Petition Against Holocaust Denial Being Considered Protected Free Speech on Campus

I got this email from the Hope Not Hate anti-racism, anti-religious extremism organisation. They’re concerned that the government’s legislation to protect free speech on campus will include Holocaust denial, and are petitioning the government to stop it. The email runs

‘The government is proposing a new law which they say will protect free speech on University campuses. But there’s a problem. Last night, the Universities Minister confirmed that the law will protect Holocaust deniers. In effect, it will pressure Universities to provide platforms to people who lie about the Holocaust being a historical fact.

It’s wrong and we can’t allow this to go ahead. We’ve launched a petition to pressure the government. Can you add your name?

Sign the petition!

In her media interview, Universities Minister Michelle Donelan essentially argued we must “protect and promote” the free speech of Holocaust deniers. That shows up the fundamental issue with the Government’s new so-called free-speech bill.

Pressuring universities to platform the views of Holocaust deniers would be completely unacceptable. The Holocaust is a historical fact. Those who deny that are seeking to spread hate.

The point of universities is to expand people’s knowledge. That includes hearing opinions they disagree with. However, whether the Holocaust happened is not up for debate. It is a historical fact. Ensuring people who lie about the Holocaust are given a platform is wrong.

There will be people in Government who will be nervous about this. If we can make enough noise about it, we might be able to get them to backtrack. Add your name to our petition, then share it on social media.

Thanks,

–Liron, Nick, Roxy and the HOPE not hate campaigns team’

Hope Not Hate is, unfortunately, connected to the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, which is one of the organisations that is pushing the anti-Semitism smears against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters. This is because the CAA isn’t against anti-Semitism so much as anti-Zionism, which it conflates with anti-Semitism in order to protect Israel from criticism for its vile persecution of the Palestinians.

However, you don’t have to be any kind of fan of the CAA to be concerned about the inclusion of Holocaust denial as ‘protected free speech’. It is historical fact, as an American judge ruled in California in the 1970s. The good law man’s decision was on a case brought by a Holocaust survivor against the neo-Nazi rag, National Vanguard. The magazine had run a competition with a substantial cash reward for an essay that would prove the reality of the Holocaust. The survivor wrote about his experiences in the camps and included the Nazi documentation and other details. National Vanguard refused to pay up, he sued and the judge found in his favour, ruling that there was so much evidence supporting the reality of the Holocaust that it couldn’t be credibly denied. The only people who wish to deny it occurred are Nazis, who’d like to repeat it if they could. Holocaust denial is already a crime in several European countries, like Germany and Austria. The petition doesn’t criminalise it, but it would stop it being promoted on campus. Holocaust deniers desperately seek a veneer of academic respectability, which is why they give their noxious journals names like ‘Historical Review’ or some such. Being allowed onto to campus to present their views gives them that respectability, which is why there was so much concern in the 1980s/90s when the historian and Holocaust denier David Irving was allowed to speak at the Oxford Union. I have therefore signed this petition, and am posting it here for anyone else to do so as well.

Twitter Peeps Educate Universities Minister About What Decolonising the Curriculum Really Means

It’s not about censoring history but about including the ignored or omitted perspectives of the colonised peoples themselves.

Zelo Street put up a brilliant piece on Sunday refuting nonsense printed in the Torygraph by their reporter Christopher Hope. Hope had been talking to the universities minister, Michelle Donelan, who was extremely concerned about the ‘culture war’ being waged in the universities. She was afraid that those unis, who were decolonising their curricula were engaged in a massive piece of historical censorship. Like the former Soviet Union, they were removing those incidents that were not regarded as stains. This greatly concerned her as a former history student who was also a vehement champion of preserving our history.

This provoked a number of academics and/or students, whose universities were involved in this restructuring of their history curricula, to put her right. They informed her that this wasn’t about removing awkward parts of British colonial history, but adding to it by including the perspectives of the subject peoples we ruled and all-too frequently abused and exploited.

Alex Stevens from the University of Kent put this up:

“Dear [Michelle Donelan] ‘Adding stuff in to enrich our understanding’ is *exactly* what decolonising the curriculum is doing at my university”.

Edward Anderson of Northumbria University also agreed, posting the following

“When we decolonise curricula, it’s almost always ADDING more stuff in: scholarship & perspectives from the Global South, source material of the colonised not just coloniser, etc. [Michelle Donelan] must know this, but chooses to peddle a straw man, fictitious idea of what uni’s do”.

Coventry University’s Andrew Jowett backed this up with his remark

“She has no idea what she’s talking about. It’s not about ‘taking things out’ of the curriculum, it’s about contextualising what is taught and ensuring other cultures and indigenous peoples are represented in the curriculum. Maybe she should attend a webinar on it”. 

And then came Dr. Priyamvada Gopal, who teaches colonial literature at Cambridge

 “Let’s break this down for [Michelle Donelan]. When we ‘decolonise’, we put the ‘offensive’ bits BACK IN. To give a random example, we tell [the] story of Winston Churchill not just as unimpeachable war hero–but as a man of empire & race science. We don’t pander to white snowflakery”.

Gopal was the centre of controversy last summer in the Black Lives Matter protests, when she was falsely accused of hating Whites because she’d put up a tweet ‘White don’t matter as White lives’, which I think she intended to mean that White lives have no more or less intrinsic value than anyone else’s. Their value lay simply in being human lives. This was in response to an enraged White chap flying over a local football match on a plane towing the banner ‘White Lives Matter’. I think another of Gopal’s tweets had been altered and the fake version reproduced by the right-wing press to present Gopal as wishing for a real White genocide. Gopal sued for libel, and I believe won.

The comments about Churchill were provoked by the denunciation s of the Great Man at a conference on his legal at Churchill College, Cambridge. Churchill was denounced by some of the speakers as responsible for the horrific Bengal famine, which killed 3-6 million Indians, and a White supremacist. Kehinde Andrews, a prominent Black racial activist, was present at this event, who is notorious for claiming that the British Empire was worse than the Nazis.

This provoked a reaction from offended Tories, like Nicholas Soames, who declared that if they were going to denounce the British wartime PM, then they shouldn’t use his money. The right-wing historian of Africa and the British Empire, Andrew Roberts, also wasn’t impressed. He is the co-author of a paper, published by the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange, defending Churchill. But I think that the allegations against Churchill are absolutely correct. He was an imperialist and White supremacist. It was the dominant ideology of the time and obviously very strong in the British and colonial ruling class. He was also responsible for the Bengal famine through the sequestration of their grain in order to feed British troops in Europe. The result was mass starvation in India, while the emergency requiring its use never came. Nevertheless, Churchill refused to release it to where it was really needed, blaming the Indians themselves for their plight. It was all their fault for having too many children. His attitude shocked many senior British officers and colonial administrators, who compared him to the Nazis.

Zelo Street described Donelan’s interview and her views as

Once again, we have a Government minister apparently not in command of their brief, with their ignorance amplified by a shameless propagandist for the sole purpose of riling up his paper’s base and demonising purveyors of inconvenient thought.

He concludes that, as for her reference to the Soviet Union, that is exactly where her government is taking us, but you won’t read it in the papers. Quite. We have a very authoritarian government, which really is determined to censor history. And the press are right behind her.

This looks like an attempt by a failing government to whip up some popularity by playing the race card. The approved Tory view of the British Empire as essentially benevolent is under attack from evil lefties, and so must be defended at all costs. Just as Britain is being invaded by all those evil refugees crossing the Channel in dinghies.

Meanwhile, people continue to die from the Coronavirus, and the government is determined to push through the welfare cuts which Mike has documented as killing the poor, the disabled and the unemployed.

But we mustn’t look there. They’re just welfare scroungers. We must be worried about the attack on our imperial history and great leaders like Winston Churchill. Even when those attacks are historically accurate.

See: Zelo Street: Decolonising Drivel Deceives No-One (zelo-street.blogspot.com)