With homes and buildings vandalized, and communities literally reduced to ashes, it has become easy to dismiss the violence on the street as “pure criminality.” But such conclusions are naive and insufficient. Viral civil unrest should not be reduced to simple terms; the riots have many different elements. Although some rioters have been plainly motivated by opportunism, social, political, and racial factors are also at play.
An attempt by the Nazis to make a propaganda film about how Jews were responsible for conditions in the Warsaw ghetto never got off the ground.
On June 25, 1991, Slovenia achieved its independence. As the new state took form, citizens of the former Socialist Republic of Slovenia gained immediate citizenship, retaining their economic and social rights in a fresh homeland. But all citizens of other republics of the former Yugoslavia, with permanent addresses in Slovenia, were granted only six months to file for citizenship. If they failed to act within this timeframe, their permanent resident status was revoked immediately. This arbitrary act of abjuration resulted in the “erasure” of 25,671 people from the registry of permanent residents in Slovenia.
As the sun rose on August 2, Spanish authorities destroyed the tent-village that had come to symbolize what some participants have called the Spanish Revolution. The ruling Socialist Party, via the Ministry of the Interior and in conjunction with the right-wing Popular Party that controls the local government, ordered Madrid’s Puerta del Sol cleared of all remnants of the 15-M (May 15) movement as its participants, the indignados (the outraged) watched helplessly.
When President Barack Obama took office in January 2009, U.S.-Russian relations were strained and delicate. Arms control agreements had all but disintegrated and acrimonious conflict had largely displaced cooperation. Indeed several observers, including Mikhail Gorbachev, even went so far as to proclaim the emergence of a new Cold War.
Hard-right commentator Debbie Schlussel claimed Norway’s “HAMAS Youth” got what was coming to them.
The United Nations Information Organization served stark warnings to the Axis powers that their crimes would not go unpunished and it helped galvanize the American people into action as the defenders of liberty.
Wartime information galvanized support at home, while encouraging those abroad not to give up the fight until help arrived.
This project builds on the recently published book, “America, Hitler and the UN: How the Allies Won World War II and Forged a Peace,” by Dan Plesch, the Director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy.
There is no denying that Anders Behring Breivik’s manifesto and beliefs are rooted in a distinctly post-9/11 ideology of anti-Islamism.