On this day in 1911, the Japanese government executed twelve anarchists, including radical journalists Kanno Sugako and Kōtoku Shūsui (shown), as part of a widespread crackdown on left-wing activism. Among those executed were Uchiyama Gudō, a Buddhist priest and socialist who spoke out against the Meiji government for its imperialism and advocated for conscripted soldiers to desert en masse.
The pretext for this crackdown was the "High Treason Incident", a plot to assassinate the Emperor of Japan. The incident began when police searched the room of Miyashita Takichi, a young lumbermill employee, and found materials which could be used to construct bombs, concluding that there was a broader conspiracy to harm the imperial family.
On the basis of this plot, the Japanese government rounded up leftist activists from all over the country. 24 of the 26 defendants actually brought to trial were sentenced to death, despite the evidence against nearly all of them being circumstantial.
Among those executed anarcha-feminist journalist Kanno Sugako (some sources say she was executed on January 25th). At the age of 29, Kanno became the first woman with the status of political prisoner to be executed in the history of modern Japan.
Prior to his execution, Kōtoku Shūsui etched this message on the wall of his cell: "How has it come about that I have committed this grave crime? Today my trial is hidden from outside observers and I have even less liberty than previously to speak about these events. Perhaps in 100 years someone will speak out about them on my behalf."
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Cuba is the litmus test for telling when people are actually cool in LatAm. I can talk to libs here about Sankara and show them how amazing socialism was for Burkina Fasso because no one has ever heard of it, but to get someone to consider if Cuba is good you have to get them to face decades of propaganda. If someone is good about Cuba, though, it means they probably have done the work to understand the core of international geopolitics, as the Chinese meme would say. I guess it's ironically a very similar situation in West Africa, they can get people to see socialism as a force for good by pointing to how Cuba helped in decolonizing African nations, but they probably have a lot of reactionary propaganda about the ones who went "too far" such as Sankara.
Do the DemSoc's in your country like Venezuela? Because they do here but are just annoyingly stubborn about Cuba
I haven't really met any demsoc organization. I've heard the communists give statements of solidarity with Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela.