Sketches of Some of My Favourite Comedians and Comic Actors

Here’s something a bit lighter. I spent part of last week sketching some of my favourite comedy stars. You can probably tell from them that I’m of a certain age, as most of them come from ’70s. ’80s and ’90s. They are of Les Dawson, Victoria Wood, Joyce Grenfell, Dave Allen, Peter Cook, Derek Griffiths and Molly Sugden in war paint as the redoubtable Mrs Slocombe. I’ve drawn Dawson twice, once as himself and then in drag with Roy Barraclough as the two ladies who were a staple of his programme in the 1980s. I know many women find drag offensive, but they were well-constructed characters, and the humour wasn’t malicious. I chose Derek Griffiths as he was on a lot of children’s programmes when I was small, from Play School to Film Fun. This was a history of the Warner Brothers cartoons, set in a cinema with Griffiths playing all the characters, from the cinema manager, the commissionaire, and Doreen the Usherette. He was also in more adult programmes like Terry and June. For all the clowning, he comes across as a very versatile performer. On one programme on the history of children’s TV, he described how he created the theme for Bod on the flute. He’s also done theatre for the deaf, which uses sign language. Joyce Grenfell is in there because I find her dialogues hilarious, especially where she plays a harassed junior schoolteacher telling some little boy called George not to do that. What ‘that’ is, is perhaps wisely never revealed. And I don’t think any list of British comedians could ever be complete without Victoria Wood. As for Molly Sugden, she’s best remembered for Mrs Slocombe, another brilliant British sitcom character. Dave Allen will always be remembered for his wry, and very witty observations on the lunacy of everyday life. But sometimes the real gems are in the sketches. I often wish he were still around to comment on the madness of today’s life. Ditto with the awesome Peter Cook. I’ve tried to draw them as I think they should be remembered – happy, smiling and doing something characteristically funny. But some many of the images I used as source material showed them as solemn and grave, as in this drawing of Peter Cook. And yet he’s probably best remembered looking coolly at an interviewer over a cigarette with the same glint in his eye he had when making Dudley Moore laugh on Not Only But Also. Grenfell, Wood, Dawson, Allen and Cook are no longer with us, but their comedy lives on in DVD. And on the web, where you can particularly enjoy Cook talking to the late, also missed Clive James while a young Victoria Wood looks on completely bemused.

Labour Party Invite Me to Anti-Semitic Awareness Event Run by Sectarian, Fanatically Zionist Witch-Hunters Jewish Labour Movement

I got this email yesterday from Southwest Labour

‘Dear David James,

We are pleased to be inviting members in the South West to attend anti-semitism awareness training from the Jewish Labour Movement. It will take place over Zoom on Wednesday 6th July at 7pm. 

Please email’ ————–‘to register and the meeting link will be sent closer to the date.

Best wishes,

Labour South West’

I should cocoa! The very cheek! Just in case you need reminding, the Jewish Labour Movement was one of the Jewish organisations deeply involved in the witch-hunt against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour party for alleged ‘anti-Semitism’. I put ‘anti-Semitism’ inverted commas because these organisations, including those outside the party like the Chief Rabbinate and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism were not, in my opinion, genuinely concerned with anti-Semitism in its true and original sense. This is a hatred of Jews, simply for being Jews, regardless of political or religious opinions on their part. I have made this point again and again on this blog, citing some of the 19th century founders and leaders of modern organised anti-Semitism in Wilhelm Marr’s Bund Antisemiten or League of Anti-Semites. The Jewish Labour Movement used to be Paole Zion, Workers of Zion, and was virtually moribund until a decade or so ago when in received an injection of cash from person or persons unknown. The Labour Party has always had Jewish members and the parliamentary party has, or used to have, slightly more than the Tories. There are a number of other Jewish organisations in the Labour party and on the left, such as Jewish Voice for Labour and the Jewish Socialist Group, not to mention Jewdas, with whom Jeremy Corbyn spent a Passover Seder. Corbyn also received strong backing from the Haredi Jews, who believe it is their duty to stay in galut, exile, until they are called back to Israel by the Messiah. In the meantime, they are to cooperate with the peoples in whose lands they reside to build better societies and to ‘pray for the health of the city’ as commanded by the Prophet in the Hebrew Bible. And I’ve no doubt there are many other Jews in the Labour party, who are not party of any Jewish organisation, because, like Dr. Jonathan Miller, they consider themselves Brits, who happen to be Jewish, and don’t want to be part of a minority.

But these Jews and their organisations are not recognised as properly Jewish and are actively opposed and maligned by the Jewish Labour Movement. The JLM’s focus, like the other organisations behind the witch-hunt, is to combat anti-Zionism and silence any criticism of Israel’s barbarous treatment of the Palestinians. And they do this by smearing their enemies as anti-Semites. And very many of their victims are Jews, which make their claims to be tackling anti-Semitism risible.

Mike was told by the Labour party that he would be allowed to remain in it after he was smeared as an anti-Semite if he attended anti-Semitism training by the JLM. Mike’s only crime was to point out that Ken Livingstone was entirely correct when he said that Adolf Hitler initially supported Zionism. He did. It was the Ha’avara Agreement, a shameful pact with the German Zionists to smuggle German Jews into British mandate Palestine. It was done as a way to cleanse Germany of Jews. The pact was short-lived, but it happened. Mike refused, as he is not and has never been and never will be an anti-Semite and attendance would have been taken as a tacit admission of guilt.

Jackie Walker is another of their victims. They secretly recorded her at workshop to discuss the best ways to commemorate the Holocaust. Holocaust Memorial Day not only commemorates the Jewish Holocaust, but also the many other genocides that have disfigured human history. Walker is a Jew by faith and blood. Her father was a Russian Jews, and so she knows from family experience more than most about real anti-Semitic persecution. Her mother was a Black American civil rights activist, and so was deeply concerned about another form of racial persecution against her people. Walker’s crime was to ask what the event would do about commemorating other holocausts, such as those against Black people. Since the great Black activist and scholar W.E.B. DuBois, many Blacks and White sympathisers have regarded the slave trade and slavery as a Black holocaust. Walker asked a decent question. But for some reason this was regarded as ‘anti-Semitic’ and she was smeared and purged.

I think most severely normal Brits are aware of the dangers of anti-Semitism. The documentaries about the Second World War and the Nazis shown on television necessarily include the Nazi persecution of the Jews and the Shoah. There have been a number of award-winning Hollywood films about the Holocaust and the heroes who rescued Jews, like Schindler’s List, which came out in the ’90s. I also remember the outrage and campaigning on the left in the 70s and 80s against the NF and BNP when they were marching about trying to get votes, and similar fears and disgust when the BNP briefly revived and its noxious leader, Nick Griffin, was invited onto Question Time. There are very many excellent books about the Holocaust, and some of the late Clive James’ best TV criticism is from the 70s when Fascist and Nazi scumbags like Oswald Mosley, Albert Speer and Baldur von Schirach were interviewed on British TV. James expertly took apart their lies and false protestations of innocence to reveal the real malignity underneath.

Part of my undergraduate course in history was on the rise of Fascist and Communist regimes in Europe, and I still have the books I bought during then. I’ve also done some reading on Fascism since then, including on its post-War varieties. I’m also interested in conspiracy theories, the most infamous of which are those about some secret Jewish conspiracy which controls both capitalism, socialism and communism to enslave the White race. These theories became prominent again in the ’90s when they were incorporated into the UFO mythology and the right-wing conspiracy theories about the Illuminati, another group who are supposed to be controlling world events, the economy and politics from behind the scenes. David Icke believed that the world is secretly run by Reptoid aliens. He caused alarm and outrage because he used quotations from the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Tsarist anti-Semitic forgery, to support his crank ideas. Icke isn’t an anti-Semite, and genuinely seemed to believe that the world was run by extraterrestrials rather than Jews. Other UFO researchers, like the late Bill English, did the same, though when they cited the Protocols they claimed they should be read as talking about the Illuminati, rather than the Jews. Nevertheless these quotations were in danger of making the Protocols seem respectable to the point where a branch of Waterstones in one of the northern towns stocked them.

I totally accept that respectable scholars and lay people have to be very careful when it comes to some of the material on topics like the Nazis and Holocaust. Real anti-Semites and Nazis try to disguise their awful views and attempts to deny or minimise the Holocaust by setting up respectable-sounding magazines. Often they use coded language. For example, a very respectable folklorist wrote a piece in one of the urban folklore magazines back in the ’90s to tell how he’d been taken in by such tactics and to warn other to be on the guard. He had been researching tales of atrocities committed by the Germans during the First World War. He came to the conclusion that one of these, the story that the Kaiser’s troops had crucified a Canadian soldier, was bogus and may have been just allied propaganda. He was then approached by a history magazine with a respectable-sounding title, who asked him if they could reprint his article. He innocently agreed, only to find out later it was a Nazi rag. Its editors were using stories of allied propaganda to suggest that the Holocaust was also nothing but fiction. But as an American judge has ruled, the Holocaust is so well documented that its existence cannot be sanely denied. The scholar was shocked and disgusted, and so wrote the article to let others know about the deception and to be on their guard about similar tactics and approaches.

As for coded language, the believers in a world-wide conspiracy to enslave humanity talk about the globalists, the Illuminati, or the global elite. Sometimes this is innocent of anti-Semitism, and they really are talking about a secretive group of leading politicos, capitalists and so on, which isn’t some Jewish conspiracy. But sometimes it isn’t, and is code for ‘Jews’. I’ve also noticed that while Simon Webb of History Debunked isn’t an anti-Semite or anti-Zionist by any stretch of the imagination, some of his commenters do seem to be. There’s a lot of talk by them about the Great Replacement, the idea that the Jews are trying to destroy the White race with non-White immigrate. There’s also comments about ‘small hatted people’, or ‘people with small hats’, which sounds very much like its about the Jews, referring to the kippa skullcaps many observant Jews wear.

Sometimes you really do need to be careful and be informed so you’re not taken in by such language and deceit. But the Jewish Labour Movement won’t help you.

They’re concerned to discredit criticism of Israel using literary criticism and citing entirely bogus conspiracy theories about the Jews from the past. Remember when Shai Masot was caught plotting with a senior British civil servant to decide who should or shouldn’t be in the cabinet? This could rightly be called a conspiracy. But if you called it that, or described the two as plotting, you were the using an anti-Semitic trope because of all the genuinely stupid, poisonous and entirely mythical anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in the past. The same if you report the atrocities committed by the Israeli state and IDF against Palestinians, especially if they can get in a reference to the Blood Libel, that Jews sacrificed Christian children to use their blood in the matzoh bread at Passover. This vile medieval smear has been responsible for numerous anti-Semitic pogroms. However, the Israeli state now is manipulating its memory to close down reasonable criticism. When the IDF shot a Palestinian woman a few years ago, one of the respectable newspaper cartoonists produced picture of her burning in the fireplace while Netanyahu, the-then president of Israel, hobnobbed with the US president. This was promptly denounced by the Israelis as anti-Semitic, because the fire recalled the gas ovens of the Holocaust. Similarly, when Gerald Scarfe drew a cartoon of the Israelis building their wretched wall to keep the Palestinians out using Arab blood, the Israelis again demanded a retraction and an apology because the blood supposedly referred to the infamous Blood Libel. And so another piece of entirely reasoned, reasonable and absolutely not anti-Semitic criticism and comment was again silenced. And this is what the Jewish Labour Movement also does in its events about anti-Semitism. They have nothing to do with making people genuinely aware of the threat of anti-Semitism and the way it is coded. They are all about discrediting justifiable criticism of Israel through using literary devices to make them apparently connected to past anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and innuendo.

I have absolutely no intention of going to this monstrous charade. If I want information and guidance on genuine anti-Semitism, I’d try to consult the JLM’s Jewish victims – Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Martin Odoni and others, self-respecting decent people, who have been smeared by the anti-Semitism witch-hunters as self-hating. Even though these people are Jewish and have fought against anti-Semitism and other forms of racism. Or I would contact Marc Wadsworth, the Black anti-racism activist. He was smeared as an anti-Semite, again using literary tropes, because he caught a Jewish Labour MP passing on a party brochure to a Torygraph hack. Oh, it was the trope of the disloyal Jew, they claimed. This was despite the fact that Wadsworth didn’t know the politico was Jewish, and had in the 1980s worked with the Board of Deputies about passing legislation to protect Jews against genuine anti-Semitic violence by the NF or BNP. Or I’d go to someone like Mike, who can tell fact from fiction, well-researches his stories and who was asked by a Jewish friend at College to be one of the readers in her performance commemorating the Holocaust’s victims.

All of the above have a far better understanding of anti-Semitism, or a more honest one than the Jewish Labour Movement and its highly ideological, distorted view of what counts as Jew hatred.

I’ve said it before: Judaism is a religion. The Jews are a people. Zionism is an ideology. Israel is a state. Judaism and its people are not synonymous with the modern state of Israel. Under a free society, all ideologies should be able to be examined and criticised, including Zionism. States can and do commit horrible atrocities, for which they should criticised. Israel should not be an exception merely because its people are Jews. Only hatred of Jews, simply for being Jews, should count as anti-Semitism.

Fight racism! Fight anti-Semitism! And don’t be taken in by bogus propaganda like that of the Jewish Labour Movement.

Message from We Own It about Their New Website and Campaign Against Channel 4 Privatisation

I got this email from anti-privatisation campaign group We Own It informing me about their new website and their continuing campaign against the government’s proposed sell-off of Channel 4.

‘Dear David,

What do Armando Iannucci, the Archbishop of York and Siobhán McSweeney from Derry Girls all have in common?

They’re all taking a stand against Nadine Dorries’ plan to privatise Channel 4.

They’re not the only ones. 27 independent production companies, actor Jon Pointing, comedian Jack Rooke, and the Bishops of Ripon and Leeds are taking a stand too.

They’ve come together today to send a message to the divided Conservative Party: Channel 4 ain’t broke. Don’t fix it. Conserve it.

Thanks to donations from hundreds of you, today we were able to launch an ambitious new campaign which hit the front page of the Yorkshire Post, the Evening Standard, the Independent, the National and local papers across the country.

Check out the beautiful new website and share it to spread the word! We need YOU to make this big launch even bigger! This is a campaign we can win.

Share the new campaign on Twitter

Share on Facebook

Check out the website and forward the link by email to friends and family

THANK YOU so much for showing this government where you stand.

Cat, Alice, Johnbosco, Matthew, Jack and Kate – the We Own It team

PS Thanks so much to everyone who took part in the day of action for the NHS on Saturday. You were all over the press for that campaign as well!’

I very much support this campaign, not least because Bristol is one one of the various cities in which the broadcaster is located. I’m afraid that if the government privatises the station it will have to close down its offices or studios in Bristol and the other towns, and that these local broadcasting industries will be severely damaged. A little while ago I wrote to my local Labour MP, Karin Smyth, to express my fears about the loss of local broadcasting in Bristol. She very kindly wrote back stating that she also was going to oppose Channel 4’s privatisation.

I think the channel has declined in quality since the 1980s and 1990s, but it has been a vital part of British broadcasting and cinema. There have been a stream of British films made either by, or with the participation of Channel 4 films. And when it was first launched in the 1980s, it offered a genuine alternative to mainstream broadcasting. It showed Indian films in a slot entitled ‘All India Goldies’ as well as an adaptation of the Indian national epic, the Mahabharata. It also provided excellent opera coverage, and really did much to bring it to a genuinely popular audience. It also gave Britain the wit and wisdom of the journalist and TV critic, Clive James, who had his own show on a Sunday night. James published a trio of books of his TV criticism, as well as his travel journalism and an autobiography, Unreliable Memoirs. His writing could be hysterically funny, as when he covered the extremely excitable remarks of over-the-top sports commenters. In one of his articles he described how one of the cars broke down or crashed during a race ‘and Murray Walker exploded’. At other times, when discussing the horrors of the Holocaust and the surviving Nazi and Fascist leaders like Albert Speer, Baldur von Schirach and Oswald Mosley, who turned up on British television, he was deadly serious and scathing. As he also was when writing about Stalin’s famine and purges and Mao’s China. He interviewed a number of great personalities on his show, including a very young Victoria Wood and the late, great Peter Cook. For fantasy enthusiasts, there was The Storyteller, a series of tales adapted from folk stories, narrated by John Hurt, with puppet creatures, including the Storyteller’s dog, created and operated by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. Henson and Frank Oz were the geniuses behind the Muppets. They also made the fantasy movie The Dark Crystal, in which every character is a non-human creature. In the 1990s Henson’s Creature Shop also created the various aliens in the Australian-American SF series Farscape. I am very much afraid that if Channel 4 is privatised, then this history and pool of great broadcasting talent and skills will be permanently lost.

And it will be lost not because there’s anything wrong with Channel 4, but because the Tories’ backers, like one Rupert Murdoch, want British state broadcasting to end so their own cruddy networks can move in and take its place.

Howard Jacobson Cartoon

Here’s my drawing of British author Howard Jacobson. I’ve read that it was Jacobson, who came up with the slogan ‘For the Many, Not the Jew’ to promote the anti-Semitism smears against Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party when he was living in New York. Way back in the 1980s he wrote a parody of the Book of Genesis, which Private Eye reviewed. This was at the same time militant Muslims were demanding Salman Rushdie’s head over the Satanic Verses. The Eye said that Jacobson’s novel showed the difference between Jews and Muslims, because if Jews were at all similar to them, Jacobson would have to move in with the other author. The other year Jacobson won a literary award for his The Finkler Question. From the very, very little I’ve read about it seems to be a tale of adultery in Jewish suburbia. This makes him sound like a kind of Jewish male version of Jilly Cooper with literary pretensions.

For some reason the late Clive James seems to have been a fan of his, and I did have some respect for him a few years ago. Jacobson describes himself as a Humanist, but disliked the New Atheists, as many old school atheists did, for their intolerance and abuse. But that vanished when I read that he was responsible for the slogan parodying Corbyn’s ‘For the Many, Not the Few’. Jacobson’s wretched slogan helped keep in power the Tories, who are determined to privatised the NHS and inflict further cuts on the welfare state at the expense of Britain’s working people. A working class, that has always included Jews. It’s also assisted in the seizure of the Labour leadership by Starmer and his crew, who are using anti-Semitism as an excuse to purge the party of socialists and critics of Israel. And their victims have been particularly Jews. All to protect the Israeli state from a possible Labour administration that would have tried to help the Palestinians gain justice and equality, instead of empty words and toothless condemnations of Israel.

I thought of Jacobson’s wretched slogan, and it seemed to me that you could also alter it, beginning with the names of the organisations pushing the anti-Semitism smears: the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Jewish Labour Movement, Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and then

‘For Israel

For the Rich

Against the Poor

Against the Jew’

Because the people behind the smears seem to me to be Tories and Thatcherites determined to help the rich get even richer and drive the poor even further into poverty. And those poor also include Jews, who worry along with everyone else about the way the NHS is being run down, the cuts to state services, how they will pay for the social care their elderly relatives need and suffer from the government and management freezing their wages so they also take a cut in salary in real terms.

Would Fascist Oswald Mosley Have Treated the Windrush Migrants Better than the Tories?

Oswald Mosley, the head of the British Union of Fascists, tried to get back into British politics after the War. He’d been interned during the War, but still wished to return and lead a far right party. His new outfit was simply called the Union Movement, and Mosley desperately and vehemently denied that he would have been a collaborator had there been a Nazi invasion, and that he wasn’t a racist or anti-Semite.

There’s footage on YouTube of an interview he gave on British television in the 1970s, from the same programme, I think, which the late, great antipodean TV critic, Clive James, reviewed in his column for the Absurder. Mosley’s interviewer asks him frankly about anti-Semitism and his attitude to the Jews. At this, Mosley gets visibly angry and starts to deny that he is or has been any such thing. This is interrupted by a working class bloke in the audience, who stands up to remind him that the ordinary working people of this country saw him off, and his mate Hitler during the War, and they’ll see him off again. It’s been suggested that if the Nazis had invaded Britain, Mosley wouldn’t have collaborated with them because he would already have been shot by Special Branch as a traitor. As for the anti-Semitism, it has been claimed that Mosley genuinely didn’t hate the Jews and the BUF only turned towards anti-Semitism from a mixture of opportunism, the anti-Semitism of some of it’s rank and file and Mosley’s subordinates and advisers, and as a reaction to the hostility to the movement from the Jewish community. More recent research suggests that Mosley may already have been anti-Semitic, and I don’t doubt that if somehow he had seized power and made Britain an ally or satellite or Nazi Germany, he would have cheerfully collaborated in the Holocaust.

Some of Mosley’s post-War political views are laid out in his 1961 book, Mosley – Right Or Wrong? The book’s arranged as a series of questions on issues like the Empire, international relations, race, industry, the economy, trade unions and so on. Section 13 is on the ‘Colour Question in Britain, Immigration, The Racial Question’. In it, Mosley tells the reader what he intends to do about non-White immigrants. His solution is compulsory repatriation, but he claims he won’t be inhumane, because those deported will have their fares paid. He also intends to avoid criticism from Britain’s Black colonies by making sure Britain buys their products and helps their economy rather than their competitors’. This means, for example, that he would buy sugar from Jamaica rather than Cuba. Question 116 in this section asks the wannabe dictator how he would deal with coloured students and and coloured immigrants, who have been here a long time. Mosley’s reply is that he would continue to allow coloured people to come here for their education and that they would be made welcome. As for non-Whites, who have been resident in Britain for a long time, he states that those,

who have been good citizens and have developed roots in this country will also not be sent away. For this reason we propose that all coloured people of this character who came here before the last war, should be allowed to stay, if they wish. They are too few to create any serious problems. And on the whole they have been good citizens of Britain. (p. 118).

You can compare that with Tweezer’s and the Tories’ deportation of the Windrush Migrants. They’d been resident here for a similar length of time or more than the non-White immigrants Mosley was talking about. They also had a guaranteed legal right to remain, which Tweezer as home secretary illegally removed. It may therefore seem possible from the above passage in which Mosley states he’d let some non-White immigrants remain, that he, a horrendous Fascist, would also have respected the Windrush immigrants rights to remain.

In fact I doubt very much that he would. The history of Fascism shows that they can’t be trusted and that however moderate and respectable they appear, the reality is always dictatorship, brutality, violent repression and mass murder. Fascist leaders like Hitler and Mussolini were able to win power partly through propaganda and carefully tailoring their message to their audiences. If Hitler was speaking in a very traditionally left-wing, working class district, he’d stress the anti-capitalist strand of Nazi ideology. When campaigning in a traditionally right-wing, anti-Semitic area, he’d attack the Jews. Mosley and the other Fascist and Nazi groups were presented with the problem after the War that Europe had had enough of it. The British people had seen and fought against its horrors and weren’t going to tolerate its revival. Hence Mosley’s attempts to present himself in a more moderate light. He states at one point that he dislike the word ‘racist’ because it implies that one race is superior to another, which he rejects. Well, he might have done, but that won’t stop anyone reading him coming to the conclusion that a racist was precisely what he was. I don’t doubt therefore that if by some miracle of medicine Mosley had lived on and been in power a few years ago, he would have deported the Windrush immigrants like Theresa May and the Tories.

What is alarming is not that he would have done – you’d expect it from a Fascist leader – but that Mosley could sound more moderate and tolerant in some respects than the leaders of the modern Conservative party. Or if he doesn’t, then he doesn’t sound that much more extreme, either.

And that should show you how much trouble we’re in, and how much the Tories are moving to the extreme right.

Tony Greenstein on Zionist Anti-Semitism

Last Wednesday Tony Greenstein, a veteran Jewish opponent of racism, Fascism and Zionism, put up on his blog a piece about how Zionists resort to anti-Semitic rhetoric when attacking their Jewish opponents. He made it very clear that this was because, in his view, anti-Semitism was at the very heart of Zionism.

The Hate Mail Directed at Jenny Manson, Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein

Greenstein began his piece with some very nasty examples of Zionist anti-Semitic hate messages sent to himself, Jenny Manson, the chair of Jewish Voice for Labour and Jackie Walker. Manson was left a vile message on her voice mail calling her a ‘f***ing Nazi bitch’, ‘Nazi cow’ and ranting that she should be burned in a gas oven, and should burn in hell, in acid. He points out that this disgusting rant mixed the Zionist accusation that non-Zionists are Nazis, with the real Nazi abuse that a Jewish person should be gassed like the innocent millions in the Holocaust. He compares this with another unpleasant message sent to Jackie Walker, which questioned whether she was really Jewish and that she should be put into a burning bin. He also put up the full text of a hate message he received, which called him a ‘traitorous b***ard’, ‘a left-liberal Jew’, ‘a cowardly traitor’, who should go back to the shtetls and ghettos under non-Jewish domination, and said that it was a pity that Hitler or the Angel of Death missed his house, that of his family, and Naturei Karta’s, the Jewish anti-Zionist organisation. Greenstein compared this with another message he’d received which denied the existence of the Holocaust. Greenstein states he passed on both of these messages to the Community Security Trust, which compiles lists of anti-Semitic incidents. They duly logged the second message, but refused to list the first, as they don’t include anti-Semitic incidents perpetrated by Jews. Discussing the reason for this omission, he quotes the Jewish American anti-Zionist, Aurora Levins Morales, who states in her book, On Anti-Semitism, that she gets anti-Semitic abuse from Zionists, because they really believe that the only way Jews can be safe is to have their own homeland where only they are the privileged people.

The Nazi Nicknames Adopted by Israeli Soldiers

Greenstein goes on to make the point that under the right circumstances, every people can become racists. It was, he states, inevitable that Jewish Israelis should develop the same mindset and attitudes as their Nazi oppressors. He cites articles in Haaretz and al Hamishmar from 1989 about Israeli army units that called themselves after Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor, who experimented on Jews and other human victims in the concentration camps; ‘Our Nazis’, for those squaddies in the IDF who liked to beat Arabs, and ‘the Auschwitz 10’ and ‘Demjanjuks’, after a sadistic concentration camp guard, who was just being tried. He also quoted a supporter of Lehava, the Israeli group that campaigns against racial mixing, who said that it was ‘unfortunate’ that Hitler attacked the wrong nation, as Jews were the chosen race. He also describes an incident from 2012 involving Israeli schoolchildren, who had been taken to see the play Ghetto, about Jewish life in Vilna during the Nazi occupation. Instead of sympathising with the suffering of their parents’ and grandparents’, the kids instead applauded the Nazis, even cheering on a scene in which a kapo struck a Jew.

Herzl and Anti-Semitism

Greenstein then goes on to show how there always was a confluence of interests between Zionism and anti-Semitism. He quotes Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, who believed that gentile anti-Semitism contained the Divine will to good by forcing Jews to close ranks. He also quotes a piece from the Jewish paper, Davar, from the 1950s in which the writer stated he would like to select a group of ‘efficient young men’ who would be sent to countries in which the Jewish population are engaged in ‘sinful self-satisfaction’. These men would then paint anti-Semitic hate messages on walls disguised as non-Jews and demanding that they go to Palestine. He states that Zionism was never really concerned with fighting anti-Semitism. It was concerned with gathering the Jewish people together to establish a Jewish state. And so Zionists came to see their real enemies as the Jewish opponents of Zionism, who should themselves be the victims of anti-Semitism.

He states that, contra France’s President Macron, who declared that anti-Zionism was a new version of anti-Semitism, Jewish history shows that it is Zionism that actually has the closest similarity to gentile anti-Semitism. He illustrates this with a passage from Herzl’s The Jewish State, which lays the blame for anti-Semitism on the Jews themselves. For Herzl, Jews, who married gentiles were lost to the ‘Jewish tribe’ and he declared he had no quarrel with the ‘honest anti-Semites’ who would spur on Jewish emigration. He also recognised that people would accuse him of ‘giving a handle to anti-Semitism’ when he said that the Jews were one people. One of the very many Jews, who did consider Zionism anti-Semitic was Lucien Wolf, the head of Britain’s Conjoint Committee and British Jewry’s ‘unofficial foreign minister’, who is quoted as saying

‘I have spent most of my life in combating these very doctrines, when presented to me in the form of anti-Semitism, and I can only regard them as the more dangerous when they come to me in the guise of Zionism. They constitute a capitulation to our enemies.’

Herzl also admired Edouard Droumont, a notorious anti-Semite and anti-Dreyfusard, who Herzl declared was ‘an artist’ and was delighted when Droumont gave The Jewish State a glowing review.

The Zionists also agreed with the anti-Semites that the Jews were an ‘asocial’ body that did not belong among gentiles. The Marxist Zionist left, which followed the doctrines of Ber Borochov, Hashomer Hatzair and later Mapam, believed that there were too many rich Jews at the top of diaspora Jewish society and not enough workers. The reality, however, was that the vast majority of Jews in the Russian Empire lived in grinding poverty. The Zionists also agreed with the anti-Semites that Jews were either rootless cosmopolitans behind Communist agitation or the excesses of capitalism. He once again quotes Herzl, who wrote

When we sink, we become a revolutionary proletariat, the subordinate officers of all revolutionary parties; and at the same time, when we rise, there rises also our terrible power of the purse.

This is exactly the sentiments of that terrible Tsarist anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which has inspired so much Nazism, Fascism and real Jew-hatred in the 20th century.

Other Zionist Anti-Semitism

Greenstein goes on to quote the Israeli novelist, A.B. Yehoshua, who said that Jews treated other people’s countries as hotels. And when Zionists described diaspora Jews, they sounded exactly like gentile anti-Semites. The first Israeli Minister of Justice, Pinhas Rosenbluth, described Palestine as an ‘institute for the fumigation of Jewish vermin’. Jacob Klatzkin, the co-editor of the Jewish newspaper, Die Welt, and co-founder of the Encylopaedia Judaica, wrote that Jews were

‘a people disfigured in both body and soul – in a word, of a horror… some sort of outlandish creature… in any case, not a pure national type… some sort of oddity among the peoples going by the name of Jew.’

Hashomer Hatzair’s Weltanschauung, first published in 1917, and then republished in 1936, also described Jews in hostile terms:

“a caricature of a normal, natural human being, both physically and spiritually. As an individual in society he revolts and throws off the harness of social obligations, knows no order nor discipline.”

Greenstein concludes

Why is this relevant? Because even today Zionism considers the Jewish diaspora as essentially worthless. Whenever a choice has to be made between the Jews and the Jewish state then the interests of the latter always take priority.

http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2019/04/why-when-zionists-abuse-their-jewish.html

The Identification of the Oppressed with their Oppressors

This is deeply shocking stuff, and it shows that Zionists have absolutely no business whatsoever accusing decent people, particularly self-respecting Torah-observant and secular Jews, of anti-Semitism. Greenstein has elsewhere argued that Zionism is a capitulation to anti-Semitism. It also reminds me of a comment the great journalist of the gogglebox, Clive James wrote way back in the 1970s. He observed in a piece about Roman Catholic children identifying with the British army in Northern Ireland, that oppressed peoples often supported and took on the views of their oppressors. I think James may have been wrong in the case of Ulster Catholics, as many of them initially supported the deployment of British troops, because they expected them to be far more impartial than the police. But it does seem to apply to many Zionists’ view of the degraded nature of diaspora Jewry following Herzl.

Israel’s Abandonment of Diaspora Jewry for Its Own Interests

And Zionists have shown themselves to be perfectly willing to sacrifice diaspora Jews to real anti-Semitism if it will benefit Israel. Greenstein has blogged about how one of the Zionist pioneers – I have a feeling it may have been David Ben Gurion – said that he would rather half of Europe’s Jews were wiped out by the Nazis, if half of them went to Israel, than all of them being saved by going to Britain. George Soros, the billionaire financier, who is cordially hated by Zionists and gentile anti-Semites, despises Zionism because of the deal Kasztner, the leader of Hungarian Zionism during the Nazi occupation, struck with the Nazis. This allowed for tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews to be sent to the death camps in return for a certain number escaping to Israel. And they’re still doing it today. David Rosenberg has written time and again on his blog, Rebel Notes, about the threat posed to eastern Europe’s remaining Jews by the extreme nationalist, anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim regimes in Hungary, Poland, the Ukraine and the Baltic states. But these have received little criticism from Israel, because they support the Israeli states and buy its armaments. Stephen Pollard, the gentile editor of the Jewish Chronicle, notoriously declared that a far-right Polish MEP wasn’t an anti-Semite, but a true friend of Israel. This was a politician, who among other things, supported legislation banning any discussion of Polish collaboration with the Nazis in the Holocaust, contrary to historical fact and ordinary, common morality.

Anti-Semitism and the Idea of a Chosen People

As for that comment by the Lehava supporter stating that Hitler shouldn’t have attacked the Jews, because they were the Chosen People, this is deeply offensive and dangerous for a variety of reasons. One common anti-Semitic accusation is that the Jews believe themselves to be superior to everyone else because they believe themselves to be God’s elect. There have been many attempts by Jews to tackle this misconception. In the 1920s, I believe, some German synagogues removed a prayer from their services referring to them as the Chosen People, because they were afraid it would give their non-Jewish compatriots the wrong idea. Other Jewish authorities have pointed out, citing the Bible, that their status of the Jewish people does not confer on them any kind of superiority. Rather, God chose the Jews because they were the smallest, weakest people, who are called upon to be a servant people.

Many Jews are uncomfortable with the idea of being a Chosen People, and some reject it outright. My guess is that some of this discomfort may also be due to the apparent similarity of the doctrine to secular ideas of racial superiority. I knew a lad at college, who bitterly hated Christianity, though he definitely wasn’t an anti-Semite nor any kind of Nazi. Quite the opposite. He believed that the roots of Nazi racism lay in the Old Testament and the idea of a Chosen People. He was wrong. Nazism grew out of western biological racism, which was founded in the 19th century by the French count, Gobineau. This also inspired Nazism, although the Nazis also took over and exploited Christian anti-Semitism. The Lehava supporter’s statement about Hitler and the Jews as the Chosen People would support the prejudiced views of the opponents of Judaism and Christianity as the origins of racism.

Zionist Silence over their Anti-Semitism

The existence of the virulent anti-Semitism in Zionism, which Tony Greenstein describes, also raises another issue. Why won’t Zionist organisations like the Community Security Trust log anti-Semitic incidents and hate speech committed by Jews? It seems to be a prohibition that really only goes one way. As we’ve seen, very many of the decent people vilified and smeared as anti-Semites in the Labour party and elsewhere for their opposition to israel’s oppression of the Palestinians have been Jewish. Their Zionist opponents have shown themselves to have no qualms about accusing them of Jew-hatred. But it seems they do not want to record instances where decent Jewish critics of Israel have been so reviled.

Not only is this a disgusting double standard, it also makes you wonder what they’re hiding. Is there so much of this vilification, that if it was recorded, Zionists would find themselves exposed as some of the worst anti-Semites?

The Discreet, Poisonous Corporatism of the Labour Party Quitters

Yesterday, a group of seven MPs formally split from the Labour party. Now going independent, this glittering array of third raters, has-beens and deadbeats were supposed to form the nucleus of this new, shiny Blairite ‘centrist’ party that has been mooted for the past year or so. The group included such luminaries as Gavin Shuker, Luciana Berger, Chris Leslie, Chuka Umunna, Angela Smith, Mike Gapes and Ann Coffey. They were all Blairites, who had been trying to overthrow Corbyn or undermine his leadership since he was elected head of the party. Or else had been threatening to quit.

Comparisons have been made to the Labour split in the 1980s which saw the notorious ‘gang of four’, including Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams form the short-lived Social Democratic Party. They ended up shortly forming an alliance with the Liberals before finally merging with them to form the Liberal Democrats. At the time there much verbiage in the press about the SDP ‘breaking the mould’ of British politics. It didn’t happen, despite the TV critic Clive James in his Observer column sneering at Tony Benn, who said that support for the SDP had peaked. But, as Zelo Street has pointed out, the comparison also doesn’t do the Quitters any favours in another way. Some of the MPs, who formed the SDP were actually first rate politicos. As Home Secretary in the 1960s, Roy Jenkins oversaw some profound changes in the liberalization of British society. Like the partial decriminalization of homosexuality, for which, among other things, he’s still bitterly resented by the Tory right today. Reading Shirley William’s 1979 book, Politics Is For People, it’s clear that she did have a powerful mind with strong, distinct views on how socialism should improve British society and industry.

This bunch, by contrast, don’t seem to have any distinct views or anything more to offer than rehashed, warmed up Blairism. Before their website crashed yesterday, Zelo Street was able to get on it and read what they had to say. Which seemed to be a lot of flannel. More fine-sounding words about democracy which didn’t actually come down to meaning very much. The website said

Our primary duty as Members of Parliament is to put the best interests of our constituents and our country first. Our free media, the rule of law, and our open, tolerant and respectful democratic society should be cherished and renewed. We believe that our Parliamentary democracy in which our elected representatives deliberate, decide and provide leadership, held accountable by their whole electorate is the best system of representing the views of the British people. Zelo Street remarked that the first part of this statement, about cherishing and renewing free media, rule of law and democratic society doesn’t actually mean anything, while the second – about parliamentary democracy being the best method of representing the views of the British people – is just what every MP in the House believes.

But what the group really stands for is best shown by the group’s legal organization and its members’ very cosy relationship with private enterprise. The group’s website was set up in 2015 in a tax haven. The new party actually isn’t a party. It’s been registered as a private corporation, Gemini A, which means that it doesn’t have to identify its backers. This also, apparently, makes it exempt from the spending restrictions on campaigning which apply to genuine political parties.

And then there’s Angela ‘People of funny tin…’ Smith’s connection with private water companies. Smith is chairman of the all-party water group, which is mainly funded by private water companies like Wessex Water and Affinity Water. Talking to Smith on This Morning Yesterday, Ash Sarkar pointed out that her group were some of the very few people left, who still believe in water privatization. She predicted that people would like at Smith’s leadership of the group and say, ‘You know what, that stinks of corruption’.

Sarkar isn’t going to be wrong either. The Canary in their article on this pointed out that 83 per cent of the population want the water companies to be renationalized. And Blair’s very strong links to private industry were very heavily criticized when he was power. Blair was a corporatist, who gave business leaders and senior management key positions in government in exchange for donations. This whole, nasty web of corporate links was exposed by the Groaniad’s George Monbiot in his book, Captive State, which lists various businessmen and the government positions Blair gave them. Even at the time Blair’s government was notorious for doing political favours in return for donations, as Blair did for Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One magnate, in return for something like a million pounds of corporate dosh.

‘Bevan Boy’ described what other Blairite policies this crew probably also stand for in this tweet, quoting by Mike in his article on them:

What will this new “Centrist” party stand for?
More Austerity?
Rampant marketisation & uncontrolled capitalism?
Neoconservative Thatcherism?
I suspect all of the above under a pro EU banner. The policies are being rejected & thank Christ they are.
We need a socialist LAB govt!

And what the splitters really think of democracy is shown by the fact that none of them actually want to hold a bye-election and give their constituents a say in whether they want them to represent them in parliament. It’s been pointed out that only one per cent of voters say that they actually vote for the individual MP, rather than the party. But these avowed democrats really don’t want to give their constituents the opportunity to decide whether they want to keep them as their MP or whether they want to elect someone else.

Which is what you could expect from a group that includes Luciana Berger. Berger, or should that be Lucrezia Borgia?, was facing a vote of no confidence from her local constituency. She then declared that they were bullying her, and demanded Jenny Formby expel the constituency party from Labour. Formby told her that she had no cause to do this and refused.

But Borgia, sorry, Berger, has carried on whining about bullying and intimidation nonetheless. Just as all the Quitters have moaned about anti-Semitism. The truth is, anti-Semitism is not the reason they’re splitting. It never has been. It has only been a convenient stick with which to beat Corbyn and his supporters. In fact anti-Semitism in the party has fallen under the Labour leader. It is lower in the Labour party than in the others and in the general British population. And the anti-Semitism accusations against him and the majority of those accused are nothing but contrived smears.

The real truth is that Berger, Umunna, Shuker, Leslie, Smith, Coffee and Gapes are corporatist anti-democrats. They wish to hang on to power against the wishes of their constituents, in order to promote the power of private corporations. Just as Mussolini and Hitler promoted private industry and gave it a seat in government and the management of the economy in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

For further information, see:
https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/02/18/mps-split-off-from-the-labour-party-voters-say-good-riddance/

https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/02/18/mps-split-off-from-the-labour-party-voters-say-good-riddance/

http://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-independent-group-on-way-out.html

https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2019/02/18/ash-sarkar-takes-down-a-resigning-blairite-mp-so-brutally-a-bbc-host-intervenes/

A Few Sharp Quotes about Thatcher and the Tories

I also found a couple of sharp quotations about the Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the same issue of Focus, which had a comment from Martial. Martial said that man loved malice, but only against the fortunate and proud, not the unfortunate. It’s completely the opposite case with the Tories, who are only too full of malice towards the unfortunate. Here are the quotes printed in the magazines against Maggie.

She sounded like the Book of Revelations read out over a railway public address system by a headmistress of a certain age wearing calico knickers.

Clive James.

She only went to Venice because someone told her she could walk down the middle of the street.

Neil Kinnock.

A semi-house trained polecat

Michael Foot on Norman Tebbit.

And on Ronald Reagan:

A masterpiece of the embalmer’s art.

Gore Vidal.

And there are many others about the Tories. I think it might have been Roy Hattersley, who said that there wasn’t a British tradition Thatcher hadn’t struck with her handbag, and described her as a ‘bargain-basement Boadicea. And it was also him, or someone else from the Labour party who described being attacked in parliament by Douglas Hurd as like being savaged by a dead sheep.

And a friend of mine, who used to be a member of the Tory party, was fond of the quote, ‘The Tory party is an organized hypocrisy’.

Clive James on Nixon’s Interview with Henry Kissinger

One of the books I was reading in hospital was Clive James’ The Crystal Bucket (London: Picador 1981). As I said in a previous blog post, James was the TV critic for the Observer. He started out on the radical left, and ended up a Conservative, writing for the Torygraph. During the 1980s and 1990s, he had his own show, first on Channel 4 with Sunday Night Clive, and then on the Beeb with Monday night. In these, he zoomed up and down the information superhighway to bring you satirical comment on the news and interview stars like Peter Cook, William Shatner, and Sylvester Stallone’s weird and highly embarrassing, at least for him, mother.

James could be witty and intelligent, and in The Crystal Bucket he reviewed some of the programmes then being shown on the serious issue of the time. Like old Nazis and Fascists like Albert Speer and Oswald Mosley talking about Nazi Germany or their career as Fascists, without once admitting that they were genuinely persecutory anti-Semites, responsible or in Mosley’s case, criminally supporting a regime that murdered people in their millions for no other crime than their ethnicity or political orientation.

James also reviewed David Frost’s interview with Richard Nixon, in which America’s most notorious president until Trump tried to sound repentant for the horrors of his foreign policy, while actually not denying or repudiating them at all. This was the interview that was recently filmed as Frost/Nixon.

Frost also interviewed the man responsible for Nixon’s genocidal foreign policy, Henry Kissinger. Kissinger brought chaos, torture and death across the globe from the overthrow of Allende in Chile to the support of another Fascist thug in Pakistan. Of whom Nixon himself said that this thug was ‘a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch’. Kissinger’s massive bombing campaign was responsible for the rise in power of the Khmer Rouge, who became the leading opposition group against the Americans. And after they seized power came the genocides and massacres of Pol Pot’s Year Zero, in which 1-2 millions died.

The review’s particularly interesting for this passage. James was not a total opponent of the Vietnam War, and seems to have believe that the Americans were right to fight against the Viet Cong because of the horrors they would inflict on the rest of the country when they gained power. He criticised Frost, because he thought Frost had bought the whole anti-Vietnam War argument, and states that the Americans were justified in bombing North Vietnamese bases in Cambodia. They were just too brutal, as was Kissinger’s foreign policy generally, and his overthrow of the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, was criminal.

James wrote

Indeed Frost’s questioning, though admirably implacable, was often wide of the mark. Frost had obviously bought the entire ant-war package on Cambodia, up to and including the idea that the North Vietnamese had scarcely even been present within its borders. They were there all right. There was considerable military justification for US intervention in Cambodia, as even some of the most severe critics of Nixon and Kissinger are prepared to admit. ‘Now jusd a minude,’ fumed Kissinger, ‘with all due respecd, I think your whole line of quesdioning is maging a moggery of whad wend on in Indo-China. ‘

Well, not quite. Nixon and Kissinger might have had short-term military reasons for their policy in Cambodia, but the ruinous long-term consequences were easily predictable. Nor, despite Kissinger’s plausible appeal to international law, was there anything legal about the way he and his President tried to keep the bombing secret. In fact, they conspired to undermine the United States Constitution. Kissinger’s personal tragedy is that his undoubted hatred of totalitarianism leads him to behave as if democracy is not strong enough to oppose it.

Unfortunately his personal tragedy, when he was in power, transformed itself into the tragedy of whole countries. The most revealing part of the interview was not about South East Asia, but about Chile. It transpires that a 36 per cent share of the popular vote was not enough to satisfy Kissinger that Allende had been democratically elected. Doubtless remembering Hitler, who had got in on a comparable share of the total vote, Kissinger blandly ascribed Allende’s electoral victory to a ‘peculiaridy of the consdidution’. But Margaret Thatcher is Prime Minister of Great Britain by the same kind of peculiarity, and presumably Kissinger, if he were still ruling the roost, would have no plans to topple her. By what right did he topple Allende?

Kissinger couldn’t even conceive of this as a question, ‘Manipulading the domesdig affairs of another goundry’, he explained, ‘is always gombligaded.’It is not just complicated, it is often criminal. The Nixon-Kissinger policy in Chile was an unalloyed disaster, which delivered the population of that country into the hands of torturers and gave Kissingers’ totalitarian enemy their biggest propaganda boost of recent times. You didn’t have to be Jane Fonda to hate the foreign policy of Nixon and Kissinger. all you had to be was afraid of Communism.
(‘Maging a Moggery’, pp.226-228, 4th November 1979).

This shows up two things. Firstly, the sheer murderousness behind Hillary Clinton. Posing as the ‘woman’s candidate’ in the Democratic presidential election contest, and then again in the elections proper against Trump, she showed none of the deep feminine, and feminist concerns for peace and humanity, which have seen women across the world lead marches and protests groups against war and Fascism. Like the women in Chile who formed a group campaigning for the release of information on the victims of Pinochet’s coup who ‘disappeared’. I remember Sinead O’Connor singing ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ back in the 1990s as part of a programme celebrating them and protesters like them. Hillary, instead, has shown herself every bit as much a military hawk and anti-democrat as the generals she surrounded herself with. I’ve no doubt that if she had won the election, we would now be at war with China and Russia. She’s also the woman, who glowingly boasted how she went on holiday with Kissinger, something that did not impress Bernie Sanders in the presidential debates.

It also shows up the Times. A few weeks ago, I posted up a bit I found in a book on the right-wing bias of the British media. This was an extract from the Times, in which one of their lead writers declared that Pinochet’s coup was entirely justified, because Allende only had 36 per cent of the vote and he couldn’t control the country.

Well, Thatcher had the same proportion of the vote, and there was widespread, determined opposition to her in the form of strikes and riots. But instead, rather than calling for her overthrow, the Times celebrated her election victory as a return to proper order, economic orthodoxy and the rest of the right-wing claptrap.

It shows just how thuggish and hypocritical Murdoch’s Times is, and just how much Hillary certainly didn’t deserve the support of America and its women. She’s been whining about how she’s been the victim of left-wing ‘misogyny’ ever since. But if you want to see what she really represents, think of Nixon, Chile’s disappeared, it’s campaigning women and Sinead O’Connor’s performance. O’Connor herself, in my opinion, is no saint. But she’s the better women than Hillary.

Out of Hospital for Myeloma Treatment

Way back on the 18th of last month I posted that I was going into hospital for 2 1/2 weeks for the intensive dose therapy for myeloma. Myeloma is a type of blood cancer, which causes anaemia, loss of calcium, and attacks the bones and kidneys. Since about a decade ago it’s been treated with a number of drugs, which avoid the side-effect of traditional chemotherapy. I was diagnosed with the disease last September.

However, after that phase of the course of treatment has finished, they then call you in for a more intense course of treatment to drive the disease further back into remission. Your own stem cells are removed, ready to be returned to you to jump start your own immune system. You are also called into hospital and put in isolation. In Bristol’s BRI you are given your own room. You have a piccline inserted running from your bicep to almost to your heart, through which they administer the drugs. They then give you a dose of malophan, the drug that they originally used to treat the disease.  The next day, they also give you back your own stem cells, and a few days later they also give you back the platelets they removed.

Throughout the whole period you are carefully monitored, given drugs, both in pill form and in infusions to deal with the effects of the cancer treatment. The doctors see you every day to see how you’re coping. If you have problems eating, you may also a nutritionist, while a physiotherapist will also visit to advise you on gentle exercises if you are weak.

I shudder to think how much all this would cost under the private insurance system in America, which the Tories  and New Labour so much admire, even while they’re prating about how much they ‘treasure’ the NHS.

They released me yesterday, and it’s good to be home. The treatment has, however, left me as weak as the proverbial kitten, with a sore mouth, and diarrhoea. I’ve been prescribed and given mouthwashes and drugs for some of these effects. The booklets for the treatment state that it may be 2/3 months, or even 5-6 months, before you make a complete recovery. So don’t expect very much energetic blogging!

I cannot fault the treatment given by the medical and the ancillary staff. They were professional, friendly, courteous and reassuring. I found the treatment very difficult, but they were at pains to say, ‘This is not the ‘new you’. You will recover.’ And it can be very interesting talking to the ancillary staff, some of whom were non-White immigrants, and hearing their stories and perspectives. The NHS certainly has benefit from the skills and dedication brought to it by its medical professionals and ancillary staff from across the world, whether Asia, the Caribbean, Africa, or eastern Europe. And the health service is suffering because many of these are being forced to return home, or look elsewhere for work, because of Tweezer and Brexit.

I’m afraid I haven’t been blogging very much while in hospital, despite my best intentions. Their wifi system simply wouldn’t let me. The hospital wifi system was insecure, so that anyone geographically near me could see my passwords if I went to a site that require them. So the system simply refused to let me on after I posted up those couple of pieces to the blog about George Galloway winning his libel battle against the Torygraph, and New Labour’s desperate policy to stop NHS hospitals owning and operating their own MRI scanners, as opposed to leasing them from private firms. So I spent my time in bed trying to read an SF novel by the awesome Paul McAuley, and re-reading a few old copies of Private Eye and Clive James’ The Crystal Bucket. This last is a collection of James’ old TV reviews from the 1970s from the Observer. James started out as a radical socialist, and then move right, eventually ending up in the Torygraph. An intellectual, with a tendency to show off, he nevertheless took trash culture very seriously, at a time when many intellectuals did dismiss television. One of the jokes about it used to be ‘Why is television a medium? Because it’s neither rare nor well done’. Which is true of a lot, but not all. And James stated that heartfelt trash culture was worth far more than bad high art, like Michael Tippet’s A Child Of Our Time. The ’70s were also the  decade of the Vietnam War and the horrors of the CIA coup in Chile, George Kissinger’s support of genocidal, murderous dictators across the world as part of the campaign against Communism, Watergate, and TV dramas about the Holocaust, all of which he reviewed, along with Star Trek, Dr. Who, Miss World, the World Disco-Dancing Championships, the footie and the athletics. Quite apart from more highbrow productions of Shakespeare, intense dramas, and the horrors of the classic BBC series, I, Claudius, set under the deprave reign of Caligula.

He also reviewed an interview with the old Fascist, Oswald Mosley. Mosley was the leader of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, and a series of successive Fascist movements after the Second World War. He was very definitely persona non grata for many years, until he partly rehabilitated himself with the publication of his autobiography, My Life.  He then got a job doing book reviews for the Telegraph. Mosley was a fan of Mussolini and then Adolf Hitler. When Mussolini was overshadowed by Hitler as the great Fascist dictator, Mosley changed the name of the BUF to the ‘British Union of Fascists and National Socialists’. He corresponded very amicably with the Nazis, although claimed during the War that in the event of an invasion of Britain he would not serve as this country’s Quisling, the traitor leader of Norway. And in the interview the old thug constantly denied being an anti-Semite, claiming that the attacks and violence were instead all the fault of the Jews. All the while making it clear that he still identified them with the ‘money power’, which was secretly ruling from behind the scenes. James said of him that he didn’t so much proclaim anti-Semitism as embody it. There’s much to blog about in James’ TV criticism from this period. I especially want to do a piece about this interview with Mosley to show the difference between real anti-Semites, and those decent people, who have been smeared as such by the Israel lobby, New Labour and the Tory press. People like Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone, mike, my brother, Tony Greenstein and so many, many others. Absolutely none of whom are in any way, shape or form anything like the real Nazis and anti-Semites, like Mosley or the characters now crawling out into public view from the Alt-Right and Libertarians.

I spent part of yesterday evening trying to answer the various comments that had built up on this blog over the past few weeks. I really appreciate all the messages of support and encouragements to get well and get blogging soon! It was really great and encouraging to read. I feel fortunate that I have people like you all following my blog.

I’m still quite ill at the moment, but I hope to pick up and carry on blogging as far as I can. And I hope you all are enjoying good health, and haven’t suffered too much from the heat these past weeks. With luck, it shouldn’t be too long before it’s business as usual. I hope.