Lobster have also published a very interesting review by John Newsinger, a historian at one of Bath’s universities, of the latest work by American right-winger David Rubin, ‘Confronting Radicals: What America Can Learn from Israel’. Rubin has published a number of works claiming that America and the West are under threat from Islam and the left. Rubin’s Jewish, but his books are aimed at the Christian right, arguing that America can only be saved if it returns to Biblical, Judaeo-Christian values and securely allies itself with Israel against Islam. Although Rubin’s Jewish, his books are addressed to right-wing Christians because American Jews overwhelmingly vote Democrat and despite the alliance between the right and Israel. Newsinger begins his review by discussing Rubin’s book, The Islamic Tsunami: Israel and America in the Age of Obama, which came with an endorsement from David Horovitz and notorious right-wing Christian preacher, Pat Robertson. It’s an all-out, shockingly vitriolic attack on Islam, which among other things, compares Mohammed to Hitler. But what I found really shocking is his recommendations for dealing with Islam in America. He wants an end to Islamic immigration, bans on certain forms of Islamic observance and limiting the size of Muslim families. Oh yes, and he wants an end to hate speech legislation. Newsinger writes
Rubin puts forward a plan for how to defeat this attempted Muslim takeover. Among his recommendations are an immediate ban on all Muslim immigration into the United States; encouraging Muslims already in the country to use birth control and to limit the size of their families; banning the call to prayer and Muslim dress; and the expulsion of ‘actively hostile Muslims’, a category that includes all those Muslims who do not embrace ‘Judeo-Christian’ values. He makes clear earlier in the book that he does not really believe that it is possible for any Muslim to become a genuine American. It is also vital to oppose hate speech legislation ‘which in practice will be used as a big brother technique to curtail the free speech of those who dare to speak out against Islamic ideology’. More generally, it is necessary to assert the values of ‘Judeo-Christian civilization’ throughout the education and legal systems, and a return to ultra-patriotism ‘based on the American biblical tradition and the religious values promoted by the Founding Fathers’. The maintenance of a close partnership with Israel is also obviously essential. He even considers whether or not it would be a good thing if the United States actually took over Syria and Iran. Would, he asks, ‘a little old-fashioned American “colonialism” [ . . . .] be so terrible’? The answer is, of course, yes.
This is terrifying stuff. Now I think he has point about hate speech legislation. It is being used to stop reasonable debate about race and immigration as well about the trans ideology and whether transwomen should be allowed into women’s spaces. And I think there are real problems within British and western Islam. There does seem to be a section of the Islamic community in Britain which has active hostility towards Christianity, Judaism and the secular values of the west, and which does regard western, non-Muslim women with contempt because of the sexual freedom they enjoy. But clearly, this does not mean all western Muslims. As for the restrictions he wishes to place on Islam in the west, this resembles the legislation passed by the Spanish crown during the Reconquista which finally culminated in the expulsion of the Moors by Ferdinand and Isabella. It also brought to mind some of the restrictions placed on Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I think they were also subject to restrictions on marrying and having families. And obviously, there’s the shadow of the race laws the Nazis introduced against the Jews before the Introduction of the Holocaust.
It’s also worth quoting Newsinger’s comments on the way American Jews reject views like Rubin’s, and the reasons behind Rubin’s venomous denunciation of Barack Obama. Rubin seems to see the former president as some kind of closet Muslim or ally backing the nefarious schemes of Islam and the Left to bring down America:
Two points need to be made here. First, The Islamic Tsunami was not n any way targeted at American Jews. Its audience was the US Christian Right, i.e. white evangelical Christians. The overwhelming majority of American Jews actually voted for Obama, both in 2008 and in 2012. He got 78% of the Jewish vote in 2008 and 69% in 2012. Moreover, Hillary Clinton got 71% of the Jewish vote when she ran against Donald Trump in Indeed throughout Trump’s Presidency, of all religious groups, it was American Jews who gave Trump his lowest approval rating, and in 2020 they voted overwhelmingly for Joe Biden. The great majority of American Jews are Democrat in sympathy and completely reject the Israeli alliance with the Republican and Christian Right. And as for Obama being hostile to Israel, it is worth noting that his administration provided more military aid to Israel than any previous administration, and in 2016 ‘concluded a new ten-year agreement providing a total of $38 billion in military aid to Israel, which the White House described as “the largest single pledge of military assistance in U.S. history”’. Rubin’s quite outrageous assault on Obama was not motivated by his supposed hostility to Israel, but by his refusal to endorse the expansionist agenda pursued by Benjamin Netanyahu and the Zionist Right.
This bears out what has been said elsewhere that American Jews are turning away from Zionism, or at least the ultra-Zionism of Benjamin Netanyahu and his fellows. The largest Zionist organisation in America in terms of membership is Ted Hagee’s Christians United for Israel. It also sheds more light on the way the anti-Semitism witch-hunters specifically target Jews and Jewish critics of Israel.
Views like Rubin’s, with his endorsement of Islamophobic politicians like Gert Wilders are frightening. At the moment they’re fringe, but there is the possibility that if the ultra-Zionists gain strength, they will take America and the west down the route of real, jackbooted Fascism in their determination to stamp out the radical left and Islam.
I put up a post yesterday about Keir Starmer’s plans to purge four left-wing groups from the Labour party – Resist, Labour Against the Witch-Hunt, the Labour in Exile Network and Socialist Appeal. He and his fellow Blairites despise Labour Against the Witch-Hunt and the Labour in Exile Network because they challenge the lie that the people purged from the party were anti-Semites. They weren’t. Many of them were Jewish, like Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein, and were very firmly anti-racist with a firm commitment to combating real anti-Semites and Fascists, such as Marc Wadsworth, a Black anti-racism activist who worked with the Board of Deputies of British Jews to fight BNP anti-Jewish attacks in the Isle of Dogs. The real reason they were purged was that they were socialists, who wanted a return to the mixed economy of the post-War consensus, a nationalised NHS and a welfare state that genuinely supported the poor, the unemployed, the disabled and elderly. They were targeted because they supported Jeremy Corbyn’s superb programme and, like him, they were opposed to Israel’s brutal dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, or defended those who did. Mike was smeared as an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier because he wrote a document showing that Ken Livingstone was perfectly correct when he stated that Hitler initially supported Zionism.
The left-wing members of Labour’s NEC are determined to stand against the proposed purge. They fear it is an attack on Labour democracy and will lead to further purges and the erasure of the left-wing and Bennite traditions in the party. I believe very strongly that they are correct. As news of the proposed purge broke, various noxious MPs came out howling for the expulsion of other Labour party groups. One of them was Neil Coyle, who demanded that Jewish Voice for Labour should also be expelled along with other groups because they were ‘Communists’.
Not far enough. JVL should be gone too. And other outright Communists who have their own political party/ies they can ruin.
Mike in his great article about this latest piece of factionalism from Starmer points out that this anti-Semitic.
“There’s no reason to suggest that Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) are Communists. Or that any of the organisations Starmer will purge are “poisonous”, “toxic” or “warped”.
But it is easier to persuade doubters with emotive language than it is to actually provide a reasoned argument for the unreasonable thing Starmer is about to do.
Coyle’s tweet is anti-Semitic. JVL argues that the purge of Labour Party members on grounds of anti-Semitism is false – from a Jewish standpoint. Coyle is therefore prejudiced against these Jews because they are Jews, which is the classic definition of anti-Semitism. And Starmer is perfectly happy with that, meaning that he is also an anti-Semite, notwithstanding his familial connections to Judaism.“
Absolutely. The malignant and intolerant ultra-Zionist right of the party despise Jewish Voice for Labour because they stood up for Corbyn, and denounced the attacks on the Palestinians. The Israel lobby is particularly harsh on Jewish critics of Israel, because they visibly contradict the lie put into Israeli law by Netanyahu that Jewry and Israel are synonymous and the Jewish state has the support and affection of the world’s Jews. Hence, Jewish critics of Israel are smeared as self-hating, anti-Semites and reviled as ‘traitors’ and ‘kapos’ – the last a reference to the officials in the Warsaw ghetto to whom the Nazis delegated the responsibility of selecting the victims destined for Auschwitz and the other murder factories.
Coyle’s own comment, however, is extremelyclose to real Nazi anti-Semitism.
The Nazis railed against ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, considering that Communism and ‘Marxist’ socialism, along with capitalism, liberalism, democracy and trade unions were all part of the overarching Jewish conspiracy to enslave White gentiles. They also claimed that Jews were disproportionately represented in the Social Democrats, the German equivalent of the British Labour party, and these socialist Jews were working to reduce the number of ‘Aryan’ members of the Reichstag as part of their insidious conspiracy. While Coyle isn’t a Nazi, his comment contains many Nazi tropes. If it came from a Corbynite group, they would be accused of anti-Semitism and expelled. But Coyle is safe because of the partisan bias of the NEC and because his noxious comment is directed against socialist, genuinely anti-racist Jews.
But it is a form of anti-Semitism, and racism in the party against Blacks and Muslims has risen under Starmer, whose followers in the NEC were responsible for the racist bullying of Black MPs and activists such as Diane Abbott.
The four groups Starmer wants to purge are not a threat to the Labour party. Starmer and his supporters in the NEC are, and it is they who should be purged and expelled as Thatcherites and racists opposed to genuine Labour values and policies.
Yesterday, the Groaniad published a piece by Rajeev Syal reporting that Keir Starmer was planning to purge the Labour party of four left-wing groups supporting Jeremy Corbyn’s leaderships. The report begins
Keir Starmer is preparing to support a purge of far-left factions that were vocal supporters of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.
After 15 months of being party leader, Starmer is expected to support a proposal before the party’s governing body on Tuesday to proscribe four named groups.
The proposal, first reported in the Daily Mirror, has angered leftwing members who believe this may be part of a wider purge of the party.
Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee will be asked to proscribe Resist and Labour Against the Witchhunt, which claims antisemitism allegations were politically motivated, and Labour In Exile Network, which expressly welcomes expelled or suspended members.
Socialist Appeal, a group that describes itself as a Marxist voice of Labour and youth, would also become a banned group. Anyone found to be a member of any these groups could be automatic expelled from the Labour party.
Several left-leaning groups are organising a picket of the NEC meeting at Southside, Labour’s headquarters in Victoria, central London, to protest against the proposals.
The article quotes the founder of Labour in Exile, Norman Thomas, as saying “There is wide agreement Starmer is pretty pathetic at fighting the Tories, but he’s in overdrive when it comes to attacking his own members. He has destroyed democracy in Labour to get rid of the thousands of people who joined after Jeremy Corbyn became leader.”
I don’t doubt for a single moment that the witch-hunt against Labour party members and activists accused of anti-Semitism was politically motivated. It Included Jews like Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein, as well as the Black anti-racism activist Marc Wadsworth and others like Ken Livingstone and Mike over at Vox Political. Mike’s crime was to put together a document showing that Ken Livingstone’s comment about Hitler initially supporting Zionism was factually correct. The witch-hunt’s victims were all members or supporters of the Labour left and Jeremy Corbyn, and/or were critics of Israel’s barbarous persecution and decades-long ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Starmer and the NEC that supports him are Blairites, determined to carry on Blair’s transformation of the party into an alternative version of the Tories. They support the Tories’ policies of privatisation, including NHS privatisation and the destruction of the welfare state. As for anti-Semitism, many of those targeted in the witch-hunt were firmly opposed to anti-Semitism as well as all other forms of racism. But Starmer is an ardent Zionist, who received thousands of pounds of funding from pro-Israel donors.
Starmer has been appalling as party leader. He has brought nothing but factionalism and division to the party, while doing precious little to oppose the Tories. Hence Johnson has ridiculed him as ‘Captain Hindsight’ and ‘Major Indecision’. When campaigning for the party’s leadership, he promised to support and retain Corbyn’s policies that were genuinely popular – the renationalisation of the NHS, the nationalisation of electricity and water, greater rights for workers and a welfare state that actually worked and supported the unemployed, the disabled, sick and elderly. He has broken this promise, and offered no policies of his own. The result has been that no-one knows what he stands for. This was clearly displayed in a car-crash interview in which one of his shadow cabinet or aides told the interviewer that, yes, Starmer had policies, but they were secret and he could tell the interviewer what they were.
There is also a nasty undercurrent of racism there as well. The party is losing Black and Muslim members because of Starmer’s complete lack of interest in punishing the party bureaucrats that racially bullied and abused a number of Black MPs and activists, including Diane Abbott, and in tackling rising Islamophobia in the party. This is costing the Labour party valuable support and votes, quite apart from being against ordinary decency and justice. The result has been a poor performance in the council elections and barely hanging on to the seat at Batley and Spen.
Starmer is an incompetent Tory, who is wrecking the party. But he and his fellow Blairites are determined to hang on to power any way they can. And that means ordering further purges of left-wingers and supporters of his far more worthy predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn.
On Sunday Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol pulled down a statue of Edward Colston from its plinth in the city’s centre, and threw it in the Floating Harbour. It’s been both local and national news. The local news interviewed a White woman, who had been part of the protest. She was married to a Black man, and as the mother of a half-Black child thoroughly approved of the statue’s maltreatment. In fact, she felt a bit teary and overcome with emotion.
Colston, Slavery and Charity
It’s not hard to see why. Colston was a 17th-18th century slaver and president of the Royal African Society. He made a colossal fortune from the enslavement of Black Africans. As historians and Black activists have pointed out, millions of the enslaved died en route to America and the Caribbean due to the appalling conditions on board the slave ships. Slavers like Colston also responded brutally to slave mutinies aboard ship by throwing their cargo overboard, chains and all, to drown. They also did this if a storm threatened to sink the ship, and they needed to lighten it. That’s shown in the classic 19th century painting of a ship at sea facing an oncoming storm. It was based on a real incident, that of the Zong, and the painting shows the struggling Blacks drowning as a detail.
Anti-racism activists have been campaigning for the statue’s removal for over forty years, ever since the St. Paul’s race riots of the 1980s. Mike wrote a long piece about it yesterday. He, and the peeps, whose tweets he cited, viewed the statue’s fall as good riddance to bad rubbish. He wondered why it hadn’t been done years ago. Some of those commenting were Blacks, like the awesome Kerry-Ann Mendoza of The Canary. They compared the statue to those of Hitler, and described how it had tore them up to go past it. If Colston had only been a slaver, the statue’s removal wouldn’t have been an issue. What complicated the matter is that Colston, who actually spent most of his life in Mortlake in London, gave very generously to charity. He endowed several schools in Bristol, one of which was Colston Girls School. As Mike explains in his excellent article, we also had Colston Day at school. This was a one-day holiday. Some pupils were also called upon to attend a special service at St. Mary Redcliffe church, and received a Colston bun. Mike had that experience. So did I.
Bristol and the Slave Trade
I should also point out here that, like Mike, I also grew up believing that one branch of our ancestral family tree, the Haberfields, had been slavers. That was dispelled last week by the historian David Olasuga on the Beeb’s programme, A House Through Time. Olasuga stated instead that the Haberfield’s made their money as wine merchants. There may have been other branches of the family that were slavers, however. I don’t know. I’ve heard stories that one ancestor was the captain of a slave ship, and that the City Museum has his log. But when I talked to people from the City’s museums, they denied they had any such thing. Bristol did benefit immensely from the slave trade, but, contrary to popular belief, most of the slaves were taken to the Caribbean. Those few that came back to the City were trusted personal servants. As a result, there is precious little in Bristol, apart from the luxurious homes the slavers built for themselves, that is directly connected to the slave trade. When the City Museum held an exhibition on Bristol and the slave trade there were so few objects left over from Bristol’s slave trade, that they had to borrow some from elsewhere. There are written documents, like contracts and ledgers, but museums don’t like putting them on display. Not because they’re trying to hide anything, as some people have alleged, but simply because visitors don’t find them interesting.
Anti-racist Politics in Bristol
There have been petitions over the years to remove the statue. It’s remained, because these campaigns did not achieve a majority. At the last poll, Bristolian opinion was divided half and half. Roughly the same proportion of people wanted the statue to stay as those, who wanted it gone. And not all Black anti-racism activists wanted it removed. Paul Stephenson was one of the leaders of the Bristol bus boycott in the 1960s and 1970s. This was against the colour bar operated by the local bus company, which refused to employ Blacks. When he was interviewed about racism and the slave trade in the city a few years ago, he felt the statue should be kept, but with a plaque pointing out that he was responsible for enslavement and genocide. As it is, the statue is going to be fished out of the harbour, and put on display in the M Shed. One of the arguments for keeping it up is that it serves to educate people about this aspect of Bristol’s history, but as one of the tweeters Mike quotes also says, this comes from people, who really don’t want schoolchildren talk about the dark side of the British empire.
I’ve also no doubt that some of the resistance to tearing the statue down and to some of the initiatives by the local authorities to commemorate Bristol’s involvement in the slave trade and its millions of victims comes from the highly emotive and divisive racial politics in the city. Although Britain has had a Black presence since the Roman Empire, and Bristol has had a Black population from at least the 16th-17th centuries, there has only been a large Black community in Bristol since the mass immigration of the post-War years. The Black community in the inner city has, like those elsewhere, a reputation for drug dealing, prostitution and violent crime. St. Paul’s was a district Whites from outside the area drove through with their windows up and doors locked. Furthermore, some of the demands and accusations made by the community’s representatives were less than tactful.
It’s often asserted that Bristol was built on the slave trade. That’s true, but only up to a point. Bristol did profit very well from the trade, as did many other ports. But Bristol was great trading city before the slave trade took off in the 17th century. We traded with France, Spain and Portugal, as well as Ireland and across the Channel to Wales. And the first slaves sold by Bristol were White Anglo-Saxons bought by Irish merchants. The Anglo-Saxon cleric St. Wulstan visited the city to condemn the trade in the 11th century.
There’s also the problem that some anti-racist activists make unwarranted assumptions about racism and Whites. There’s an automatic assumption by some that if you’re White, you must be racist. That naturally gets peoples’ backs up. One of the Conservative blogs I read years ago quoted an American study that found that police officers tended to become more racist after anti-racist training than previously. I don’t know if that’s true, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was. The automatic reaction of anyone accused of racism, whatever their colour, is going to be resentment and defensiveness. And in the 1980s the Tory papers explicitly claimed that the riots were caused by Black racism. Some Black leaders didn’t help their cause either. I remember an article in the Absurder c. 1984/5 attacking one Black politician – it might have been Paul Boateng – for suggesting that Blacks should have their own autonomous areas. The writer correctly pointed out that this was a demand for segregation and apartheid. Fortunately, the call for separate Black communities went unheeded.
There has also been the problem that the city has devoted funds and resources in combating the poverty, unemployment and crime in the racially mixed inner city areas of Bristol, at the expense of the White majority areas further out. South Bristol was promised a local hospital back in the 1970s, but it was only built a few years ago. Positive discrimination schemes also give more funding to those areas with a large ethnic minority population. This has caused some resentment.
As a result it has seemed at times that the demands for Colston’s statue to be pulled down, and for the slave trade to be commemorated in Bristol, has come from a position of anti-White racism, rather than a desire for racial justice in itself.
Black Separatism and the Name of the Malcolm X Centre
And if you’re talking about the official commemoration of racists, there is the whole issue of the name of the community centre in St. Paul’s. It is, or was called the Malcolm X Centre, after the American civil rights leader. The problem is that Malcolm X’s organisation, the Nation of Islam, is racially separatist. They want a separate Black state, to be formed from a group of Black majority states in the US. In the 1960s they used to hold joint rallies with the American Nazi party. There was an article on this in the Sunday colour supplement for the Independent back in the 1990s. It contained an article written by a White American female photographer, who followed, interviewed and photographed Malcolm X at the time. The article reproduced some of the photos shed’ taken of these rallies. Now Malcolm X didn’t remain a separatist. He later converted to orthodox Islam, and supported integration after he went on the Hajj to Mecca, during which he found that people of all races were fundamentally the same. I think he also took an orthodox Muslim name. There is therefore the problem that if it is wrong to commemorate a slaver like Colston, then why should a Black activist, who also stood for racism and separation, be commemorated?
Conclusion
Colston’s statue had its time long ago. It’s removal, one way or another, was pretty much inevitable. It won’t be missed. The argument for its retention was weakened when the Americans began pulling down the statues of Confederate generals. At the same time, it’s right that Bristol’s involvement in the slave trade and the slaves transported should be commemorated. There’s a whole gallery devoted to this at M Shed on Bristol’s docks. There’s also a slave walk, and a commemorative plaque. Black Lives Matter still has an urgent point. Racism still exists in this country, and Black communities as a rule are underprivileged, poorer with higher rates of unemployment and underrepresented in large parts of industry, society and the arts.
But anti-racist campaigns also need tact and sensitivity. Accusations that Whites in general are racist, or that Bristol must somehow be intrinsically racist because of slavery, just cause more division and resentment.
It leads to embittered Whites giving their votes to the Tories, who will just use them to justify their own racism and destruction of state aid for the disadvantaged regardless of their colour.
Yesterday Mike put up a piece reporting and commenting on Trump’s denunciation of Green activists at the Davos summit. He called them ‘prophets of doom’, who were trying to dominate, control and transform the lives of everyone in the world, and announced that he would not change his country’s high carbon economy. He would, though, sign up for planting, restoring and conserving a trillion trees.
This didn’t impress Greta Thunberg, who was also there. Mike quotes her as saying
“Our house is still on fire. Your inaction is fuelling the flames by the hour, and we are telling you to act as if you loved your children above all else,” she said.
“You say: ‘We won’t let you down. Don’t be so pessimistic.’ And then, silence.”
And she asked: “What will you tell your children was the reason to fail and leave them facing… climate chaos that you knowingly brought upon them? That it seemed so bad for the economy that we decided to resign the idea of securing future living conditions without even trying?”
Beeb wildlife presenter Chris Packham also made a speech about the climate emergency at the BAFTA’s, warning that unless we act to solve the environmental crisis, future generations may look on Trump, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Vladimir Putin and Australia’s Scott Morrison in the same way as mass murderers like Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot, because of the millions killed through climate change.
Mike also makes the point that while the world’s leaders are doing nothing about climate change, Boris is moving closer to a trade deal with Trump, one that will also make him deny the danger. Mike states that our clown of a prime minister has missed opportunities to make a difference, and asks if he will sell us down the river again for the sake of a few American dollars.
The answer is yes, yes, he will. And it’s for the same reasons Trump and the rest of the Republican party are denying climate change: powerful corporate interests. The Republicans received very generous campaign funding from big industrialists like the Koch brothers and the other heads of the fossil fuel industry. These big businessmen also sponsor fake grassroots organisations and biased scientific think thanks in order to lobby against and discredit climate research and laws to protect the environment. The results have been disastrous. Since he took power, Trump has gutted the environmental protection agency and forbidden it from publishing anything supporting climate change or environmental decline in America. Koch money has seen universities close down proper climate and environmental research and their replacement with laboratories and organisations funded by the brothers and others in the fossil future industry. These present as fact the false information they want the public to hear: that climate change isn’t occurring, and the coal and oil industries ain’t wrecking the landscape. But these industries are. There are a whole sections of the Louisiana swamps that is heavily polluted by oil. The oil pipeline through indigenous people’s land in Idaho that made the news a few years ago was opposed because the indigenous people of the area feared that there would be spillages that would pollute the water they use for drinking and which nourishes their wildlife. They were right to do so. There have been a large number of similar spillages, which have not garnered so much media attention, which have similarly contaminated vast acreages of land. And then there’s the whole fracking industry, and the damage that has also caused the water table in areas where it has been allowed.
These are the industries funding Trump’s campaign. They’re part of the reason why there were right-wing jokers all over the internet yesterday sniggering at Trump’s put down of Thunberg. Trump and his supporters really do believe that environmentalists are some kind of crazy apocalyptic cult with totalitarian aims. There’s a section of the American right that really does believe Green activists are real, literal Nazis, because the Nazis were also environmentally concerned. And the corporate interests sponsoring Trump are the same industries that want to get a piece of our economy and industries.
The Tories have already shown that they are little concerned about the environment. They have strongly promoted fracking in this country, and the book The Violence of Austerity contains a chapter detailing the Tories’ attacks on the environment and Green protest groups. David Cameron’s boast that his would be the greenest government ever vanished the moment his put his foot across the threshold of Number 10.
If Boris makes a Brexit trade deal with Trump, it will mean that our precious ‘green and pleasant land’ is under threat from highly polluting, environmentally destructive industries. It will mean further reductions in funding for renewable energy in favour of oil, gas and coal, attempts in this country to discredit and silence respectable, mainstream climate research and scientists in favour of corporate-sponsored pseudoscience. And there will be further laws and state violence against environmental protesters.
Trump’s climate denial is a threat to the British environment, industry, the health of its people, democracy and science. But Boris depends on him for any kind of successful trade deal.
He will sell out and wreck this country and its people for those dollars offered by Trump and his corporate backers.
I found this Quaker declaration of the freedom of religion in Documents of the Christian Church, selected and edited by Henry Bettenson, 2nd edition (Oxford: OUP 1963). It’s taken from The Chief Principles of the Christian Religion, as professed by the people called the Quakers, drawn up by Robert Barclay in 1678, and published in his Apology for the Quakers. Proposition XIV, Concerning the Power of the Civil Magistrate in Matters purely Religious and Pertaining to Conscience, runs
‘Since God hath assumed to himself the power and dominion of the conscience, who alone can rightly instruct and govern it, therefore it is not lawful for any whatsoever, by virtue of any authority or principality they bear in the government of this world, to force the conscience of others;… provided always, that no man, under the pretence of conscience, prejudice his neighbour in his life or estate; or do anything destructive to, or inconsistent with, human society; in which case the law is for the transgressor, and justice to be administered upon all, without respect of persons.’
(p. 256).
It’s almost incredible to think that this was written in the 17th century, and that nearly 3 1/2 centuries later there are still countries in this world that don’t recognise it. Countries like Saudi Arabia, North Korea, China and Russia. In Saudi Arabia only Wahhabi Islam is permitted, and Shi’a Muslims viciously persecuted. A few years ago they also passed a law declaring that atheism was terrorism even without any violence or threats of violence being made. Russia is far more tolerant of religion than it was under Communism, when it was a persecuting atheist state. But even now, some religions are declared to be illegal. This includes not only extremist sects and beliefs, like Islamism, but also the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I admit they can be a pain when they come knocking on your door sometimes in their zeal to spread their version of Christianity, but a dangerous, radical extremist group? When, and to whom? The Nazis also persecuted them, because they wouldn’t accept Hitler as a secular Messiah.
It’s a disgrace that in the 21st century, freedom of religion and conscience still needs defending from persecutors across the world.
There’s some very nasty lies – at least, I sincerely hope they’re lies – being put about by someone about the notorious Roswell UFO crash. This was the incident in 1947 when a UFO supposedly crashed on Mac Brazell’s ranch in Roswell, New Mexico. The US army came to investigate and collect the debris. The USAF then released a statement by Major Quantanilla that they had recovered a ‘flying disc’. This story was then changed the next day, or a few days later, to a tale that they had in fact recovered a weather balloon, with Quantanilla shown holding up its foil remains. That, more or less, is what is known for sure. However, local people continued to believe very strongly that an alien space vehicle had crashed near their town. In 1980 Charles Berlitz and another researcher published a book claiming that this was the true. This was followed by even more books claiming that not only had a UFO crashed, but alien bodies had been recovered and removed to Wright-Patterson AFB for analysis and dissection. There was also one alien survivor, who was also taken by the Air Force. This in turn spawned the infamous Alien autopsy hoax video created by pop producer Ray Santilli and shown around the world. Which in turn inspired the British SF comedy, Alien Autopsy, starring those lovable funsters Ant and Dec, now appearing on Britain’s Got Talent.
Since then there have been a number of theories and highly dubious claims about what really happened at Roswell. And one of these stories is extremely nasty, and, in my view, grossly offensive. It’s that the crash was a deliberate fake, using children or handicapped adults, who had been experimented upon by Nazi, Japanese, Russian and American scientists, as part of a Cold War plot.
Annie Jacobsen and the Joe Rogan Experience
A few days ago I discovered this video from the Joe Rogan Experience, put up on YouTube on 18th May 2019. In it, Rogan, the host, talks to the journo Annie Jacobsen, about the claims in her new book that American scientists working for the military surgically altered children to look like aliens as part of a Cold War campaign of disinformation against the Soviets. The Russians had supposedly tried to fake a UFO encounter using children mutilated by the Nazis, and the Americans were experimenting to see how the Russians did it.
Rogan’s sceptical about the whole tale. He states that he knows people in the armed forces, and they will spin stories to get people going. And I share Rogan’s scepticism. This seems to be simply the latest version of a series of claims that the crash was faked using children operated upon by the Nazis, Japanese and Russians.
Redfern’s Account of the Russian Hoax Landing
A few days ago the Magonia website published my review of Nick Redfern’s Flying Saucers from the Kremlin: UFOs, Russian Meddling, Soviet Spies & Cold War Secrets. In it, Redfern discusses similar claims made by Jacobsen in an earlier book, published in 2011, Area 51. Based on information supplied by an anonymous informant, she claims that the Roswell Crash was a failed attempt to fake a UFO landing by the-then dictator of the USSR, Joe Stalin. The flying saucer was based on the tailless aircraft designed by the Nazi aeroengineers, the Horten brothers. The aliens were really children surgically altered by the Nazi doctor and war criminal, Josef Mengele. The mysterious hieroglyphs seen on some of the saucer remains was really Cyrillic, the Russian alphabet. Jacobsen doesn’t name her source, but another investigator, Tony Bragaglia, claims that he was Alfred O’Donnell, an elite engineer from EG&G, the leading designer and contractor of federal classified facilities in the US. Redfern then states that he was told practically the same story from a former employee of Area 51, which he published in his 2010 book, The NASA Conspiracies. This source claimed that physically altered people had been flown from Russia to the US aboard a bizarre-looking aircraft in order to convince Americans that their country was being invaded by aliens.
Redfern and Japanese Human Experiments at Roswell
In an earlier version of this tale, also published by Redfern five years earlier, the object that crashed at Roswell was a massive balloon based on Japanese technology, which carried a manned glider. This contained a pilot, and a group of handicapped Japanese. Suffering from diseases such as dwarfism and progeria – rapid aging – they had been brought to the US from the Japanese Unit 731, the infamous Japanese military unit responsible for experiments on humans. These experiments were every bit as sick and horrific as Mengele’s and the Nazis’. A little while ago one of the Horror blogs reviewed a film someone had made about the Unit’s atrocities in Japanese-occupied China and Mongolia during the Second World War. The film claimed to be recreations of real experiments. From reading the review, I decided it was definitely one to miss. Apparently the victims of the Roswell and similar crashes were being used as guinea pigs to assess the effects of exposure to high altitude and radiation.
Redfern’s book, Body Snatchers in the Desert: the Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell Story (Paraview Pocket Books 2005), was reviewed by Magonia in issue 89, August 2005. Their review concluded that it wasn’t a story that should be accepted or rejected out of hand, but was worth the attention of properly qualified reporters and investigators, and would gain in stature if someone, particularly outside Ufology, would come forward to corroborate it. Or if a whistleblower also came forward, and they brought with them evidence and documentation.
The Magonia article notes that there were unethical experiments conducted by the American state, like the MKUltra drug experiments and the infamous Tuskeegee syphilis experiments on Black sharecroppers. They also mention here the scandal of the British state sending ‘orphaned’ children to be used as slave labour in Canada and Australia. However these conspiracies are backed up by genuine evidence and documentation. But there’s none here. Only people walking up to Redfern at UFO conferences. Magonia says of this
Assuming that these people exist and are who they say they are, then the fact the people on two continents approach Redfern with more or less similar stories suggests either that rumours along these lines have been around for some time and are being ussed as the basis of stories, that the stories are to some degree at least true, or that Redfern is being set up by someone or other.
My guess is that they’re either just rumours, which people are turning into stories, or that Redfern and Jacobsen have been set up.
The Problem of Age and Memory
In the above interview, Rogan does ask Jacobsen if the people telling her these tales weren’t lying. She replies that her informant was a 95 year-old man, who broke down crying in front of his wife of 65 years, because he was so ridden with guilt at his complicity in the atrocity. She asks him in turn how this could happen if the story wasn’t true.
The problem with this is the same that Magonia also pointed out affected the testimony of other witnesses to the supposed Roswell crash, people who believed they’d seen alien bodies. They were very elderly, sometimes quite frail, and the family of one man said that his mind and memory were prone to deceive him. It’s quite possible that this has happened here and that the whole story is a confabulation by a man, who is clearly upset and disturbed about something in his career, but whose mind has constructed a false story about why. On the other hand, it could also very well be that this entire story is simply malign twaddle dreamed up by someone. It could be the government trying to hide a genuine mystery, or it could simply be private citizens laughing at the gullibility of the public, who have somehow pulled this bloke into their fantasies.
The Weekly World News and the Nazi Saucer Myth
These tales also seem to resemble and draw on a version of the Nazi saucer myth published in the Weekly World News on 27th January 1981. The Weekly World News was an American supermarket tabloid newspaper, and gave us such brilliant investigative reports such as ‘Mom was bigfoot, says beastie man’. This reported the claim of Olav Meyer, a German geologist living in Seville, Spain, that the UFOs were developed by the Nazis, but not actually used because Hitler preferred the V2. The article claimed that this had been corroborated by another journalist and investigator, Christof Friedrich, of Toronto. According to Friedrich, the Germans were working on flying saucers, but were unable to develop them because of a shortage of raw materials. Friedrich also said that he had learned from Major Donald Keyhoe that the Americans had seen troops into Germany to recover the saucer scientists, but that they had escaped to Russia instead. Both Meyer and Friedrich cited a book, published in the 1950s by Rudolph Lazar, which supposedly showed the Nazis were developing flying saucers.
Lazar’s book is notorious. Although the WWN article claims that Lazar was a scientist, he was really a former German army officer. His book was about supposed German super weapons developed during the War, which included flying saucers. It’s one of the major sources for the Nazi saucer myth, which returned once again to haunt Ufology back in the 1990s. Apart from ordinary people, who have been taken by this rubbish, the myth seems to be pushed by Nazis trying to create some kind of spurious glamour about the Third Reich. As it developed, the Nazi saucer squadron was supposed to have escaped the allies, establishing a secret base out in the Canadian arctic. They then moved down to Antarctica, which is why the Americans also have a base down there. The video UFO Secrets of the Third Reich, produced by Royal Atlantis Films in the 1990s, also claimed that they were built following instructions channelled through a medium from an alien civilisation around the star Aldebaran. The Nazi saucer myth also formed the basis for the SF comedy, The Iron Sky, in which a female American president, who resembles Sarah Palin, starts a war with a Nazi colony on the Moon. Magonia published a series of articles attacking the Nazi saucer myth. Kevin McClure, a long-time investigator of the paranormal, also published a very well researched piece very effectively demolishing it.
I find the Nazi saucer myth vile and distasteful, if not dangerous for the way it seeks to promote and glamorize the Nazis. And the stories of maimed and disfigured people used to impersonate aliens seems to me to be a kind of blasphemy against the real victims of Nazi and Japanese experimentation.
I have no idea whether these stories are some kind of government/ state disinformation campaign, or simply private hoaxers. But I don’t doubt for a single minute that they’re lies that should be discarded. Until someone involved comes forward bringing real evidence and supporting documents, at least.
This little snippet from the I might explain why the Sunset Times may be preparing to run more anti-Semitism smears against Labour this Easter Sunday. According to the paper, Labour have a 10 point lead over May’s wretched gang of thugs and profiteers.
The article by Florence Smead in the paper’s edition for 19th April 2019 ran
The Labour Party emerged with a 10 per cent lead from a poll that asked people how they would vote at the next general election.
Jeremy Corbyn’s party would take 33 per cent of the vote if a ballot was held tomorrow, according to the ComRes survey, with the Conservatives trailing on 23 per cent.
The Brexit Party was backed by 14 per cent of respondents, while the newly named Independent Change UK party achieved 9 per cent. The Liberal Democrats were fourth with 7 per cent, ahead of UKIP on 5 per cent and the Scottish National Party and the Greens tied on 3 per cent.
ComRes said its research suggested that just over half (53 per cent) of voters who backed the Tories in 2017 intended to do so again at the next election. However, a quarter of the same group said they planned to vote for Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. (p. 9).
The Mail on Sunday last week was trying to panic its readers that Labour were set to win, and ruin their savings and investments, while Pogrund – or Poo Grunt, as I feel he should be called – Kerbaj, or Garbage and another hack ran yet another anti-Semitism smear story in the Sunset Times, a paper with a proud future behind it. The Tories are afraid, and hence the attempts to smear Labour and paint its leader as the reincarnation of Hitler.
But hopefully this is going to have less and less effect as people wake up to the fact that these are baseless smears by an exploitative and entitled media-political elite. With luck, it’ll get worse for the Tories, and we can look forward to a Labour government.
I remember coming across the image below when I was at college, stuck up on the walls of the Religious Studies department. As you can see, it’s of Hitler making his usual, lazy salute with his hand flung casually back, into which a giant figure representing capitalist big business is giving him wads of notes.
The original was by John Heartsfield, born Helmut Herzfeld, a radical German-born artist. He was a member of the Dada avant-garde artistic movement and a Communist. The original work had the legend Millionen Stehen Hinter Mir – Millions Stand Behind Me’, as well as Kleiner Mann bittet um grosse Gaben – ‘Small Man Asks for Big Donations.’
The image is obviously about how big business funded the Nazis. It’s not entirely accurate, as the Nazis were first ignored by the large corporations, and they were funded instead by small businesses and the lower middle class. But Hitler later appealed to them and once in power Nazi policy always favoured monopoly capitalism.
But you could easily replace the photograph of Hitler with that Tweezer, Tony Blair or one of the Independents. Especially the Independents. As I’ve discussed many times, they’re all corporatists, who let their donors in big business decide their policies and send their staff to ‘assist’ them, and give their donors posts in government, in return for their funding. They are also, all of them, hostile to working people. They are anti-union, for privatisation and austerity, and against the welfare state.
And that is why they, and the media, so viciously hate Jeremy Corbyn. Not only does he intend to turn back Thatcherism and actually empower people, he and Bernie Sanders in America are doing so by appealing to ordinary party members and their money rather than big business.
So get corporate money out of politics, the Blairites, Independents and Tories out of government, and Jeremy Corbyn in. And may Bernie do the same to the corporate Democrats and Republicans in America!
It wouldn’t be the Tory conference without a bit of casual racism. The Tory students down at Plymouth were photographed in their T-shirts saying ‘F**k the NHS’, and with Stars of David drawn on and captioned ‘Jude’ – the German for ‘Jew’. One of their number even drew a Hitler moustache on himself. One of the many great commenters on this blog, Kate Blair, alerted me to the article about it in Jewish News, who unsurprisingly really, really weren’t impressed. See: https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/tory-students-criticised-over-hitler-moustache-and-star-of-david-on-night-out/
And a few days ago the young master, Jacob Rees-Mogg, also had a sneer at Libya under Colonel Gaddafi. In the video below, the presenter and reporter Anastasia Churkina discuss Rees-Mogg’s sneer at Colonel Gaddafi’s full name for his country. This was the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahariya. The latter term is Arabic, and means ‘state of the masses’.
Rees-Mogg had drawled that the countries, who were least interested in their people always called themselves ‘peoples’, and referred to Gaddafi’s Libya as the ‘People’s Republic of Jam Jar, or something.’
Rees-Mogg sneer brought down condemnation from the MPs Alex Sobel, Liz Innes, and the Lib Dem’s Christine Jardine. They made the point that these sneers were becoming very common from the Brexiteers. It showed how Rees-Mogg and the others were ‘Little Englanders’, and Sobel even wondered if Mogg had had the same geography teacher at Eton as Boris Johnson.
Churkina and the presenter suggested that this comment had touched a raw nerve because of BoJo’s own casual racism in his remark about women in burkas looking like letter boxes or bin bags. Churkina also said it was remarkable, given Britain’s own role in Libyan affairs.
Actually, it shows the completely dismissive attitude towards this country from the Patrician, neocon elite. Which includes not just Rees-Mogg and Johnson, but also Tony Blair.
Gaddafi was a monster, who killed and tortured his political opponents in Libya, and had them assassinated abroad, in Africa and the Middle East. But under him, his people had free education and healthcare, and his country was the most prosperous in Africa. And while he used the Islamists as weapons to murder his rivals outside Libya, they were never allowed to operate within its borders. He also believed in African solidarity, and Blacks in his country were treated as equals.
All this vanished when Obama, Blair and Sarkozy decided to overthrow his regime, helping the Islamists to seize power. As a result, Libya has two parliaments, one part of the country is ruled by a coalition of Islamist warlords, and Black Africans are being enslaved. And the person chiefly responsible for agitating for Western aid to the rebels was Tony Blair.
And Boris Johnson showed his own unconcern for the victims of the civil war a year or so ago, when he told a conference that there were investors lining up to put their money into one Libyan city, ‘when they’ve cleared the bodies away’.
Gaddafi was a tyrant, but he was better for his people than what Obama, Blair and Sarko unleashed in his stead. And the remarks from Johnson and Rees-Mogg shows what they really think of the smaller countries and their people, who get in the way of Western imperialism.
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