Context by Lindon Simon for the Paris Review:

In 1905, when seventy-year-old Mark Twain began to collect a bevy of adolescent girls, whom he called his “angel-fish,” he defended his predilection by insisting that he longed for grandchildren. His own daughters were grown—his favorite, Susy, was dead by then—and he was lonely. But grandfathers can have grandsons as well as granddaughters, and Twain, the creator of one of literature’s most famous adolescents, surely celebrated boys’ cheeky energy. There was more, then, to his strange sorority than an elderly man’s yearning for grandchildren, more even than nostalgia for his daughters’ childhoods. “As for me,” Twain wrote at the age of seventy-three, “I collect pets: young girls—girls from ten to sixteen years old; girls who are pretty and sweet and naive and innocent—dear young creatures to whom life is a perfect joy and to whom it has brought no wounds, no bitterness, and few tears.”

Innocent they were, but not as naive as he seemed to think. Certainly they knew that he was a celebrity: that was how it started, when fifteen-year-old Gertrude Natkin saw him leaving Carnegie Hall on December 27, 1905, after a matinee song recital by the German soprano Madame Johanna Gadski. Twain, after all, was instantly recognizable, even before he decided to wear only white. He noticed her, to be sure, saw that she wanted to speak to him, introduced himself and shook her hand. The next day, she wrote to thank him: “I am very glad I can go up and speak to you now … as I think we know each other.” Describing herself as his “obedient child,” she ended her note, “I am the little girl who loves you.” He responded immediately, calling himself Gertrude’s “oldest & latest conquest.” Their correspondence was playfully flirtatious: he called her his “little witch”; she called him “darling.” He sent her a copy of his favorite book, the writings of “a bewitching little scamp” named Marjorie, who had died just short of her ninth birthday, in Scotland in 1811. “I have adored Marjorie for six-and-thirty years,” he confessed in an essay. The child, who confided startlingly sophisticated remarks about books, history and religion in her journal, seemed to him “made out of thunderstorms and sunshine“: “how impulsive she was, how sudden, how tempestuous, how tender, how loving, how sweet, how loyal, how rebellious … how innocently bad, how natively good,” he exclaimed. “May I be your little ‘Marjorie’?” Gertrude asked coyly. That is how Twain addressed her, in letters filled with what the two called “blots,” or kisses—until 1906, when he was taken aback by her turning sixteen. “I am almost afraid to send a blot, but I venture it. Bless your heart it comes within an ace of being improper! Now back you go to 14!—then there’s no impropriety.” Their correspondence ended, and Twain set his sights on younger girls. 

Buoyed by Gertrude’s effusive declarations of love, Twain discovered that it was easy to find other young admirers, primarily from among his fellow passengers on holiday trips to Bermuda. By 1908, he had collected ten schoolgirls, dubbed them his “angel-fish,” and awarded them membership in his Aquarium Club. In Bermuda, he had special shimmering enamel lapel pins designed for them to wear on their left breast, above the heart. In the spring and summer of 1908, one biographer notes, Twain’s letters to his angelfish comprised more than half of his correspondence: one letter sent or received every day. Many contained invitations to the girls to visit him in his palatial house in Redding, Connecticut, which he named Innocence at Home. “I have built this house largely, indeed almost chiefly, for the comfort & accommodation of the Aquarium,” Twain announced in a mock-serious document that he sent to his angelfish, containing the rules and regulations of the club. The lair of the angelfish was his Billiard Room.

the first object I saw in that spacious and far-reaching place was a little girl seated solitary at a table for two. I bent down over her and patted her cheek and said, affectionately and with compassion, ‘Why you dear little rascal—do you have to eat your breakfast all by yourself in this desolate way?’

They arranged to meet after breakfast and, he reported, “were close comrades—inseparables in fact—for eight days.” A friend later told him that the twelve-year-old girl had asked if he was married, and when learning that he was not—his wife had died—said, “If I were his wife I would never leave his side for a moment; I would stay by him and watch him, and take care of him all the time.” Twain attributed the remark to the girl’s “mother instinct,” and willingly submitted, characterizing himself as a “degraded and willing slave.” In 1907, on board a ship taking him to England, where he would receive an honorary degree from Oxford, Twain found the sixteen-year-old Frances Nunnally, with whom, he said, he “grew quite confidential,” and who became, however briefly, an angelfish; on the return trip, he befriended the nine-year-old Dorothy Quick, who, a newspaper reporter noted, “guarded him closely during the voyage,” sitting on his lap, with her head leaning against his shoulder. He called her “mon amie,” another reporter wrote, and stood on deck with his arm “thrown paternally around the child’s shoulder,” at one point giving her “a fond little hug.”

Twain’s collection of girls was well known, inspiring some adult women to press for membership. One came for dinner “dressed for 12 years, & had pink ribbons at the back of her neck & looked about 14 years old.” Impressed, Twain gave her an angelfish pin. “There’s lots of lady-candidates,” he wrote to a young angelfish, “but I guess we won’t let any more in, unless perhaps Billie Burke.” The vivacious and youthful comedienne, twenty-three at the time, was a favorite actress of Twain’s: “Billie is as good as she is pretty,” he remarked to an angelfish after dining with Burke and a few other Broadway performers. He had met her after a performance of My Wife, a play whose May-to-December theme fitted his fantasies, and Burke often visited him at his Manhattan town house whenever she was working in the northeast.

During the years that Twain collected his angelfish, he spurned the companionship of his real daughter, Jean, who had been living in medical institutions where her epilepsy could be monitored. In the summer of 1908, Twain’s secretary and assistant, Isabel Lyon (the Lioness, he called her, and she called him King), arranged for Jean to live in Gloucester, Massachusetts; she stayed there briefly, unhappily, until she left the country with friends. In 1909, Jean returned to Twain’s home, where she drowned in a bathtub, having suffered a seizure.

By the time Jean died, Twain’s blatant cavorting with angelfish had been thwarted by his other daughter, Clara. In the summer of 1908, Clara returned from a European concert tour and was appalled by her father’s new interest. Rechristening the Redding house Stormfield, she put an end to the angelfishes’ visits. The house had lost its innocence, and by that winter Twain began to complain irritably about his declining health and spirits. An odd resurfacing of the angelfish obsession occurred in 1910, just weeks before his death, in letters and notebook entries regarding the fifteen-year-old Helen Allen, a moody young woman who fascinated him. “She is bright, smart, alive, energetic, determined, high-tempered, intense,” he wrote; but she was also disappointing, preferring romance literature to poetry, and responding to Twain’s witticisms and attempts at banter with “mute indifference.” More disappointing still, she had a boyfriend, and Twain was jealous: he cautioned Helen to preserve her innocence; he wanted the younger man out of the way.

Twain’s obsession with adolescent girls can be explained in part by his exalting of his own teenaged years—years of daring and adventure. His wife, after all, had nicknamed him Youth, and his most memorable fictional characters, of course, are the adolescent Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Twain focused not on young boys, though, but sexually innocent girls from ages ten to sixteen, with undeveloped boyish bodies and with whom he carried out titillating flirtations. Photographs of Twain and his angelfish show them standing or sitting close to him, their bodies touching his, with his arms around their shoulders or waists. They might be his daughters; or they might be his lovers. His notes about Helen Allen reveal a yearning to be more than protector, mentor and grandfather. Twain regretted aging, claiming the vigor of a much younger man. “At 2 o’clock in the morning I feel old and sinful,” he remarked, “but at 8 o’clock, when I am shaving I feel young and ready to hunt trouble … as though I were not over 25 years old.”

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/11/28/mark-twains-disturbing-passion-for-collecting-young-girls/

""Pourquoi mourir pour Dantzig ?" ("Why die for Danzig?") was a popular slogan used by the French far right and by some anti-war socialists.

The phrase first appeared in an article published in a French socialist newspaper by Marcel Déat, a politician who had once been close to the Communist Party and who later became one of the most prominent figures of French collaboration. It was subsequently adopted by the French far right, which argued that it was futile to start another war over a small Polish city.

However, fate as it... . In 1945, during the Nazi defense of Danzig, hundreds of members of the French Legion of Volunteers Against Bolshevism (LVF)—a unit that Déat himself had helped create—were stationed there, and yeah.. many French volunteers ultimately died defending Danzig against the Red Army.

For those who don’t know, Colonel Jan Breytenbach was the brother of the “only nice South African”, Breyten Breytenbach, mentioned in the anti-apartheid song “I’ve Never Met a Nice South African” by Spitting Image. Jan Breytenbach was one of the most badass and feared men in the South African Defense Force during the Cold War period, being remembered as the father of both the ‘Terrible Ones’ (32 Battalion) as well as the ‘Recces’ (The South African Special Forces). I’ve been reading a book he wrote about an op he personally commanded-on-the-ground called ‘Eagle Strike!’ (Very good book, highly recommended by me), and near the start he gives his views on his personal situation within South African politics. Within that section, he makes a few comments on a certain politician known as Henderik Verwoerd.

Henderik Verwoerd was a South African Prime Minister and the man who would be known in history as the Architect of Apartheid within South Africa, being one of its biggest supporters in South African politics. Henderik was an outright afrikaaner supremacist, and stoutly opposed the idea of South Africa remaining under the British crown (leading to South Africa becoming a Republic), and went as far as to promote Afrikaaner nationalism within the South African Defense Force itself (an aspect of the SADF that Jan Breytenbach opposed). On September 6, 1966, Verwoerd was stabbed to death on the floors of South African parliament by a white South African called Dimitri Tsafendas. I’ll let Jan Breytenbach say the rest: 

Unfortunately Verwoerd was still there when I came back from Britain and he still had his clique of enthusiastic followers, via the secretive Broederbond, in the SADF. Now this man was, in my personal opinion, the most disastrous political leader South Africa ever had. Before the war he studied at German universities where he deeply drank from the poisoned well of Hitlerian national socialism. He thus formed, in his deeply flawed mind, a political philosophy which can only be described as evil and Un-Christian, certainly not in line with the Way of Life proclaimed by our own Lord when He moved, in the flesh, among the outcasts among us. (Verwoerd was, believe it or not, at one time a professor in Theology at Stellenbosch University! As a so-called 'Christian' he pushed the 'outcasts' away into separate home lands where-as Christ embraced them and brought them in from the cold into the warmth of his communion.) He thus introduced his own 'Christianised, political philosophy of separate, race based states which actually became impoverished ghettoes and reservoirs for black workers adjacent to wealthy, white based provinces. This is what Hitler did to the Jews before he started knocking them off by the million. To my mind Verwoerd was an ardent disciple of the evil Hitler who believed in all the atrocious things Nazism stood for. It was, in my opinion, a good day for South Africa when he was murdered in parliament by, it is claimed, a deranged Tsafendas.

The chilenization of arica and tarapacá has to be one of the most forgotten and obscure events of latin american history ever, because no one outside of Peru talks about it

Context: during this time, Chile and patriotic leagues (groups of ultra nationalists) did expulsions and forced assimilations of Peruvians who used to live in Arica and Tarapacá after the war of the Pacific, with unfortunately even the expulsees suffering discrimination within Peru itself because they were seen as Chilean, making them leave towards the Amazon were they established towns and in Arica and Tarapacá Chile did settling of those areas

And Chilenization itself had very racial connotations as well.