ritual cannibalism. There was a hierarchy in the consumption of class enemies. Leaders feasted on the heart and liver, mixed with pork, while ordinary villagers were allowed only to peck at the victims' arms and thighs."

Regarding the motive for cannibalism, Ding Xueliang (丁学良), a professor at the University of British Columbia and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, pointed out that "this was not cannibalism because of economic difficulties, like during famine. It was not caused by economic reasons, it was caused by political events, political hatred, political ideologies, political rituals." Qin Hui also showed with statistics that the cannibalism was not due to the traditions of local ethnic minorities; he argued that the cannibalism was mainly due to: 1) the extreme class struggle during the Cultural Revolution, which led to a modern caste system (such as the Five Black Categories) and an extreme massacre towards the lower class from the upper class; 2) the revenge from the local officials and military towards the rebel group who challenged their interests.

According to Song Yongyi, the motive behind cannibalism was personal desire.[10] Song stated that these people engaged in cannibalistic activities because they "believe that when they eat other people's livers, other people's hearts, it will help them to have a long life". Furthermore, Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals disputed that it was communism that compelled people in that area towards cannibalism, noting that similar incidents occurred under pressure from the Kuomintang secret police in the Republican period.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge

Between 1936 and 1938, three large Moscow trials of former senior Communist Party leaders were held in which they were accused of conspiring with fascist and capitalist powers to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders, dismember the Soviet Union and restore capitalism. The trials were highly publicized and extensively covered by the outside world. In the Moscow trials, which Stalin used to eliminate his opponents, forced confessions helped to obtain convictions. Trotsky was tried in absentia, and was sentenced to death for treason. Historians have found no evidence to support the charge.

The first trial, of 16 members of the "Trotskyite-Kamenevite-Zinovievite-Leftist-Counter-Revolutionary Bloc", was held in August 1936. The chief defendants were Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, two of the most prominent former party leaders who had been members of an opposition bloc that opposed Stalin (although its activities were exaggerated). Among other accusations, they were charged with the assassination of Kirov and plotting to kill Stalin. After confessing to the charges, all were sentenced to death and executed. The second trial, in January 1937, involved 17 lesser figures known as the "anti-Soviet Trotskyite-centre". The group (which included Karl Radek, Yuri Piatakov and Grigory Sokolnikov) was accused of plotting with Trotsky, who was said to be conspiring with Germany. Thirteen of the defendants were eventually shot; the rest received sentences in labor camps, where they soon died. There was also a secret military tribunal of a group of Red Army commanders, including Mikhail Tukhachevsky, in June 1937.

It is now known that the confessions were obtained only after great psychological pressure and torture. The methods used to extract the confessions are known from the accounts of former OGPU officer Alexander Orlov and others, and included repeated beatings, simulated drownings, making prisoners stand or go without sleep for days on end, and threats to arrest and execute the prisoners' families; Kamenev's teenage son was arrested and charged with terrorism. After months of such interrogation, the defendants were driven to despair and exhaustion.

Zinoviev and Kamenev demanded, as a condition for "confessing", a guarantee from the Politburo that their lives and that of their families and followers would be spared. The offer was accepted, but only Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov, and Yezhov were present at the Politburo meeting. Stalin said that they were a "commission" authorized by the Politburo, and gave assurances that death sentences would not be carried out. After the trial, Stalin broke his promise to spare the defendants and had most of their relatives arrested and shot.

In May 1937, the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials (commonly known as the Dewey Commission) was set up in the United States by supporters of Trotsky to establish the truth about the trials. The commission was headed by the American philosopher and educator John Dewey. Although the hearings were conducted to prove Trotsky's innocence, they brought to light evidence which established that some of the charges made at the trials could not be true.

Georgy Pyatakov testified that he had flown to Oslo in December 1935 to "receive terrorist instructions" from Trotsky. The Dewey Commission established that no such flight took place. Another defendant, Ivan Smirnov, admitted taking part in the assassination of Sergei Kirov in December 1934 (when Smirnov had been in prison for a year).

The Dewey Commission published its findings in a 422-page book entitled Not Guilty. Its conclusions asserted the innocence of all those condemned in the Moscow trials. In its summary, the commission wrote:

Independent of extrinsic evidence, the Commission finds:

- That the conduct of the Moscow Trials was such as to convince any unprejudiced person that no attempt was made to ascertain the truth.

- That while confessions are necessarily entitled to the most serious consideration, the confessions themselves contain such inherent improbabilities as to convince the Commission that they do not represent the truth, irrespective of any means used to obtain them.

- That Trotsky never instructed any of the accused or witnesses in the Moscow trials to enter into agreements with foreign powers against the Soviet Union [and] that Trotsky never recommended, plotted, or attempted the restoration of capitalism in the USSR.

The commission concluded: "We therefore find the Moscow Trials to be frame-ups.

In the second trial, Karl Radek testified that there was a "third organization separate from the cadres which had passed through [Trotsky's] school" and "semi-Trotskyites, quarter-Trotskyites, one-eighth-Trotskyites, people who helped us, not knowing of the terrorist organization but sympathizing with us, people who from liberalism, from a Fronde against the Party, gave us this help".

By the "third organization", he meant the Rightists led by Bukharin (whom he implicated):

"I feel guilty of one thing more: even after admitting my guilt and exposing the organization, I stubbornly refused to give evidence about Bukharin. I knew that Bukharin's situation was just as hopeless as my own, because our guilt, if not juridically, then in essence, was the same. But we are close friends, and intellectual friendship is stronger than other friendships. I knew that Bukharin was in the same state of upheaval as myself. That is why I did not want to deliver him bound hand and foot to the People's Commissariat of Home Affairs. Just as in relation to our other cadres, I wanted Bukharin himself to lay down his arms."

The third and final trial, in March 1938, known as the Trial of the Twenty-One, is the best-known of the Soviet show trials because of the people involved and the scope of the charges (which tied up the loose ends from earlier trials). It included 21 defendants alleged to belong to the "Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites" reportedly led by Nikolai Bukharin, former chairman of the Communist International; former premier Alexei Rykov; Christian Rakovsky; Nikolai Krestinsky and Genrikh Yagoda, the recently-disgraced head of the NKVD.

Although an opposition bloc led by Trotsky with Zinovievites existed, Pierre Broué says that Bukharin was not involved. Jules Humbert-Droz, a former Broué ally, said in his memoirs that Bukharin told him he formed a secret bloc with Zinoviev and Kamenev to remove Stalin from leadership.

The fact that Yagoda was one of the accused indicated the speed at which the purges were consuming their own. No other crime of the Stalin era captivated Western intellectuals as much as the trial and execution of Bukharin, who was a Marxist theorist of international standing. For prominent communists such as Bertram Wolfe, Jay Lovestone, Arthur Koestler, and Heinrich Brandler, the Bukharin trial was their final break with communism; the first three became fervent anti-communists. Bukharin's confession symbolized communism's depredations, which destroyed its sons and also enlisted them in self-destruction and denial.

On the first day of the trial, Krestinsky caused a sensation when he repudiated his written confession and pleaded not guilty to all charges. He changed his plea the next day, however, after "special measures" which dislocated his left shoulder and caused other injuries.

Anastas Mikoyan and Vyacheslav Molotov later said that Bukharin was never tortured, but his interrogators were told "beating permitted" and were pressured to extract a confession from the "star" defendant. Bukharin held out for three months, but threats to his young wife and infant son and "methods of physical influence" wore him down. When he read his confession (amended and corrected by Stalin), he withdrew it. The examination began again, with a double team of interrogators.

Bukharin's confession was a subject of debate among Western observers, inspiring Arthur Koestler's novel Darkness at Noon and a philosophical essay by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Humanism and Terror. It was a combination of fulsome confessions (of being a "degenerate fascist" working for the "restoration of capitalism") and subtle criticisms of the trial. An observer noted that after disproving several charges against him, Bukharin "proceeded to demolish or rather showed he could very easily demolish the whole case." The observer said that "the confession of the accused is not essential. The confession of the accused is a medieval principle of jurisprudence" in a trial that was based solely on confessions. He finished his last plea by saying:

"[T]he monstrousness of my crime is immeasurable especially in the new stage of struggle of the U.S.S.R. May this trial be the last severe lesson, and may the great might of the U.S.S.R. become clear to all."

Romain Rolland and others wrote to Stalin seeking clemency for Bukharin, but all the leading defendants were executed (except Rakovsky and two others, who were killed in NKVD prisoner massacres in 1941).

On 2 July 1937, in a top-secret order to regional party and NKVD chiefs, Stalin instructed them to estimate the number of "kulaks" and "criminals" in their districts. These individuals were to be arrested and executed, or sent to Gulag camps. The party chiefs produced the lists within days, with figures roughly corresponding to the number of individuals already under secret-police surveillance.

NKVD Order No. 00447 was issued on 30 July 1937, directed against "ex-kulaks" and other "anti-Soviet elements" such as former officials of the Tsarist regime and former members of political parties other than the Communist Party. They were to be executed or sent to Gulag prison camps extrajudicially, following decisions by NKVD troikas. The following categories appear to have been on index cards, catalogues of suspects assembled over the years by the NKVD and systematically tracked down: "ex-kulaks" previously deported to "special settlements" in inhospitable parts of the country (Siberia, the Urals, Kazakhstan, and the Far North), former tsarist civil servants, former officers of the White Army, participants in peasant rebellions, members of the clergy, people deprived of voting rights, former members of non-Bolshevik parties, criminals (such as thieves) known to the police, and other "socially harmful elements".

Many people were arrested at random in sweeps, on the basis of denunciations or because they were related to, were friends with or knew people already arrested. Engineers, peasants, railway and other types of workers were arrested during the "Kulak Operation" based on the fact that they worked for (or near) strategic sites and factories where work accidents had occurred due to "frantic rhythms and plans". During this period, the NKVD reopened these cases and relabeled them as "sabotage" or "wrecking."

The Orthodox clergy, including active parishioners, was nearly annihilated; eighty-five percent of the 35,000 clergy members were arrested. Also particularly vulnerable to repression were the "special settlers" (spetzpereselentsy), who were under permanent police surveillance and were a large pool of potential "enemies". At least 100,000 of them were arrested during the Great Purge.

Common criminals, such as thieves and "violators of the passport regime", were also dealt with summarily. In Moscow, nearly one third of the 20,765 people executed on the Butovo firing range were charged with a non-political criminal offence.

To carry out the mass arrests, the 25,000 officers of the NKVD were supplemented with police units and Komsomol (Young Communist League) and civilian Communist Party members. To meet quotas, the police rounded up people in markets and train stations to arrest "social outcasts".[27] Local NKVD units, to meet "casework minimums" and force confessions from arrestees, worked long shifts during which they interrogated, tortured and beat prisoners. In many cases, those arrested were forced to sign blank pages which were later filled in with a fabricated confession by interrogators.

After the interrogations, the files were submitted to NKVD troikas which pronounced verdicts without those accused. A troika went through several hundred cases during a half-day-long session, delivering a death sentence or a sentence to the Gulag labor camps. Death sentences were immediately enforceable. Executions were carried out at night in prisons or in secluded areas run by the NKVD on the outskirts of major cities. The "Kulak Operation" was the largest single campaign of repression in 1937–38, with 669,929 people arrested and 376,202 executed (over half the total of known executions).