Weekly History Quiz No.296

Part of the Caucasian War, which lasted from 1817 to 1864. This was part of the expansion of the Russian empire. Chechnya has continued to resist Russian domination, most notably in the First and Second Chechen Wars of the 1990s and 2000s.

From the 1880’s until they lost the colony at the end of WWI the German colonial government of then German South West Africa embarked on a brutal and genocidal campaign against the Herero and Nama peoples. This saw over 100,000 people killed, mass rape and theft of land and livestock.

The signal sent by by Wing Commander J.M. Lerew, RAAF commander at Rabaul, to Air Force Headquarters in Melbourne after being ordered to commit his few surviving and outnumbered obsolete Australian aircraft to resist an overwhelming fleet of superior Japanese aircraft. New Britain was the first Australian territory to be attacked by the Japanese. A Japanese force several times larger than the Australian defenders and supported by battleships and aircraft carriers landed near the capital, Rabaul. The RAAF's small and under-equipped defending squadron was quickly overwhelmed by the more numerous and better-equipped Japanese aircraft. Wing Commander J.M. Lerew continued fighting with his two surviving Wirraways and one Hudson. His reply to Air Force Headquarters - 'Those who are about to die salute you' – was inspired by that of Ancient Rome gladiators facing death in the arena.

Beginning as heavily subsidised grain supplied to low income citizens, the ‘grain dole’ grew to include the free supply of bread, olive oil, wine, and pork to up to 320,000 Roman citizens.

NATO formed the core of Western collective defence against the Soviet bloc. SEATO mirrored this structure in Asia, it was created in 1954 and operated until 1977. The UN is not a military alliance, the Warsaw Pact was the Soviet counter to NATO.

Enosis (Greek for 'union') is an ideology held by various Greek communities living outside Greece that calls for them and the regions that they inhabit to be incorporated into the Greek state. The most widely known example of enosis was the Greek Cypriot movement for a union of Cyprus with Greece. Following a terror campaign by Cypriot guerilla group, EOKA, Britain granted Cyprus independence in 1959. Support for enosis reappeared in the 1970s, leading to conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. This was followed by Turkey occupying northern Cyprus in 1974, ostensibly to protect the Cypriot Turkish minority, resulting in the partitioning of Cyprus.

The Khmer Rouge brutally ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. The Viet Cong fought in Vietnam, and the Pathet Lao operated in Laos. The Malayan Peoples' Anti-Japanese Army was a communist guerrilla army that resisted the Japanese occupation of Malaya during World War II.

Gaddafi took power in a coup and transformed Libya into an Islamic socialist state. He was deposed during the Arab Spring revolution and killed in 2011.

While both communists, Stalin and Tito did not work together. Stalin saw Tito as a rival and attempted to bring Yugoslavia into the Soviet orbit. He didn’t succeed in this, and Tito maintained and solidified his control over the Communist Party of Yugoslavia as well as the army and the secret police. This is summed up by a letter Tito sent to Stalin 'Stop sending people to kill me. We’ve already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle… If you don’t stop sending killers, I’ll send one to Moscow, and I won’t have to send a second.'

Around 33 CE Roman prefect Pontius Pilate had Jesus of Nazareth executed by crucifixion on the charge of sedition, an act that led to the birth of Christianity.