As unlikely as you think, but:

1. The Brits did not have the benefit of knowing just how constrained the German military was, and all of their prior estimates had just fallen apart in France, so a bit of preparation was not, perhaps, entirely amiss.

2. These women performed minor mundane military tasks on the homefront, like their male counterparts in the Home Army, freeing up troops of the regular army.

3. It helped keep morale up - the Women’s Home Defense Corps were created because when the Home Guard was made, a bunch of women tried to sign up too. Apparently having women in such a MANLY organization was out of the question, so after the Home Guard made it clear that they were not going to change their mind, a Labour MP created a separate org for women to join.

Based grandparents, part of the Great Crusade saving millions from Nazi rule. o7

I ask from the comm a moment of nostalgia for shooting Nazis instead of asspatting them 😔

Faus

The Foxblob emojis are fantastic

Someplace in the Anglosphere. I don’t think I have it in me to learn a new language just to get by in day-to-day life. New Zealand, maybe.

Unfortunately, my immensely low income and numerous medical issues means that I’m not much of a candidate for emigration.

Also, ideally, a region without a lot of insects.

In any case, though, I’m probably going to die here, stubbornly. If these fascist fucks want me dead bad enough to see it through, I’m at least going to inconvenience them with getting rid of my body.

Fantastic idea! I miss Tumblr terribly ever since the Great Porn Ban of 2018, even though I never even reblogged or followed ‘adult’ blogs. I just wanted to reblog holsum and funny fanart, but fuck giving into puritan corpo censorship.

What’s the moderation policy on genocide denial and the like? I hate having to ask this, but having heard too many people deny the Holodomor on here, I feel it necessary to make the inquiry.

For that matter, more generally, are you prepared, in terms of moderation structure, for the massive amount of legitimately disturbing material that’s going to pass through the site and will need to be removed if the site grows beyond a few hundred users? I would hate to join and then see this crash because of (completely understandable) moderator/admin burnout at the depravity and speed of mankind’s worst elements.

Guillotines

Modern estimates tend closer to 3-5 million, but 1984 was before the opening of the Soviet archives to researchers.

Still happens but you have European and US Jewish settlers spitting on the Christians

Considering most Israelis were born in Israel, and Mizrahi ancestry is about as common as Ashkenazi, I would seriously caution against calling Israelis “European and US” settlers unless you’re on some seriously racist shite.

Fascism and racism being immensely popular in Israel doesn’t mean you should adopt racist notions in response.

couldn’t help yourself could you

?

Some clients have an option for blocking keywords. Browsing by subscribed comms is also useful. I only have a handful of comms that allow US politics content that show up on my feed.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/forgotten-origins-modern-gay-rights-movement-wwi-180963283/

In the winter of 1915, a German soldier died in a field hospital in Russia. The soldier, whose name is missing from the historical record, had been hit in the lower body by shrapnel when his trench came under bombardment. Four of his comrades risked their lives to carry him to the rear. There, he lay for weeks, wracked by pain in the mangled leg and desperately thirsty. But what troubled him most was loneliness. He sent letters to his boyfriend whenever he could manage it.

“I crave a decent mouthful of fresh water, of which there isn’t any here,” he wrote in his final letter. “There is absolutely nothing to read; please, do send newspapers. But above all, write very soon.”

This soldier, who had to keep his relationship hidden from those around him, was just one of the approximately two million German men killed in World War I. His suffering is not unlike what many others experienced. What his loved ones made of that suffering, however, was different, and had enormous consequences.

His boyfriend, identified in surviving documents only as “S.,” watched the man he loved go off to serve in a war that he did not fully endorse, only to die alone and in pain as S. sat helplessly by hundreds of miles away. S. told their story in a letter to the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which published it in April 1916.

The Scientific Humanitarian Committee was then the world’s leading homosexual emancipation group, boasting a membership of about 100 people. The soldier’s story took a cruel twist at its very end: S.‘s loving replies were lost in the chaos of the war and never reached the soldier.

“He died without any contact from me,” S. wrote.

After the war, many believed the slaughter had been for nothing. But S. saw a lesson in his partner’s suffering and death.

“He has lost his bright life … for the Fatherland,” wrote S. That Fatherland had a law on the books that banned sex between men. But the sodomy law was just the tip of the iceberg: S. and men like him generally could not reveal their love relationships in public, or even to family members. Homosexuality meant the loss of one’s job, social ostracism, the risk of blackmail and perhaps criminal prosecution.

S. called it “deplorable” that “good citizens,” soldiers willing to die for their country, had to endure the status of “pariahs.” “People who are by nature orientated toward the same sex … do their duty,” he wrote. “It is finally time that the state treated them like they treat the state.”

Many veterans agreed with S. When the war ended, they took action. They formed new, larger groups, including one called the League for Human Rights that drew 100,000 members.

In addition, as I argue in my book, the rhetoric of gay rights changed. The prewar movement had focused on using science to prove that homosexuality was natural. But people like S., people who had made tremendous sacrifices in the name of citizenship, now insisted that their government had an obligation to them regardless of what biology might say about their sexuality.

They left science behind. They went directly to a set of demands that characterizes gay rights to this day – that gay people are upstanding citizens and deserve to have their rights respected. “The state must recognize the full citizenship rights of inverts,” or homosexuals, an activist wrote in the year after the war. He demanded not just the repeal of the sodomy law, but the opening of government jobs to known homosexuals – a radical idea at the time, and one that would remain far out of reach for many decades.

Ideas of citizenship led activists to emphasize what historians call “respectability.” Respectability consisted of one’s prestige as a correctly behaving, middle-class person, in contrast to supposedly disreputable people such as prostitutes. Throughout the 20th century, gay rights groups struggled for the right to serve openly in the military, a hallmark of respectability. With some exceptions, they shied away from radical calls to utterly remake society’s rules about sex and gender. They instead emphasized what good citizens they were.

In 1929, a speaker for the League for Human Rights told an audience at a dance hall, “we do not ask for equal rights, we demand equal rights!” It was, ironically, the ghastly violence and horrible human toll of the World War I that first inspired such assertive calls, calls that characterized gay rights movements around the world in the 20th century.

It would take nearly a century for these activists to achieve one of their central goals – the repeal of sodomy laws. Germany enjoyed a 14-year period of democracy after World War I, but the Nazis came to power in 1933 and used the sodomy law to murder thousands of men. A version of the law remained in force until the 1990s. The United States struck down its sodomy laws only in 2003.

Whilst in Egypt Forster “lost his R [respectability]” to a wounded soldier in 1917[59][60] and had a short-lived but emotionally powerful affair with an Egyptian tram conductor, Mohammad el Adl. The pair met in 1917 and quickly developed an interest in each other. Their relationship began to end in 1918, as el Adl prepared to marry. El Adl and his wife had a son, who they named Morgan. After returning to England in 1919, Forster visited el Adl in 1922 and found him deathly ill with tuberculosis.[61] After el Adl’s death, his widow sent his wedding ring to Forster.[3] Forster kept el Adl’s letters for the rest of his life.[61]

Apathy - the human constant

Maybe the Afghanis didn’t want to be a vassal state to the country that was invading them for 20 fucking years.

Luckily, as every good campist knows, the holsum Taliban, definitely not an imperialist catspaw of Pakistan which has been invading them for 30 fucking years, is widely beloved by comparison.

I mean, the Progressive Politics comm is run by campists who will accept any argument as long as it can loop back around to some form of critique of The West™. In that same thread is a commenter saying that violence is the only language those damn woman-educators understand.

Not sure why you expect them to remove this critique of the Western-backed Afghan government, regardless that it’s built on a racist premise. It’s against Bad Camp, after all!

Very cool!

.world

Sh.itjust.works

Sopuli.xyz

Lemmy.cafe

The purpose of a legal system is to provide consistent and coherent methods of conflict resolution that are superior for the functioning of general society than means outside of a system of centralized coercion for certain, sufficiently disruptive acts.

By this extremely broad definition, the legal system in my country, the USA, fulfills its purpose. But so would the legal system of fucking Napoleonic France.

More narrowly, a legal system should be oriented towards a standardized means of punishment and reform of those who disrupt the basic functioning of civil society.

By this narrower definition, my country only succeeds on ‘standardized means of punishment’, and even there arguably only partially. It largely fails at reform, and the punishments are both visited on those who do not disrupt the basic functioning of civil society (minor drug offenses, immigration crackdowns, anti-homeless legislation), and failed to be visited on many of those who do disrupt the basic functioning of civil society (gestures broadly at corporate America and the current coterie of fascists in power in government).