#The First Henchmens' Union

[dycefic]

Tom Saves The World

Everyone knows that it’s super-heroes who save the world. They fight the aliens, or the monsters, or the bad guys. And mostly, that’s true.

But not always.

I’m a psychic. The thing is, my range isn’t that great. I don’t have much detail more than about 36 hours out, 48 for something really big. I’d had a nebulous sort of bad feeling for about a week before this one finally hit, and it was big. Something very tough and very supernatural was going to come up out of the harbor of Nova Roma, and the death-toll was going to be high. Crazy high.

I did all I could. I told the Unaligned Supers Job Placement Agency, and they put the word out to everyone on both sides of the Line. The Henchman’s Union don’t like natural disasters any more than anyone else, and they’re often quite helpful against eldritch horrors and stuff like that. Things that don’t hire henchmen and ruin the property values.

The trouble was, nobody big was around. The only really big team of heavy hitters on the West Coast were away dealing with some sort of doomsday cult - I never was clear on what that was about - and Guarde and Dog Fox were out of touch and even Mx Frantique was out of town at someone’s wedding. It was going to happen in less than two days and we couldn’t find anyone to help and I was seriously considering calling in some kind of bomb threat or something to get people away from the docks, at least.

And then, about eighteen hours out, it just… went away.

Which never, ever happens.

My powers might be short range, but they’re reliable. I don’t get stuff wrong, and I hadn’t been able to find any way to prevent what was going to happen, or even been able to identify anyone who could. But someone did. Someone had done something to stop the threat, something that happened literally while I was opening my car door. When I reached for the handle, thousands of people were going to die. By the time the door was open, there was no threat at all.

At first I thought it must have been a ranged thing. Like, whatever I’d been seeing (all those teeth, I saw them in nightmares for months after) had been distracted by something tasty on its way here and gotten off track, that it’d come up somewhere up or down the coast. My range isn’t that big, either. Anything outside about thirty miles might as well be on Mars for all I know about it. So we kept a watch out, and warned the chapters of the Union and the Agency in other cities.

But nothing happened. Nothing at all. I couldn’t explain it, and I was really unpopular for a while. Supers do NOT like people who cry wolf. There’s enough freaky shit we have to deal with without someone panicking everyone with a dire prophecy that fizzles out.

Thank all the gods that Tunny showed up. Nobody’s really sure what Tunny actually is - sentient fish creature, some kind of really mutated human, an alien, or what. She changes her story a lot. But she’s pretty friendly, especially for a twenty-foot-long horror-movie-mermaid-thing with four arms, so when she came into harbor to pick up some supplies a guy from the Agency went out to tell her what I’d seen. I’d gotten a wharf and dock number, so she went down to check.

I don’t think anyone had ever seen Tunny scared before. Her English wasn’t good enough to really explain what she’d found hibernating down there, but it was something very old and very powerful and very dangerous, and if it’d been woken up my vision would just have been the start of the crisis.

She rounded up a bunch of whales to help her move it, once she was sure it hadn’t been agitated and wasn’t likely to rouse if moved carefully. They towed it out before dawn, not wanting to scare the civilians, and when I saw the footage from the helicopter the Union sent up, when I saw how big the swell was, how many whales were pulling, I swear I nearly crapped myself. No wonder I’d been getting hints a week in advance. Somehow we dumbass humans had built a whole fucking city almost on top of some kind of Ancient Old… THING, and eroded the sea-bottom until it was exposed, and if someone hadn’t done whatever it was we’d all have been dead long before Tunny arrived. And not just all as in ‘all of Nova Roma’, it could have taken out half of the continent... or all of it.

It took me years to find out what happened. YEARS. It turned into a kind of hobby, tracking everything that might possibly have come into contact with Wharf 38 on that particular day.  

And what I found, eventually, was a city employee named Thomas Briggs.

I’d found out early on that 38 wasn’t in good repair. Not that bad, but not great. It was old, things were getting a bit saggy in a few places, but there’d been no sign that anything was likely to fall off on the day. It had sat there for a couple of years after the crisis that never happened,, doing its job without problems then been rebuilt without any drama at all.

Entirely, completely, and totally because of Thomas Briggs.

The story, when I finally pieced it together, went like this.

There’d been some project or other to build some sort of high-budget science project over on the other side of the harbor, hanging it off’ve Pier 8, the furthest out on that side. Something about tracking sea-life or ships or something. My conversational English is near perfect, I’ve been here for years, but I don’t speak science nerd in ANY language. It’d all been approved, some university was covering most of the cost, it was all gonna be fine. And it was gonna be over on 8 because that side of the harbor is the shallow end. It’s where the sailboats go. All the big stuff that would block visual sensors and deafen the thing with engine noise was over in the thirties, in the real deep water.

They were almost ready to install the thing when a bunch of rich dudes suddenly got their panties in a bunch over having a big sciency tower thing ruining the view from their yachts, and tried to get it moved.

To, and I’m sure you guessed this, Wharf 38.

Which was completely insane. It wouldn’t be able to do its job over there, it’d be way more in the way, and (although they couldn’t have known it) the installation would definitely have woken up the Thing sleeping by the wharf and we all would have died. But rich dudes with yachts don’t care about that stuff. They’d bitched out and bribed up their friends on the city council, and those friends had done their thing, and the scientists had been left in the dark, and it’d almost gone through. They’d figured to install it right away, so that when the science guys found out it’d be too late and they’d either have to pay a lot to move it or just use it where it was.

Enter Thomas Briggs.

Mr Briggs, Tom to his friends, didn’t give a crap about the yachts or the science. He was a senior money guy for the commercial wharfs, the one who figured out things like how much money they’d take in in a quarter, and what the repair budget should be, stuff like that. He found out about this thing two days before the disaster would have happened, and sat down and did the math.

Then he sent out an email to the guys trying to push this through, and he ripped into them like they’d threatened to knife his mother. I got my hands on that email, and I didn’t understand a lot of it any more than the council guys would have. It was ALL numbers. But at the top he wrote it out in plain English. Pier 8 was new, and rated to handle the weight of the thingy. Wharf 38 was going to be scrapped in a few years, and it was NOT rated for that kind of structure. Pier 8 had plenty of room around it. Wharf 38 was already a tight fit for the big commercial ships, and adding a structure sticking out on one side would block off at least half of the wharf to those ships completely.

Bottom line, putting the thing on Wharf 38 would cost the city hundreds of thousands of dollars more per year than putting it on 8, AND the city would have to eat the cost if 38 collapsed under it which it could easily do, AND the city would have to pay to move it in a couple of years anyway when 38 was due to be rebuilt.

And he cc-ed every important person he had an email address for, including the mayor, the anti-corruption people, and several reporters.

He must have sent that email right when I was opening my car door.

The whole plan collapsed right there, and some people got fired. There was no news story because the whole plan got killed before the reporters even got to the right office. The installation was started on Wharf 8 a few weeks later and I never connected it to a commercial wharf on the other side of the harbor.

One email, and a man who I never could have located in time, a man who had no powers at all, a man who was just conscientiously doing his job looking after the city’s money saved the city, and the continent, and maybe even the world.

Who could have predicted that? Not me, that’s for damn sure.

I can’t deny that I went home and got drunk off my ass that night. Just thinking about how close that had been made my hands shake. One man. One honest man who’d done the math.

I put the word out, once the hangover wore off. What had happened. That Thomas Briggs was the reason we were all alive and everyone better make his life real nice from now on, because he’d done what none of us could do and nobody but the supers would ever even know it.

He’s got a lot of luck coming to him, I can tell you. We don’t forget debts like that.

And I knew that’d freak him out, because honest men don’t like it when people start doing them a lot of favors for no apparent reason, so I tracked him down at the little bar where he likes to have a quiet beer on Friday nights before he goes home. Hell, I was the one who’d gone through it all, back then. I should get to tell him.

I sat down beside him at the bar and looked at him. I saw a thin, small, balding man who looked like he worried too much and didn’t get enough sleep, with lines around his eyes. Yeah, he looked like a man who’d do the math. “Thomas Briggs?”

He blinked at me through his glasses. “Yes? Do I know you?”

“No, you don’t. My name’s Barkhado Omar, and I’ve been looking for you for a long time.” I offered him my hand and he shook it, still looking confused. Which was fair, ‘cause I doubt a lot of seven foot tall Somali women came up to him in bars even when he was young. He’s got to be close to retirement now.

He frowned. “Looking for me? Why?”

I smiled at him. “Tom, let me buy you a drink and tell you about the day you saved the world.”

It’s usually us who save the city, or the world. We have all the intel, all the advantages, all the powers.

But sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s someone like Tom Briggs, doing the right thing at the right time and never knowing that he changed the course of history.

Wild, huh?

--

This story is a direct result of me and my ex chatting about how different the entire Marvel Universe would have been if Jean’s first ‘resurrection’ - being found in a life pod under a wharf, IIRC - had happened at like... any other time. Earlier. Later. It would have changed SO MUCH.

And we speculated about how it could happen, how someone just puttering around in middle management might have unknowingly saved countless lives, prevented Madelyne’s corruption, the legacy virus, all of it, just by postponing that particular set of repairs a bit longer.... and I couldn’t resist writing a version of the story in which Tom does, in fact, save the world.

[ask-maxie-boy]

Goonion's Ghoul (Part 3) [dp x dc]

(A/N we switching the official name of the goonion to The First Universal Henchmans' Union. Just makes sense, thank y'all for the advice)

(Parts 1 & 2: here) (Part 4: here)

"Before we begin, I'd just like to clarify a few things. Mainly, can I ask for your preferred name?"

"Is that a joke?"

"Well, I figured it would professional to come out and call you Mr. Cobblepot, but seeing as we're talking about a... certain aspect of your enterprises, I wasn't sure you wanted your legal name in the records. The Union takes confidentiality very seriously."

Oswald Cobblepot looked down at the scrawny boy in front of him. This was the guy that had Eddie shaking in his boots? He tapped the ashes off his cigarette into the ashtray, and scoffed. "Doesn't matter to me, as long as you remember who you're talking to before you open your mouth."

"Of course! As you wish, Mr. Penguin."

There it was. That smile just a bit too wide, just like Riddler had said. Oswald Cobblepot wasn't an amateur, he wouldn't let something like that throw him off balance. "Alright, kid, lets cut to the chase. Whats this all about a Union?"

"Oh, Mr. Penguin, I had thought you heard! The First Universal Henchmans' Union is a recently formed collective of working class freelance goons, henchmen, and grunts of all different colors."

"Hweh! And what do I care if a bunch of simpletons wanna have a party together?"

The kid's head tilted, a sickening crack! ringing through the room. Just for a second, its eyes seemed to glow.

When you deal with bats for so long, little things like that don't sway you.

"If they're so little to you in your mind, then surely anything they might ask of you shouldn't be that hard to swallow?"

The temperature in the room seemed to drop, as the thing's face tried to imitate inquisitiveness.

Good. The Penguin likes it cold.

"You can toss away the whole intimidation shtick, boy. I didn't get to be where I was by bending over to every ignoramus who thinks they can get me to do what they want."

When you deal with Bats for so long, you start to pay more attention to little expressions. The way the shadows suddenly fall onto the boy's blue-eyed, black haired face as he tilts his head downward makes The Penguin's flinch, just for a moment.

"I promise you sir, the Goonion is a very real, and very serious organization."

Cobblepot sneers, cigarette holder angling upward, as he taps his umbrella on the ground. "I pay my people well. My lounge is up to code, too. You don't have a damn thing on me, and here you are trying to pull the wool over my eyes. Well listen here, boy, you don't run an operation like this in Gotham without knowing fear. Fear is watching every shadow, looking for the pin pricks of light. Fear is the cracking of bones in the room over as you know the jig's up. Fear is watching Gotham's shadow spawn appear from the darkness, promising the only thing he wont do is kill you. You're way out of your league if you think I'll bend to such a cheap trick."

When you deal with Bats for so long, you learn to keep your eyes open. You keep track of exits, you look for little disturbances, keep your ears ready for even the softest sound.

You pay attention to that little voice that says you're being watched.

"Mr Penguin, do I need to remind you just who these 'simpletons' are? They're the men who carry your goods to and from your lounge. They're the ones who rig up the Riddler's bombs, traffic weapons in and out of the city. What happens when deals go south, when plans are canceled partway though?"

When you deal with Bats for so long, you watch the shadows. They practically live in them, entering and exiting like they're made from the stuff. Anything that might give away their position.

The shadows are dancing. Pulsing with something even darker than Gotham. He swears he can hear the sound of a bat gently hitting someone's hand. Distant laughter, not natural, almost forced.

"You know, Mr. Penguin, The Joker is easily one of our worst offenders. One of his more interesting complaints is the lack of security in regards to chemicals. See, he doesn't really care much if there's missing inventory, or what happens after his plan, as long as there's enough for what he needs." A vial flutters between its fingers, eyes almost bored as a forked tongue slides between sharpened teeth. "I wonder, where does it all go?

Eyes, green as emerald and as bright as the sun burn into Ozwald's. A grin stretches wider, wider, quite literally from one ear to the next filled with jagged teeth. "Do you want to find out?"

...~☆~...

"...My... smoking habits."

"Yeah, honestly. Its like you said. Most of your stuff is up to board, and your workers are fairly happy. Its mainly just an issue for henches with asthma, though secondhand smoke isn't something most people enjoy."

"You did all that over my cigarettes?!"

"its fairly understood that the Iceberg Lounge is not a smoke-free area, so you can do as you please there, but when it comes to abandoned warehouses or other places of business, we ask you please refrain from smoking."

"I can't believe this."

"For what its worth, the goons understand its part of your whole outfit, and are willing to compromise. We have a list of alternatives that visibly resemble a lit cigarette, and will fit in your holder, but wont actually release any smoke..."

@akikkobara @thegatorsgoose @addie-lover-of-stories @apointlessbox @screamingtofillthevoid @semiprofessionaldumbass @sailor-goddess @malice-of-the-sunrise @savaton @spikedlynx @emergentpanda-blog @starlightcat04

[starlightshadowsworld]

I don't think this will happen but I'm thinking about if Kunikida was the one to join the Port Mafia in the exchange.

Reasons being:

A way to learn more about him, given Kunikida is Fukuzawa's successor. And or how to break him if they go back to being enemies again.

To possibly fuck with Dazai cos that's his partner, cos self preservation who's she?

Or they asked for someone like Atsushi and Kunikida objects like no way absolutely not and that gets there attention.

Whatever way, somehow Kunikida ends up in the Port Mafia.

He would run that place so fucking efficiently it would make heads spin.

You kidding me? He's not even an executive or anything but somehow this man is booked and busy.

Paperwork is getting done on time, he probably organised a henchmens union while he was at it.

Mori explained his role and the first thing Kunikida asks is do you guys get dental?

People reckon he'll be a pushover and his ideals are nothing but words on paper, but Kunikida is nothing but committed to them.

Kunikida would go the entire time not killing anyone. Even it seems like the only way out.

Someone tries to order him too so and he snaps the gun in half. They say they'll kill him for disobeying orders.

And he walks away like you won't because your aim is shit.

Also adding my Kunikida has a criminal record for things like tearing off spikes of benches so unhoused people can sleep on em and stuff like that.

Kunikida's not like "your blood is Mafia black" but he's not a goody too shoes either.

Which is something the Port Mafia expected and quickly learn isn't true.

If Kunikida doesn't want to follow a rule or an order, he fucking wont.

It's as simple as that, he's got an iron will.

Kunikida regularly calls the agency and makes sure they're all doing well.

Of course he sees and witnesses things that are rough but man has his 2 hour scheduled break down and he's good to go.

Well not really but you get it.

Goes drinking with Chuuya, they both bitch about Dazai and become well acquainted.

Probably has tea with Hirotsu on the weekends.

Kunikida doesn't take shit from anyone, he'll sit and listen to Akutugawa rant before raising an eyebrow like "you done?"

But he'd also look out for him and everyone else he's with. They are allies afterall.

Imagining Akutugawa getting injured on a mission and Kunikida just creates a first aid kit. Akutagawa is just like excuse me no.

And Kunikida rolls his eyes, patches him up in an alleyway and than helping him get home. All without complaint.

Even asks later if he's okay, Akutugawa is like why do you care? And Kunikida looks at him like it's ridiculous for him to even ask before Akutugawa admits he's okay.

It's not a thank you but Kunikida will take it.

Kunikida who's open with his emotions and yet it's never seen a weakness.

He's also crazy strong, and it's so shocking the first time anyone sees his strength.

People trying to scare him and he's like I am Dazai's partner and I used to teach maths to teenagers, you can't do shit.

Without meaning too or realising it he starts to gain their begrudging respect.

I'm not saying Kunikida would thrive in the Port Mafia.

I'm saying the Port Mafia would thrive with him.

[tomorrowusa]

Executing your own troops must do wonders for morale. No wonder Russia is losing.

Those comparisons of Putin to Stalin and Hitler are not really hyperbole.

“We have information that the Russian military has been actually executing soldiers who refuse to follow orders,” U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said at a press briefing in Washington on Thursday. “We also have information that Russian commanders are threatening to execute entire units if they seek to retreat from Ukrainian artillery fire,” he added. “It’s reprehensible to think … that you would execute your own soldiers because they didn’t want to follow orders,” Kirby said. “And now threatening to execute entire units. It’s barbaric.” [ ... ]

Kirby said Moscow appears to have resumed the “human wave tactics” of throwing hundreds of poorly trained soldiers at the Ukrainian lines, which the Kremlin first used in the winter offensive last year. “Russia’s renewed offensive is a sobering reminder that President Putin has not given up his aspirations to take all of Ukraine. As long as Russia continues its brutal assault, we have to support Ukraine,” Kirby said.

If Russian troops know that Putin's Mafia-style enforcers are probably going to shoot them, they have plenty of incentive to shoot the pro-régime henchmen first. 💡

It's Day 614 of Putin's 3-day "special operation" in Ukraine. It's getting increasingly difficult for Russia's dictator to find people who will voluntarily fight for his cherished goal of restoring the decrepit Soviet Union in all but name. Just yesterday you may have seen a post here about how kids in Russia are being militarized.

The best advice we can give to Russian males of military age is GET OUT.

Neighboring Mongolia and Kazakhstan are supposed to be beautiful in the autumn. It's the perfect time for a vacation.

Putin has ruined Russia for at least a generation; it's gradually turning into a large version of North Korea. Even if the war ends tomorrow there is little future for anybody in Russia – except maybe in Putin's secret police.

Leaving Russia may be difficult but staying there could become catastrophic.

[scotianostra]

The Scottish actor Alex McCrindle passed away on Aoril 20th 1990.

Born on 3rd August 1911 in Glasgow, Alex McCrindle started work at the age of 10 years, probably like many of us, delivering milk. At 15, he left school and got a job in a timber merchants’ office. He started his acting career playing heroes in plays put on by the Boys Brigade. Later, after moving to Glasgow and getting a job as a manager of a hardware firm, he joined the Glasgow Clarion Players. A pioneer Scottish theatre group with strong links to the Communist Party, this was a predecessor of Glasgow Unity and Glasgow Citizens.

McCrindle went to lectures on drama at Glasgow University and had become so engaged in theatrical matters that he had to choose to give up his hardware career. He was lucky to be able to become an indentured apprentice at Queen Theatre in London He finished up as an electrician but became immersed in the world of theatre and actors along the way.

He eventually became a formable actor himself. In the period 1937-9, he appeared in a dozen plays on the first broadcasts of television, including `Juneo and the Paycock’, before the medium was closed down for the duration of the war, sometimes being credited as Alex McCringle or Alex McGrindle, as well as in his own name. he was also in the cast of the classic Hitchcock film, `The 39 steps’, although he was more proud of his nationwide tour of `Six men of Dorset’, about the Tolpuddle Martyrs, in 1937

McCrindle began a history of the actors’ union, Equity, but was unable to finish it due to being called up for the Royal Navy during the Second World War. He produced the first ever play performed on board a RN ship during war, `Androcles and the Lion’, transmitted over the Tannoy!

He starred in the British BBC radio show `Dick Barton Special Agent’ from 1946-51, which ran for 700 episodes and had 15 million listeners. Alex played the role of Jock Anderson one of Dick Barton’s key henchmen and was widely loved for the role and enormously popular in it. In 1947, he was producer of the childrens TV programme `Larry the Lamb’.

Although he also branched out very successfully into scriptwriting, McCrindle was effectively blacklisted because of his Communist and Equity activities for much of the important years of his career, especially from the late 1940s to the end of the 1950s. In the 1950s, he appeared – often uncredited to escape the blacklist – in a string of small budget movies as a character actor. But, in the main, blacklisting resulted in him devoting more time to building up Equity and securing improved pay and conditions for Actors, to meet this objective he was sent by his union to found Scottish Equity, which only had 15 members before he began his work. He worked at this full-time for the next seven years, leaving the union in a flouring position north of the border. In this period, he only worked in British television and then only twice during the early 1960s.

In the later stage of his career, he began to secure significant parts in films and TV programmes from `The Saint’ in 1965, and then through many other projects, with increasingly more significant parts, to `All Creatures Great and Small’ and `Taggart’ and then, in the 1977 first `Star Wars’ movie in which he played a rebel general.

George Lucas, short of capital, offered the actors on the movie "points" in lieu of salary. Big stars such as Alec Guinness, could afford to indulge in some capitalist speculation and take "points" and, in the event, the film proved to be the best move Guinness ever made financially. "Hollywood thought Darth Vader was a tough nut," one luvvie has recalled, "but they hadn’t met Alex."! He campaigned through Equity for bonuses for all actors in Star Wars, among them R2-D2 (who was played, or operated inside, by Birmingham-born Kenny Baker), who also took a working wage and contributed to the success of Star Wars.

Alex had a great love of Scottish poetry and regularly read it aloud to audiences. He produced and read his own selection of 37 poems by William Soutar (Glasgow, Scotsoun, 1989) and raised money for Brownsbank Cottage., the former of the great Scottish writer, Hugh MacDiarmid, now a home for "writers in residence"

He was married twice, the first was Sandy, the second wife, Honor Arundel, the Communist children’s author and Daily Worker film critic. (See entry for Honor Arundel.) The home of McCrindle and Arundel in the fifties was always a hub of Party activity and organisation, as the writer Doris Lessing notes in her autobiography. Alex became close friends with Paul Strand, the famous photographer, and was a major asset to Strand in his `Tir a Mhurain’ photography project. He went onto become Strand’s agent in Scotland, negotiating with Compton Mackenzie and visiting the School of Scottish Studies in order to help set up the project.

In the 1980s, with US screenings no longer debarred to him, he appeared in dozens of major roles on television mini-series, including "Reilly: The Ace of Spies" and in film such as `Eye of the Needle’. As late as 1987 he played the role of a jailer in `Comrades’, the film about the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

Alex McCrindle’s obituary in the Times was headlined "Communist stalwart" and stated that he remained committed to an "unrelenting Marxism which lost nothing of its purity and uncompromising severity". His daughter Jean also became involved in politics and an award for drama was named after him. Alex McCrindle died on April 20, 1990 in Edinburgh.

[sasheneskywalker]

batfamily fic recs where original characters are main characters

The Pros and Cons to Digging Your Own Grave by vermillion_crown

[+] Well, at least you know where it is.

[-] Like you don't have enough to do already.

Or another tough debate on which is worse: falling to your death from about 100 ft up onto wet concrete, or experiencing the still nebulous but unspeakable horrors of child trafficking?

Given the bluff profile of the average 10-year-old, maybe the terminal velocity can be increased significantly if that 10-year-old curls up during descent? While undesirable, instantaneous death still ranked higher than drawn-out suffering and mental trauma (if not also death). At least, that's the personal evaluation here. No prescribing this scenario's weightings onto anyone else.

So, the only thing left to do with that solved is to start climbing; bat-people have a schedule to keep, after all.

(The smart thing to do, when in way over your head, is to avoid trouble when you see it—animal-themed vigilantes first and foremost. But sometimes, they are the lesser evil.)

(Dick Grayson pulls a Bruce, gets bullied by a child, more at 11.)

T | Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings | Dick Grayson & Original Male Character(s), Barbara Gordon & Dick Grayson, Barbara Gordon & Original Male Character(s), Tim Drake & Original Male Character(s), Undisclosed Relationship(s)

Singing in the Dead of Night by shesgotthespirit

Bodies are dropping in Gotham--children, brain dead and tortured, numbered and tagged like cattle. The Bats are on the case, but with little to no physical evidence left behind, they’re faced with more questions than answers. But when a mysterious metahuman involves herself in the case, the investigation turns in a new, disturbing direction--and it turns out she might need their help just as much as they need hers.

OR

“Has anyone else noticed that the cooling-off period between Bruce’s dubiously-legal child acquisitions seems to be getting exponentially shorter?”

M | Graphic Depictions Of Violence | Cassandra Cain & Tim Drake & Dick Grayson & Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne & Damian Wayne, Cassandra Cain & Tim Drake & Dick Grayson & Jason Todd & Damian Wayne, Bruce Wayne & Damian Wayne, Dick Grayson & Damian Wayne, Stephanie Brown & Cassandra Cain, Tim Drake & Original Female Character(s), Bruce Wayne & Original Female Character(s), Cassandra Cain & Original Character(s), Dick Grayson & Original Female Character(s), Damian Wayne & Original Character(s), Batfamily Members & Original Female Character(s), Tim Drake & Bruce Wayne, Jason Todd & Original Female Character(s)

Mama's gonna buy you a Mockingbird by Blazonix

Your name is Catherine Todd. It’s not the name you went to sleep with last night, but that’s the name printed on the ID card tucked away in your bra. It took a while to find because you were a bit distracted by the fact you have a completely different face.

Not Rated | Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings | Catherine Todd & Jason Todd

oh, well imagine by blenderfullasarcasm

A union.

For goons.

A goon union.

A…goonion?

…Eh, beats customer service.

T | Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings | No Relationships

Reddit Posts of a Crime Alley Kid by Beachfox

Conrad's just your average 20 year old Crime Alley street-rat. He's no one special. Just another (Second) Robin worshiping, baseball bat wielding, Hench Work avoiding, homeless kid wrangling, street patrolling, Red Hood work for-ing, formerly homeless gay street-punk thug.

And sure, there's that time Robin slammed him off a wall hard enough to change his life, and that time he accused Batman of murder, and the time his sister Joker Gas bombed a playground. And sure, most of his family are active Henchmen for various Rogues, and sure Red Hood seems like he might be flirting with him, and sure despite his best efforts the Bats keep showing up in his life more and more often. But he's still just a normal average guy.

He also has a crippling Reddit addiction.

Alternatively

A character study of a hot trashfire of a human being in the DCUniverse as told through his many many Reddit posts.

T | Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings | Jason Todd/Original Male Character(s), Batman & Robin - Relationship

Nay, I Can't Resist Thee by Gement

"If that's what you're up for, 'kay." Oh god, he'd embarrassed Batman. Zach was too far gone on adrenaline and panic to shut up. "But I'm a masochist, and you're Batman. Look, I'm sorry. I know that makes it weird."

The one where a total stranger asks Batman to hit him in the face and, against all odds, this is an effective meet-cute strategy. It spirals out from there. Way, way out.

(Come on in, the water's fluffy-kinky-queer.)

E | No Archive Warnings Apply | Bruce Wayne/OMC, side Clark Kent/Bruce Wayne, side Selina Kyle/Bruce Wayne

[honeydewcorporation]

Hey Boss, I finished writing up that incident report you wanted.

I've included a list of procedures you should follow in the future to avoid mass employee casualties in the future. You don't need to follow all of them, but following at least one of the procedures will greatly improve employee safety.

Give all employees at least a two hour notice of when you'll be spending quality time with your polycule so they can evacuate the building.

Deactivate voice recognition in the Control Room when spending quality time with your polycule.

Use safety words that cannot be mistaken for voice commands recognized by the building's Master Control System when spending quality time with your polycule.

Do not spend quality time with your polycule in the Control Room.

Also, please be aware this list was approved by the Henchman Union and they will take legal action if you do not comply going forward.

WHO LET THE HENCHMEN UNIONIZE??

Anyway, the Honeydew Corporation Corporate Headquarters of Corruption is LOADED with defense systems that should finish any henchman hurt in a workplace accident off so that they can't sue. Don't you worry there. (Plus, nothing boosts efficiency like working in a building with grenade launchers attached to the security cameras.)

As for your list, I can't fulfill that first request on account of the profit loss we'd face with nobody in the building. The second request is a little iffy, because quality time with the polycule often involves me being tied up. And at times like that it's only logical to keep the voice recognition on in case I need to bark any orders or demands.

That third one... well ok, listen, I get it, but that was one time. I made the threat level thing scale based off of color and when members of my polycule call my face red, the defense system thinks we're in a class 7 emergency and... y'know it just kills anything that moves, it's a whole ordeal. I'll switch it to something a little harder to accidentally set off.

And the last one? Wellll I mean... It's kinda like, y'know it's a nice safe space. The monsters can't get through the hardlight reinforced door in case they ever breach. I just feel safer in there than out on the factory floor. So I'll pass on that one.

Seriously can't believe they unionized, that sucks. Hope they don't think this means they're getting paid!

The Honeydew Corporation solemnly bids farewell to the six camera operators who tragically passed away during the production of this post.

[lsleofthelost]

this is a thing that’s been in my brain for way too long, so even if it’s kind of half baked i’ve decided to release it into the wild

so, before i’ve watched the descendants movies (can u believe there was a time when i didn’t have all of them marinating in my mind…) i kind of assumed that by Descendants, they meant like really descendants, as in 2-3 generations at least, not just children of heroes and villains. i remembered that a couple of months ago, and thought well, that could make a great AU, where we keep all the characters but we make them a little more distant in generations. and because i love historical dramas, i’ve created a whole fake history in my head.

here’s what i have so far:

The timeline is that King Adam created the Isle when he did, and sent the first batch of villains then. The action of the films that historically take place before that are shifted to take place practically simultaneously or soon after Auradon forms (Hercules, The Sword in the Stone, Mulan, Aladdin, The Sleeping Beauty, Emprerors New Groove, Pocahontas) so all the villains and henchmen are sent there as the first experimental batch. They get an Island from the Olympians, the Island that before was serving as a prison only for the God of the Underworld, Hades. They call it Le Carcéral, which just means The Prison. The magical cage at that point is different, it allows everything to come in, but it doesn’t let anything or anyone leave. So the magically inclined can summon their belongings, even parts of their castles, perform magic, etc. but if they tried to curse someone outside, it would either bounce back inside or just dissipate at contact with the barrier.

During Adam’s reign, there is still unrest in other Kingdoms, and with their strong military (backed by Wei, the Empire from Mulan) and experience in dealing with villains, Auradon helps them to catch and neutralise the threats by sending them to Le Carcéral in exchange for these Kingdoms either paying a tax or joining the Union and also pay the tax but now getting offered military support, trade agreements, political unity etc. So the films that take place during this are: Rapunzel (Corona joins), Frozen (Arendelle doesn’t, they already trade well and have a good military), Alice (Wonderland can’t really join, since it’s kind of like a dimensionally weird space + value privacy in their politics, but they get some trade agreements because they have unique products to export, still pay the prison tax), Cinderella (i’ve long ago decided to call their Kingdom Sujeong, also join; but stay pretty closed off politically, not letting Auradon interfere a lot), Ariel (Tirulia, which is what I think Eric’s Kingdom is called, enthusiastically joins, Atlantea doesn’t, still pretty hostile to humans).

So there are all these new villains and their henchmen, but there is also a pretty steady, if small, stream of prisoners accused of the worst crimes. Treason, practicing dark magical arts (magic overall is still legal), first degree murder, mass murder, drug trafficking, etc. The Island becomes crowded, so the fairies bring up more territory all around to enlarge it. This is also the time where they realise that by enchanting the barrier to let absolutely nothing leave, they made it so the prisoners’ years and even souls are trapped, they are sort of preserved in age and can’t even die. They modify the enchantment but that turns into a huge riot and a lot of people, including the Auradon patrol guards and some volunteers, die, so they reverse it. This is around the time when Le Carcéral becomes The Isle of the Lost colloquially for the prisoners.

Sometime during the calmer times, I’m thinking soon after Corona joins, Belle gives birth to their first son, securing the line of succession with Le Grand Dauphin Marcel. They have three more children, two girls and a boy, but only the girls survive. Elisabeth marries the Camelot prince, and Adelaide marries an Auradon noble who was gaining traction to start a civil war.

King and Queen start being more religious after the loss of their son, and proclaim Catholic Christianity the official religion in the Union. They don’t outright ban practice of other religions, but Agrabah leaves nonetheless, they still house their worst prisoners at Le Carcéral, so they now pay a bigger tax but they are an incredibly rich land, they can afford it. (The Hunchback of Notre Dame takes place around here)

With more religion, they start to introduce and enforce more and more laws against magic.

Marcel marries the princess of Schwarzwald, Charlotte, Snow White’s oldest child, and has a child of his own, while Adam is still ruling, Benjamin. Marcel dies unexpectedly, when Ben is only five, so the title of heir apparent, Le Grand Dauphin, goes to him.

Adam is already in his fifties-sixties when the events of Peter Pan (Auradon and Camelot don’t consider the native population and proclaim the islands theirs, and cleans away the pirates in the surrounding waters), Atlantis (the discovery of Neverland spurs more exploration missions, but theirs is officially fruitless since the members of the crew decide to keep Atlantis a secret from the world), The Princess and the Frog (yes this opens plot holes by being so close in time to Pocahontas, but this is my fictional world so i’ve decided it’s just two different places, so the land Tiana is from is just New Orleans, a country in the Commonwealth of former Auradon colonies. They join but Naveen’s Kingdom doesn’t, since they are majority Hindu), 101 Dalmatians (the downfall, capture and imprisonment of Cruella de Vil make huge news, as she was regarded as The Style Icon of all Kingdoms). The fact that as much as they punish villains, new magical villains, or villains using magical artefacts, are still so active makes Adam outlaw magic fully, with only exceptions having to get the Crown’s personal approval.

When Benjamin is around 13, Adam dies, leaving him with the tension at the border with Aragon, Moors and Ulstead (Kingdoms of Aurora and Phillip). They want to make a bid for overturning the Union and coming out ruling over it. Some reasons are that their House has strong connections, through history and marriage with many other Union Kingdoms, they want to reverse the magic ban, and they own more land than Auradon and have to pay huge taxes for it. Queen Regent Charlottes rule is spent in trying to minimise the threat of war, small battles at borders, and protecting Benjamin. When he comes of age and is crowned King (at age eighteen), he is also continuing that. But he sees an opportunity for peace when he learns that Princess Audriana has been presented to society and has yet to have an official marriage contract. They get married, and pleased to see someone of Amanacer House on the throne and to have their taxes reduced, the war actions seize.

Once the threat that has been hanging over his head for more than five years is taken care of, Benjamin starts looking at the project that his father has been passionate about but been turned away by his grandfather. Freeing the trapped descendants from the Isle of the Lost.

[droppingartintotheinfinite]

Ok! So! Big Goncharov revival has happened on tumblr recently, and I’ve decided to take the opportunity when it’s handed to me to talk about one of the best movies I have ever seen.

Bear with me for a moment.

For those unfamiliar, Goncharov (1973) was a movie directed by Matteo JWHJ0715, a (then closeted) bisexual filmmaker from Italy. Martin Scorsese then lent his name to it to provide a popularity boost for the American release, which is where we get the common misconception that he directed it.

It stars a Russian mob boss named Goncharov (no first name given, for reasons I’ll discuss later) who’s brought a few key members of his gang to Naples, Italy in order to get revenge against Italian mob boss Mario Giglioli. (A good breakdown of the movie’s plot can be found in @mst3kproject’s review, which I would link here but tumblr is being weird)

Along the way, we’re introduced to his wife, Katya Goncharova, his right hand man, Andrey, Mario’s wife, Sofia Giglioli, and a few others.

Goncharov is an almost nauseatingly stereotypical man. What stereotype, you ask? Why, all of them! He’s a tall, heavily built man with a thick accent and a tendency to reference “Mother Russia” in tones of alternatively nearly reverential praise of Soviet era Russia and harsh condemnation of the Russia he leaves during the movie - the Russia directly after the Soviet Union’s fall. The way he does this is heavy handed and obviously written by a man who’s never visited Russia in his life in any era, to the point where my own lax education on the country doesn’t actually leave me unqualified to analyze the film, despite the majority of the main characters originating from it. (Though I’m sure there are great analyses to be made on the cultural inaccuracies within the film, especially given how many are entirely deliberate- but I’ll get to that later)

He’s also exhaustingly heterosexual, and very much being so with an eye towards to the beliefs of the time. There are many scenes in Goncharov that are hard to watch today, and many of the scenes between Goncharov and Katya are among them, especially the dinner scenes.

Here, you may be saying, “But Sol, didn’t you say the director was bi?” And hey, hold your horses, we’ll get to that.

Katya, Goncharov’s wife, is on the surface an ideal 70s housewife, if a bit more murderous than the average due to her mafia husband. She makes him dinner every night, defers to his whims without argument, and spends most of their shared scenes standing behind him, never beside.

She also violently murders him to avenge her lesbian lover, but as I’ve said, we’ll get to that.

Mario Giglioli, Goncharov’s rival, is just Goncharov with an Italian accent. I think if they could have cast Robert De Niro twice and had him play Mario as well as Goncharov, they would have. He has a german shepard and Goncharov makes one of his henchman steal it near the start of the film. I am unhinged about this man.

One of Goncharov’s few named henchmen is called Icepick Joe. He’s an ostensibly minor character who gets a bizarre amount of screentime covering his personal journey of *checks notes* petting Mario’s dog, stealing said dog, murdering his wife, stealing Mario’s dinner, and dying alone due to the poison in said dinner while the dog abandons him to run off into the woods.

He is quite possibly the most important character in the entire movie.

To explain why, I have to introduce two more characters, who fans of the film have no doubt been waiting for me to bring up since they started reading this post.

But first, let me talk about Goncharov’s marriage for a bit!

Goncharov and Katya are often said to have a loveless marriage, but the truth of the matter is a lot more complicated than that. There are moments throughout the film where it’s implied that they care about each other deeply, and that in any other circumstances they might have a perfectly healthy relationship, but they’re so mired in the idea of being the perfect mafia man and the perfect mafia man’s wife that everything they say or do is filtered though so many layers of performance that any actual affection they might hold for one another is suffocated under it.

No one in the film ever refers to Goncharov by his first name. There are a few contenders for what it might be - he signs his name N. Goncharov, which some have hypothesized could stand for Nikolai, some of the early promotional material called him Ivan Goncharov… but there’s nothing sufficiently internally consistent for it to be stated as his first name with true confidence.

This is deliberate. In an interview, JWHJ0715 stated: “[Goncharov] is a man consumed by his work. He’s forgotten how to be anyone other than Goncharov, mob boss, and the lack of a first name is part of this. […] Goncharov is a man who’s lost his identity in favor of the image he projects”

Katya, conversely, is only ever referred to by her first name, even when speaking to characters who would be expected to use her last. It’s not quite as complete an erasure - there are a few moments where she’ll be introduced as Katya Goncharova instead of just Katya, but the vast majority of the time she’s referred to as either Katya or “Goncharov’s wife”.

This, too, is part of an erasure of identity, though in a different way. Katya has so thoroughly separated herself from the role she plays as Goncharov’s wife that in the few moments she is referred to by her full name, you can spot a split second of confusion, like she doesn’t know who’s being spoken about.

There’s a sense that Katya is unable to be herself with Goncharov, that she’s become so caught up in the person she thinks he wants that she can’t be the person she actually is, and it’s masterfully played as this slowly poisons her ability to care for him and eventually leads to her faking her death and later killing him.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

(And, uh. Also ahead of my ability to write. This is getting long, so I’m going to break it here and post the rest later.)

[netheresegale]

Post Avernus with her infernal engine fixed. What is your headcanon for what Karlach does for the rest of her life?

I headcanon she's a mercenary/adventurere at first but then goes on to help form a union for henchmen/bodyguards.

[peppermint-chocolate-cherries]

Some Analysis of LietBela

I’ve been thinking about making this post for quite some time, but I also knew I’d be explaining my side of things in essay form.  Well, I finally wrote the essay.

Full disclaimers, I am a Canadian who was barely taught anything about Eastern Europe in high school.  My knowledge on Lithuanian, Belarusian and Polish history is from spending a few hours clicking through Wikipedia as I wanted to learn more about Lithuania once the Hetalian became my newest muse a few years ago.

Hetalia’s Lithuania was really an afterthought at best when I joined the fandom. When I wrote my first story, Absorbing the Deck, he appears as a side character in the last couple chapters driving the Clubs carriage.  At that point in my fandom experience, he was still just Russia’s lackey, and that’s how he was until I planned out The Nefarious Mathilda Jones.

I don’t recall what the change was this time, I think I just wanted to give Ivan a familiar Hetalian to be working with as one of Mathilda’s nefarious henchmen.  Even in the original D&D alignment chart (good vs evil, lawful vs chaotic) I made for the characters in the story, Tolys was never specifically assigned an alignment.  I even considered putting him and Antonio into a side fling, but that didn’t pan out.  Over time, since it took 2.5 years to write the last 10 chapters of the story, I was able to think about the nefarious quartet’s motivations a lot more, and develop backstory for them that would cover ⅔ seasons worth of a television show.  That is when Tolys’s POV became so important for me, as a voice of reason to rationalize Mathilda’s decisions in the last year of the story.

And that is when I fell in love with the character of Lithuania, and looked up his history.  Turns out that Lithuania was already an Eastern European powerhouse in the 1200’s-1400’s, before joining up with Poland to create the renowned Commonwealth.  There were many instances during their union where Poland wanted to cooperate more with other kingdoms, such as Sweden and France, but it was the Lithuanian faction that opposed this.  I realized that this made for an interesting dynamic between the two of them: Poland was the politician, and Lithuania was the warrior.

Then we have Belarus.  The young child was bounced around a lot between guardians, along with Ukraine and Russia.  The rise in power of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 1200’s was all about taking over land from the Mongols and from the former Kievan Rus when opportunity struck. At that time, he controlled territory all the way from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, including large sections of what are now Belarus and Ukraine.  As such, both sisters would have technically been under Lithuania’s charge for some time.

So, this is where this complex relationship starts, with Lithuania as Belarus’s guardian.  In the Hetalia strips and anime, we see that Belarus is quite young around this time, as this is also when Russia is a child struggling to make friends while also fending off the Teutonic Knights (aka Prussia).  While not much older, Lithuania definitely has the advantage in this power dynamic with Belarus. Although I did read that the Lithuanians did allow the Ruthenians a bit more economic and cultural autonomy in exchange for on-call military support.

During these centuries under Lithuania’s control is where Belarus grew up into a young lady, in my humble opinion.  Perhaps it was the autonomy while under his control that allowed her to do just that.  Even when Poland entered the mix and the Commonwealth came to be, Belarus remained firmly under Lithuania’s control and was not shared with Poland.  Perhaps it was Lithuania, or even Poland, that taught her how to use daggers in self-defence, should the two of them ever be unable to protect her.

Meanwhile, through all this time, Belarus kept an eye on the welfare of her siblings.  While Ukraine was also subject to Lithuania’s rulership at times, Russia was not.  He eventually found his own footing and path to imperial power, eventually becoming a fascination and a threat to the rest of Europe.  The inheritance and control of Kievan Rus, the former territory that was home to all three siblings, was becoming a hot topic of debate again, and now Russia had the power to make the move.

And so he did.  Not only did he bring his sisters back under his wing, he also dismantled the Commonwealth and claimed Lithuania for the Russian Empire as well.

Lithuania had all his former power and glory stripped away, and was reduced to following the orders of someone else.  Sure, he had to work with Poland for centuries, but that was a relationship of equals.  For the first time in centuries, Lithuania no longer had his autonomy, and now had to answer to the Russian empire.

The only trace of his former life was having Belarus at his side in the same position.

This is where I think their relationship becomes more twisted and complicated.  Belarus is the only constant that Lithuania has left, she’s the only one here he can technically still trust.  This is likely where he starts projecting his affections on her, believing that she still cares enough about him to watch his back.  Meanwhile, Belarus is embracing her role in the Empire, enjoying her people’s return to Slavic cultures and traditions, and more than happy to serve her brother instead of Lithuania.

When the Russian Empire collapses, and everyone becomes independent after World War I, Lithuania and Belarus both find themselves suddenly fighting with Poland and Russia to reclaim the territories surrounding Vilnius.  There were even a couple attempts to work together, first as equals in a Lithuanian-Byelorussian republic, but then with Belarus still a part of Lithuania.  Ultimately, her land got split between Russian control and Polish control, while Lithuania had to cede control of Vilnius to Poland.  Nobody was getting along during this time, let’s just put it like that.

World War II comes along, and they both get conquered again, bouncing between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia a few times before they both ultimately become Soviet states after the war.  Finding himself in the same position as before, Lithuania is desperate to make amends with Belarus and rekindle the allegiance they once held to each other.  Even if the times of conquering lands and controlling territories was no longer a thing, Lithuania still deeply cared for her.  However, Belarus was once again happily embracing Russification and rejecting Lithuania at every turn.

This is where I ultimately think their relationship became toxic.  Lithuania is pining for her beyond reason, and she wants nothing to do with him.  It’s hard to say who is more at fault here. While Belarus breaking his fingers in the Hetalia strips is certainly a very extreme action, Lithuania also did not have the wherewithal to take off his rose-coloured glasses and see that she was genuinely not interested in his advances.

It’s not until the fall of the Soviet Union, when Lithuania and Belarus take their separate paths to independence, that I think Lithuania finally sees the light.  He’s making all these efforts to join the European alliances and economy, and earn his places in the UN and NATO.  He’s working with the other European countries to find ways to bolster his own economy and provide for his own people, now that everyone has agreed to stop invading each other and work together instead.

On the other side of the border, he can see all too clearly now how stuck Belarus is in her own ways.  She struggles to make ends meet for herself, she does not seek aid or alliances with the rest of Europe, and she ultimately resorts to being a puppet state to now-capitalist Russia.  It troubles Lithuania greatly, since he’s watched her for so long as she grew to be a nation only for her to take this path that opposes his own.

He does still have to cooperate with her on border issues, and he still has to pay attention to anything she or Russia might be up to.  Lithuania still cares about her fate, but I think in modern days he’s come to accept that he cannot control it for her.  One day, Belarus will have to remove her own rose-coloured glasses and see where she has allowed Russian influence to take her.

On that day she comes to her senses, she might realize that it’s already too late to avoid becoming entirely Russian and fading away into the history books.  On the other hand, she might wake up in time to resist that fate, and forge her own independence.  She might finally call on assistance from the West to break free from Russification, to reclaim her own culture and language that were nearly lost.

Lithuania still awaits the day where she’ll come to his doorstep asking for help, and he will always keep the door open for her.  But now he realizes that it’s up to her to ask for his help, when and if she is ever ready to.

I found Hetalia in 2015, at which point there were already thousands of stories posted to Livejournal, Fanfiction.Net and AO3.  When looking through the tags for LietBela (as well as RusLiet), there is a LOT of toxic relationships in there.  Early fandom really went hard with the “Lithuania pines, Belarus breaks his fingers” aspect of the manga and wrote some very dark and abusive tropes into their stories for Tolys and Natalya.  I only needed to read a couple of these stories to figure out that this is definitely not my cup of tea.

However, I cannot overlook the historical context between these two characters, and what events would have led to their relationship becoming so toxic and complicated in the first place.  These are two characters who have known each other for 800 years, who grew up together and forged their identities alongside each other.  No doubt they used to respect each other when Belarus was under Lithuania’s rulership, perhaps even admire each other’s strengths.  But that loss of Lithuania's power led to their relationship becoming incredibly strained and violent.

In my headcanons for the modern day nations, Lithuania is still recovering from the anxiety and paranoia he developed under Russia’s control, and part of that journey is accepting what has become of his relationship with Belarus.  He has learned to move on, to work on himself instead and to find happiness in other ways and with other relationships.  But he still holds onto that hope that, someday, Belarus will come to him and ask for his help.

And he will answer that call gladly.

[dispatchesfromtheclasswar]

🔴 [On days like these] back in 1969 Italian anarchist Pino Pinelli is being murdered by the police, being pushed off the 4th floor of the police station.

🎥 [Video] 1.000 people accompany Αnarchist Giuseppe (Pino) Pinelli to his final resting place on 20 December 1969, 5 days after his murder by cops at a police station in Milan, Italy.

📍 Giuseppe Pinelli, nicknamed Pino, was born 21st October 1928 in the working class neighbourhood of Porta Ticinese in Milan. He worked from a young age as an errand boy, and then later as a warehouse worker. In 1944-45 as a teenager he operated as a courier for an anarchist partisan group operating in the Milan area. Despite having to work at an early age he managed to educate himself by reading hundreds of books.

📍 Mario Mantovani had set up the paper Il Libertario, organ of the Federazione Comunista Libertaria Lombarde in 1945 in Milan and managed to gather together some of the surviving old comrades. Il Libertario appeared at first as a weekly and then as a bimonthly up to 1961. Giuseppe was one of a handful of young people who gravitated towards the grouping.

📍 In 1954 Giuseppe got employment on the railways as a fitter. The following year he married Licia Rognini, who he had met on an Esperanto evening course.

📍 The 1960s saw the steady growth of the Milanese anarchist movement, which accelerated after 1968. This was in no small way due to Giuseppe who organised young anarchists in the Gioventu Libertaria (Libertarian Youth) in 1963. Two years later he was one of those who founded the Sacco and Vanzetti Circle who founded a local centre which remained open for the next decade. In 1968 with the end of that circle he founded the Ponte della Ghisolfa Circle (named after the nearby bridge) on 1st May. The group organised a series of conferences and student meetings and assemblies. The circle and Pino were also involved in some of the first initiatives around the base union CUB. Pino also worked for the reconstruction of the anarcho-syndicalist union USI.

📍 He organised the library of the circle making sure the hundreds of books were all bound in black, classified and arranged. On Sundays the circle’s centre welcomed the older comrades, some aged 90 and some even older!

📍 On 25 April 1969 fascists initiated a series of bomb attacks as part of the Strategy of Tension which involved the manipulation of the Italian secret services working together with the US's CIA. Some Milanese anarchists were arrested as part of a scheme to discredit the anarchist movement. Pino organised support for the imprisoned anarchists (who were finally acquitted in June 1971). He brought food parcels, clothing and books to the prison. At the same time he began to organise the Crocenera Anarchica (Anarchist Black Cross) as a prisoner's support and counter-information network.

📍 Pino had attracted the attention of the police and in the aftermath of the December 1969 bombing at Piazza Fontana (where 16 people were killed by fascists) he was arrested and taken to the central police station to be interrogated by Calabresi and his henchmen. On the evening of 15th December he "fell" from the 4th floor of the police station. The police maintained that he accidentally went through the window of his own accord, but the official story was so full of holes, an entire play was written by Dario Fo debunking it.

The state murder of Pinelli set off a wave of protests. 1000 people attended his funeral on 20 December 1969. Later Nobel Prize-winner Dario Fo wrote his play Accidental Death of An Anarchist about Pinelli’s murder.

📍 3 policemen, who were interrogating Pinelli, including Commissioner Luigi Calabresi, were put on trial for his death, but his death was ruled as an accident. Calabresi was mysteriously gunned down in the street a few years later.

📍 In 2001 a new investigation found 3 members of a Neo Fascist group responsible for the bombing that Pinelli had been detained for.

📍 "The ballad of Pinelli" you hear in the video is a song that tells the truth about what happened the night Pinelli died.

🎼 --- Lyrics ---

That evening it was hot in Milan

how hot, how hot it was,

"Brigadiere, open the window!",

a push ... and Pinelli goes down.

"Mr. questor, I told you already,

I am repeating that I am innocent,

anarchy does not mean bombs,

but equality in liberty".

"No more humbug, confess, Pinelli,

your friend Valpreda talked,

he is the author of this bombing,

and you certainly are the accomplice".

"Impossible!", shouts Pinelli,

"A comrade couldn't possibly do that

and the author of this crime,

must be sought among the masters".

"Watch out, suspect Pinelli,

this room is already full of smoke,

if you persist, we'll open the window,

four floors are hard to do".

There's a coffin and 3,000 comrades,

we were clasping our flags,

that night we swore,

it won't end this way.

And you Guida, you Calabresi,

if a comrade was killed,

to cover a State slaughter,

this fight will just get harder.

That evening it was hot in Milan

how hot, how hot it was,

"Brigadiere, open the window!",

a push ... and Pinelli goes down.

[stillunusual]

Kremlin propagandists claim that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which led directly to the outbreak of the Second World War a week after it was signed, was no different from earlier treaties that other countries signed with Germany.... There's a shit ton of Kremlin propaganda about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on social media (including many variations of the list in the above screenshot) which seeks to portray the infamous pact between the Nazis and Soviets as being essentially no different from all the other treaties in the list, which - surprise, surprise - is not the case. It's just another Russian lie. To illustrate this, let's compare the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with the Polish-German Non-Aggression Treaty of 26th January 1934, which for some strange reason is referred to here as the "Hitler-Pilsudsko Pact" (sic). The Polish-German non-aggression treaty is often used by mindless vatniks and tankies to portray interwar Poland as "pro-German" in a dishonest attempt to excuse the Soviet Union's subsequent collaboration with Nazi Germany at Poland's expense and the war crimes that the USSR committed against the Polish people as a direct result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (ie "let's blame the victim - they got what they deserved"). Stalin's apologists routinely do the same to other victims of the pact, as well as victims of Soviet tyranny in general, because in their delusional fantasy world it was perfectly fine for the Soviet Union to invade, occupy and terrorise other countries. Obviously, when Hitler or western imperialists did stuff like that - it was bad, but when the Soviets did it - it was good. And if you were one of the millions of men, women and children who were robbed, gang-raped, imprisoned, sent to the gulags, tortured, starved to death, executed or ethnically cleansed by Stalin's henchmen - the Kremlin's shills and useful idiots will either deny it happened, or blame it on somebody else or - if there's no way of doing that - they'll just say that you deserved it. Because they also frequently try to dishonestly portray all Stalin's victims - or anybody who opposed Soviet tyranny - as fascists and/or Nazis. And as a lot of people are very ignorant about the history of central and eastern Europe (or only seem to see it from the perspective of the so-called "great powers") this kind of bullshit is widely believed, even though it's blatant historical revisionism. Interwar Poland was very aware that it was sandwiched between two aggressive neighbours who wouldn't hesitate to wipe "the bastard child of the Versailles treaty" off the map if they got the chance. As such, Poland signed non-aggression treaties with both the USSR and Nazi Germany in an attempt to normalise relations and reduce tensions that existed along their borders. In the aftermath of the Polish-Soviet War and Treaty Of Riga, Polish statesman Józef Piłsudski initially believed that the more immediate threat was from the Soviet Union, because prior to the rise of the Nazis, Germany was a million miles away from the force it would eventually become by the end of the 1930s (Germany only seriously re-armed after Piłsudski’s death in 1935). Russian disinfo generally avoids any mention of the fact that Poland signed a non-aggression treaty with the Soviet Union first, in 1932 (and this treaty was subsequently re-confirmed in 1938). The treaty with Germany two years later was simply a continuation of the same policy of trying to maintain peaceful co-existence with Poland's neighbours. Piłsudski was deeply concerned about the emergence of Hitlerism, although disputes over the free port of Danzig (Gdańsk) were already ongoing before Hitler came to power. Poland had retained the right to formally welcome foreign ships into the port, but in 1932 the Danzig Senate kept delaying the renewal of the requisite agreement. Piłsudski used the planned visit of three British warships for a show of strength and they were duly welcomed into Danzig by the Polish destroyer Wicher, after he'd made it clear that the ship had instructions to open fire on the nearest government building if the local German authorities intervened. The incident annoyed the League of Nations but successfully secured the renewal of the agreement sought by Poland. Immediately after Hitler came to power Piłsudski made a similar gesture, by assigning 120 more Polish troops to Westerplatte (on 6th March 1933) - and again the Germans acquiesced. According to some accounts (by Jan Karski and Norman Davies for example), Piłsudski actually suggested a pre-emptive attack on Germany to the French government in 1933, with the aim of removing Hitler from power, but his proposal was rejected by the French. Poland was also alarmed by Italy's plan to cut "minor" nations out of European settlements, which would be determined by the four "major" powers — Britain, France, Germany and Italy - and could have potentially included decisions about Danzig and the "Polish Corridor" to the Baltic sea. These are the events that prompted Poland to seek a non-aggression treaty with Germany in 1934 - and after signing it, Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck travelled to Moscow to reassure the Soviets that the Polish-German declaration did not affect the 1932 Soviet-Polish Treaty of Non-Aggression in any way, and offered to extend the treaty to ten years. It's perfectly understandable why a country in Poland's position would enter into such agreements in an attempt to safeguard its security. Furthermore, a non-aggression treaty is not an alliance, and these treaties did not make Poland "pro-Soviet" or "pro-German". Poland's 1934 agreement with Germany had no secret protocol or ulterior motive, and any comparison with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is completely false.  One of the more ludicrous claims made by Kremlin propagandists is that Poland tried to form an alliance with the Nazis to attack the USSR. However, this is yet another Russian lie. When Hermann Goering visited Poland in January 1935, he sounded out the Polish government about a possible anti-Soviet alliance but the idea was promptly dismissed. In February 1937 Goering again visited Warsaw to suggest that Poland align itself with Germany against the Soviet Union. Beck turned him down. When German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop came to Warsaw in January 1939, Beck informed him that Poland would not agree to German demands (made since 1938) for the return of Danzig to the Reich and an extraterritorial highway to East Prussia, and would also not join the Anti-Comintern Pact against the Soviet Union. In a speech to the Reichstag on 28th April 1939, Hitler denounced Germany's non-aggression treaty with Poland. Beck responded in a speech to the Polish parliament on 5th May 1939, making it clear that he refused to be intimidated. In reality, it was Germany that tried to persuade Poland to enter into an anti-Soviet alliance, and after Poland declined, the Nazis then turned to the Soviet Union and negotiated the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which was presented to the world as a simple non-aggression treaty, but was really a plan to carve up Europe between Germany and the USSR - involving the mutual invasion and partition of Poland, a free hand for Hitler to attack Western Europe and for Stalin to annex the Baltic states, Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, and to attack Finland. And funnily enough, that's exactly what actually happened.... TL;DR - Russian propagandists are lying as usual. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union led directly to the outbreak of the Second World War, and all its tragic consequences, almost immediately after the pact was signed on 23rd August 1939. The signatories were the foreign ministers of the two countries, Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop - hence its name. A week later on 1st September, Nazi Germany attacked Poland from the west and just over two weeks after that, the USSR attacked Poland from the east (which is another topic that the Kremlin simply can't stop lying about).... What also makes the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact different from the other treaties listed in the screenshot above, is that it was just one step in a continuum of Nazi-Soviet collaboration that lasted until June 1941, and was well documented in the numerous diplomatic communications between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union throughout this period. After the Second World War, the relevant documents that had been stored in the archives of the German Foreign Office were translated into English and published in a book called "Nazi-Soviet Relations 1939-41". The complete collection can now be found online. There was actually a sickening prelude to Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, ie the dismissal by Stalin of his staunchly anti-fascist foreign minister Litvinov (who also happened to be Jewish), and his replacement by the more Nazi-friendly Molotov (who was told to purge the ministry of Jews) in order to facilitate negotiations between the two tyrannies. This change was received favourably by the Nazis, and after Molotov took over from Litvinov, Stalin immediately sounded them out to see if this would make it easier to do business, as shown by this quote from the German Foreign Office Memorandum dated 5th May 1939: "Astakhov touched upon the dismissal of Litvinov and tried without asking direct questions to learn whether this event would cause a change in our position toward the Soviet Union. He stressed very much the great importance of the personality of Molotov, who was by no means a specialist in foreign policy, but who would have all the greater importance for the future Soviet foreign policy".... The pact was signed on the basis that: "there exist no real conflicts of interest between Germany and the USSR. The living spaces of Germany and the USSR touch each other, but in their natural requirements do not conflict" (as stated in a telegram from Ribbentrop to the German ambassador in the Soviet Union on 14th August 1939). It had seven articles.... ARTICLE I Both High Contracting Parties obligate themselves to desist from any act of violence, any aggressive action, and any attack on each other, either individually or jointly with other powers. ARTICLE II Should one of the High Contracting Parties become the object of belligerent action by a third power, the other High Contracting Party shall in no manner lend its support to this third power. ARTICLE III The Governments of the two High Contracting Parties shall in the future maintain continual contact with one another for the purpose of consultation in order to exchange information on problems affecting their common interests. ARTICLE IV Neither of the two High Contracting Parties shall participate in any grouping of powers whatsoever that is directly or indirectly aimed at the other party. ARTICLE V Should disputes or conflicts arise between the High Contracting Parties over problems of one kind or another, both parties shall settle these disputes or conflicts exclusively through friendly exchange of opinion or, if necessary, through the establishment of arbitration commissions. ARTICLE VI The present treaty is concluded for a period of ten years, with the proviso that, in so far as one of the High Contracting Parties does not denounce it one year prior to the expiration of this period, the validity of this treaty shall automatically be extended for another five years. ARTICLE VII The present treaty shall be ratified within the shortest possible time. The ratifications shall be exchanged in Berlin. The agreement shall enter into force as soon as it is signed. However, the above articles were just a cover story for the secret protocol between the Nazis and Soviets, which defined their mutually agreed "spheres of influence", ie the territories that each of the signatories could invade without having to worry about retaliation from the other. SECRET ADDITIONAL PROTOCOL On the occasion of the signature of the Non-aggression Pact between the German Reich and the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics the undersigned plenipotentiaries of each of the two parties discussed in strictly confidential conversations the question of the boundary of their respective spheres of influence in Eastern Europe. These conversations led to the following conclusions: 1. In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement in the areas belonging to the Baltic States (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), the northern boundary of Lithuania shall represent the boundary of the spheres of influence of Germany and the USSR. In this connection the interest of Lithuania in the Vilna area is recognized by each party. 2. In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement of the areas belonging to the Polish state the spheres of influence of Germany and the USSR shall be bounded approximately by the line of the rivers Narew, Vistula, and San.The question of whether the interests of both parties make desirable the maintenance of an independent Polish state and how such a state should be bounded can only be definitely determined in the course of further political developments.In any event both Governments will resolve this question by means of a friendly agreement. 3. With regard to Southeastern Europe attention is called by the Soviet side to its interest in Bessarabia. The German side declares its complete political disinterestedness in these areas. 4. This protocol shall be treated by both parties as strictly secret. It's interesting to note that the protocol already includes a provisional agreement about the future border between Nazi Germany and the USSR "in the event of a territorial and political rearrangement of the areas belonging to the Polish state" and it's also fascinating to read through Nazi Germany's diplomatic records of the negotiations between the Nazis and Soviets to define all the "spheres of influence" that Hitler and Stalin eventually agreed on. These negotiations clearly demonstrate that when the Kremlin subsequently made the ludicrous claim that the Soviet invasion of Poland was some kind of spontaneous rescue mission to protect the Belarusians and Ukrainians living in the east of the country, it was just another gratuitous lie. Further negotiations after the pact was signed also led to minor alterations in the "spheres of influence". TL;DR - Russian propagandists are lying as usual. Soviet military and economic cooperation with Germany actually dated back to the Treaty of Rapallo in 1922, although it was initially discouraged by Hitler after coming to power. However, from August 1939 onwards the USSR provided Hitler with a great deal of much needed economic and military support, which ironically also helped the Germans in their preparations to launch Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. During their invasion of Poland the Nazis and Soviets held a joint military parade in Brest-Litovsk on 22nd September 1939. A Friendship and Border treaty was signed by Germany and the USSR on 28th September 1939, along with a secret protocol that finalised the new border between the two countries. Three additional protocols were added to the agreement, the third of which stated that: "Both parties will tolerate no Polish agitation in their territories which affects the territories of the other party. They will suppress in their territories all beginnings of such agitation and inform each other concerning suitable measures for this purpose". The signing of the treaty was accompanied by an announcement stating that both parties wanted an end to the war between Germany, Britain and France - and that if Britain and France refused to stop the war "....the Governments of Germany and of the USSR shall engage in mutual consultations with regard to necessary measures". According to Molotov: "....it is not only absurd, it is criminal to wage a war to 'smash Hitlerism' under the false slogan of a war for democracy". At a session of the Supreme Soviet on 31st October, he bragged about the USSR's military partnership with Germany: "....it was proved enough for Poland to be dealt one swift blow, first by the German army and then by the Red Army, to wipe out all remains of this monstrous bastard offspring of the Versailles Treaty". The USSR and Germany implemented parallel policies of suppressing resistance in occupied Poland and destroying the Polish elites in their respective areas of occupation. The Soviet NKVD and Nazi Gestapo coordinated their actions on many issues, including prisoner exchanges. Between 1939 and 1941 the NKVD delivered to the Gestapo over 4000 Jews and German communists who had taken refuge in Soviet held territory. Hitler then proceeded to invade the other countries in his agreed "sphere of influence" while Stalin did the same in his agreed "sphere of influence".... An important factor in Hitler's successes in the west was that he didn't have to watch his back following his alliance with the USSR, which gave him a free hand to mobilise all the forces at his disposal to rapidly conquer the countries of Western Europe. And in June 1940, while the Germans were marching into Paris, the Soviet Union was simultaneously annexing the Baltic states (although they did find time to send congratulations to their Nazi allies). The Soviets also provided all manner of assistance to the Nazis during their military campaigns in the west, and while Germany was fighting Britain and France, Stalin was not only calling them "criminals" and "imperialists" for opposing Hitler, but he was also helping his Nazi allies to break Britain's blockade by supplying Germany with raw materials. Provision was made for the supply from the USSR of a million tons of grain for cattle, 900000 tons of mineral oil, 100000 tons of cotton, 500000 tons of phosphates, 100000 tons of chrome ore, 500000 tons of iron ore, 300000 tons of scrap iron and pig iron, and numerous other commodities vital to the German war effort. In the summer and autumn of 1940, when Polish pilots were defending the skies over Britain from the Luftwaffe (after escaping to the west following the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland), the German pilots were flying on fuel supplied by their Soviet allies. More details here.... Nazi–Soviet economic relations (1934–1941) The Nazi–Soviet Commercial Agreement (1939) The Nazi–Soviet Commercial Agreement (1940) The Nazi–Soviet Border and Commercial Agreement (1941) The USSR also furnished Germany with military cooperation far beyond that which the United States was giving to Great Britain during this time. The Soviets actually allowed Germany a naval base on Soviet territory near Murmansk, which proved valuable for U-boats operating in the North Sea, and played an important role in helping to supply Hitler's invasion of Norway. German ships such as the liner "Bremen" found refuge at Murmansk, as did a succession of blockade breaking vessels - and measures violating international law were adopted by the Soviet authorities to allow the Germans to escape with a captured American merchant ship, City Of Flint (which had been carrying a cargo of tractors, grain and fruit to Britain). German auxiliary cruisers were also equipped at Murmansk for raids on British shipping. The Soviets helped a German raiding cruiser, Schiff 45, to make its way through the ice around Siberia to the pacific, where it subsequently captured or sank 64000 tons of allied shipping. In this and other ways the Soviet Union lent enormous assistance to the otherwise vulnerable German Navy. Stalin actually requested the USSR's membership of the tri-partite Axis agreement as a full member, and negotiations took place over several months from 1940-41 but never reached fruition. He was "visibly pleased" at the idea and irritated when it didn't happen, although the USSR did sign a neutrality pact with Japan in April 1941. These negotiations are also documented in the archives of the German Foreign Office. When they were published after the war Stalin was so embarrassed that he went to the trouble of publishing a book full of reality-denying nonsense about how he was just playing a game of bluff with the Axis powers, and didn't mean any of it - but then again, he would say that wouldn't he? From 1939 to 1941, the friendship between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was promoted to the Soviet people in state propaganda - even that which was aimed at children. And as well as indoctrinating the citizens of the USSR with pro-Nazi and anti-western messaging, Stalin also ordered communist parties throughout the world to stop all agitation against Hitler's regime and to follow suit. For example, the newspaper published by the Communist Party of Great Britain (which was then known as the "Daily Worker" but later changed its name to "Morning Star") began the war supporting resistance to the Nazis, but then rapidly changed its tune and began shilling for Hitler under orders from Moscow - and continued to do so even as German bombs were dropping all over the UK. Ironically, on 16th April 1941, the Daily Worker's London office was destroyed by fire caused by German bombing.... By this stage publication had already been suspended by the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, for contravening Defence Regulation 2D, which made it an offence to "systematically publish matter calculated to foment opposition to the prosecution of the war". FUN FACT: Jeremy Corbyn's mother Naomi was an enthusiastic seller of the Daily Worker at the time.... Stalin was simping for the Nazis for two whole years before Hitler turned on his former ally - taking an unprepared Stalin completely by surprise and forcing him to execute the "great patriotic u-turn" and join the alliance against the Nazis out of sheer desperation. TL;DR - Russian propagandists are lying as usual. It's easy to see what motivated Stalin to agree to a pact between the world's only communist state and a fascist state. Neither Germany nor the USSR recognised the Versailles treaty, Stalin's personal animus towards Poland was well known and when Hitler offered him an opportunity to destroy Poland he jumped at it (there may also have been an element of desiring revenge for defeat in the Polish-Soviet war two decades earlier, especially as Stalin's incompetence had played a role in that defeat). Dividing continental Europe into mutually agreed spheres of influence also suited both countries to an extent that made ideology irrelevant. Two years later, when Hitler broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and launched Operation Barbarossa, Stalin refused to believe initial reports that Germany was invading his country, just as he'd previously refused to believe credible intelligence that Germany was preparing an invasion (these preparations had been monitored and even filmed by the Polish resistance, and having seen footage smuggled out of occupied Poland by Polish SOE agent Krystyna Skarbek, Winston Churchill personally warned Stalin about the imminent invasion, but the Soviet dictator stupidly brushed him off). Stalin's immediate response to Hitler's attack on the USSR was to run away and hide in his dacha in a state of panic because he didn't have a clue what to do. He eventually re-emerged eleven days later to deliver a radio address to the Soviet people, in which he claimed that he agreed to the pact because he'd always known that a German invasion was inevitable and that it had "secured our country peace for a year and a half and the opportunity of preparing our forces to repulse fascist Germany should she risk an attack on our country despite the pact. This was a definite advantage for us and a disadvantage for fascist Germany". This was a laughable claim, given that the German invaders were cutting through the completely unprepared and disorganised Red Army like a knife through butter at the time. Although the Soviets had made some half-hearted attempts at building fortifications in the territory they'd gained via the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, nothing much had actually been accomplished and all this territory was rapidly overrun by the Germans. The obvious fact that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact resulted in Germany and the USSR having shared borders, which made it easier for the Germans to invade, didn't seem to occur to Stalin. The huge economic and military aid that the USSR had provided to the Nazis, which helped them to expand and build up their war machine in preparation for the invasion also seems to have slipped his mind. And he also forgot about the fact that he'd been pumping out pro-Nazi, anti-western propaganda for the previous two years.... Stalin was clearly upset about being betrayed, but felt that Hitler would pay for his treachery with the damage it would do to Germany's public image: ...."What has fascist Germany gained and what has she lost by perfidiously tearing up the pact and attacking the USSR? She has gained a certain advantageous position for her troops for a short period of time, but she has lost politically by exposing herself in the eyes of the entire world as a bloodthirsty aggressor".... This is also laughable. Stalin was very happy to tear up treaties when it suited him - like the eight treaties he threw out of the window when the Soviet Union invaded Poland in 1939 as allies of the Nazis: 1. The Peace Treaty between Poland, Russia and the Ukraine signed in Riga on 18th March 1921, in which the eastern frontier of Poland was defined. 2. The Protocol between Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Rumania and the USSR regarding renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy, signed in Moscow on 9th February 1929. 3. The Non-Aggression Treaty between Poland and the USSR signed in Moscow on 25th July 1932. 4. The Convention for the Definition of Aggression signed in London on 3rd July 1933, signed by Estonia, Latvia, Rumania, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and the USSR. 5. The Protocol signed in Moscow on 5th May 1934 between Poland and the USSR, extending until 31st December 1945, the Non-Aggression Treaty of July 25th 1932. 6. The agreement resulting from the notes exchanged in Moscow on 10th September 1934 between the Polish government and the Soviet government, in connection with the entry of the USSR into the League of Nations. This agreement emphasised that the relations between the countries would, in every respect, continue on the basis of all existing agreements between them, including the Treaty of Non-Aggression and the Convention for the Definition of Aggression. 7. The Covenant of the League of Nations, to which the USSR acceded on 17th September 1934. 8. The joint Communique issued in Moscow on 26th November 1938, by the Polish and Soviet governments, which confirmed that relations between them were, and would continue to be, based on all the existing agreements, including the Non-Aggression Treaty dated 25th July 1932, and extended on 5th May 1934. Stalin had also exposed himself as a bloodthirsty aggressor since signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In a speech by Winston Churchill broadcast in January 1940 (while the Soviet attack on Finland was ongoing), he made it clear that he viewed the Nazis and Soviets as opposite sides of the same barbaric coin: ...."Everyone can see how communism rots the soul of a nation; how it makes it abject and hungry in peace, and proves it base and abominable in war....if at any time Britain and France, wearying of the struggle, were to make a shameful peace, nothing would remain for the smaller states of Europe, with their shipping and their possessions, but to be divided between the opposite, though similar, barbarisms of Nazidom and Bolshevism".... The Soviet Union continued to deny the existence of the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact almost until its dying day, as well as denying all the other well documented examples of Nazi-Soviet collaboration that took place between 1939 and 1941, and the numerous Soviet war crimes that are directly attributable to the pact, such as the Katyń massacre, which was carried out by the NKVD in 1940, and the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Polish and Baltic citizens to the gulags. However, another fun fact that Kremlin trolls rarely mention is that in December 1989, a couple of years before the USSR was finally flushed down the toilet of history, its highest body, the Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Union, adopted a resolution denouncing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which finally condemned the secret protocol and accused Stalin and Molotov of "treacherous collusion" with the Nazis. But even after that had happened, the Soviet Union and its successor state, Russia, were very reluctant to undo some of the consequences of the pact that still remained. For example, when the Baltic states declared independence, it took Russia until August 1994 to finally withdraw all its troops from their territories, after enormous international pressure was exerted on Moscow. Under the iron grip of Vladimir Putin, Russia has tried to justify the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with lame propaganda (like the above list of pacts signed with Nazi Germany) that doesn't actually hold any water. Another of the never-ending revisionist lies that the Kremlin's stooges promote is the ridiculous claim that Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were never occupied by the Soviet Union. Russia also continues to occupy part of Moldova to this day.... TL;DR - Russian propagandists are lying as usual. In summary, there are two fundamental differences between the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the other treaties in the screenshot. 1. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact contained a secret agreement to divide Europe into Nazi and Soviet spheres of influence that led directly to the immediate outbreak of the Second World War, after which the Nazis and Soviets both committed appalling war crimes in the countries they invaded as a direct result of the pact. 2. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was also the first step in a continuum of collaboration between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that lasted for the next two years. It's not rocket science is it?

[greysfic]

Ey boss I'mma wise guy representin' the local chapta of the International Union of Henchmen, Goons, and Lackeys and lemme first say how we appreciate you recognize the nuanced world of professional goonery insteada usin' outdated offensive terms like 'minion'

Please remember to hire goonionized labour for all ya syndicated needs, because if fer example you was going to contend with some kinda nocturnal violence enthusiast in a rubber mask, we gotta make sure the properly trained and insured workers are offered first refusal.

[holeymoleymeohmy-blog]

#UshiOiWeek2023 #Superheroes #UshiOi

Happy UshiOi week! I’m mixing prompts and days but it is what it is.

This is a snippet based on the Venture Brothers where villains essentially are unionized and are assigned superheroes to be their archnemesis based on skill level/resources. If you haven’t watched Venture Brothers, you should give it a try!

______

Oikawa who wanted to be the hero, but ended up as a villain instead, joins the Guild of Calamitous Intent and has every intention to arch his old colleague who took over his position, Kageyama.

He’s deemed too low-level to arch Kageyama, that position ends up going to Atsumu, and instead ends up having to arch a small-scale agricultural scientist Ushijima instead.

Even with his team of henchmen, nothing goes as planned when going against Ushijima. Sometimes Ushiwaka doesn’t even notice or acknowledge the arching happening, or it inadvertently helps him with a break-through, and Ushijima ends up not taking their nemesis status seriously.

Oikawa blames the man’s red-headed best friend who keeps putting romantic notions in Ushiwaka’s head. Clearly Oikawa is not flirting! He takes his job very seriously!

He’s determined to do something big, something to bump his ranking up allowing him to arch his real, and very personal, adversary. He decides on creating a toxin that will target Ushijima’s plants, and he’s successful. He’s long perfected his evil laugh, and he does just that as Ushijima takes in the sigjt of his destroyed greenhouse. His laughter dies down when he notices that there are no threats of revenge, curses or retaliation. Instead he sees the look of utter despair and sadness on the other man’s face.

“They were…my friends,” he mumbles quietly. Oikawa feels terrible, he went too far, did not know the extent of attachment Ushijima had to these plants.

“But it’s what you wanted, right?” His favorite henchman Iwazumi says. “With this you’ll be able to work in the big leagues.”

This isn’t what he wanted, not at the cost of this pain in his nemesis’ eyes.

“The antedote, get me the antedote.”

“But, you’ll loose your cred,” Iwa-chan hesitates before Oikawa rips the antedote himself from his number 4’s hands. He quickly releases it into the greenhouse, and the plants slowly revive.

He slowly approches Ushijima and lays a hand on his shoulder. “I am so sorry, I shouldn’t have done that to you.”

“You saved them,” He states simply. “Even at the cost of your dreams?”

“There’s always next time.”

Oikawa is gentler to his arch after that, and hope builds in Ushijima.

“Are you planning anything for this weekend?” He asks one day.

“Ha! I’ll never tell you, gotta keep you on your toes!”

“If you are free, would you like to go on a date with me?” Oikawa blushingly agrees.

It’s not long after their first date that Oikawa puts in a transfer request, afterall you can’t arch your partner! Oikawa does make sure to continue to stop by the lab though, if only to drop off Ushijima his lunch. He always gets a kiss goodbye as he heads out for his daily arching against Date Tech’s obnoxious Iron Wall.

“Be careful at work, love.” Ushijima says with one final kiss to Oikawa’s cheek.

“Of course, pookie! See you for dinner!”

[kalakian]

Why it's hard to talk about Martial Law and the Marcos regime

The student who dared to question Imee Marcos.

Archimedes Trajano, a student of Mapua Institute of Technology who unfortunately met his end in the hands of Imee Marcos’ henchmen.

During an open forum at the Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila, the then-21-year-old questioned Imee on her capability to lead the youth and told her that she only became the head of the Kabataang Barangay because she was the president’s daughter. He also questioned her on the human rights abuses being committed by her father.

On September 2, 1977, his crumpled body was strewn on the streets of Manila. The official explanation was that he had died in a frat rumble inside his dormitory. Witnesses, however, said that Imee’s security dragged him away from the open forum. Trajano’s family successfully sued Marcos for civil damages in a Hawaii court; however, the local Supreme Court overturned it in 2006 due to a technicality committed by a lower court in trying to implement the prior verdict.

CONGRESS PADLOCKED UNDER MARTIAL LAW, 1972-1986

Days before the scheduled reopening of the Senate and the House of Representatives under the 1935 Constitution, Marcos promulgated the 1973 Constitution, which effectively abolished Congress and replaced it with a unicameral legislature which would be formed three years after. Opposition legislators reported to the Legislative Building on January 22, 1973, but found the building padlocked and under an armed guard.

The 7th Congress had been set to open its second regular session on January 22. The photo depicts Senators Doy Laurel, Eva Estrada Kalaw, Ramon Mitra, and Jovito Salonga posing in front of the Senate session hall which had been padlocked, a stark symbol of power held by a single man.

Between 1972 and 1977, sixty thousand Filipinos were arrested for “political reasons.” A new word entered the Filipino vocabulary, “salvage.” The brutal verb described how the military would disappear individuals, torture and murder them, and then toss their corpses into vacant lots or drop them by the side of the road. Thousands were salvaged under Marcos’ reign of terror.

Photo shows the legs of Judy Taguiwalo, former Social Welfare secretary and member of the Samahan ng Demokratikong Kabataan, as policemen force her and her fellow activists to leap off a jeepney during a rally after the State of the Nation Address of President Ferdinand Marcos in front of Manila's Congress on January 26, 1970. 

Two were killed and many were injured after a scrimmage at Manila’s Burgos Drive up to nearby golf link in Intramuros and Luneta Park. The injured were brought to the Philippine General Hospital on Taft Avenue.

Prior to the confrontation between students and policemen, Ed Jopson of Ateneo and the conservative National Union of Students of the Philippines (NUSP) chose radio commentator Arienda as a rally speaker over firebrand Gary Olivar of UP and SDK. It was dubbed as the “microphone battle” of the radical and conservative protesters in the 70s.

(1) FilipiKnow: 10 Lesser-Known Photos from Martial Law Years That Will Blow You Away

GMA: High court voids case vs Imee over 1977 killing of student

(2) FilipiKnow: 10 Lesser-Known Photos from Martial Law Years That Will Blow You Away

Official Gazette: The History of the Senate of the Philippines

(3) World Socialist Website: Forty-eight years since Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines

(4) ANC: The 7 deadly protests of the First Quarter Storm