People are saying puritans or religion, but the US was even more religious and puritain 150 years ago, when nudity in public bathhouses was common. What changed was the US got rich enough to buy millions of tiny single person bathtubs and make installing more of them than you need an investment asset that you sell to pay for retirement.

Japan has onsens and it also has people sleeping in a bush on the street. Both of those disgust Americans because you look poor. Even if you’re a sleepy business man in a suit it’s offensive that you’re not embarrassed that somebody might think you’re poor for a second. American onsens were for the poor, then for the very poor, then they were effectively illegal because we hate the idea that somebody too poor to buy a personal bathtub is allowed to live.

The Soviet officer is Semyon Krivoshein, he’s Jewish and not celebrating for multiple reasons. The Nazis occupied Brest when they weren’t supposed to, Krivoshein got there and started negotiating to try to get them to leave. The Nazis were making a propaganda film out of this (which is where the picture comes from) so they wanted the Soviet army to have a parade with them. After an argument Krivoshein agreed that just him and some of his staff would stand there and watch the Nazis parade out of town in exchange for the Nazis leaving Polish prisoners they took in Brest.

Brest was 50% Jewish at this point, in Operation Barbarossa the Soviets defended for 6 days, Jewish Soviet officers were summarily shot by the Nazis, almost the entire Jewish population of Brest died in the Holocaust.

People say that because outside of modern times in the first world, landlords = the mafia. Without expensive police, landlords have to enforce their own rent. So if you’re socialist or any other political movement bad for landlords, they probably make up the biggest paramilitary force in your country and if you don’t decapitate that chain of command fast you get dumped in a cave with 20,000 other skeletons.

And even in a first world country, the police manhours dedicated to evictions and the private security industry funded almost entirely by landlords is something anybody who wants to deal with housing prices is going to have to worry about.

Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt after the Yom Kippur War gives Israel control of a 100-meter wide buffer between Gaza and Egypt. So it doesn’t open its borders because it doesn’t have one, just a border with Israel. A later agreement gave Egypt some limited control over the buffer zone, so there are Egyptian guards in charge of the border crossing now, but they can’t do whatever they want.