Might makes right

[Socrates]

In the first chapter of The Republic Plato says 'justice is nothing else but the interest of the stronger'. 

This aphorism is a very ancient one, in its older usage, it holds a top to bottom view of force and power, but thinkers such as Foucault see power as a capillary force that we all exercise.

What are your thoughts on this?

[kFoyauextlH]

We all exercise it. The most powerful wins. Not necessarily the most good or beneficial. The strong can bully and force entire Empires into the ground, suppressing those with more intelligence and better plans that would likely receive better results. Brute force is like a blustering wind, the wind wears away the structures in what seems to be a pointless exercise. People generally don't blame the wind for this energetic display because they don't expect the wind to have a mind, maybe they expect too much from people, as it may be people can not control the power running through them and are like scraps at the edge of an incoming wave, only appearing to be the head of it.

​​​​The most blessed is the one who can not be obsyructed or unobstructed, and they are not given this status by any deed or worth, but happen to be the one, the undefeatable foe, the victor, the lucky power and power of luck. This one can do whatever and without repercussions, far from ever being "right" it determines such things and can blatantly pervert them or destroy them too and none can stop whatever none can stop, but we should try.

The exercise of Being is to struggle against everything until you reach what can not be overtaken, and to exercise your power until you know surrender through never giving up and non-surrender. Anyone who gives up, falls short.

[Socrates]

So do you see it as a state of nature?

[kFoyauextlH]

Violence? I don't find it necessary, but in our realm it seems to be the way things work, practically everything is forced and forceful, we hear things we don't want to hear which force us to think things in order to understand them, its just one huge event of pushing and being pushed, which I can imagine is a novelty in a vacuum or with nothing else around, but I'd say this whole thing is really disturbing, but then can you imagine what it would be like to push and never be able to get a result or meet pressure or sensation or touch anything? That would be hell too. One of my practices is to come up with hell meditations, simulating all sorts of experiences in order to really understand versions of those feelings which arise in people.

I don't think any of this is necessary though, so if Nature is equated with Necessity, then I can't say this particular aspect is really necessary as I don't think it "had to be this way" from the very physical aspect to the more metaphorical version of the way things work in social interactions and human behavior.

In nature, the strongest doesn't always win between or against a weaker, but whatever wins in a sense is left to be the strongest, and finally the strongest of all are the most imposing circumstances, like Chance or Freedom (God). So neither is might right, nor is it the determiner of what wins, except in the case of the One Might, of which all are made equal before it by being unrankable and unpredictable and randomized. The two lions, the strongest doesn't necessarily win, any strange interference, even the bite of a spider or some strange twist can lead to a weaker in every way lion being the one that carries on. Nothing is stronger than Chaos or Madness or Freedom/Randomness.

[atreestump]

Locke holds that the use of force by the state to get people to hold certain beliefs or engage in certain ceremonies or practices is illegitimate. The chief means which the magistrate has at her disposal is force, but force is not an effective means for changing or maintaining belief. Suppose then, that the magistrate uses force so as to make people profess that they believe.

[kFoyauextlH]

Its just a difference of narrowness or broadness in what is considered qualified as force. My use is very broad and equates force at its maximum with undeniable reality. In the case of political or social structures, force is generated made up of a certain matter, known as "matters of fact", things which people are forced to accept, like "it is amatter of fact that if you go out running naked you are likely to be threatened and stopped with violent force" which itself is very real and serious, even though it has no really strong or sensible reasoning behind it "it is simply what is done" and that is just a small imitation of "it is simply how it is" which is the acceptance of what is considered unalterable or what should not be altered, its right to remain as it is granted by its apparent difficulty or early presence " It was here before me and so has the seniority and is the convention, plus it appears difficult to stop or change (it is too strong seeming)".

[kFoyauextlH]

Added in 5 days 4 hours 57 minutes 42 seconds:


Added in 20 hours 37 minutes 25 seconds:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Israel

This doesn't even touch upon the reality of the ubiquitousness of racism in that culture, and how everything is twisted into racist and superior and inferior terms, it has completely taken over and is so flagrant.

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

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

"


Ilan Pappé, an expatriate Israeli historian, writes that the First Aliyah to Israel "established a society based on J supremacy" within "settlement-cooperatives" that were owned and operated by J.[6] Joseph Massad, a professor of Arab studies, holds that "J supremacism" has always been a "dominating principle" in religious and secular Z.[7][8]

Since the 1990s, Orthodox J rabbits from Israel, most notably those affiliated with Chabad-Lubavitch and religious Z organizations, including the Temple Institute, have set up a modern Noahide movement.[9][10] These Noahide organizations are aimed at non-J in order to convince them to follow the Noahide laws.[9][10] The rabbtis that guide the modern Noahide movement, many of whom are affiliated with the Third Temple movement,[9][10] expound an ideology that has been criticized for racism and supremacy, and consists of the belief that the J are God's chosen people.[9][10] These organizations mentor Noahides because they believe that the Messianic era will begin with the establishment of a J theocracy in Israel—including the rebuilding of the Third Temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and re-institution of the J priesthood—supported by communities of Noahides.[9][10] David Novak, professor of J theology and ethics at the University of Toronto, has denounced the modern Noahide movement, saying, "If J are telling Gentiles what to do, it's a form of imperialism".[11][12][13]

In 2002, Massad said that Israel imposes a "J supremacist system of discrimination" on Palestinian citizens of Israel, and that this has been normalized within the discourse on how to end the conflict, with various parties arguing that "it is pragmatic for Palestinians to accept to live in a J supremacist state as third class citizens".[1][14]

In 2021, the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem classified the State of Israel as "a regime of J supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea" through laws amounting to apartheid. It also took note of the fact that, after it was established in 1989, it initially focused on the legal and social situation in the Israeli-occupied territories, but that "what happens in the Occupied Territories can no longer be treated as separate from the reality in the entire area under Israel’s control" because there "is one regime governing the entire area and the people living in it, based on a single organizing principle".[15]

In the aftermath of the 2022 Israeli legislative election, the winning right-wing coalition included an alliance known as Religious Z Party, which J-American columnist David E. Rosenberg said is "driven by J supremacy and anti-Arab racism".[16]

Proponents of the one-state solution cite the development of J supremacy as one of the main reasons for the necessity of a single country that applies democratic principles across all sectors of society, regardless of ethnic or religious affiliations.[17]
"

https://aratta.wordpress.com/ie-italo-celts/

Added in 17 minutes 39 seconds:

[kFoyauextlH]

https://www.youtube.com/live/42c2NP_1RN ... ure=shared

Added in 5 days 2 hours 11 minutes 45 seconds:


This is a guy in Samurai armor and European Knight armor hitting each other's armor with swords and pretending to get hurt and collapse.

[atreestump]

Definitely the state of nature there!

[kFoyauextlH]

His camera and cinematography is like the fancy films of today, which aren't as lovely as some much older films but is at a very high prestige level today for giving the impression of being serious and expensive, even if it usn't with digital technology today.



I've long wanted to make and be in films.











The art for some children's books during earlier periods up to the 70s were significantly better than a lot being produced today, for example:

https://downthetubes.net/in-memoriam-il ... d-to-life/

https://cloud-109.blogspot.com/2012/02/ ... s.html?m=1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_and ... _Johnstone

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/S/com ... 162163.jpg

They have a bunch of stuff that I'm hoping to find and acquire at some point for a reasonable price, otherwise images of all the art will suffice in the meantime or pdf scans of these books.

The designs these days and for many decades now, maybe 50 years at this point, have been increasingly ridiculous, reaching new heights of bad and boring as we progress:



Now the secret that is underlying many of these examples, and how I approach things in an oblique and unusual fashion, is the idea of "might" and pride in several ways, related to visual standards and what is being depicted in them.





A comment mentions DiCaprio's Revenant and Fassbender's Macbeth, both of which depict proud, attractive, and strong "white" or "old/pride in past" European and European descent characters, part of a project of visual esteem that in some ways other groups of people are not pursuing as apparently.





Even this is relevant to my paripheral approach:





https://www.imdb.com/list/ls000098032/

https://wiki.ubc.ca/Masculinity_in_Films



https://cinemaaxis.com/2014/01/10/moder ... in-cinema/

Added in 23 minutes 29 seconds:
https://scholarworks.utep.edu/cgi/viewc ... t=open_etd

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/363 ... hall-i-die

https://menshealthclinic.com/ca/resourc ... al-health/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5675294/

https://en.natmus.dk/historical-knowled ... ppearance/

"
The faces of men and women in the Viking Age were more alike than they are today. The women’s faces were more masculine than women’s today, with prominent brow ridges. On the other hand, the Viking man’s appearance was more feminine than that of men today, with a less prominent jaw and brow ridges.

These ambiguous facial features mean that it is difficult to decide upon a Viking skeleton’s sex based on the skull alone. Therefore, other traits need to be studied in order to identify the sex of skeletons. Pelvis width can be very useful in this respect.
"

https://www.stk.uio.no/english/research ... g-age.html

https://time.com/5882287/viking-gender/

https://www.copenhagenpride.dk/en/gay-v ... li2wu8v7iw

"
This raises a question that we need to talk more about: “How does the concept of whiteness strip white people of culture?” If we look into the creation of whiteness, and how it was used to divide and control people, it makes sense to question it. The construction of whiteness makes it so that our cultural heritage becomes homogenic, which is clearly visible in America, where culture is lacking and every white person somehow speaks from the same homogenized cultural reference and in desperation tries to find some kind of identity. We see plenty of people clinging to dreamcatchers, chakras, namaste, and voodoo, even though their bloodline was taking part in the destruction of those practices.

The creation of whiteness, and its historical function, can be read about more in depth in Jacqueline Battalora’s ‘Birth of a White Nation’. It is important to acknowledge and understand that we are all socialized into whiteness, and we must collectively liberate ourselves of the construction of whiteness, which is firstly done by understanding how it is built and how we unknowingly uphold white supremacy in our daily lives.

Before Christianity came to Scandinavia, there were widespread practices of the old Norse people, whose gods and practices aligned with the Norse culture. The practice of Seiðt (say-th) a kind of spirituality that involved rituals with chants and spirits to see into the future and find answers to the questions of the people. That was a practice often said to resemble the shamanic practices of the indigenous people of north Norway, also known as the Sami people. Seiðt is believed to also raise a question of queerness. Many scholars believe that the practice of Seiðt was only done by women, and the men who did practice, were seen as effeminate, which is believed to have had a taboo connected to it. Within Norse culture it is believed that there was a term called “ergi” (noun) or “argr” (adjective) which were used to insult a man’s manliness by denoting feminine behavior on him. The practice of spirituality, in this case often the practice of Seiðt, was considered an effeminate practice, so the male practitioners were considered ‘ergi’.

The practitioners of Seiðt were called Seiðkona and Seiðmaðr (Seidr woman and Seidr man) or vǫlva, which meant the staff carrier. Within Seiðr there were 4 pillars of practice, the 4 S’s: the song, the staff, the seat & the spirits. It was practiced by singing, or chanting songs in rhythms, while the practitioner held a staff to ground, upon a high seat, calling forth the spirits to find answers to the questions which they held.

Spiritual practices are queer, and queerness is spiritual. We can see it through our Scandinavian ancestors, who shamed men for practicing Seiðt, even though many of their gods were also believed to practice this effeminate sorcery. But not only was the practice of magic seen as queer and othering; the understanding of gender was also different from what we normally would believe. It is important to notice that we should be critical when it comes to how we interpret old Norse social beliefs, since we view them through the lens of our current social understanding. We should also be critical since many Norse studies from the 1900’s were done by Nazis to justify their goals of “purity”. The creation of the male and female binary is a colonial product, which was put into place so that the human experience could be coded into a strict system of man and the other gender (woman), with social characteristics to each gender. Many scholars argue that the Norse understanding of gender was different from the one we have now. Some would argue that the identities of Shieldmaidens and Valkyries were third genders in the context of being female-born masculine-behaved individuals. It is often criticized that it is an erasure of Viking lesbians, who might have been a little more masculine than other women and that it doesn’t necessarily mean that they were a third gender. Here we can again look to the practice of Seiðt, where men were seen as queer for practicing the spiritual arts. Could it not be argued that they also could be viewed as a third gender, the bridge from Male-born Femme-behaving?
"

This is all modern political stuff, where groups try to make one exaggeration or another by applying anachronistic understandings of what people were even saying or referring to and targeting groups for certain reasons, because this team uses it for this reason so this counter teams wants to undermine the fantasy made by the one team and replace it with another fantasy, using methods similar to filmaking as "evidence" and manipulating viewers.

This was something being done even in the past, but in different ways with different objectives and targets, and then that old propaganda and those old polemical attacks get re-purposed and even completely given new content with only the surface remaining the same, the definitions being most likely entirely different from now remote understandings due to the lack of the network of references giving those things whatever cloud of meaning and coloring they had, which goes far beyond just what someone ends up writing down as the frank and apparent meaning orhow it is used in a minority of texts not accessed by most people and only known to a particularly closed minority like monks or princes during their educations.

If people can try to counter all these thinking traps and make somehow smarter calculations, they will either create a new fantasy or come closer to the truth, all to be laughed and smashed out of the discussion by mere aggression, belligerence, bullying, threats, and penalties by whichever group can muster the effort and resources to myth-make more aggressively and dominate the mental landscape, which brings me back to things getting a whole lot more dim, dark, mumbly, and uglier in American films.

Added in 1 hour 36 minutes 45 seconds:
https://relearn.org/the-masculinity-of- ... istianity/

Buddhism and Christianity, possibly also Zoroastrianism which had an impact on Buddhism, J, and Christianity, were "Masculinity" obsessed, verging on misogyny, which may come from a Caucus influence:

https://kb.gcsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi ... corinthian

https://sites.nd.edu/manuscript-studies ... zed-magic/

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

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

https://www.tumblr.com/tourajdaryaee-bl ... of-ancient

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/buddhist- ... 231210478/

Added in 8 minutes 27 seconds:
So there seems to have been a repeated movement that emerges which both promotes masculinity and simultaneously erases history or anything deemed unfavorable to the collective ego of the society, and which also juxtaposes anything outside of the in-group as unfavorably hedonistic and thus also effeminate as "dependent on sense-pleasure and by extension sex", which is how women are repeatedly depicted in the stories that are developed and promoted in these cultures by these groups, at least at certain points. There was an inversion of this in Europe where the feminine has become exaggerated and glorified, and that occured in cultures connected to Zoroastrianism and Buddhism too, but there were major periods of disparaging anything feminine while also erasing as much as possible about the cultures these religions were operating in and re-writing the history of.

It is happening again, and another "this is what you should be like, boys" and "this is what it was like" movement, overlapping and with the same actors spreading both ideas, is currently active and more potent than ever due to the ease with which these ideas can reach people now through internet "entertainment".

Added in 6 hours 13 minutes 19 seconds:


A lot of Might Makes Right type language and propaganda in the above video.

Added in 6 minutes 10 seconds:
He blatantly says it at 6:00.

Added in 8 hours 27 minutes 8 seconds:


Added in 3 days 8 hours 25 minutes 21 seconds:
https://classics-at.chs.harvard.edu/sla ... nd-beyond/

Added in 1 minute 3 seconds:
That is sbout Neoptolemus bashing an old man to death with a baby, and how that story developed.

Added in 22 hours 42 minutes 56 seconds:
https://tripleampersand.org/have-i-got- ... feudalism/

Added in 1 day 22 hours 12 minutes 11 seconds:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-Cossackization

Added in 16 minutes 8 seconds:
"


The deportations and exterminations are recognized as genocide by modern scholars.[6][7][8][9][10] While there were more than a million Cossacks before 1917, very few people consider themselves Cossacks today.[10] Shane O'Rourke states that the de-Cossackization "was one of the main factors which led to the disappearance of the Cossacks as a nation".[10]

According to Łukasz Adamski and Bartłomiej Gajos, the exact death toll from de-Cossackization is highly contentious, with estimates ranging from thousands to hundreds of thousands.[25] Several factors contribute to the difficulty of estimating the death toll, including exaggerated numbers published by the white movement[1] and varying definitions of the genocide; some historians count the deaths of the Holodomor in the Don region, an engineered famine that killed hundreds of thousands of Don Cossacks and Ukrainians.[26][27]

Robert Gellately claims that "the most reliable estimates indicate that between 300,000 and 500,000 were killed or deported in 1919–20" out of a population of around three million,[4] with most being deported. Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev, head of the Presidential Committee for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, writes that "hundreds of thousands of Cossacks were killed",[28] and Rudolph Rummel cites an estimate of 700,000 deaths in the Don Cossack genocide.[2]

Peter Holquist estimates a death toll in the thousands or tens of thousands in the period 1919–20,[1] but notes that the extent of the genocide varied substantially by region. In some regions such as Khoper, tribunals executed thousands of Cossacks in a full-fledged extermination attempt, while some other tribunals did not conduct any executions at all.[1]

Research by Pavel Polian from Russian Academy of Sciences on the subject of forced settlements in the Soviet Union shows that more than 45,000 Cossacks were deported from the Terek Oblast to Ukraine. Their land was distributed among Cossack collaborators and Chechens.[3]

According to the Dictionary of Genocides, the "genocidal treatment" of the Cossacks was based on class, ethnicity and politics and part of a broader Bolshevik policy of remaking society.[29][30]
"

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

"
Max Vasmer's etymological dictionary traces the name to the Tatar Turkic word kazak, kozak, in which cosac meant 'free man' but also 'conqueror'.[11] The ethnonym Kazakh is from the same Turkic root.[12][13][14]

In written sources, the name is first attested in the Codex Cumanicus from the 13th century.[15][16] In English, Cossack is first attested in 1590.[12]
"

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

"
In every sample of Kazakhs, D (predominantly northern East Asian, such as Japanese, Okinawan, Korean, Manchu, Mongol, Han Chinese, Tibetan, etc., but also having several branches among indigenous peoples of the Americas) is the most frequently observed haplogroup (with nearly all of those Kazakhs belonging to the D4 subclade), and the second-most frequent haplogroup is either H (predominantly European) or C (predominantly indigenous Siberian, though some branches are present in the Americas, East Asia, and northern and eastern Europe).[94]
"

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

"
The propaganda machine of Napoleon, a French military and political leader, spread the myth of English Cossacks. French propaganda portrayed the inhabitants of the Scottish Highlands as barbarian with non-human bodily functions, who allegedly felt great joy when destroying civilian housing, farmland, and even entire human settlements. This stereotype of Scottish people was later mingled with observations on Russian soldiers fighting on the European continent. In Europe Cossack is a titulation for a thief, while Russians have been stereotyped by French authors as exotic.[166]
"

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

"
Many Scottish surnames have become anglicised over the centuries. This reflected the gradual spread of English, initially in the form of Early Scots, from around the 13th century onwards, through Scotland beyond its traditional area in the Lothians. It also reflected some deliberate political attempts[citation needed] to promote the English language in the outlying regions of Scotland, including following the Union of the Crowns under King James VI of Scotland and I of England in 1603, and then the Acts of Union of 1707 and the subsequent defeat of rebellions.[who?]

However, many Scottish surnames have remained predominantly Gaelic albeit written according to English orthographic practice (as with Irish surnames). Thus MacAoidh in Gaelic is Mackay in English, and MacGill-Eain in Gaelic is MacLean and so on. Mac (sometimes Mc) is common as, effectively, it means "son of". MacDonald, MacDougal, MacAulay, Gilmore, Gilmour, MacKinley, Macintosh, MacKenzie, MacNeill, MacPherson, MacLear, MacAra, Bruce, Campbell, Fraser, Oliver, Craig, Lauder, Menzies, Stewart, Galloway and Duncan are just a few of many examples of traditional Scottish surnames. There are, of course, also the many surnames, like Wallace and Morton, stemming from parts of Scotland which were settled by peoples other than the (Gaelic) Scots. The most common surnames in Scotland are Smith and Brown,[125] which each come from more than one origin: e.g. Smith might be a translation of Mac a' Ghobhainn (thence also e.g. MacGowan), and Brown can refer to the colour, or be akin to MacBrayne.[citation needed]

Anglicisation is not restricted to language. In his Socialism: critical and constructive, published in 1921, future British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald wrote: "The Anglification of Scotland has been proceeding apace to the damage of its education, its music, its literature, its genius, and the generation that is growing up under this influence is uprooted from its past, and, being deprived of the inspiration of its nationality, is also deprived of its communal sense."[126]
"

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repatriat ... rld_War_II

"
The repatriation of the Cossacks or betrayal of the Cossacks[1] occurred when Cossacks (ethnic Russians and Ukrainians) who were opposed to the Soviet Union and fought for Nazi Germany, were handed over by British and American forces to the Soviet Union after the conclusion of World War II. Towards the end of the European theatre of World War II, many Cossacks forces with civilians in tow retreated to Western Europe. Their goal was to avoid capture and imprisonment by the Red Army for treason, and they hoped for a better outcome by surrendering to the Western Allies, such as to the British and Americans. However, after being taken prisoner by the Allies, they were packed into small trains. Unbeknownst to them, they were sent east to Soviet territories. Many men, women and children were subsequently sent to the Gulag prison camps, where many died. The repatriations were agreed upon at the Yalta Conference; Soviet leader Joseph Stalin claimed that the prisoners were Soviet citizens as of 1939, although there were many of them[quantify] who had left the country before or soon after the end of the Russian Civil War or had been born abroad, hence never holding Soviet citizenship.[2]
"

"


On 28 May 1945 the British Army arrived at Camp Peggetz, in Lienz, where there were 2,479 Cossacks, including 2,201 officers and soldiers.[22][19] They allegedly went to invite the Cossacks to an important conference with British officials, informing them that they would return to Lienz by 18:00 that evening; some Cossacks were worried, but the British reassured them that everything was in order. One British officer told the Cossacks, "I assure you, on my word of honour as a British officer, that you are just going to a conference". However, no hard evidence exists for any such guarantees or promises.[22][19] By then British–Cossack relationships were friendly to the extent that many on both sides had developed feelings for one another. The Lienz Cossack repatriation was exceptional, because the Cossacks forcefully resisted their repatriation to the USSR; one Cossack allegedly noted, "The NKVD or the Gestapo would have slain us with truncheons, the British did it with their word of honour."[19] Julius Epstein described the scene that occurred:

The first to commit suicide, by hanging, was the Cossack editor Evgenij Tarruski. The second was General Silkin, who shot himself...The Cossacks refused to board the trucks. British soldiers [armed] with pistols and clubs began using their clubs, aiming at the heads of the prisoners. They first dragged the men out of the crowd, and threw them into the trucks. The men jumped out. They beat them again, and threw them onto the floor of the trucks. Again, they jumped out. The British then hit them with rifle butts until they lay unconscious, and threw them, like sacks of potatoes, in the trucks.[23]

The British transported the Cossacks to a prison where they were handed over to the waiting Soviets. In the town of Tristach, Austria, there was a memorial commemorating General von Pannwitz and the soldiers of the XV SS Cossack Cavalry Corps who were killed in action or died as POWs. This memorial was removed in September 2021 because of the connection between General von Pannwitz and both the SA and the SS, as well as his loyalty to the Nazi regime.[24]
"

Like they weren't people. Yet the current villains who just comitted major atrocities don't get effaced and made non-existent and never to be resurrected in this world.

"
The Cossack officers, more politically aware than the enlisted men, expected that repatriation to the USSR would be their ultimate fate. They believed the British would have sympathised with their anti-Communism, but were unaware that their fates had been decided at the Yalta Conference. Upon discovering that they would be repatriated, many escaped, some probably aided by their Allied captors;[11] some passively resisted, and others killed themselves.

Of those Cossacks who escaped repatriation, many hid in forests and mountainsides, some were hidden by the local German populace, but most hid in different identities as Latvians, Poles, Yugoslavians, Turks, Armenians, and even Ethiopians. Eventually they were admitted to displaced persons camps under assumed names and nationalities; many emigrated to the US per the Displaced Persons Act. Others went to any country that would admit them (e.g., Germany, Austria, France and Italy). Most Cossacks hid their true national identity until the dissolution of the USSR in late 1991.[citation needed]

After the death of Stalin, a mass partial amnesty (Amnesty of 1953) was granted for some labor camp inmates on 27 March 1953 with the end of the Gulag system. It was then extended on 17 September 1955. Some specific political crimes were omitted from amnesty: people convicted under Section 58.1(c) of the Criminal Code, stipulating that in the event of a military man escaping Russia, every adult member of his family who abetted the escape or who knew of it would be subject to five to ten years' imprisonment; every dependent who did not know of the escape would be subject to five years' Siberian exile.[34]

The event was documented in publications such as Nicholas Bethell's The Last Secret: The Delivery to Stalin of Over Two Million Russians by Britain and the United States (1974).[35] The first book written about the subject appears to have been Kontra by the Polish writer Józef Mackiewicz, which was published in Polish in London in 1957.[36] Subsequently, in two volumes entitled Velikoe Predatelstvo (The Great Betrayal) published in 1962 and 1970 by a Russian language publisher in New York, Vyacheslav Naumenko, the former ataman of the Kuban Host, documented the event.[36] Neither the books of Mackiewicz or Naumenko were translated into English for decades after their publication and hence were almost completely ignored in the English-speaking world. The two volumes of Velikoe Predatelstvo were first translated into English in 2015 and 2018. Kontra has been republished several times in Polish, but has apparently never been translated into English. The first book written in English on the subject was The East Came West (1964) by the British author Peter Huxley-Blythe, but attracted little attention because of Huxley-Blythe's involvement with the European Liberation Front. The cover of The East Came West featured an image taken from a Nazi propaganda poster showing a demonical ape dressed in a Red Army uniform surrounded by fire and brimstone reaching out towards Europe. The first book about the subject published on official documentation was Operation Keelhaul in 1973 by the Austrian-born American author Julius Epstein, which was based on U.S. sources and primarily dealt with the American role in the repatriation.

The subject of the repatriation was largely unknown in the English-speaking world until 1974 when Lord Bethell published his book The Last Secret, which was also turned into a BBC documentary that aired the same year.[37] Bethell was critical of the repatriation, accusing the British government of "intentionally over-fulfilling" the Yalta agreement by handing over people who were not Soviet citizens, but was careful in his treatment of the evidence.[37]

The year 1974 also saw the publication in English of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's book The Gulag Archipelago, where he mentions that many of the prisoners he met in Gulag in the late 1940s were veterans of the Vlasov Army repatriated by the British and Americans in 1945, a policy which he portrayed as craven and self-defeating.[38] Though Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago did not deal specifically with the repatriation of the Cossacks, instead dealing with the repatriation of people to the Soviet Union in general, the book increased popular interest in the subject, as did his claim that Anglo-American policy towards the Soviet Union was driven in a fundamentally sinister and conspiratorial way, punishing the alleged friends of the West such as the Vlasov Army and the Cossacks while rewarding its enemies such as the Soviet Union.[38] Solzhenitsyn describes the forced repatriation of the Cossacks by Winston Churchill as follows: "He turned over to the Soviet command the Cossack corps of 90,000 men. Along with them, he also handed over many wagonloads of old people, women and children who did not want to return to their native Cossack rivers. This great hero, monuments to whom will in time cover all England, ordered that they, too, be surrendered to their deaths."[39] The man who led and supervised the entire operation was Major Davies.[40]

Subsequently, Count Nikolai Tolstoy published The Victims of Yalta in 1977, which was described by a critical historian, D.R. Thorpe, as "a work of considerable scholarship".[37] Tolstoy describes this and other events resulting from the Yalta Conference as the "Secret Betrayal" (cf. Western betrayal), for going unpublished in the West.[41] The 1970s were a period when détente had become fashionable in some quarters and many on the right believed the West was losing the Cold War.[38] The subject of the repatriations in 1945 were used by a variety of right-wing authors in the 1970s-1980s as a symbol of both of the malevolence of the Soviet Union and of a "craven" policy towards the Soviet Union alleged to have been pursued by the successive American and British governments since the Second World War.[42]

Reflecting the increased popular interest in the subject of the repatriations, which had become by the early 1980s to be a symbol of western "pusillanimity" towards the Soviet Union, a monument was unveiled in London on 6 March 1982 to "all the victims of Yalta".[43] John Joliffe, a conservative Catholic British intellectual whose fund-raising help build the monument accused "the British government and their advisors of merciless inhumanity", and ignoring the fact that Churchill was a Conservative went on to blame the repatriations on "the hypocrisy and feebleness of progressive leftists who turned a blind eye to the communist enslavement of Eastern Europe."[43]

In May 1983, Tolstoy published an article "The Klagenfurt Conspiracy" in Encounter magazine alleging a conspiracy by Harold Macmillan, the British "resident minister" for the Mediterranean, Field Marshal Harold Alexander and other British officials to hand over the Cossacks.[44] In his article, Tolstoy alleged that on 13 May 1945 in a meeting in the Austrian city of Klagenfurt that Macmillan gave the orders to repatriate all Cossacks regardless if they were Soviet citizens or not. On 11 December 1984, Macmillan was interviewed on the BBC by Ludovic Kennedy and during the course of the interview Kennedy asked several questions about the Cossack repatriation in 1945.[45] Macmillan seems to have been taken by surprise by Kennedy's questions, and the defensive tone of his answers certainly gave public the impression that he had something to hide.[45] Several of Macmillan's statements such as he felt no guilt because the Cossacks were "rebels against Russia", "not friends of ours" and most damaging of all "the Cossacks were practically savages" did not help his reputation.[46] In 1986, Tolstoy followed up his 1983 article with the book The Minister and the Massacres alleging a conspiracy led by Macmillan to deliberately hand over refugees from the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia knowing full well they would be executed.[44] As Macmillan went on to serve as prime minister between 1957 and 1963, Tolstoy's allegations attracted tremendous attention in Britain while also causing immense controversy.[44] The architectural historian and interior designer James Lees-Milne wrote in his diary: "It was wicked to hang Ribbentrop, who was never a criminal. The man who deserved hanging was Harold Macmillan for sentencing all those Poles and Russians who were sent back after the war".[47] The novelist Robert Graves publicly stated: "Harold Macmillan, he's a murderer you know".[47]
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