Another week, another anti-Semitism smear. This time they’re attacking Jeremy Corbyn himself. Last Saturday was Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the Labour leader wrote his own, personal message in the Holocaust Book of Remembrance. He was then accused of anti-Semitism by the former BBC director of television, Danny Cohen, and his friends at the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, who demanded that the Labour leader apologise. Corbyn was an anti-Semite, the claimed, because his message did not specifically mention Jews.
Oops! It turns out that Corbyn did mention Jews. And the messages of the leaders of the other parties didn’t mention them, or not explicitly. Theresa May’s messages didn’t, neither did Vince Cable’s, the leader of the Lib Dems. Nor did Rabbi Mirvis, the Chief Rabbi, explicitly mention Jews either in his message. The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism was duly caught out, and torn to shreds by people disgusted at their lies and hypocrisy on Twitter. Three days later, on Monday, they issued a grudging non-apology for their mistake, still maintaining that there was a problem with anti-Semitism in the Labour party.
As I’ve blogged about many times previously, the anti-Semitism smears against Corbyn, Momentum and a large number of ordinary members of the Labour party, including Mike himself, are politically motivated. The Blairites in the Labour party were very closely linked to the Israel Lobby. Both these groups hope to hold on to power by smearing Corbyn and his supporters as anti-Semites, even though the allegations are nothing but a pack of lies. Lobster issue 74 has a couple of pieces on the anti-Semitism smears, including one by the former Labour MP, Colin Challen. Challen states very clearly that there isn’t a problem with anti-Semitism in the Labour party. Or if there is, it’s no bigger than the amount of anti-Semitism found anywhere else. Various Jewish members of the Labour party have also written pieces making it clear that, in their experience, there is no anti-Semitism in the party, and that they have personally never encountered anti-Semitic abuse or attitudes from its members.
A little while ago I received a comment from a reader, who took issue with one of my pieces about the antics of the Zionists and the Israel lobby. He complained that by talking about ‘Zionists’, rather than specifically attacking Benjamin Netanyahu and the other, racial nationalist members of his coalition, I was handing the people making these smears a loaded gun. He pointed out that Corbyn was a supporter of Israel, and had appeared and spoken to a number of pro-Israel groups.
I’ve no doubt that he’s correct. I used the term ‘Zionists’ to describe the Israel lobby, because the very founders of Israel planned on the ethnic cleansing and deportation of the Palestinians. The brutality and atrocities committed by Netanyahu, Likud and their allies are merely the latest phase of a long campaign of oppression and persecution that goes right back to the nation’s very foundation. But the commenter is right that the critics of Israel and its barbarity don’t support its destruction. There’s an interview with Norman Finkelstein, a very prominent Jewish American historian, and critic of Israel, who makes that very clear.
There is instead a debate within the critics of Israel how to combat Israel’s ethnic cleansing and give freedom and dignity to the indigenous Arabs. The most popular, at least until a few years ago, was the ‘two state’ solution, in which the Palestinians were to be given their own state. Many of Israel’s critics believe that this should be achieved by Israel withdrawing to its pre-1967 boundaries. This is a move that the Israelis themselves reject, claiming that it would strategically weaken Israel and leave the country open to attack.
The other suggested solution is that the nature of the Israeli state has to change, so that the Arabs are also granted full Israeli citizenship. This would be unacceptable to most Zionists, as Israel was set up to be the Jewish state. Only Jews are allowed to immigrate to Israel and settle as citizens under the Law of Return. Altering the law so that the indigenous Arabs are also Israeli citizens, with all the rights and privileges currently enjoyed by Israelis, would change the formal ethnic basis of the Israeli state and society.
Corbyn is a threat to the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and its mouthpieces, like Danny Cohen, not because he’s an opponent of Israel, but because he’s a supporter of the Palestinians. And so they’ve decided to smear him, and anyone who dares support him or criticise Israel.
As for Danny Cohen, I see absolutely no reason why any decent, reasonable person should take anything he says in this respect remotely seriously. Cohen was the director of television at the Beeb until a few years ago, when he went off to Israel. He claimed that Europe was no longer safe for Jews, and that there was a resurgence of anti-Semitism comparable to that of the 1930s in Germany, and advised other Jews to follow his example and move there. It’s the standard line retailed by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the other groups in the Israel lobby, and it’s pure twaddle. The stats actually show that 70 per cent + of all Brits have a positive or neutral attitude towards Jews. Only five per cent of the British public have negative views of Jewish people.
The same is true of France. The Financial Times way back in the first years of this century published an article stating that only five per cent of French people considered that Jews weren’t really French. The numbers, who consider that Muslims aren’t really French is much higher at something like 15 per cent.
And Tony Greenstein, a Jewish critic of Zionism, as well as a firm opponent of all forms of racism and Fascism, has pointed out that in Britain, there is much more racism against Blacks, Asians and Muslims. But the racism experienced by these groups isn’t treated as quite so serious and outrageous as anti-Semitism. This is so, even though some Black and African historians have argued that Africa also experienced its own Holocaust through the depredations of the slave trade. During the roughly three centuries the trade was in existence, about 12 million or so people were carried off from the Continent into bondage in the New World. It’s been estimated that a similar number of Africans were also killed by the slavers during their raids. The 19th century abolitionists themselves gave very graphic accounts of whole regions, that had been depopulated thanks to slave raiding.
I also wondered if these latest smears against Corbyn were also a diversion, to take attention away from another incident that’s embarrassed the Israelis. This is the case of Ahed Tamami, a 16 year-old Palestinian girl, who was arrested for slapping a Jewish soldier. Well, he and a few other goons had burst into the girl’s house. I think they also shot another member of her family, though I can’t remember whether it was a father, brother or other relative. But for that act of terrible disrespect, the girl has been arrested and tried for his crimes against the Israeli military. There’s been a public outcry about it, and the other child prisoners the Israelis drag through their military courts. Israel’s one of the very few nations to do this, and try children as adults. But only if they’re Palestinians. Faced with this awkward and shameful incident, it wouldn’t surprise me if someone in the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism decided that the best form of defence was attack, and so decided to smear Corbyn once again. And especially now that Tweezer is very weak politically, with various challenges to her leadership coming from within her party.
I’m not complacent about the threat of anti-Semitism. It is present in Britain, and has come to the fore once again in the various Nazi sects, like National Action, now banned. Eastern Europe has seen the emergence of a number of ultra-nationalist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic parties. The Alt-Right is gaining power in the US through its connection to Trump, while in Germany the last elections saw the Nazi Alternative Fuer Deutschland enter the Bundestag for the first time. This is a party that includes real Nazis among its members. Various leading members have made speeches denouncing Germany’s Holocaust Memorial as a badge of shame, and vowed to build an underground railway to Auschwitz.
These are real threats to European Jews, along with other ethnic minorities, and ordinary, decent people, who don’t want their countries transformed into Fascist dictatorships. But its seems that these threats don’t concern Cohen and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism quite so much as smearing decent people simply for the crime of sticking up for the Palestinians and exposing Israeli atrocities against them.
Remember when the Tories were trying to convince everyone that Tweezer was ‘strong and stable’, and could be trusted to get us a good deal on Brexit? Oh, how times have changed!
Mike put up a story yesterday, reporting that the German Chancellor has been making jokes at our PM’s expense about her negotiating style. According to die Kanzlerin, all the negotiations between her and May go round in circles, with both of them saying exactly the same things. May will say, ‘Make me an offer.’ Merkel will reply, ‘We don’t have to. You’re leaving.’ At which point May will repeat her first request. Merkel then repeats her reply, and the conversation goes on, round and round in circles.
Now before we go any further, it needs to be said that domestically Merkel is in a precarious position. She’s hung on to power, but her decision to welcome the wave of Middle Eastern refugees from Syria and North Africa a few years ago has damaged her popularity, and boosted that of the Nazi AfD. I also gather that there are problems about whether or not the SPD will join her grosse Koalition. They joined a coalition with her before, only to find their share of the vote declining as Merkel’s Conservative Christian Democrats took the credit for genuine improvements in the benefits system, which had actually been done by the SPD. The pressure’s on Merkelt to make herself look strong for the voters in Germany.
But this actually shows how weak May is. If this is right, then it shows how May actually doesn’t have anything to negotiate with. As we’re leaving the EU, they don’t actually have to make any concessions to us whatsoever. But the country needs them to, as does May personally. And so her remark to Merkel, ‘Make me an offer’, sounds less like an invitation by a skilled business negotiator in a Hollywood drama to productive talks than begging by a desperate and embattled PM. It also seems to show that May can’t talk, except in clichés she’s learned from the movies. Or had programmed into her by her handlers at Tory Central Office. But the cliché, coming as it does from Hollywood, is there to convince someone that actually she’s a tough negotiator. Perhaps she’s trying to persuade Merkel that she’s going to be able to make an offer Merkel can’t refuse. In which case, she and the Tory hordes behind her are very, very sadly deluded.
May needs an offer, any offer, even if it’s one she has no option but to reject, in order to show the Tory faithful and the voting public that she is able to negotiate any kind of settlement at all. And Merkel is determined to show her the opposite: that she’s in absolutely no position to demand anything.
Thus the Brexiteers, far from leading Britain back into a resurgence of pride and sovereignty, as people like Jacob Rees-Mogg would have us all believe, have actually done the opposite. Repeated studies have shown that Brexit will damage our economy, and the process has left the Prime Minister suppliant and begging before Merkel and the other leaders of the EU.
So much for ‘strong and stable’.
Not that Young Master Rees-Mogg is upset. Mogg makes his money, or a fair part of it, from investments, and so hopes that by going outside the EU and turning Britain into a low tax, low regulated economy just outside the EU, they can make Britain into a colossal tax haven for the global financial industry. No matter that the rest of the British economy, such as manufacturing, and its working people, have already suffered because of the Thatcherite promotion of the financial sector. Mogg’s a true blue, Tory aristocrat, who has consistently voted to give him and his class generous financial rewards, while cutting welfare for the poor, the disabled and working class. This shows his priorities, and those of the Hard Brexiteers that stand behind him. Whatever deal he wants to negotiate will very definitely not benefit anyone, who isn’t a millionaire investment banker.
Mike posted this tale on his blog yesterday, and it’s too awesome not to share.
The Labour MP Jonathon Reynolds Tweeted yesterday that he had written in the Holocaust book of remembrance. Last Saturday was, after all, Holocaust Remembrance Day, when the world remembers not just the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis, but also all other victims of genocide.
Reynolds then got this deeply unpleasant comment from a Holocaust Denier by the name of Steve Steglitz:
“You politicians are not doing your duty to the public. The Holocaust is one big lie. Time you put pressure on the media to do their job and start asking a few questions. But politicians and journalists are either owned or brainwashed themselves.”
Reynolds replied back
“As much as I would like to converse with you Steve, I’m literally going to prioritise picking up shit with my hands from my local canal this morning.”
He meant it too. The Labour MP Tweeted a picture of himself, with another man and a woman, and various bags and a wheelbarrow, who were there with him helping to clean out his local canal. So he really had been putting picking up ordure with his bare hands over responding to a nasty little Tweet denying that the Holocaust ever occurred.
In fact, a California judge ruled in the 1970s that the evidence for the Holocaust was so abundant and plentiful, that its existence could not reasonably be doubted. This came after one of the American Nazi magazines ran a competition, offering a prize to anyone who could prove that the Holocaust had actually occurred. A Jewish fellow, who was indeed a Holocaust survivor, took them up on it, and sent in a piece showing that the Holocaust was historical fact. The ruling came because the magazine didn’t pay out, and so the survivor was forced to take them to court. And at the end of that trial, the judge issued his ruling.
The Holocaust is a very sticky issue for Nazis. Obviously, they have to deny it, because nobody is going to join a movement notorious for having the organised murdered of six million people, simply because of their ethnicity/ religion as a major plank of its policy when it was in power. This is not to mention the other 5 1/2 million people, comprising gypsies, the disabled, P.O.W.s, Slav slave workers, trade unionists, Socialists, Communists, and other political and religious opponents of the regime, that the Nazis also butchered in the concentration camps. And so the Nazis lie, and claim that it never happened, inventing some very bizarre and convoluted conspiracy theories to try to explain away all the evidence of the horrors of the Shoah.
It also presented something of a psychological problem for some of the British Nazis, when they found out about the Holocaust. Arnold Leese, who was one of the most vehemently anti-Semitic of the various British Fascists, who emerged between the wars, had a nervous breakdown because of it. This was despite the fact that in his speeches he had also frequently called for violence against the Jews, and their extermination. When someone pointed this out to him, he said ‘Not like that.’ And then went on to make the bizarre statement that he had wanted it to be done ‘humanely’.
There is no way you can murder an entire people humanely, no matter how the perpetrators and their supporters lie about it.
Reynolds’ reply to Steglitz was truly awesome, and shows just how low Holocaust Denial and arguing with those, who promote it, comes in decent peoples’ list of priorities. Way below picking up pieces of ordinary, honest muck, in an effort to clean up their local environment.
This is the Doomsday Clock set up by the Organisation of Atomic Scientists, to show graphically how close the world is to nuclear omnicide. It used to be five minutes to midnight, and I remember the New Cold War of the 1980s, when Thatcher and Reagan nearly started a nuclear conflict. As did a computer malfunction over on the Soviet side. The only way we served that is because of an heroic Red Army officer, who insisted on visual confirmation because he correctly didn’t trust machines. The man was reduced to a nervous wreck afterwards, but he’s a hero. He saved the world.
Now we’ve moved closer to full-scale nuclear war. The scientists blame Trump, his stupid remarks on Twitter, and his sparring and provocation of Kim Jong-Un.
The man’s a menace. For the safety of all humanity, and our beautiful planet, he has to go. Now.
Last Tuesday, Mike put up a piece commenting on an interview on that day’s Daily Politics of the Tory MP, George Freeman by Jo Cockburn. Cockburn had let Freeman’s comments that the Labour party was ‘nasty and intolerant’, with anti-Semitic and misogynist abuse rife in the party.
This is, of course, a falsehood. The anti-Semitism accusations and the witch-hunt against those accused of it is entirely political, and has zero to do with real anti-Semitism. It’s a campaign by Zionist organisation like the Jewish Labour Movement, formerly Poale Zion, which states in its Constitution that it is a Zionist organisation, to defend Israel from criticism and opprobrium over its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Those accused are not just gentiles, but also self-respecting, secular and Torah-observant Jews. The non-Jews they also accuse are similarly very often convinced anti-Fascist activists, and campaigners against racism and anti-Semitism. It’s a tactic used by Zionists across the globe. Norman Finkelstein, one of the leading critics of Israel’s maltreatment of its indigenous Arabs, has described them as ‘a factory for making anti-Semites’. Mike is one of those smeared. So is Jackie Walker, the anti-racist daughter of a Russian Jewish father and a Black American mother. Her parents met on a Civil Rights march. Mike’s article comments on the way a Zionist troll, Emma Pickens, smears her by confusing her with another Jackie Walker. Which he observes is par for the course. The Zionists smear, lie and distort and twist evidence without compunction.
As for the ‘misogyny’, that’s similarly illusory. A group of 30 Labour female MPs accused Momentum of this, writing to Jeremy Corbyn to stop it. They were all entitled Blairites, who were frightened for their seats now that Corbyn moderates were the ascendant, and ready to reverse the decades of Thatcherism that has wrecked this country and impoverished its great people. And the way they decided to do this, was by following Killary’s lead against her left-wing opponent in America, Bernie Sanders. She made up stories about his followers being misogynists, and invented a class of supporters she called ‘Bernie Bros’. There was no misogyny on that part of the Left, and the ‘Bernie Bros’ existed only in her imagination. It’s the same with these ladies and their accusations, but it’s all grist to the mill for Tory and establishment propaganda.
Freeman then went on to excuse Boris Johnson’s comments, made over a decade ago during or after a trip to Africa, about Black Africans. BoJo had written a piece about ‘picaninnies’ with ‘watermelon grins’. BoJo himself has apologised for these comments, but when asked about them, Freeman responded that ‘it was just Boris’. It’s all ‘journalistic language’. Or something like that. It doesn’t wash. Buddy Hell, of Guy Debord’s Cat, stated quite rightly that Johnson would not get away with writing similar material which used anti-Semitic stereotypes against the Jews. Many others on Twitter were also disgusted with BoJo’s racism, and Freeman’s defence of it.
Boorish Johnson’s dated vocabulary brings to mind some of the sputtering of that other right-wing journo, who spent his time abusing and sneering at the left, Auberon Waugh. Waugh once complained in an interview in the 1980s to one of the middle market tabloid Sunday supplements – either for the Mail on Sunday or the Sunday Express – that his daughter had gone to Ethiopia to teach ‘Blackamoors’.
Going further back, it also recalls the racist invective poured out by Enoch Powell in his notorious ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. He made comments there about ‘grinning picaninnies’, along with all the racist incidents, which also happened only in his imagination.
I did wonder if Johnson’s anti-Black spleen was the result of extenuating circumstances. Africa is a continent with huge potential and a creative people, beset by terrible problems. Many of its countries are so corrupt that the Financial Times described them once as ‘kleptocracies, which are only considered countries courtesy of the UN’. The various warlords, who have arisen to plunge these nations into civil war are often guilty of the vilest human rights abuse. If you want examples, look up the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, and the horrific abuse they mete out against the children they kidnap as recruits. I think BoJo encountered some of these private armies and their commanders, and that would leave a very bitter impression. Although Whites, who have settled in Uganda have praised ordinary Ugandans for their great national character. These butchers are not representative of Black Africa as a whole.
But I don’t think this washes any more. Neither do I believe that it is just how Boris writes. Most people don’t make those comments, and many Whites would probably feel embarrassed reading them out in front of Blacks, even their Black friends. Several generations of children have been taught to know better. I can remember when I was at junior school, I picked up a few nasty racist terms for Blacks from the other pupils. When I tried them out that evening, I was told very firmly by my mother that these were certainly not ways to talk to, or about, Black people. And that if I did ever use it to one of them, it would get me hit, and quite right too. And I’m sure other people have had similar experiences.
Johnson may have been told this, but he clearly decided to reject it before he wrote the offending article. And I honestly don’t believe he’s the only one. Back in the 1990s a backbench Tory MP was thrown out for using similar racist terms about Blacks. In the 1980s there was a resurgence of ‘racial nationalism’ – the ideology of the NF and BNP – in many parts of the Tory party. And going further back to the various British Fascist groups during the Second World War, the aims of one of them was ‘to purge the Conservative party of Jewish influence.’
Johnson’s image of an accident, gaffe-prone ‘lovable oaf’ – at least, that’s the image he and his supporters want to project – is very carefully crafted. In private his hair is carefully combed, but he messes it before appearing on TV. He is also a very shrewd, calculating, aggressive political manipulator. And those who know him have said that the bonhomie he exudes on programmes like Have I Got News For You is similarly false. In reality he has a vicious temper.
I simply don’t believe that Johnson’s vile comments about Black Africans are simply his way of writing about them. He’s made enough mistakes like that in his career as Foreign Secretary to show that he has no clue about not offending people, but I think this goes much further than that. I think this is how he, and a very large proportion of his party, sincerely feel about Blacks. Though in journalism they have been very careful to dress it up in dated language, in order to camouflage it and present it as a bit more upmarket than the gutter abuse spat out by the avowed Fascists.
And under Johnson there was an undercurrent of real anti-Black racism in the Spectator. Taking their cue from the Republicans’ appeal to ‘angry White men’, one piece in the Speccie began with the remark that there was only one ethnic group not welcome in inner London: White men. A piece in another issue by one of their other hacks told the story about how he had his mobile stolen by a Black man, and how mistaken he was when the thief phoned him to tell him he’d return it, only to do nothing of the kind. It was a scam designed to help the thief prolong the use he had of it before he had to ditch it. The writer of the piece added to this story his experience of giving the Black thief the benefit of the doubt, only to be disappointed. It was a coded piece designed to appeal to White prejudice about Black criminality.
Johnson is a racist, in my opinion, who appeals to the racist elements that still survive in a very racist party. Despite David Cameron’s attempt to purge it of racism and connections to the Far Right. And George Freeman looks very much like one of the racists. Meanwhile, they retail all the Blairite and Zionist lies about anti-Semitism and misogyny in the Labour party, while doing nothing – absolutely nothing – about the real bigots and vicious racists in their own.
Today is, I believe, Holocaust Remembrance Day, when the world, or at least the Western world, reflects on the Shoah and the calculated extermination of six million Jews. But it is also important to remember the other victims of the Nazi camps as well. The Jews were the largest single group, but in total 11 1/2 million people were murdered by the Nazis in the death and concentration camps. This included the congenitally disabled, who were murdered by Nazi doctors under the Aktion T4 programme with the assistance and supervision of the SS. Historians such as Martin Broszat in The Hitler State and Karl Dietrich Bracher in The German Dictatorship, have pointed out that this prefigured and prepared for the murder of the Jews, particularly in the use of poison gas. In the end, Aktion T4 was stopped by the courageous action of the Roman Catholic aristocrat, Count Galen. This shows that Christian opinion in Germany and opposition to the Holocaust from the churches could also have stopped the Shoah. But with a few, very honorable exceptions, like Bonhoffer, the churches didn’t.
The Nazis also attempted to exterminate the Romanies – the Gypsies – as they too were considered, like the Jews, to be subhuman and a threat to German society and racial industry.
Other victims of the camps included the mentally ill, neurotics, prostitutes, recidivist criminals, Prisoners of War, and political prisoners, such as trade unionists, Socialists, Communists, Anarchists, gay men, and slave workers from the Slav nations. The last were worked to death in horrific conditions, including building the Nazi fortifications and tunnels in the Channel Islands.
Holocaust Remembrance Day isn’t just about commemorating the Holocaust and its victims, but other genocides and their victims that have occurred throughout history. Hitler partly made his decision to go ahead with the extermination of the Jews because of the complete lack of western reaction to the Young Turks’ massacre of the Armenians. He commented, ‘Who remembers the Armenians?’ And before then, the German colonial authorities in what is now Tanganyika had attempted to exterminate the Herrero after they revolted, using similar eugenicist logic.
Unfortunately, as Mike has pointed out, genocides have continued to be perpetrated, such as the various crimes against humanity committed by Fascist regimes across Latin America, Asia and Africa, supported by American foreign policy. The persecution of the Rohingya is just the latest of these. And Jews have been involved in protesting and commemorating them and their victims as well. In Canada, the leader of the mainstream Jewish organisation, Bernie Farber, organised a ‘Shabbat for Darfur’ after that city was attacked by the Islamist Janjaweed Militia in the early part of this century. Farber’s generous action has been bitterly criticised by members of the transatlantic conservative Right, who feel that Jews should concentrate solely on their own sufferings in the Holocaust, and not expand their experience of suffering, persecution and attempted genocide to form solidarity with the other persecuted ethnic and religious groups.
Israeli scholars have also noted that the Holocaust, while horrific, was not a unique event. See Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review, edited by Israel W. Charny, the executive director of the Institute on the Holocaust, Jerusalem, and Director of Postgraduate Interdisplinary and Graduate Social Work Programs in Family, Therapy, Bob Shapell School of Social Work, Tel Aviv University. Dr. Charny’s book also includes a chapter on the ethnic cleansing of Israel’s indigenous Arab population, which is definitely unwelcome to the Likudniks. But it bears out Ilan Pappe’s assertion that Israelis are still decent people, who need to have the situation and issues properly explained to them. But odiously, Netanyahu, Likud and other ethno-nationalists in his ruling coalition are doing all they can to prevent that occurring. As are his little helpers over here in the shape of the Jewish Labour Movement and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism.
So as we commemorate the sufferings of the Jews during the Nazi regime, we also need to take on board that it isn’t just about anti-Semitism, but about similar horrors that have disfigured human history down the centuries, and murderous, criminal regimes that are perpetrating them today.
Remember Sebastian Gorka, who was one of Trump’s key advisers in government, before the Orange Buffoon lost his rag and sacked him, like he’s done to so many others? Gorka was of Hungarian extraction, and had strong links to the Hungarian Far Right. He wore the insignia of the Vitezi Rend, the Hungarian chivalric order set up by Admiral Horthy, the Hungarian dictator, who led the country into a pact with Nazi Germany and assisted them with the Holocaust and deportations of Jews in his country. Gorka has also been personally active in a number of Hungarian Far Right organisations, and was one of the founders of one of them.
Turns out Gorka’s a wanted man. In this clip from the David Pakman Show, host David Pakman and his producer discuss the news that Gorka is wanted for firearms offences in Hungary going back before he became a member of Trump’s cabinet. Gorka has responded to this by making a non-denial. He Tweeted that the warrant was put out after he moved to America, adding ‘moron’ for good, insulting effect. But as they point out, this isn’t actually a denial that he is wanted for these crimes. Pakman also draws parallels of moving to America from South America, where he grew up. It’s perfectly possible that Gorka committed the offences after he emigrated to the US. Just because his primary residence is now the USA, does not mean he hasn’t been back to his family’s old homeland from time to time. Just as it doesn’t mean that because someone lives in California they have never been out of that state.
Pakman and his producer also point out that this also has dire implications for Trump’s claims that he’s hard on immigration and stands for law and order. Well, no, clearly he doesn’t. He claimed he was going to be super-hard on vetting his staff. He clearly wasn’t, otherwise Gorka’s arrest warrant would have been flagged, noted, and he wouldn’t have got the job. On the other hand, perhaps he was, and the Generalissimo of Reality TV didn’t care. Pakman also contrasts Gorka with the Mexican and Hispanic immigrants, who enter America to do physical work, like labouring. This wasn’t the case of a normal immigrant, who actually does something useful, like put in windows, fix the plumbing or mow the lawn. No, Gorka was a criminal immigrant, whom Trump took into the White House itself.
The last minute or so of the clip is a piece of advertising for their sponsors. I’m sorry for this, but I realise that shows like Pakman will only survive by advertising, and need sponsorship. Because Google is desperately trying to close down any left-wing news sites on the spurious grounds of combatting fake news.
As far as Gorka’s unsavoury activities and connections go, I honestly don’t think that Trump cares. He’s surrounded himself with all kinds of deeply unpleasant characters with extreme right-wing views, like Richard Spencer and the Alt Right. A century ago Gorka’s own ethnicity would have been problem for American nativists. Back in the 1920 right-wing American ethnic nationalists really didn’t like immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, like Poles and Hungarians, because they were considered racially inferior. Hitler in his Table Talk remarks that Hungarians are ‘men of the Steppe’, which is sort-of true in that the Magyars had been steppe nomads before the entered the Pannonian March in the 9th/10th century. And the Nazis despised the Poles and other Slavs as racial inferiors. Millions of Poles and related peoples were imported into Nazi Germany to work as slave labour. However, the Nazis strictly outlawed any sexual contact between Germans and Poles as a threat to Aryan racial purity. And if you look at some of the diagrams showing the differences between peoples in Nazi texts, like the handbook given out to the Hitler Youth, they portray the Poles and the other Slavs – Russians, Belorussians, Ukrainians, Czechs, Slovaks, Ukrainians and so on – as having very Asiatic features similar to those of the Chinese and other east Asian peoples.
This racist contempt for the Slavonic peoples was reversed after the War, when the Nazis turned their attention to Black and Asian nationalist movements, and non-White immigration. The Shoah had made anti-Semitism absolutely unacceptable to most people, although in Britain and America groups like the National Front, BNP and the American Nazi Party were still goose stepping around in Nazi uniforms as late as the 1970s. Then the White Nationalists decided that Magyars and particularly Slavs, weren’t subhuman after all, and started actively recruiting them. Hence the re-emergence in these countries of anti-Semitism, now allied with a vicious Islamophobia, amongst a plethora of Far Right parties. And Sebastian Gorka’s inclusion in Trump’s cabinet of horrors, along with other prominent leaders and spokespeople for the racist Right.
Hungarian workers, like the other varied immigrant groups in America and the new, Hispanic immigrants Trump and his supporters despise, contributed greatly to building the American economy. One of the heroes of working class folklore amongst the steelworkers of Pittsburgh, was Hungarian. He became a larger than life figure, similar to Paul Bunyan in the logging camps of the West, and was reputedly able to paddle and splash in superheated molten metal. This came at a time when working people had strong unions, which could demand respect and insist on their rights. All of which has been destroyed by pernicious Reaganomics and the neo-liberal assault on the working and lower middle classes that has followed it.
We need more working class heroes like the immigrant workers, Irish, Chinese, Italian, Slav, Hungarian, and oppressed domestic indigenous groups like Afro-Americans, who physically built America, toiling on its roads, railways and factories. And as Pakman points out, the Hispanic immigrants have proved themselves invaluable in doing dirty jobs no-one else wants to do. In fact, after one town kicked them all out, it then found it had a labour shortage and appealed for them to come back.
What we don’t need, is more far Right racists like Gorka and his domestic counterparts in the Alt-Right, Klan and various Nazi parties.
The news today has been full of the sexual assaults, including an incident of indecent exposure, of the hostesses at the banquet in aid of charity at the President’s Club. Tickets for the bash cost £5,000. It was a men-only event, hosted by David Walliams, and billed as the most ‘un-PC event’. The hostesses, who wore ‘skimpy’ black uniforms, were subjected to groping, had hands shoved up their skirts, propositioned and some of the men tried to drag them onto their laps. One of those, who attended was the Tory minister Nadhim Zahawi. Walliams claims that he did not see any of the assaults on the young women.
I’m not surprised this has occurred. It was a single-sex event, and one of the prizes was an evening at a lap dancing club, in which the first dance would be free. It was a gathering of oversexed, rich, powerful men, who clearly believed that they could do what they liked. This was regardless of the changed attitudes towards such behaviour and the mass outrage against sexual predators in film and television, industry and general society. It came after the massed women’s marches against sexual assault and exploitation in America, and elsewhere, including London, last weekend. But these entitled men clearly didn’t think it applied to them, and they could carry on as they pleased.
My guess is that this behaviour has been carrying on for years. It’s just that now it’s become front page news, and women are organising and vociferously demonstrating against it. It also reminds me of a comment by one of the contributors to Lobster. The writer had a friend, who had attended a meeting of high level bankers in America. The writer asked him what they were like.
‘Worse than you can possibly imagine’, his friend replied.
That tells you everything you need to know about the attitudes and antics of the super-rich, when they think no-one else is watching.
This is a piece I found on YouTube by the disabled vlogger, Tony Linford, commenting on Toby Young’s attendance at a eugenics conference at University College London. The video was posted on the 11th January 2018, so it’s somewhat old news now. But I wanted to put it up, as it gives the perspective of a disabled person on Young and his grotty views.
Linford makes the point that the Nazis considered the congenitally disabled ‘lebensunwertigen’ – ‘unworthy of life’, and that they were murdered by the SS as part of the Nazis’ eugenics programme. He goes on to stoutly defend the right of all disabled people to life, and movingly talks about his experience meeting one severely disabled youngster being cared. The lad was in a wheelchair, and was mentally challenged, in the polite way of talking about it. Nevertheless, the lad was full of life and energy, and bubbling with ideas. Linford states that he learned a lot from him. He sadly reflects that the lad’s probably dead by now, but as disabled as he was, he was certainly not ‘lebensunwertigen’.
And discussing Young and his vile opinions on selective breeding, he also wonders how many others in the Tory party also hold the same disgusting views.
My guess is that there’s quite a few, but they keep very, very quiet about it because their leaders know full well the storm of outrage they’ll cause if they ever make their beliefs public. Maggie’s mentor, Keith Joseph, provoked such indignation with his comment in the 1970s that unmarried mothers were ‘a threat to our stock’. Young clearly thought he could get away with such views. Looking at some of the videos on YouTube, it appears that the Spectator had published a piece ‘The Return of Eugenics’, which was plastered all over its front cover. It looks like that after this piece was published, and didn’t seem to have people rioting in the streets, Young thought he would be safe. I am glad that he was profoundly mistaken.
Young and the other Tory eugenics snobs, Ben Bradley, who wanted the unemployed sterilised and the police to play ‘splat the chav’ with watercannon during the London riots six years ago, and his defender James Cleverly, hold thoroughly disgusting views. It’s the same attitude Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics, had, who was terrified that the biologically unfit poor would outbreed respectable, biologically superior middle and upper class people. It’s the views of privileged public schoolboys, who see themselves as innately biologically superior to everyone else, and have nothing but contempt for their social inferiors.
Cleverly tried defending Bradley’s comments about sterilising the unemployed by bleating something about it being at heart, a ‘reasonable’ statement about personal responsibility. Er, no. If the argument was about personal responsibility, then it would have been about encouraging those, who can’t afford children to use contraception. That would be about personal responsibility, as the choice would still be that of the unemployed whether or not they wanted to bring another life into the world.
Bradley’s comment was about denying the unemployed any personal responsibility, by taking away their personal freedom and forcibly sterilising them. It was a moralistic, punitive attitude by someone, who clearly has nothing but a Daily Mail-type rage against the poorest members of society.
And it isn’t just proles and the lumpenproletariat, who become unemployed. It also strikes respectable middle class people. I can remember hearing Tim Waterstone, the founder of the chain of booksellers that bears his name, speaking on the radio one day about how he spent a period unemployed. He described his feelings of absolute humiliation at the experience. Waterstone was lucky, in that I think he went on from this to start up his chain of stores. But others aren’t. They are laid off, or their businesses fail. And the lifestyle they found easy to support on their previously high salaries suddenly become a heavy burden. What happens to these people, if they have large families that they may find difficulty providing for if and when they are made unemployed? In Ben Bradley’s ideal eugenics Britain, would they be sterilised? Or do they get a pass, because they’re nice and middle class? Given the way the Tory party does everything it can to give extra money to the rich, while denying the poor the financial and medical support they need, my guess is that if this happened to a large number of middle class people, Bradley would be loudly screaming about how disgraceful it all was and demanding government support for them. His attitudes show the class snobbery that runs through Tory politics, and particularly through May’s government of privileged toffs.
The Nazis used eugenics not just to murder the disabled, but as part of their attempted extermination of the Jews during the Holocaust. The German historian Martin Broszat, in his The Hitler State, points out that the Nazi murder of the disabled served as a trial run for the mass slaughter of the Jews, including the use of poison gas. And there were Nazis and Nazi-sympathisers over here, who shared the same horrendous views.
One of these was Lord Lymington, an aristocrat, who wished to recreate the rural, agrarian and feudal society he idealised over modern capitalist, industrial society. Lymington was also a fan of eugenics, and in his 1943 book, Alternative to Death: The Relationship between Soil, Family and Community, discussed ‘the dangers of losing our own character from alien influence and blood’ in which he ranted about the threat to British racial purity from ‘the marketer, the unscrupulous trader, the slick haggler, the seditious natural underdog’, who was a type of immigrant ‘too often conditioned to the mental slum and the bazaar’. (See Richard Griffiths, What Did You Do During the War? The Last Throes of the British Pro-Nazi Right (Routledge, 2017) 240-1.) All of which is coded way of playing on anti-Semitic prejudice, without actually spelling it out in so many words. The quote graphically demonstrates why so many people found Young and his belief in eugenics so repulsive, that he ended up resigning from his position on the universities’ regulatory board. And why so many people this week have been extremely unimpressed with Bradley and Cleverly, and their stupid, bigoted, dangerous and contemptible comments.
The Tories’ movement towards authoritarianism and dictatorship goes on. Mike today put up a story about Theresa May, our unfunny comedy prime minister, wanting to set up a ‘rapid response unit’ in the cabinet office to rebut ‘fake news’ on social media. Mike on his blog raises the obvious question about who will trust such a unit, when the Tories have been responsible for spreading so much fake news themselves. He illustrates this with a piece from the Canary, in which Victoria Atkins, the Undersecretary of State for Crime, Safeguarding and Vulnerability, by Niamh Eastwood of the drug charity, Release, for the lies Atkins had told about British drug policy and drug treatment.
And this is really just one instance of so many, many others. The Tories lie inveterately and constantly. Another example that comes readily to mind this week is Boris Johnson, once again reviving his lie that the money saved from being in the EU will go to the NHS. It’s been shown repeatedly that we won’t save the £350 million he claims, and when England did vote against EU membership last year, Johnson then went back on the promise, and blustered about how it was just an example of the kind of thing the money could be spent on. But in actually fact wasn’t. He’s revived this lie once before, and last week dragged it back up again.
May’s proposal also shows the massive insecurity the Tories now have. Despite having the overwhelming support of the British press and broadcasting, with the BBC apparently staffed by members of their party and producing constant pro-Tory propaganda through presenters and editors like Laura Kuenssberg, the Tories still feel they have to crack down on a threat from social media.
It’s because people are rejecting established news sources, like the press and the BBC, because they’ve been caught out lying too often. The Tories and their collaborators in the mainstream media have done their level best to vilify and smear the Labour party, and specifically Jeremy Corbyn and Momentum. If you believe them, Corbyn and the true Labour moderates – most definitely not the Thatcherite entryists that came in with Blair – are a load of anti-Semites and Trotskyites. But few people are buying that. Corbyn gained a considerable amount of support on social media, much of which was spontaneous, just as Bernie Sanders did over in the US. The Tories have been unable to compete with this, and so they want to shut it down. Mike’s article on this piece of news concludes
This is not an attempt to ensure a “fact-based public debate”.
It is a bid to hijack the news and turn it into Tory propaganda.
Who are you going to believe if you aren’t given a choice?
Tories hate the freedom of speech employed by the social media. They see this as their opportunity to end it. And they think the people are too stupid to realise they’ll be filling our newspapers and other news media with lies.
Absolutely. And May’s proposal is a real danger to free speech and freedom of opinion in Britain. It comes close to the ‘Ministry of Truth’ in Orwell’s 1984, or the rigid state control of the media in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Soviet Russia. Perhaps the functionary Tweezer intends to put in charge of this new unit will be called ‘the Minister for Public Enlightenment’, like Goebbels?
This comes after the various attempts by Thatcherite administrations to set up secret courts. These are closed hearings, where, for reasons of national security, the accused may not know what crimes they are charged with, nor have the evidence against them disclosed to themselves or their lawyers. Blair tried to introduce them, and David Cameron and Nick Clegg passed legislation setting them up. Again, it’s a justice system very much like the Kafkaesque travesties of the Communist and Fascist totalitarians of the last century.
And this has to be stopped. This is another infringement by the Tories on freedom of speech and conscience. If it goes ahead, whatever May or her spokespeople will bluster and say to the contrary, it will be another attempt to dictate to the people of this country what they can believe politically. By a weak, terrified Tory prime minister, and the corrupt, mendacious party and corporate class she serves.
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