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Thursday, April 23, 2009

Peace.... Isn't It Wonderful!: Violent Europe, Spring 1919


Let me just list a few events outside Paris in these busy peacemaking days.


March 3—Freikorps units continue their pacification of "leftists" and resume "force and awe"-type tactics in Berlin. Twenty-four "radicals" are killed in Berlin in early March with more to come.

In Latvia, other "volunteer" fighters under German General von der Goltz began an advance on Riga, which had been captured by Bolsheviks.

March 4—In Siberia, Admiral Kolchak's White army begins an offensive against the Reds on a 700-mile front.

March 10—Bitter fighting between White forces (Cossacks in this instance) and Bolshevik Red Army forces on the Dnieper.

March 17—Red forces in Archangel fought Germans, French (!), and British (!) in heaving fighting near Bolshe Ozerki. The offensive of von der Goltz's mostly Latvian and German volunteer forces retake Milau from the Bolsheviks on March 18, finding massacred hostages in the citadel of the town.

March 19—The Supreme War Council in Paris orders a stop to fighting and massacres between Poles and Ruthenians along the Poland/Ukraine border.

March 21—Count Karolyi's government in Hungary falls, its place taken by a Communist/Socialist government which includes Bela Kun as foreign minister. A Hungarian Soviet is declared shortly thereafter, and Hungary declares war on Czechoslovakia (!), with Hungarian "Reds" invading Slovakia in early April.

March 23—Mussolini founds the Fascist movement in Milan, amid street fighting and strikes in Italy.

March 24—100,000 miners Britain strike against new rationing and other grievances.

March 25—Beginning of the end of the "Hunger Blockade" against Germany as the first "food ship" docks at Hamburg to begin offloading 400,000 tons of food.

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Design of a Violent Century by Hunt Tooley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.