December 2025

  • I am not suggesting that charity is a bad thing—quite the opposite. However, some charities are not what they appear to be. During World War II, for example, several organizations operated under the guise of charity. One such case was Winterhulp in the Netherlands, which was more focused on propaganda than on genuinely helping people.

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  • Harry Haft’s Survival

    During the Holocaust, many people imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps across Europe had to fight tooth and nail to stay alive. And for Harry Haft, the fight was literal. Harry Haft, a Polish Jew whose harrowing experiences during World War II reflect both the cruelty of the Holocaust and the indomitable human spirit. Haft’s survival

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  • Gallipoli, 20 December 1915

    On 20 December 1915, the Gallipoli Campaign effectively ended not with a final charge or a decisive victory, but with silence. In the early hours of that winter morning, the last Allied troops slipped away from the beaches of Anzac Cove and Suvla Bay, leaving behind empty trenches, abandoned positions, and a battlefield that had

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  • The Ku Klux Klan in Canada

    Recently, I made the mistake of referring to my local petrol station, “Circle K,” as “Triple K,” I suppose it could be considered a Freudian slip. I remember back in 1998, there was talk about a KKK chapter in Ennis, Ireland. Thankfully, that appeared to be a false claim. However, there is this notion that

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  • The history of the Trump family has been the subject of considerable public interest, particularly following Donald Trump’s rise to prominence in U.S. politics. One of the most contentious aspects of this family history is the connection between Fred Trump, Donald Trump’s father, and an incident involving the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in 1927. While

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  • In the fall of 1944, South Limburg was liberated by American troops. Many young men subsequently volunteered for the Domestic Forces to contribute to the liberation of the Netherlands after years of occupation. Among them were veterans Cor van Wageningen (1918–2013) and Frits Faro (1921–2012). In the fall of 1944, they were assigned as guards

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  • “Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows

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  • The Victorian age is often imagined as an era of high collars, tight corsets, and unsmiling faces frozen in early photographs. Yet beneath this austere exterior, Victorians possessed a sharp, often irreverent sense of humor. One outlet for this was the then-new tradition of sending Christmas cards—a practice less than two centuries old. It began

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  • Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, first published on 19 December 1843, is one of the most enduring works of English literature and a defining text of the Victorian era. Although it is often regarded as a simple holiday story, the novella is a sophisticated moral narrative that addresses social inequality, personal responsibility, and the possibility

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  • Dated 16 September 1919, the ‘Gemlich letter’ is the first known written statement of Hitler’s Antisemitism. It a letter written by Adolf Hitler at the behest of Karl Mayr to Adolf Gemlich, a German army soldier. The letter, written in 1919 in response to a request for clarification on the Jewish question. (Karl Mayr in uniform

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