https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borki_train_disaster#Investigation
In the preceding years, [Sergei] Witte had been regularly involved in managing imperial train journeys across his railroad and was well known to the tsar. Two months before the crash, Alexander, upset about Witte’s insistence on reducing train speed limits, had publicly chastised him and his railway, referring to its owners’ ethnicity:
Nowhere else has my speed been reduced; your railroad is an impossible one because it is a Jewish road.
According to Witte, he had warned the government earlier of the deficiencies in train setup, notably using paired steam engines and faulty saloon cars.
A hysterically funny thing to me personally is whenever I read about right wingers prior to 1945, they would always accuse other people of being jews. It comes out of nowhere every time and it sort of cracks me up, because I genuinely cannot imagine people doing that today. Granted, today they just use other words to amean the same thing, but it’s probably the bluntness that tickles me.
Americans today accuse me of being russian 20 times per week. It’s exactly the same behaviour.
Neo-nazis are still on the “accuse anyone we don’t like of being Jewish” train. They bust out the calipers and rulers to measure people’s noses and get into struggle sessions over it.
I’m not kidding: any woman in an interracial relationship or who does sex work is seen as being secretly Jewish and they get into arguments over how large her nose is and if you find her attractive you must be secretly gay because she’s obviously trans and…
They would also accuse them of being Jewish communists/Bolsheviks.
They’ve since swapped it to “Islamo-communist” and “woke”
Yeah, but like, I’m reading a long-ass book about Franco’s Spain, and one of the things that the Spanish Right would do in the leadup to the Civil War was just the Spanish oligarchs denouncing various people as jews. That author at least, didn’t make it sound like it “spanish right accuses others of being secret bolsheviks” but more liken “spanish right reinvents inquisition and accuses random catholics of secretly being jewish / jews”, with the implications that being jewish was the crime these people committed.
Oooh, a recommendation? What’s the title? Is it any good? Thanks comrade!
A People Betrayed by Paul Preson. It details a long story of Spain and it’s politics from around the time of the Spanish-American War and until the fall of Franco I believe. The lead up to the civil war is incredibly long and detailed, and I think it’s about 300 pages before you even get to the civil war, and then 20 pages of war, before it goes deep into post-war politics under Franco. I’m not even halfway and it’s really good, albeit it’s REALLY fucking detailed, and it makes you hate everyone that has ever been a right winger with a burning passion, if you don’t already.
Edit: Should probably add, this book was recommended highly on GenZedong back when that sub was still pretty active, and it was recommended with the caveat that the author isn’t a socialist or a marxist, but he is still really good at understanding how structural contradictions drive society. Apparently the author isn’t all too charitable to the Spanish socialist movement, but all I’ve seen so far is the fact that he blames the Republican’s own infighting for the poor performance of the left/center in the civil war. Which isn’t too much of a stretch to argue, I would say.
Thank you! I’ll check it out
the raving imperialists who ran the anglo newspaper empire (the magnate behind the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror basically bought all English newspapers — also thought he was Napoleon reincarnated and looked like the lovechild of churchill and hitler) when drumming up support for WWI called anti-war and neutrality efforts something like “a dirty German-Jewish plot of international finance to bully us into neutrality”.
Then a decade and a half later they published as genuine the Protocols of the Elders of Zion forgery.
European racism is a fascinating thing.
Okhrana even published a test balloon earlier in Russian part of Poland, accusing Jews of plot to exterminate Slavs in the Wisła valley by… building sewers in Warsaw. It did increased antisemitism locally so then they worked on Protocols. Though the sewers were build because it was nearly 700000 city with no sewers whatsoever.
There’s also this bizarre new trend with Russian anticommunists where they say “Yeah sure things weren’t great under the Tsar, but people werent lying awake at night in fear that they might be disappeared by evil secret police!”
And like. (???) серьёзно? every single tactic of deceit and brutalization and infiltration and torture and lies and falsifications and frameups and false flag terror and provocateurs that intelligence and secret police use worldwide were inspired in awe by the expertise of the Okhrana. They were so deep in every aspect of society they reached the point where you would literally have Okhrana agents in every lead position of labor movements and religious movements and everything; and they’d direct protests into just sufficient enough resistance to make the protests feel like they struggled and sacrificed and accomplished something without ever really making a difference — while disappearing and torturing those who had other ideas; kinda like Darren Seals and BLM corporate in the US today. Even father whats-his-name who led bloody sunday was a goddamn Okhranki.
And they weren’t even uniquely a new thing – The Oprichniki before them were also things of nightmares (though afaik it was mostly boyars who were afraid of them and fuck those guys). There was that famous (and very cool) painting named after them based off the event where they staged a mock-coronation for some boyar lord to murder him. Like where do they think the Chekists and Red Terror came from and were necessary for the Bolsheviks? It was just for fun? had nothing to do with the pre-existing state and security forces? White terror was fake? One of Lenin’s closest allies in the revolution turned out to be an Okhrana agent and they couldn’t believe it for the longest time until it became proven enough to shoot the prick.
Not to mention all of the pogroms. I couldn’t believe the first time I heard someone assert ‘at least there was no terror under the tsar’
There is a reason the same people cry rivers about the Oprichnina but stan for Okhrana.
Won’t someone think of the feudal lords!?
Southpark trying to bring it back