Jonathan Arkush’s smear against Corbyn and Jewdas as anti-Semites also set me wondering who Arkush and his fellows really represent in the Jewish community. Arkush and various other members of the Board of Deputies of British Jews are fully paid up, true-blue Tories. So they obviously don’t represent the many left-wing British Jews. Which Arkush more or less admitted when he accused the Labour leader of ignoring mainstream Jewry.
But I don’t think Arkush represents them either. I think he represents an elevated, corporate elite, which looks down on everyone else. I can remember a conversation I had many years ago with two friends of mine, who lived in a very affluent, Jewish area of London. They weren’t impressed with the people there, who were very, very clannish. If you weren’t part of their circle, you were no-one.
There’s nothing uniquely Jewish in all this, despite the claims of anti-Semites. You find rich snobs in all religions and in mainstream, gentile society. I’m very much aware of the perception of Christians as righteous, sanctimonious snobs, who look down on everyone else. As a general statement, it’s utterly false, but it is true of some groups. Like the very middle class Evangelicals, who support Trump and are trying to destroy what little remains of the American welfare network. Because they see the rich, not the poor, as the truly blessed and righteous.
And the religious types surrounding Theresa May and the Tory party undoubtedly hold the same views. In one of their articles, Lobster mentioned how, under the Tories, the DWP is stuffed with right-wing, largely Evangelical Christians, but drew back from calling it a conspiracy.
And then there’s the general snobbery and bigotry in the Tory party itself. Like the comments about the homeless ‘They’re the people you step over coming out of the opera’. Toby Young’s sneering comments about the poor, the disabled and Blacks, Asians and other non-Whites or members of immigrant groups. As well as his loathsome misogyny. Ben Bradley and the other Tories, who want to have their left-wing opponents sterilised. That kind of middle class snobbery is rife in the Tories, regardless of religion.
And it seems to me very strongly that Jonathan Arkush, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and the Jewish Leadership Council represent the same type of howling snobs in their own community. Rich corporate types, who feel threatened by left-wing Jews and Jewish organisations, and who are doing their best to smear them as ‘anti-Semitic’.
Arkush and Goldstein, the head of the Jewish Leadership Council, are snobs and bigots, who should be made to apologise for the use of anti-Semitic smears and tropes against decent people, and particularly left-wing Jewish organisations. No-one should be allowed to get away with bigotry, no matter how ‘respectable’. Not the Chief Rabbi, and certainly not the President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews.
This is another excellent piece of reporting from RT, which shows once again why it’s miles better than the Beeb and other establishment news services. This is a report from their Ann Vuger on the recent discovery of documents pertaining to the programme of forced sterilisation of the congenitally mentally handicapped in Japan. This was pure eugenics, as was made very clear in the title of this vile piece of legislation. It declared that it was ‘to protect the purity of the Japanese race’. It did not occur during the wartime Fascist regime, but ran from 1948 to 1996.
I think the operation was supposed to be consensual, but 16,500 people were sterilised without their consent.
The video contains testimony from one of the victims of the programme. This is a woman, who was falling behind at school. So her teacher and a government official forced her father to sign the papers for her sterilisation. The only thing the woman herself knew about it was when she woke up after the operation.
The sister of another victim also describes what happened to her. She states that her sister was forcibly sterilised as a congenital mental defective. In fact, the girl had been left brain-damaged by another medical procedure when she was aged two. And this was just one, of many false diagnoses.
Both these people had their identities changed and faces obscured for the cameras to protect them.
The programme also features Katsumi Yamamoto, Chief Executive and psychologist of the Tokyo Board of Public Health, who strongly condemns the programme and speculates about the existence of further files.
After the end of the programme, the records on it were destroyed, but as this shows, some have survived. It is hoped that the discover of these papers will help the victims in their campaign to sue the government for compensation.
This should delight the Tories’ Ben Bradley. After all, it was he, who wanted the unemployed to be forcibly given vasectomies to stop them breeding, along with a number of other highly offensive views. And Toby Young, a Tory journo who also delights in writing offensive articles, also attended a eugenics convention.
The eugenicists aren’t just in Japan. They’re right here in Theresa May’s Tory party. And they want to kill the poor and disabled.
It seems employers will seize any opportunity or technological development to spy on their workers. Yesterday the I carried a story about a tech company, that had developed a chip, carried in a security card, that would allow employers to monitor the whereabouts of their workers as moved through their building. It would help them see if they were spending too long in the loos or otherwise wasting time.
This is very much like something out of some of the nightmarish futures portrayed in cyberpunk SF. In Jack Womack’s novels of a parallel Earth in which central authority has collapsed along with Christianity – Ambient, Heathern, Random Acts of Mindless Violence and Elvissey – power is held by an oppressive industrial conglomerate. This corporation makes sure its staff stays at their desks through the simple expedient of shackling them there in stocks.
And we’re getting closer to that nightmare future all the time. I’ve mentioned the book on the terrible way office workers are treated in America, White Collar Sweatshop, before on this blog. One of the elements of modern American office life that was draining any kind of joy from clerical work was the constant surveillance.
And it’s being done over here to call centre workers. According to Private Eye, the weirdo Barclay Twins also tried to inflict it on their hacks in the Torygraph. The Gruesome Twosome had motion detectors put up around the hacks’ desks, so they could tell when they were walking about and not sat behind them making up stories about how wonderful capitalism and the Tories were, and how Corbyn was an evil Communist anti-Semite. This was a step too far for the galley slaves on the sinking rag. They revolted, and the vile pair had to take them down.
Britain really is becoming a totalitarian, Orwellian society, where we are monitored all the time. In 1984, the TVs watch you, to make sure you’re doing what Big Brother’s government wants. Now there are fears that private companies are collecting personal data on individuals from the internet, in order to target them better for advertising. And this is apart from the expansion of state surveillance under the Snooper’s Charter, and the travesty of the Secret Courts, in which you may not know what you’re accused of, nor the evidence against you, or who the witnesses and accusers are, or have members of the press and the public present, if the authorities deem all this is endangers ‘national security’.
And with the corporate media now panicking that no-one’s watching the Beeb and other news broadcasters because of their horrendous pro-Tory bias, perhaps it won’t be too long before some bright spark at a right-wing, corporate thinktank decides that we really ought to be monitored to make sure we’re watching the required amount of TV per day. Just like in the Robert Rankin comic SF/Fantasy novel, Armageddon – The Musical.
As for how evil the corporate masters of Womack’s fictional world is, the Southern businessman whose drawling pronunciation of ‘Heathen’ provides the title of the second book in the sequence, Heathern, organises shooting parties where the quarry is Black, Asian and Mexican children.
So far our captain of industry aren’t that despicable. Not just yet. On the other had, we do have IDS and Esther McVile to thank for the genocide of the disabled. This is their warped welfare policy, in which the goal is to throw as many desperate and needy people of government support as possible, even if it kills them. According to an official report, this has resulted in the deaths of 120,000 people.
They’re killing people, but doing so without alarming the sensitivities of all the ‘aspirant’ middle class folks, who vote for them. No gas chambers or SS-style murder clinics, as under Aktion T4. They just through them off benefit, have the Heil and the rest of the baying Tory press vilify them as frauds and scroungers, and leave them to starve to death.
But we can put actually physically shooting the poor for sport past them? Toby Young is an ardent supporter of eugenics with a hatred of the working class and nothing but sneers and contempt for ‘diversity’ and feminism. He also wrote that he masturbates to images of starving Africans. And his oppo Ben Bradley wanted the cops to play ‘splat the chav’ during the 2012 London riots. It might be a bit of stretch, but I can imagine both these charmers writing stupid pieces about how shooting chavs and the rest of the disadvantaged would be a nice day’s sport.
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.
I just read this little bit by Mike over at his Vox Political blog. It seems that Ben Bradley, who was appointed by Tweezer as the vice-chair of Young People, put up a blog post in 2012 declaring that unless something was done, Britain would drown in a sea of ‘unemployed wasters’ due to unemployed people on benefits having too many children. He then argued that they should be forced to have vasectomies. The story was, apparently, uncovered by Buzzfeed, and when they came to Bradley for comment, he simply deleted the article.
Bradley’s a nasty piece of work anyway. He was four-square behind the benefit cap, and voted against scrapping tuition fees, against university maintenance grants, against nurses’ bursaries, against Education Maintenance Allowance, ending the public sector pay cap and increases to the minimum wage.
In other words, he’s a typical Tory, who thinks only of enriching himself and his class, and exploiting working people, who no doubt after Ayn Rand he also regards as ‘moochers’ and ‘looters’. His comments about sterilising the young unemployed are pure eugenics. In the early part of the 20th century, the chattering classes all over Europe and America were worried by the possibility that the ‘dysgenic’ poor would outbreed all the responsible, biologically superior middle and upper classes, and so demanded legislation to stop them breeding. This programme was then taken up by the Nazis, who sterilised the congenitally disabled and recidivist criminals, before launching the infamous Aktion T4, which saw the mentally retarded murdered by Nazi doctors in clinics, in an operation run by the SS.
One of those, who was impressed by the eugenics argument was Lord Beveridge, before he issued his report that laid the foundations for the NHS. Beveridge argued that the long-term unemployed should be granted state support, but in return they would have to be sterilised to prevent them producing more children like them, who would be a drain on the state’s resources.
It’s recently been revealed that amongst his other activities, Toby Young attended a eugenics conference at University College London, as well as writing an article supporting it. And way back in the 1970s, Thatcher’s mentor Sir Keith Joseph expressed similar sentiments when he claimed that unmarried mothers were a threat to ‘our stock’.
The Tory party, it seems, is full of borderline Nazis, who hate the poor and the disabled, and wish them nothing but harm. Because they consider them a positive threat, not just to their position in society, but also to their biological superiority and purity.
Here’s Chunky Mark’s perspective on Bradley’s comments, in which he states that Bradley’s comments about it aren’t really an apology. He merely says that ‘the language was wrong’. Chunky Mark states that we are just experiments to the Tories, with people dying in corridors, and hormones injected into our food animals, which contaminate the meat. The Tories really believe in eugenics, and we’re their dinner.
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