A few days ago I put up a couple of posts showing the very close similarity between far right Labour MP Neil Coyle’s comments about Jewish Voice for Labour and the Nazis’ and British Fascists’ denunciations of ‘communist’ Jews and Jewish influence in politics. But unfortunately it’s not only White bigots who seem to share their attitudes and rhetoric. Many Black and Asian allegedly ‘anti-racist’ ideologues and activists do to.
The Black Lives Matter protests across the world were an attempt to raise awareness about the supposed greater incidence of Blacks being shot and killed by the police. Behind them was outrage and frustration at the continuing material poverty, high unemployment, lack of educational achievement, crime and drugs in the Black community. BLM groups, such as those in Bristol, were keen to present themselves not as racists trying to cause division, but as sincere anti-racists trying to draw people together. The organisation’s Bristol branch put up posters that included the statement that they weren’t trying to start a race war. They were trying to stop one. But unfortunately the protests were accompanied by highly racist, genocidal statements and attitudes from high profile members of the Black and Asian communities. A Black American academic, Britney Cooper, caused outrage when she appeared on the Black American internet show, The Root, declaring that Whites were dying out, and ‘may be we should help them along’. An Asian academic at a New York university, who specialised in the psychology of racism, stated she fantasised about shooting Whites. A recent video put up by the New Culture Forum also contained a selection of tweets from angry Black activists. One of these stated that the poster looked forward to destroying White prosperity and livelihoods, and forcing Whites to endure the same poverty as BAME people. The tweeter’s name is blurred, but it looks like Priyamvada Gopal, the professor of Colonial and Postcolonial literature at Cambridge.
These comments are almost exactly like those of the Nazis, and particularly their attitude to Poles and Slavs. In 1942 Martin Bormann wrote
‘The Slavs are to work for us. In so far as we do not need them, they may die. Slav fertility is undesirable. They may possess contraceptives or abort, the more the better. Education is dangerous. We shall leave them religion as a means of diversion. They will receive only the absolutely necessary provisions. We are the masters, we come first.’
Joachim C. Fest, The Faceof the Third Reich, page 204.
In fact there has been a strain of viciously anti-White racism present in Black political culture for a very long time. Afrocentrism holds that Blacks are intellectually and spiritually superior to other peoples, especially Whites, who are supposed to be more stupid, less spiritual, intuitive and cruel. These attitudes are reinforced by Post-Colonial and Critical Race Theory, which see Whites, even when they are opposed to racism, as deeply racist and embedded in and part of a culture which privileges them. A year or so ago right-wing videos on the Net showed a clip of one lecturer, Angela Shackleford, telling a White class that they were not born into humanity, cannot change, and that they were ‘devils’ to her.
And some Black rhetoric and activism has crossed the line into overt Fascism. Marcus Garvey, who held paramilitary parades in New York, once declared that Hitler and Mussolini learned everything from him. In the 1970s his son announced, during the Jamaican celebrations of the great man’s birth, that Garveyism must become Black National Socialism, for Africa also needed its Lebensraum. Before she was shot by a criminal gang, Black activist Sasha Johnson demanded a Black militia to safeguard Blacks against the police, whom she accused of being like the Klan. She duly appeared on platforms with them, dressed alike in stab vests. Johnson fancied herself as ‘the British Black panther’, but her parade violated British legislation going back to the 1930s against political paramilitary uniforms aimed squarely at Fascist organisations like Mosley’s BUF.
And Black British politicians have encouraged and extended a welcome to deeply racist Black American activists. Back in the 1980s ‘Black radical’ Labour politician Bernie Grant invited over here Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam. The Nation of Islam demands a Black-only state. Now more or less a science fictional space cult, it believes that Whites were created by an evil Mekkan scientist, Shaitan, to destroy the purity of the Black race. It is also very definitely opposed to the welfare state. If this had been a White politician, he would have been denounced as Fascist and his visit accompanied with protests from the Left. But Grant excused him, saying he didn’t agree with everything he said, but regarded him as an elder statesman.
The Left tends to turn a blind eye to such racism. It is fixated on the real threat of White racism and fascism, to the extent that it ignores anti-White racism and refuses to accept it. Matthew Collins, the author of the Demonisation of the White Working Class, in an interview on the New Culture Forum YouTube channel, remarked that when his book came out it was bitterly criticised as itself racist by the left-wing press because of its discussion of Whites forced out of Black majority areas due to anti-White racism. The publication of Ed Hussein’s book, Among the Mosques, about Muslim anti-White hatred, was also greeted with accusations of racism and Islamophobia by the left.
This attitude is itself profoundly racist and a mistake, because anti-White racism in the past has at times reached and exceeded the same extent as White racist crimes against people of colour. In 2006 the Independent report that the racist murder of Whites was almost at the same level as the racist murders of Blacks. And back in the 1990s the newspaper also covered a report, published by the then Committee for Racial Equality, written by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, that racist attacks on Whites now amounted to 60 per cent of the total number of such incidents. This was the first time it had done so. Since then I’ve no doubt that it’s been overtaken by assaults against people of colour, especially Muslims after 9/11. But the threat of a revived, violent anti-White racism is still there in my opinion, especially as it could be encouraged by the anti-White rhetoric and ideologies of Post-Colonial and Critical Race Theory and its adherents.
I don’t believe that the extent of these pernicious ideologies should be exaggerated. Such people don’t speak for all Blacks or Asians by any means, just as the real Nazis never represented the vast majority of Whites. But these attitudes and ideologies do need to be fought. They should not be indulged in or promoted by the left because they come from the left and are supposed to be about defending and promoting persecuted, marginalised peoples. Rather the left needs to unite against them. There needs to be left-led anti-racist marches, with both Blacks, Asians and Whites, against Muslim grooming gangs. There needs to be a no-platform on campus against Post-Colonial and Critical Race Theory racists, just as there are for White supremacists and Fascists. But there isn’t. And so such issues are left to the right and genuine racists like the Islamophobic Tommy Robinson.
This needs to be stopped and radically changed now. Racism and Fascism can appear in all peoples and colours, including Black and Asians. And it needs to be fought be all races together.
According to today Torygraph, far-right Labour MP Neil Coyle has had the party whip withdrawn because of racist comments about the Chinese he made to a journalist at Stranger’s Bar in parliament. This left the press gentleman, who presumably is of Chinese descent, feeling unsafe. Well it’s all coming out now. Coyle, as Mike has reported, made disgusting remarks about Jewish Voice for Labour, tweeting that their members were communists with their own party they could ruin. This resulted in a complaint to Starmer from three very distinguished Jewish gents – Geoffrey Bindman, a Queen’s Counsel, Avi Shlaim, professor of Middle Eastern history at Oxford and a Mr Harold Immanuel. I’ve said in a previous post that Coyle’s disgusting comment was almost straight out of Hitler’s vile rantings. The Nazis attacked the SPD, the German socialist party, as Marxist, and with a disproportionately high Jewish members. The Jews in it were all conspiring to throw gentiles out and place it under Jewish dominance as part of their subversion of parliamentary democracy and their plot to take over Germany. I’ve been trying to find the exact quote to show how similar this accusation is Coyle’s. I haven’t been able to find it, unfortunately, but I have found others that are broadly similar. For example, in one of his speeches Hitler ranted
‘that wherever one looks one sees Jews. The whole of Germany is governed by Jews. It is a sandal that the German workers, whether with head or hand, let themselves be so harassed by the Jews. Of course, because the Jew has the money in his hands. The Jew sits in government and swindles and smuggles. When he has his pockets full again he drives the workers into confusion, so that again and again he finds himself at the helm, and we poor Germans put up with all that. He also spoke about Russia and who did all that? Only the Jews. Therefore, Germans, be united and fight against the Jews. Because they will gobble up our last crumbs. The lecturer’s concluding words: We shall carry on the struggle until the Jew has been removed from the Reich even if it seems like an insurrection or even to revolution.’
Joachim C. Fest, The Face of the Third Reich (London: Penguin 1970) 41.
Mike has also pointed out how the Nazis identified the Jews with Marxism. This is absolutely correct, as another quote from the wretched man shows
‘Fate answered the question for me inasmuch as it led me to make a detached and exhaustive inquiry into Marxist teaching and the activities of the Jewish people in connection with it. The Jewish doctrine of Marxism repudiates the aristocratic principles of Nature and replaces the eternal privilege of vigour and strength by numerical mass and its dead weight.’
Fest, Face of the Third Reich, 55.
And then there’s this quote from a 1933 speech by General Reichenau to a council of commanding officers baldly stating the party’s role in stamping out ‘Marxism’:
‘We must understand that we are in the midst of a revolution. What is rotten in the state must fall and it can only be brought down by terror. The party will proceed ruthlessly against Marxism. The army’s task is to order arms. No succour if any of the persecuted seek refuge with the troops.’
Fest, op. cit., 360.
Okay, let’s not exaggerate – Starmer and Coyle aren’t shooting Jews and Marxists or putting them in concentration camps. But he is smearing decent people, who are Jews and leftists, as anti-Semites and ‘Communists’ in order to purge them from the party and make it safe for nice, Zionist neoliberals. Who are the only people, including the only Jews, that are welcome in the party as they wish to mould it. And the rhetoric they are using is exactly that of Hitler and the Nazis. They are real anti-Semitic tropes.
But left-wing Jews don’t count. Certainly not, it appears, to comedian, writer and broadcaster David Baddiel, who has written a book, Jews Don’t Count, about the revival of anti-Semitism. This presumably includes Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters as members and adherents of left-wing anti-Semitism. Because criticism of Israel for its barbarous treatment of the Palestinians is anti-Semitic, and not merely anti-Zionist. Looking through YouTube yesterday, I found that Baddiel had turned up on Spectator TV to talk about his book. Yeah, the Speccie, whose columnist ‘Taki’ has been described as an anti-Semite, and who wrote a piece in his column in the wretched magazine praising the Greek Chryse Aurea, ‘Golden Dawn’, bunch of Nazis. The group that beats up immigrants and asylum seekers, whose leader has, I believe, been banged up for the murder of a left-wing journo.
In fact the Spectator has been running stories about Socialist and Muslim anti-Semitism for some years now. Way back in 2004 there was a review by Frederick Raphael of a book, set in France in this decade, in which the remains of the French socialists has joined force with the Muslims to seize power. Together the two have launched a new Holocaust against the Jews. Yes, I know the left isn’t free of anti-Semitism, and it’s present in the Islamic community, but this is just anti-socialist, Islamophobic smears and propaganda. But one of the complaints by Jewish right-winger around that time was that the left was more concerned about racism towards Muslims than anti-Semitism. It seems Baddiel may also share this attitude. Well, as the Independent pointed out in its analysis of French racism at the same time, the French were more concerned about Islamophobia because it was far more prevalent than anti-Semitism. Something like 30 per cent of French people polled believed that Muslims weren’t really French, as compared with only five per cent who thought the same about Jews. And I dare say much the same is true over here as well.
David Baddiel is highly intelligent and a genuinely witty, funny bloke. He has a double first and a doctorate from Oxford. I can remember laughing fit to burst along with the rest of his audience when I heard him read from his book, Time For Bed, nearly two decades ago at the Cheltenham Literary Festival. But now it seems he’s another one who’s checked his brains at the door when it comes to anti-Semitism in Labour.
He made some excellent observations about Whoopi Goldberg’s ignorant remark that the Holocaust wasn’t about race. Unfortunately, his views about Corbyn and his supporters are also ignorant and prejudiced. Don’t bother with them.
The lamestream media really are becoming vile and dangerously vindictive. Of course, we knew that all too often they were absolute scumbags already from the way they’ve smeared and libeled decent left-wingers like Michael Foot, Mike from Vox Political, Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone, Marc Wadsworth and so many, many others. Foot was libeled as a KGB agent, something that even Private Eye found ridiculous and disgusting. Mike, Walker, Wadsworth and Livingstone were all smeared by the press as Jew haters and Holocaust deniers, simply for the horrendous crime of being true Labour folks, and daring to criticise Israel for its apartheid and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Or because they dared to stand up for those who had. As a result, they’ve had to endure unspeakable abuse on social media. Walker’s been told by racists that she can’t be Jewish, ’cause she’s Black, and that she should be lynched, set on fire and her body dumped in bin bags. And Mike showed me the other day the splenetic abuse he gets from bigoted morons, who’ve swallowed the lies about him. But the media seems to be digging ever lower depths.
Laura Kuenssberg yesterday revealed that Omar Salem, the father of a sick child at a hospital BoJob was visiting, was a Labour activist and gave out his twitter handle. This has resulted in this principled man getting a mountain of abuse from the indignant, vitriolic right. Because Salem had the temerity to tell BoJob how disgusting his destruction of the health service is. It doesn’t matter that a doctor at the hospital shares Salem’s disgust and outrage at the poor service the hospital is providing because of the cuts. The Beeb and the rest of the Tory propaganda machine laughingly called the mainstream media cannot tolerate any criticism of the party. Dissenters must be crushed, vilified, humiliated and terrorised into silence.
Now it seems they’re going to do it to Jolyon Maugham, a long time critic of government policy. According to Zelo Street, Maugham has tweeted that the Mail on Sunday is going to dox him. That is, they’re going to reveal his private address. This comes after he has received death threats because he opposes Brexit. This is mentioned in an article discussing how the Mail on Sunday’s hack, ‘Whinging’ Dan Hodges, has lied on twitter about Jon Lansman’s move to replace the post of deputy leader of the Labour party, which was vetoed by Jeremy Corbyn. Said veto has the support of Lansman, but never mind. Hodges has lied about the decision, claiming that the Labour office now resembles a scene from the Death of Stalin but without the jokes. When this was very obviously shown to be wrong, Hodges claimed that Lansman was going to be set up to take the fall for the decision by Corbyn. He was going to be the patsy, just like Lee Harvey Oswald was for the JFK assassination. Peter Oborne, who left the Torygraph because he was disgusted at the way the editors were slanting stories in line with the wishes of their advertisers, said it was part of the ‘deformation professionelle’ of journalism. For which he also claimed partial responsibility. Oborne’s very definitely a man of the right, but he does have journalistic integrity which is more than the hacks at the MoS have. And he’s been reviled by the press for it. Tim Fenton, the man behind the Zelo Street blog, also has experience of this kind of intimidation. After he published an article criticising the Speccie for supporting Tommy Robinson, Robinson and his islamophobic stormtroopers turned up on his doorstep.
And if all this wasn’t sordid enough, apparently the ‘Fake Sheikh’ Mazher Mahmood is also working behind the scenes at the Mail on Sunday. This is the scam artist, who used to work for the News of the World trapping unwitting slebs into saying or doing something indiscreet or illegal. He dresses up and poses as an Arab sheikh in order to ingratiate himself with his victims. He’s got some aristos into trouble for saying something uncomplimentary about the royals, got a Radio 1 DJ the sack after persuading him to buy drugs for him, and tried to get George Galloway to say something monstrous about the Holocaust. But Galloway recognised him and didn’t fall for it, stating instead that the Holocaust was a crime against humanity. Mahmood’s employment was supposed to have stopped due to the phone hacking scandal, but apparently he’s still running around doing the same old tricks. Still, the Zelo Street article has a handy photo of him, so keep it handy if you’re a public figure. And bear in mind that he’s as much Arab nobility as I am, even if he is Asian.
But doxing people after they’ve received death threats. This looks like the media’s way of putting people in genuine fear for their lives, but in a manner that allows them to deny any responsibility. Hitler and Goebbels used to do that kind of thing against their enemies in Weimar Germany, before they moved on to outright assassination themselves. Joachim C. Fest describes in his book, The Face of the Third Reich, the way they’d smear political opponents, including members of the Weimar police and civil authorities, as Jews even when they weren’t simply for propaganda purposes. It was deliberately dangerous, as other right-wing groups were also carrying out attacks and assassinations on the ‘traitors of Versailles’, as they called the mainstream Weimar parties. Now the Mail and its sister paper are doing exactly the same and for the same reason: they also believe that the people they smear are traitors, though because of their opposition to Brexit.
And so BoJob and the Tory press and media are leading us ever further into real Fascism and state terror.
And now from one Australian Fascist, Senator Fraser Anning, to another, a home-grown one: ‘Hatey’ Katie Hopkins. Zelo Street yesterday posted a long article commenting on a nasty piece Hopkins had put up on Facebook, stating that people should not feel sorry the victims of mosque shootings in New Zealand, because they were Muslims, and we were at war with a religion trying to replace us.
The Sage of Crewe gives a few, pungent quotes from Hopkins’ keyboard, beginning with this one.
“A war for the world is underway. And watching the media, the mouthpieces and the multitudes desperate in their search to be the most sorry, I fear that the sad truth none of us want to face is that the victor has already been declared”
She goes on to voice her feelings of pity for Fraser Anning, and deride everyone who sympathised with the victims as pathetic, before claiming that the media has been singled out for blame for this atrocity by the media. Zelo Street states that this is simply untrue. She then goes on to say that the police told us that the real danger was islamophobia after every islamist terror attack in the UK. Which isn’t true either. She then says that after this attack on a mosque by a white bloke, the real enemy is once again islamophobia, and that whatever the terror, the real problem is islamophobia. She then talks about Muslims killing Christians in Nigeria, ISIS bombing a Roman Catholic cathedral, and so, as Zelo Street says, to tell us all that it’s really all Islam’s fault and we are not to feel sorry for the victims.
And then she goes full Enoch Powell with the words about the truth behind the violence
“You can’t see it, can’t hear it, can’t witness it – because you are not allowed. It can’t be recognised without fear of arrest. You can’t talk about the problems of conflicting cultures. Of being threatened by one religion, seeming determined to take over all that was once ours … the future is grim. People are desperately unhappy and feel lost. Forced out from within, strangers in their own lands, separated by fear. On both sides, all sides”.
Zelo Street comments very succinctly that this is White Genocide and the Great Replacement.
She goes on “We are sitting on a volcano, the hot lava of anger forced down by the constant suppression of our words, repression of our emotions, policing of our thoughts. Controlled by blatant lies”.
There was no announcement over a cracking radio. No Churchillian speech to rally us. But the silent exodus of Jews from Europe, of Christians in Britain looking Eastwards for a new place to call home, makes us refugees all the same.”
“And watching the media, its mouthpieces and the multitudes desperate in their search to be the most sorry, waving their white flags in advance, shutting their Churches and Synagogues in deference to the Mosque, I fear that the sad truth none of us want to face is that the victor has already been declared”.
Zelo Street comments
In the world of Katie Hopkins, we should not show empathy for the victims, because she is convinced that Muslims don’t show it to the victims of Islamist attacks, so we should behave in that way too – except, of course, that she is making that bit up. It allows her to conclude that by showing that empathy, we have shown “deference” – her term – to Islam, and therefore that in her imaginary war of cultures, Islam has been victorious.
He goes on to make the point that no-one is suppressing Hopkins’ speech or her thoughts, or is going to arrest anyone who shares her views. But she has to shape her narrative like that in order to push her paranoid, White supremacist fears. He concludes
It is a continuation of the story arc piloted by the likes of Enoch Powell. Then, it was simply about frightening Britons about brown and black people. Now it is about religion, too. But it is still racism, still bigotry, still hatred, and it is still wrong.
The reality is that most people want to end the hatred. Katie Hopkins does not, as it is in her interest for it to continue. She will not prevail. That is all.
What really chills the blood is that Hopkins’ sentiments are very similar to those expressed by Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and the architect of the Holocaust, in a speech he made to his ranks of mass murderers calling for them not to have any sympathy for the peoples they were to kill – Czechs, Russians and Jews – in order to safeguard the German race.
The speech is quoted in the chapter on Himmler in The Face of the Third Reich by Joachim C. Fest (London: Penguin 1970). I give it here for comparison with Hatey Katie’s words.
It is absolutely wrong to project you own harmless soul with its deep feelings, our kindheartedness, our idealism, upon alien peoples. This is true, beginning with Herder, who must have been drunk when he wrote the Voices of the Peoples, thereby bringing such immeasurable suffering and misery upon us who came after him. This is true, beginning with the Czechs and Slovenes, to whom we brought their sense of nationhood. They themselves were incapable of it, but we invented it for them.
One principle must be absolute for the SS man: we must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood and to no one else. What happens to the Russians, what happens to the Czechs, is a matter of utter indifference to me. Such good blood of our own kind as there may be among the nations we shall acquire for ourselves, if necessary by taking away the children and bringing them up among us. Whether the other peoples live in comfort or perish of hunger interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our culture; apart from that it does not interest me. Whether or not 10,000 Russian women collapse from exhaustion while digging a tank ditch interests me only in so far as the tank ditch is completed for Germany. We shall never be rough or heartless where it is not necessary; that is clear. We Germans, who are the only people in the world who have a decent attitude to animals, will also adopt a decent attitude to these human animals, but it is a crime against our own blood to worry about them to bring them ideals.
I shall speak to you with the full frankness of a very serious subject. We shall now discuss it absolutely openly among ourselves, nevertheless we shall never speak of it in public. I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. It is one of those things which it is easy to say. ‘The Jewish people is to be exterminated,’ says every party member. ‘That’s clear, it’s part of our programme, elimination of the Jews, extermination, right, we’ll do it.’ And then they all come along, the eighty million good Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others are swine, but this one is a first-class Jew. Of all those who talk like this, not one has watched, not one has stood up to it. Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand. To have gone through this and yet – apart from a few exceptions, examples of human weakness – to have remained decent, this has made us hard. This is a glorious page in our history that has never been written and never shall be written. (pp. 177-8)
Okay, Hopkins isn’t Himmler and she isn’t standing in Auschwitz urging troops forward as they beat, butcher and gas innocents in their millions, all the while preaching a twisted morality that salutes the atrocity as somehow decent, even noble. But this is where such sentiments end up. And as you can see from the above, it wasn’t just the Jews, but also the Slavs – the Russians, the Czech, the Slovenes in the above speech, but also the Poles, Ukrainians and others. Hitler himself said of the Czechs that the Germans should be utterly ruthless with them, as ‘it’s either us or them’.
Hopkins words are sick and dangerous. They come from a woman who has declared that we should fire on immigrant boats. I don’t know how serious she is about all this. She’s a troll, who feeds on the hatred she gets for upsetting decent people with her obscene views. She might even by like Himmler himself, who, for all his tough talk, was personally squeamish when it came to the Nazis’ murder. In one famous story, he was attending an execution by firing squad. The unit failed to kill their victims with their first salvo, and they had to fire again. Himmler shrieked, and had to be carried off hysterical. It wouldn’t surprise me if, decent her thuggish comments, Hopkins would behave like that herself if she personally had to witness people carrying out the mass murder of immigrants. She’d almost certainly say that she never meant people to start the mass killing of Muslims and immigrants.
But this is where Hopkins’ words can all too easily end up. And that’s no stupid piece of trolling.
One of the points Tony Greenstein, a determined opponent of all forms of racism and Fascism makes against Zionism is that it’s a Jewish version of anti-Semitism. Instead of believing that Jews and gentiles can live together in harmony, peace and friendship, it is based on the terrible view that this is impossible, and Jews must therefore have their own state. It’s a concession to gentile anti-Semitism, and Greenstein supports this arguments by quoting passages from modern Zionism’s founder, Theodor Herzl. Herzl believed that gentile resentment of Jews for emerging from the ghetto and joining and competing with them in wider society was natural. At one point in his writings he even talks about he came to ‘forgive’ anti-Semitism in Paris. And Greenstein also makes the point that some of the rhetoric Herzl used when arguing for a Jewish state is anti-Semitic.
In a post on the 10th January 2019, Greenstein wrote a piece illustrating just how anti-Semitic Herzl’s rhetoric could be with excerpts from Herzl’s text, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). This contrasted the wretched condition of modern, diaspora Jewry with the brave, new Jewish type that would come into being with his projected new state. Modern Jewry was represented by the ‘Y*d’, small, ugly, dark, cringing. The future citizen of the Jewish state, on the other hand, was the ‘Hebrew’, who was everything fine and noble: tall, strong, beautiful, proud. Now Herzl was clearly trying to improve the condition of the Jews, who were oppressed in eastern Europe. Herzl had originally been in favour of Jews integrating into wider, gentile society. But he turned against the idea after the ferocious pogroms of the 19th century which forced many eastern European Jews to flee abroad – to England and the United States, for example. But clearly the language used to describe contemporary eastern European Jews, the Yiddish-speaking masses of Poland, Ukraine, Romania and Russia, is very much that of the anti-Semites.
But it’s also similar to the rhetoric used by later Fascists – by Mussolini in Italy and Adolf Hitler in Germany – to express the contempt they also felt for their compatriots and their perceived failings, in contrast to the new Fascist type into which they wished to mould them. Mussolini several times rejoiced when conditions became harder for Italians, because it would, he believed, improve them by toughening them up. For example, he was very pleased at the cold winter of 1939-40, commenting ‘This snow and cold is very good. In this way our good-for-nothing Italians, this mediocre race, will be improved. One of the principal reasons I wanted the Apennines because it would make Italy colder and snowier.’ And when there was a coal shortage in January 1940, he was happy again, because it was good for them to be put to tests that would shake off their centuries-old mental laziness.
See Noel O’Sullivan, Fascism (London: J.M. Dent & Sons 1983) 66.
Mussolini blamed every failure in the War on the national character of the Italians, who were ‘a soft and unworthy people’, or a ‘people made flabby by art’. And when Speer told Hitler in March 1945 that the War was lost, both economically and militarily, Hitler declared ‘The nation has proved itself weak, and the future belongs solely to the stronger eastern nation.’
O’Sullivan, Fascism, 80.
O’Sullivan also has this to say about the Fascist project of creating a new breed of human:
The fascist ideal, by contrast, involved nothing less than the creation of an entirely new kind of man. The character of this man would be martial and heroic, with a will which recognised no obstacles. For that reason, Marxism, in fascist eyes, was no better than liberalism. It offered, that is, only one more materialist ideal, and by its stress upon the laws of history it deprived the will of its potential creative power. For the Nazis, racial theory implied that the new man was in fact already in existence, but lay buried by a mass of corrupt liberal, democratic and materialist values, which had therefore to be destroyed in order to reveal the Aryan prince hidden beneath them. For the Italian Fascists, on the other hand, the new man had still to be created.
O’Sullivan, op.cit., 74.
That monster, Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS who supervised and implemented the industrial murder of 11 1/2 million innocents – 6 million Jews and 5 1/2 million non-Jews in the concentration camps, was determined to bring the new type of Aryan German into existence through a creation of a special breeding programme, the creation of a different, Nazi society and the colonisation of the territories conquered from Poland and the USSR. The German historian of Nazism, Joachim C. Fest, thus describes his vile plans
It was his conviction that by systematically pursuing his policy, ‘on the basis of Mendel’s Law’, the German people could in 120 years once more become ‘authentically German in appearance’. To this end he put forward and partially implemented an alteration in the marriage to do away with monogamy. He had various plans for establishing a privileged SS caste, eliminating traditional standards of value and working out a system of limited educational and developmental opportunities for subjugated peoples. Within the national frontiers pushed three hundred miles to the east, towns were to be pulled down and that ‘paradise of the Germanic race’ created, of which splendid visions were continually conjured up by the Reichsfuhrer of the SS, and those of his followers who enjoyed his special confidence. A widespread network of defensive villages was also envisaged, not merely to make it possible for the members of the Order, the ‘New Nobility’ to maintain tehir dominant position by force and government, but also to re-establish the ancient contact with the soil.
Fest, The Face of the Third Reich (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1970) 175-6.
I am not claiming that Herzl was a Fascist or a Nazi. He was a secular democrat, who seems to have genuinely believed that the indigenous peoples of the area in which the new Jewish state was to be established could be peacefully removed from their ancient homeland. And I haven’t seen any evidence whatsoever that Herzl envisaged any kind of eugenic breeding programme, like that dreamed of by Himmler and the rest of the Nazis.
But Herzl was a nationalist, and like the revolutionary nationalists of the various eastern European nations struggling to gain their independence from the great empires in the 19th century, he demanded a radical break with the existing political order. And like the Future Italian Fascists, he saw the state as creating the nation. Mussolini declared of the relationship between state and people
It is not the nation that guarantees the state, as according to the old nationalistic concept which served as the basis of the political theories of the national State of the nineteenth century. Rather the nation is created by the State, which gives to its people, unconscious of its own moral unity, a will and therefore an effective existence.
O’Sullivan, ibid, 173.
The similarity between Mussolini’s attitude to the state and that of Herzl’s, even if the latter did not articulate it in so many words, is due to the similarity between the Italian and Jewish peoples. Italy had been forged through the conquest and amalgamation if different states, whose peoples had, it was believed, different national characteristics and who spoke different dialects. In 1911 the Italian Nationalist, Corradini, complained that there was as yet no national Italian language and literature. The new Italian people had also to be created by the national Italian state. Similarly, it can be argued that there is no single Jewish people. The Ashkenazi Jews of eastern Europe spoke Yiddish, a language derived from the middle Franconian dialect of medieval German. Sephardic Jews, on the other hand, speak Ladino, a language descended from Old Spanish. And this is quite apart from the Jews, who naturally spoke the national languages of the countries in which they had lived for centuries. Zionism’s opponents were keen to point out that Jews weren’t a nation, but a religion. In Britain they stated very clearly that like their non-Jewish countrymen, they were Brits. It was simply the religion that was different, not nationality.
Herzl wasn’t a Fascist, and it would be an anachronistic distortion to say so. Nevertheless, he shared certain attitudes with them, derived in part from their similar positions as radical nationalists, seeking in part to mould their peoples into a higher national type through state action. He shared Hitler’s and Mussolini’s contempt for their own peoples, which in Herzl’s case is expressed through language that is shockingly anti-Semitic.
And perhaps this is why Jewish anti-Zionists suffer so much harassment and truly vile abuse from the Israeli lobby. They are diaspora Jews defying this extreme nationalism to support a state to which they have no desire to emigrate, and which to them is often a terrible distortion of what they see as the true nature of Judaism and Jewish people. It’s a sharp reproach to Herzl’s ‘Hebrews’: the despised ‘Y*ds’, who should, when they’re not cringing and kowtowing to their gentle masters, be desperate to join their ranks with all the fervour of the ultra-nationalist. But they aren’t, and worse: they’re talking back.
Mike over at Vox Political has several times commented on stories in the mainstream media, which suspiciously repeat some of the points he’s made in his articles. Now it’s the turn of the I’s columnist, Deborah Orr, to catch up with some of the points Mike’s been making about the grossly disproportionate influence the DUP now has, thanks to the Tories’ dependence on them for support in the Commons. And the way this has meant that effective devolved government won’t be coming back to Ulster any time soon.
The power sharing agreement between Sinn Fein and the DUP collapsed last year, and since then Ulster’s been governed from Westminster. After Eire voted by a two-thirds majority to legalise abortion, feminists – not necessarily female – have been calling for a similar referendum in the Six Counties, where abortion is also illegal. But the DUP and Arlene Foster are very firmly against abortion, and don’t want to give the people of Ulster the choice of whether it should be legal or not. And because May needs their support, she really isn’t going to risk alienating them by giving them the referendum many are calling for. Nor is she going to risk losing them by handing power back to Stormont. And so, thanks to Foster and her far right hordes, Ulsterwomen don’t get to vote on what can be a matter of life and death – not just for unborn children, but also for the mothers – and Ulster’s people are denied their right to self-government.
Orr is also one of the columnists, who’ve repeated the anti-Semitism smears against the Labour party and Ken Livingstone. Last week in her column she claimed that Leninspart had said that Hitler was a Zionist, and called him ‘a fool’. In fact, the depraved Marxist newt-fancier had said no such thing. He had said that Hitler briefly supported Zionism ‘before he went mad and killed the Jews’. This is actually solid, established fact. Under the Ha’avara Agreement, the Nazis did support sending German Jews to Israel with the Zionist organisations. As Mike’s pointed out over and again, you can find this on the website of the International Holocaust Museum in Israel.
Livingstone’s comment that Hitler killed the Jews in the Holocaust only after he went mad is wrong. Historians of the Third Reich have argued that the implications of Hitler’s anti-Semitism were clear from the outset, even if he only started murdering the Jews en masse from 1942 onwards. The Nazis made absolutely no secret of their murderous hatred of the Jews. Joachim C. Fest in his biography of Hitler records how the Nazis in Berlin even sang about having ‘the Jew lies bleeding at our feet’. This is quite apart from their real attacks on Jews, and their brutal persecution in Germany and Austria before the Final Solution.
However, Leninspart hasn’t been smeared as an anti-Semite because of his belief that Hitler hadn’t planned the Jews extermination from the start. He was smeared because he raised an awkward fact of history that the Israel lobby, and its enabler in the mainstream press and the political parties, can’t tolerate: that Hitler briefly allied with the Zionists, without being a Zionist himself.
And Orr couldn’t tolerate that fact herself. Or perhaps she was just too lazy and complacent to research the historical fact behind Livingstone’s statement. Either way, she was happy to repeat the Israel lobby’s contemptible lie.
Either way, her article shows that if you really want to know what’s going on, check Mike’s blog, and those of the other great left-wing bloggers and vloggers he follows and cites.
One of the tactics the Right uses to try to discredit socialism is to claim that the Nazis were socialist, based largely on their name and the selective use of quotes from Hitler and other members of the Nazi party.
This claim has been repeatedly attacked and refuted, but nevertheless continues to be made.
In the video below, Jason Unruhe of Maoist Rebel News also refutes the argument that the Nazis were socialists by looking at the economic evidence and the Nazis’ own policy of privatising state-owned industries and enterprises. He puts up several graphs showing how the stock market rose under the Nazis, as did the amount of money going to private industry. Indeed, this evidence shows that the Nazis were actually more successful at managing capitalism than the democratic, laissez-faire capitalist countries of Britain and the US.
Then there is the evidence from the Nazis’ own policy towards industry. He cites a paper by Germa Bel in the Economic History Review, entitled ‘Against the Mainstream: Nazi Privatisation in 1930s Germany’. In the abstract summarising the contents of the article, Bel states
In the mid-1930s, the Nazi regime transferred public ownership to the private sector. In doing so, they went against the mainstream trends in Western capitalistic countries, none of which systematically reprivatized firms during the 1930s.
He goes further, and makes the point that the term ‘privatisation’ actually comes from Nazi Germany. It’s the English form of the German term reprivatisierung.
I am very definitely not a Maoist, and have nothing but contempt for the Great Helmsman, whose Cultural Revolution led to the deaths of 60 million Chinese in the famines and repression that followed, and unleashed a wave of horrific vandalism against this vast, ancient countries traditional culture and its priceless antiquities and art treasures.
But Unruhe has clearly done his research, and is absolutely correct about the capitalist nature of German industry under the Third Reich. Robert A. Brady, in his The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism (London: Victor Gollancz 1937) also described and commented on the privatisation of industry under the Nazis.
He states that the organs set up by the Nazis to ‘coordinate’ the industrial and agricultural sectors were specifically forbidden from giving any advantages to the state sector rather than private industry, and that state industry was handed over to private industrialists.
The same picture holds for the relations between the National Economic Chamber and the organs of local government. As Frielinghaus has put it, “The new structure of economics recognises no differences between public and private economic activity….” Not only are representatives of the various local governments to be found on both the national and regional organs of the National Economic Chamber, but it is even true that local government is co-ordinated to the end that economic activities pursued by them shall enjoy no non-economic advantages over private enterprise.
The literature on this point is perfectly explicit, being of a nature with which the general American public is familiar through numerous utterances of business leaders on the “dangers of government competition with private enterprise.” Under pressure of this sort the Reich government and many of its subsidiary bodies have begun to dispose of their properties to private enterprise or to cease “competition” with private enterprise where no properties are at stake. Thus the Reich, the states and the communes have already disposed of much of the holdings in the iron and steel industry (notably the United Steel Works), coal and electric power. Similarly, support is being withdrawn for loans to individuals wishing to construct private dwellings wherever private enterprise can possibly make any money out the transactions. True, the government has been expanding its activities in some directions, but mainly where there is no talk of “competition with private enterprise”, and with an eye to providing business men with effective guarantees against losses. (Pp. 291-2).
There is a serious academic debate over how far Fascism – both in its Nazi and Italian versions – was genuinely anti-Socialist and anti-capitalist. Mussolini started off as a radical Socialist, before breaking with the socialists over Italian intervention in the First World War. He then moved further to the right, allying with Italian big business and agricultural elites to smash the socialist workers’ and peasants’ organisations, and setting up his own trade unions to control the Italian workforce in the interests of Italian capital.
Ditto the Nazis, who banned the reformist socialist SPD – the German equivalent of the Labour party – and the Communist party, and destroyed the German trade unions. Their role was then taken over by the Labour Front, which also acted to control the workforces in the interests of capital and management.
As for Hitler’s use of the term ‘socialist’ and the incorporation of the colour red, with its socialist overtones, into the Nazi flag, Hitler stated that this was to steal some of the attraction of the genuine socialist left. See the passage on this in Joachim C. Fest’s biography of the dictator. The incorporation of the word ‘socialist’ into the Nazi party’s name was highly controversial, and resisted by many of the party’s founders, as they were very definitely anti-socialist.
Brady himself comments on how the Nazis’ appropriation of the term ‘socialist’ is opportunistic, and disguises the real capitalist nature of the economy. He writes
the principle of “self-management” does appear to allow the business men to do pretty much what they wish. The cartels and market organisations remain, and have, in fact, been considerably strengthened in many cases. These are the most important organisations from the point of view of profits. The larger machinery is, as previously indicated, primarily designed to co-ordinate police on threats to the underlying tenets of the capitalistic system. The fact that the new system is called “socialism,” and that “capitalism” has been repudiated, does not detract from this generalisation in the slightest. The changes made to such as worry compilers of dictionaries and experts in etymology, not economists. For the realities of “capitalism” has been substituted the word “socialism”; for the realities of “socialism” has been substituted the word “Marxism”; “Marxism” has,, then, been completely repudiated. By reversing the word order one arrives at the truth, i.e. “socialism” in all its forms has been repudiated and capitalism has been raised into the seventh heaven of official esteem.
And the structure of Nazi Germany, where there were very close links between local and state government and industry, and where private industry and big business were celebrated and promoted, sounds extremely similar to the current corporatist political system in Britain and America. Here, political parties now favour big business over the public good, thanks to receiving donations and other aid, including the loan of personnel, from private firms, and the appointment of senior management and businessmen to positions within government. While at the same time pursuing a policy of deregulation and privatisation.
And this is without discussing the murderous Social Darwinism of the Reaganite/ Thatcherite parties, including Blairite New Labour, which has seen the welfare safety net gradually removed piecemeal, so that hundreds of thousands in Britain are now forced to use food banks to survive, and around 700 desperately poor, and particularly disabled people, have died in misery and starvation thanks to the regime of benefit sanctions and the use of pseudo-scientific procedures by ATOS and Maximus to declare seriously and terminally ill people ‘fit for work’.
The Blairites, Tories and their Lib Dem partners have set up a system of secret courts, in which, if it is considered ‘national security’ is at stake, individuals can be tried in secret, without knowing what the charges against them are, who their accuser is, or the evidence against them. Cameron and May, and indeed Tony Blair, followed Thatcher’s lead in trying to destroy the unions, and have put in place progressively stricter legislation against political protests.
Meanwhile, under the guise of combating ‘fake news’, internet companies like Google and Facebook are trying to drive left-wing, alternative news networks and sites off the Net.
The Code Pink and Green Party campaigner, Vijay Prashad, gave a speech in Washington, where he stated that Trump could be the last president of the US. If he doesn’t destroy the world, the political processes that are operating under him could result in him being the last democratically elected president, should the elites get tired of democracy.
Trump’s regime is certainly Fascistic, particularly in the support it receives from racist, White supremacist and openly Nazi organisations. If the business elites bankrolling the two parties do get tired of democracy – and due to their pernicious influence Harvard University has described the current American political system as an oligarchy, rather than democracy – then the transition to real Fascism will have been completed.
And where the Republicans go in America, the Tories over here in Britain duly follow.
Yesterday I put up a 25 minute video by the stand-up comedian, Richard Coughlan, debunking Holocaust denial. It’s a grim video, complete with images of the emaciated victims of the Shoah and the bodies packed into mass graves. It is, however, necessary with the Alt Right and the other Nazis trying to claw their way into power, and Coughlan did a very good job of it.
This video’s somewhat longer at half an hour. In it, Coughlan talks about how glad he is that his first video was so well received, and describes the immense amount of research he did to make it. He compares learning about the Holocaust to tugging at a loose piece of thread in your jumper – it looks tiny, but once you pull much more comes away. He says he spent many months preparing the video, to the point where it felt that he spent his whole life making it. He read extensively, the first couple of books were The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz. The latter book was the true memoirs of a British soldier, who escaped from a P.O.W. camp. The escapee heard about the death camps, and in order to investigate the truth of what he’d heard actually broke out into the most notorious – Auschwitz. His book was covered on British breakfast television about a year or so ago when it was first published. Not only did he break into Auschwitz, exchanging clothes with a Jewish prisoner, but he did it twice.
Coughlan also goes on to talk about how he got the transcripts of the trial between Deborah Lipstadt and David Irving. Irving’s an extreme right-wing historian, who wrote at least one book minimizing the scale of the atrocity. Lipstadt’s an American academic, who called Irving what he was: a Holocaust denier. So he sued her, and lost. Coughlan says that by that point, Irving was losing popularity and credibility. Even so, I can remember the immense controversy that was caused when the Oxford Union invited him to speak. I can also remember talking to a co-worker at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol, who had been in the public gallery watching the proceedings of the trial. He states that during the proceedings Irving himself was extremely confident and ebullient compared to some of the witnesses testifying against him. Not that it did Irving any good whatsoever. The trial exposed just how sloppy and fraudulent his own work on the Holocaust was. There were vital facts he didn’t mention, and he mistranslated some texts from the German. The trial resulted in Lipstadt being acquitted, and Irving’s reputation as an historian in tatters. I don’t think he’s ever recovered, and the last thing I heard the Austrians had sent him down in their country for Holocaust denial, which is a crime there and in Germany.
He also talks about one text he also read online. This was an encyclopedia of the death camps, also 45,000 or so of them. The book is divided into two volumes, each volume further divided into two parts. Each part is about 900 pages. And that’s just only some of the books he read.
He also talks about the monstrous horrors the Nazis perpetrated, such as the amount of ash generated by the cremation of the victims’ bodies, and the rooms full of the victims’ belongings and clothes. One room was full of children’s shoes. The victims’ were shaved, and their hair collected. In one camp, it was found stuffed into packs, so that there was a roomful of it, the total weighing many kilos. He wonders at the mindset of the guards, who could walk past these rooms full of their victims’ remains with complete indifference.
He also talks about how the people, who perpetrated this atrocity weren’t any different from us, citing once again the Stanford prison experiment. This was a psychological experiment, in which people were asked to play at being cops. After three days it was called off because these ordinary Americans were actually too brutal. Coughlan says that there have been three movies made of it. There was also a documentary about it shown on British television, which repeated the experiment. However, the documentary also added a few facts that I had never heard of. Such as when the experiment began, the volunteers playing the cops actually were too lenient, and those playing at the prisoners were more or less running amuck. So the experiment was stopped, and they were more or less encouraged by the experimenters to adopt a tougher approach.
And the psychology of some of high level officers responsible for implementing the Final Solution is bizarre. Joachim C. Fest in his book, The Face of the Third Reich, which is a collection of potted biographies of the leading Nazis, includes Hoess, the commandant at Auschwitz. Hoess is a vile character, who oversaw the mass murder of millions of innocents without any scruple. But he claimed he was no sadist. He said he was always at the back of the crowd, or tried to be away from it in his office, when the guards were beating or setting the dogs on the inmates. The Italian writer and chemist, Primo Levi, who had been imprisoned in the death camps, states that the guards ‘had our faces’. In other words, they were no different than we are. Coughlan says that Stamford Prison Experiment and the Holocaust shows how easy it is to turn ordinary people into monsters. And they do it gradually, drawing you into it little by little, until it all seems completely natural.
Coughlan highly recommends that his viewers take an interest in the subject, and do their own reading and research, ”cause it’s good to know stuff.’ Especially if you’re confronted by someone – and here he goes into a lengthy piece of invective to describe that kind of person- who tries to tell you that it didn’t happen, or that six million didn’t really die. At one point he mocks those, who try to argue for a lower number of deaths, such as two million, asking rhetorically what makes them think this will impress anyone. It’s still an horrific number.
He also says that studying the Holocaust teaches you so much, about politics, the media, how hate can be generated and used, and so on. He jokes about the old anti-Semitic remark about the media being full of Jews, who control it. Well, if that were to happen to him or people like him, he would definitely make sure his people would go into the media to stop it ever happening again. He also rebuts the objection to studying the Holocaust because there have been so many others. ‘No, not like the Holocaust’.
Actually, the unique nature of the Holocaust is a problem for historians and scholars of international law and politics. There are a number of different definitions of genocide. These can differ significantly, so that some cover certain forms of persecution to the exclusion of the others. The only thing they have in common is that they all cover the Holocaust. This means that some scholars advocate abandoning the quest to produce exact definitions of genocide in order to try to prevent the violent persecution of different groups at the societal level and prosecute those responsible as they really are and occur, unencumbered by too much ideological baggage.
What also comes out of this video is the sheer brazenness of the Holocaust deniers in seeking to refute what has been so extensively documented and witnessed. I’ve already mentioned how one judge in California ruled against one of the Nazi rags in his state that there was just so much supporting evidence for the Holocaust that it could not be reasonably regarded as anything other than a fact. Way back in the 1990s, when there were concerns about racist attacks in Bristol and the BNP nationally was trying to revive itself, one of the Black groups in the city held an evening, where the speaker was a Holocaust survivor, to hear his testimony about the reality of Nazism. They’re about, but obviously there are few of them because of old age, and the sheer, horrific efficiency with which the Nazis set about their extermination.
Coughlan describes how Holocaust deniers and Nazi apologists try to discredit descriptions and accounts of the death camps, by focusing on small discrepancies between them. Like in one account, it says there were 12 steps down to the gas chambers, but others say there are only eleven. They then move from this to the conclusion that this shows that people were making it all up. As if it followed from what had just been said. He also at one point describes how long it took for the victims to die when they were gassed with Zyklon B: 20 minutes. It’s another horrifying detail, and Coughlan appears quite naturally deeply moved by the fact.
This is a great video adding more information to his original piece. He also encourages others to learn as much about it as possible, so that they have all the information available to them to refute the lies of those who deny it ever happened, when they meet them, information which he couldn’t really put into the video here.
The election of Donald Trump in America and the Brexit vote in Britain last year has led to a massive growth in racial bigotry and intolerance in both countries. Mike has put up on his blog today a critique of the government’s statement that migration to the UK has gone down. He points out that this is hardly surprising, given that hate crime has risen by 41 per cent. This includes assaults, arson attacks and canine excrement thrown at doors or shoved through letter boxes. He wonders if any of the Tory and UKIP politicos – David Cameron, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson or Michael Gove are really worried about this. It is, after all, not them or their class that’s being attacked, but Johnny Foreigner. Mike reminds us that Jo Cox, a politician, was murdered in a racist attack by Thomas Mair, and notes that the Commons yesterday cheered a move to commemorate the anniversary of her murder with the Great Get-Together, an initiative intended to bring communities together.
But he also remarks that there’s a bit of hypocrisy in their support for it, saying that
It would be hypocritical for them to applaud a drop in net migration fuelled by the same hate that ended Mrs Cox’s life.
The fact that violence is the real reason net migration has fallen means this is not a success for the United Kingdom and Theresa May.
The Young Turks on Tuesday reported the anti-Semitic desecration of about 200 graves in a Jewish cemetery in University City near St. Louis. One elderly lady from the community states that she no longer feels safe after the attack. This is not the only Jewish community has been attacked. So far 54 Jewish community centres have been threatened this year, including 11 in the past week. Discussing the incident, the two presenters, Ben Mankiewicz and Ana Kasparian, make the point that this hate has partly been unleashed by Donald Trump and his rhetoric and campaigns against Muslims and other groups, with Kasparian mentioning the misogyny in his speeches. They make the point that it is no accident that Trump’s cabinet includes Breitbart’s Steve Bannon, an anti-Semite and White supremacist, and his supporters include Richard Spencer, the leader of the Alt-Right. Spencer was interviewed by the left-wing news host, David Pakman, on his show. While Spencer denies being a Nazi, he refused to denounce Adolf Hitler. He said instead that he wasn’t ‘going to play those games’. He did state that the Third Reich was a failure. Which is something, but not the same as condemning it or Nazism. They also note that in his speech for Holocaust Remembrance Day, Trump somehow forgot to mention the Jews. Despite his own denial that he is anti-Semitic, Trump was very reluctant to disavow the support of David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan. Mankiewicz and Kasparian make the point that the people listening to Trump’s hate, and who feel emboldened and encouraged by it, aren’t going to limit their own hatred and attacks merely to the groups he’s selected. So even though Trump has denied that he is anti-Semitic, pointing out that his son-in-law is Jewish, and his daughter converted to Judaism to marry him, Trump’s own racist campaigning is responsible for encouraging these attacks on Jewish communities.
Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, has drawn fire for her father’s opponents, as she has tweeted a statement condemning the attack, which points out, quite rightly, that America was founded on religious toleration, and that we need to defend each others houses of worship.
There have also been an attempt by one right-wing journalist to blame the Left for the attack. Wolf Blitzer claimed that the cemetery was desecrated by Progressives. This seems to me to be complete and utter bilge. The Left, by and large, is very anti-racist. This accusation just seems to me to come from that part of the Republican and Libertarian ideologies that think that the Nazis were Socialists, ’cause Hitler put ‘Socialism’ in their name. He did, but only to draw some supporters away from the parties of the Left, such as the Social Democrats, the German equivalent of the Labour party, by making it appear that they were socialists. See the appropriate page in Joachim C. Fest’s biography of the nauseating little man, Hitler. And Hitler had to overcome the resistance of the other, founding members of the Nazi party, who bitterly despised Socialism and very definitely did not want their party to be associated with it. It also seems to me that the smear also owes something to continuing attempts to attack the BDS campaign against the Israeli occupation of Palestine. This is an anti-racist campaign, supported by very many Jews as well as gentiles. But the Zionist lobby have always responded to criticism of Israeli imperialism and racism by smearing their opponents as anti-Semites. Many progressives as doubtless involved in the BDS movement as part of their general campaign against all forms of racism. But for the Israel lobby and their journalistic supporters, the progressives involved in the BDS campaign and similar movements must be anti-Semites. And from their it’s only a short leap to claiming that Progressives must somehow be responsible for this and similar attacks.
More positively, a Muslim organisation has come forward and raised money for the cemetery’s repair. Linda Sarsour, a Muslim activist, and one of the four principal organisers of the Women’s March on Washington, set up a website to raise the money. She wanted to get $20,000. Instead she raised $71,000. This is more than is needed for the cemetery in St. Louis, so the money will also be used to help other Jewish communities that have suffered attacks. The website states that it was set up to send a clear message from the Muslim and Jewish communities against such intolerance.
The programme’s hosts, Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian state that this shows the best of America, and that people are coming together to defend other victims of intolerance, whether it is over skin colour or religion. Kasparian states that she feels that there isn’t enough coverage of movements and events like this, as quite often the focus is dominated by the negative things now happening. But this makes her feel more positive and hopeful.
I don’t think this is the only incident in which the members of one religion have reached out to aid those from others, which are in need. There have been cases like it in this country, one of the most recent examples being the decision of some Asian restaurants and takeaways in Britain to stay open on Christmas Day to supply meals for the homeless. The Get-Together campaign cheered in the Commons yesterday is only the latest and most prominent of these events and movements. And there will undoubtedly be more of them, as more people come together to tackle the intolerance and Fascism unleashed by Trump and Brexit.
Mike over at Vox Political has also put up a very important piece by the economist, Simon Wren-Lewis, on the terrible racism and lies behind the Brexit campaign. He notes that not only has the Brexit campaign lied massively, the fact that their lies have been repeatedly revealed as lies does not seem to have stopped them or their campaign. Despite being repeatedly told the truth, the supporters of Brexit continue to believe that migrants are all a strain on the economy and the NHS. He discusses the way the centre right here and in the US are being taken over by extremist, populist politicians – meaning the Republicans and Trump across the Pond, and BoJo, Gove, Patel and the Conservatives over here, as well as the murder of Jo Cox, a politician, who stood against it. He also makes the point that this racism could become even more vicious and extreme if Britain does leave the EU, and the trade deals that the Brexiters have promised don’t materialise. He makes the point that Britain doesn’t have any immunity from the rise of such pernicious racism, and it cannot be allowed to pass.
Mike has illustrated this piece with a picture of Enoch Powell, whose infamous ‘rivers of blood speech’ is still referred to as a telling prediction of the truth by right-wingers like Nigel Farage. Mike’s absolute right here. The NF used to sell a Union Jack badges. Around the edge of them was written the slogan ‘Enoch was right’. In fairness to Powell, before he completely lost his sense politically, he had done much that was admirable. He was a member of CND, and in 1959 made a speech attacking the British abuse of Mau-Mau prisoners at the Hola Camp in Kenya. This is included in The Penguin Book of Twentieth Century Protest, edited by Brian MacArthur, pp. 254-6. He wasn’t personally racist, and could speak Urdu. Nevertheless, his speech, and his absolute opposition to non-White immigration, gave an immense filip to the racist right and other Conservative opponents of immigration like the right-wing journalist, Simon Heffer.
The prof’s piece is also interesting for some of his remarks of his commenters. Most seem to be Brexiters absolutely outraged that anybody could decently oppose their plans for Britain. But one comment especially caught my eye because of what it said about Maggie’s favourite economist, von Hayek.
The commenter quoted the ideologue of neoliberalism from a piece he wrote to one of the papers supporting Maggie Thatcher’s anti-immigration stance in 1979. Hayek claimed that respectable society in Austria wasn’t anti-Semitic, and deplored attacks on Jews, before the First World War. It was only when ‘unassimilable’ Jewish immigrants flooded into Austria after the First World War that attitudes towards them changed. The commenter states that this was also Thatcher’s attitude, and has been the attitude of people like the Brexiters ever since.
The commenter’s right, but I found von Hayek’s claims that there was little anti-Semitism in Austria before World War I unconvincing. Hitler claimed in Mein Kampf that he only became an anti-Semite after he saw a Jew dressed in a kaftan while wandering through the backstreets of Vienna. This was when Hitler was a tramp, and his biographer, Joachim C. Fest, has made the point that the Jew he saw was probably a refugee displaced from the eastern provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which stretched as far as Ukraine, by the pogroms which broke out in the late 19th century. Many of the ethnic German schoolchildren and younger generation in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late 19th century were Pan-Germans, wishing to unite with the Wilhelmine Empire further north, and with a racist hatred of Slavs and Jews. Discussing his experience of late 19th century Vienna, Hitler describes his admiration for Karl von Lugerer, the mayor of Vienna and leader of an anti-Semitic party. Apart from von Lugerer’s anti-Semitism, Hitler also admired his mastery of propaganda. Nevertheless, anti-Semitism increased in Austria considerably during the Council and Communist Revolutions that broke out there, as in Germany, just after the First World War. These were initially popular, but were increasingly resented after a series of church burnings. Many of the Communist battalions responsible were led by Jews, and although the Communists in the Soviet Union and elsewhere were militant atheists, who attacked and persecuted all religions, this was particularly blamed on the Jews. Gentile Austrians also felt themselves threatened by Jewish success in business, especially in banking.
Despite von Hayek’s comments, the rise of anti-Semitism in Austria was not simply a result of the sudden influx of ‘unassimilable immigrants’. It was partly due to the strained ethnic tensions caused by rising nationalism amongst the various peoples of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and a reaction to the anti-religious activities of committed Communists during the 1919 revolutions. Nevertheless, von Hayek’s comments supported Thatcher’s anti-immigration policy, just as fears of unassimilable immigrants now fuel the Brexit campaign.
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