Tony Greenstein Unmasks 31 Israel Activists Disrupting Palestinian Events

Back on the 9th December 2017, Tony Greenstein, the pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist activist, listed on his blog 31 pro-Israel activists, who regularly protest and disrupt pro-Palestinian events in London. He also has photos of them, and puts names to faces, along with very brief remarks about them. He begins his piece with the following passage:

Below we name and shame the 31 fascists and Zionists who have been attempting to disrupt and prevent solidarity events on Palestine. Led by Jonathan Hoffman they contain people who are members of other fascist groups like Britain First and the new Pegida. We see their connection with the far-Right. Jewish bourgeois groups like the Board of Deputies deliberately turn a blind eye to these people and no questions have been asked about Hoffman’s open links with neo-Nazis, holocaust deniers and fascists.

These people need to be treated in exactly the same way by the Left as fascists have traditionally been treated and that is to be physically driven off. As the alliance between Zionist activists and fascists grows, the Left needs to wake up to what is happening and get organised.

They’re quite a sordid bunch. At least two of these charmers have spent time in prison, or jumped bail before they could be jailed. And among the organisations they represent are the Jewish Defence League, the EDL – Jewish Division, Pegida UK, and the storm troopers of Britain First. A number of them sport Kahane T-shirts, which Greenstein explains as ‘Jewish Neo-Nazi’. I know very little about Meir Kahane, except that he was an extreme right-wing gun nut, who believed that Jews should arm themselves against persecution. And that they had an absolute right to Palestine. According to Adam Parfrey in one of his books, Apocalypse Culture or Cult Rapture, Kahane was an influence on one of the groups in the militia movement of the 1990s. The militias were right-wing, survivalist private armies, set up to defend America against despotic left-wing government and the collapse of civilisation once the Blacks, Commies, feminists and leftists took over. A number were very definitely bitterly anti-Semitic, with all the vile fantasies about ZOG. No, not Ahmed Zogu, the former king of Albania, but the Zionist Occupation Government. In their weird fantasies, America is really secretly run by the Jews, who are intent on destroying the White race through racial intermixing. It’s the same bizarre and noxious conspiracy theory you can find on neo-Nazi sites like the Daily Stormer, or Stormfront. However, one of the militia groups apparently was Jewish. Which adds further evidence to the numerous examples cited by Greenstein himself, which show how the Jewish extreme right and Zionists will make alliances with real anti-Semites and Fascist when it suits them.

A number of them are also members of the various fake organisations set up to combat anti-Semitism and advocate for Israel. These include the Israel Advocacy Movement, Eyeonantisemitism, UNWatch, Campaign4Truth and Hippodrome GG. Also featured is Jayda Fransen of Britain First, and various members of Essex Friends of Israel and Sussex Friends of Israel.

http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/exclusive-we-name-gang-of-31-zionists.html

I don’t advocate violence to anyone, and I find the idea of violence against Jews particularly repugnant because of the long history of persecution, violence and genocide against them. But these people are Fascists, pure and simple. They have allied with Fascists, in the shape of Britain First and the EDL. They support militant armed extreme right-wing organisations, or at least those wearing the Kahane T-shirts do. If they weren’t Jews and were members of gentile extreme nationalist and racist organisations, there’d be absolutely no question that they were Fascists. And so they deserve to be called and treated as such.

The Tory, Privatise Enterprise Cure for Stressed Teachers: Electrostimulate their Brains!

Everything about this says Bad Science, as in the book by Ben Goldacre. And ‘bad’ in every definition of the word. Not only wrong scientifically, but also morally. But it’s what you get all too often with the Tories in charge.

Mike over at Vox Political has today posted up a piece commenting on a story in today’s Torygraph, hyping the use of an electronic device, the Alpha-Stim, which Leigh Academies Trust are offering to their staff at seven secondary schools, seven primary schools and a special educational needs school in Kent to treat the symptoms of stress amongst their staff. The Torygraph says that the device is the size of a mobile phone, and works by sending micro-pulses of electricity to the brain to stimulate the production of alpha waves. This supposedly helps relieve anxiety, depression and sleep disorders. The Trust is offering it along with other therapies. The extract Mike includes in his piece quotes one Peter Caunt of Nottinghamshire Healthcare Trust, who says ‘We know this type of therapy works’ before going on to say that the question is whether it is cost-effective.

Mike compares it to the shock treatment used on very disturbed people, which works by burning out part of their frontal lobes. He states that he personally knows people, who’ve had it done, and they have not been the same afterwards.
He asks why the schools management company isn’t trying to solve the problem by making teachers’ lives less stressful.

He wonders if the real reason is that the company’s bosses want to turn their staff into compliant little teaching zombies, who won’t complain, because they’ve had their conscience burned out of them along with the stress.

He also makes the point that the Trust used to be headed by Frank Green, who was appointed to a two-year stint as schools commissioner by Michael Gove. This shows the strong connection between the company and the Tory party.

The device should, apparently, be used for 20 minutes each, but some teaching staff are using it twice or three times. So Mike asks the obvious question of what kind of teachers they’re like afterwards.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/07/03/the-tory-cure-for-stressed-teachers-is-electrocute-their-brains/

Everything about this is highly dubious. It looks very much like something straight out of the accounts of bad, if not pathological science, from the pages of Ben Goldacre, Martin Gardner and others. Ben Goldacre, you may remember, wrote a book, Bad Science, about this kind of nonsense a few years ago. the Sceptic, Martin Gardner also attacked bad and pernicious science a few decades ago in his Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. This looks like a prime example of it, to go with other, earlier pseudo-sciences like eugenics, lobotomies, Lysenkoism, Nazi ‘race science’ and monkey glands.

As for electro-convulsive therapy, it was devised by a German Jewish doctor, who fled Nazi Germany to Fascist Italy. Deciding that it could be an effective method of treating the mentally ill, he started by testing it on tramps he and the authorities rounded up off the street. Adam Parfrey published an essay on it, ‘Gimme Shock Treatment’, in one of his books on the extremes of belief in 1990s America, Apocalypse Culture or Cult Rapture. That essay made it very clear just how nasty it was.

It’s still used, but proper medical professionals only resort to it in the case of severely disturbed people, where there really isn’t much choice.

And everything known about the brain should say that tinkering with it, unless you know exactly what you’re doing, is an appallingly bad idea. The brain is the most complex structure in the known universe. Modern neuroscience has succeeded in identifying which parts of the brain produces which mental function, but even so, there is a vast amount we don’t know. Raymond Tallis, who is a Humanist and former neurologist and neurosurgeon, wrote a book, Aping Mankind, with the aim to show that much human thought and mind couldn’t be reduced to neurological functions. He stated clearly that he wanted to show that thinking was ‘as mysterious as walking on water’. Given the vast complexity of the brain, and its vulnerability, it really is stupid and dangerous to mess around with it in this manner.

Remember a few years ago, when many doctors started to worry about possible brain damage caused by putting mobile phones next to your ear? They were afraid of the health risks posed by putting what is a microwave source next to your brain when talking on the phone.

It also reminds me of the ‘feedback cult’ of the ’70s. This also noted the connection between alpha waves and mood. It therefore encouraged people to hook themselves up to special monitors, which registered their alpha waves, and then learn how to control them and so altered their mood, all for supposedly beneficial purposes. That was also debunked some time ago.

The alpha-stim also sounds to be me like something that escaped from the Human Potential labs in the ’60s and ’70s. The Human Potential movement was one of those weird movements based on psychology that emerged in the 1960s, promising to bring people fulfilment and happiness through their programme of therapies. It still survives in various forms, and developed strong links with corporate capitalism, to the point where its detractors have called it a corporate mind control cult.

Adam Curtis devoted a programme to it in his documentary about the legacy of Freudianism, The Century of the Self, over a decade ago now. And what the programme revealed about it was truly chilling. The movement and its doctors managed to convince the medical profession to let them try to treat a selection of patients suffering from schizophrenia. The treatment consisted of dosing these poor souls up to the gills with LSD, and then attaching electrodes to electrify their brains. And all the while they were taught to repeat to themselves, ‘I am comfortable in myself’.

They interviewed one poor young woman, who’d been a victim of this nonsense. The treatment was a horrible, ghastly failure. It was perhaps a mercy that the woman said that she couldn’t remember much about it now, except that sometimes she had it done several times a day. It was this kind of appalling medical experimentation that the producers of Classic Star Trek took solid aim at in the episode ‘Dagger of the Mind’.

As for this latest rubbish, it also reminds me of an episode in Star Trek: Deep Space 9, when Doctor Bashir is called on treat Garak, the station’s Kardassian tailor and spy. Garak, like many other Kardassian secret agents, had a device implanted in his brain to stimulate his pleasure centres, so he could get through being tortured. Garak, however, has become so miserable that he started using it recreationally, and so has become addicted. Bashir has no choice but to find out what he can about the device, and try to remove it from his friend.

Which all sounds dangerously close to what’s going on here, with the exception that it’s teachers being treated with it, not alien spies.

I am really not at all surprised that it’s the Tories, or a company that’s associated with them, that’s peddling this nonsense. The Tories just love pseudoscience. I’ve reblogged stuff from Kitty S. Jones and other disability bloggers about the model of sickness devised by Unum and their pet psychiatrists at Cardiff University to have people thrown off benefit and declared fit for work, has been roundly debunked by other medical professionals.

And a little while ago, Private Eye in its ‘Rotten Boroughs’ column took a pot shot at a Tory-controlled council in Kent or that part of the world, where the local authority had cut council services, but was funnelling tens of thousands of pounds to a company headed by one of its female members, which specialised in using Neuro-Linguistic Programming or some other kind of dodgy therapy to offer spurious treatment to council staff.

Which, again, sounds very much like what’s going on here.

And then there was the case of the Leaderene herself, Maggie Thatcher. Thatcher was into Ayur Veda, a system of alternative therapies brought to the world by one of the dodgy Indian gurus, who rocked up here in the 1960s. Thatcher treated herself to baths, where along with the water there was a weak electric current. Obviously, she thought it would do her some good. I’m quite sure there were many others, who wish the voltage had been somewhat stronger.

This looks to me very much like a potentially harmful pseudoscience. As for Caunt’s statement that ‘we know it works’, that’s what Tory spokespeople have said about work improving people’s mental health, and other mental professionals, not to mention normal, ordinary people without a financial or ideological stake in it, pointing out that it’s rubbish. And I’ve no doubt it’s the same here.

This is just bad science, which is being hyped by company that obviously finds it cheaper to have their staff trying to make themselves less miserable by running electricity through their brains, than actually trying to do something more positive and concrete to improve conditions for them.

Pretty much like British society as a whole, where instead of offering real guidance and support to the unemployed, their harangued and demeaned by Jobcentre Staff through stupid, nonsensical models of unemployment and disability supported as government policy.

Zionist Fearmongering and Israel’s Demographic Crisis

Tuesday evening I got the news from Mike, of Vox Political, that he’d been libelled as an anti-Semite by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, who wish to have him deselected as his local Labour candidate in the Powys council elections. As I blogged yesterday, Mike is actually one of the least prejudiced people I know. As his record shows, he is not remotely anti-Semitic, or prejudiced against anyone else based on their skin colour, religion or sexual preference. When he was at College, he was asked by one of his Jewish friends to be a reader in her commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust. Mike was one of those reading out some of the names of the millions butchered by the Nazis. He was very proud of the fact that the girl was deeply moved by his performance.

Mike’s real crime is to oppose the attempts of the Israel lobby and the Blairites within the Labour party to silence Israel’s critics by smearing them as anti-Semites. It’s standard practise for the Zionist lobby in general. Decent people, who stand together with the Palestinians against their brutalisation, massacre and expulsion, are libelled as racists. The victims includes not only anti-racist gentiles, but also proud Jews, from the secular to the Torah-observant. Indeed, many of the Jewish victims of these smears believe that the Zionist lobby especially singles out Jews for particular vilification. Those so maligned by the Zionists also include Israelis, like Dr Ilan Pappe, who was forced out of his homeland because of his determination to present and publish the truth about Israel’s crimes against humanity. But Dr Pappe is no self-hating Jew, and has defended his people, the Israelis. In one video I put up a few months ago, he spoke about how Israelis were decent people, who just need the facts of their country’s terrorisation of the country’s indigenous people explained to them. Before he was forced out, he was very proud at opening his home, every Thursday evening, to his fellow Israelis so he could do just that. He states that these evenings were very well attended by decent, but confused Israelis, seeking the truth.

While I am certainly not complacent about the threat of anti-Semitism and other forms of racism in the West, I am very sceptical of some of the grosser claims about it made by apologists for the Israeli regime. These are a gross distortion of what is really happening and are made, not to protect British or European Jews, but to provide further colonists for Israel.

Over the past decade and a half, various individuals have come forward claiming that the situation facing Jews in Europe today is exactly like that which faced their parents and grandparents in the 1930s. This often reaches extremely grotesque and hysterical anticipations of a renewed Holocaust in the very near future. Round about 2004 the Conservative magazine the Spectator, published a review of an American book set in France in the next decade or the 2030s. The remnants of the Socialist parties in the European parliament had joined forces with the burgeoning Islamic parties to begin the process of exterminating the Jews. This farrago was given a glowing review, if memory serves me correctly, by Frederick Raphael, then back in the media eye after his work on the script for Stanley Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut. This was part of a standard narrative being sold to the European and American public by the Zionist right after 9/11. There were various books published in America, which claimed that the response of the Left after 9/11 and their attempts to defend innocent Muslims against victimisation, showed that liberals in America and Socialists in Europe where inherently anti-Semitic.

Many of those making these libels offered a simple solution for European Jews: they should emigrate to Israel. This was made by a rabbi in the south of France following attacks on Jews in his country a few years ago. One of the top level bureaucrats at the BBC, Danny Cohen, resigned and emigrated to Israel a few years ago, making the same claims.

As a Brit and a European, I don’t recognise these portrayals of my continent and my country, although I do realise that there is a terrible culture of anti-Semitism in eastern Europe. These claims aren’t made to combat genuine anti-Semitism. They’re made to encourage Jews to move to Israel, because of the profound demographic crisis the country is facing. That crisis is explained in the chapter on modern Israel in the history textbook, The Modern Middle East, edited by Albert Hourani.

In the 1990s there was a poll of Jewish young people, which asked them where they would rather live. Would they rather live in America, where their neighbours were Christians, who loved them, or Israel, where their neighbours were Muslims, who hated them? I’ve forgotten the exact figure, but about 75 per cent of the youngsters, who responded said ‘America’.

The country’s leaders are also faced with a demographic crisis caused by Arab immigration, lower Israeli fertility and pressure from the Likud party’s coalition partners, who want to colonise the West Bank. Jewish Israelis are less fertile, in the strict demographic sense of having fewer children, than Arabs. As a result, many Israelis fear that they will be outbred by the Arabs, thus undermining Israel’s character as the Jewish state. Moreover, diaspora Jews are becoming increasingly assimilated into the general population. On May 21, 1986, The New York Times carried this snippet under the headline ‘Concern in Israel over Immigration’.

… Prof. Robert Bacchi, head of the Hebrew University statistics department, told the Cabinet that today’s 9.5 million Jews living outside of Israel would shrink to about 8 million by the year 2000 if current demographic trends in assimilation, intermarriage and low birth rates continues.

Prime Minister Shimon Pere said the answer is that every Jewish family in Israel should have four children. On Sunday the Cabinet approved in principle the allocation of as much as $20 million to help 6,000 infertile Israeli couples have children.

Quoted in Adam Parfrey, ‘Eugenics: The Orphaned Science’, in Adam Parfrey, ed. Apocalypse Culture, expanded and revised edition (Feral House 1990) 227-8.

The Israeli state relies on Arab labour in many sectors of the economy, to perform menial or other low-waged work that Jewish Israelis do not with to perform, like fruit picking. In some areas, such as the Negev, the Jewish population is extremely thinly spread. But Likud’s coalition partners are keen to expand Jewish colonisation of the Occupied Palestinian territories on the West Bank, as part of their programme to create a greater Eretz Israel matching the boundaries of ancient Israel. However, to do so with Israel’s present population would mean withdrawing Jews from areas like the Negev to colonise these areas. As a result, they would become wholly, or almost wholly, Arab.

It seems very clear to me that Likud and their ethno-nationalist partners are trying to solve this problem by encouraging Jewish emigration by the diaspora in which fearmongering and anti-Semitic slurs are a major instrument. Israel’s critics are vilified and the all-too real threat of rising anti-Semitism grotesquely exaggerated and misrepresented, in order to make European and British fear and distrust their gentile compatriots, in the hope that they will move to Israel to bolster that country’s declining share of the population.

It’s a vile policy, that goes back to the 1930s. A little while ago I posted a piece about how some of the Zionist leaders made it quite clear that they were happy for the Nazis to butcher Jewish Europeans, if that encourage the survivors to move to Israel. They really hated those patriotic Jewish organisations, like the League of Jewish Servicemen, the Bund Judischer Frontsoldaten, in Germany, who fought for Jews to continue to live in peace in their historic European homelands.

Fears of a similar holocaust are being played up by the Zionists for exactly the same reasons today. It’s a vile, racist policy designed to make European Jews feel insecure and suspicious of wider, gentile society, in order to provide more colonists for what is a European settler state. Right up to the point of smearing and vilifying Jews and Israelis, who object to this policy, as anti-Semites themselves.

Hence the lies and smears, of which Mike, Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker and so many, many others, have been victims. We need to stand together, Jews and gentiles alike, against these lies and attempts to divide us. Just as we need to stand together against the genuine anti-Semites now crawling out of the woodwork, the Islamophobes, and those who would stir up hatred against Blacks, Asians, gays or whoever.

The Culpable Silence over the Genocide of the Disabled

Two weeks ago Mike over at Vox Political posted a piece about how he had praised on Twitter the Last Leg for its hosts describing the Tory government’s lethal policy of throwing disabled people off benefits for what it was: a disabled genocide. Alex Brooker and the show’s main man, Adam Hills had said of the policy

“At first these cuts looked like a good plan experiencing teething problems, then it started to feel like a badly executed system but now – it’s beginning to look a lot like disabled genocide.”

“This government is slowly killing off a generation of disabled people.””

He continued: “The only question is are they doing it on purpose? Because if you are, why stop at sanctions?

”Why not round us up put us on a reservation and sterilise the drinking water because that is literally more humane than what you’re doing right now. For any Conservatives watching that is not a genuine suggestion.”

Brooker and Hills then urged the government committee meeting to examine the issue not to issue bonus for swift assessments, but to punish people when they do so wrongly.

Mike makes the point that his blog had also been describing the Tory policy as a genocide for years. Mike also hoped this would spark a debate, but noted that the social media was far too much a minority pursuit to do so on its own. He hoped mentioning the Last Leg, a popular comedy news review show on Channel 4, would do something to get more people interested. Unfortunately, Mike was disappointed. After only a couple of days, the story had been overtaken by the controversy surrounding Emma Watson showing much of her bosom in one of the fashion magazines.

See: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/03/05/praise-for-the-last-legs-attack-on-disabled-genocide-but-was-it-only-words/

I am not surprised there has been this silence over the organised murder of the disabled. Much of the supposed news content of the mass media is, as Mike and the other bloggers have pointed out time and again, ad nauseam, about provoking hatred and demonising those on benefits and particularly the disabled. Mike has frequently cited the statistic that while fraud accounts for only 0.7 per cent of benefit claims, the general public seem to have swallowed the media’s lie so that they believe 25 per cent of all benefit recipients are scroungers and malingerers. One of the worst offenders in this regard is the Daily Hail, where these stories are a constant staple of its ‘journalism’. The TV companies aren’t much better, however. Over the past few years we’ve also seen the emergence of ‘poverty porn’ TV series, like Channel 4’s Benefits Street, looking at the lives of Britain’s poorest people on welfare. These series also regularly show amongst their cast of real-life characters, at least one person, who is committing fraud. It wasn’t a coincidence that one of these series was produced by the TV company owned by Esther McVie, Cameron’s ‘Wicked Witch of the Wirral’, who was briefly in charge of throwing the disabled out off benefits and out of their homes when she was at the DWP.

The media’s and general public’s lack of reaction to the claim that Britain’s disabled people are being systematically targeted for extermination by an uncaring government reminded me of the controversy in America way back in the late 1980s and early 1990s about claims that there was a secret government plot to exterminate the Black population. Many Black Americans were so convinced of this, that Jack White, a journalist at Time magazine, wrote an article rebutting it with the title ‘Genocide Mumbo Jumbo’. Harry Allen, the ‘media assassin’ with the Black rap outfit, Public Enemy, was then asked to write a response to it. Adam Parfrey included the resulting article ‘How to Kill: Are Afrikan People Subjects of a Genocidal Plot?’ in his book Apocalypse Culture (Los Angeles: Feral House 1990) 229-44.

Apocalypse Culture is an anthology of essays and articles on fringe and extreme issues in America during the late ’80s and first year of the ’90s. Many of the articles are written from an occult perspective, or that of new religious movements, the paranormal, and extreme or fringe political movements so that the authors include the late head of the Church of Satan, Anton Szandor LaVey and the founder of the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammed, as well as Oswald Spengler, the conspiracy theorist John Shelby Downard and the chronicler of weird phenomena, Charles Fort, and the Red Brigades. This is genuinely transgressive writing. While I don’t agree with the occult and am not a member of a new religious movement or hold the extremist political views of some of the authors, this does not mean that I don’t think that some of the writers have a point.

Allen in his article interviewed Jack White and Asiba Tukahache, a First Nation American woman, who stated that she’d been aware of the genocide of Black people since 1973. Clearly the organised campaigns that have been inflicted on Black people and Indigenous Americans are different from the British government’s attacks on the disabled. Nevertheless, some of the observations Tupahache and White make do seem to parallel some of attitudes and the process of discrimination that disabled people on this side of the Pond are experiencing. For example, Tupahache remarks on the way racist portrayals of Blacks were still considered acceptable on television, and the way monuments to her people on Long Island were being obliterated in the 70s, at the same time Roots was on TV and everyone was talking about slavery. She said that what first brought this issue to her attention was

‘Seeing an ‘Inky’ Warner Bros. cartoon caricature on television. I was just amazed that the cartoon was still being shown, and just how easy it was for that to be shown, and no one objected. No one seemed to think anything was wrong. I started making photographs, taking pictures, shooting off the television-Flintstones cartoons, shooting ads out of magazines, billboards and everything. Just feeling like there was something I was going to do with it, just to tell everybody how wrong it was and how abnormal it was to pretend, or at least not know, that anything was wrong, when it really was a very hurtful thing. I didn’t what I was gonna do, I knew I was gonna do something, and I just started collecting stuff, and it turned into boxes…

I think the turning point was when some land markers were going to declare on (sic) of our ancestral areas Long Island’s first Black national land mark. It kind of flipped my brain inside out, trying to deal with the panic and outrage of my relatives, while at the same time trying to understand and cope with deaf, dumb and blindness of a public, who I thought wanted to know the truth, but who, in fact, only wanted to know what they wanted to hear. 1977, right after Roots was televised, and everybody was slave wild. And it was bicentennial time, and nobody wanted to hear about this obscure idea of a people called Matinecoc getting in the way of their slavery revelry and their bicentennial minutes.

Tupahache was nevertheless successful in bringing the issue to a large number of people, and said in the interview that she was overwhelmed by the public’s response. She stated that it had received

Very positive reactions, for those who have seen it. And I guess that’s probably what really overwhelmed me the most. The first week I sold a hundred copies of it, after a radio discussion on a show called Night Talk. I didn’t really understand the impact that it made on people, but it did [make one]. And just the process of sending them out to people, then finding it had been understood and useful was kind of a transition right there, because I had spent all the time gathering the evidence, figuring it out, writing it all out, and then sending it out. Saying goodbye to it.

She also makes the point that many people in Nazi Germany also did not believe that their government was trying to exterminate people because of their race.

Well, you have an environment of extreme terror. People are responding in terms of genocidal acts of aggression against them, because of how brutal things are and can be. And also, as DePres has said in his book, that a lot of people refused to believe that it was going on in Nazi Germany too.

And it was just that people who, quote, ‘live decently’, unquote, don’t want to think that there is anything going on around them that could mean a guilt on their part, or an examination of their lives, or a questioning of their own motives or failure to do something about it. But that has its opposite reaction: For all of that denial, you also have that very same panic and fear. Not that the fears of the people are unfounded, when I talk about panic, but from the absolute fright of what’s going on =which is so obvious to them, but is totally deniable and invisible to others who seem to wilfully not want to address it or change it.

There’s another form of absolute terror! When you totally rearrange what’s going on around you into “Mumbo Jumbo”, or to trivialise it, to the point of contempt, is another form of denial. To say it isn’t rue, to trivialize.

White and Tupahache also differed in their attitude to whether genocide was possible in a democracy. Tupahache did not believe it was, while White admitted it could. When asked if it was possible in the United States, he replied

Well, I think it’s probably unlikely. But sure, why not? I mean, probably not in the United States, but you’re asking in principle, right? In theory? Sure, I think it’s possible. I think that’s why in societies like this one we have constitutional protections: To protect minorities, because I think it’s always possible. I mean, the mass hysteria that attended the rise of Nazism in Germany could conceivably take rise in any society in the world, if had sufficient friction, and the right ethnic group, and the right sort of numbers involved. Again, I say, I don’t think that pertains to the United States, but it’s conceivable it could occur somewhere else, and probably has. I don’t know that it has but it probably has.

Some of the difference between White’s and Tupahache’s view of whether there is a Black genocide in America comes from their difference in attitude to what constitutes it. For White, it seems to be a matter of the use of physical force. For Tupahache, it comes through a system of racialization that denies people their nationhood and connection to the land, which makes them other than human, and which also leads the victims to blame themselves for the brutality that is inflicted upon them.

Reading these different, it’s clear from Tukahache’s experience that disabled people in Britain are not alone in finding that a public that considers itself liberal and informed does not want to hear about or discuss the way they are being systematically discriminated and killed through the withdrawal of the support they need. People don’t see it, because, like the racist images of Black people in mainstream culture, they don’t see anything wrong with it and don’t connect it to mass death.

The public is being told by the mass media that welfare recipients, and particularly the disabled, are all scroungers and malingerers, so they think that if people are being thrown off benefit, they’ve only themselves to blame, because they’re obviously a scrounger or malingerer. And like the Nazis, the Tories have been very carefully to keep the numbers of people they’ve killed from reaching the public. You look at the articles posted by Mike over at Vox Political about his struggle to get the information from IDS’ DWP. The Department refused again and again, decried his requests as ‘vexatious’, and did everything it could to block or evade answering the question. And it’s still doing so.

And my guess is that much of this indifference also comes from the was accusations of Fascism have become so routine, that there is a tendency not to take it seriously. For example, one of the people, who took the opportunity to pose on the empty fourth plinth as a public work of art, was a disabled woman in a wheelchair. She dressed in Nazi costume, and sat in her chair, on top of the plinth, as a protest against the government’s treatment of the disabled. This was reported in the Independent, and then, I think, forgotten. Yet another person from a minority making an hysterical and inflated claim to persecution.

My guess is that for most of the public, discrimination against the disabled is probably connected with issues of accessibility and jobs. These are issues of frustration and injustice, yes, but not at the same level as being herded into gas chambers, shot, or dragged into reservations or forced labour camps. And because of that – because the organised campaign to deny disabled people the funding they need to live, let alone live with dignity – it is easy for the public and the media to dismiss any complaints about genocide as grossly exaggerated. More inflated hyperbole from grievance-mongers.

Except that this is a genuine grievance, and the disabled are being genuinely killed by the government’s callousness and determination to save money, even if it means death to those refused it.

As for the issue of racial genocide, I’m afraid that now, after a quarter of a century, that seems far more possible in Trump’s America than it did when the article was first published. Trump’s administration is racist in its determination to deport and ban Latin American and Muslim immigration, and it includes people, who are genuinely racist and hold views that could reasonably be considered Fascist and White supremacist, like Steve Bannon, Richard Spencer and Sebastian Gorka. They need to be stopped, before they start killing people.

As for raising awareness of the genocide against the disabled in this country, Stilloaks, Atos Miracles and DPAC are publishing details of the people the government are victimising and throwing off benefit. I hope the Last Leg will continue to cover this issue, and persist in calling it what it is so that the Tories can’t get away with denying what they’re doing. There are artists out there, who’ve also made it the subject of their work. Johnny Void had on his site a few years ago a picture made up of smaller photos of some of the victims of the government’s policy. I hope they also carry on, and are joined by more artists, journalists and commenters. And perhaps what we need here is for a few more people on talk radio to cover this, and not be satisfied by the smooth, patronising lies of Damian Green, Iain Duncan Smith, Cameron or May.

Book Review: Gathering Storm: America’s Militia Threat

Morris Dees with James Corcoran (London: HarperCollins 1996).

A few minutes ago this evening I put up a post about an article on Hatewatch, a site by the Southern Poverty Law Centre that monitors extreme right-wing terrorism in the US, about the contacts between British Nazis, such as Thomas Mair, accused of the murder of Jo Cox, other extreme rightists, like Anders Breivik, and the National Alliance, the main Nazi organisation in the US. Twenty years ago, Morris Dees, the chief trial counsel at the Southern Poverty Law Centre, wrote this book about the emergence of the militia movement in the US. These are right-wing paramilitary organisations, which came out of the survivalist movement in the 1980s. Their immediate impetus was the FBI’s killing of the wife and son of Randy Weaver, a right-wing extremist during an attack on his home at Ruby Ridge. The militias included fringe Christian groups, such as Christian identity and the neo-Nazi compounds and organisations at Hayden Lakes. It was the nexus that published the Turner Diaries, written by William Pierce, a Fascist fantasy about a White supremacist rebellion against a future America dominated by ZOG – the Zionist Occupation Government – Jews and Blacks. This was the book that inspired Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the federal building in Oklahoma.

These were and are armed groups that believed that America was run by a secret Jewish government intent on enslaving gentiles and determined to destroy the White race through racial interbreeding with Blacks. Flicking through the book again, I found a photo of Col. ‘Bo’ Gritz. Gritz claimed to be the real person on which Rambo was based, and for years supposedly toured Vietnam looking for missing American soldiers still kept in prison camps after the War. Apart from his paramilitary activities, Gritz also had some very strange metaphysical views. He turns up in one of the pieces by Adam Palfrey, collected in Cult Rapture and Apocalypse Culture, in which he is interviewed after a meeting with a little old lady, who was one of the New Age channellers, who appeared in the ’80s and ’90s. Most Channellers seemed to have been essentially decent types, offering fairly banal warnings about the importance of love, peace, spiritual values and the need to save the planet from a various cast of interplanetary aliens and Ascended Masters. Unfortunately, the interstellar authority this one channelled was Hathon. He was a 9 1/2 foot tall reptilian from the Pleiades and a Nazi, who told people that there really was an international Jewish conspiracy and UFOs were a Nazi secret weapon. It’s the kind of stuff Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke describes in his book on modern Neo-Nazi pagan cults, The Black Sun.

At the time, there was a real fear that the Militias would try to organise some kind of coup, or at least begin a wave of extreme right-wing terror. Those fears largely haven’t materialised. One demented woman, who claimed to be a militia commander, tried to organise the Militias to form a mass march on Washington, but this never got off the ground as most of them suspected her of being a federal agent provocateur. And not all of them were racist. The commander of one of the Militias was Black, and there was a Jewish Militia, whose members believed that Jews should arm themselves against the possibility of a renewed Holocaust. Nevertheless, extreme rightwing terrorism is still very much a threat in America. In contradiction to the impression you get from the media, there’s more terrorism by White Supremacist and Neo-Nazis in America than from the Islamists. This is part of the milieu that’s produced the extreme right-wing radio hosts, who tell their listeners that America is in the hands of an atheist/ Communist/ Nazi/ Muslim conspiracy to kill good patriotic Christian Americans. The type of people, who blithely state over the airwaves that Obama is going to kill more people than Pol Pot. They’re part of the same milieu that has produced the Nazi supporters of Donald Trump, and that may be their most lasting and pernicious legacy to American politics.