Comment by thomassmith65
2 days ago
The Germans announce over the wireless that as the inhabitants of a Czech village called Lidice [...] were guilty of harbouring the assassins of Heydrich, they have shot all the males in the village, sent all the women to concentration camps, sent all the children to be “re-educated”, razed the whole village to the ground and changed its name.
[...]
It does not particularly surprise me that people do this kind of thing, nor even that they announce that they are doing them. What does impress me, however, is that other people’s reaction to such happenings is governed solely by the political fashion of the moment. [...] In a little while you will be jeered at if you suggest that the story of Lidice could possibly be true. And yet there the facts are, announced by the Germans themselves and recorded on gramophone discs
In our age of social media, that phenomenon is no longer surprising.
Screwing the other side is far easier to sell than having things be good for the average person. Some pretty gross displays of greed and hypocrisy.
Sometimes it’s just ideology ploughing through as in the cases that happened in Ukraine before WWII but after Lenin died.
Do... you refer to the "korenizatsiya" [0] effort during which the Russian language/culture/tradition was heavily penalized and the local ethnic languages/cultures/traditions elevated to the official and mandatory status?
There are enough of open letters from the local Russian-descended population to the central papers that complained about such policy, and even more articles in those papers as the response that declare that yes, the Party absolutely wants to stamp out the Russian cultural influences from the national republics because otherwise there is no chance to build the socialism, so if the not quite politically correct workers would please stop complaining so much and keep in with the Party line, thank you — or else. Thankfully, until the mid-30s that "or else" was mostly sacking from the current place of work and expulsion from the Party.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korenizatsiia
1 reply →
"Ploughing through". I see what you did there.
This entry piqued my curiosity, and I did a cursory search for the original broadcast; what wording does a government use to position an announcement like this? I didn't find a recording, but I did find a related article from June 12, 1942
https://nytimes.com/1942/06/12/archives/nazis-kill-34-more-i...
...and a newsreel statement from Czechoslovakian President-in-exile Beneš from June 29, 1942
https://youtu.be/QFMJYhJNmeQ
I was also curious as I haven't heard of this before. There's a Wikipedia page about the massacre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidice_massacre
It links to a Wikimedia page including photos of written announcements of the massacre in German: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Lidice_massacre#...
Wikipedia also links to Nurembourg Trial proceedings where apparently footage of the anihilation was presented. See sections 120-121 of https://archive.is/http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/02-22-46.a...
And footage of the immediate aftermath, kept in a secret German archive: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn556023/
I wasn't familiar with the incident either. At first, I assumed it was Oradour-sur-Glane, which was a similar case but in France. I have seen drone footage of current-day Oradour-sur-Glane on Youtube.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oradour-sur-Glane_massacre