Canada's “None is Too Many”
"None is too many" was the response given by a high-level Canadian government official when asked how many Jews should be accepted into the country, during the time of the Nazi persecution of the Jews. This phrase described the immigration policies of the Canadian government, which closed its doors to Jewish refugees* who were fleeing the Holocaust. During the Second World War, Canadian policies were anti-Semitic and Jewish refugees were treated differently than other European refugees.
Yuri Bezmenov: The Four Stages of Ideological Subversion (1984)
Yuri Bezmenov, a former KGB agent and Soviet defector who worked in propaganda and subversion operations before defecting to the West in 1970. In a 1984 interview with G. Edward Griffin, he outlined what he described as the Soviet strategy for ideological subversion of the United States, breaking it down into four stages: demoralization (undermining morals, education, and institutions over 15-20 years), destabilization (creating economic and social chaos), crisis (leading to a violent change in power structure), and normalization (establishing a new socialist regime under Soviet influence). Bezmenov claimed this was part of a long-term KGB plan to weaken and ultimately take over American society without direct military conflict.
Rosa Parks - Premeditated
The famous Rosa Parks refusing to sit at the back of the bus incident was organized by the NAACP.
Start of WWII
Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 which officially marked the start of WWII. Russia also invaded Poland 16 days later on September 17, 1939 also with the intent to take it over. However war was only declared on Germany with Russia actually being more of an ally during WWII. This was due to a very specific pact where Poland was only protected from invasion by German forces.
Women's Suffrage
Roughly 20-30% of women at the time actively campaigned and felt strongly about their right to vote. Around 10-20% actually campaigned for the opposite and opposed this new right. The rest 50-70% didn't feel too strongly either way. Now these numbers are estimates but generally accepted ones. The reasoning was that two votes would bring unnecessary conflict into a marriage. The reason seems naive to us today but back then it was very typical to be married by your early 20s.
Infection Disease and Sanitation
During the early 1900s there were substantial improvements to sanitation and overall public health in the western world. This lead to massive declines in infectious disease deaths like measles well before the advent of the relevant vaccines, sometimes down by 99%. Sanitation and personal health were by far the largest factors in controlling disease, vaccines came in to clean up the remaining fatal cases since even one preventable death is too many. Some diseases like cholera are prevented directly by sanitation while others like measles are kept less fatal by good nutrition and overall health. Just don't be fooled by the graphs that show a decline in infectious disease deaths and the relevant vaccine being distributed, it's more correlation than causation. Why does this matter? It's true that vaccines reduce how much disease exists at all, and the relevant cases did collapse to zero after the vaccine, but the pros and cons change. If you take the graphs at face value, many of which are even presented in congressional hearings, then you would see that vaccines prevented millions of deaths, so side effects if any are acceptable. But when you change your frame so that now you're preventing millions of cases but only a few hundred deaths, then a vaccine administered to millions needs to be bulletproof.
Operation Cast Thy Bread
Operation Cast Thy Bread was a A top-secret biological warfare campaign run by the Haganah from April 1948 until roughly December 1948 where the Israeli Jews poisoned local wells. It took place during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War (also known as the Nakba, or "catastrophe," when roughly 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were displaced). The well-poisoning was one tactic among many used by Jewish/Israeli forces at the time, alongside village captures, demolitions, expulsions, and conventional military operations under plans like Plan Dalet.
Nazi Economic Boom
The great depression combined with post WWI contracts hit Germany incredibly hard. It went from a destroyed country with hyperinflation to a global power that was able to fight nearly alone against most of the developed world at the time in just a few years. A similar progression is like if Venezual matched America's military in a span of 10 years. This is an incredible feat that hasn't really been replicated, although China has come close but over a longer period of time and more sustainably. The key factors were government spending and an already modern talented base. Although there are common misconceptions here in what actually happened. People who glorify this progress usually fail to note that it was likely unsustainable since it required constant government input via debt and spending, and more or less needed a war as a purpose for all this spending. And the people who downplay the achievement don't realize that this liquidity injection from the German government totalled around 60-70% of GDP over 7 years, but during covid the US spent around 25% of GDP in just 2 years. (The German one was in MEFO bills which functioned differently from the US version but that's another story). I usually try to avoid exact numbers since they are pretty complex, but do your own digging on how much money was actually printed during covid and 2008 and you'll be shocked.
Humility among Nobles
In ancient Rome when a general would come back from a big victory, they would hold a parade in his honor, but it was common for a slave to be riding in his chariot that would whisper to the general how he is just mortal and will die one day.
In medieval Europe the purpose of the fool or jester wasn't just to make the nobles laugh, it was to operate outside of the social order and taboos, he alone could speak freely to the king. It was a sort of reality check for the royalty.
Cat Burning
I'll just quote wikipedia here since it captures the action well.
Cat burning was a form of cruelty to animals as an entertainment or festivity in Western and Central Europe prior to the 1800s. People would gather cats and hoist them onto a bonfire causing death by burning or otherwise through the effects of exposure to extreme heat. In the medieval to early modern periods, cats, which were associated with vanity and witchcraft, were sometimes burned as symbols of the devil.