A few things worth remembering about him:

• He fronted Black Sabbath, the band widely credited with inventing heavy metal. Their 1970 debut helped define the genre.
• He built a long solo career after leaving Sabbath, starting with Blizzard of Ozz in 1980.
• He reached a second generation through The Osbournes, the MTV reality show that ran from 2002 to 2005.
• He played his farewell concert with the reunited original Black Sabbath lineup at Villa Park in Birmingham on July 5, 2025, less than three weeks before his death.

Source: BBC
Image Source: Wikimedia Commons / Ozzy Osbourne performing live at Monster of Rock 2007 (Spain).

To mark the 85th anniversary of Operation Barbarossa—Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union and the start of the most barbaric war of annihilation in history—we are republishing here an article that originally appeared on the World Socialist Web Site on the 80th anniversary.

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Eighty years ago, on June 22, 1941, the German military invaded the Soviet Union. A war began the likes of which humanity had never before experienced. The barbarism of the Middle Ages was combined with the most modern technology of the 20th century.

There had previously been horrific wars with millions of victims. The cannons of the First World War had been silenced just 23 years earlier. The blood-soaked fields of Verdun and the Marne, on which the flower of German, French and British youth were mown down by machine guns, were considered a monument of human barbarism.

But the attack on the Soviet Union went much further. From the outset, it was planned as a war of annihilation. It was not only a war for territory, raw materials and markets, but also a war driven by racism and ideology. The destruction of Bolshevism, the extermination of the Jews and the creation of living space in the east, which Hitler had been proclaiming for 20 years, was now put into practice.