Category Archives: History

History, Security

US Protected Nazi War Criminals

Leave a comment

The US National Archives has issued a report based on newly declassified material, which confirms that the US protected Nazi war criminals as early as 1946. I noticed it mentioned on German news, ironically.

The report, titled “Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, US Intelligence and the Cold War,” draws on information classified until 2005 and made available under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, an effort by Washington to shed more a critical light on its own secrets.

The report looks into a number of former SS and Gestapo members who escaped justice with the US either knowingly tolerating their escape or even helping them to flee.

The report is available at www.archives.gov (PDF). Here are some excerpts:

The CIA moved to protect Ukranian nationalist leader Mykola Lebed from criminal investigation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in 1952.

[…]

…on October 15, 1959, only 10 days after the CIA Munich base made the request [for a US Visa], a KGB assassin named Bogdan Stashinskiy murdered Bandera with a special gun that sprayed cyanide dust into the victim’s face. The Soviets, who had penetrated Bandera’s organization and the BND years before, evidently decided that they could not live with another alliance between German intelligence officers and Ukrainian fanatics.

[…]

Once in the United States, Lebed was the CIA’s chief contact for AERODYNAMIC. CIA handlers pointed to his “cunning character,” his “relations with the Gestapo and … Gestapo training,” that the fact that he was “a very ruthless operator.”

Food, History, Security

The Compliance of Bagels

Leave a comment

A New York Times review of Bagel articles brings to light a rich history of compliance.

The definition of a bagel is an obvious start.

A bagel is a round bread, with a hole in the middle, made of simple ingredients: high-gluten flour, salt, water, yeast and malt. Its dough is boiled, then baked, and the result should be a rich caramel color; it should not be pale and blond. A bagel should weigh four ounces or less and should make a slight cracking sound when you bite into it. A bagel should be eaten warm and, ideally, should be no more than four or five hours old when consumed. All else is not a bagel.

I dare you to find a specimen that meets even a few of these seven rules of bagel-ness. A true bagel is few and far between. I further dare you to put on a QBA (Qualified Bagel Assessor) hat and ask a bakery….

But wait, there is more. The first reference to a bagel, by Jews living in Poland, also came from compliance.

It is found…in regulations issued in Yiddish in 1610 by the Jewish Council of Krakow outlining how much Jewish households were permitted to spend in celebrating the circumcision of a baby boy — “to avoid making gentile neighbors envious, and also to make sure poorer Jews weren’t living above their means.”

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s bagels.

And last, but not least, fast forward to the American bagel. It was tightly regulated by a union of New York bakers.

The rise of the bagel in New York is inextricably tied to that of a trade union, specifically Bagel Bakers Local 338, a federation of nearly 300 bagel craftsmen formed in Manhattan in the early 1900s.

Local 338 was by all accounts a tough and unswerving union, set up according to strict rules that limited new membership to the sons of current members.

Something tells me that a rule of hereditary bagel-making is not related to the quality of the bagel. Even if it was, it obviously did not work; today’s bagels do not comply with that or any of the above regulations.

History, Security

Science-fiction under Soviet rule

Leave a comment

A historical science-fiction exhibit in Prague illustrates how writing about the future was controlled and then relaxed under Soviet authority

“Unlike Western science fiction, which was more plot-oriented, Czech writers tended to be more oriented to ideas, and maybe moral issues,” added Ivan Adamovic, another curator at the show. It was not until the 1960s that they devoted more attention to action and gripping plots, he noted.

Pospiszyl also pointed out the emphasis on the positive posed particular difficulties in creating plot lines.

“It was actually quite a problem for writers and artists of that time to even find dramatic situations,” he said. “Because the future was supposed to be optimistic and great. They found a solution in ceding little pockets of capitalism that somehow travelled in time, or were rediscovered in the future.”

A more fundamental change also happened around the same time; when the party-line optimism was relaxed, a more critical look at the risks from technology became possible:

“It came in the second half of the 1960s, when people realised we would not reach communism within the 20th century,” Adamovic said. “Also they noticed that technological progress will not solve everything, as they thought before.”