Count Folke Bernadotte: Sweden's Servant of Peace (2010)

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/count-folke-bernadotte-swedens-servant-peace

by apollinaire • 10 months ago

52 53 10 months ago

willvarfar• 10 months ago

Another notable Swede is Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who issued Swedish passports and sheltered thousands of Jews in Budapest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raoul_Wallenberg . He disappeared and died in Russian captivity.

(Random lighthearted fact: because his exact date of death is disputed, Google's AI summary in the search results tells me his age is 113.)

On another scale, Carl Gustaf von Rosen was a Swedish count who defended Biafra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Gustaf_von_Rosen

Podrod• 10 months ago

I have the AI summary stuff disabled but the regular Google infobox tells me he died in 1947 aged 34. Kinda amusing how the AI disagrees.

von Rosen and the Biafran Air Force is quite fascinating.

mamonster• 10 months ago

The craziest one to me is still that Fridtjof Nansen's main sidekick in helping Armenian refugees was .... Vidkun Quisling.

vintermann• 10 months ago

It's not so surprising. Nansen was conservative-ish politically. Seeing the effects of the famine in Ukraine radicalized Quisling as a fanatical anti-socialist. He also married a Ukrainian woman (bigamously, but that's another story). As a fanatical anti-socialist in the 20s-30s he fell in with the wrong crowd.

Who knows if Nansen too would have, if he had lived to see the rise of Hitler. Probably not, as he was usually fairly ambivalent about politics, but it wouldn't have been terribly surprising either.

GardenLetter27• 10 months ago

Crazy how awful the Russians were - same with Josef Bryks - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Bryks

And yet a lot of young people somehow think they were good guys.

CaptainOfCoit• 10 months ago

And yet a lot of young people somehow think they were good guys.

Reality is really context dependent, and with lots of nuance. Obviously being anti-fascist and helped out taking down the Nazis makes you more of a "good guy" than "bad guy" for that specific moment, but obviously that doesn't mean the USSR or Russia is exclusively the "good guys" always, which goes the same for every country out there.

Where are you finding these young people praising the USSR though? It always seems like a talking point from conservatives on the internet, as I'm never able to find these elusive USSR-praisers in real-life. There is a ton of people ironically saying they love USSR, but surely these are not the people you're talking about?

bjourne5• 10 months ago

Maybe my perspective is slanted, but it seems that nobility was way more badass back then. Nowadays they just hide out in Saint-Tropez, Monaco, or chill on their yachts and don't care much about the world.

krapp• 10 months ago

I think your perspective is slanted. 99% of nobility were materialistic, detached (and probably inbred) sociopaths, just like 99% of billionaires and heads of state today.

southernplaces72• 10 months ago

"Von Rosen's happiness with his second wife, Hanny, ended with the outbreak of World War II. She joined the resistance, was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Dachau in Germany. After the war, she committed suicide[citation needed] in 1949."

What a bizarre way of phrasing things. His happiness with his second wife ended with the outbreak of the war? They say this specific thing as if they were referring to some marital breach, not seeing their time together be destroyed through arrest by a genocidally monstrous secret police agency, internment in one of its concentration camps and later suicide, probably from the trauma of surviving those two events. Yes, such a thing will destroy.... marital happiness, to say the least.

defrost• 10 months ago

What a bizarre way of phrasing things.

Given the subject there's a good chance that phrasing was written by someone with English as a second or third language and European 'good enough' pidgin English grammar.

If it grates on you excessively there's always the option of editing the paragraph.

pbiggar• 10 months ago

The Stern gang, who killed him, became the IDF (along with the Haganah and the Irgun). These groups performed the ethnic cleansing of Palestine that allowed Israel to be built on Palestinian land (commonly known as the Nakba).

One of the chief organisers of the assassination was Yitzhak Shamir, who became Israel’s prime minister in 1984.

Exactly.

antonymoose• 10 months ago

This is the part that I never understood about US-Israeli relations, that they were going on doing terrible deeds from the beginning.

How exactly did they go from these constant attacks including on a close ally like the British to “Greatest Ally” status.

FridayoLeary4• 10 months ago

The UK is also historically a strong ally of Israel. Like other former colonies they looked to britain for help and guidance. After all the whole state was built on British foundations. After a while britain realised it was in their interests to help Israel and their relationship even today is one of mutual respect.

I think it goes to show the limits of the conflict between the British and the jews of palestine. It was never personal and therefore while there was much anger and resentment, there was never any hate.

The history of how the alliance came about is fascinating. It started with the suez war. Their relationship with the US came about at the same time as the breakdown with the French and was helped by the fact that the US saw Israel as a convenient proxy against the Soviets.

breppp13• 10 months ago

The Irgun was forcibly integrated into the IDF, claiming dead and almost triggering a civil war.

Something the Palestinians could never muster, and one of the reasons they are still in this position, stateless under the control of Hamas

jedimind5• 10 months ago

The claim that "The Irgun was forcibly integrated into the IDF" is a classic piece of Zionist propaganda because it uses a technically true event, the Altalena Affair, to paint a profoundly false picture. It's a self-serving myth designed to launder the history of the Irgun and create a clean break between the "respectable" new "state" of Israel and its terrorist antecedents, a break that never truly happened.

The Altalena incident was not a moral battle against terrorism, it was a cynical power struggle. Ben-Gurion needed to establish the state's monopoly on force and could not tolerate Menachem Begin's private terrorist gang. After the confrontation, Irgun fighters were not punished. They were absorbed into the IDF, where their terrorist skills became state assets.

This move whitewashes what the Irgun actually was. Long before "Israel" absorbed them, they were internationally recognized as terrorists (even by the US AND UK!) for terrorism e.g. like the King-David Hotel bombing. In a famous letter, Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt called Begin's organization terrorists and "closely akin in its organization, methods, [and] political philosophy to the Nazi and Fascist parties." The ultimate proof that Israel never rejected its terrorist ideology is the career of the Irgun commander himself, Menachem Begin. He was never tried as a traitor or a terrorist. He founded the party that would become Likud and was later elected Prime Minister. Israel didn't purge its terrorist founders, it eventually put one in charge of Israel.

rdtsc• 10 months ago

The Irgun was forcibly integrated into the IDF, claiming dead and almost triggering a civil war.

So that means the terrorists, especially the leaders, were tried and punished for their crimes?

ylabidi• 10 months ago

The context from the Palestinian side is quite different and comparing the two is flawed for many reasons:

There was never a consensus on the Oslo accords from both sides. While the Israeli Labor pushed for the process, the Likud and the rest of right wingers worked thoroughly to undermine it. And on the Palestinian side, the OLP, essentially Fatah, went on to accept terms every other Palestinian faction refused to adhere to (demilitarized state, practically land-locked on a mozaic of patches that amounts to a fraction of the country's total area and surrounded everywhere with ever-increasing Israeli settlement projects.

That effectively weakened Fatah's position which essentially morphed into a caretaker on behalf of the Israelis for the day-to-day. And the resistance weight shifted from secular factions to the Hamas.

breppp13• 10 months ago

It's been 1 day since the last hackernews mandated hour of Israeli hate

Count Folke Bernadotte: Sweden's Servant of Peace (2010)

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