Explaining History

Between 1915 and 1918 all sides in the First World War used poison gas against one another, but it was Germany that was the biggest pioneer of battlefield chemical weapons. The last year of the war saw the highest intensity of gas use as the desperation by all sides for a breakthrough intensified.

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The Communist Party of Great Britain was established in 1920 and was heavily influenced by Comintern, the Communist International organisation in Moscow. Lenin was interested in shaping the party in Britain and other European countries, imposing the principal of democratic centralism on party members.

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Fascist bombing campaigns and planned coups, leading up to a massacre in Bologna in 1980 brought the threat of splinter group fascism to the Italian government's attention. The MSI (Italian social movement) attempted to broaden its appeal and mask its overtly fascist politics during a period where there was widespread revisionism about the legacy of Mussolini and an attempt to partly rehabilitate the fascist era in mainstream politics and discourse.

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In the aftermath of the Second World War a set of global institutions allied with a social democratic shift in several leading world economies to create a relatively stable post war economic order. The long and bitter memories of the 1930s and the destruction of the Second World War gave rise to this post war new order. By the 1970s this had started to fall into decline and provide opportunities for the political and economic insurrectionaries of neoliberalism to seize control of economic agendas around the world.

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In the 1960s, splinter groups from the right wing Italian Social Movement began to believe that only a military coup in Italy could save the country from the threat of communism. By the late 1960s they began actively planning and carrying out bombing campaigns across Italy in order to 'prepare the population' for direct rule by the army.

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As the allied powers deliberated at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, David Lloyd George encouraged the Greek prime minister Venizelos to seize the former Ottoman city of Smyrna. The consequences for the city, once a bastion of religious and cultural tolerance, would be tragic, but to the British simply consequence of a wider imperial game in the near east.

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The Nazis always intended to wage a war of annihilation in the Soviet Union and both soldiers and civilians would die in unprecedented numbers. In the Nazi camps Soviet soldiers were left to starve, but the Soviet political officers, the commissars, were targeted for immediate execution wherever they were discovered.

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In the mid 1960s a series of plots were considered, with varying degrees of organisation and commitment, to overthrow the Labour governments of Harold Wilson using the army. Even though a coup failed to transpire, the plots showed that deeply reactionary forces in the army, the City of London and the aristocracy were resistant to the modest reforms of the decade and the social change that accompanied mass affluence.

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Between the the late 1940s and late 1950s, as Cold War politics swept Europe, the Italian Social Movement, a neo fascist party, tried to merge into the wider parliamentary political right. Using electoral pacts with the other parties of the right, they saw their electability gradually improve, but faced angry resistance on the streets from those with long, bitter memories of Mussolini's crimes.

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The coordination and control of the German press by the Nazis took several years to complete as prior to 1933, the German newspaper industry was among the most diverse and vibrant in the world. A process of intimidation and self censorship, combined with Nazi confiscation and theft destroyed German press independence within three years.

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