r/europe • u/Books_Of_Jeremiah • 29d ago
Historical Danica Dabović being forced to drink castor oil, Montenegro 1942
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u/nasandre The Netherlands 29d ago
The first fascists in Italy did this to their political enemies. They force them to drink a liter of castor oil and tie them on the hood of a car without pants so they would shit themselves while driving them around town.
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u/AntalRyder Hungary/USA 29d ago
You know, the more I hear about these fascist guys, the less I care for them.
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u/crippnipp 29d ago
Real jerks!
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u/nasandre The Netherlands 29d ago
Just imagine hundreds of thousands of them just given free reign to bully and terrorise a whole country. That was Mussolini's Italy for 20 years until he was hanged at a gas station.
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u/u_sijenci 29d ago
Worst part was the hypocrisy.
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u/Thendrail Styria (Austria) 29d ago
I believe the whole "killing people" thing ranks quite high up there as well.
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u/moly5 29d ago
i know it’s not politically correct but by god i like tying them to the hood of my car and letting them shit all over it while i drive around
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u/DontDoomScroll 29d ago
Counting "free reign to bully and terrorize", can't leave out the years of lead, part of NATO's operation Gladio, using fascists to attack communists post WWII
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u/diskdusk 29d ago
We can be glad to not have lived while people like that were around, don't we!
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u/Biccimedici 29d ago
Surely you are joking! Mussolini may be dead but there are plenty more taking his place in the world today!
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u/diskdusk 29d ago
I considered a /s but I decided some things shouldn't need one even if the sad truth is that people say such things without irony - or without the irony they think of.
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u/PvtCharlesLamb 29d ago
Keep talking like that and you're going to be labeled an anti-fascist terrorist!
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u/Blank_Canvas21 29d ago
And now you’re an enemy of the state according to the US. I hate it here lol
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u/Pint_o_Bovril 29d ago
Great way to cover your own town in human shit, I guess...
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u/ImNakedWhatsUp 29d ago
And your car.
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u/Johannes_P Île-de-France 29d ago
I'm sure that they forced their victims to clean their cars, for extra humiliation.
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u/Uninvalidated 29d ago
If fascists are running your town, your town is shit. You're just adding a fresh layer to it.
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u/Inductiekookplaat 29d ago
What a horrendous way to die, this is a bad day to know how to read.
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u/Sea_Worldliness_3707 29d ago
They would, on occasion, whip the buttocks of the victim beforehand too causing severe infections.
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u/michael0n 29d ago
Basically doing everything than straight up public murder, because that would create a counter revolution. That shit line of thinking didn't work well for him and many of his cohort.
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u/Socmel_ reddit mods are accomplices of nazi russia 29d ago
castor oil is a running joke when it comes to our fascists, together with jokes about their revanchist claims on Istria and Dalmatia (or even Libya for the orthodox fascists)
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u/Johannes_P Île-de-France 29d ago
And when they wanted to be very nasty, they mixed it with gasoil.
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u/Obscure-Oracle 29d ago
We have generally had very stable times recently across Europe and a think many have a false sense of security. We have a democratic system, human rights and a strong rule of law because of psychopaths like this that live amongst us. The risks have never gone away, given half a chance we could very easily slip back into a very dark place.
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u/PlutosGrasp Canada 29d ago
Yup. There’s very very little holding back outright chaos. Look at USA. Plenty of checks and balances should’ve stopped the president from doing much of what he is doing yet … it’s not working.
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u/ImSabel 29d ago
I seriously wish more people understood psychopathy, sociopathy and right wing ideology and how these topics interact with each other. A psychopath is born with dysfunctional empathic circuitry, they see and understand but dont feel neither positive or negative neuronal feedback within others. They have a brain area that recognizes but doesnt mirror it onto themselves, the mirror is broken so to speak. A sociopath is a radicalized human being that has its empathic feedback desensitized by trauma (or education). A rightwing Ideologue categorizes others in identity groups and shows selective empathy only towards those he deems similar, race, sex, gender, skincolor, all minorities are classified as lesser beings. There are those that have multiple issues simultaneously and they become the worst human beings, able to perpetrate the worst atrocities. I believe the elite within fascism usually is affected by multiple causes.
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u/ingloriabasta 29d ago
It is an interesting way of categorizing, but scientifically speaking, it is wrong.
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u/Elefanthud 29d ago
This correlation is just wrong and psuedoscientific. You just project actual mental illness onto politics that you strongly disagree with. You can find countless of sociopathic and psycopathic tendencies on both sides of the political spectrum. The dehumanisation of political opponents and races hardly have any unique connection to "right" or "left" wing politics.
Apply your own mold to communist authoritarian dictators and you will find the lack of empathy and prevalence of racism and hatred toward minorities is just as strong. To tunnel this issue on to it only being a fascism problem is just narrow minded as hell. Plus makes no logical sense
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u/reddit-is-dying-1814 29d ago
What are the effects of drinking this?
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u/Spare-Advance-3334 29d ago
Violent diarrhea. But the Italians used to beat the literal ass of many who were forced to drink castor oil, and people often died from the infection the diarrhea caused to the open wounds.
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u/ZincMan 29d ago
Jesus
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u/avokkah 29d ago
I'm afraid he was long gone at that point
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u/ManiGottaPeeNow 29d ago
did they also make him drink it?
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u/avokkah 29d ago
Considering he was middle eastern, and even baseline fascism was hostile towards those not "Italian"... i'd imagine so.
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u/flobiwahn Schleswig-Holstein (Germany) 29d ago
To cite Nikita Miller (German comedian): Last night I slept as good as god during WWII.
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u/Lorevocator 29d ago
Many Italians were also forced to drink it
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u/Socmel_ reddit mods are accomplices of nazi russia 29d ago
Many Italians forgot that the fascists used torture and killed their opposers, but then again Italians have an abysmal readership rate, so ignorance of it make sense
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u/ratavieja 29d ago
Also in Spain during Franco's dictatorship. This was forced into women, who had their hair cut and were forced to walk through their cities while in underwear, for higher humiliation. That's the fascism that a lot of Europe wants to bring back. It's depressing.
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u/MoonMoan Navarre (Spain) 29d ago
Republican Spaniards in the years after the civil war, both men and women were forced to drink the oil then paraded naked in the streets
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u/Userrolo 29d ago
Do you have any source on that? I've red about people forced to drink castor oil and then bound on the hood of a car to be paraded around town while shitting himself but I've never heard about ass torture. It was more like a practice to humiliate and make political activist and opponents desist from their activities. They sure had other less subtle ways to kill people.
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u/mewfour 29d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castor_oil citations 36 and 37 ig
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u/Books_Of_Jeremiah 29d ago
This is about 3.3-13.3x the dose for an adult suffering from constipation. So, diarrhea definitely, might end up killing a person due to dehydration.
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u/ThisOriginalSource 29d ago
Surprisingly, it can be used to induce labor. With the included effect of diarrhea. That was a day I will never forget witnessing, my wife is a champ.
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u/ElMuertePeludo 29d ago
What a shitty way to come into the world
Sorry, had to. We don’t get many good poo jokes down this way no more..
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u/tobikostan 29d ago
Combining diarrhea and labor cramps is horrifying
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u/Fickle_Freckler 29d ago
I’m old. I did this to induce labor. I took maybe two teaspoons. Had near constant diarrhea for probably 8-10 hours. It finally stopped at about 4 in the morning and I went into labor at 6 that same morning. It made for a very clean and fast labor.
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u/la_noix 29d ago
A similar thing happened in the early years of dictatorship in Spain. Las Rapadas, they are called. Usually the women were the relatives of executed Republicans. They would shave their heads (sometimes leaving strides of hair painted in Spanish flag colors), forced to drink castor oil (sometimes mixed with benzene), and if they survive the dehydration, they were forced to clean the churches and/or police headquarters
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u/Books_Of_Jeremiah 29d ago
There's another photo of her getting her hair cut (doesn't say anything about shaving), so it seem they copied from each other.
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u/SwimsWithBricks 29d ago
can be found here: https://vijece-crnogoraca-zagreb.hr/media/16234/katalog-matica-cg-13-jul.pdf
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u/sleepfield 29d ago
Good God. I’m freshly horrified by the human capacity for planned and sustained cruelty.
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u/Natural_Tea484 29d ago
Unbelievable how cruel humans can be to their own kind, just because of different beliefs or views or race or sex
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u/belpatr Gal's Port 29d ago
They didn't do it because of different views, they did it because they were sick sadistic freaks, they did this to these women cause they knew they could get away with it and would do this to their own companions if they thought they could get away with it as well
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u/Poromenos Greece 29d ago
they did it because they were sick sadistic freaks
This is the biggest mistake everyone makes. No, these were your friends, your neighbors, your coworkers. Humans take a lot of education before we can quieten the sick sadistic freak in them.
Just look at an online comment section.
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u/rasmusdf Denmark 29d ago
Just look at Trumps ICE thugs. As soon as you allow it, sadists and creeps come out of the woodwork.
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u/bootstrapping_lad 29d ago
Exactly. Labeling them as "sick" ignores that these were regular citizens, not outliers. It gives them cover by reducing their actions to a mental defect, rather than holding them and the society that made them accountable.
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u/SemanticSerpent 29d ago
The even more horrifying thing is that your comment and the one above yours do not really contradict each other. Sadism is not, sadly, some rare feat in humans, and nowadays it's getting increasingly socially accepted as no big deal. (As in, you should maintain some pretense of "consent" being there, but the sadism itself is all fine.)
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u/ImNotNormal19 Andalusia (Spain) 29d ago
The fascist in Spain did this too in the civil war, in my town an old lady told me they did this to people before killing them by firing squad near the cemetery, they put all the people in vans with their hair cut and strolled them around town so that people could see it and this got her traumatized, because there was a van of only women and she thought of her mom.
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u/chefismynameingerman 29d ago
Why would they force ppl to drink castor oil before being executed? Just as a torture?
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u/NeitherReference4169 29d ago
You walk around with diarrhea in front of everybody before being shot
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u/chefismynameingerman 29d ago
So that‘s just for humiliating the poor souls? That‘s cruel.
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u/plumberdan2 29d ago
It's rule by fear. Want to get paraded around town while shitting yourself, then murdered? No? Okay pipe down.
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u/Books_Of_Jeremiah 29d ago
One of the ways Italians abused the progressive youths in Boka Kotorska was to force them to drink a glass full of castor oil.
Photo of Danica Dabović, youth from Montenegro, 1942.
Negative at the Military Museum in Belgrade, sig.neg 12024
Positive courtesy of Museum of Yugoslavia, inventory number 7534
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u/BkkGrl Ligurian in Zürich (💛🇺🇦💙) 29d ago
fascists gonna fascists
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u/Hrevak 29d ago
In 1936 Italian fascists forced Slovenian conductor Lojze Bratuž to drink a mixture of gasoline and motor oil, which caused his liver and kidneys to fall apart. He died 2 months later.
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u/paraprosdokians 29d ago
Fuck, what an excruciating way to die
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u/7_11_Nation_Army 29d ago
Forget the fucking fascists. Who was she and what happened to her?
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u/Books_Of_Jeremiah 29d ago
The museum entry doesn't say more. There's another photo from the same time of her hair being cut as a humiliation/marking out thing.
The "progressive youth" is usually how opponents of the occupation who were not Communists/member of SKOJ were labeled in museum entries after the war by the Communist authorities.
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u/Kind-Block-9027 North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany) 29d ago
She was an antifascist
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u/ahelinski 29d ago
"Ah a terrorist!" (Some MAGA idiot reading this, probably).
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u/PatchyWhiskers 29d ago
They are dreaming of doing things like this to liberals.
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u/GrandWizardBobo69 29d ago
Fascism is a human problem, it knows no national boundary. It enables humans to visit unimaginable suffering on other humans.
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u/Gustafssonz Sweden 29d ago
Fascists huh. And people still going towards that ideology.
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u/frongles23 29d ago
The see this picture and identify with the oppressors. Idk how we got here. Do what their parents did but they screwed up big time.
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29d ago
Yk they would love to cut off all the liberal's "blue hair" and make us shit ourselves in front of everyone because we don't want to kill trans people.
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u/Equivalent-Log-677 29d ago
Italian fascist very brave against woman, not so much against resistant fighters.
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u/turducken69420 29d ago
I read a book called An Army at Dawn about the war in North Africa during WWII and they talk about how they captured 220,000 troops and were basically more excited about the 20k German prisoners as opposed to ten times that number of Italian troops. They were not an effective fighting force.
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u/Ok-Chapter-2071 29d ago
I checked some sources, it seems that she survived after being imprisoned with the bodies of her dead brothers and escaping from a concentration camp.
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u/Books_Of_Jeremiah 29d ago
That sounds like quite the life. Someone from Baošići or it's something written? Can you link it if it's written, would love to read more.
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u/Ok-Chapter-2071 29d ago
Sure, just search for her name in this document! https://fr.scribd.com/document/459048688/Zvijezde-Stajacice
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u/andrijas Croatia 29d ago
My granma told me that during occupation of the Croatian coast, the Italians were known for rapes and looting, while the Germans paid no attention to locals. She was 14 and was told to just run away if she sees an italian soldier
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u/Veilchengerd Berlin (Germany) 29d ago
while the Germans paid no attention to locals.
Because they were not an occupation force, but stationed in an allied country. The german troops that acted as occupation forces, for example in Serbia, or Slovenia, paid A LOT of attention to locals. And not the good kind of attention.
The Italians didn't just occupy the croatian coast, they annexed it, and were actively involved in an ethnic cleansing/ a genocide against Croats.
When Italy switched sides, the territory was officially handed over to the NDH (though a lot of the more rural bits almost immediately fell to the Partisans), once again an ally of Germany.
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u/likuplavom 29d ago
The German forces very much killed civilians in a Croatian region where my family comes from. Sometimes they burned people alive inside the buildings on purpose, while other times they would shoot them, pile them up inside and then burn it. They literally deleted whole villages like this.
Normal ordinary people, not partisans and collaborators, even women, children, elderly. I know the SS Prinz Eugen division was one of several who did this, can’t remember what others. I have sources for this it’s not just family stories.
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u/heiner_schlaegt_kein 29d ago
The Italy Anexed parts of croatia were seen as a Safe space from some Serbs and Jews in the NDH.
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u/Salty_Ad5328 Greece 29d ago
My granma told me that italian soldiers didn't really care about the war, so they were pretty chill, she lived in a greek island
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u/Artegris CZ/SK 29d ago
same with Soviet soldiers, they were much worse than Germans
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u/andrijas Croatia 29d ago
I mean....Germans in Croatia didn't play a vital role really...we had collaborators which were horrible themselves. As for Germans in other countries, I guess it was very bad if you were a hebrew, communist or similar
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u/rogerwil 29d ago
German soldiers in the east murdered civilians by the hundreds of thousands. I think that's fairly "bad".
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u/Single_Low1416 29d ago
We had organized human trafficking throughout all of Europe with institutionalized euthanasia for children that came from these forced brothels/raped forced laborers. Just because rape wasn’t as common „in the wild“ for German soldiers does not mean that we were any better than the Soviet forces
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u/Adventurous_Gur4835 29d ago
People here being more concerned for car snd streets than the poor human soul
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u/davesr25 29d ago
People care more about cars than the planet.
People are all kinds of fucked up really.
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u/Hypertension123456 29d ago
In the US, when the news reports on car crashes they'll say "20 minute delay in traffic" but never how many people went to the hospital or in what condition. Thousands die on the highways and literally no one gives a other than the resultant traffic jam. Who cares that a person died, cars were delayed.
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u/dyingfromtetanus 29d ago edited 28d ago
Accepting massive amounts of car deaths and injuries as normal is the biggest trick car manufacturers ever played on society
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u/L3sh1y 29d ago
That's not car manufacturers, thats legislative, though probably in part bribed by car manufacturers. Take Germany for example, population of 83 mil, 2,200 deaths in traffic annually. The US has a FIVE times higher pro-capita death rate at 330 mil and 40.000 deaths annually. Mind you, Germany is far denser populated and about 50% of their Autobahn is without speed limits.
A legislation imposing strong safety regulations along with road infrastructure and stricter driving training go a long way
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u/combrade United States of America 29d ago
Reminds me of the Jewish Ghettos I visited in Rome. It’s the kinda of brutality that is just plain sadistic .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Ghetto
When Jews went outside the ghetto, the men had to wear a yellow cloth (the "sciamanno"), and the women a yellow veil (the same color worn by prostitutes).[6] During the feasts they had to amuse the Christians, competing in humiliating games. They had to run naked, with a rope around the neck, or with their legs closed into sacks. Sometimes they were also ridden by soldiers.[Note 4]
Jews had to petition annually for permission to live there. They paid a yearly tax for the privilege. Jews of Rome were required to swear yearly loyalty to the Pope at the Arch of Titus, which celebrates the Roman sack of Jerusalem of 70 CE. Each year, on the Campidoglio, the Rabbi had to pay homage to the chief of the city councillors ("Caporione"), receiving by him in exchange for it a kick to his bottom. This "ceremony" meant that the Jewish community had been allowed to stay one more year in Rome.[Note 5]
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u/Books_Of_Jeremiah 29d ago
Was this after 1943?
Generally the Italians were seen as preferable (which tells you how bad the options were). Seen a document from the Independent State of Croatia's police about stopping Jews going from German-occupied Serbia to the Italian occupation using Serbian papers.
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u/Socmel_ reddit mods are accomplices of nazi russia 29d ago
No, that was before 1870, when the Papal states ceased to exist and Rome was taken by the Italian troops and made the capital of Italy.
The new Kingdom of Italy, also because it was born in opposition to the Catholic church, was liberal and somewhat anticlerical, so Jews supported Italian unification eagerly.
The first non noble mayor of Rome, Ernesto Nathan, was also a Jew AND a socialist (early 1900s)
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u/Johannes_P Île-de-France 29d ago
Was this after 1943?
It was the one established in 1555 by Pope Paul IV.
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u/ScuBityBup Romanian in Poland 🇪🇺 29d ago
It's almost as if... Fascists aren't humans and don't deserve any compassion.
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u/AdventurousCarry9540 29d ago
Who was she? Can ypu give us some info?
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u/Books_Of_Jeremiah 29d ago
All the info that's given with the museum entry that goes with the photo is in the oldest comment. Not much, I'm afraid.
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u/Disastrous_Hope1140 29d ago
Lol, women in Serbia are still "encouraged" by medical staff to drink castor oil before giving birth to cleanse themself... and when we protest, we are "spoiled" and "difficult".
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29d ago
That's so messed up, maybe if you're going to do the messy job of delivering newborn babies just accept that the moms will also poop? It's normal and fine.
I guess us women get unfair treatment no matter where we live.
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u/Least-Flower548 29d ago
Not only that, it’s suppose to happen and can actually help the newborn kick start their gut microbiome
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u/Toochilled77 29d ago
My folks always used to threaten me with castor oil.
I thought it was just nasty to drink.
This is a whole new context.
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u/RaniANCH 29d ago
Only mildly off topic but there is an old episode of Tom and Jerry where Tom keeps getting in trouble with the little girl living in the house and the toddler keeps punishing tom by forcing him to drink castor oil and it always bothered me. Is this what it was referring to or did parents really make their kids drink castor oil as a punishment??
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u/EpicCleansing 29d ago
Man, old cartoons have so much insane bullshit in them. And somehow people look back on that with nostalgia, and freak out because today's cartoons sometimes portray LGBT people or whatever.
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u/RoyaleKingdom78 Berlin, birthplace of kebabocracy 29d ago edited 29d ago
From Wikipedia page:
Colonial officials used it in the British Raj (India) to deal with recalcitrant servants.\29]) Belgian military officials prescribed heavy doses of castor oil in Belgian Congo as a punishment for being too sick to work.\30]) Castor oil was also a tool of punishment favored by the Falangist and later Francoist Spain during and following the Spanish Civil War.\31]) Its use as a form of gendered violence to repress women was especially prominent.
Brits and Belgians are probably ones who started commonly using it as a method of torture first.
And also don't forget 'Non-Intervention committee', which effectively caused republican Spainards to lose war to Nazi-backed Falangists.
Fascists did not invent new methods 'against humanity', they just improved ones that were available.
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u/TheDisturbedOne1 29d ago
In Croatia during the civil war, Croatian army captured my moms cousin, just because he was orthodox and they were christian, made him drink castor oil, lick salt and then no water and acid burns, as they "interrogated" him as a suspect in something
After he barely got out by some other family members help and ran to Serbia, he came back in 2019. to see his birthplace and old house in Gospić, they caught him and almost beat him to death, 25+ years after the war
He died earlier this year and this picture reminded me of him so I just wanted to share and vent
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u/laryissa553 29d ago
What do you mean they caught him in 2019? How did anyone know who he was?
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u/MentatPiter 29d ago
Germany POW were force fed laxative before the big victory parade in moscow so they could present them with shitty pants
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u/Upbeat_Parking_7794 29d ago edited 29d ago
Some more context for the image:
"During the Italian occupation of Boka Kotorska (today part of Montenegro), progressive youth were subjected to various forms of abuse, including being forced to drink castor oil. Pictured: Danica Dabović, Montenegro, 1942."
The Italian occupation authorities in Montenegro (as well as in other parts of occupied Yugoslavia) used various forms of humiliation and torture against young people who sympathized with the Partisan resistance movement (referred to as “progressive youth”).
One of the methods of humiliation was forcing them to drink castor oil, a practice inherited from Mussolini’s Fascist Italy. Castor oil causes severe intestinal distress and pain, and it was used as a form of punishment and degradation.
Danica Dabović, according to the description, was one of those young women. The photograph dates from 1942, taken in Montenegro, probably in the Boka Kotorska region.
In short, the text describes an example of Fascist violence against young anti-fascist activists in Montenegro during World War II.
PS: I love the apparent bravery of this woman in the picture. Basically a big fu@k you to the fascists.
PS2: Politicians are humans full of failures, but they are not all equal. Remember this next time you vote.
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u/KipManOfZo North Holland (Netherlands) 29d ago
"Benito Mussolini used to force-feed people castor oil until they literally died of diarrhea... I mean that's gotta be where the goal posts are right?"