History Memes

Context: On June 8, 1967 during the Six Day War, Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty, an American intelligence ship operating in international waters off the Sinai, killing 34 crewmen and wounding 171 despite the vessel flying a large U.S. flag and transmitting its identity. Israel later apologized and said the attack was a tragic case of mistaken identity, but many survivors and later analysts have pointed to the length of the assault, the use of napalm and torpedoes, and Israeli surveillance flights earlier in the day as evidence that the ship was well identified, making the official explanation deeply controversial. U.S. investigations ultimately accepted Israel’s account in diplomatic terms, yet dissent within the Navy and among historians has kept the episode alive as one of the most disputed friendly fire incidents of the Cold War.

Context: on the eve of WWI the SPD in Germany was the most successful and powerful socialist party in the world with a good shot of taking power in a couple years. Like the other socialist parties it was officially opposed to imperialist wars, but when it came down to it, barring a few principled individuals like rosa Luxembourg, the party voted yes on war bonds out of fear of looking unpatriotic, signing the blank check the kaiser issued and sending Germany into WWI which of course worked out great for the working class and Germany as a whole...

Context: During the Dutch East India Company’s violent takeover of the Banda Islands in the early seventeenth century, Jan Pieterszoon Coen reinforced his European troops with hired Japanese mercenaries, including men described in contemporary sources as samurai, who had experience in organized warfare and siege fighting. These fighters were used in assaults on Bandanese strongholds and in intimidating or eliminating resisting communities as the Dutch imposed their nutmeg monopoly, culminating in the 1621 campaign that devastated the islands’ population through massacres, executions, starvation and forced deportations. The presence of armed Japanese auxiliaries alongside Dutch soldiers and local allies underscores how globalized early modern warfare already was, with Asian mercenaries playing a direct role in one of the most notorious colonial conquests of the spice trade era.