took me a minute to figure out how to post to our memes comm properly

there's 3 "memes" listed that are identical, but going to the comm is a decent workaround for now

This Guardian piece has some clues if you read it critically.

Gareth Jones's accounts of what was happening in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-33 were different from other western accounts. Not only did he reveal the true extent of starvation, he reported on the Stalin regime's failure to deliver aid while exporting grain to the west. The tragedy is now known as the Holodomar and regarded by Ukrainians as genocide.

The story of Jones, a devout, non-comformist teetotaller from Barry, often has elements of Indiana Jones and Zelig.

Rory Finnan, a lecturer in Ukrainian studies at Cambridge, called him "a true hero"."He is a remarkable historical figure and it is also remarkable that he is not well known. Jones was the only journalist who risked his name and reputation to expose the Holodomor to the world."

But there is more to Jones's story and a Zelig-like quality to his life. For example, he was once on a 16-seat aircraft with the new German chancellor, Adolph Hitler, and Joseph Goebbels, on their way to a rally in Frankfurt. Jones wrote for the Western Mail that if the plane had crashed the history of western Europe history would have changed forever.

Another time, outside the gates of the White House, he saw the one-time American president Herbert Hoover preparing to have his photograph taken with schoolchildren. Soon enough, somehow, Jones is in the photograph.

After his Ukraine articles Jones was banned from the USSR and, in many eyes, discredited. The only work he could get was in Cardiff on the Western Mail covering "arts, crafts and coracles", according to his great-nephew Nigel Linsan Colley. But again his life changed. He managed to get an interview with a local castle owner: William Randolph Hearst who owned St Donat's Castle near Cardiff. The newspaper magnate was obviously taken by Jones's accounts of what had happened in Ukraine and invited the reporter to the US.

Jones dutifully arrived at Hearst's private station – as Chico Marx was leaving the estate – and wrote three articles for Hearst and used, for the first time, the phrase "manmade famine".

a few bits about Hearst: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst

After 1918 and the end of World War I, Hearst gradually began adopting more conservative views and started promoting an isolationist foreign policy to avoid any more entanglement in what he regarded as corrupt European affairs. He was at once a militant nationalist, a staunch anti-communist after the Russian Revolution, and deeply suspicious of the League of Nations and of the British, French, Japanese, and Russians.[2] Following Hitler's rise to power, Hearst became a supporter of the Nazi Party, ordering his journalists to publish favourable coverage of Nazi Germany, and allowing leading Nazis to publish articles in his newspapers.[3] He was a leading supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932–1934, but then broke with FDR and became his most prominent enemy on the right.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst#Anti-Communist_enthusiasm_for_Hitler

With “AMERICA FIRST” emblazoned on his newspaper masthead, Hearst celebrated the “great achievement” of the new Nazi regime in Germany—a lesson to all “liberty-loving people”—the defeat of communism. In 1934, after checking with Jewish leaders to ensure a visit would be to their benefit,[57] Hearst visited Berlin to interview Adolf Hitler. When Hitler asked why he was so misunderstood by the American press, Hearst retorted: "Because Americans believe in democracy, and are averse to dictatorship."[58] William Randolph Hearst instructed his reporters in Germany to give positive coverage of the Nazis, and fired journalists who refused to write stories favourable of German fascism.[3] Hearst's papers ran columns without rebuttal by Nazi leader Hermann Göring, Alfred Rosenberg,[3] and Hitler himself, as well as Mussolini and other dictators in Europe and Latin America.[59] During that same year 1934, Japan / U.S. relations were unstable. In an attempt to remedy this, Prince Tokugawa Iesato travelled throughout the United States on a goodwill visit. During his visit, Prince Iesato and his delegation met with William Randolph Hearst with the hope of improving mutual understanding between the two nations.

A long and very comprehensive read about how the anti-communist Hearst propaganda was ultimately put into history books as 'fact':

https://www.villagevoice.com/in-search-of-a-soviet-holocaust/

This is also related to a CIA-funded publishing corp that help establish fascist-sympathizing literature to support the 'terror famine' propaganda:

The CIA facilitated Lebed’s move to the US, getting asylum for him and his family in 1949 and helping him obtain citizenship in 1957. As head of a CIA operation called Project AERODYNAMIC, Lebed spent the next few decades in control of a Agency-funded non-profit publishing company, the Prolog Research and Publishing Association.

Prolog Research and Publishing went on to promote lots of anti-Soviet propaganda, including popularizing the 'terror famine' rhetoric.

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2018/sep/18/mykola-lebed-and-the-cia/

Thanks to his collaboration with the CIA and their active shielding of him, Lebed was never tried for the war crimes he and his men had committed against Poles and Jews during WWII.

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

Anyone working on that yet? There's so many of these in the finale, but there's also many from the other Gorn episodes. If you see this anywhere please post it here!

The U.S. assigned General Douglas MacArthur to oversee occupied Japan and designated him the Supreme Commander of Allies in the Pacific (SCAP). From his General Headquarters (GHQ) in Tokyo, MacArthur controlled SCAP, a massive bureaucracy of 6,000 people that dictated policy to the Japanese government. He commanded the occupying army of 430,000 soldiers to enforce his orders. MacArthur has gone down in mainstream history as an erratic but nevertheless heroic figure. He was nothing of the sort. MacArthur was a reactionary Republican who believed that the white man’s burden was needed to bring civilization, commerce and Christianity to Asia. He held his Japanese subjects in contempt, and he only spoke to a total of 16 Japanese people during his six-year rule. At the end of his reign, MacArthur summed up his attitude toward the Japanese: "If the Anglo-Saxon was say 45 years of age in his development, in the sciences, the arts, divinity, culture, the Germans were quite as mature. The Japanese, however, in spite of their antiquity measured by time, were in a very tuitionary [sic] condition. Measured by the standards of modern civilization, they would be like a boy of 12 as compared with our development of 45 years."

For the first several years of the occupation, the Japanese were devastated and starving. A memo from General MacArthur’s command stated that Japan "can only be considered a vast concentration camp under the control of the allies and foreclosed from all avenues to commerce and trade."

Not only did the U.S. impose Jim Crow segregation, it also collaborated with the Japanese regime in oppressing the women of Japan. The Japanese regime set up the Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA) which hired 70,000 poor women to work as prostitutes to serve the U.S. troops. The RAA ran government brothels around the U.S. military bases for the first two years of the occupation. In 1947, SCAP ordered the RAA privatized, but the brothels still operated in government approved red light districts surrounding the U.S. bases through 1949.

The Pentagon ordered General Charles A. Willoughby, who oversaw the intelligence section of the SCAP, to develop a plan for eventually rebuilding a Japanese army. Willoughby opposed the New Deal reforms and befriended and protected a set of militarists at the core of the old order. He considered these reactionaries the real allies of the occupation and denounced all the attacks on them as plots by leftist infiltrators inside GHQ.

[General Charles A.] Willoughby actually had fascist sympathies; he had served as the U.S. liaison to Mussolini, praised the dictator for "reestablishing the traditional supremacy of the white race" in Ethiopia and went on to work as an adviser to the fascist dictator Francisco Franco in Spain after he retired from the U.S. military.

Willoughby took pride in his nickname "Little Hitler" and [General Douglas] MacArthur’s reference to him as "my lovable fascist."

Confronted with this democratic uprising, the U.S. abandoned most of the reforms they had granted. The U.S. initiated what John Dower calls a soft Cold War policy from 1947 to 1949.53 They cancelled all the punitive attacks on the Japanese ruling class, whipped up anti-communism, repressed the labor movement and scapegoated the Koreans. Their goal was primarily defensive–to quell internal revolt.

Many historians have wrongly described this new phase of the occupation as a "reverse course." This argument fails to understand the overall strategy of the U.S. and the different tactics it deployed to accomplish its goals. The U.S. strategy before, during and after the war was to establish its imperial domination over Asia and reform a subordinate Japanese capitalism firmly under conservative control. The American rulers that committed genocide in Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not somehow discover democratic values in 1945 and then lose them again in 1947. A changing situation compelled them to adopt different measures to accomplish the same goal, and those measure after 1947 were the rollback of the democratic movement from below and strengthening of the old order to save Japan from Russia’s sphere of influence and from revolt.

Islamist group claims responsibility for attack on China's Tiananmen Square

A radical Islamist group has claimed responsibility for an attack on Tiananmen Square last month and warned of future attacks in the Chinese capital, according to an eight-minute audio clip obtained by a US-based internet monitoring organisation.

The Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) is the first group to claim responsibility for the attack on 28 October, when a four-wheel drive vehicle ploughed through a group of pedestrians near the iconic square in central Beijing, crashed into a stone bridge and caught fire, killing five people and injuring dozens. Chinese authorities quickly identified the driver as Uighur, a Muslim ethnic minority hailing from Xinjiang, a sparsely populated, restive region in the country's far north-west.

"O Chinese unbelievers, know that you have been fooling East Turkistan for the last sixty years, but now they have awakened," the organisation's leader Abdullah Mansour said in the clip, which was posted online this weekend by the Search for International Terrorist Entities Institute (SITE), a Bethesda, Maryland-based website which monitors jihadist forums. Uighur separatists call the region East Turkistan.

The Uighur terrorist orgs have had close ties to Al Qaeda and ISIS in Syria just to name a few (and if you know the history of Afghanistan, it's kinda easy to see how US support for anti-communist terrorism is a go-to strategy).

more info on attacks, how the US held Uighurs at Gitmo for over 5 years, etc:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkistan_Islamic_Party#Attacks_and_incidents

Xavier Hernandez, professor at UNAM in Mexico who first suggested wide binary tests of gravity a decade ago, says, "It is exciting that the departure from Newtonian gravity that my group has claimed for some time has now been independently confirmed, and impressive that this departure has for the first time been correctly identified as accurately corresponding to a detailed MOND model. The unprecedented accuracy of the Gaia satellite, the large and meticulously selected sample Chae uses and his detailed analysis, make his results sufficiently robust to qualify as a discovery."

Pavel Kroupa, professor at Bonn University and at Charles University in Prague, has come to the same conclusions concerning the law of gravitation. He says, "With this test on wide binaries as well as our tests on open star clusters nearby the sun, the data now compellingly imply that gravitation is Milgromian rather than Newtonian. The implications for all of astrophysics are immense."

minimal effort silliness