New Holocaust Memorial Announced for London – Sargon and Co Ask Why

First off, I’m sorry I haven’t posted anything for a few days. I’ve been busy with other things down here, but normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. Yesterday, our Tory government announced that they were going to put a new memorial up commemorating the Holocaust. And Sargon of Gasbag, the man who broke UKIP, and his mate Callum over at the Lotuseaters Youtube channel have asked the obvious question: why? The proposed memorial has received widespread approval, especially from the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who were highly delighted. They claimed it was needed because Holocaust denial was growing in the UK and we needed to be reminded of our part in the Shoah, the great crime against the Jews, and also against the disabled, gays and the Roma. But as the commenters on the Lotuseaters video have pointed out, they said nothing about the Slav peoples of eastern Europe, who were also massacred. This is true. Hitler hated the Slavs, and in his Tabletalk he makes it clear he was looking forward to the extermination of the Czech. After the Jews, the Poles formed the largest number of the victims of Nazi massacre and extermination, particular Polish Roman Catholic clergy. Slavs were considered subhuman under the Nuremberg race laws. Their lands were targeted for German colonisation, and those Poles, Russians and Ukrainians lucky enough to survive were to serve as an uneducated peasant class producing agricultural goods for their German masters.

The Lotuseaters are men of the right, and the extreme right at that. I find their videos difficult to watch because of the idiot sneering at the Labour party, idiot ‘woke’ lefties and similar comments that also come out of the mouth of the mad right-winger, Alex Belfield. Particularly annoying in this video was all their jokes about Jeremy Corbyn and anti-Semitism, and how he especially wouldn’t like the memorial and agrees with Holocaust denial. It’s just right-wing libel. Corbyn, like George Galloway, has never denied the Holocaust and has a proud record of standing up for the Jews in this country, as he has done for Blacks and other ethnic minorities. His crime wasn’t anti-Semitism, but standing up for the Palestinians. The Israeli state and the ultra-Zionists, like the Board of Deputies, can’t justify it, so they smear those criticising their ethnic cleansing of Israel’s indigenous population as anti-Semites. This include proud, self-respecting Jews, who are tarnished and demonised as ‘self-hating’.

But the Lotuseaters are right to ask why we need such a memorial. They say we entered the War to stop the persecution of the Jews, when the Nazis and USSR had signed a non-aggression pact to divide Poland between. Callum even claimed that when the Soviets took over their part of Poland, they handed over its Jewish inhabitants to the Nazis to massacre. Well, I haven’t heard that before and neither did Sargon, but it doesn’t surprise me. Stalin was a vicious anti-Semite, and during the Weimar period western Communists were ordered to collaborate with Nazis despite the Nazis hatred of Marxist socialism and their persecution of the KPD under the Third Reich. It’s wrong to say we entered the War to save the Jews. We didn’t. We declared war on Nazi Germany because of our defensive alliance with France and Poland. Although there was little outright anti-Semitic persecution in Britain, low-level anti-Jewish sentiment was widespread and acceptable. There was considerable sympathy for Nazism amongst the British aristocracy, with various high-ranking individuals joining pro-Nazi organisations like the Anglo-German Fellowship. The father of Geordie Grieg, editor of the Heil, was a member of one such group. On the other hand, the Fascist parties and groups remained generally small. Britain passed laws banning the stirring up of racial hatred, and once war was declared Oswald Mosley, the head of the BUF, was sent to the Tower of London and his stormtroopers interned on the Isle of Man along with other enemy aliens. And our troops did liberate some of the concentration and death camps, along with the Russians and our other allies, and we did save the survivors from starvation, or as many as we could. There were Nazi sympathisers who served as auxiliaries in the Waffen SS, the British division of which served as the basis for neo-Nazi organisation the League of St. George. But as far as I know, there was absolutely no British state involvement with the Holocaust and I haven’t heard of any British commercial involvement with it, either. I’m therefore puzzled when the Board says it was needed to remind us of our role in it.

As for anti-Semitism in Britain, only 7 per cent of Brits have negative view about Jews. The majority have positive views of them, and a smaller number consider them no better or worse than anyone else. The Lotuseaters state that the Holocaust is taught as part of the British history curriculum. There are Holocaust deniers knocking around, but there are very few of them, at least among the vast majority of severely normal Brits, who despise them. I wondered if behind the cloaked language which didn’t name anybody in particular, the real fear was about the possible growth in anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial amongst Muslims. It’s rife in the Middle East because of the Israeli colonisation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and the humiliation inflicted on the Arab nations during the Six Day War. I have the impression that the majority of British Muslims despise Israel for its maltreatment of the Palestinians. However, Tony Greenstein has pointed out that the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism offer no supporting statistics or information on their website for their statement that the majority of anti-Semites are Muslim.

David Cameron apparently approved the monument five years ago in 2016, but Boris has only just given it the go-ahead. My impression is that this has precious little about commemorating the Holocaust for itself, and everything to do with generating support for Israel. Peter Oborne in his documentary for Channel 4’s dispatches 11 years ago described how the Israel lobby had effectively captured Britain’s political parties, and especially the Tories, through parliamentary friendship groups, sponsored trips to Israel and donations from pro-Israel Jewish businessmen. Any British paper or broadcaster, including the Beeb, that dared to cover atrocities by the Israelis and their allies, like the Lebanese Christian Phalange, were attacked and smeared by the Board as anti-Semites. Hence the attacks on the Labour party and Jeremy Corbyn, and the capture of the party of Keir Starmer, who has declared himself to be ‘100 per cent Zionist’. Hence also the foundation of front organisations claiming to represent Jews and combat anti-Semitism, but which are really concerned with persecuting and smearing critics of Israel, like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Labour Movement, previously Paole Zion, Workers of Zion. These two organisations were founded to combat the rise in anti-Israel sentiment following Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. My guess is that Israel and it’s satellite organisations and mouthpieces in the UK have been rattled by British support for the Palestinians following the riots around the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian districts in east Jerusalem ready for Israeli settlement. This all looks to me very much like the Israel state exploiting the Holocaust to garner support on the one hand, and the Tories using it to signal their compliance with Israel and its genocidal attitude to the Arabs on the other.

The Holocaust was a monstrous crime against humanity and it is entirely right that British schoolchildren are taught about it. But this new memorial looks like it has nothing to do with remembering the victims of the Shoah, but is simply a PR exercise to shame Brits into supporting Israel and its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

Scum! London Lifeboatmen Abused Following Patel’s Demands about Channel Migrants

Really, what kind of people are the Tories turning us into? A week or so ago, Mike reported on his blog that our smirking, vile home secretary had demanded that the RNLI shouldn’t rescue the migrants trying to cross the Channel in dinghies and other flimsy, unseaworthy craft. The Lifeboats refused. Quite apart from their duty to rescue everyone at sea by reason of simple morality and humanitarianism, their patron is Her Maj and it’s written into their charter. Which means they’re answerable to the Queen, not the smug racist in Johnson’s cabinet. That’s supposed to refer to Patel, but I admit, it could also mean any one of them, including Johnson himself. Yesterday Mike reported that a lifeboat crew on the Thames in London had been abused. This looks like they did so from anger at the Lifeboats refusal to kowtow to Patel’s commands over the migrants. It’s disgusting. As the TV series following Britain’s and Ireland’s lifeboat service has amply shown, these are extremely courageous men and women risking their lives to save others often in conditions of appalling danger, in storms and raging seas. They’re also unpaid volunteers, so by anyone’s standards, they’re heroes.

Mike in his article about this revolting incident pointed out that the people hurling insults at the lifeboat crew would be very glad to be rescued by them if they met with an accident on the Thames and were going under for the third time. Quite. I also think that nearby ships are formally required by maritime law to rescue or give aid to ships in trouble. I don’t know, but if that’s true, then it means that the lifeboats have a legal duty to rescue migrants trying to cross the Channel, quite apart from their duty to the Queen and regardless of what Priti Patel has to say. Not that I think she has any respect at all for international law. She and the rest of her party of bandits have shown they have none whatsoever for British law and our unwritten constitution when it suits them.

But it’s the simple, callous rejection of any kind of humanitarian concern for the welfare of others that worries me. It shows that Patel wants to withhold aid from people in peril of their lives. In short, she is quite happy seeing the migrants drown rather than have them cross the Channel. Mike’s posted that the Tories are rapidly crossing from Fascism to Nazism, and I posted the other day about the similarities between their assault on democracy and the Nazi suspension of German civil liberties during their seizure of power. Patel’s call for the lifeboats to ignore the Channel migrants and the real threat of them drowning is well on the way to Nazi morality. It reminds me of the comment by Heinrich Class, the chairman of the Pan-German League, about his generations rejection of the liberalism of the 1848 generation of German radicals and nationalists. Their watchwords had been ‘patriotism, tolerance, humanity’. But the new generation of German nationalists utterly rejected their fathers’ and grandfathers’ values. Class said, ‘We youngsters had moved on; We were nationalist pure and simple. We wanted nothing to do with tolerance if it sheltered the enemies of the Volk and the state. Humanity n the sense of that liberal idea we spurned, for our Volk was bound to come off worse.’ In J. Noakes and G. Pridham, Nazism 1919-1946 1: The Rise to Power 1919-1934, 4. ‘Enemies of the Volk and the state’ – that seems very much to be the attitude of the Tories towards the Channel migrants. Hence Patel’s decision to house them in appalling conditions in what could be considered concentration camps.

The end result of the development of the extreme nationalism of ethno-nationalist groups like the Pan-German League and their rejection of the liberal values of tolerance and humanity was the Nazis and the horrors of the Third Reich – the internment and massacre of millions, including the disabled, Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Russians and political prisoners, because simply by existing they were enemies of the Volk and the state.

Johnson, Patel and the rest of their vile crew haven’t yet destroyed British democracy and traditional British values, but they’re taking us in that direction. They have to be stopped before they take us further towards a similar viciously intolerance, murderous dictatorship.

The Nazis and the Tory Destruction of British Civil Liberties

A few days ago, Mike over at Vox Political commented that our smirking, intriguing Home Secretary, Priti Patel, had gone from Fascism to Nazism in her latest assault on democracy. Hacks publishing leaked documents can now be punished with up to 14 years imprisonment for embarrassing the government. This is in addition to her massively authoritarian, racist approach to dealing with the influx of illegal immigrants crossing the Channel. This isn’t hyperbole. The Nazis passed similar legislation when they seized power in 1933, making it illegal to defame the government. See Martin Broszat’s The Hitler State: The Foundation and Development of the Internal Structure of the Third Reich, page 66, for how the Nazis banned and intimidated Communist, Socialist and liberal newspapers using the laws against defaming the government.

This follows creeping Tory legislation gradually destroying civil liberties and further restricting constitutional limits to Conservative authoritarianism. Patel has passed further legislation limiting the right to demonstrate, abolishing fixed-term parliaments so that the Tories can choose when they hold elections rather than have to abide by the limits set by law, and further limiting the courts’ ability to hold them to account. This all reminds me of the Nazi suspension of German civil liberties following the Reichstag fire and the passage of the emergency decrees as shown in this piece of Nazi legislation

By the authority of Section 48 (2) of the German Constitution the following is decreed as a defensive measure against Communist acts of violence endangering the State:

1. Sections 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124 and 153 of the Constitution of the German Reich are suspended until further notice. Thus restrictions of personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press, on the right of assembly and association, and violation of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications, and warrants for house-searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property rights are permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.

In J. Noakes and G. Pridham, Nazism 1919-1945, 1: The Rise to Power 1919-1934 (Exeter University Publication 1983) 142.

The Tories haven’t gone that far yet with outright bans on newspapers and opposition publications, but this is clearly the direction they are going unless the process is halted. We are heading for a Tory dictatorship.

But stopping this means having an effective opposition, something which is glaringly lacking in the Labour leadership of Keir Starmer.

Yay! Marc Wadsworth Wins Libel Fight Against Far Right Ultra-Zionist Smear Sheet

First the good news. Black anti-racism campaigner Marc Wadsworth has won his libel battle against the Jewish Chronicle, one of the Jewish newspapers involved in the press and media smear campaign of Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters as raging anti-Semites and Nazis. Wadsworth was unjustly accused of anti-Semitism and expelled from the Labour following accusations from the noxious Ruth Smeeth. Wadsworth had seen her pass on a Labour party brochure to a Torygraph hack sitting next to her at a Labour party, and so commented about her helping the Tory press. Smeeth and her supporters in the party and beyond chose to interpret the comment as more anti-Semitic tropes. He was accused of saying she was part of a conspiracy, just as Jews are accused of conspiring against gentiles, subjected to a kangaroo court like like the others the Labour right and right-wing British media and political establishment smeared as anti-Semites, and thrown out of the party. This was despite the fact that Wadsworth isn’t any kind of anti-Semite or Fascist. Far from it. In the 1980s he worked with the Board of Deputies of British Jews to bring in legislation to protect Jews in Thanet from real anti-Semitic assault by members of the NF/BNP. He was also responsible for arranging the parents of the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence to meet Nelson Mandela. During his farcical trial by the Labour party, a squad of angry White female Labour MPs turned up to demand his expulsion. Some observers found this extremely chilling as it was very reminiscent of the lynch mobs attacking Blacks.

Wadsworth sued the Chronicle for libel because it also claimed that he was part of the Labour In Exile Network, which was targeting Jewish Labour party activists at their homes in order to ‘take care of them’. Wadsworth wasn’t a member of the group and didn’t have anything to do with what the Chronicle claimed they were doing. As a result, he has won his libel case, the Chronicle was forced to apologise to him and pay him substantial damages. Mike over at Vox Political is particularly glad Wadsworth won as he too was on the receiving end of the Chronicle’s mendacity when it smeared him years ago as an anti-Semite and Holocaust-denier. Zelo Street has also suggested that he might also care to launch a libel suit against Tom Bower for the smears and lies in his biography of Jeremy Corbyn. This repeats the Tory establishment lie that Corbyn is some kind of Trotskyite traitor and anti-Zionist Nazi. It repeats the smear that Wadsworth anti-Semitically abused Smeeth, despite the fact that not only is he definitely not a Jew-hater, he didn’t even know she was Jewish. But this hasn’t stopped Bower repeating the libel with a few additions of his own. He has invented a statement that was never made by Wadsworth, writing that after he made the conspiracy theory comments, Wadsworth said ‘And she’s Jewish’.

It’s great that Wadsworth has won his libel battle against the Chronicle, but the injustice remains. There are many others, like Mike, who were thrown out of the party and similarly falsely smeared, who have spent years trying to clear their names.

And the Labour party’s witch-hunt and smear campaign is continuing under its useless and partisan leader, Keir Starmer.

See: Falsely-accused Wadsworth wins libel victory and substantial damages from Jewish Chronicle | Vox Political (voxpoliticalonline.com)

Zelo Street: Marc Wadsworth – A Little Vindication (zelo-street.blogspot.com)

Hugenberg’s View of Rule by Elites – Shared by Boris and the British Tories?

Alfred Hugenberg was a German press baron and the First Party Chairman of the DNVP – the German Nationalist People’s Party – a right-wing party during the Weimar Republic. In 1928 he wrote

I believe in government by the elect few, not by the elected… I believe in leaders, not in speakers. Words are enemies of action… I believe in a government by strong men who have the willpower and strength to carry through their decisions.

In J.W. Hiden, The Weimar Republic (Harlow: Longman 1974) 44

This rejection of popular democracy in favour of rule by the privileged elite sounds like it could easily come from Boris Johnson, David Cameron and the other Tory toffs who have taken up 10 Downing Street, presiding over cabinets of obscenely wealthy millionaires. Or even by Keir Starmer.

The Weimar republic eventually collapsed, descending into rule by presidential decree until it was finally overthrown by the Nazis in 1933. Which makes you wonder how long real, effective democracy in Britain will last, now that the Tories are ushering in successively repressive legislation to limit the right to demonstrate, curb the power of the courts and press, and remove fixed term elections.

Starmer: A Puppet Opposition in a Sham Democracy

Is Starmer monumentally stupid and deluded, or deliberately trying to destroy the Labour party? I ask this because it’s now been reported that the party’s membership crisis has reached such an extent that it now faces bankruptcy and extinction. Although reviled as everything from a Communist, Trotskyite and anti-Semite, Jeremy Corbyn and his policies were inspirational. Hundreds of thousands of traditional labour members and supporters return to the party after leaving it under Tory Tony Blair. As a result, Labour had a membership that outstripped the Tories and was the richest political party. Now all that’s vanishing into the wind due to Blair Stalin’s utter incompetence, factionalism, racism and vindictiveness. Starmer betrayed the genuinely popular policies put forward by Corbyn, from whom he had the whip removed. He carried on purging left-wing members, showed a complete contempt for party democracy by suspending constituency parties and officials who defied him, parachuted in his preferred candidates against the wishes of local parties and their supporters and turned his back on Black and Muslim members and supporters. He has done nothing about rising levels of Islamophobia in Labour and refused to investigate and punish the abuse and bullying of Black MPs like Diane Abbott and David Lammy. As for combating the Tories, he’s has been a total failure. So much so that Johnson has been ridiculing him as ‘General Indecision’ and ‘Major Hindsight’. He has no policies to speak of, although a spokesman for this vacuity in a suit told an interviewer that he did, but they were secret and so he couldn’t say what they were. As a result the party is haemorrhaging members and has suffered a string of defeats at the local elections. According to Private Eye, Starmer has appointed a Blairite pollster as his head of Strategy, which means that he’s seeking to revive Blairism long after that’s been proven a massive failure. Albert Einstein once said that insanity was performing the same experiment twice expecting a different result. If politics are likened to scientific experiments, then Starmer must be absolutely bonkers.

But another possibility has occurred to me. Starmer is deliberately trying to destroy the Labour party, at least as an effective socialist opposition. His supporters were actively conspiring to get Labour to lose the 2017 and 2019 elections, including calling for Lib Dems and Tories to enter it to take power away from the real Labour members who had returned and some members of the party bureaucracy were even members of Tory internet groups. It looks like Starmer and his supporters are determined to destroy the party, rather than see it return to socialism.

But they also remind me of the bizarre constitution of the former East Germany. This was a Communist dictatorship, but on paper it constitution, drawn up by the allies after the War, proclaimed it to be a multiparty democracy. And indeed there were other parties, which all duly recognised the leading role of the East German Communist party and were there to provide the illusion of genuine democracy even though the reality was very different. Boris Johnson is taking us towards real Fascism at a rate of knots with his curbs on the right to demonstrate, the ability of the courts to hold the government to account and now Priti Patel’s new laws to impose jail terms of 14 years for any journo who embarrasses the government. All this could very well lead to the establishment of what would be effectively a Tory dictatorship. But the Tories also need to claim some democratic validity, and hence I wonder if that’s Starmer’s role. He’s there to maintain the illusion that there are opposition parties even though their leadership has reduced them to impotence. Lobster once quoted an MI5 official, who said that there wasn’t a political organisation in the country where their man either wasn’t in a position of leadership, or was in a position to call someone off and place their man in charge instead. I wonder if that hasn’t happened to Labour with Starmer inserted by the establishment and secret state. After all, Red Ken’s 1987 book, Livingstone’s Labour, described how in the 1970s there were plans for a military coup in which radical MPs, trade unionists, journalists and activists would be rounded up and interned.

Perhaps I’m being too paranoid here. Generally, I prefer to believe that things are bad because of incompetence and unforeseen circumstances rather than the result of conspiracies, although genuine conspiracies by the secret state have certainly existed.

But such is the magnitude of Starmer’s incompetence and sheer partisanship at the expense of the party he’s running and the working class it was founded to represent and defend, that I wonder.

Private Eye: Starmer Appoints Pro-Tory Supporter of Middle Class as Head of Strategy

This fortnight’s edition of Private Eye for 23rd July to 5th August 2021 has a very ominous piece, ‘Keir Review’, reporting that Blair Stalin, I mean, Keir Starmer, has appointed Deborah Mattinson as his new head of strategy. The satirical magazine reports that when she previously held such a post advising a Labour leader six years ago, she wanted him to hold a review into the party’s economic performance, headed by a Tory, and to go after middle class swing voters. In other words, it was more Blairism after Blairism had failed with the election of David Cameron instead of Blair’s chancellor and successor, Gordon Brown. The article reads

Deborah Mattinson, Keir Starmer’s new director of strategy at Labour, has the job of relaunching his ailing leadership. The last time Mattinson advised a Labour leader in 2015, offers some clues of what’s to come: back then she wanted the party to have a review of its economic performance that would be “headed by a Tory”, and to start focusing more on the middle class.

Mattinson is a “public opinion” specialist who has worked for the party on and off since the New Labour years. She and her company, Britain Thinks, specialise in focus groups: the company has lucrative contracts with the Home Office and does opinion research for McDonald’s, Capita and Virgin Money. She will be stepping aside from her role there to work for Labour.

Starmer’s appointment of Mattinson is part of his attempt to rejuvenate his leadership with what is briefed as an undefined but “bold” new direction. Her previous political prescriptions were certainly bold, but were not popular with the party.

After Labour lost the 2015 election and Ed Miliband resigned, Britain Thinks produced a report for acting leader Harriet Harman called Emerging from the Darkness, advising how the party could recover from the defeat. The private report, which was leaked to ITV News, advised Harman to pull sharply to the right after the failure of Miliband’s modest move left.

One piece of advice was to commission an independent review of Labour’s economic performance in government “ideally headed by a Tory” – which Labour would publish because the party had to start “atoning for the past”. Mattinson also advised that Labour needed to “be for middle-class voters, not just down and outs.”

The report was based on conversations with focus groups of swing voters, relying on their opinion to form policy rather than just test potential messages. Harman did appear to follow the report’s logic, instructing Labour MPs not to oppose the government’s welfare bill or limiting child tax credit to just two children – decisions that were deeply unpopular in the party.

MPs, members and voters await the new direction the focus group guru will take Labour in now.

Basically, it’s going to be more Blairism: a return to neoliberal policies, the use of focus groups to test the popularity of policies, a concentration on the middle class to the neglect of Labour’s traditional base in the working class and absolute determination not to oppose Tory policies but to copy them. And her contempt for the working class is shown very clearly in the reference to ‘down and outs’. It comes after the massive success of Jeremy Corbyn in winning back Labour members and the popularity of his traditional Labour policies – a mixed economy, strong welfare state, renationalised NHS, powerful trade unions and strengthened workers’ rights – showed how bankrupt Blairism was. Under Blair, the party had been haemorrhaging members and the number of people who actually voted for it was lower than under Corbyn. Blair beat the Tories only because they were actually less popular than he was.

But all this has changed. It ain’t 1997 and these policies won’t work against a revived Tory party. Quite apart from the fact that they’re noxious policies that run directly counter to the Labour party’s whole raison d’etre. It was set up to defend and fight for working people, not abandon them and side with the employers and landlords who exploit them. But Starmer clearly hasn’t learned this lesson. Either he’s stupid and fanatical, pushing a set of policies long after they’ve been proved to be wrong and disastrous, or he’s deliberately trying to destroy the party. Either way, there’s a simple way to revive the Labour party:

Get the noxious Tory cuckoo out!

Neil Coyle and Adolf Hitler on the Threat of Jews in Parliament

Yesterday I put up a piece attacking Neil Coyle, a Blairite Labour MP, for demanding the expulsion of Jewish Voice for Labour from the Labour party along with other ‘Commies’. I pointed out that it was very much like the anti-Semitic rants of the Nazis, who rejected democracy as a Jewish plot to enslave ‘Aryan’ Germans. For example, in 1922 Hitler gave a speech which explicitly stated it.

And the Right has further completely forgotten that democracy is fundamentally not German: it is Jewish. It has completely forgotten that this Jewish democracy with its majority decisions has always been without exception only a means towards the destruction of any existing Aryan leadership. The Right does not understand that directly every small question of profit or loss is regularly put before so-called ‘public opinion’ he who knows how most skilfully to make this ‘public opinion’ serve his own interests becomes forthwith master in the State. And that can be achieved by the man who can lie most artfully, most infamously: and in the last resort he is not the German, he is, in Schopenhauer’s words, ‘the great master of the art of lying’ – the Jew….

(O)ne day it will turn to those who have most consistently foretold the coming ruin and have sought to disassociate themselves from it. And party is either the Left: and then God help us! for it will lead to us to complete destruction – to Bolshevism.

From: J.W. Hiden, The Weimar Republic (Harlow: Longman 1974).

Coyle’s demand for the expulsion of Jewish Voice for Labour comes from the same vicious factionalism that has resulted in the NEC voting to expel other left-wing groups within the Labour party – Resist, Socialist Appeal, Labour Against the Witch-Hunt and Labour in Exile. It’s the partisan hatred of Blairite neoliberals for real socialists, the kind of people that actually build the Labour party with the trade unions, founded the welfare state and NHS, and gave us the mixed economy. For all its faults, the mixed economy in which the utilities were owned and managed for the state actually provided these vital industries with the investment they needed and gave better service than under privatisation. This is why Blair Stalin, I mean, Kier Starmer, is running scared from these policies which were promoted by Corbyn and supported by a majority of the British public. It’s why the railways are failing spectacularly and the Tories are desperately fighting off having to renationalise them.

But Jewish Voice for Labour, Labour Against the Witch-Hunt and Labour in Exile are also being attacked and smeared because they state and argue unequivocally that the expulsions of Labour party members for supposed anti-Semitism are politically motivated. It’s not just just a hatred of socialists, but also a fanatical desire to protect Israel from reasonable criticism for its barbaric treatment of the Palestinians through conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Many of Israel’s most trenchant critics are decent, self-respecting, God-fearing or secular Jews. People like Jackie Walker, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Tony Greenstein, Ilan Pappe and Martin Odoni. These people are subject to particular abuse, vilification and sometimes even physical assault because they show that the Jewish community is not and has never been uniformly behind Israel, no matter how many laws Netanyahu passed to say that Jewry and the state of Israel were one and the same.

Coyle was undoubtedly motivated by a fear of Marxism and pro-Israel fanaticism when he made his noxious attack on JVL, rather than anti-Semitism per se. But he repeats very closely the real anti-Semitic, anti-democratic and anti-parliamentary denunciations of the Nazis.

Despite the attacks on Corbyn for anti-Semitic tropes, the real Nazi rhetoric is coming from the ultra-Zionists and Blairites.

Labour Anti-Semitism: Blairite MP Neil Coyle Demands Expulsion of Jewish Voice for Labour

I put up a post yesterday about Keir Starmer’s plans to purge four left-wing groups from the Labour party – Resist, Labour Against the Witch-Hunt, the Labour in Exile Network and Socialist Appeal. He and his fellow Blairites despise Labour Against the Witch-Hunt and the Labour in Exile Network because they challenge the lie that the people purged from the party were anti-Semites. They weren’t. Many of them were Jewish, like Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein, and were very firmly anti-racist with a firm commitment to combating real anti-Semites and Fascists, such as Marc Wadsworth, a Black anti-racism activist who worked with the Board of Deputies of British Jews to fight BNP anti-Jewish attacks in the Isle of Dogs. The real reason they were purged was that they were socialists, who wanted a return to the mixed economy of the post-War consensus, a nationalised NHS and a welfare state that genuinely supported the poor, the unemployed, the disabled and elderly. They were targeted because they supported Jeremy Corbyn’s superb programme and, like him, they were opposed to Israel’s brutal dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, or defended those who did. Mike was smeared as an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier because he wrote a document showing that Ken Livingstone was perfectly correct when he stated that Hitler initially supported Zionism.

The left-wing members of Labour’s NEC are determined to stand against the proposed purge. They fear it is an attack on Labour democracy and will lead to further purges and the erasure of the left-wing and Bennite traditions in the party. I believe very strongly that they are correct. As news of the proposed purge broke, various noxious MPs came out howling for the expulsion of other Labour party groups. One of them was Neil Coyle, who demanded that Jewish Voice for Labour should also be expelled along with other groups because they were ‘Communists’.

Not far enough. JVL should be gone too. And other outright Communists who have their own political party/ies they can ruin.

Mike in his great article about this latest piece of factionalism from Starmer points out that this anti-Semitic.

“There’s no reason to suggest that Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) are Communists. Or that any of the organisations Starmer will purge are “poisonous”, “toxic” or “warped”.

But it is easier to persuade doubters with emotive language than it is to actually provide a reasoned argument for the unreasonable thing Starmer is about to do.

Coyle’s tweet is anti-Semitic. JVL argues that the purge of Labour Party members on grounds of anti-Semitism is false – from a Jewish standpoint. Coyle is therefore prejudiced against these Jews because they are Jews, which is the classic definition of anti-Semitism. And Starmer is perfectly happy with that, meaning that he is also an anti-Semite, notwithstanding his familial connections to Judaism.“

Absolutely. The malignant and intolerant ultra-Zionist right of the party despise Jewish Voice for Labour because they stood up for Corbyn, and denounced the attacks on the Palestinians. The Israel lobby is particularly harsh on Jewish critics of Israel, because they visibly contradict the lie put into Israeli law by Netanyahu that Jewry and Israel are synonymous and the Jewish state has the support and affection of the world’s Jews. Hence, Jewish critics of Israel are smeared as self-hating, anti-Semites and reviled as ‘traitors’ and ‘kapos’ – the last a reference to the officials in the Warsaw ghetto to whom the Nazis delegated the responsibility of selecting the victims destined for Auschwitz and the other murder factories.

Coyle’s own comment, however, is extremely close to real Nazi anti-Semitism.

The Nazis railed against ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, considering that Communism and ‘Marxist’ socialism, along with capitalism, liberalism, democracy and trade unions were all part of the overarching Jewish conspiracy to enslave White gentiles. They also claimed that Jews were disproportionately represented in the Social Democrats, the German equivalent of the British Labour party, and these socialist Jews were working to reduce the number of ‘Aryan’ members of the Reichstag as part of their insidious conspiracy. While Coyle isn’t a Nazi, his comment contains many Nazi tropes. If it came from a Corbynite group, they would be accused of anti-Semitism and expelled. But Coyle is safe because of the partisan bias of the NEC and because his noxious comment is directed against socialist, genuinely anti-racist Jews.

But it is a form of anti-Semitism, and racism in the party against Blacks and Muslims has risen under Starmer, whose followers in the NEC were responsible for the racist bullying of Black MPs and activists such as Diane Abbott.

The four groups Starmer wants to purge are not a threat to the Labour party. Starmer and his supporters in the NEC are, and it is they who should be purged and expelled as Thatcherites and racists opposed to genuine Labour values and policies.

Vandals! Israel Destroys Ancient Canaanite Cemetery for Settler-Only Road

Mike’s also written an excellent article about Starmer’s planned purge of the Labour left while remaining absolutely complacent and ineffective against the Tories. He also makes the point that the purge is being directed against socialists and genuine supporters of traditional Labour values and policies. This includes decent, principled men and women who are opposed to Israel’s brutalisation and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Many of them, who have been terribly demonised and vilified, are self-respecting, upstanding Jews, like Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein. Mike’s put up a series of tweets by peeps criticising Starmer for this renewed persecution, as well as some of the atrocities Israel is pushing through without a murmur from him. This includes the destruction of an ancient Canaanite cemetery as reported by the independent Lebanese journalist Sarah abdallah, who tweeted

Israel just destroyed the oldest known Canaanite cemetery in Palestine, a 4,200-year old site, to build an Israeli-settlers-only road. This is a war crime. The occupation regime is literally erasing Palestine’s history as the world looks on in silence.

This is absolutely true. Tony’s put up a series of pieces on his blog pointing out that there is an absolute ban on teaching or using books about Palestinian history and culture in Israeli schools. Furthermore, some archaeologists have criticised Israel for its imposition of nationalist Israeli interpretations on Israeli archaeology. For example, the periods into which the ancient history of Israel are divided are given names based on the country’s history as described in the Bible, such as that of King Solomon. The remains of ancient towns mentioned in the Bible, which have been excavated by Israeli archaeologists, generally lay underneath Palestinian settlements. The result has been that the information archaeologists have gained about ancient Israel has come at the expense of the destruction of Palestinian communities. I’m an historians and archaeologist, and while I support Biblical archaeology as far as it can reasonably be defended, I am definitely opposed at the destruction of the Palestinian people’s own archaeological heritage, which includes the country’s Canaanite remains. The destruction of the Canaanite cemetery is indeed a war crime. I think it may also count as an act of genocide under international law. If I remember correctly, this includes not just the massacre and physical extermination of a people, but also the forcible destruction of their ethnic identity. And I’d say that the destruction of Palestinian monuments and archaeology constitutes just such an atrocity, as well as a barbaric destruction of the past in itself.

But I’m not surprised Starmer hasn’t said anything against it. By his own admission, he’s an avowed Zionist and the Blairites showed the contempt they had for historical truth when they claimed that Ken Livingstone was an anti-Semite when he said that Hitler initially supported Zionism. Nothing in that statement is an anti-Semitic, as it’s factually correct. This was the Ha’avara Agreement made between Nazi Germany and the Zionists in which German Jews were to be smuggled into Palestine, then under the British mandate. It didn’t last long, unsurprisingly, but it certainly existed and is described on the website of the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Israel itself. But it contradicts the approved Zionist view of Jewish history, and so those that mention it, like Livingstone, and their defenders, like Mike over at Vox Political, are smeared and libelled as anti-Semites.

History is valuable and needs to be protected from assault and falsification, regardless of who’s doing it. And Starmer is showing himself to be completely incapable of defending objective truth and fair, reasonable comment against politically motivated lies.