Yet, the Boer Wars were hard for the Afrikaners to overcome. Truth be told the British had been magnanimous conquerors and South Africa had prospered under British rule but bitter memories still remained. For many, such as Maritz, it did not matter how gentle the British had been after the war it did not erase their memories of the succession of British invasions, the wars of conquest or the British concentration camps where Boer women and children died horribly of disease and starvation. Men like Maritz were simply biding their time for yet another opportunity to take their revenge and drive out the British and with the coming of World War I it seemed that their chance had come. Making common cause with the Germans only seemed natural. During the Boer War the Germans were openly sympathetic to the Afrikaners and Kaiser Wilhelm II had got into some controversy with his British cousins over his words to Boer leader Paul Kruger. German colonial forces in Africa were very weak compared to the surrounding Allied powers and the colony of German Southwest Africa in particular knew they would soon come under attack by the British in South Africa. Their only hope for survival was for a Boer rebellion which would throw the British off balance and allow the Germans and the Afrikaners to unite against them.
The British themselves were rather worried about how the Boers would respond to the outbreak of war with Germany and with good reason. Of the three preeminent Boer leaders from the freedom wars; Louis Botha, Christiaan De Wet and Jacobus Hercules (Koos) De la Rey only Botha was considered reliably loyal to the British. Many Afrikaners took divergent positions based on different motives but a sizeable minority at least were not prepared to fight against a nation that had sympathized with them in their own struggle for freedom in the service of those who had conquered them. The First World War was their opportunity to take revenge and the Germans counted on this, stockpiling a great deal of weapons and ammunition to equip the rebel Boer army they hoped would soon emerge. The Germans had been spreading the word for some time that with their help the Boers could drive out the British and establish a greater empire for themselves in Africa more to their own liking. As war erupted in Europe both sides began to form up in South Africa.
Louis Botha, newly elected Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, pledged his loyalty to the British Empire and agreed with London to launch the conquest of German Southwest Africa which many Boers opposed. Christiaan De Wet was advocating opposition to Britain and alliance with Germany and General Koos De la Rey, who was believed to be on the side of rebellion, was gunned down by British police before his influence could have effect. Likewise, Christiaan Frederik Beyers, commandant-general of the Union of South Africa Defense Force, resigned his position to join the rebel faction as did General Jap Christoffel Greyling Kemp who was in charge of the training post at Potchefstroom. However, the most dangerous of them all was Colonel Salomon Gerhardus (Manie) Maritz who was to have been on the front lines of the invasion of German territory. Maritz was sent orders to report to Pretoria in the hopes of neutralizing him but he smelled the trap and ignored the order. War might have been headed for German Southwest Africa but it was to hit South Africa first.
British intelligence reported that Maritz and his officers were openly speaking of joining the Germans. True enough, Maritz announced his intention to ally with the Germans to his commandos and his allegiance to the provisional rebel government of the former Boer republics. He proclaimed the independence of South Africa, the Orange Free State, Cape Province and Natal and called upon the White population to join him and their German comrades in revolt against the British. It was October, 1914, and Maritz gave his men one minute to decide whether they were on the side of the Boer-German alliance or the British. Most followed their commander but about 60 remained loyal to Britain and were duly handed over to the Germans as prisoners of war. Rallies were held, speeches were given, and passionate appeals on behalf of Afrikaner nationalism were voiced as the rebellion seemed to be catching on. Beyers, De Wet, Maritz, Kemp and Bezuidenhout were chosen to lead the provisional Boer government and newly promoted General Manie Maritz occupied Keimos around Upington which had been his previous area of operations. Fighting broke out in local clashes between rebel and loyalist factions.
The British themselves were rather worried about how the Boers would respond to the outbreak of war with Germany and with good reason. Of the three preeminent Boer leaders from the freedom wars; Louis Botha, Christiaan De Wet and Jacobus Hercules (Koos) De la Rey only Botha was considered reliably loyal to the British. Many Afrikaners took divergent positions based on different motives but a sizeable minority at least were not prepared to fight against a nation that had sympathized with them in their own struggle for freedom in the service of those who had conquered them. The First World War was their opportunity to take revenge and the Germans counted on this, stockpiling a great deal of weapons and ammunition to equip the rebel Boer army they hoped would soon emerge. The Germans had been spreading the word for some time that with their help the Boers could drive out the British and establish a greater empire for themselves in Africa more to their own liking. As war erupted in Europe both sides began to form up in South Africa.
Louis Botha, newly elected Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, pledged his loyalty to the British Empire and agreed with London to launch the conquest of German Southwest Africa which many Boers opposed. Christiaan De Wet was advocating opposition to Britain and alliance with Germany and General Koos De la Rey, who was believed to be on the side of rebellion, was gunned down by British police before his influence could have effect. Likewise, Christiaan Frederik Beyers, commandant-general of the Union of South Africa Defense Force, resigned his position to join the rebel faction as did General Jap Christoffel Greyling Kemp who was in charge of the training post at Potchefstroom. However, the most dangerous of them all was Colonel Salomon Gerhardus (Manie) Maritz who was to have been on the front lines of the invasion of German territory. Maritz was sent orders to report to Pretoria in the hopes of neutralizing him but he smelled the trap and ignored the order. War might have been headed for German Southwest Africa but it was to hit South Africa first.
British intelligence reported that Maritz and his officers were openly speaking of joining the Germans. True enough, Maritz announced his intention to ally with the Germans to his commandos and his allegiance to the provisional rebel government of the former Boer republics. He proclaimed the independence of South Africa, the Orange Free State, Cape Province and Natal and called upon the White population to join him and their German comrades in revolt against the British. It was October, 1914, and Maritz gave his men one minute to decide whether they were on the side of the Boer-German alliance or the British. Most followed their commander but about 60 remained loyal to Britain and were duly handed over to the Germans as prisoners of war. Rallies were held, speeches were given, and passionate appeals on behalf of Afrikaner nationalism were voiced as the rebellion seemed to be catching on. Beyers, De Wet, Maritz, Kemp and Bezuidenhout were chosen to lead the provisional Boer government and newly promoted General Manie Maritz occupied Keimos around Upington which had been his previous area of operations. Fighting broke out in local clashes between rebel and loyalist factions.
On October 26, 1914 the British side made the state of war clear when Louis Botha personally took command of the forces assembling to crush the Boer rebellion. It was the first and so far only time that a British Empire/Commonwealth prime minister led troops into battle while in office. Moreover, this was especially difficult for old Boer soldiers like Botha and Jan Smuts who would be fighting against their own people, many of them their own comrades from the previous wars against the British. However, Botha and Smuts were truly committed to the Allied cause and when Australian troops on their way to Europe were offered to help crush the rebellion Botha refused and preferred to use loyalist Afrikaners to suppress the rebel Afrikaners so as not to exacerbate the Boer-British ethnic tensions which were obviously already running high. Volunteers, reserves, support personnel and the like were all mobilized in this massive effort by the Union government to stamp out the uprising before the Boer rebels spread their influence and forged a coordinating strategy with the Germans which would have been disastrous.
The Boer rebels were busy as well. General De Wet took his Lydenburg commandos and seized Heilbron and captured a British train which provided a wealth of supplies and ammunition. Soon De Wet had 3,000 men under arms while General Beyers mobilized more in the Magaliesberg in addition to those already assembled around Upington under General Maritz. On the loyalist side, Botha took command of 6,000 cavalry and some field guns assembled at Vereeniging in the Transvaal with the aim of destroying De Wet. Martial law was declared and overwhelming government force was brought down on the rebels. General Maritz was defeated on October 24 but escaped into German Southwest Africa where he continued his own resistance. Botha caught General De Wet at a farmhouse in Mushroom Valley and broke the Boer rebels on November 12. General De Wet and a remnant of his men retreated into the unassuming but brutal Kalahari Desert. General Beyers and his commandos met with an initial defeat at Commissioners Drift after which he joined forces with General Kemp. However, they too were beaten and Beyers drowned while trying to escape across the Vaal River. Kemp led the rest of his men to safety in German territory to join up with General Maritz but only after a long and brutal march across the Kalahari. Kemp was eventually captured in 1915 though by his former comrade General Jaap van Deventer after which he served time in prison and went on to become minister of agriculture in 1924.
The potential Boer rebellion had been crushed in its infancy and Prime Minister Botha went ahead with his invasion of German Southwest Africa. On hand to oppose him was Manie Maritz who had no intention of giving up so easily. He was aided by the fact that the Germans had probably the best colonial army in Africa and although hopelessly outnumbered they fought with considerable skill and tenacity. Early German victories hurled the British invasion back and forced Botha to take a more careful approach. He heard of General Maritz again when the rebel Afrikaner took his Boer troops and with German assistance attacked his former base at Upington, inflicting quite a bloody nose before General van Deventer beat them back. The Union troops faced stiff German resistance, harassing artillery fire, poisoned water wells and land mines in their march into the interior of Southwest Africa. The Germans won a number of stunning victories but eventually the strength of British numbers, some 60,000 troops, proved impossible to overcome and German Southwest Africa was conquered. The British also liberated the loyalists Maritz had turned over to the Germans when they took Tsumeb where the Germans had also been keeping their weapons stockpile for the Boer rebellion.
However, the rebellious General Manie Maritz was not to be captured having escaped yet again, this time to the safety of then neutral Portuguese West Africa (Angola). For the rest of the war years he traveled to Portugal itself and later Spain before returning to his native South Africa in 1923. Once back he proved just as troublesome for the British as he ever had and still somewhat attached to Germany as time would tell. In 1936 he organized a South African Nazi type party with typical anti-Semitic rhetoric thrown into the mix. Of course, in reality, Jews were hardly a presence in South Africa, but it was part of an overall Afrikaner nationalist program and to the disgust of the British and pro-Union South Africans he continued his agitation even after the start of World War II. He did not live to see the final defeat of Nazi Germany though as he died in a car wreck on December 19, 1940 in Pretoria. A lifelong Afrikaner nationalist and enemy of Great Britain he certainly regretted nothing. It would be easy to say (and many have) that the entire Maritz rebellion and the German defeat in Namibia were an exercise in futility and a complete waste of time. However, although the Boers remained subject to Britain and the Germans lost what was arguably their most profitable colony, in a way the German and Boer campaigns were a success for the Central Powers in that they delayed considerably the mobilization of South African troops for use against the more formidable German colonial army in German East Africa (which went on a rampage) and they prevented any transfer of South African troops to the western front during the vital battles fought in 1914. That being said, the evaluation of these actions still depends a great deal on the point of view of the observer. To the British and loyalists General Maritz was a traitor of the blackest sort, a collaborator and ranked at the top of the list of enemies of the British Empire. However, General Maritz is still revered by some Afrikaner nationalists for his dogged defiance and by modern day neo-Nazi Boers who think he was on the right side in World War II as well.
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Particulièrement impitoyable, la guerre à laquelle fut confronté l’État Indépendant Croate entre 1941 et 1945 s’est achevée, en mai 1945, par l’ignoble massacre de Bleiburg (1). Tueries massives de prisonniers civils et militaires, marches de la mort, camps de concentration (2), tortures, pillages, tout est alors mis en œuvre pour écraser la nation croate et la terroriser durablement. La victoire militaire étant acquise (3), les communistes entreprennent, en effet, d’annihiler le nationalisme croate : pour cela, il leur faut supprimer les gens qui pourraient prendre ou reprendre les armes contre eux, mais aussi éliminer les « éléments socialement dangereux », c’est à dire la bourgeoisie et son élite intellectuelle « réactionnaire ». Pour Tito et les siens, rétablir la Yougoslavie et y installer définitivement le marxisme-léninisme implique d’anéantir tous ceux qui pourraient un jour s’opposer à leurs plans (4). L’Épuration répond à cet impératif : au nom du commode alibi antifasciste, elle a clairement pour objectif de décapiter l’adversaire. Le plus souvent d’ailleurs, on ne punit pas des fautes ou des crimes réels mais on invente toutes sortes de pseudo délits pour se débarrasser de qui l’on veut. Ainsi accuse-t-on, une fois sur deux, les Croates de trahison alors que personne n’ayant jamais (démocratiquement) demandé au peuple croate s’il souhaitait appartenir à la Yougoslavie, rien n’obligeait ce dernier à lui être fidèle ! Parallèlement, on châtie sévèrement ceux qui ont loyalement défendu leur terre natale, la Croatie.
Er zijn echter 4 begrippen die doorheen de geschiedenis van het Carlisme steeds terugkeren en duidelijk op de voorgrond staan: Dios, Patria, Fueros, Rey.
As a historical (rather than a chronological) period, the twentieth century begins in 1914, with the onset of the First World War, whose devastating assault on European existence shook the continent in every one of its foundations, destroying not just its ancien régime, but ushering in what Ernst Nolte calls the “European Civil War” of 1917-45 or what some call the “Thirty Years War” of 1914-45. For amidst its storms of fire and steel, there emerged four rival ideologies — American liberalism, Russian Communism, Italian Fascism, and German National Socialism — each of whose ambition was to reshape the postwar order according to its own scheme for collective salvation. Our world, Venner argues, is a product of these contentious ambitions and of the ideological system — liberalism — that prevailed over its rivals.
The clash between aristocratic and democratic values — between Europe and America — reflected, of course, a more profound clash. Venner explains it in terms of Oswald Spengler’s Prussianism and Socialism (1919), which argues that the sixteenth-century Reformation produced two opposed visions of Protestant Christianity — the Calvinism of the English and the Lutheran Pietism of the Germans. The German vision rejected the primacy of wealth, comfort, and happiness, exalting the soldier’s aristocratic spirit and the probity this spirit nurtured in Prussian officialdom. English Protestants, by contrast, privileged wealth (a sign of election) and the external freedoms necessary to its pursuit. This made it a secularizing, individualistic, and above all economic “religion,” with each individual having the right to interpret the Book in his own light and thus to justify whatever it took to succeed.
Il y a maintenant plusieurs années de cela, un ancien officier du renseignement militaire soviétique nommé Vladimir Rezun provoqua de vives discussions en Russie à cause de son affirmation sensationnelle, selon laquelle Hitler a attaqué la Russie soviétique en juin 1941, au moment exact où Staline se préparait à submerger l’Allemagne et l’Europe de l’Ouest, en prélude à une opération bien préparée, visant à «libérer» toute l’Europe en la mettant sous domination communiste.
(Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2008).
Vi sono scelte che non vengono perdonate, che fruttano al proprio autore la «damnatio memoriae» perpetua, indipendentemente dal valore del personaggio e da tutto quanto egli possa aver detto o fatto di notevole, prima di compiere, magari per ragioni contingenti e sostanzialmente in buona fede, quella tale scelta infelice.
Nella sua ricerca di un nuovo ordine europeo che consentisse alle «patrie» francese, tedesca, inglese, italiana, di continuare a svolgere un ruolo mondiale nell’era dei colossi imperiali, si era accostato anche a certi ambienti industriali e finanziari che egli definiva «capitalismo intelligente», perché aveva intuito che, in un mondo globalizzato, anche il capitalismo avrebbe potuto svolgere una funzione utile, purché si dissociasse dal nazionalismo e contribuisse a creare migliori condizioni di vita per gli abitanti del Vecchio Continente. Grande utopista, e forse sognatore, Drieu La Rochelle si rendeva però conto della importanza dei fattori materiali della vita moderna, e intendeva inserirli nel quadro della nuova Europa da costruire.
Eu estava, pois, apoiado no bar, bebericando um xarope de romã, quando vi avançar na minha direção um homenzinho calvo com alguns fios longos ao redor das orelhas; visivelmente ele tinha vontade de debater, pouco importando o assunto; nós bebemos e ele falou; ou o contrário; ele tinha um velho sobretudo negro, cujas manchas eram muito grandes, óculos que eram verdadeiros binóculos e se exprimia com um sotaque curioso, que enrolava os “r”, vindo talvez de qualquer parte do leste. Uma mistura de professor Girassol com Bergier. Ele me contou uma história engraçada sobre múmias que foram descobertas na China em um deserto, múmias de “gigantes loiros”, dizia. Ele desapareceu no momento em que eu pagava a conta; eu me perguntei se ele não era uma aparição, de um ou de outro dos personagens anteriormente citados; sim, eu sei que o professor Girassol não existe que sob o lápis de Hergé, mas sabe-se lá. Paul-Georges Sansonetti deve saber. Eu havia esquecido esta história até os dias de hoje, quando eu fiz algumas pesquisas. Somente para saber que o homenzinho não brincava.
É o turcólogo alemão F.W. K. Muller quem deu, em 1907, o nome de tokariana a uma língua que nós podemos decifrar facilmente nos manuscritos, pois eles estavam anotados de maneira bilíngüe tokariano – sânscrito. Os lingüistas teriam em seguida estabelecido os vínculos entre esta língua e as línguas indo-européias, essencialmente o celta e o germânico. Nós reencontraremos alguma sonoridade similar nestes exemplos, respectivamente em português², francês, latim, irlandês e tokariano: mãe, mère, mater, mathir, macer. Irmão, frère, frater, brathir, prócer (próximo do inglês “brother”), três, trois, tres, tri, tre (segundo Giovanni Monastra). 
Cette année 2011 marque le 70e anniversaire de la naissance de l’État Indépendant Croate, un épisode majeur de l’histoire de la Croatie au XXe siècle mais aussi un événement qui soulève encore d’âpres controverses. Le 10 avril 1941 fut-il un accident de l’histoire, fut-il au contraire une étape logique et inéluctable de la vie nationale croate ou encore une simple péripétie orchestrée par Hitler et Mussolini pour servir leurs intérêts ? Extrêmement délicat eu égard aux méchantes polémiques que suscitent encore les faits et gestes des Croates durant la IIe Guerre mondiale, le débat n’est toujours pas clos et il n’est peut-être pas inutile de faire le point.
Comprovamos assim que Bombacci não é um fascista, mas defende as conquistas do regime e a figura de Mussolini. Não se aproximou do partido fascista – jamais se inscreveu no Partido Nacional Fascista – apesar da sua amizade reconhecida com Mussolini, não aceitou cargos que lhe poderiam oferecer nem renegou as suas origens comunistas. A sua independência valia mais. No entanto convenceu-se de que o Estado Corporativo proposto pelo fascismo era a realização mais perfeita, o socialismo levado à prática, um estado superior ao comunismo. Jamais camuflará os seus ideais, em 1936 escrevia na revista “La Veritá”, confessando a sua adesão ao fascismo mas também ao comunismo:
Quando Mussolini é deposto em Julho de 1943 e resgatado pelos alemães uns meses depois, o Partido Nacional Fascista já se desagregou. A estrutura orgânica desapareceu, os dirigentes do partido, provenientes das camadas privilegiadas da sociedade passaram-se em massa para o governo de Badoglio e a Itália encontra-se dividida em dois (ao sul de Roma os Aliados avançam em direcção ao norte). Mussolini reagrupa os seus mais fiéis, todos eles velhos camaradas da primeira hora ou jovens entusiastas, quase nenhum dirigente de alto nível, que ainda acreditam na revolução fascista e proclama a República Social Italiana. Imediatamente o fascismo parece voltar às suas origens revolucionárias e Nicola Bombacci adere à república proclamada e presta a Mussolini todo o seu apoio. O seu sonho é poder levar a cabo a construção dessa “República dos trabalhadores” pela qual tanto ele como Mussolini se bateram juntos no início do século. Tal como Bombacci, outros conhecidos intelectuais de esquerda juntam-se ao novo governo: Carlo Silvestri (deputado socialista, depois da guerra defensor da memória do Duce), Edmondo Cione (filosofo socialista que será autorizado a criar um partido socialista aparte do Partido Fascista Republicano), etc.