When the Swedish warship Vasa sank in Stockholm harbor in August 1628 it was basically a massive failure of naval infrastructure. King Gustav II Adolf commissioned it as a flagship but it was built far too narrow and top heavy for the amount of carved wooden propaganda attached to the hull. It rolled over and went down barely 1300 meters into its maiden voyage.

Vasa historically vital is what the local geography did to the physical hardware. In standard open ocean water wood boring shipworms will consume an oak hull within a few decades. But the Baltic Sea has restricted saltwater inflow and massive freshwater river runoff. The salinity drops too low for the mollusks to survive.

water chemistry essentially acted as a geographic preservation vault. When salvage crews raised the hull in 1961 this two tonne carved oak lion figurehead was almost entirely intact. It proves that a wrecks specific chemical environment does just as much work as human effort in deciding what historical hardware survives.

do u study Gilded Age architecture for the surface aesthetics but the subterranean infrastructure is much more telling. The ultra wealthy in late 19th century New York installed a massive underground legacy system. They dug private brick tunnels and basement rail networks connecting carriage houses directly into the mansion cellars. It was basically institutional firmware designed to erase the working staff from sight. I tracked down the original blueprints and property logs.

When reviewing major archaeological discoveries from the past century, what stands out is how often a single physical archive forces historians to completely redraw their working models of antiquity.

Royal Archives of Ebla (Tell Mardikh, Syria): Before excavators uncovered Royal Palace G in the 1970s, standard historiography modeled the Bronze Age Near East as a strict trade duopoly between Egypt and Mesopotamia. Finding over 1,800 intact cuneiform tablets proved an autonomous, highly organized commercial power existed across the Levant. Uluburun Shipwreck (Kaş, Turkey): Sinking around 1305 BCE with raw cargo sourced from Cyprus, Central Asia, the Baltic, Nubia, and Mycenae, this single vessel provided direct physical proof that the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean operated as an integrated, circular international market. sanxingdui (Sichuan, China The 1986 discovery of massive sacrificial pits containing colossal bronze masks broke the long-held "Yellow River hypothesis," showing that complex urban metallurgy developed simultaneously across separate river basins.

Some excerpts:

The area has a history of strange happenings long before Aleister Crowley moved in. The parish of Boleskine was formed in the 13th Century. A Kirk and graveyard were built in the parish around this time. A succession of Ministers ran Boleskine Parish and would travel the area on horseback or on foot in all weather conditions. Minister Thomas Houston (1648–1705) was said to have had the task of hastily laying animated corpses back in their graves after a devious local wizard had raised the dead in Boleskine graveyard.

Boleskine House was built on the site of the kirk, which, according to legend, caught fire during congregation and killed everyone inside

Crowley believed the location was ideal to sequester himself to perform a series of operations known as the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, taken from a grimoire called The Book of Abramelin.

According to Crowley, in his book The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, in order to perform the operations "the first essential is a house in a more or less secluded situation. There should be a door opening to the north from the room of which you make your oratory. Outside this door, you construct a terrace covered with fine river sand. This ends in a 'lodge' where the spirits may congregate."

The purpose of this ritual is to invoke one's Guardian Angel.

It requires at least 6 months of preparation, celibacy, and abstinence from alcohol. However, it also includes the summoning of the 12 Kings and Dukes of Hell, to bind them and remove their negative influences from the magician's life. Whilst Crowley was in the process of performing the lengthy ritual, he was called to Paris by the leader of the Golden Dawn. According to legend, he never banished the demons he had summoned, leading to strange happenings occurring in and around Boleskine House.

In the early 1920s, the US Postal Service faced a major bottleneck: airmail was fast by day, but cross-country routes stalled at sunset because pilots had no reliable navigation instruments for night flights or fog.

so to solve this, government constructed the Transcontinental Airway System a physical visual highway stretching from New York to San Francisco 50 foot concrete arrows: Poured directly into the ground and painted bright chrome yellow to point pilots along the exact flight corridor. Rotating gas beacons: Placed atop 50-foot steel skeletal towers mounted at the center of each arrow, flashing distinctive Morse codes every 10 miles.

Small concrete shacks housing automated generators and fuel supplies stood at the tail of each arrow. Pilots would fly from one flashing beacon to the next, checking the physical orientation of the arrow beneath them to stay on course. Within a decade, radio navigation and radar rendered the visual airway obsolete, leading to the decommission of the towers. However, hundreds of these massive concrete arrows remain preserved on remote hillsides and desert terrain across the American West today.

Full write-up detailing the route maps, logistics, and surviving markers: https://thehistoricalinsights.page/2026/07/giant-concrete-arrows-america-before-gps.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler

In 1933, Butler claimed to have been approached to become involved in a controversy, the Business Plot, telling a United States congressional committee a group of wealthy American industrialists were planning a coup d'état to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Butler also claimed the plotters of the alleged coup intended to use him, at the head of a group of veterans, to place the federal government under arrest. The individuals alleged to be involved in the coup all denied the existence of such a plot and the media ridiculed Butler's allegations, but a final report following an investigation by a special House of Representatives committee confirmed at least some of his testimony.

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/50371785

Institution:

University of Toronto, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

Lecturer

Timothy Snyder

University Course Code

MUN180H1-S

Syllabus

https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/phl/hitler-and-stalin-today

Subject:

#authoritarianism #colonization #colonialism #communism #democracy #fascism #genocide #history #holocaust #politics #soviet #worldhistory #20thcentury #democracyindanger #historymatters #hitler #hitlerandstalintoday #massatrocities #nazi #nazigermany #neveragain #riseofauthoritarianism #sovietunion #stalin #timothysnyder #totalitarianism #ukraine

Year:

2024

Description:

In Hitler and Stalin Today (MUN180H1-S), Timothy Snyder examines the Nazi and Soviet responses to the new globalized world they shared. The course begins with the colonial background that made totalitarianism possible, and which remains an essential element of our politics now. Their ideologies are described as worldviews and as practical politics, with an emphasis on the reasons for their appeal. Attention to their policies of mass killing, essential events of twentieth-century history, instructs us about how "it" can happen here. The study of dissident thought helps us to see connections between historical predicaments and our own, and instructs us about possible reactions as individuals and as citizens. The course asks what we have learned from the twentieth century and what lessons we should carry forward.

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Class 1: What is History?

We speak often about history, but we are careless with the past. When we choose not to know what has happened before, we are also choosing not to influence what will happen after. If we don't care about history, we find ourselves in an eternal present, denied any sort of imagination about the future, and nurtured on lies about a past in which we were innocent. History does not mean these misleading tales; it means a search for knowledge, using a certain set of tools; it means a process that enriches and humanizes, one that allows us to name things by their proper names.

Required Readings

• Tadeusz Borowski, "Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories", Here in Our Auschwitz)
• Snyder, "The War on History is a War on Democracy"

Free Alternatives

• Tadeusz Borowski, "Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories", Here in Our Auschwitz)
• Snyder, "The War on History is a War on Democracy"
  • Listen

Watch

Class 1: What is History?

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Class 2: A world of empire

Totalitarianism did not emerge from nowhere. It was a response to the world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and more particularly to the empires that Europeans had created during the previous four or five centuries. In order to understand the aims of Hitler and other fascists, of Lenin and Stalin, we must first understand the world in which they matured, one in which Europeans dominated others and applied law only to themselves. In some ways the fascists and the Leninists sought to break this world order, in that they wanted to transcend other empires; in some ways they took imperial practices to a radical extreme.

Required Readings

• Marc Ferro, Colonization: A Global History, Chapter 1
• Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Chapter 5

Free Alternatives

• Ferro, Colonization: A Global History, Chapter 1
• Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Chapter 5

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Class 2: A world of empire

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Class 3: What is fascism?

Guest Lecturer: Marci Shore

For about twenty years fascism seemed like the future for millions of people. It was a way of appealing to the past that was mystical and inspiring; it was a way of seizing the future by taking technology and pushing it towards dreams of rapid military conquest. Fascism reacted to and in some ways admired Bolshevism: it borrowed the idea of the one-party state and of a revolution based not so much on interests and history as on will and conjuncture. Fascism was a way of seeing the world that denied reason—preferring conspiratorial thinking and the arbitrary choice of enemies—and so is hard to define precisely; but what cannot be denied is that this way of seeing the world is gaining followers now.

Required Readings

• Zeev Sternhell in Iordachi, ed., Comparative Fascist Studies, 2010, pp. 53–59
• Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works, New York: Penguin, 2018, pp. 57–92
• Corneliu Codreanu, "A Few Remarks on Democracy," 1937

Free Alternatives

• Sternhell, Comparative Fascist Studies, pp. 53–59
• Stanley, How Fascism Works pp. 57–92
• Corneliu Codreanu, "A Few Remarks on Democracy," 1937

Watch

Class 3: What is fascism?

Class 4: What is Communism?

Communism was a lived reality for hundreds of millions of people in the twentieth century and remains a lived reality for many in the twenty-first century. It is based in an analysis of capitalism and a theory of history proposed by Karl Marx, which is the main subject of this lecture. Marx's ideas were revised by Vladimir Lenin so as to allow the individual (or the party elite) much greater latitude to choose the timing and the place of revolution. Lenin's very success in making a revolution in a country that Marx regarded as backward led to the Stalinist program of accelerated development and associated starvation and mass terror. That model was then copied in China and elsewhere.

Required Readings

• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848
• Vladimir Lenin, "What is to be done?", 1902
• Judt and Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century, 2012, ix–xvii, 75–105
  • duplicated in class 6, possibly added here in error

Free Alternatives

• Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto
• Lenin, "What is to be done?"
• Judt & Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century, 75–105
  • duplicated in class 6, possibly added here in error

Watch

Class 4: What is Communism?

Class 5: What is Ukraine?

Ukraine has to be at the center of a class on Hitler and Stalin, because it was at the center of both men's mental worlds. Each of them saw Ukraine as the key to a global transformation: be it the Stalinist plan to collectivize agriculture and build industry, or the Hitlerian plan to treat Ukraine as a breadbasket. In both cases, hugely ambitious ideologies found their axial point in a certain place; and in both cases, the attempt to transform Ukraine led to mass death. Between 1933 and 1945, the most dangerous place in the world was Ukraine. All this, as I seek to show in the lecture, was the latest stage in an ancient history. Ukraine has been less a crossroads and more a source of human innovation for centuries and millennia and indeed tens of thousands of years. Ancient history associated with Mesopotamia, Greece, or Rome very often only makes sense in connection with lands that are now Ukraine. With the globalization associated with modern history, Ukraine became for the first time an object rather than a subject of history, as its special position at the connection of steppe and salt water became less important, and as empires with global reach sought to base their power in its resources.

Required Readings

• Yekelchyk, "Historical Roots of Modern Ukraine"
• Snyder, "The War in Ukraine is a Colonial War," The New Yorker, April 28, 2022

Free Alternatives

• Yekelchyk, "Ukraine : Birth of a Modern Nation", Chapter 1 - Historical Roots of Modern Ukraine
• Snyder, ""The War in Ukraine is a Colonial War""

Watch

Class 5: What is Ukraine?

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Class 6: Why was Communism appealing?

Guest Lecturer: Marci Shore

For much of the twentieth century the appeal of communism was simply a sociological fact; by now it is something that needs to be explained. Communism promised a future that was far better than the present and offered a way to achieve it; it presented a world full of darkness that could be broken by small circles of people who could see the light; and it provided those oppressed around the world with a beacon for their imaginations and hopes. The story of the appeal of communism is a reflection of the reality of suffering and atrocity; it is also one of betrayal, trauma, mass murder, and rethinking.

Required Readings

• Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century, 2012, ix–xvii, 75–105

Free Alternatives

• Judt & Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century, 75–105

Watch

Class 6: Why was Communism appealing?

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Class 7: How was mass killing possible?

At the center of the history of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were their policies of mass killing. The Soviets began first with terror during and after the revolution, the construction of a huge system of concentration camps, and then mass starvation. An organized political terror followed in the late 1930s. The Germans, after Hitler came to power in 1933, were most able to repress and then murder people defined as enemies, Jews above all, after they destroyed the states around them. Their greatest crime was the Holocaust, the deliberate murder of almost six million Jews; they also starved about three million Soviet prisoners of war to death, killed around a million people in "anti-partisan" operations, and murdered hundreds of thousands of Sinti and Roma and perhaps a quarter of a million people deemed to be disabled. These crimes were committed by human beings, often at very close range, so they raise questions about the political conditions that are necessary for mass atrocity, but also about how people did and can react to those conditions.

Required Readings

• Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, New York: Basic Books, 2022 (2010), vii–118
• Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, Stalin to Kaganovich, 11 August 1932

Free Alternatives

• Snyder, Bloodlands, vii–118
• Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, Stalin to Kaganovich, 11 August 1932, Document 57

Watch

Class 7: How was mass killing possible?

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Class 8: Back to Colonialism

After each World War, the structure of global empire changed. At the end of the First World War, the victorious maritime empires condemned the land empires—the Germans, the Habsburgs, the Ottomans—for their imperialism, and supported, with many qualifications, the rights of nations to have states. The maritime empires continued. In the Second World War, victory was not enough: in the decades that followed, all of the European maritime empires lost their direct overseas power. The cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union used the language of colonialism and imperialism, as each intervened in the territories closest to it on a regular basis, and as each presented itself as the antidote to the aggression of the other. With or without (or after) an allegiance to communism or the far Left, African-Americans and others could reasonably see the United States as a racial frontier empire; some found resemblances to Nazi practices, and made arguments that were also used by Hannah Arendt.

Required Readings

• Hannah Arendt, "We Refugees," 1943
• W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto," 1952
• Richard Wright, in Crossman, ed., The God that Failed, 1949, pp. 115–163
• Paul Robeson, "Genocide Stalks the U.S.A.", 1952
• James Baldwin, "An Open Letter to My Sister Angela Davis," NY Review of Books, 1971

Free Alternatives

• Hannah Arendt, "We Refugees," 1943
• W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto," 1952
• Richard Wright, in Crossman, ed., The God that Failed, 1949, pp. 115–163
• Paul Robeson, "Genocide Stalks the U.S.A.", 1952
• Baldwin, "An Open Letter to My Sister Angela Davis"

Watch

Class 8: Back to Colonialism

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Class 9: East European Dissident Thought

The victorious Soviet Union extended its empire westward after the Second World War. In addition to adding to its own territory, it created satellite regimes in much of eastern and central Europe. In both the Soviet Union and in central and eastern Europe, the death of Stalin in 1953 was a turning point, opening up the apparent possibility of revisiting Marxism; after 1968 and the Soviet (Warsaw Pact) invasion of Czechoslovakia this avenue was closed. In the 1970s and 1980s dissidents sought to redefine freedom as the daily practice of values, and saw small truths as shelters from the big lies in which no one really believed any longer. The "post-totalitarian" or the "post-ideological" or the "anti-political" approach offered tools and enabled meaningful resistance in the form of solidarity and civil society, as well as concepts that apply just as well to our own predicaments as to theirs.

Required Readings

• Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless, London: Vintage, 2018 (1978)
• Leszek Kołakowski, "In praise of inconsistency", 1958
• Snyder, Bloodlands, pp. 379–408

Free Alternatives

• Havel, The Power of the Powerless PDF
• Leszek Kołakowski, "In praise of inconsistency", 1958
• Snyder, Bloodlands, pp. 379–408

Watch

Class 9: East European Dissident Thought

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Class 10: Oligarchy, Neo fascism and Liberation

1989 was supposed to be the end of all that: fascism had been defeated, and now communism had fallen, first that year in eastern Europe, and then two years later in the Soviet Union. But history did not end; and the belief that it had accelerated some of the more dangerous trends. Communism continued in North Korea and China, where party leaders managed to combine one-party rule with capitalism. That economic system proved compatible with essentially any form of politics. Post-communist Russia became a pioneer of extreme inequality of wealth, bringing with it oligarchy and ultimately fascism and a war of aggression in Ukraine. That inequality was characteristic of the United States as well, making social mobility difficult and opening political possibilities for those able to choose enemies and punish them. Fascism, defeated in war, now returned, first quietly, and then openly. The internet, far from spreading knowledge and reason, favored conspiracy thinking and habits of mind inconsistent with freedom and the rule of law. The world of the 2020s is not the world of the 1920s; the differences of wealth and the capacity for propaganda have both become more extreme, and no one is really offering a vision of the future any longer. But the critiques of twentieth-century politics often proved to be quite applicable; and insofar as remembering them is a first step towards history, it is also a first step towards a different and better future.

Required Readings

• Snyder, "American Abyss," New York Times Magazine, 2021
• Charles Mills, "Theorizing Racial Injustice," Lecture 2020

Free Alternatives

• Snyder, "American Abyss" — Web Archive
• Charles Mills, "Theorizing Racial Injustice," Lecture 2020

Watch

Class 10: Oligarchy, Neo fascism and Liberation

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Source: Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

https://www.reddit.com/r/IndianHistory/comments/1v8pxli/the_worlds_oldest_hospital_complexes_be_hidden_in/