Hitler’s sales pitch to the German people was grounded in the idea that average German working people were victims and Hitler was their champion.
He claimed Jews, homosexuals, and socialists had “stabbed Germany in the back” by participating in negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles that imposed punitive conditions on the country, producing widespread poverty and an economic crisis.
If the German people were victims, Hitler told them, the villains were German minorities, promoting degeneracy like jazz and swing music, tolerance of homosexuality and transgender people, and the “international Jewish conspiracy.”
Once the Nazis took power they banned books, outlawed drag shows and homosexuality, changed school curricula to remove mention of their atrocities in WWI, and rewrote election laws so they’d never again lose an election.
On this day, 23 April 1971, Ecuadorian Indigenous communist Dolores Cacuango died aged 89.
She got involved in the movement of landless Indigenous workers in the 1920s and 1930s, taking part in rebellions an advocating for women’s rights. In the revolution of 1944 she led an armed assault on the police station in Cayambe, and the following year established the country’s first autonomous Indigenous school, teaching lessons in Spanish and Quechua. More similar schools opened up, until the dictatorship of General Ramone Castro Jijon shut them down in 1963, banned Kichwa in schools and raided Cacuango’s house, driving her underground.
Dolores remained active, using disguises to evade capture, and after a year of continued Indigenous activism the dictatorship was forced to implement agrarian reforms. Of their movement, Cacuango declared: “We’re like the grass of the mountain that grows back again after being cut, and as mountain grass we will cover the world.”
More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/9536/dolores-cacuango-dieshttps://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=613881947451691&set=a.602588028581083&type=3
