Tomorrow’s National Demonstration for Palestine is part of a Global Day of Action to mark the 76th anniversary of the Nakba, the act of mass ethnic cleansing undertaken by Zionist forces to establish the state of Israel which saw over 750,000 Palestinians expelled and over 500 Palestinian towns and villages destroyed. Reflecting on the anniversary of the Nakba, Lindsey German, wrote earlier this week:
“The world is becoming a much more dangerous place, and Netanyahu’s war is helping to make it so. While Britain, the US and EU states are nervous at his attack on Rafah, and don’t want it to happen, but will not stop it because Israel is a key ally in the Middle East.
So on the anniversary of the Nakba, we find Israel, a nuclear state, acting with greater impunity than ever, and with its right-wing politicians wanting a total war not just against Gaza but in the whole of the Middle East.
We also find the Palestinian people continuing to resist and to demand justice, backed by a solidarity movement which is only growing stronger as Israel is forever branded a pariah state.”
Above is the route for the tomorrow’s march. The start point will be slightly different from marches from the BBC in the past, beginning on Mortimer St. Please use the following underground stations: Goodge Street, Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Circus.
Hundreds of thousands are predicted to march in what is the 14th national march since October, calling for a ceasefire to end the genocide in Gaza. Click here to find transport from your area. See you on the streets tomorrow!
More Speakers Added! Why War, Peace & Palestine Are Trade Union Issues
We’re super excited to announce that the inspirational Chris Smalls from the Amazon Labour Union in the US is coming over in-person to be part of our 2024 Trade Union Conference! Also joining our excellent line-up will be Suzan Abdul Salaam from the New Union of Jerusalem (online), Emma Rose (NEU President) and Jim Kelly (Unite London & Eastern – Personal Capacity).
We’re looking forward to an excellent conference focused on building the anti-war movement in the workplace. Make sure to get your branch to support the conference and send a delegation.
Speakers Previously Announced:
Jo Grady, UCU Gen Sec // Eddie Dempsey, RMT Assistant Gen Sec // Riccardo LaTorre, FBU National Officer // Mohammed Shafiq, Chair of PCS Black Members Committee // Sean Vernell, UCU Exec // Andrew Feinstein, Shadow World // Lindsey German, StWC Convenor // Andrew Murray, StWC Vice President
We are joining calls for a mass demonstration outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London on Monday (20 May) from 8.30am as the monumental decision is handed down. A decision is expected on the day and should extradition be allowed moves to initiate his transfer the US could be taken immediately.
Stella Assange will be at court along with WikiLeaks’ Kristinn Hrafnsson and our team to make sure that we provide comprehensive coverage of this historic decision. Julian must be allowed to resume his life with his young family who have been robbed of their father simply for his commitment to standing up for the public’s right to know.
Okay, here’s a bit of politics and it’s going to be highly controversial. Norman Finkelstein is a Jewish-American scholar and critic of Israel and its slow motion ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. In this video from YouTube, he gives his perspective as a Jew on Israel. He states very clearly that it isn’t a Jewish state, but a lunatic state. A type that goes against everything he believes is Jewish. He points to how proud Jews were that four of the leading intellectuals that created the modern world were Jewish – Einstein, Marx, Freud, and some would say Jesus – were all Jews. Jews surged with pride at this fact. The life of the mind loomed large for Jews. Standing behind a perimeter fence to target double amputees has nothing to do with a Jew or Jews. This is why he doesn’t believe that Israel constitutes a Jewish states according to what he grew up to understand as a Jew.
He’s not alone. This is why many Jews have taken part in the protest marches waving placards with the slogan ‘Not In My Name’ and ‘Not Again For Anyone’. Among those attacking Netanyahu for his war crimes are Holocaust survivors, who clearly deserve to be listened to because of their experience of genocide. Not that you would know this from right-wing news organisations like GB News and various internet commenters, who want you to believe that the only people marching against the ethnic cleansing of Gaza are fanatical Muslims with a genocidal hatred of the Jews and the desire to turn Britain into a Muslim state under sharia law.
This is a video from Double Down News, one of the left-wing internet news channels that got our right-wing, establishment media so rattled. Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi is the head of the Jewish Voice for Labour, and another victim of the anti-Semitism smears and witch-hunts. I think she has been purged from the Labour party because she dared to criticise Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. She states here quite clearly that she is the wrong type of Jew, the Jews who aren’t shown on the media giving their support to the Palestinians despite the fact that there are thousands of them and more across the world. Instead the media goes to the Chief Rabbis, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and, heaven forfend, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, all of whom have support for Israel written into their DNA, instead of talking to anti-Zionist Jews like herself. The media presents Jews as the frightened victims of the police guarding Jewish no-go zones. Instead, the opposite is almost true. Jews are demonstrating for Palestine like other, reasonable people. They include Holocaust survivors and the children of Holocaust survivors, concerned that what was done to them will not be inflicted on another people. As for being scared and frightened, she is scared and frightened because she, and people like her, have been abused and silenced. But what is going on in Gaza is not religious, it is an attack on people by settler-colonialism, which is perpetrating human rights abuses, ethnic cleansing and plausible genocide. As for the chant ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ she states that this is about Palestinians being between those borders, with the implication that this does not mean the extermination of the Israelis.
She is given hope by the many people marching and demonstrating for Gaza across the world, including America, and trying to shut down arms factories. Many of them are Jewish, such as the young man she met today. He had family in Israel, and it was the first demonstration he’d been on, but it was the first time he felt empowered to do so.
The video concludes with her appealing to people to support Double Down News as a way of avoiding right-wing media bias.
The video shows Jewish demonstrators, including Holocaust survivors, marching and holding placards making their opposition to the genocide in Gaza very clear.
One of the events mention on the bulleting was yesterday, so I’m afraid I’ve missed posting about that in time. However, the other events are still a few days away if anyone wants to sign to them.
‘Event Bulletin – 17/04/24
This Sat: Israel, Iran & the Threat of Wider War
The threat of the war in Gaza spilling over into a wider Middle East war has never been greater.
The tense relationship between Tehran and Tel Aviv is stretched to breaking point. Israel’s missile strike on the Iranian embassy in Damascus led to the first ever direct attack by Iran on Israel. Western powers leapt to condemn Iran’s actions yet they conspicuously failed to condemn Israel for its provocations.
Pressure is being put on Netanyahu to avoid further escalation but he is hardly a leader known for his restraint. The world is on tenterhooks as it awaits Israel’s response. And while we wait Israel continues its slaughter in Gaza, continues to use hunger as a weapon of war, and the UK, along with the US, continues to supply Israel with arms.
Join us on Saturday evening for a discussion with eminent commentators, Trita Parsi (Responsible Statecraft), John Rees (Stop the War), Kate Hudson (CND) and Maryam Eslamdoust (TSSA) who will be examining how we got to this point and where we might be headed next.
Tomorrow – Palestine & the Unions: The Next Steps for the Movement
The global movement against the genocide in Gaza is having an enormous impact. The pressure on governments to stop arming Israel is huge and we must keep it up. Tomorrow (18 April), we’re bringing together representatives from across the UK and beyond to discuss how trade unionists can continue to deliver effective solidarity to the Palestinian people.
Susan Abdul Salaam from the New Union of Jerusalem will be joining us live as will president and founder of the Amazon Labor Union, Chris Smalls, from the US. PCS General Secretary Fran Heathcote, RMT President Alex Gordon, Stop the War’s Andrew Murray and Frankie Leach from Unite’s EC make up an esteemed line-up. Join us for this crucial discussion.
National Demonstration: Stop Arming Israel – Ceasefire Now!
Saturday 27 April, 12 noon
Central London, Assembly Point TBA
The next National Demonstration for Palestine will be on Saturday 27 April in Central London. If you haven’t already, please start organising to ensure the highest turnout possible. We’ll have flyers for the demo in our London office from tomorrow. If you can flyer please click below.
Bruce Gilley, The Case for Colonialism (Nashville, Tennessee and London, New English Review Press 2023)
Introduction
This is a controversial book that arose from an extremely controversial academic article written by the author. It’s particularly timely as yesterday the Guardian reviewed an exhibition on Black slavery with the approving comment that it was a great rebuttal to those who are now arguing that British imperialism was benign and civilising. Gilley is indeed one of the latter. in 2018 he was moved to write an academic article defending European colonialism after researching Sir Alan Burns, the last British governor of the Gold Coast, now Ghana, and reading positive comments about British colonialism from the anti-colonialist activist and writer, Chinua Achebe. Achebe is regarded as a staunch enemy of British colonialism, and yet Gilley presents quotation after quotation showing that his attitude was more nuanced. Achebe stated that by and large, Nigeria under the British was well run and that they cared for their colonies. He noted that he owed his education to European missionaries who ran excellent schools, the state schools and finally the university founded by the British. He had no animus against the British themselves, and lived in London. He was also attacked for writing in English rather than his native Igbo, despite the fact that an Igbo language press did not exist.
Benefits of Colonialism
Gilley argues that colonialism benefited its subject peoples by modernising their countries with western technology, medicine and industry, as well as fundamental institutions of political liberty as property rights and democracy. It was not regarded as illegitimate by the colonised peoples themselves. The book begins with a letter from the peoples of the Lakes region of Nigeria, now Lagos, for the British to take over their lands to protect them from their tribal enemies and inviting them to stay as long as they liked. Their willing acceptance of colonial authority was shown in the way they moved closer to the centres of colonialism, not away from them, seeking the greater opportunities to be found there. The colonies’ indigenous peoples formed the majority of civil servants, police and soldiers so that the number of White administrators in some of these nations was minuscule compared to the vast populations over which they ruled. And some of the former colonies are coming to a positive reappraisal of the colonialists as the founders of their nations. This is happening in Nigeria with Lord Lugard and the former Belgian Congo with A Brazza. Moreover, the abysmal misgovernment and corruption in these nations is forcing many of them to look back on their former colonial overlords requesting them to return. After the explosion at the port of Beirut several years ago, a petition in Lebanon went up calling for the French to return and take over the colony. 60,000 people signed in the first hours it was up on the Net. Macron acceded to the request, so that the French state acted as a kind of supervisor in an international arrangement in which a western company took over the running of the port. A Belgian journalist, van Reynbrouck, was surprised when he visited the former Belgian Congo by the numbers of young Congolese who came up to him asking when the Belgians would return. In a similar case to Lebanon, the Indonesian authorities were extremely concerned about corruption among the customs officers in Jakarta. They sacked all 3,000 of them and brought in a Swiss company to rebuild it. But the projects to reintroduce elements of western colonialism to genuinely modernise and restore good government and business practice to these countries goes far beyond that. One economist has recommended setting up ‘charter cities’ in the former colonies, with the authorities’ consent. These would be leased to the former colonial powers under 99 years leases, like Hong Kong, and governed by the former imperial masters. At the same time, leases granting residential status would be given to a limited number of migrants seeking to live and work there. In this way modern, democratic government and business would return to the former colonies.
Resulting Controversy
Gilley submitted his article promoting colonialism to two academic journals. One turned it down because it was too controversial. He then offered it to another, the Third World Quarterly. They published it to a storm of outrage. Over a hundred academics, including those of his own university, demanded that he be sacked or subjected to something like a Maoist ‘struggle session where he would be forced to recant his sin. Eventually the article was withdrawn because of threats to lives of the magazine’s editors and staff from anti-colonial fanatics in India.
The book is partly a response to this controversy. The first few chapters describe the affair and respond to his critics. The next part of the book provide examples of the positive influence of colonialism around the world, including iconoclastic reappraisals of German rule in Africa and China and a complete demolition of the claim that King Leopold’s rule in the Congo was genocide resulting in the deaths of 8 million Black Africans. The chapter on German imperialism shows that, rather than proto-Nazis, the Germans had made explicit provision for the good government of their subject peoples leading to their eventual independence at the Congress of Berlin in 1880. They ruthless punished imperial administrators and troopers who abused and victimised the natives. In Qingdao their chief judge was keen to incorporate local, Chinese law into that of the colony and wrote three books on the subject. The genocide against the Herero in Southwest Africa was not planned and was largely the result of forces beyond the authorities’ control.
Refutation of Holocaust Allegations over King Leopold’s Rule in the Congo
In the Congo the real death toll from the exactions of the Force Publicque was largely confined to one section of this vast, sprawling country and consisted of 18,000 people. This was largely the result of tribal warfare, not deliberate policy by Leopold himself. The severed feet and other bodies shown in photographs of alleged colonial atrocities were the result of the traditional way the tribes in the area showed that they had killed their victims. Leopold had taken over the country with the specific intention of eradicating the slavery and cannibalism which plagued the area. The photographs of people with severed limbs were staged recreations of mutilations resulting from these atrocities, and not of horrific punishments visited by Leopold and his servants on those who failed to meet the rubber quotas. These photographs were then taken over by British missionaries and the anti-colonialist British press to show the supposed horror inflicted by Leopold over the people of his private empire. One notorious photo showed a man looking down forlornly at severed feet and an arm. This has been presented as limbs hacked off by the Force Publique on those rubber workers who had failed to meet their set targets. But the original photograph states that the man was looking down on the remains of his wife and daughter after they had been eaten by cannibals.
Black Anti-Slavery Activists Embrace of American Constitution
Another chapter presents the positive case for enslavement in America. He does not seek to present slavery itself as a positive institution benefiting its victims, although that was one of the arguments of its supporters. Instead he notes that in America slaves could, surprisingly, have the benefit of the law. In 1791 in Newport, Connecticutt, a slaver was tried for murder for throwing an enslaved woman with smallpox overboard as a threat to the health and lives of the rest of the ship. The trial lasted five years before the man was acquitted on the grounds that he had acted to protect the others on board against the contagion. Moreover, Black anti-slavery activists were well aware of the anti-slavery implications of the American constitution and its enshrinement of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all. They sought to widen its application beyond White Americans to themselves, in alliance with Whites, writing hymns and other texts supporting this view.
British Attempts to Supply Food to Famine-Struck First Nations in Canada
The book also rehabilitates British rule on the Canadian prairies, stating that they were not indifferent or complicit in a 19th century famine of the indigenous peoples that has now been described as a Holocaust. The British had scant resources in this corner of Canada and did what they could to provide food. They were also seeking to provide the Indians with modern, industrial education in the now notorious residential schools at the Native Canadians own request. They were hampered by distance and the problems of farming in that section of Canada which stumped even season agriculturalists from Ontario and was only solved ten years after the famine. And the same problems afflicted White Canadians. One man, who moved west, suffered from the loss of vital equipment en route. When he arrived, local people, including the Indians, borrowed his equipment but did not return it. The environment itself proved to be too challenging and after sticking it out for three years he finally gave up and returned home.
Erasure of the History of White Farmers in America
White farmers in colonial era America are also being erased from official history through a movement that claims that the piles of stones they left in their fields are really Native American cairns. This started with a group of old, White men. The founders of the movement were interested in pseudo-history, like finding Atlantis. Farmers in 19th century New England, when clearing their fields of stones, used to pile them up in the centre of the field. They were given to children to play with or sold to workers building roads. When such piles have been excavated, they reveal underneath rusted farm equipment and White American domestic refuse. The indigenous peoples then adopted the idea, passionately claiming that the piles were indeed cairns left by their ancestors. They gained this knowledge after visiting the stones and a few minutes of sacred contact with their gods and spirits. From there it moved on to be adopted by state and county authorities, sometimes as a means of preventing building development of these areas. Yet the fake history presented by this movement damages real colonial history. The stones themselves are the physical remains of the agricultural settlement and abandonment of these areas as the farmers moved to fresh lands further west. Another chapter takes apart this misrepresentation of Malayan colonial rule during the Emergency, stating that most Malayans actually supported British rule against that of the Communist guerrillas.
Achebe and Naipaul on the Benefits of Colonialism
There are two chapters given to the positive appreciation of colonialism by Chinua Achebe and the British Asian writer, V.S. Naipaul. Naipaul believed very strongly that British colonialism had benefited its peoples around the world. For him, it was a universal civilisation that promoted benign values applicable to all humanity. He was sharply critical in his novels of the dictators that took over these countries, plunging them into corruption and horrific bloodshed, and their left-wing White European supporters who followed them around, turning a blind eye to the horrors in the belief that something great and genuinely African would arise. He is also scathing of the hypocrisy behind the critics of British colonialism, who all seek its benefits in London or the West. These include Fazlur Rahman, who led the campaign to the Islamise Pakistan in the 1960s. When this provoked opposition, he fled to a nice tenured academic position at an American university. Vijayamprada Gopal, a professor of Colonial and Post-Colonial Literature at Cambridge University and a favourite with Novara Media, also gets it for her snobbery. She stated that she would no longer teach working class students after the university porters called her by the university’s accustomed form of address of ‘madam’ for all women, rather than calling her ‘doctor’ as she wanted. This conforms to Naipaul’s comment that Oxbridge educated Indians were worse petty tyrants than the Indian landlords, who insisted that their tenants bow and touch their feet.
Criticism of Gandhi
Naipaul was also critical of Islam in Among the Believers, and had scant regard for Gandhi. Gandhi had the right idea when he started out, but then transformed himself into a Hindu holy man, after which he had nothing positive to contribute. It’s controversial, but there have been books and articles written arguing that Gandhi was not the benign figure he’s been presented as. Rabindranath Tagore, another great figure in Indian nationalism, dislike Gandhi because of his tactic of whipping up mobs until they were on the edge of rioting and violence and then pulling back. His sudden embrace of the Dalits in the 1920s was provoked, not by genuine concern for them, but because the British were planning to add an extra clause protecting their voting rights. Gandhi feared that this would lead to them supporting British rule, not Indian nationalism. He also knew absolutely nothing about the Second World War and the nature of Nazism. He wrote a letter to Churchill urging him to make peace with Hitler as ‘he is not a bad man’. On the invasion of Czechoslovakia, he recommended that the Czechs and Slovaks should meet the Nazis with passive resistance. When someone pointed out to him that this would simply result in the Nazis exterminating them, he acknowledged that this would happen, but ‘it would have been glorious’. India today is an emerging industrial and technological global superpower, quite contrary to what Gandhi himself would have wanted for his country. Gandhi hated modern technology with its trains and airplanes. He would have liked India to return to its traditional Vedic social and economic structure. And it is precisely by rejecting his vision that India has developed and become the global force it is today.
Gilley’s View of the Handing of Hong Kong to China
The last chapter is Gilley’s own personal observations of Hong Kong’s handover to China in 1991 under its last governor, Chris Patten and an article he wrote for the final edition of a magazine devoted Asian affairs when this magazine finally folded. Patten comes across as trying to do his level best for Hong Kong and its people despite almost insurmountable opposition from the Chinese. Beijing did not respect the original treaty and simply regarded it as an opportune time to take over the colony. They warned Patten not to introduce democracy just before independence, as the British had done elsewhere. Patten defied them and gave it to Hong Kong anyway. He was very keen to soothe local feelings about colonialism, and so appeared in a lounge suit rather than traditional gubernatorial garb. As for the magazine, based in Hong Kong, this was very much a product of the colonial age in taking a broad view of the politics and economic affairs of the region. But it lost readers with the retreat of colonialism. Instead of a broad, regional view, magazines now presented the specific views of the individual nations, such as India or China, and the broader view was now being lost.
Genocide and Butchery by Post-Independence Dictators
The book also describes the horrors and carnage perpetrated by the colonies’ various dictators, who seized power after independence. Guinea-Bissau’s dictator wanted to destroy the legacy and infrastructure left over by the Portuguese, and so tore his country apart, butchering its people in the process. The British in Zanzibar had set up a multi-party system which sought to balance the interests of African and Arab Zanzibaris. A year after Prince Philip had formally handed power to them, however, it was invaded by anti-colonial forces backed by the Soviet Union and East Germany. Only one in ten indigenous Zanzibaris supported the invasion. The invaders set up a regime of massacre and repression, driving out the Sultan and the Arab and South Asian Zanzibaris. In one massacre, they invaded and slaughtered the tribespeople in one of the islands, whose children were then required to sing suitably patriotic songs celebrating their parents’ deaths.
Frantz Fanon’s Glorification of the Shooting and Murder of Whites
He also attacks Frantz Fanon, the Caribbean psychiatrist whose text on Algerian war of independence, The Wretched of the Earth, is now a classic of the decolonisation movement. Rather than being some kind of benign text on the necessity of Black liberation, Fanon’s book is bloodthirsty, revelling in the genocidal massacre of French colonists and White Europeans, and endorsed with a foreword by Jean-Paul Sartre. Gilley is harshly critical of the western left-wing intellectuals, safely ensconced in their Paris cafes, supporting people who can only be described as monstrous tyrants. No positive view of French rule in Algeria is permitted in the mainstream French press, but there is a large, self-published literature by the Pieds-Noir, the former French colonists, arguing that the mainstream view is incorrect. He also criticised the modern anti-colonial crowd, who angrily denounce America as a colonial power while demanding the right of Africans and Muslims to immigrate there.
Independence Not Expected or Wanted by the Majority of Colonial Peoples
Against this, and attacks on western notions of democracy and human rights, Gilley argues that the independence came unexpectedly and was not wanted by the mass of the colonised. In the Belgian Congo, only 27 per cent of the population supported it, but they were given it anyway, like it or not, by the departing Belgians. The real forces behind decolonisation was European exhaustion following the Second World War. Europe no longer had the ability to afford to run the former colonies and there was pressure from both America and Russia to open them up and decolonise, plus the politics of the Cold War. The countries that did best following independence were those that retained the most of their colonial legacy and infrastructure. This is recognised by many of the former colonies themselves. While colonial rule is hated by the people of most of the former colonies, their rulers are seeking to reintroduce elements of the colonial legacy in order to improve their countries.
Colonialism Preferable to the Alternatives
This all runs counter to what has been taught for decades, at least since the 1970s, about European colonialism, which is still being blamed for the many failures and troubles of the former colonies today. It will certainly not be popular with the Guardian and the other left-wing papers and magazines that hold the view that colonialism was uniformly bad, oppressive and exploitative. But Gilley makes a very strong and clear case. As well as the known facts that contradict the received narrative, it also argues from counterfactuals. What would have happened in the absence of colonialism? There are three possibilities. One is a continuation of tribal warfare and indigenous slavery. The second is the penetration of these colonies by western mercenaries and companies seeking concessions. The third is colonisation by a rival power. None of these would necessarily benefit the indigenous peoples.
As for the brutality of the British and other Europeans, the indigenous rulers and imperial powers were just as ruthless, if not more so. Nader Shah, the Persian emperor, was preparing a common currency for Persia and India, suggesting he planned to invade and annexe the country. During his time in Delhi he massacred 30,000 people. On his return to Persia he gouged his son’s eyes out, castrated one of his generals and had six merchants buried alive for the crime of buying a rug belonging to the imperial court. The British and other colonial powers, on the other hand, erected laws against the exploitation and brutal treatment of natives, sending reports back to the home countries and investigating and prosecuting offenders. This provides the basis for the many works of history denouncing colonialism, which is rather hypocritical in the absence of similar concerns by the indigenous powers presented as being somehow innocent of these crimes.
Arguments for Forced Labour
Gilley also seeks to rehabilitate the system of forced labour the British and other Europeans imposed on their African colonies. Gilley argues that this was indeed to make the colonies pay for themselves in the absence of monetary taxation. He states that the arguments against it are economically illiterate. Perhaps, but in Malawi and no doubt other African countries it was resented as a new form of slavery. He also points out the contradictory arguments against colonialism. For some, it underdeveloped its colonies. For others, it interfered too much. And there is the attitude among many of colonialism’s critics that the British should have provided free education and healthcare to their colonial subjects. In fact, Britons themselves did not have free healthcare until the establishment of the NHS and welfare state by the Labour government in 1948. Education in Britain wasn’t compulsory until the 1870s, and even if it was supposed to be free, the poverty of many working class Brits meant that some were unable to afford items such as school uniforms, pens and pencils and other equipment. It’s a case of presentism, the imposition of modern attitudes on to the past, in this case the expectations of the modern welfare state at a time when it did not exist.
Two Phases of British Colonialism
It is noticeable that Gilley begins his treatment of colonialism when it had entered its paternalistic, liberal phase after 1824. In Britain’s case this followed the abolition of the slave trade in 1809 and the introduction of progressive legislation for the improvement of the slaves’ lives in preparation for their eventual emancipation. The previous phase of British imperialism, such as the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland, James VI’s/I’s plantations and the horrors of the Cromwellian campaigns, in my view cannot be justified. Nor can the conquest of the Caribbean and the New World with the extirpation of the original Amerindian populations and the establishment of transatlantic slavery. Which is, no doubt, why he doesn’t and is silent on this phase of western colonialism. Some anti-imperial historians have written about European colonialism as if it was consciously proceeded according to a pre-set plan. But his was not the case. There was no uniform plan and European imperialism was the result of different economic, political, social and religious forces at different times. The lost of the American colonies and their slave holdings made it easier for the British to ban the slave trade and eventually slavery in theirs. Historians have long recognised that there were two phases of British imperialism, the first in America and the Caribbean, the second in the conquest of India, Africa and Asia. It may well be high time that anti-imperial historians and activists took on board the fact that the nature of colonialism itself changed in these two periods.
Imperialists as Colonies’ Real Nationalists
The book is part of a growing mass of literature seeking to present a positive case for colonialism, such as Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. Gilley goes further than Biggar, who merely argues that there were certain aspects of British colonialism that were deeply amoral and oppressive, by presenting this phase of imperialism as benign and positive, and takes friendly issue with Biggar on this point. There are even a very few positive facts in favour of Apartheid. One of these is that under it, 100,000 Black Africans a year sought to immigrate to South Africa. But this probably says more about the horrific state of the other African countries than anything really positive about Apartheid. Despite the barrage of abuse and threats Gilley received for his article, the book also reproduces the positive and supportive comments he received from other academics and activists from Africa and Asia, some of whom said that they and their families had greatly benefited from the institutions, especially schools and universities, left by the British. He also claims at one point that the British and other colonialists were these countries’ true nationalists, in that they had a deep interest in the indigenous cultures and their arts and literature that were often being neglected by the indigenous peoples themselves. Naipaul quotes an Indonesian Muslim as saying that his countries’ historic mosques are now preserved by the West, as previously the Indonesians themselves wanted to pull them down.
Necessity of Proper Academic Debate
This is a powerful counterblast to the received narrative about the evils of colonialism. Whatever one feels about it – and looking at the current state of political corruption and creeping authoritarianism in Britain, I am extremely doubtful about the ability of my country to act as a new, benign imperial force – I strongly believe that it and similar books have a place in academic education and discussion. The attempt to silence Gilley, and indeed Biggar on this side of the Pond, with denunciations, personal abuse and death threats is deeply authoritarian and oppressive in its turn. Gilley at one point states that it may take national legislation in America to restore genuine free speech to campuses. And free speech and genuine academic debate are the cornerstones of genuine democracy. Without it, you just have authoritarianism and indoctrination.
Defy this Rotten Rotten Government – Free Palestine 🗣️🇵🇸
“There is a form of extremism in the centre of the main party that is accusing everybody else.” Michael Mansfield KC
This week the government has, once again, been exposed as the extremists we know them to be. As Michael Gove attempted to create a shadowy confusion around the definition of extremism, in the process targeting our Muslim sisters and brothers, the government were found to be receiving millions of pounds from a racist who thinks Diane Abbott MP “should be shot”.
Abbott, who was due to speak at our public meeting on the right to protest on the same evening the vile comments came to light, received a vote of confidence from the meeting and sent an excellent statement on the issues. She said:
“All of us who have gone on all the Gaza demos calling for peace, should wear the attacks on us as a badge of honour. We are standing in a long line of brave campaigners who stood up for what is right.”
Following Gove’s speech in Parliament, we released a joint statement with the other groups responsible for organising the recent, unprecedented series of demonstrations for Palestine which concluded:
“We call upon all political parties to condemn Gove’s statement and resist the government’s plans. We are united as a coalition and will not allow Gove’s intervention to distract us from standing in solidarity with a people confronting genocide, ethnic cleansing, occupation and apartheid. We call upon all of those who support us in these aims, and uphold the right to protest, to join us in our next national march in London on 30 March.”
In particular we’d like to send our solidarity and support to the Muslim Association of Britain who were named by Gove and have been partners of ours for many years. We find these vindictive government attacks abhorrent.
The March Against Racism tomorrow is a very important opportunity to show that we won’t allow racism and hatred to divide us. Our Convenor, Lindsey German, will be speaking at the march – please join if you can.
Last Saturday’s tremendous demonstration proved once again the phenomenal resilience of this movement. Nearly half a million people took to the streets in the tenth national demonstration calling for the ceasefire that our politicians still refuse to countenance.
We have to continue to resist the attacks from this rotten government and, more importantly, show our unrelenting commitment to the cause of a free Palestine. We urge all our groups and supporters to start building now for another massive march on Saturday 30 March – Palestine Land Day.
Defend the Right to Protest: Palestine, Islamophobia & Civil Liberties
Watch or listen back via our new Spotify Podcast Channel to Tuesday’s meeting at the Human Rights Action Centre with Michael Mansfield KC, Jude Lanchin, Jan Nielsen, Raghad Altikriti, Ben Jamal, Chris Nineham, Jun Pang and Liz Fekete – discussing how to defend our rights at this dangerous moment.
Philip George Chadwick, with introduction by Brian Aldiss, The Death Guard (London: Penguin 1982).
I bought this a few weeks after reading about it online. It was first published in 1939, although according to Wikipedia Chadwick probably started writing it in 1919 after the First World War. Very little is known about Chadwick himself, though the brief author biography at the end of the novel states that he was born in 1893, the youngest son of a North Country family. He wrote a number of short stories for newspapers and magazines in the ’20s and ’30s, as well as poetry. He lived for a while in Brighton, where he raised a family and was known as a articulate and talented political speaker, first for the Fabians and then as an Independent MP. He died in 1955.
The description of the book as ‘underground’ suggests that it was somehow officially banned. This wasn’t the case. It appears to have had a limited print run, and all but one copy seems to have been destroyed during the Blitz. It was long believed to have been lost completely, and perhaps even mythical, despite being referred to several times by no less than H.G. Wells. It was then rediscovered and republished by Penguin when they were trying to launch the RoC imprint of SF and Fantasy novels.
What makes the book fascinating to me is that it appears to be one of the earliest future war novels in which the menace is from genetically engineered warriors, somewhat like the armies clones used by the Empire in Star Wars, or the replicants in Blade Runner. In Chadwick’s vision, however, they are a form of artificial life that develops from a chemical soup into things like worms, before transforming into something like tadpoles then becoming humanoid. The creatures, simply dubbed ‘the Flesh’, or ‘units’ are pure slabs of muscle, with every other biological aspect pared down to the bare minimum. Instead of eyes, they have sockets of photosensitive skin. They breathe through their mouths, which has a membrane at the back through which they absorb air and their food, a mess of biologically engineered nutrients of the same type from which they are spawned, called ketchup. They have no intelligence or individuality. They exist purely to march and kill. Their creators equip them with helmets, a pair of spikes on either side of their bodies to make them even more efficient killers, metal shoes that make their feet rather like pig’s trotters, and a type of spear with four blades, dubbed a quadrifane. They are almost unkillable, and even when apparently dead, their biological substance lives on. It sprouts vesicles containing immature versions of the flesh, neoblasts, which then erupt to attack and kill in their turn. And the ketchup itself, unless consumed or destroyed, will also spawn more of the monsters.
The Origins of the Guard
These creatures are the products of Goble, a recently demobbed World War I soldier waiting with other former troopers for transport back to the demob centres and civilian life. Goble is haunted by an incident during the War, when he accidentally kills a fellow British trooper while on sentry duty. The man was too terrified to utter the password, and mistaking his inarticulate mumbling for that of an enemy, Goble killed him. He states, bitterly, that he didn’t want to be a soldier and become a killing machine. He is a former scientist, who with his supervisor, Dax, was engaged on a project to create life. It was during the War that he formulates the idea of the Death Guard, sketching out their appearance and equipment. Biological machines to do the fighting that humans wouldn’t.
Goble is discovered by Edom Beldite, a semi-retired industrialist seeking new projects to occupy his time. driving past Goble as he waits for transport back home. Beldite is fascinated by him, picks him up in his car, and takes him back to his country house, where Goble becomes a friend of the family, which includes his grandson Gregory Beldite, and the junior Beldite’s aunt, Fertile. Goble describes his killing of the other British squaddie and reveals his and Dax’s work on creating artificial life. Edom Beldite is fascinated by this, taking it up as a new hobby and converting the house’s stables into laboratories. This is the household environment in which the young Beldite grows up. The novel is framed as Beldite’s history of the war with the continental powers resulting from Beldite’s and Goble’s creatures, in which his personal memoirs as a significant participant in the events and ensuing war are an important part.
The Book’s Description of the Britain of the Late 20th Century
Despite initial official disapproval – at one point the laboratories and their staff have to be hidden from an inspection by the authorities – the experiments become an important but carefully hidden part of Beldite industries. Europe is bound by a series of international disarmament regulations which restrict the manufacture of weapons and technologies that may be used for war. This alternative future – the book is set in the 1970s – has autogyros and aircraft, but they are gliders launched from giant catapults. Other devices include the televisor, a sort of television. Not only can people watch it at home, they also do so in halls like cinemas. The broadcasting equipment is two way, so that politicians and political speakers using it to address the British public are able to view their audience and take stock of how well their speeches are going. It has been said that much Science Fiction reflects the time it was written, not the future, and this is the case with The Flesh Guard. Brighton is an entertainment resort, and people go to dance halls, not discos or nightclubs, and the Prime Minister wears a frock coat. It is also a Britain of grinding working class poverty and mass disaffection. There are militant pacifist groups plotting revolution and political censorship. When the leading pacifist spokesman attempts to address the nation on the threat of the Flesh Guard through the televisor, the authorities turn the sound off before dragging him away.
Racism and Black Subordination
It also reflects the racism of the time. The actual work of manufacture is done by the Experts, low-class, semi-educated Whites with brutal tastes. These centre around women, gambling, and staging ‘red try-outs’ – gladiatorial combats between members of the Guard, as well as their killing of cattle. After the infant creatures have been produced – dubbed at this stage ‘pugs’ – they are given over to Black workers to wash the chemicals from which they were spawned off them. These workers are described as ‘nigs’ or ‘ni**ers’. They are portrayed as simple minded, but potentially rebellious and bloodthirsty. In order to prevent them turning on their White employers and then the wider White community when they are relocated to Britain, they are kept in line with a false religion. This extols the White man, in the form of Edom Beldite, Dax, and a third leader in the manufacture of the Guard, as the creator of the Black race as well. The Flesh Guard are believed by the Black workers to be their brothers, and have instilled in them the doctrine that the Guard was deliberately created to protect Black people. This indoctrination is hammered into them through the ‘Glory Service’, held every evening in which attendance is mandatory.
As the manufacture of the Flesh becomes a part of Beldite’s industrial concerns and no longer a hobby, it is moved to Africa and a part of the Congo, under the guise of a subsidiary specialising in a new form of producing rubber. At the same time, the Guard draws the attention of Vessant, the smooth and scheming minister for war. Vessant sees them as a new weapon, an invincible army that will prevent and fight off any attempt by the continent to invade Britain. He therefore arranges with Beldite to increase production. Secret factories and depots are established throughout Yorkshire and the north. The ketchup that feeds the bioengineered hordes is disguised as ‘artificial food’. Gregory Beldite grows up, and takes up boxing and gliding as his hobbies. His uncle moves to Brighton, and it is there that his aunt Fertile introduces him to Paddy Hassall, the book’s heroine. Moving back to Yorkshire, Gregory Beldite joins the workforce at one of the Flesh factories, though as a ‘mugger’, a labourer running around serving the Experts, rather than management. One of the office workers is a member of the pacifist underground, and later introduces Beldite junior to his comrades at a political meeting in town. This gives the novel a quasi-working class viewpoint, even though young Beldite is a scion of the propertied classes.
Massacres by the Flesh in Africa
The Experts are restless for their old bloodsports, and so arrange a red try-out, whose victim is to be a cow they’ve managed to purchase. Only the Experts and muggers like Beldite are to know about this, not the office staff. This becomes a scene of carnage when one of the office women bursts in on them, wondering what it’s all about. The Unit at the centre of bullfight turns and kills her, and carries on killing the other personnel who futilely attempt to save her life. Back in Africa similar events have occurred. The Flesh escape from the Beldite compound to massacre the local African village leaving no one, not even a White missionary, alive. The Belgian authorities are outraged, as is much of the continent. They demand an immediate investigate of the Beldite compound. The Beldite company refuses and won’t allow them entry unless they are allowed to leave taking all their research and instruments with them. The Belgians therefore send an armed force against them, which is repulsed by the Flesh Guard. They are totally massacred, and the unleashed Guard goes on to butcher the British radio journalist and his crew secretly covering the events, which are broadcast live on the national news.
War with the Continent
The continental powers, fearing invasion and subjugation by Britain, join together in an alliance to invade. Even though they have been bound by the same international treaties, weapons research and manufacture has gone on secretly on their side as well. Their weapons include types of gas. One of these completely surrounds its target with murky black, preventing them from seeing the enemy. Another type, described as electric, destroys the functioning of machines as well as killing humans. This type of gas doesn’t disperse, but remains as a largely unseen toxic presence to kill the unwary travelling through the battle zones. The continental forces also have dominance of the air. There are giant motherships, flying aircraft carriers, transporting the Bomb Pluggers, sleek, streamlined dive bombers operated electronically by their pilots and which follow pre-programmed routs. The British navy is completely destroyed and the air force ruthlessly decimated. The continentals invade, but the British unleash the Death Guard, who mercilessly beat them back.
This does not end the war. The continentals embark on a bombing campaign, first against the Flesh factories, and then against the transport network and the towns and civilians centres. Order begins to break down. The government arranges the evacuation of civilians from the towns, and then shipments by air of food. Large areas of the country become impassable due to the destruction of the roads, the lingering gas and the neoblasts erupting from the parental Flesh seeking victims. Revolution breaks out in several parts of the north, as starvation and abandonment by the authorities to the bombing takes its toll. Roaming the devastated towns and countryside are the Mercy Gangs, volunteers who provide emergency medical aid to the wounded who can be saved, and euthanasian to those that can’t. Effective control of the country contracts to London and Brighton, an important place for the politicians and military leaders to unwind. As the war goes on, everything above ground is levelled and London’s people left to the assaults of the continental bombers. The really important personnel and equipment is moved hundreds of feet underground, where factories have been set up to produce a Flesh invasion force that will be transferred to the continent on rocketgliders to wreak death and destruction there.
After attending secret pacifist meetings, Gregory Beldite is conscripted into a special force of Experts charged with exterminating escaped Flesh and the neoblasts, during which his convoy is attacked by bombers, leaving him as the only survivor. He escapes, and makes his way across country, going to his old family home of View to meet his ailing uncle and persuade him to do something to stop the War. Beldite senior, however, lives in a hotel suite in Brighton along with Aunt Fertile. He is old, and sick, and while he wishes to stop the war, he is utterly sidelined by Vessant and the government. Haggard, one of his fellow Experts, goes down there with a message from Gregory telling them that he is now determined to do everything he can to stop the bloodshed. Haggard believes he is dead, but Paddy Hassall resolves to find him and forces Haggard to take her up north. Doing so they struggle with impassable roads, starving crowds who riot and try to attack them when they see Haggard’s Experts’ uniform. Finally their car is wrecked and Haggard killed protecting Paddy from a mass of attacking neoblasts. She struggles on alone, escaping the attention of a farmer, who forces her to attend to his wife in childbirth, but who clearly has other plans for her. Gregory Beldite eventually finds the view, but is shot and wounded by two unknown gunmen. There is no food or water in the house, so he starves while sustaining himself drinking its wine store. A crashed bombplugger at the side of the house offers him the opportunity of escape, but before he can use it, it is totally wrecked and himself nearly killed by a Flesh Unit. He seeks to escape and join a passing pacifist march, but he is shot again by the unseen shooters and the march killed by a continental air attack. Lying awaiting death, he is discovered by a Mercy Gang, recognised and then sent back south to recuperate.
He and Paddy become guests of Vessant and his wife at his country house. Vessant knows this is scheduled by the continentals to be destroyed the following day, but is going to abandon it and move to the underground warrens in London, there to preside over the Flesh counterattack and invasion of the continent. He takes Gregory Beldite, who has inherited ownership of Beldite from his uncle, who has since died, as well as the other remaining company directors. Once there, Gregory Beldite sees how far advanced the preparations are, and wonders if it is too late to stop it. The rocketgliders are hidden in silos hidden underneath buildings on the surface. The are blown up to open the silos beneath. Two columns of the Flesh Guard are marched to their waiting craft, which are then catapulted across the Channel to begin their murderous work.
Beldite Seizes Power to End the War
This is interrupted by a revolt from the Black workers, The Experts rush to Vessant’s command centre in panic, during which one of Vessant’s goons shoots one of the loyal Blacks, who had dropped to his hands and knees to plea for peaceful treatment. Gregory is also shot, but is dragged out by the other Experts, who kill Vessant and everyone in the room with him with one of the gas guns they use on the Flesh. Beldite then takes control of the situations, and in a coup seizes power in the government and company. He arranges a truce between Britain and the head of the continental forces, who descends to meet him in his mothership. Beldite has promised the British public victory, which doesn’t go down too well with the French commander. Nothing but complete surrender will satisfy the continentals, not even if Beldite stops a further invasion of the continent. Beldite then plays his last hand. One of his fellow directors, whom Beldite despises for his mercenary money-grubbing attitude, has repeatedly urged Beldite to sell the secrets of Flesh production to the various individual continental countries. They are businessmen, after all, and not in the business of war. Beldite tells the commander that if peace is not agreed upon, he will sell the secret to the individual nations of the alliance. They will immediately become mutually suspicious, and turn on each other, just as the alliance has turned on Britain. The Flesh will rampage across Europe and then the world. But to show the commander his good faith about British disarmament, he asks the Frenchman to look out the window. There, the remaining Flesh are being marched down the streets to their incineration by fire amidst cheering crowds attacking them with anything they can. This persuades the commander and the leaders of the alliance. Peace is declared. Beldite and Paddy are married and the work of reconstruction begins.
A Reflection of Interwar Britain
Chadwick was clearly drawing on the events and political situation of his own time. It reflects the tensions in interwar Britain, with pacifist societies and working class unrest. The seizure of power by revolutionaries in a number of northern towns seems to me to be based on the outbreak of the Russian Revolution and the collapse of central authorities and the seizure of power by local revolutionary councils in Germany and Austria after their defeat in World War I. The descriptions of combat, the disgust of troopers forced to watch it and the cynical attitude to the crowds cheering the Experts and other soldiers as heroes, strikes me very much as coming from a man who really did see combat and all its horrors. At one point, Beldite and Haggard are rescued from a destroyed observation post by a cheerful airman, charged with carrying food to the surviving population. Beldite looks down on him as inexperienced, someone who has only seen the war from the air.
The description of the grinding poverty of sections of the working class, and the conduct of their political meetings, also has the ring of authenticity.
Racism, Colonialism and a Black Fascist SF Writer
Contemporary readers, however, may be put off by the racism towards the Black workers. I think this reflects not just the attitude of the time, but also possibly more specifically that some colonials. The Experts may be based on some of the rough, low class Whites, given jobs above the Black workers in colonial society. And the distrust of Black Africans as potentially violent and murderous probably comes from racial tensions during the late 19th century phase of imperial expansion. As for the creation of a false religion to keep them in line, this plot device was used by a Fascist Black American writer in the 1930s. This individual published a novel in which a Black American superscientist takes over the leadership of Africa and its Black population to wage a genocidal war against White Europeans. In order to give Blacks the necessary moral and spiritual strength for their struggle, he creates a giant Black android to pose as their new god during religious services established to inculcate the superiority of the Black race and the urgency of the struggle against Whites.
Similarities to The Day of the Triffids and Stalker
The book is interesting for several reasons. It’s a cracking good story in itself, and the passages of Beldite’s, Haggard’s and Hassall’s travel through a devastated Britain reminded me Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids and its depiction of a ruined Britain threatened by another set of creatures, which may also have been biologically manufactured and which have also escaped human control. The hidden hazards of the devastated zones, such as the lingering gas, also reminded me of the Strugatsky’s Stalker, whose hero also navigates his way through a treacherous zone with hidden traps, though one that may have been created by material from an alien spaceship rather than a human war. It’s also interesting for its 1930s vision of a future Britain, which is pretty much like 1930s Britain but with advanced technology. Some of the predictions for this technology are very inaccurate, like the motherships, although there were experiments with them by some air forces. The planes are all propeller driven, so there are no jets, and mass air travel seems to be gliders launched from catapults. The televisor is shown in halls like a development of the cinema rather than rival to it.
Science and Artificial Life
The creation of the Flesh itself seems to come from contemporary scientific speculation, in particularly the vitalism of philosopher’s like Henri Bergson. Goble at one point explains that life is inherent in matter, and it is only a case in some ways of freeing it. This is before the discovery of DNA and the more recent findings of biochemistry, which have shown how intricate and complex the chemistry of biological life really is. Scientists are engaged in creating analogies of biological cells from non-organic matter. This has been discussed by the Russian science vlogger, Anton Petrov, but it will be something like a thousand years before humanity will be able to make anything like one of Blade Runner’s Replicants.
Conclusion: A Forgotten Masterpiece
But it does show the horrors of war, and the threat of uncontrolled scientific advances used for military purposes, a threat not just to Britain, but also to Europe and global civilisation. This is SF as the literature of warning. In one incident, the continent sends war robots into Britain to fight the Flesh, which defeats them. We are nearing such an international situation now, with the development of real war robots, unmanned drones and tanks. For all its faults, I think the vividness of its writing, its creative imagination of a future war and its machines and its realistic depiction of working class politics and militancy makes the book well worth reading and, indeed, an SF masterpiece.
Well, George Galloway won the by-election in Rochdale yesterday, and the pro-Israel establishment and media have had a meltdown. I came across a headline today from one of the right-wing news and comments channels on YouTube proclaiming that it was a ‘black day for British Jews’. No, I really don’t think so. But it was a black day for the Israel lobby.
The right has tried to frame the current war in Gaza as a justified reprisal by Israel, which has a natural right to defend itself, against evil anti-Semitic Muslims. And the protests held up and down Britain in protest at the mass killing and displacement of Gazans by the IDF, which according to the Palestinian authorities, has now reached 30,000, have similarly been denounced as anti-Semitic and the marchers ‘Islamists’. Israel does have a right to defend itself, and Hamas’ brutal murder of 4,000 people at a music festival is a terrorist atrocity. But Israel’s reprisal has massively exceeded the number of Israelis killed, just as Operation Cast Lead in 2012 was massively disproportionate to any terrorist incident or mass protest that provoked it. Douglas Murray has appeared on Jewish YouTube channels denying that the IDF’s invasion of Gaza is ethnic cleansing. Well, in the words of Christine Keeler, ‘he would, wouldn’t he’. News channels like Middle East Eye have dug out comments and speeches from the Israeli leadership, including, I believe, Prime Minister Isaac Herzog, stating openly that ethnic cleansing is exactly what they’re doing. It has also been reported that that the IDF plan, or planned, to expel the Gazans firstly to refugee camps in Egypt, and then to Europe.
The pro-Palestine marches have been composed of Brits from a variety of backgrounds. Very many, possibly the majority, are Muslims deeply concerned about the treatment of their co-religionists in the Holy Land. A minority of these may justly be called Islamist, because of their shouts of ‘Jihad’ including one group who filmed waving its black flag while lying to everyone else that it was really the shahada, the Muslim creed. But many are White, including Jews, who have said how welcome they felt among the demonstrators, including the Muslims.
There are points of concern with the process of the election up in Rochdale. Starmer, who has declared himself to be ‘100 per cent Zionist’, withdrew the whip from the Labour candidate because he repeated what the Egyptians said about the Israelis not responding to their warning of an impending attack, with the addition of a bit of speculation of his own. Such as why was the music festival actually moved further towards Gaza, and why was it that the placed was ringed by IDF bases only four miles away, but it took eight hours for the troopers to respond to the atrocity? Stalin and his faction immediately accused the Labour guy of making anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and so imply that somehow asking these questions was tantamount to spreading the lunatic and genuinely vile smears that Jews secretly control the world and are plotting the destruction of Whites, Muslims, Blacks or whoever else is claimed to be their victims. But Israel does have a genuine history of staging false flag attacks. The most notorious of these was the attack on the USS Liberty during the Six Day War. It was stationed off the coast monitoring the conflict. This alarmed the Israelis, who were afraid they’d pass on its intelligence to Egypt, and so Israeli troops boarded the ship and slaughtered its crew. There is genuine, and genuinely revolting anti-Semitism in the Arab world. You can buy the infamous Tsarist forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Egypt, and a few years ago it was serialised on Egyptian television. But the Labour party’s candidate’s question actually seem reasonable. They aren’t about Jews, but about the Israeli state and military, who do have a record of lying.
In these circumstances, and with Starmer’s refusal to back a ceasefire until he started losing Muslim votes, it was almost inevitable that Galloway would win. Galloway has a long record of supporting Arab nations. I’ve heard he converted to Islam, and that his first wife was Palestinian. He is not, however, an anti-Semite. The News of the Screws journo who used to go around posing as an Arab sheikh in order to entrap the great, the good and the not-so-good into saying or doing something indiscreet or criminal tried it with Galloway over the Holocaust. The Fake Sheikh arranged to meet him for lunch at a London restaurant. On his way in, Galloway recognised the hack’s minder, nicknamed Jaws. Like the Bond villain, this guy was approaching seven feet tall and had a mass of gold teeth resembling the character’s steel gnashers. Galloway was put on alert, which was justified when the Fake Sheikh asked him if he thought the Holocaust was a good thing. Galloway responded as any decent person would, and said it was an horrific crime against humanity, and the hack went back to his office disappointed. Galloway, as far as I’m aware, isn’t an anti-Semite by any stretch. He’s just critical of Israel’s treatment of its indigenous Arabs. As many proud and self-respecting Jews and Israelis are also. There have been mass protests against the Gazan genocide by Israelis and also by Jewish Americans.
Britain’s Jewish community has been worried about its waning social and political influence for a number of years now. About half a decade or so ago there were reports that the community was worried that it was losing the concern of the British public for its issues and history of persecution in favour of other ethnic groups. Hence there were a series of events intended to celebrate Jewish achievement to British society and culture. These naturally included festivals about Jewish comedians and literature. The last was featured on the One Show. A lady speaking for the festival said you didn’t have to be Jewish to go to it. Galloway’s victory does show the strength of Britain’s Muslim electorate and its concern for Palestine, and in this sense it shows that the Israel lobby, which identifies itself with the Jewish community, has lost ground. But as the mighty Tony Greenstein has pointed out, Judaism and Jewishness does not equal Israel. Zionism was a minority movement among European and American Jews before the War. In America this lack of interest continued until the late ’60s and ’70s. It ended with the rise of Neo-Cons, and their identification of Israeli values with American Christian values. Now the pendulum’s swinging back, American Jews are turning away from Israel, and most of the country’s support now comes from bonkers right-wing Christian organisations like Jack Hagee’s Christians United For Israel. Just don’t tell ’em Palestinians are also Christians, and they’ve also been subjected to abuse and violence by the Israeli state and right-wing settlers.
I think much the same thing is happening in Britain’s Jewish community, despite the oft-touted statistic that 70 per cent or more of Britain’s Jews believe that Israel is very important to their identity. Tony critiqued that stat a few years ago, showing that the true figure was probably rather less. The campaign in the Jewish community to unseat Corbyn as leader of the Labour party because of his pro-Palestinian, but not anti-Semitic views, was chiefly led by the United Synagogue. This is only one sect amongst the diverse variety of Jewish denominations and political and religious tendencies, as well as organisations like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, which seems spectacularly unconcerned about real anti-Semitism in Britain, but terribly worried about any criticism of Israel. A fair number of the victims of the Labour party’s anti-Semitism witch hunt were Jewish critics of Israel. Some of these men and women have received abuse, violence and threats after the pro-Israel organisations smeared them because of their views. One of these was a lady in Devon, who had her car firebombed after one of these gutter hatemongers put her location on a map.
Galloway is an avowed anti-racist and definitely not an anti-Semite. The pro-Palestine marchers are also, in the majority, simply that: pro-Palestine. Whatever may be said about the genocidal implications of the phrase ‘from the river to the sea’ – and remember, Likud also uses this as part of its foundational ideology, the vast majority of these people certainly do not want the persecution and annihilation of the Jewish people.
His victory is not a black day for Jewish Brits. But it is a crack in the political grip of the Israel lobby.
I found this a few days ago on Middle East Eye, which puts the alleged genocidal implications of the Palestinian chant into very sharp perspective.
‘Many Western politicians demonise pro-Palestinians who chant “From the river to the sea”.
But they keep silent when Zionist Israelis use the slogan, which is at the heart of the ideology of Israel’s ruling Likud party.
“The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable… therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”
—Likud Party Platform, 1977
Source: ‘It’s Time to Confront Israel’s Version of “From the River to the Sea”’ by Rashid Khalidi in The Nation
I dare say you’ve seen the various spluttering in the media and online. There’s been frothing outrage on the Islamophobic right after the events of Wednesday night. At the same time as the abortive debate on the SNP’s motion for a ceasefire in Gaza, there was a Stop the War protest outside parliament as well as other protests outside MP’s constituency offices. As a result, GB News and other right-wingers have been accusing MPs, and particularly the Labour party, of cowardice for supposedly giving in to Islamist demands. GB News in particular has been ranting about how Britain is now under Islamist mob rule, a stance echoed and repeated by others on the nationalist/populist right.
There are several criticisms of this view which clearly demonstrated it to be completely false.
Firstly, it wasn’t an Islamist protest. It was a protest against Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in Gaza, present as a reprisal for Hamas’ butchery of the kids at a music festival. As such, it naturally involved a large number of Muslims. Which is pretty much as you’d expect, as Muslims are keenly interested and deeply upset by the treatment of their coreligionists in Israel and the Occupied Territories. But the Palestinians aren’t just Muslims – they’re also Christians, and there are any number of videos on YouTube of Christian clergy and lay people being abused, spat at and struck by bigoted Israelis. This is the face of Israel that the Israel lobby and the official Jews of the Chief Rabbinate, Board of Deputies, Jewish Chronicle and Campaign Against Anti-Semitism don’t want westerners knowing about. They want you to believe that the only people persecuting Christians in the Holy Land are Muslims. It’s true that Christians are persecuted by Muslims, but they’re also persecuted by Israeli settlers and quite often the people literally standing between Christians worshipping in church and an mob of Israeli fanatics intent on destruction is the Muslim doorman. The secular Israeli state also persecute the Orthodox Jews of Jerusalem’s Old Jewry. These are the descendants of 19th century Jewish immigrants to the Holy Land, who came to practise their faith in the land of their ancestors. They reject, however, Israel as a secular state and, like their brethren and sisters overseas, believe that Israel will only be restored by divine will under the Mashiach – the Messiah. You can find videos on YouTube of them being tormented and beaten up by the IDF. If you want to know how Israel really treats the Palestinians, I strongly recommend reading the blogs and books produced by Israel-critical Jews, like Ilan Pappe, Norman Finkelstein, Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Martin Odoni and so on. Also, the marchers for Palestine included a number of severely normal White Brits. The Islamophobes have made much of Starmer being confronted by ‘Islamist’ protesters on the train and on the station in Edinburgh. Well, I’ve seen the video, too, and most of them looked White to me.
Now I do think that the right does have a point when it comes to the massed protests outside MPs constituency offices. It does look like intimidation after MP David Freer announced he was resigning because of the abuse and threats he and his family suffered. This comes after the murder of Amess by an Islamist fanatic, as well as the attack on Lib Dem MP a few years ago by a nutter with a Samurai sword in which the MPs assistant was tragically killed, as well as the assassination of Jo Cox back in 2015 by a native British rightist. I agree with the Stop the War Coalition that such protests should not be banned, as it would isolate MPs from public opinion, but believe it was wrong to do so in this case. Not least because it hands ammunition to a government determined to curb any kind of public protest.
Secondly, the Labour party doesn’t appear to have given in, whatever it looks like from outside. From what has been said by critics of Labour’s behaviour towards the SNP motion, it appears like the opposite, carefully crafted to look like a call for a ceasefire. According to a message I put up from the StWC yesterday, Starmer presented the motion after a phone call with Israeli PM Isaac Herzog. Herzog is in no way a peacenik, and I’ve come across several quotes from him indicating that he has an absolute and unyielding hatred of the Palestinians. It looks like Starmer deliberately added his amendments knowing that this would upset the SNP and they’d walk out. Damo Kernow, the man from the ancient British kingdom of Cornwall, has put up several videos about this. He notes that Labour’s amendment stripped out any criticism of Israel and removes the stipulation that the ceasefire should be immediate. He also notes that the speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, allowed the amendment to go ahead despite breaking parliamentary rules he declared were antiquated. These were rules that had last been amended in the 1980s during the IRA bombing campaign. Hoyle has very strong pro-Israel views, and proudly tells the world how his grandfather was one of the founders of Labour Friends of Israel. This now looks less like parliament caving in to Muslim opinion than a carefully crafted piece of sabotage designed to look like genuine support for a Palestinian ceasefire. Which is what you’d expect from a master of lies and deceit like Starmer. As the Native Americans used to say in Westerns during their pow-wows with the cavalry, ‘White man speak with forked tongue’. Well, definitely not all White men, but definitely in the case of Starmer. He’s made a career out of it.
But I don’t doubt that there were Islamists among the marchers. Any kind of left-wing protest attracts firebrands and extremists. I was at secondary school during the St. Paul’s riots in Bristol in 1980/81. Our school fortunately wasn’t affected, but I do remember a White guy standing on the stone square supporting the trees lining the school entrance, ranting down a megaphone trying to incite the kids to join the rioters. Mahyar Tousi put up a video showing a group of Muslims waving the black banner of Jihad, while telling the cops and everyone else that it was merely the shahada, the Muslim creed. It wasn’t, and waving an enemy banner is outlawed, so they should have been arrested. But these are the bigots and extremists, who I’ve no doubt comprised only a small minority of the crowd.
And the statement that Britain has now fallen and is now under the Islamist heel is more than a little exaggerated. Last time I looked, King Charles was still ensconced on the throne, not a caliph. Rishi Sunak is still PM – unfortunately – and not a mullah, as in Iran. I live in Bristol, which is a multicultural city with its fair share of mosques, as well as Hindu temples and Sikh gurdwaras. I haven’t seen any rampaging Muslims hordes up my way, nor from anywhere else in the city. I’ve mentioned how Patrick Christys, one of the esteemed fixtures of GB News, more Grievous Bodily than Great British, put up a video calling for sharia law to be banned. Well, last time I looked, sharia law had no official standing and only five per cent of Muslims wanted it introduced. Over 70 per cent of Muslims polled believe Islam was compatible with British society. But Grievous Bodily News has form when it comes to alarmism and scaremongering, so it’s no surprise that they’re doing it now about the protests for Gaza.
I do think, however, that we also need to be very cautious and suspicious of some of those marching. I’ve no doubt that the Islamists are trying to exploit massed Muslim opinion against the war in Gaza in the same way some Marxist sects used to practice ‘revolutionary entryism’ and deliberately infiltrate conventional, social democratic parties like Labour in order to disrupt and radicalise it. The critical event that mobilised specifically Muslim politics in Britain, according to the scholar Alfred Kepel in his book, The Revenge of God, was the confected outrage over the Satanic Forces. This was falsely accused of blasphemy by the Ayatollah Khomeini as a cynical political gesture to take the spiritual leadership of the Islamic world away from Saudi Arabia. It has led to death threats and attempts on the lives, some of them all-too successful, of the author, Salman Rushdie and his publishers. I can remember the mass book burnings in Bradford, and the rantings of its leaders, Mohammed Akhthar and Kalim Zaddiqie. Akhthar’s pamphlet, Be Careful With Mohammed, was a full-scale attack on Christianity and western secular democracy, and exaltation of Islam as absolutely perfect. It ended with a short section ‘What Western Intellectuals Think of Islam’, containing a series of quotes condemning the religion from various writers and public figures. As for Zaddiqui, He was filmed in a BBC documentary, The Trouble with Islam, telling his congregation that ‘British society is a monstrous killing machine, and killing Muslims comes very easily to them’. When he was challenged, Zaddiqui muttered some nonsense about the publication of Rushdie’s notorious book marking the beginning of ‘a holocaust of Muslims’. That was 30 and more years ago, and it’s no more come true than Alex Jones’ telling the world that Obama was going to become a dictator and put ordinary, White Christian Americans in FEMA camps. I don’t doubt that some of the Islamists who joined the marches are considering ways in which they can spread their disaffection and hate amongst bog-standard ordinary Muslims who simply want peace and dignity for the Palestinians.
We cannot let the forces of hate use the marches to spread fear of the Islamic threat on one hand, and Islamist disaffection on the other. The marches are not Islamist mob rule, and are not to be presented or used as such.
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