Drag Queens, Freemasons and the World Economic Forum: The Weird Conspiracist Views of Correct, Not Political

I spent some time Saturday evening watching a couple of videos posted by the far right YouTube outfit, Correct, Not Political. One was of their man Jim walking around the demonstrators and supporters at Drag Queen Story Time in Colchester asking them awkward, ‘Socratic’ questions. The other was an interview between Jim and another fixture of the British far right, Godfrey Bloom. Both were weirdly interesting, but only for the light they cast on these two men’s conspiracist views. I’ve already written about how Correct, Not Political has the classic paranoid idea that the Masons are behind a massive conspiracy. His interview with Bloom, and the comments he made talking to some of the people in Colchester confirmed it. It also revealed him to be a mad anti-vaxxer who thinks they’re putting something in it to kill people as part of the WEF’s goal to reduce the human population on the planet.

The drag queen reading to the kids in Colchester was Edward Wilcox, who performs under the name ‘Ann Nemic’ or something similar. Talking to various members of the crowd, Jim said that ‘Nemic’ had been vaccinated twice, and given blood 92 times. He didn’t want to say too much, as he didn’t want his channel to be banned, but didn’t this tell you something. Er, yes. It demonstrates that he was like everyone else and did as the government and medical authorities advised. He got vaccinated to protect himself. As for giving blood 92 times, one of the women at the demonstration pointed out that it made him a good person and that surely you want people to give blood? His stage name also shows that he has a sense of humour: Ann Nemic/ anaemic. It doesn’t say anything more than that, unless you’re so paranoid you think he was actively trying to spread whatever it is in the vaccine which you think is a poison by donating his contaminated blood. Sadly, I think Jim really is that bonkers.

Looking at the crowd, he declared, ‘There isn’t half a lot of sodomy going on here!’ This was probably because they were quite a few gay people and people waving pride flags, not because gay men were having sex in the street. He then went round warning people that drag queen story hour was a plot to indoctrinate kids with gender ideology and abuse from paedophiles. Here he has a point. James Lindsay has read out a paper co-written by a drag queen and queer activist, which states that the purpose of these shows is to queer the children’s minds and upset gender norms. And yes, the founder of Queer Theory, Judith Butler, did support paedophilia and the breaking down of barriers between adult and child. But this doesn’t mean that every drag queen, library or school which stages these sessions holds such views or is even aware of their existence. They may just be doing it because they genuinely feel it is spreading tolerance towards gay and trans people whilst encouraging children to read. No more than that.

Walking around the demonstration was a bald bloke, who looked a bit like the Matt Lucas character George Daws, selling copies of the Socialist Worker. So Jim immediately called him a Communist, asked whether he was trying to get people to sign up for Communism, and then asked people to tell him if there was a country in which Communism had ever succeeded. Well, technically the man was a Trotskyite, which is a slightly different form of Marxism. And I actually agree with him in that there hasn’t been a country where Communism has been successful. China has been doing very well of late, but that’s also thanks to a capitalist component in its economy. But from where Britain stands at the moment, capitalism isn’t working very well either. Far from improving people’s living standards, they’re being lowered. However, the right haven’t given up the refrain that this generation has it far better than anyone else at any time in history, and capitalism has raised more people out of poverty than socialism has. The first part of that statement is utterly wrong, and the second needs serious qualifications.

The drag show, Jim said, was all about promoting equality. But this was equality under communism, where everyone didn’t have life equally good, but equally bad, except for those at the top. Again, this seems to come from critiques of the woke ideology from James Lindsay and the EDIJester. It’s certainly present in those ideologies, though its equity – equality of outcome – rather than equality of opportunity. There were a couple of examples of this in the American education system a month or so ago. One teacher, in the interest of equality, gave all her students an ‘A’. Another one just gave the average award to a series of excellent students, who actually deserved much higher marks to take them into one of the prestigious American universities to study science. This was eventually revealed after an inquiry and possibly legal action. I have yet to hear of a case like this in this country, however.

Jim also got shirty with the Trotskyite because the man called him a Fascist and a Nazi. Jim told him that was libel, to which the fellow rightly pointed out that it was slander, as he’d know if he’d actually had any knowledge of the law. As Jim has prefaced several of his livestreams with old footage of Oswald Mosley and the BUF, and that Mosley changed his benighted organisation’s name to the ‘British Union of Fascists and National Socialists’, it could be said that what the man said was fair comment.

When someone asked who was behind this plot to corrupt Britain’s kids, Jim replied that, again he didn’t want to say too much, but it was the Freemasons, citing a couple of 19th century authors, who, he said, were themselves 33rd degree members of the brotherhood. I’ve forgotten just who they were, but their names rang a bell among the sources cited by those convinced of such a conspiracy. Finally, after bothering the good burghers of Colchester for about an hour, and nearly being assaulted by some particularly angry LGBTQ+ rights demonstrators, he went off in search of something to drink. Going through the town’s back streets, he complained about the number of ‘weirdos’ there were and that it was all coffee houses. Quite what he has against coffee houses I don’t know. Perhaps he was afraid that if he went inside, left-wing intellectuals would all jump on him like the characters in Fraser all those years ago.

His conspiracist views became much clearer in his conversation with Godfrey Bloom. Bloom announced himself has having been an investment banker for 40 years and at one time a member of the defence council or something like that. He was thus well-placed to know that capitalism was about to collapse. Actually, there’s a Marxist economics professor on YouTube, Richard Wolf, who has being saying exactly the same thing. And if it hadn’t been for Brown in 2008, I’m sure it would have collapsed. The two then shared their views on the World Economic Forum wishing to depopulate the planet, set up Green Communism and make us all eat bugs. The WEF has captured all our institutions, including the monarchy. Prince Philip also believed there were too many people on the planet. Well, the late Duke of Edinburgh was the head of the World Wide Fund for Nature, so his views are hardly a surprise. The WEF are Malthusians, which means that they believe that population always outstrips the supply of available food, as suggested by the 19th century economist Thomas Malthus. Malthus and his followers believed that when this happened, starvation and war would inevitably result. In order to prevent this, they recommended birth control and were active promoting contraception. As did the Duke, who on one of his official visits to some tribe showed the men how to put on a condom using a spear. However, the WEF were going much further and planning to wipe out a sizable chunk of humanity using a manufactured disease or its vaccine. Those who survived would be under the WEF’s new communist order.

This made me wonder if Jim knew about the wretched views of the late zookeeper John Aspinall, best known for his big cats killing and mauling people. Aspinall also believed that there were too many people around. He said the British population should be only eight million. However, he definitely wasn’t a communist of any description. He declared that what the country needed was a ‘counterrevolution, Francoist in spirit.’ So his green views were closer to Hitler’s than the WEF. And almost certainly pretty close to Jim’s and Bloom’s.

Correct, Not Political’s Jim therefore seems to have read or watched much material about the woke ideology, especially Queer Theory, and mixed this up with old conspiracy theories about the masons. I also think there might be a touch of anti-Catholicism in their as well. When he was voicing his objections to drag queens reading to children as getting them used to nonces, one woman asked him about Roman Catholic priests abusing children. He didn’t agree with that, either, but said he didn’t agree with established religions as ‘they’re from Satan’. But some of the other things he has said, and they’re nothing I can put a precise finger on, suggests that he might have the same conspiracist views about the Catholic church, which is supposed to be doing the work of the antichrist, as some as the bigoted Protestant writers of the 19th century.

Correct, Not Political aren’t physically violent, and while Jim’s sneers about socialism are irritating, he personally has an affable manner. I can’t say that they present a physical danger, unlike National Action or the BNP, for example. What is dangerous is the mad anti-vaxxer views and the deranged paranoia about the WEF, which he also shares with the Lotus Eaters, Alex Jones and any number of others on the right. And these views are a danger to democratic politics, if only because the undermine proper democratic views in favour of suspicion and paranoia.

Open Letter from Hope Not Hate for Tories to Expel Former Fascist Local Councillor

I got this email from the anti-racist, anti-religious extremist organisation Hope Not Hate asking people to sign an open letter calling for the Tories to expel a local councillor, who used to be a member of the Mosleyite fascist group, the New British Union. It runs

‘Dear David,

Last night we broke the news that we’ve discovered a Conservative Party councillor with a worrying fascist past. 

Andy Weatherhead (formerly Andrew Beadle) represents the ward of Hythe West on Kent County Council. But as recently as 2014, he was a member of the fascist group the New British Union where he’d held the positions of Business Officer and Policy Officer.

The NBU is full of nazis and violent bigots. They are fascist revivalists who proudly display pictures online of members wearing pre-war fascist uniforms and openly try to emulate Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. One member of the group, Clive Ceronne, was even jailed for an arson attack on a mosque in Gloucester.

Tory councillor Andy Weatherhead wrote several blogs on the NBU website under a pseudonym. In them, he published deeply antisemitic passages, including criticising the government for “appeasing the British and International Jewish lobby, whilst allowing the British people to be feed [sic] lie after lie through the Jewish controlled Press and Media.”

Weatherhead’s NBU activity did not end there though. In 2013, he attended an NBU demonstration outside the Greek embassy in support of the Greek neo-nazi Golden Dawn party. Golden Dawn members were often accused of violently attacking immigrants, ethnic minorities and their political opponents. 

David, it’s simple. Andy Weatherhead is not fit to hold political office. 

And this is where you come in. Will you join other HOPE not hate members in calling for Andy Weatherhead to be permanently expelled from the Conservative Party?

EXPEL THIS TORY COUNCILLOR

This isn’t the first time that HOPE not hate has exposed elected officials with dangerous far-right beliefs. Last year, we discovered Tim Wills, a borough councillor in Worthing, West Sussex was an active supporter of the UK’s fastest-growing fascist threat, Patriotic Alternative. 

HOPE not hate supporters contacted Conservative Party Chairs asking for them to remove Wills and eventually, after immense pressure, he resigned.

Together, let’s drive out hate from our communities.

In solidarity,

Gregory – Researcher at HOPE not hate’

I’ve signed the open letter because the NBU really does seem to be exactly as they describe it – an attempt to revive Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. They even wear a uniform rather like Mosley’s Blackshirts, albeit the colour looks like very dark blue rather than black and have insignia very like Mosley’s black lightning bolt. Weatherhead also seems to be someone who really does believe all the real poisonous anti-Semitic conspiracies, which shouldn’t come as a surprise if he was a Mosleyite. Mosley denied he was ever anti-Semitic, but it was clear from his actions and general attitude that he was. He also changed the name of the BUF when he was trying to ingratiate himself with Hitler to the ‘British Union of Fascists and National Socialists’. Nazism is, by definition, anti-Semitic, and the Golden Dawn racist thugs. He’s definitely the kind of activist David Cameron made so much noise about expelling the party. And somehow, I’m not surprised that he also used to be UKIP, despite that party also stating that they would not accept former members of the far right into the party. It’s possible that Weatherhead might have changed his attitudes towards race and human rights since he left the NBU, but that’s highly debatable considering how many real islamophobes and anti-Semites were found on internet groups supporting Rees-Mogg.

Cartoon: Up Pompous

As I said, I’m glad Boris Johnson has recovered enough from the Coronavirus to be sent home. I really don’t want anyone to die from this disease, including BoJob. But his recovery also means that I can at last put up the cartoon below. I was drawing just when it was announced that Johnson had been taken into hospital, and to lampoon the man when he was fighting for his life would have been unacceptable. But Johnson’s illness doesn’t change what he is, or what he and his party stand for. And so they’re still suitable subjects for ridicule and satire.

Johnson prides himself on his classic learning. He presented a series a few years ago on ancient Rome, and had a column in the Spectator when he was its editor, in which he discussed what lessons the classics had for us today. I remember one piece he did in his series about Rome, in which he contrasted the early empire, which was governed by just 12 men, with the army of MEPs and bureaucrats that administer the EU. The obvious lesson there was that smaller government equals good government. Of course the argument falls apart when you consider the vast distance in time, morals and social and technological sophistication, as well as the simple fact that the EU and its constituent nations are meant to be democracies. Ancient Rome wasn’t. It was an oligarchy, in which only a narrow section of the population had the vote, and the only real political power was that of the emperor and the army. The senate continued to meet under the empire, but their debates were so meaningless that I think they more or less stopped having them. One emperor was forced to send them a message requesting them to debate something. With his background in the classics and admiration for ancient Rome, it therefore made sense to lampoon Boris as a Roman politician.

But readers of this blog of a certain age will also remember the late, great Frankie Howerd and the comedy, Up Pompeii. This was set in the famous Roman city, and starred Howerd as the slave, Lurcio. It would start with Lurcio leaving the house, sitting down on a convenient seat, and saying ‘Salute, citizens. And now, the prologue -‘ at which point he would be interrupted by some commotion. And thus would begin that week’s episode. It was a ’70s BBC TV show, but in the winter of 1990-1, it was revived by ITV. Howerd was once again Lurcio. But the show had moved with the times and changed one character. In the original series, I think the son of the family that owned him was supposed to be gay, and the butt of various jokes about effeminacy by Lurcio. This was before the gay rights movement had had quite the impact it has now, when jokes about gays were still acceptable. By the 1990s they weren’t, and so the gay son was replaced by a eunuch, so they could still carry on making the same jokes about lack of masculinity. Sadly, it only lasted one episode, as Howerd died after the first episode was shown.

His material, like the ‘Carry On’ films, is dated now, but Howerd was a great comedian and genuinely funny man. He lived in the village of Mark in Somerset, and after his death his home was turned into a museum. He was very popular and respected there, because whenever they had a village fete, he’d turn up to do a turn and give them his support. He also, I heard, used to rehearse in the church hall. A friend of mine told me he’d actually been in a church service while Howerd was rehearsing, and his lines could be heard coming through the hall. Let’s hope they weren’t the monologue where he pretended to be a vicar, and joked about how last Sunday he held a three-hour service for the incontinent. ‘There wasn’t a dry aisle in the house’, is the punchline to that one.

So I’ve drawn Johnson as a Roman patrician politician, being jeered and pelted with mud, cabbages and buckets of water by the mob. Behind him is Howerd’s Lurcio, looking at once shocked and puzzled, and underneath is one of Howerd’s catchphrases ‘Titter ye not’.

As Johnson and his party are authoritarian and extremely right-wing, I’ve tried to show their Fascistic tendencies in the decoration at the top. The pattern around the panel is based on a Roman design, although I’ve taken a few liberties. If you look at it, it’s composed of repeating swastikas. It also has the fasces, the bundle of rods with an axe attached. This was the ancient Roman symbol of the lictor, a Roman official. The rods symbolised his right to beat, and the axe to behead, Roman citizens. It was also adopted by Mussolini’s Fascists and their counterparts in other nations, like Oswald Mosley’s disgusting BUF.

Here’s the cartoon. I hope you enjoy it, and it helps cheer you up in these dreadful times.

 

The Board of Deputies of British Jews: Tory, Rich, Fanatically Zionist, Unrepresentative and ‘an Affront to Democracy’

Mike has put up several pieces this week commenting on the decision of all five contenders for the Labour leadership – Lisa Nandy, Keir Starmer, Jess Phillips, Rebecca Long-Bailey and Emily Thornberry – to sign a series of ten pledges devised by the Board of Deputies of British Jews on how they will tackle anti-Semitism in the Labour party. This has outraged Mike and a very large number of other Labour supporters and members, because it is a capitulation to the Board. It effectively cedes to the Board extremely wide-ranging and draconian powers over who can be accused of anti-Semitism, and how they should be tried, judged and punished. Mike and the other commenters, bloggers and activists on this issue have extensively criticised the document and how it represents a very serious breach of natural justice. For example, those accused of anti-Semitism are more or less to be treated as guilty simply through the accusation, and expelled promptly. I’ve made the point as an historian with an interest in the European witch hunts of the Middle Ages and 16th and 17th centuries that accused witches could expect a fairer trial than the kangaroo courts set up by the Labour party, and which are demanded by the Board and their satellite organisations within the party, like the Jewish Labour Movement. Some of the demands made by the Board very much resemble the way cults and totalitarian states exercise total control over their members’ lives. For example, another of the provisions demands that existing members do not have anything to do with those expelled for anti-Semitism. This is exactly like the way cults and less extreme religious sects demand that their members have nothing to do with those outside them, thus cutting ties with family and friends.

The Board is also not a credible judge of what constitutes anti-Semitism. They have been extremely bad on the issue on anti-Semitism in the Labour, acting in bad faith and deliberately falsifying its extent, supporting evidence and maligning and smearing decent women and men. 

Their motives throughout their pursuit of this issue has certainly been not to defend Jews against anti-Semitism. Rather, like their counterparts elsewhere in the Jewish establishment – the Chief Rabbinate, the Jewish press and the Jewish Leadership Council – it has been extremely party political. The goal has been to oust Corbyn as leader of the Labour party, purge it of his supporters and prevent it coming to power. Not because Corbyn is an anti-Semite – he isn’t by any objective standard – but because he is a staunch anti-racist and a critic of Israel’s slow-motion ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. And as Tories, like the rest of the Jewish establishment, they were also frightened by a movement within the Labour party that would restore power and dignity to working people, including Jews. David Rosenberg has made the point on his ‘Rebel Notes’ blog that the Board and its ilk do not represent Jews, who are working or lower-middle class – yes, they exist! – they don’t represent the Jewish disabled, the Jews who work in or use the public services. And they don’t give a damn about racism and real anti-Semitism. He has described how, when he was a young activist in ’70s and ’80s, the Board did its level best to stop Jews going on anti-racism demonstrations and gigs like ‘Rock Against Racism’. Ostensibly this was to protect the young and impressionable from anti-Zionist propaganda. But others suspected the real reason was that they had zero interest in joining protests against discrimination and hate against Blacks and Asians. And Tony Greenstein, another staunch Jewish critic of Israel and fierce opponent of racism and Fascism in all its forms, has described how, in the 1930s, when British Jews were in real existential danger from Mosley and other genuine Fascist and Nazi groups, the Board did nothing to encourage them to resist. When Mosley and his storm troopers marched through the East End of London to intimidate and terrorise the Jews and other minorities there, the Board meekly told them to stay indoors. Fortunately there were Jews, who didn’t believe in passively tolerating the BUF, and joined with the Communists, unions and other left-winger to give Mosley’s thugs the hiding they richly deserved.

The Board claims the authority to dictate the Labour party’s policy towards anti-Semitism as the organ representing the Jewish community as a whole. This is a lie.

Mike today put up a statement by Jewish Voice for Labour – a far more representative Jewish organisation than the Board – about this issue. And the simple answer is: they aren’t. The JVL said

The Board’s claim to be democratic is, however, distinctly tenuous. There are no British Jewish elections, no direct way for all British Jews to directly elect the board’s 300 Deputies. To be involved in electing Deputies, one must be a member of one or more of approximately 138 synagogues, or be connected to one of 34 ‘communal organisations’ (such as the UJIA or Reform Judaism) that are affiliated with the Board, all of which elect one to five Deputies—anyone not involved with these institutions does not have a vote, despite the Board still claiming to speak on their behalf. Inevitably, some individuals may be represented multiple times, through being members of more than one organisation.

The biggest problem, however, is with the elections held by affiliate organisations to select their deputies—it is these that justify the Board’s claim to be a representative democracy. Transparency is a fundamental requirement of democracy—there needs to be openness as to who the electorate is and how many of them turn out in order for any election to be considered legitimate. Despite its own constitution obliging it to receive the data (Appendix A, Clause 3: “the election shall not be validated unless the form incorporates… the total number of members of the congregation… and the number who attended the election meeting”), the Board does not release a list of the membership size or the numbers voting in each affiliate organisation, and claims to have no idea what the numbers might be. The Board’s spokesman explained to me that, “While we do need to be more thorough in collecting statistics, these figures wouldn’t add anything—they don’t speak to the democratic legitimacy of the organisation or to anything else.” This seems extraordinarily complacent—can we imagine a British election in which the size of the electorate, the list of candidates standing, and the turnout remained secret? It would be regarded as an affront to democracy.

The anti-democratic nature of the Board is confirmed by other Jewish critics, like Tony. They point out that the Board really only represents the United Synagogue, which is believed to have 40,000 members out of a total Jewish population in the country of 280,000 – 300,000. They don’t represent that third of the Jewish people, who are secular and don’t attend synagogue. Neither do they represent the Orthodox, may represent as much as a quarter of all Jewish Brits and are set to overtake the United Synagogue as the largest section of the Jewish population in a few years. Some synagogues haven’t had elections for years, and so have sitting candidates. Others don’t allow women to vote. And the Board also defines itself as a Zionist organisation, and so excludes Jews, who do not support Israel.

So it seems that the Board represents, at most, 1/3 of British Jews. That’s hardly a majority and gives them no mandate to issue their demands.

As for the Board’s manifest lack of democracy, it all reminds me of Britain before the 1833 Reform Act, with its pocket and rotten boroughs. But these are the people claiming to have the moral authority to speak for the British Jewish community!

I fully understand why the Labour leadership candidates signed the Board’s wretched pledges. They hoped that this would end the Board’s interference in the Labour party and their continued criticism. But it won’t. The Board and other Zionist organisations that use allegations of anti-Semitism as a weapon against their critics will not be satisfied. They see such capitulation as weakness, and will always press for further concessions. This is what Corbyn and his advisers, like Seaumas Milne, failed to understand. Instead of caving in, Corbyn should have fought back.

My own feeling now is that the only way to settle this issue decisively in Labour’s favour is to attack and discredit the Board – to show how biased and unrepresentative it is, to reveal how it lies and libels decent men and women, and particularly self-respecting Jews.

That would be a long, very hard, and perilous struggle, especially as the media and Tory press would be on the side of the Board all the way.

But until it is done, the Board as it stands now will always be a politically partisan threat to British democracy and genuine Jewish security and anti-racist action.

Frances Barber’s Racist, Anti-Semitic Meltdown at Ash Sarkar and Jon Lansman

Frances Barber is a minor ‘sleb, who appears in bit parts here and there. She turned up in Red Dwarf in the ’90s as one of the forms of shape-shifting genetically engineered organism that fed on emotion. Appearing as a glamorous woman, the creature fed on the Cat’s vanity. She also appeared a little while later in an episode of the sitcom My Family, in which she played a woman with depression, who was part of a poetry group which the son joins. She’s part of the coterie around Rachel Riley and Tracy Anne Oberman, who think that Corbyn and the Labour party really are Nazis. Because criticising Israel as an apartheid state and its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians means you have to be a fully paid-up anti-Semite ready to get another Holocaust going. And Zelo Street has put up an excellent piece describing and commenting on her meltdown at Ash Sarkar in which she unintentionally displayed how racist she was.

Why the fury? Sarkar had appeared on Question Time, and describes her self as Communist. She then issued a series of tweets declaring that her beloved Labour Party was now the Communist party, attacking Communism as a hateful, despicable regime and sneering that it was ‘good our [Labour] representative – meaning Ash Sarkar – loves it’. There two things at least wrong with that statement, as Zelo Street reminds us. Firstly, just because a regime describes itself as something doesn’t mean it actually is. North Korea describes itself as the ‘democratic people’s republic of North Korea’, but is obviously anything but. And as Sarkar herself reminded Barber, she’s not a member of the Labour party. Barber couldn’t accept this. She asked Sarkar why she was representing Labour. Sarkar replied that she wasn’t, unless she’d been elected an MP and hadn’t noticed. Then Barber had the first of her racist sneers. She responded

“Neither you or Shami Chakrabati [sic] have been elected, but you speak on behalf of Seumus [sic] each time you are on Political programs . We the people hate it. You do not speak for us”.

To which another tweeter, Louise Raw, answered in turn by asking Barber why she was throwing Sarkar in with Shami Chakrabati. Sarkar was a media commentator, Chakrabati the Shadow Attorney General. It couldn’t be because they were both Asian, could it?

Then Barber moved on acting out Godwin’s Law. This states that in an internet debate, sooner or later someone will compare someone else to the Nazis. Barber then commented on the news that there had been a proposal in the Labour party to put a candidate up against Harriet Harman if she chooses to stand as Speaker by declaring that Labour were ‘the Brown Shirts’. And when she found out that Jon Lansman, the head of Momentum had tabled a motion calling for the abolition of the post of Deputy Leader, she again made an accusation of Nazism. ‘As if we didn’t tell you,’ she wrote, Ernst Rohm in action’. As Zelo Street pointed out, she had just called a Jew a Nazi, which is anti-Semitic according to the definition of the term by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association.

Zelo Street concluded

‘Not much use calling anti-Semitism on others if she’s going to indulge in it herself. And that’s on top of the brown people inference. Ms Barber needs to learn one lesson.

Stay away from Twitter late at night. Or don’t bother, and give us all a good laugh.’

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/09/frances-barbers-bigoted-meltdown.html

Let’s make a few more points here, just to expand on those already made by the Sage of Crewe. When Sarkar describes herself as Communist, she’s undoubtedly talking about the Communist ideal, before it was substantially altered by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. I’ve put up pieces showing that most Marxists before the Bolshevik coup were democrats, after Marx himself. Except that they believed in a genuine democracy in which the workers took power into their own hands. Mainstream Marxist intellectuals like the Austrian Karl Kautsky hated the Bolshevik dictatorship and their persecution of the former upper and middle class. As for Soviet Communism, this described itself as Marxist-Leninism. In other words, Marxism as interpreted and adapted by Lenin. And when I was studying the Russian revolutionary movement at College, we were told that Lenin had altered Marxist doctrine almost as much, or as much, as the Revisionists.

As for the Labour party, the one thing Corbyn and the rest aren’t, is Communists. Corbyn’s programme of empowering the working and lower middle class by reviving the welfare state, taking the railways and other utilities into state ownership, giving back working people rights at work and restoring trade union power, is really simply a return to the post-War social democratic consensus. The consensus that no-one seriously challenged until Thatcher in 1979, with disastrous consequences. It’s nowhere near the complete nationalisation or the bureaucratic state Soviet Marxism demanded.

And let’s make one thing very clear: Corbyn and his supporters are very far from Nazis. 

Historically, it’s been left-wing Socialists, Communists and trade unionists, like Corbyn and his supporters, who’ve actually stood up physically to Nazism and Fascism in this country. If you want further evidence, go over to David Rosenberg’s blog, Rebel Notes. Rosenberg’s Jewish, and a member of the Jewish Socialist Group. He comes from the tradition of the Bund, the eastern European Jewish Socialist party, who fought for Jews to be able to live and work as equals and fellow countrymen with the gentile peoples of the countries in which they lived. They had no desire to go to Israel and displace a people, who had historically treated the Jews better than Christian Europeans. Which means he’s also a strong critic of Israel. Rosenberg has put up many pieces describing how the Communists, the ILP and trade unionists, including the ’47 Group of Jewish combat vets kicked the rear ends of Mosley and his squadristi in the BU up and down London and the provinces, so that gentiles, Jews, Blacks, Asians and working people in general could live in peace and dignity without fearing the jackboot. See, for example, his article ‘When Stockton Fought Back’, about how the good folk of Stockton on Tees fought Mosley when he tried campaigning in their toon.

See: https://rebellion602.wordpress.com/2019/09/08/when-the-people-of-stockton-fought-back/

His most recent article is ‘When I Listen to Boris Johnson and Hear Mosley’, about the similarities between our anti-democratic populist Prime Minister and Mosley when he was leader of the New Party before its transformation into the BUF.

https://rebellion602.wordpress.com/2019/09/10/when-i-listen-to-boris-johnson-and-hear-oswald-mosley/

It’s a comparison that has become particularly pertinent, especially as the Torygraph a few days ago decided to give space to Jaak Madison, a member of the Estonian conservative party. The article’s been taken down because Madison stated that he found Fascism had many great points, and Madison himself was a Holocaust denier or minimalist.

Corbyn and his supporters are anti-Fascists. The real stormtroopers are nearly all on the right, whatever idiots and liars like Barber, Riley and the rest think, led by a mendacious media and Zionist Jewish establishment. They are the only people, who really stand between us and real Fascism in this country.

As for Barber herself, she clearly thinks of the Labour Party in terms of New Labour, Blair’s Thatcherite entryist clique. They did some good things, but they stood for Neoliberalism and the destruction of the welfare state and privatisation of the NHS. They wanted it to become another Conservative party, and in some ways went beyond the policies of the Tories themselves. They were no friends to working people, both Jewish and gentile. And neither is Riley, Barber and Oberman for supporting them.

Guy Debord’s Cat: Violence to Fascists Is Justified

Following the violent clashes between the White supremacists, neo-Confederates and outright Nazis and the counter-protesters in Charlottesville the week before last, there have been a series of articles and denunciations of the Anti-Fascists for their physical attacks on the marching hordes of the extreme Right. One of those criticizing them is the veteran critic of capitalism, racism and imperialism, Noam Chomsky, who stated that by using violence, Antifa handed them a ‘propaganda coup’. Others have gone further, and complained that Antifa are against free speech, and so are as bad, or worse, as the Nazis they attacked.

The French philosophical feline strongly rejects this attitude, and has written a blog post explaining just why he supports violence against Fascism. This includes two videos, both of which are well worth watching. One is about the 43 Group, a band of Jewish ex-servicemen, who had seen for themselves the horrific results of Nazi anti-Semitism when they were among the troops, who liberated Auschwitz. After the War, they were disgusted to find the kind of people, who had committed such monstrous atrocities were not only at large, but preaching their murderous doctrines and hatred. They resolved to treat them as they deserved, and hit them time and again force them off the streets.

The second video is presented by Mensi Mensforth, a member of the eighties band Angelic Upstarts. He also talks about the long history of anti-Fascists using physical violence, from struggles in the 1930s against Mosley’s BUF, to today’s battles with the NF and related Nazi gangs. Mensforth and the others speaking on the programme make the point that the people the Antifa are fighting are themselves extremely violent. They talk about Asians in the poorer parts of Britain being firebombed out of their homes. Mensforth himself describes how his stance against the NF so infuriated them, that they tried to silence him by attacking him at one of the Upstart’s gigs. He was saved by Antifa, who were there to defend him.

The Cat starts off by making the point that Antifa is a position, not an organization. The word stands for Anti-Fascist Action, and while later in the article he states that Anti-Fascist Action was set up in 1985 by Red Action and other anti-Fascist groups, he makes the point that if you are opposed to Fascism, then you are Antifa. He also makes the point that Nazis and related organisations in the US have been allowed to march by claiming free speech as their defence, and supported by the local law enforcement agencies and Libertarian organisations, some of whom have their own, very dubious agendas.

Buddy Hell is particularly annoyed by the middle class liberals, who are defending the Nazis’ right to say the unspeakable. He makes the point that Fascists are capitalism’s shock troops. Their leaders come from the middle and upper classes, and they and their vile doctrine emerge when capitalism is in crisis. And they don’t march through White, middle class areas. Their purpose is to divide the working class, and they march through working class and immigrant neighbourhoods as a display of triumphalism and a provocation.

He also makes the point that Fascists are also supported by the petite bourgeoisie and sections of the free press. The free world has tolerated the seizure of power by innumerable right-wing dictatorial groups, but the moment a left-wing government appears the supposed free world immediately tries to destabilize it.

And Fascists themselves are extremely violent. He states very graphically that if you turn the other cheek to a Fascist, they’ll slash it with a razor, and says

I support the activities of militant anti-fascists because I think their use of force is a necessary tactic to counter the violence of the far-right on the streets. If you think allowing neo-fascists a platform to say whatever they like is necessary because you believe everyone has a right to free speech, just imagine what would happen if the far-right ever came to power. The free speech, that you cherish so dearly, would be taken away and you’d be carted off to prison or worse. Now you can accuse me of histrionics if you like, but you’ll have to name a country in which the far-right have gained power and have allowed people to criticize them. I can’t think of one.

See: https://buddyhell.wordpress.com/2017/09/05/militant-anti-fascism-why-i-support-it/

Now I don’t support violence against anyone, and don’t wish to encourage any more of it, even against the Far Right. Real violence is anything but fun, and people have been seriously hurt and killed in the battles between Fascists and anti-Fascists.

But the Cat is right on several points. Fascists are and have always been extremely violent. They’ve been so every since George Sorel wrote his ‘Reflexions sur la Violence’ as a militant 19th century anarcho-syndicalist. Sorel later rejected syndicalism in favour of extreme right-wing nationalist and monarchist groups, but his book remained popular and influential amongst right-wing intellectuals like Mussolini. The kernel of Fascism in Italy were the Fasci di Combattimenti, bands of demobilized ex-servicemen, who went around beating up Socialists, Communists and anyone they thought that was insufficiently patriotic, or just didn’t like. One of their symbols, was the fasces – the bundle of rods with an axe sticking out, which symbolized the power of the lictor, the Roman official, who could have citizens beaten and beheaded. The other, rather less official, but very widely used, was the manganello. This was the club with which Fascist gangs used to beat their opponents in street battles, after which the victims were dosed with castor oil to humiliate them by making them soil themselves.

Before the Nazis seized power in Germany, they also used to go round fighting street battles and beating up Jews and leftists. One of their songs in Berlin was all about how they were going to carry on beating people up, ‘until the Jew lies bleeding at our feet’.

And they weren’t any better in Britain. Mosley’s BUF lost its support partly because it was notorious for its violence, particularly after the infamous Olympia rally, where the BUF’s stewards savagely beat a number of left-wing protestors. And after the war, the BNP, NF and related groups deliberately recruited ‘bovver boys’ and football hooligans. Or as one of their leaders themselves said at the time, ‘robust young men to defend Britain against Communism’. And the evidence for their extreme violence is extremely plentiful. If you go on YouTube, there are a number of videos from World In Action and other documentaries showing just how brutally violent they are. And more often than not, their victims are the weak and defenceless. One of the speakers in one of these documentaries is a female teacher, who describes how she and her colleagues were attacked without provocation by a group of NF thugs when they were having a meeting in a pub. Matthew Collins in his book, Hate, describes how he participated in an attack on an anti-Nazi meeting in one of the rooms above the local library. Those they attacked were mostly women, including a pregnant Asian lady, who was so terrified she tried to barricade herself in the toilets. These are not thugs attacking other thugs. They’re bullies. And when they do meet concerted, violent resistance, as one of the speakers in one of the videos says, they run away.

The decision of the ’43 group to give a dam’ good hiding to the Fascists is entirely understandable. One of the speakers in the video describes how he and the other old comrades put their hands together with Rabbi Hardman, the Jewish army chaplain, and swore ‘Never again’ when they saw the sheer carnage and barbarity at Auschwitz. Rabbi Hardman states he saw bodies piled as high as the surrounding buildings. Another squaddies tells how he met one woman, one of the death camp’s inmates, who had been driven mad because the Nazis had snatched her baby away from her, thrown it up into the air, and then shot it. This treatment wasn’t unique to the Jews. The Beeb a little while ago screened a programme about the Nazi occupation of Poland. One of the incidents that occurred there was when Polish mothers were required to take their children to be examined by the reich authorities. One woman’s child was deemed biologically unfit. It was snatched out of its mother’s arms, thrown onto the floor, and shot.

Most normal people would have felt horror and anger if they had witnessed what these servicemen had seen. And when it is done to one’s own ethnic or religious group, when one thinks how it could have been one’s own spouse, parents, children, or other relatives and friends lying down there among the bodies, those feelings are naturally going to turn into an intense rage, or in this case, a steely determination to do everything they could to stop it ever occurring again.

The speakers in the video make the point that they didn’t reject non-violent persuasion. They tried it, and found that it didn’t work. They state that it was a case of ‘both…and…’ rather than ‘either…or…’. But it didn’t work on the convinced Fascists. And so they resolved to disrupt their meetings and force them off the streets.

At the time there were 40 or so Fascist meetings every month in London, and the BUF, or Mosley’s successor organisations, were not opposed, and indeed supported, by the London police. This has been corroborated by other historians. Larry O’Hara wrote an article in Lobster back in the 1990s about how the metropolitan police turned a blind eye to Fascist meetings, even when they openly broke the law. Such as drinking a toast to the destruction of the Jews. Indeed, it was quite often anti-Fascist protesters, who were arrested, rather than the stormtroopers.

Not all police forces were as tolerant as London’s, however. One of the speakers describes how they heard that the Blackshirts were planning to go down and hold a rally in Brighton. So the ’43 Group let the Brighton fuzz know they would also be down there to disrupt the meeting. The rozzers duly replied that the Fascists were quite within their rights, and the police would allow them to go ahead following the principle of free speech. But in practice, they only sent one officer. He was obviously just a token presence, and the former servicemen were able to give their opponents a sound beating.

They describe how, when they attacked a Fascist gathering, their intention was to seize and overturn the podium. Among those, who got what they deserved was Hamm, Mosley’s second in command. They also reveal that they had considerable information given to them about the location of meetings and so on from informers within the Fascists’ own ranks. These were people, who had joined the party, and found out it wasn’t what they thought it was. Ultimately, the ’43 group were successful. They point out that due to their attacks Mosley couldn’t appear in public, and they talk about their pride as Jews and citizens in closing him down.

Mensforth’s video also begins with people from the East End describing the antics of Mosley’s Blackshirts in their day, and their role in the Battle of Cable Street. This was when the BUF tried to march through the East End, but were beaten off by a group of trade unionists, Communists and Jews. The speakers describe how they also fought the police, who were protecting the Fascists.

Describing the activities of contemporary Nazis, they point out that they want to keep the working class divided, and encourage racial hatred to that end. When there are no ethnic minorities available for them to whip up hate against, as in Glasgow, they find another outsider group to serve the same purpose, like Roman Catholics. One of the speakers is a Glaswegian, who was a former member of one of the Fascist groups in Scotland, as well as a Protestant supporter of one of the very Unionist football clubs. One of the songs their supporters sing is ‘Billy’s Boys’. He states most of the supporters think it’s about William of Orange, but in fact it’s about one of Mosley’s lieutenants in that part of Scotland in the 1930s. This particular speaker was drawn into it through the sectarian politics of Scots football clubs. He left when he started getting leaflets from the organization telling him to support their policies against Israel, and supporting South American dictators and death squads.

Watching these videos, it struck me that some, at least, of the violent antifa, aren’t thugs using violence for the sheer pleasure of it. They’re just people, who actually take Fascism seriously. Very seriously. To many people, the Fascist fringe are so grotesque that they’re a joke, and the numbers involved in their marches are so trivial that there’s absolutely no danger of these morons gaining power. They’re figures of fun, like the American National Socialist White People’s Party in the Blues Brothers. And it’s because they aren’t taken as a serious threat, that they and their wretched marches are tolerated. Despite considerable, and very vocal opposition, I hasten to add.

And indeed there is a certain amount of grim humour to be found there. They are so twisted, that they can be unintentionally hilarious, and mocking them does have the right effect. Hope Not Hate a few days ago put up a piece about how one of the squadristi was upset with the organization, because it was taking the mick out of him. And Private Eye also reported how members were leaving the BNP after it had been mocked in the pages of Ian Hislop’s mighty organ. The Third Reich was long ago, and so were the various Fascist dictatorships in Central and South America, as well as all the other brutal right-wing regimes that have seized power around the world.

But if you’ve seen what Fascism has done, and your family and friends have been attacked or worse by its supporters over here, your attitude might be very different. The Klan and the neo-Confederates really aren’t a joke to Blacks, Jews and other minority groups, because of the lynchings and the use of terror and extreme violence. Over in Britain, the British Fascist groups supported not only the Unionist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, but they also gave sanctuary to a group of Italian Fascists in the 1980s following the Bologna railway bombing, which killed more than a hundred people. And given the horrific atrocities the death squads committed in Latin America – things so revolting that they cannot be decently described in a family blog, it becomes a very good question why the members of various Conservative and Libertarian societies weren’t attacked or beaten when they decided to invite these scum to their annual dinners.

I don’t support violence, let alone vigilanteeism, but the Cat has done a good job in explaining why violent resistance against Fascism may be justified. As he points out, this is violence against those, who are absolutely serious in their intention to imprison, torture and kill millions, if they came to power. Their tolerated at the moment because they aren’t a significant threat. But that can change. Free speech is not an absolute, and there have to be limits to toleration. It’s why we have laws against hate speech, no matter how they right may decry them as ‘political correctness’.

Chicago University Bans Alt-Lite Speaker for Incitement to Violence

There’s a grim piece by Simon Murdoch on Hope Not Hate’s site today, reporting that DePaul University in Chicago has cancelled an event by Gavin McInnes because of a speech McInnes gave at one of the unis in New York urging his supporters to use violence against left-wing protestors. The article also discusses the formation of a militant ‘Alt-Knight’ organisation by another member of the same far-right grouping, which also shows how the Alt-Right and its ‘soft’ counterpart, the Alt-Lite, are becoming just another form of the Klan.

McInnes is the co-founder of Vice and a host on Rebel Media, a far right platform. In his speech at New York University, McInnes told his audience

“We’re the only ones fighting these [protesters] and I want you to fight them, too […] When they go low, go lower. Mace them back, throw bricks at their head. Let’s destroy them.”

Last year, 2016, he also founded Proud Boys, a fraternal order for men, ‘who are unapologetic about creating the modern world.’ Initiation into the organisation consists of four stages, the last of which is a physically violence confrontation with the Left. McInnes told Metro that this means involvement in ‘a major fight for the cause’, saying “You get beat up, kinck [sic] the crap out of antifa”.

He also told Metro that “not only would [he] love to speak” with those who protest in disagreement of his views, but that he will also “get violent and beat the f–k out of everybody”.

Members of the Proud Boys were involved in the violence at Berkeley, which erupted when Anne Coulter was due to speak there. The order also has a more ‘militant’ wing, founded by Kyle Chapman, who goes by the name of ‘Based Stick Man’, with McInnes’ approval. This calls itself the ‘Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights’. Chapman himself was arrested after fighting a member of the public at a rally in Berkeley. Before that, he had also been arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon at a Trump rally.

http://hopenothate.org.uk/2017/05/18/rebel-media-hosts-speech-banned-statements-encouraging-violence/

It probably won’t surprise anyone to hear members of the far-right advocate violence against their opponents on the Left. It’s always been there, ever since Hitler founded the SA and then SS as the official paramilitary wings of the Nazi party, the squadristi of Fascist Italy, and the ‘Biff Boys’ of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Quite apart from the skinhead boot boys, who form the thuggish hard core of post-War Fascism in Britain, North America and Europe.

As for the Alt-Knights, the Hope Not Hate article states that it refers back to the ‘Alt-Lite’ movement of which McInnes and Chapman are members. Well, perhaps. But it also seems to be a nod to a much older, violently racist organisation: the KKK. The Klan’s full title, or at least one of them, was ‘The Invisible Empire of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan’.

The Alt-Right has been described as the Klan with keyboards. Now it seems that the similarities with the KKK are becoming ever stronger and more blatant every day. The other day The Young Turks commented on a torchlight vigil organised by supporters of the Confederacy to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee by the town council of Charlottesville, Virginia. Among those protesting was Richard Spencer, the White nationalist, anti-Semitic founder of the Alt-Right. The protestors chanted ‘You will not replace us’, ‘Russia is our friend’, and ‘Blood and Soil’.

The presenters of the video, Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, state that the comments by the protestors that it wasn’t a racist issue, is contradicted by Spencer’s presence. They also demolish attempts by the supporters of Confederacy, who have tried arguing instead that the American Civil War wasn’t about slavery. They point out that instead of northern liberals not understanding history, it’s really southern Conservatives, as if you look at everything the leaders and defenders of the Confederacy wrote, they made it clear that it was about defending slavery.

This is a sharp refutation of some of the propaganda coming out of organisations like the Von Mises Institute, named after another Austrian free trade economist, who scarpered to America to escape the Nazis, while sharing their hostility to socialism and the organised working class. This outfit has also tried to argue that the Civil War was really about trade tariffs between the South and the rest of the US.

What they don’t comment on, but which makes the racist overtones of the protest very clear, is one of the slogans the crowd chanted. ‘Blood and soil’, or ‘Blut und Boden’ in German, was one of the watchwords of the Nazi party. It was based on the pseudoscientific doctrine that national characteristics were determined by the environment and landscape of a people’s racial homeland.

Observers of Trump’s rise last year remarked on the Fascistic violence that broke out against people of colour and left-wing protestors at the Orange Generalissimo’s rallies. Trump himself in one speech actually urged his supporters to beat his opponents, promising to pay their legal bills if they did.
This development shows just how deeply rooted is violence in the far-right organisations that back him. And they also show how close these organisations are to the older traditions of violent racism in Nazi and Fascist paramilitary organisations and the weird regalia and ritual of the KKK.

Sam Seder on Bercow’s Propose Ban on Trump in Parliament

Sam Seder, the host of the American internet news show, Majority Report, yesterday covered John Bercow’s proposed ban on Trump speaking to the House of Commons. Seder and his colleagues discuss a report on one of the other news shows, that Trump was planning to meet the Queen on a visit to this Sceptred Isle. According to Seder, the show had a Brit on to talk about the visit. The Brit stated that Her Maj had met a wide variety of ‘really horrible people’ including ‘serial killers’, and so she would have no trouble in meeting Trump. Comparisons are then made with John Wayne Gacy, who killed nearly a twenty men and boys.

He then shows the clip of Bercow’s speech, in which Bercow makes the point that addressing the House is an earned honour, not a right; that there are plenty of precedents for a head of state not being allowed to address parliament on a state or diplomatic visit; that the three keyholders to parliament – the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Speaker of the House of Lords and the Lord Chamberlain, were usually united, but on this occasion he would break with the others. Bercow stated that even before Trump’s ban on Muslim travel to the US, he would have been opposed to Trump’s visit. He was even more opposed now.

Seder and his team then finish with impressions of Trump demanding to sit on the throne.

It’s very clear that Seder and the rest of his crew find British parliamentary attitudes to Trump, in lumping him in with mass murderers and Bercow’s proposal to ban him hugely amusing. But as I’ve said in my last post, Bercow is right about everything he’s said. He also made it clear that parliament should not allow Trump to speak, if it took seriously its aim of combatting racism, sexism and supporting equality.

Quite apart from the fact that, even if Trump himself is not, many of his close supporters, like Richard Spencer and Steve Bannon, are anti-Semites and White Supremacists. The prospect of Trump addressing parliament is very much like the home-grown British Fascist, Oswald Mosley, and his attempts to get elected in the 1930s. As well as his party’s thuggery and brutality to Jews and left-wingers.

Yes, comparing Trump to some of the mass murderers, who’ve met the Queen is funny. It’s less of a joke when you consider that the murderers the Brit was talking about were probably heads of state responsible for horrific crimes against their own people. And allowing Trump to address parliament in reality would be a very grim joke, with very few laughing.

Tory MP Wants to Unseat John Bercow for Attacking Trump

Kudos and respect this week to the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow. The honourable gentleman spoke this week about banning Trump from addressing parliament if he ever came to this country on a state visit. He stated, quite correctly, that addressing parliament is not a right – it is a reward that has to be earned. He also stated that he would have wanted to have Trump prevented from addressing the lower house even without his ban on Muslims travelling to the US. Millions of ordinary Brits share Bercow’s opinions.

Trump has shown himself repeatedly to be a vulgar egomaniac with a despicable attitude to sexual assault and ethnic minority communities, such as Latinos, Blacks and Muslims. While he may have tried to distance himself from them somewhat, his most vocal supporters and some of his closest advisors are anti-Semites, White Supremacists and just plain neo-Nazis. Richard Spencer and his followers screaming ‘Hail Victory! Hail Trump! Hail our race!’ while raising their right hands in the Fascist salute was a clear demonstration of their real vile political views, despite Spencer’s later attempts to claim that he was ‘being ironic’.

For many millions of people, Trump and his supporters represent a horrible return of some of the Fascism and racist persecution of the 1920s and ’30s. To Brits, Trump and his supporters recall the 1930s when Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists goose-stepped up and down Britain and marched into the East End of London in an attempt to bully and beat Jews, Communists, trade unionists and members of the Labour party.

There is such a thing as the ‘dignity of parliament’, regardless of the less than sterling character or views of individual MPs. Bercow was right to want to have Trump stopped from addressing it.

Unfortunately, many Tories do not share Mr Bercow’s views. Earlier this week Mike posted a piece reporting that, despite earning the praise and support of long term Labour MP, Dennis Skinner, members of Bercow’s own party, the Tories, sat in stony silence.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/02/07/the-house-of-commons-should-be-proud-of-its-speaker-some-conservatives-seem-to-disagree/

Now one of the Tory MPs, James Duddridge, has tabled a vote of ‘No Confidence’ in the Speaker. Yesterday he wrote to Theresa May asking her not to impose the whip on her top team if the commons did hold a vote of ‘no confidence’. Now he claims that an increasing number of MPs share his anger, and that Bercow could be deposed before parliament resumes the Monday after next.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/02/10/tory-mp-tables-vote-of-no-confidence-in-john-bercow-after-donald-trump-attack/

This is disgusting, but it doesn’t surprise in the least. The Tories have for a very long time hated Bercow with a passion. They didn’t want him becoming Speaker, as they moaned that he was biased against them. Which probably means that he was trying to be fair and do his job impartially. It also wouldn’t help that he is literally sleeping with the enemy. His wife, Sally, is a Labour MP.

Bercow in his speech denouncing Trump stated that Trump should be prevented from speaking, if the House was serious about combatting racism, sexism and supporting equality. This proposal by Duddridge shows precisely what he, and many other Tories, really think about these issues. Despite Cameron’s attempt to rebrand the party as non-racist, embracing ethnic minorities, gays and promoting women, there is still a large number of Conservatives who clearly don’t share these views. The Daily Mail has consistently attacked immigration, gay rights and feminism, despite the fact that it was originally founded to appeal to a largely female readership. The same kind of attitudes permeate the Express, the Scum and the other Tory rags to a greater or lesser degree. And there have repeatedly been instances where Tory MPs have been caught making extremely derogatory remarks about Blacks, Asians or women.

Parliament is under pressure to reform itself so that it does become more representative of Britain’s diverse society, with more Black and Asian MPs and more women. It is therefore contradictory, at the very least, to give the privilege of addressing it to someone like Trump, with his racist and misogynist views.

Bercow’s principled statement of his intention of blocking Trump from speaking has shown the real nature of the Conservative party as it has brought out their support for Trump, and by implication the grotesque policies and attitudes he represents.

Bercow is to be applauded. Duddridge and his supporters are a disgrace to the dignity of House in which they sit, and their views are an insult to anyone worried about the growth of Fascism and the extreme right.

Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing of the Palestinians was Planned from the Start

Mike over at Vox Political has posted up an excellent article critiquing and rebutting a piece by Mark Regev, the Israeli ambassador in the Groaniad. Regev uses the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, where Communists, Jews and other Leftists saw off Oswald Mosley and his thugs in the BUF, to try to drum up support for Israel. Mike comments on the way Regev deliberately tries to confuse Jewishness, with Israel and Zionism, and his explicit claim that opposition to Israel is a form of anti-Semitism. As Mike, many of his commenters, and numerous critics of Israel, both gentile and Jewish have pointed out time and again, this is not the case. Both Mike and I have put up a number of posts reporting and commenting on opposition to Zionism and the Israel lobby from decent people, who are not anti-Semites, but simply opposed to Israel’s dispossession and persecution of the Palestinians. This includes many courageous, principled Jews and Israelis, who have been reviled and actively persecuted because of their stance. They include the academics Dr Norman Finkelstein and Ilan Pappe, an Israeli, who now teaches at the University of Exeter, I believe. Dr Pappe was forced out of the country of his birth through a campaign of official persecution and intimidation.

Mike makes the point that the Zionism of the late 19th and early 20th century is not the same as that today. Then the movement was, as Regev himself argues, a movement for Jewish self-determination. Today it is simply a movement for the militaristic expansion of Israel, and the ethnic cleansing of its indigenous peoples. Mike makes the point that Israel’s borders are not the same as today, despite the impression Regev’s words give, and that the hostility against Israel is due to the military expansion of its frontiers. He also makes the point that Israel’s policy aggression is not rooted in Judaism as a religion. He has a point. Zionism started as a secular movement. It remained a secular movement until Rabbi Kook made a series of prophecies in the 1960s which seeming legitimised Israel from a Jewish religious perspective. But as Sam Seder, the host of the radical news show, The Majority Report, has pointed out, Judaism has no overall religious figure determining dogma and belief like the papacy in Roman Catholicism. The traditional attitude was that it is a sin to attempt to restore the Jewish state before the coming of the Messiah, and there are plenty of texts which support that view. As the graffiti on the walls in Jerusalem says ‘Zionism and Judaism are diametrically opposed’. Religious opposition to Zionism amongst Jews is also expressed in the Neturei Karta, a group of Orthodox Jews, who are still opposed to Israel on religious grounds, and who held a mass demonstration against it New York several years ago. The anti-Zionist movement also includes other Jews from more liberal traditions. Many of them are opposed to it, because it’s persecution of the Palestinians is similar to the persecution the Jewish people have also suffered in their history, and they see their Judaism as being in solidarity with other movements for the emancipation of the whole of humanity.

MIke’s article concludes

No, he wants you to believe Israel – and the Zionists – are victims of anti-Semitism, even while they steal land that legitimately belongs to others and suppress those who would try to resist, and even though many Jews have declared their opposition to these activities.

Understand this, and it becomes clear that his claim that anti-Zionists see “the Jewish state” in the terms he describes is nonsense.

Zionism is not Judaism. Israel is not Judaism. Mark Regev is a propagandist trying to exploit and pervert the memory of a proud collaboration between Jews, the Irish, and many British groups.

Don’t let him get away with it.

Mike’s article is at: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/10/06/do-not-let-mark-regev-use-the-anniversary-of-cable-street-to-lie-about-modern-zionism/ Go and read it. And read the comments many of Mike’s readers have left supporting his previous articles on this issue. Many of them come from Jewish critics of Israel, who are definitely not self-hating, or any other kind of vile slur the Israel lobby and its lackeys throw at them.

I differ from Mike in that I believe that there was always an element within Zionism from the very start that contemplated and planned the dispossession of the Palestinians. In the piece ‘Same Old Same Old’ in Robin Ramsay’s ‘View from the Bridge’ column in Lobster 58, Ramsay notes how one of his readers spotted a paragraph claiming precisely this in a review of ‘Four Books About Islamist Terrorism’ in the Sunday Telegraph for 18th June 2009. This states

Meanwhile, the founder of modern political Zionism, the Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl, had earmarked a site for the Jewish state. In June 1895, he wrote in his diary: “We must expropriate gently the private property” and “spirit the penniless population across the border”.

Ramsay lays bare what this means

Ethnic cleansing, in other words. Which is what the Israeli state has been doing since it was founded; but doing it piecemeal, slowly enough to avoid making too many waves in America.

See: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster58/lobster58.pdf and scroll down until you get to the relevant section.

Now the quote from Herzl makes clear that he did not want it done violently. But as Ilan Pappe has documented in his books and lectures, it was done with considerable violence. Massacres and forced expropriation were committed from the very foundation of Israel in the 1940s. And quite often the worst perpetrator of these crimes were Labour governments under leaders like Golda Meir.

This does not mean that all Israelis support this programme of ethnic cleansing. Indeed, as I’ve said, there are many Israelis and human rights organisations in Israel, that are deeply opposed to it. These include B’Tselem, the human rights agency. There is a political party standing up for the Palestinians, which includes both Israelis and Palestinians. Israelis have protested against the house demolitions, where rabbis have also led down in front of bulldozers to protect Palestinian homes. Members of the Israeli armed forces have also protested against their country’s oppression of the Palestinians. And a few years ago a Jewish peace organisation occupied the New York headquarters of the Friends of the IDF.

And many modern anti-Zionists aren’t opposed to the state of Israel. Most of them, including Dr. Finkelstein, want a two-state solution, in which Israel withdraws to its pre-1967 borders. But Regev in his article lies and says Israel’s opponents want the complete destruction of the country. The Israeli government, however, firmly refuses to pull back from the Occupied Territories on the grounds that this would leave the country militarily vulnerable. And so they continue to justify their dispossession and persecution of the Palestinians.