Victory Europe Day, Victory Over Fascism Day; what do such holidays mean to us now, when fascism has once again seized and shaken us in its jaws with the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the most disruptive events of our world order among several theatres of World War Three which has engulfed the world and threatens the global subversion of democracy and the nuclear extinction of humankind?
Netanyahu and his theocratic and kleptocratic settler regime has orchestrated the October 7 tragedy as a casus belli for the Final Solution of the Palestinians and the generalization of conflict to the conquest of the whole Middle East, and in Biden has a cheerleader of state terror who has made us all complicit in crimes against humanity, a secondary purpose of Israel’s in the sabotage and delegitimation of democracy and the principle of universal human rights as the foundations of our world order.
As Israel prepares the annihilation of Rafah and the world’s future ruling elites at universities rise up to challenge our dehumanization in solidarity with the powerless and the dispossess, the silenced and the erased, all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, Genocide Joe Biden gave a speech last night at a Holocaust remembrance event in which he weaponized the idea of antisemitism against students protesting the genocide of the Palestinians, fellow semites with Jews and one people divided by faith and history, to silence dissent as police thugs raid campuses in brutal repression. We have freedom of speech in America as co-owners of the state, but only when and if it serves power.
Democracy has already fallen in America, with the Stolen Election of 2016 by Russian spy and puppet ruler Traitor Trump, and those we elected as champions of our liberty to enact the Restoration of America have betrayed us, and have instead continued Trump’s sabotage of our institutions and principles in the centralization of power to a carceral state of force and control. We ordered peace and are fed war.
We are confronted with a dilemma in our elections; vote for Trump and sacrifice democracy as the Fourth Reich emerges, or vote for Biden and abandon our humanity. Either way, the Age of Tyrants begins, and as civilization falls humankind begins an irreversible path to extinction.
Both Netanyahu and Putin now wage wars of terror and imperial conquest modeled on the doctrine of Total War as designed by Hitler and Franco and first tested at Guernica, which now finds echoes and reflections in Gaza and Mariupol.
While in America and throughout Europe, a dark tide rises to engulf us all. Meloni is now the de facto ruler of Europe, leading the original Fascist Party of Mussolini which seized power in the 1922 March on Rome. And at her back marches Europe; as written by Jon Henley in The Guardian of this June’s upcoming vote to choose the future of the European Union, entitled Anti-European’ populists on track for big gains in EU elections; “Populist eurosceptic parties are likely to come first in Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Slovakia, and second or third in Bulgaria, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Portugal, Romania, Spain and Sweden.”
Where the Gaza War is the tipping point of tyranny and democracy for the fate of humankind, it is but one of ten theatres of World War Three which include America, Russia, Ukraine, Syria, Libya, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Africa, and the nation with two faces, Israel and Palestine.
Putin and his puppet tyrant Traitor Trump are figureheads of the Fourth Reich and patrons of both white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror who have perpetrated vast war crimes and the Russian imperial conquest and dominion of the Middle East and the Mediterranean, as well as in central Asia, Africa, and Europe. Poland knows it is next on Putin’s list of conquests along with Finland, Moldova, Romania, and then all of Eastern Europe and finally Berlin, where Putin once reigned as the lord of the criminal underworld east of the Iron Curtain. Putin has threatened to annihilate the British Isles and turn Warsaw into a city of ghosts and ruins like Mariupol. In all of this his puppet tyrant Traitor Trump is complicit in providing political cover and a free hand in the invasion of Ukraine, while Putin has provided Trump vast dark money through the real estate empire he operates as a money laundry for criminal syndicates and oligarchs.
And yet we have not purged our destroyers and predators from among us.
To a Wall Street Journal article about Russia bombing a school where children were sheltering I wrote this paragraph in commentary; Russia always bombs children first. This is a policy of terror, designed to manufacture helplessness, despair, and submission, but as in the Rape of Nanking actually creates resistance as a counterforce. The Calculus of Fear obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion, and the people of Ukraine will resist beyond all reason, beyond hope of victory or survival, and while one Ukrainian yet lives and remembers who they are, are unconquerable.
Who cannot be compelled is free; this too is a truth demonstrated by Mariupol, and a gift of those who die for the freedom of us all. This we must witness and remember until the end of the world, and one thing more; Resist! To fascism and tyranny, to imperial conquest and dominion, to subjugation and dehumanization there can be but one reply; Never Again! On this Victory Over Fascism Day, let us unite in solidarity and liberation struggle to free ourselves from those who would enslave us.
What of those not killed but captured ? Of their fate Dean Kirby of Inews has written; “An investigation by i analysing Russian local news reports has identified 66 camps for Ukrainians in a network of former Soviet sanatoriums and other sites – and reveals how an underground network of Russians is helping people escape.
Thousands of Ukrainians have been sent to remote camps up to 5,500 miles from their homes as Vladimir Putin’s officials follow Kremlin orders to disperse them across Russia, i can reveal.
They include survivors from the besieged port city of Mariupol, where civilians remain trapped at the Azovstal steel plant as Russian forces make a final push to subdue to city’s last defenders.
An investigation by i analysing Russian local news reports has identified 66 camps in a network of former Soviet sanatoriums and other sites in regions including Siberia, the Caucasus, the Arctic Circle and the Far East.
i has also spoken to human rights activists in Russia who developed an underground grassroots network to help Ukrainians who want to leave the camps.
The Russians are taking people into their own homes, buying train tickets, and directing them to other groups who can help them get to the border.
One activist told i: “The state treats them as a labour force, as objects, moving them around without taking care of what they need. The state is unable to look after them. They are vulnerable and need help.”
i‘s investigation marks the first evidence of a major operation to spread them across a country gripped by a historic post-Cold War population decline.
It comes after i exclusively revealed last month that Moscow had ordered towns and cities across the Russian Federation to prepare for the arrival of nearly 100,000 “refugees”. Russia now claims it has “evacuated” one million people from the war zone.
Tanya Lokshina, associate director for Europe and Central Asia at Human Rights Watch, told i: “There is ample evidence that thousands of Ukrainians were taken to Russia under duress.
“When people are only given a choice to stay under increasingly heavy shelling or to enter the territory of an occupying power, it constitutes forced transfer under international humanitarian law.
“We are extremely concerned this is happening. People who seek evacuation to safer areas in Ukraine are shuttled off to Russia instead – in some cases to remote areas very far from Ukrainian or European borders.
“They are vulnerable, destitute, often without identification documents and find themselves at the mercy of the occupying power.”
The sites identified by i by cross-checking local news reports with Russian mapping websites are known in Russia as Temporary Accommodation Points (TAP). They include dozens of sanatoriums and former children’s wilderness camps, at least one “patriotic education” centre and even a former chemical weapons dump.
They stretch across the vast Russian Steppes and across 11 time zones over the Ural Mountains from Belgorod in the west to the remote Kamchatka Peninsula on the edge of the Pacific Ocean and Vladivostok at the end of the Trans-Siberian railroad.
With names that belie the misery being suffered by their occupants after surviving two months of war, they include the Little Prince in Perm, the Santa in Tatarstan, the Friendly Guys in Omsk, the Forest Fairy Tale in Chuvashia, the Blue Lakes in Pskov and the Pine Forest in Ulyanovsk.
i has identified 6,250 people in 38 of the camps, including 621 children. If full, the 66 camps could contain about 10,800 people, including 1,000 children, with more than a third of the camps containing citizens of Mariupol. Some are yet to house Ukrainians despite being prepared by local officials.
With an average of 162 people in each, our analysis suggests Russia could need about 6,000 camps to house the total number of people it claims have crossed the border.
While Ukrainians are able to walk out of the camps, their remoteness and a lack of money, phones or documentation means those wanting to leave the country face an almost impossible task.
But Russian activists are trying to help.
“There is an impressive grassroots organisation on several levels – people collecting money for train tickets, helping with clothes and toys for children, letting people stay in their homes for a few nights,” one activist told i on condition of anonymity.
“They are sharing messages and passing people on to groups in other cities, who are helping them get to the border.”
Some Ukrainians are known to have escaped to countries including Poland and Georgia, while there have been reports of others trying to escape through Kazakhstan. One Russian news report said Ukrainians being taken to one city south east of Moscow had failed to board the train.
Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman Lyudmyla Denisova accused Russia of genocide and of breaching the Geneva Convention, which prevents forced deportations during wartime.
Calling for the UN to investigate reports that 200,000 children are among those that have been taken from Ukraine to Russia, she said: “They have been deported to all regions of Russia. The conditions of their stay and their health is currently unknown.”
Putin’s camps revealed
i can reveal in detail how a vast network of former Soviet sanatoriums, children’s wilderness camps, hostels and orphanages is being used to move Ukrainian children and adults hundreds and thousands of miles from the border of their homeland.
On the wild Kamchatka peninsula at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, 10 people including children from Kherson were placed in a dormitory of the Kamchatka Industrial College in Yelizovo on 26 April following an eight-hour flight. About 200 people are expected in the region.
In Russia’s far eastern Maritime Territory, which is closer to Tokyo than it is to Moscow, a local newspaper reported in late April how 300 people, including 86 children, pregnant women and pensioners, arrived in Vladivostok after an exhausting seven-day journey on the Trans-Siberian Express from Taganrog.
The new arrivals, including survivors of the Mariupol siege, were taken to the Vostok hotel complex on the coast near Nakhodka. It was the third train to arrive in a number of days, with one report saying 14 TAPs were being opened in four neighbouring cities to accommodate up 1,350 people.
While Russian media claimed they had “chosen” to live in the Far East, adding that “almost everyone notes the beauty of the sea”, the advisor to the mayor of Mariupol said in a Telegram message seen by i he had learned they had no documents or money and were being promised only low paid jobs in the “arse of the world”.
Twenty people have so far arrived in the far eastern islands of Sakhalin, which contain the Kuril Islands contested by Japan, despite officials expecting 600. One report said: “The Sakhalin region, as we can see, is not very popular with them. This is understandable.”
Other reception points identified by i as housing survivors of the Mariupol siege include the Vanguard Patriotic Education Centre near Ivanovo in Ulyanovsk, a city beside the River Volga.
The centre, which has a focus on “military-patriotic work” and promoting a “commitment to serving ones Motherland”, opened at the site of a former orphanage in February as part of a national “education” project instigated by Putin to create nearly 40 similar centres including one in Russia-controlled Crimea.
It is one of two military-linked sites identified by i after this newspaper exclusively revealed last month that up to 600 Ukrainians including Mariupol survivors had been taken to a former chemical weapons dump at Leonidovka, near the Russian city of Penza, which played a former role in dismantling the country’s arsenal of nerve agents.
In Murmansk, in the Arctic Circle, officials have set up 20 TAPs at venues including a hotel named the Northern Lights in the town of Nickel and the Lapland sanatorium in Murmashi.
At a go-kart track in Belgorod, where people are staying in tents, a journalist reported having to go through two check points with armed men whose faces were covered with balaclavas.
In Ufa, the location of the TAPs was described by officials as “classified information”, but one report of a site in a university hostel said it was fenced and access was only allowed with security passes “so people will be safe”.
More than 530 people including 120 children from Mariupol have also been taken to the remote Tsaritsyno Lake boarding camp complex in the Leningrad Oblast, a three-hour drive from St Petersburg. A Russian archbishop who visited the site said several people told him they want to go home.
He said: “There are people who have lost their documents. Without them, they cannot buy tickets for trains or buses.”
In some places though, Ukrainians have already started to leave. At Nerekhta in Kostroma, numbers have dropped from 120 to 90, with reports of people travelling to Poland, while 15 have left a site in Narerezhnye Chelny.”
Terrible though it is, this network of slave labor camps and hostages throughout Russia which contain both Russian dissidents and Ukrainian and other civilians captured as war plunder conceals crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Russian state as a key factor of its campaign of terror simply because it can. This includes a system of sex trafficking and military brothels where torture is sold in at least one known incident; also torture as a sporting event with betting in arenas which recall gladiatorial combat of the Roman Empire, spectacles of savagery wherein human beings are torn apart or devoured alive by wild animals with the betting being how long it takes and how many can be killed within the time limit. This has been reported both by our allies within the Russian Army and by the Underground Railroad operated by the Wolf of Mariupol, a network of Ukrainian women freedom fighters who infiltrate groups of women captured by the Butterfly Collectors, set them free, and guide them out of Russia to safety. Some of the things the Wolf Maidens and those whom they rescue report are disturbing even beyond this.
A friend and I had an interesting conversation the other day, among the commentary on a photo with the caption “Exactly 77 years ago, on April 30, 1945, Soviet soldiers hoisted the banner of Victory over the Reichstag! A victory for all humanity.”
Writing in reaction to the first comment, by someone unknown to me, which misinterpreted the context of the post as referring to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and not the victory over the Nazis, which read; “I didn’t know this group was for supporters of fascism and genocidal dictators, ie Putin; not for me, this”, I replied with the following:
I was at Mariupol, and escaped as the city was sealed off on the 18th. I have written many times of the war crimes I witnessed there, which include torture, organized rape and abduction for trafficking, executions, cannibalism using mobile factories and erasure of evidence of torture with mobile crematoriums. But do not confuse the Russian fascist oligarchy committing these crimes with the ordinary Russians now waging revolutionary struggle against this criminal regime, or with the Russian soldiers now engaged in peace resistance by mutiny and joining their Ukrainian brothers in solidarity to defeat the invasion, or with the Red Army which liberated Europe, and which I have fought alongside to liberate South Africa from Apartheid. Putin’s is no Red Army.
“WTF? Cannibalism?” Was the reply from a friend, not the author of the comment confusing Putin’s shameful imperial conquest today with the glorious Red Army of 1945.
To this I wrote in answer; This was Russia’s solution to outrunning their supply lines; eat the killed in action. To be fair, they did this to their own fellow soldiers too, which caused an entire Russian unit to mutiny, kill their officers, and join the Ukrainian resistance, but its part of the terror campaign, like the Butterfly Collectors, the criminal syndicate of human traffickers within the Russian Army which kidnaps young girls and sometimes boys for use in Russian military brothels. The mobile factories for canning the dead as food for the soldiers operate with the crematorium trucks to erase evidence of torture.
My guide in Mariupol was Oleksandr, a boy who had been chained to a post, his arm secured to a log, and a gun put in his hand pointing at another boy who had been surgically skinned, leaving the head and neck untouched so his agony could be conveyed by his expressions and screams and he would survive for hours or days in torment. After he shot his friend who was begging to die to end the pain the Russians just let him go, laughing; their idea of a joke. They didn’t even make bets on it, as has happened here when torture becomes a sporting event. His sister Kateryna we found hanging from a post; I believe she hanged herself after escaping her captors. She was eleven.
And the reply to this was; “I am having a hard time believing this.”
Here is my reply to him; I have difficulty with this also, and this too is a purpose of states which use atrocities beyond comprehension to subjugate us. I spent a day throwing up and working through the stages of shock a few days before leaving Mariupol, not from injury but because of something I witnessed. Not the torture or rapes, nor the feeding of the dead into the machines of the cannery while those filled with shrapnel or rotting were cremated, nor the usual burned and shredded bodies of aerial and artillery bombardment; all this I have seen before and will again, for with the exception of industrialized cannibalism among the horrors of war such crimes are normal. Have I mentioned that normality is deviant, and to be resisted? But some things are beyond the limits of the human, and for this there are no words.
My friend’s final position in this conversation was this; “I am against wars, but for the soldiers who must fight them for the profit of others. All Russian soldiers cannot be this barbaric. Like the American soldiers who committed war crimes in Vietnam and Iraq, the criminals should be tried for their crimes and punished. But as a whole, those who send and command armies are the common enemy of those who are doomed to do the fighting.”
My answer here follows; On this we agree; such acts are usually committed by elite units chosen and trained for loyalty and brutality, as were the death camp units of the SS. No normal person does such things, and most of Putin’s invasion force are conscripts and fellow victims of tyranny, many of whom are members of the peace movement which like the soldier’s strike that ended America’s war in Vietnam are the best real chance for peace. Most professional soldiers fight because if they do not, men who rely on them will die, regardless of the motives that brought them into battle.
And as I’ve said, I have fought alongside Russian soldiers against Apartheid in South Africa and Angola, and other causes and places, in the eighties prior to the end of the Soviet Union, and they were not the same army as that in Ukraine, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere which serves no grand ideals, no vision of a united humankind free of the profit motive and of divisions of blood, faith, and soil, but its mirror image, an army of slaves sent by a tyrant to conquer a free people.
Many of those slaves unite in solidarity with those they were sent to conquer, and such heroes of solidarity and liberation must be welcomed and celebrated. This, and only this, will defeat war in the end.
On this Victory Over Fascism Day, let us liberate Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, America and Europe, and the future of humankind from the tyranny of war criminals wherever they may be, and from fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Now as then, let us confront the would-be conqueror of Europe as a united front, and purge our destroyers from among us.
To fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
Europe in World War Two In Film
Band of Brothers series trailer
The Longest Day film montage
Saving Private Ryan film trailer
Churchill’s speech in Darkest Hour: You Cannot Reason With a Tiger When Your Head Is In Its Mouth
Enemy at the Gates trailer
Come and See trailer
The Guns of Navarone
Life is Beautiful
The Painted Bird
Politics is the Art of Fear, as my father taught me; here is a brilliant map of our fears in Europe and how they will determine the future of the EU in this June’s vote
Which ‘crisis tribe’ do you belong to? These five factions will define Europe in 2024
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/22/crisis-tribe-europe-2024-european-elections
‘Anti-European’ populists on track for big gains in EU elections, says report
A Hobson’s Choice in the Nation With Two Faces, Israel and Palestine; one people divided by history. Who do we want to become, we Americans, we human beings?
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
Biden warns against ‘surge of antisemitism’ at Holocaust event
Joe Biden’s ‘red line’ is an invasion of Rafah. So what happens if Israel attacks?
Why have student protests against Israel’s war in Gaza gone global?
Thousands rally across Israel calling for Netanyahu to accept ceasefire deal
The Guardian view on hope and despair in Gaza: attacking Rafah will compound this disaster
Trump and Biden are like the bear and man in the woods dilemma; we know Trump will destroy us, but Biden uses lies and deception to hide his intent to subjugate us, dehumanize us and subvert our universal human rights, and use our taxes for genocide and surveillance, censorship and repression of dissent.
Either way, we lose either democracy or our universal human rights; America falls, and with us the global civilization of humankind..
‘Blood is on your hands, Biden
Joe Biden’s Backing of Israel’s War Is Making a Mockery of the “Rules-Based World Order”
The War on Gaza Is the Result of Decades of Extreme Israeli Policy
https://jacobin.com/2023/10/gaza-israel-palestine-history-geopolitics-interview-hamas
Israel’s Western Allies Have Done Everything Possible to Criminalize Nonviolent Resistance
https://jacobin.com/2023/10/israel-western-allies-bds-palestine-nonviolent-resistance-opposition
World War Two in Europe, a reading list
General Histories
The Second World War: A Complete History, Martin Gilbert
The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, Andrew Roberts
The Battle of Britain: Five Months That Changed History, May-October 1940, Fortress Malta: An Island Under Siege 1940-43, Together We Stand: Turning the Tide in the West, Sicily ’43: The First Assault on Fortress Europe, Normandy ’44: D-Day and the Epic 77-Day Battle for France, James Holland
Britain and Churchill
The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, Erik Larson
Churchill: Walking with Destiny, Andrew Roberts
Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler’s Defeat, Giles Milton
The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965, William Manchester, Paul Reid
France
The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940, France: The Dark Years 1940-1944, A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle, Julian T. Jackson
Paris at War: 1939-1944, David Drake
The Resistance: The French Fight Against the Nazis, Matthew Cobb
Outwitting the Gestapo, Lucie Aubrac
The Saboteur: The Aristocrat Who Became France’s Most Daring Anti-Nazi Commando, Paul Kix
Madame Fourcade’s Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France’s Largest Spy Network Against Hitler, Lynne Olson
The Liberation of Paris: How Eisenhower, de Gaulle, and von Choltitz Saved the City of Light, Jean Edward Smith
Italy
Mussolini Warlord: Failed Dreams of Empire, 1940-1943, H. James Burgwyn
The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, Rick Atkinson
Bitter Victory: The Battle For Sicily, July August 1943, Carlo D’Este
Monte Cassino: Ten Armies in Hell, Peter Caddick-Adams
Anzio: Italy and the Battle for Rome 1944, Lloyd Clark
Naples ’44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy, Norman Lewis
Spain
Picasso’s War, Russell Martin
Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell
The Spanish Civil War, Hugh Thomas
The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War, Giles Tremlett
Russia
Russia’s War: A History of the Soviet Effort: 1941-1945, Richard Overy
Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–1943, Antony Beevor
Jewish Peoples
Night, Elie Wiesel
Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom, Ariel Burger
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi
Primo Levi’s Resistance: Rebels and Collaborators in Occupied Italy, Sergio Luzzatto
The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, Every Day Remembrance Day: A Chronicle of Jewish Martyrdom, The Murderers Among Us, Krystyna: The Tragedy of the Polish Resistance, Simon Wiesenthal
Flags Over the Warsaw Ghetto: The Untold Story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Moshe Arens
Auschwitz, Laurence Rees
Treblinka, Jean-François Steiner, Simone de Beauvoir (Preface), Terrence Des Pres (Introduction
The Origins of Totalitarianism, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt, Julia Kristeva
https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/03/europe/russia-victory-day-explainer-intl/index.html
Here is the Wall Street Journal article on the Russian bombing of a school where children were sheltering
This article reports on the network of 66 camps for abducted hostages, slave labor, and sex trafficking in Russia
World War Three in Ukraine as it unfolds:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/russia-ukraine-war_n_62720a0ee4b0cca6755b93e9
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61249158
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61285178
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/russia-offensive-slower-planned_n_626cf88ce4b029505df296f9
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/zelenskyy-russian-soldiers-charged-bucha_n_626b110de4b0cca67553dbcb
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/28/russia-kyiv-cruise-missile-strike-biden-guterres
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61217528
https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/26/politics/mark-milley-interview-cnntv/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/25/europe/ukraine-kharkiv-paramedics-intl/index.html
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-europe-61157670
https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/ukraine-one-long-nightmare-mariupol
https://www.ft.com/content/af7996a9-8c16-4421-a5b3-390315d3c7dc
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-europe-edf7240a9d990e7e3e32f82ca351dede
This brings us to the time of my escape from Mariupol to Warsaw, with my own team and a few hundred of her defenders, as the nucleus of a new direct action network with the mission to take the fight to the enemy within Russia.
Here are my journals of Mariupol and the First General History of World War Three:
Torch of Liberty 
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