And here is an article from the late 1970s about Soviet computing…
Thanks! This has reminded me that Red Plenty has been on my reading list for a while.
Oh, I need to get that book, too.
It’s worth thinking about how few people who survived the Holocaust are still alive…
I’ve only ever met one survivor. I was in my early 20s, smoking at a bus stop. A lady, maybe in her 60s, approached me and said I was too young to be taking up something that would make the rest of my life worse. She said that she smoked when she was young, but it was a stressful time. Then she showed me her forearm tattoo. I couldn’t really think of much else for the rest of the day. Haunts me still.
I took a class on the Holocaust in undergrad, and the prof brought in a survivor… also went to the local Jewish museum and heard from the son of survivors.
It’s heard to hear about this event, but it’s absolutely critical that we learn about it, and survivors from other genocides, too. We have plenty of people who can speak to the Rwandan genocide, the acts of genocide in the former Yugoslavia, from Cambodia, etc… We have tons of resources on how these kinds of things happen, and the paths states take to get there, but far too often, people don’t want to hear it. But this is precisely what the study of history is for - fostering understanding on the how and the why, rather than pushing the idea that “it can’t happen here”…
Its definitely important to look at what humans have done to each other. Pretending that it couldn’t happen here, or downplay the suffering of others only puts us all in the path of cruelty and destruction. I can’t begin to imagine what it would be like to go through some of these terrible events and survive it.
I met Franciszek Gajowniczek back in 1989/1990. He gave a vivid account of the conditions in Auschwitz.
This is precisely the problem. It’s so easy to convince ourselves that there must have been something uniquely evil and Satanic about the Nazis, but to carry that off, we have to ignore all the other genocides that have occurred. Look at the controversy generated by merely mentioning the Armenian genocide. The logical conclusion then is to start thinking that these things must have been overblown, no way humans could possibly do this to others. Then, it becomes far too easy to have it happen again by making the victims non-human. We can see it happening here now, and fuck yes, it could happen here!
Lots of countries were looking into anthrax during WWII.
Canada had overkill quantities of botulinum toxin, and no one’s quite sure what happened to it after the war.
eta: About the one country didn’t work on bioweapons was Germany, because Hitler forbid it.
I have not had a chance to listen to this podcast yet…
But I did hear an interview with some of the folks that put it together and it sounds interesting.
“Nearly 2 million Mexican Americans, more than half US citizens, were deported without due process during the Great Depression”
A new episode of the Fall of Civilizations podcast just came out yesterday, over 10 months since the last one.
This one is about the Mongols. I knew some of the broad outlines of their conquests but man, this was serious stuff. I don’t think I had ever even heard of the Khwarazmian empire before but apparently it was huge, and the Mongols managed to conquer the whole thing in just two years, with somewhere between 2 and 15 million people killed.
Later on when the Mongols moved into Russian areas Kiev was hit especially hard, going from the major metropolis in the area to a total ruin with about 200 remaining households. That whole area has seen some serious shit. (As it is again, sadly)
I’ll play that tonight while I try to sleep!
We tend to hear very little about Iranian and Islamic civilizations when they aren’t fighting with Europeans, which I think gives a pretty warped perspective on them.