Tony Greenstein is a Jewish British critic of Zionism and the state of Israel’s decade’s long ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and its grotesque propaganda campaigns to stifle any criticism, no matter how mild. Tony’s put up an excellent piece about the furore over Diane Abbott’s letter to the Absurder and her suspension from the Labour party. Tony makes an excellent case that the real reason for Abbott’s suspension and the howls and denunciations against her, it hasn’t been because she’s an anti-Semite. One of the groups pushing for her expulsion from the party is the Community Security Trust, which has very deep links to Mossad and has even invited Cruella Braverman to one of its dinners. It also claims to be in the spirit of the heroic 43 and 62 Groups of Jewish ex-servicemen who took the battle to Mosley’s fascists when they tried to come back after the War. While the CST wants to bask in their reflected glory, it has done nothing to physically challenge real fascists on Britain’s streets. What many Brits will find equally shocking is the revelation that the 43 and 62 groups weren’t brought down by their Nazi enemies, but by a concerted campaign by the cops. Shocking, but unfortunately not surprising. Lobster published an article a few years ago describing how the cops frequently had sympathies with Mosley’s gang, and would refuse to arrest them. Even when they were deliberately performing openly provocative acts like publicly making the toast ‘PJ’, which stood for ‘Perish the Jews’. I want to give a fuller treatment of Tony’s article tomorrow.
But Tony has also written a book about the noxious links between Zionism and the Holocaust. He’s blogged about these links again and again, showing his encyclopaedic knowledge of this very carefully concealed part of Zionist history. The book’s Zionism During the Holocaust: the Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State and Nation. The review of it on Amazon runs:
‘”Tony Greenstein offers a comprehensive and incisive analysis of the indissoluble nexus between anti-Semitism and Zionism. This connection is exposed in its ugliest form during the Holocaust. You can trust a courageous and committed fighter against anti-Semitism, such as Tony, to guide us through this particular dark moment when Zionism and antiSemitism interacted in Europe’s darkest hour to educate us about its historical manifestations and implications for our time.”
Ilan Pappe, Professor of Middle East History, Exeter University
“This book is essential reading. Understanding the politics of the thirties and forties is essential if we are to ensure the horrors of World War Two never happen again. Tony Greenstein’s detailed reference to original sources leads to conclusions that cannot be ignored.”
Ken Loach, socialist film maker
“In this timely scholarly polemic Tony Greenstein authoritatively demystifies Zionism, convincingly depicting its long obscured and misunderstood connections with anti-Semitism, especially during its horrifying climax in the Holocaust. Essential reading for anyone that wants to understand Israel as a state built upon the premise of Jewish supremacy and sustained by a cruel apartheid regime to deny basic rights to the Palestinian people in their own country.”
Richard Falk, Professor of International Law Emeritus, Princeton University and Chair of Global Law, Queen Mary University London
“The present book is about the entire history of this relationship between Zionism and anti-Semitism. Tony’s encyclopaedic familiarity with the dispersed relevant publications and his achievement in arranging the vast material in a coherent account are second to none.”
“This is a work of remarkable historical scholarship and analysis, its subject matter is as telling and relevant today as it ever was.”
Dr Derek Summerfield, Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer King’s College, University of London
“Greenstein’s book, meticulously researched and liberally peppered with quotations from original sources, will make uncomfortable reading for anyone who feels a sneaking sympathy for Zionism”.
Dr. Susan Blackwell, Dept of Languages, Literature and Communication, University of Utrecht
“The historical relationship of Zionism with antisemitic and racist regimes and movements has been an area long neglected by normative research, influenced as it is by Zionist assumptions; this is why Tony Greenstein’s book is so crucial, further developing the pioneering work by Lenni Brenner. Greenstein work is epic in scope, shedding light on dark corners, covering an immense historical, geographic, political and discursive arena; It provides an updated, comprehensive account and evaluation of Zionism’s complex interrelation with, as well as its uses and abuses of the Holocaust.”
Professor Haim Bresheeth, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
“In this substantial, detailed and scrupulously referenced account, the history of Zionist policies and practices before, during and after the Nazi Holocaust is examined in all its awfulness. Greenstein will no doubt be vilified by predictable opponents, but he offers a powerful alternative to the way most people would think about Zionism, given its current status as beyond criticism, on pain of accusations of anti-Semitism.”
Patrick Williams, Emeritus Professor, Nottingham Trent University’
You won’t be surprised that Tony’s also been smeared as an anti-Semite and expelled from the Labour party. I also doubt you’ll be surprised by the fact that one of the figures spitting hate at Abbott is Steven Pollard, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, who believes Islam is a threat to western civilisation, along with socialism and the trade unions. He and his wretched rag were among the chief figures behind the accusations of anti-Semitism against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters.
This isn’t about anti-Semitism, nor anti-racism. Starmer and his faction within the Labour party aren’t remotely concerned with racism when it’s directed against Blacks, Asians and Muslims. In fact the Labour right have been credibly accused of doing it themselves. Abbott was, I believe, one of the Black MPs and activists they bullied.
This is about purging the left and critics of Israel under the false pretext of fighting anti-Semitism.
This is going to be controversial, and ideally I really wouldn’t reblog a video from this source. Correct, Not Political are what can only be described as a far right outfit. They’re anti-socialist, anti-Communist, anti-trades union, anti-environmentalist and anti-lockdown. They are genuine homophobes who disrupt drag queen story time because of this, rather than the fear that such events are being used to indoctrinate children into queer theory. Although they believe that as well. They hold weird conspiracy theories about the World Economic Forum, Freemasons and Jews and admire Oswald Mosley as if he was some kind of champion of free speech and not the absolute opposite. But this time I think they’re right.
It’s of a phone call made by their man Jim Boobeh to a school, which has called in an outside group to teach their autistic children anti-racism. This looks perfectly reasonable and good at first glance, but looking through the documents the video shows it seems BASE CC, the organisation involved, is teaching children Critical Race Theory. This is divisive, it has racialised the school children who have been exposed to it, and is based in a postmodern revision of Marxism. James Lindsay, who’s one of Peter Boghossian’s group with Helen Pluckrose, has made a number of videos and blog posts tearing this apart. He calls it ‘Race Marxism’, and that’s the title of his new book about it. Lindsay calls himself a liberal, but I think he’s very definitely a man of the right. Pluckrose is a woman of the left, and she also writes pieces for his New Discourses site. Critical Race Theory is not a continuation of Martin Luther King’s doctrine of colour blindness. It explicitly holds that all White people are racist, and one of its founders was an opponent of desegregation in schools. This is clear through his paper included in an anthology of writing on Critical Race Theory edited by one of its founders, Kimberle Crenshaw. Even though it comes from the left, I consider it just as Fascistic as the White supremacist stuff it opposes. I am aware that the Republicans in America are weaponising it against the left, and am informed by one of the great commenters here that one local Republican group lied about it being taught in the local school. Nevertheless, I firmly believe that it is a real attack on genuinely liberal values and proper anti-racism. It is political indoctrination and should not be be taught in schools, except possibly as a topic for discussion and free criticism at sixth form level.
I hope this isn’t too controversial a post, because I know many of the great commenters here are strong supporters of trans rights. But I hope that whatever our differences, we can agree on this issue: the fear going around the trans community that there is a holocaust either underway or about to come is a toxic myth that may have played a role in the tragic shooting of six people at a Presbyterian school in America on Monday. Audrey Hale, the perpetrator, was a trans-identified woman, who believed she was a transman. She walked into the school with an assault rifle and proceeded to shoot the children and staff before she was shot in the head by the cops. It’s not really known what her motives were, and she is unusual in that while I’ve heard and seen YouTube footage of violence by transwomen, transmen have not, as far as I know, been personally violent. Hale did, however, leave a manifesto, the contents of which have not been disclosed to the public. Right-wing American commenters have claimed that the authorities won’t because they don’t fit the narrative of transpeople being an oppressed minority.
Several YouTubers and other commenters on the Net have made the point that part of the cause of the tragedy lies in the very militant, violent rhetoric among trans militants. I am not going to deny that there is prejudice against transpeople, but there is a real culture of violence amongst the trans militants. Gender critical feminists like Maria MacLachlan, who was herself assaulted by an angry transwoman, have posted a number of videos showing the very aggressive counter demonstrations by trans activists. There is also footage on YouTube of feminist campaigners being beaten to the ground by trans activists in Spain. There is also a feminist site on the Net which regularly posts examples of such violence. Kelly-Jay Keen, a leading trans activist, was mobbed and feared for her life when she spoke in Auckland, New Zealand. Maria MacLachlan has posted video footage of the various aggressive militant trans who greeted her when she spoke in Bristol. The militants were also supported by Antifa, dressed in black bloc, and Bristol Anarchist Federation. They tried to storm the police cordon around the demonstration. Wheeen n she spoke in Bristol the trans militants were supported by Antifa, dressed in black bloc, and Bristol Anarchist Federation. There were similar scenes when she spoke in Brighton, when the counterprotesters let off smoke bombs and one of them, a young guy, was dragged off because Brighton’s finest had found 12 knives in his bag. Similar, highly aggressive displays have been staged by trans rights protesters over the other side of the Pond. In one such instance, a young woman speaking at university was ushered by a cop into a cupboard to hide her from the angry mob chasing her.
And trans militant rhetoric is similarly violent. There are any number of posts on Twitter where the activists display guns with slogans like ‘I Kill TERFs’. Nicola Sturgeon caught flak the other week because, when she was trying to pass the Gender Recognition Bill in Scotland, she stood in front of a flag saying ‘Behead TERFS’ or some such. In their discussion of the recent shooting, the Lotus Eaters have used as their thumbnail a picture of someone standing next to a sign saying ‘Trans Right… Or Else’ with multiple pictures of AK47s.
Many trans activists seem to sincerely believe that gender critical feminists and their supporters are real fascists. This is nonsense, which MacLachlan has also disposed of in another of her videos. My own experience of simply reading their blogs and watching their videos is that far from being any kind of allies of Stormfront and the rest of the jackbooted horrors, real ‘TERFs’ tend instead to be respectable, middle-aged ladies, and that they largely come from the political left. That’s the direction MacLachlan comes from, and KJK started out as a left-wing socialist before she got censured from her Labour feminist group simply for asking why transwomen were women. They seem to be largely women, who marched against real fascism in the shape of the BNP, NF and apartheid South Africa. And they have not, to my certain knowledge, posted anything demanding the murder, let alone the mass murder, of trans people. Not MacLachlan, not the feminists at Redux, not gender critical gays like Clive Simpson, Dennis Kavanagh or the EDIjester, Barry Wall. Not even J.K. Rowling, for whom I have a fair degree of contempt because of her support for the libellous accusations that Mike was an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier, simply because he supported Jeremy Corbyn.
Part of the problem is, I believe, the myth of the trans holocaust. There have been trans days of remembrance held in Britain and Scotland, but the numbers of trans people killed over here has been low. In Scotland they were about three, and no-one was killed last year. This should obviously be a source of pride. The figures are higher in America, but as a section of the population they’re still low. The stats the activists use to show that there is a trans holocaust underway come from Latin America. These are desperately poor countries, and some of them, like Brazil, have horrifically high murder rates anyway. And it’s unclear whether the murdered transpeople were killed because they were trans, or because they were sex workers.
But despite the lack of death camps or paramilitary mobs going from house to house looking for trans people, as happened to the Jews during the real Holocaust, this myth is spreading. The right-wing, anti-trans YouTuber, Arielle Scarcella, who is herself a lesbian, put up a piece in which she reported many trans people are joining the Pink Pistols. This is a network of gun clubs set up by the gay community in America and Canada to teach gay men and women how to shoot in order to defend themselves. I sympathise with the reason for them. There has been a violent hatred of gays in America and Britain, and in a culture like America which supports gun ownership as the citizen’s right to defend him- or herself, it’s natural that gays should also want to own them for their defence. Just like the Black Panthers decided that if the White man had guns, they wanted theirs too. But it means we’ve entered a very dangerous climate where scared, volatile people, afraid of Nazi-style persecution, are taking up arms amid angry rhetoric that calls for and legitimises the killing of their opponents. One internet commenter has even said that, given the circumstances, the shooting was entirely predictable.
This is where I hope genuinely liberal people, people concerned about the deteriorating state of social discourse over this matter can help, and particularly academics. Because we’ve been here before, folks, but from the other political extreme. I have a strong interest in folklore, and was for a time a member of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research. This was set up by academic folklorists to investigate contemporary urban folklore. You know, vanishing hitch-hikers, UFOs, and other weirdness. But this was in the 1990s when the was another spike in American and western paranoia. It was when anyone and seemingly almost everyone with a computer was producing small press magazines or pamphlets ranting about THEM. President George Bush Senior sparked some of it after the Gulf War by talking about his New Order, which harked back to the Nazis’ rhetoric about their new European order, and even further back to the 18th century and the Illuminati and the words printed on dollar bills: Novo Ordo Saecularum – ‘New World Order’. Looking for an underlying explanation for the Gulf War, people found it in the old conspiracy theories about Satanist freemasons. And there were real fears of a resurgence of the militant extreme right following the rise of the Militia movement and Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing. Morris Dees, one of the major figures in the Southern Poverty Law Centre, published a book about their threat and links to the wider American Nazi movement. It’s been widely criticised, not least because one of the captains of one of the militias was actually Black. There were calls from someone who styled herself a militia commander for them to march on Washington DC. But the other militia members smelt an agent provocateur, and wisely kept to running around training in the hills.
The Society also covered some of the weird conspiracy theories going around America. The American far right at that time hadn’t taken in the fact that real, existing state communism in eastern Europe had collapsed. There was a paranoid fringe that believed it was all a ruse. Thus there were bonkers theories that held that the Russians had established secret bases in Canada and Mexico, from which the tanks would roll into America at the given signal. And God-fearing American Christians believed that they would be targeted for extermination under the One World Satanic state. There was a rumour going around Christians in Pennsylvania that the coloured dots on the state’s road signs indicated the sites of the concentration camps in which they were to be interned. It was all false. The dots were part of a code telling state highway workers when the signs had last been painted, so that they knew when they needed another coat. It had nothing to do with concentration camps for anyone.
And then, with 9/11 came the stories about the destruction of the Twin Towers, and the rise of Alex Jones. Jones has become infamous for his wild conspiracy theories. In one of them he claimed that Barack Obama was going to use an environmental emergency to force Americans into refugee camps and seize power to become an eco-communist dictator. And there were other weird attacks on the former president, in which it was claimed that he was secret atheist/Muslim/Communist/Nazi filled with a hatred of White America and planning its extinction. In fact, Obama was in many ways a bog-standard conventional American politician. He saw himself, as he’s said recently, as a moderate Republican. And there’s a very strong continuity between his bombing of Libya and continuation of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, with Neo-Con foreign policy.
Well, Obama’s been and gone. he was succeeded by Trump, who was succeeded by Biden. There are no concentration camps for anyone. But the ideas of a trans holocaust are merely an extreme left-wing version of the right-wing American fears about a holocaust of Whites and Christians. And it needs people to point this out. During the ’90s and after there were a number of academic books published about the paranoid fringe in America, sometimes as part of wider examinations of conspiracy theories like the infamous Jewish banking myth that inspired Hitler and the Nazis. This new myth of the trans holocaust needs putting in the same context. The fact that it comes from the left, and a minority group that sees itself as vicious marginalised and oppressed, should make no difference. It’s a myth, a dangerous myth, that does seem to be inspiring militant trans activists to violence. And the internet platforms should be helping as well. Nobody should be allowed to post material genuinely calling for the murder of others. It should be immediately struck down. Protests that it’s all a joke should not be tolerated. Since the rise of political correctness in the 1980s people find racist jokes genuinely distasteful. I cannot imagine decent people finding anything funny in jokes about killing Blacks and Jews. And the so-called jokes about killing TERFS shouldn’t be tolerated either. As for masked individuals turning up in black bloc threatening violence, that could be solved by invoking the legislation passed in the 1930s that outlawed paramilitary uniforms. It was aimed at Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. I think it may have become a dead-letter because of the paramilitary violence in Ulster. But there’s a strong case for enforcing it over here.
We have to fight the poisonous myths and paranoia in the militant trans community.
Before someone else with serious mental issues and anger against society because they fear they’re going to be put into a concentration camp because of their gender identity goes on another killing spree.
I posted a video by Owen Jones taking apart the accusation that the Nazis were socialist a few days ago. Despite his claims to be one, Hitler stood for privatisation and cuts to the welfare state as well as racism and Social Darwinism, policies that are fundamental opposed to socialism. Oswald Mosley, like Hitler, also called himself a socialist despite not believing in socialist policies. He explains why he called his ideology ‘European Socialism in his answer to ‘Question 276: What is European “Socialism”? ‘in his book, Mosley: Right or Wrong? Mosley states
‘Any man has a right to call himself a socialist if he works for motives of public service rather than far private gain. That is why we used this phrase. Because our people have certainly proved that they work selflessly for the public good, and it is this spirit which is needed for the building of a new European system. But I am not going to use it in future because it has led to misunderstanding. British people in general think that socialism means the nationalization or bureaucratic control of industry, that it means the Labour party policy which was a concept of the last century. But Union Movement has never stood for anything of this kind. In practice, it has proved a mistake to use a phrase that can be misrepresented, and that is why I ceased to use it. I now use instead the term “European Service”.
Hitler took much of his ideology from right-wing authors like Moeller van den Bruck, who considered themselves revolutionary conservatives. One of these wrote a book called ‘The Worker’. They also called for what they considered to be socialism, but they also made it clear that by this they meant an ideology that encouraged individuals to work for the good of society as a whole, but did not mean the nationalisation of industry.
As for the question whether fascism is of the left or right, Mosley answered that in reply to ‘Question 285. Do you consider yourself to be of the Right or Left in politics?’ in his wretched book.
‘Neither. If any such description could be applied to us it would rather be the “hard centre”, the opposite to the present soft core. But I never use these terms in relation to our thinking, because they mean nothing to us. Our policy cuts clean across the “right” and “left” of the old world. These expressions are nonsensical when applied to us. In thought, we are no more Conservative than we are Socialist or Liberal. Our thinking is a creation of the modern age, though it has deeper roots in the European past than that of the old parties. I do not speak of our people as “right” or “left” but given them their true name: the vital forces of Europe.’
Fascism considers itself to be a third political ideology, neither left nor right, because it accepts private industry to subordinates it to state control. Thus, when the German neo-Nazis infiltrated one of the mainstream European parties in the ’80s, it wasn’t the left-wing SDP or the conservative Christian Democrats, but the liberal Freie Demokraten.
So much for Peter Hitchens’ idea that the Nazis were left-wing socialists.
David Rosenberg, Battle for the East End: Jewish Responses to Fascism in the 1930s (Five Leaves Publishing 2011).
Here’s something to cleanse the palate after the discussion of fascism and the Tufton Street gangs of free trade looters. While looking for books on fascism on Google, I found this book by David Rosenberg. I’ve got a feeling he may be the same David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialist Group, who was one of the advisors to Jeremy Corbyn and is The Wrong Kind Of Jew. He’s very firmly in the tradition of the Jewish Bund, the mass Jewish socialist party of Poland and Russia. As well as opposed to capitalist exploitation, they were also anti-Zionist and wanted Jews instead to remain in their home countries to live as free people with the h same rights and privileges as their gentile fellow-countrymen. Their anthems are on YouTube, and I’ve put up a number of them here.
The blurb for the book on Amazon runs
‘During the 1930s, Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts intensified their campaign against the Jewish community, particularly in London’s East End. As that campaign became more overtly antisemitic, and more physically intimidating, Jewish groups debated how to deal with the fascist threat, ultimately building their own defence organisations and forging alliances with others. The simmering tensions in East London culminated in the Battle of Cable Street, when more than 100,000 people, mainly from the local Jewish and Irish communities, prevented Mosley’s troops marching through the East End.’
Tony Greenstein, another Jewish critic of Israel, has also written a book about the fight against Mosley thugs in Brighton and the south coast. Unfortunately, despite being a self-respecting Jew who was obviously proud of his townsfolk’s resistance to the BUF, he was also smeared as an anti-Semite and thrown out by the Blairites. One of the points he makes is that the Jewish people who fought Mosley with the Irish, trade unions and Commies did so on their own initiative. The Board of Deputies told them instead to stay indoors and not fight back. Which is something to think about the next time Marina van der Zyle starts shouting that the Labour party is institutionally racist and it’s only the Board standing up for Jewish people.
This is an excellent video in which Guardian columnist Owen Jones attacks and refutes the right-wing myth that the Nazis were socialists, because Hitler said they were. In my experience, this is one the of the favourite accusations of the loony American libertarian right, who see any kind of state intervention in industry as a terrible infringement of sacred property rights and a form of Communism, leading ultimately to death camps and gulags. In fact, as Jones states in this video, there are plenty of examples where a country’s or political party’s name is deceptive. The German Democratic Republic, for example, wasn’t democratic, and the Russian Liberal Democratic Party is far-right. It’s the same with Hitler’s claim to be a socialist. He quotes Adolf Hitler to show that Hitler’s claim to be a socialist is based on his radical redefinition of the word, and his denial that the German Social Democrats, the Communists and Marxism itself are socialist. He goes further, and shows that the Nazis were Social Darwinists, who believed that the fittest would rise to the top while inferiors should stay at the bottom, replaced the socialist emphasis on class with race, and believed in competition as against socialist cooperation. He also makes the point that right-wing, non-fascist parties have also adopted anti-capitalist policies and rhetoric when it suits them. For example, Reform have recently announced they will nationalise the public utilities. As for the red in the Nazi flag, Hitler put it in their to troll the left so they would attend his meetings.
The Nazis’ real political orientation is shown by their cooperation with right-wing parties, like the German National People’s Party, the DNVP, and with German big business. In fact, 29 heads of industry wrote to President Hindenburg calling for him to appoint Hitler as chancellor. In return, Hitler made a speech to various industrialists announcing that private enterprise could not survive democracy and required a dictatorship to protect it. The Nazis received generous funding from firms like Krupps, I.G. Farben and Porsche, who greatly benefited from the Nazi regime and the exploitation of slave labour.
In power the Nazis followed right-wing, pro-capitalist policies such as the privatisation of industry, very much against the trend of the times. They also cut back the welfare provision that had been established by the Weimar Republic, and replaced it with their private charity, the Winterhilfe. All good, Thatcherite policies. Real socialist parties were smashed, as were the trade unions, and their members placed in concentration camps. They also forced women back into their traditional domestic role, again, not a socialist policy. There was a socialist element within the Nazi in the SA, the Nazis paramilitary group, but they were purged and murdered at the request of Hitler’s backers in big business.
The Nazis did establish a rigorous system of state control during the War, but Jones views this as a response to the conditions of wartime. Britain also had a planned economy, but it would be ridiculous to say that the British government was also socialist or communist.
The video is a response to a piece Peter Hitchen’s wrote in one of the middle-market tabloids. If it’s the Heil, they’re probably hoping that people won’t remember how they backed Mosley and his not-at-all socialist BUF. I’ve found other people repeating the same accusation that the Nazis were socialists on the net. However, one of these also claims that the SPD at the time of the German council revolution of 1919 was a Marxist revolutionary party. Well, it was partly based in Marxism, but also contained a revisionist right, led by Edward Bernstein. Bernstein had noticed that capitalism was not collapsing and the working class had become more wealthy during the 19th century. He therefore recommended a reformist, evolutionary approach to socialism through democracy like the British Labour party and the Fabian Society. The party’s leader, Friedrich Ebert, was a democrat. One of the reasons Germany today is a democratic state rather than a Communist dictatorship was that Ebert got wind that the Communists in Berlin were about to declare a republic and so pre-empted them by declaring it first.
The same YouTuber also claims that the workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ council during the revolution were Communist. Some were, some weren’t. A report by German officialdom stated that in many areas the councils were actually very moderate. In several places local authority had collapsed completely, and it was the councils who were keeping things running and the people fed. This particular YouTuber has put up a nearly five hour long refutation of the denials that Hitler was a socialist, but considering his biases and distortions I don’t think it’s worth watching to refute it.
One of Mosley’s policies for the British Union of Fascists was to turn the House of Lords into an industrial chamber. This would be like Fascist Italy’s Chamber of Fasces and Corporations in which representatives of management and the trade unions for particular industries would sit to manage the economy. It’s an interesting idea, and the Germans had experimented with a similar chamber in 1919. When Mosley was attempting his political return after the War, he was still considering having people elected according to industry rather than geographical location, and included his thoughts on it in his book Mosley-Right or Wrong (London: Lion Books 1961):
‘Question 152: Do you advocate an occupational franchise?
Answer: I think it is the best method, but it is not essential to our system. So long as government has sufficient power of action in its defined sphere to carry out the mandate of the electors during its period of office, the essential is there. Government elected by the people will be able to do what the people want done, and they can sack it by their votes at the next election if it does not do the job to their satisfaction.
But as parliament still plays a very important part in our systems, it is preferable that it should be elected in a modern instead of an obsolete way. I mean by this that in early days of the geographical franchise, when the main industry was agriculture, men exercised the very limited franchise of those days in the area where they both lived and worked. Residential and industrial interests were really identical. But now a man’s occupation may be completely separated from his residence. Certainly his interests in these two spheres are no longer identical, and most men and women are more interested in their occupation than where they happen to live.
In their occupation they are well informed concerning its problems and the people engaged in it. They are more likely to select the best people to represent them.
Further, the resulting parliament will be a serious one, more likely to approach problems in the spirit of the search for truth, rather than the frivolous mood of party warfare. That is why I prefer and occupational franchise, but it is not essential to the success of our system. People may prefer not immediately to change so many of the traditional methods.’ (p. 151).
I’d very much like working people and their industries to be represented in parliament, especially as it is now dominated by representatives of industry. When Cameron was in power 77 % of MPs were company directors and senior executives. But the Chamber of Fasces and Corporations didn’t actually do anything except cheer Mussolini and rubber stamp his polices.
As well as laying out Mosley’s policies for post-War Britain and Europe, much of the book is an attempt to justify his conduct before the War as head of the BUF. He attempts to present himself as a democratic politician and definitely not a raging anti-Semite. The BUF wasn’t responsible for violence, and in power Mosley will respect all the traditional liberties like free elections and Habeas Corpus. He also attempts to redefine various Fascist doctrines. For example, he declares that the leadership principle just means that the person in charge of a particular policy, task or ministry should be held absolutely personally responsible for it, and that the buck shouldn’t be passed among members of various committees. It’s a good attitude, especially as we’ve seen officials responsible for catastrophic failures try to shrug off their responsibility for it. But that’s not what the leadership principle means. It looks like a version of Hitler’s Fuehrerprinzep, or ‘leader principle’. Simply put, this meant that the head of an organisation was its leader, and his staff or employees had an absolute duty to obey him, such as the relationship between a factory manager and his workers.
As for Mosley respecting democracy, I don’t believe a word of it.
Mosley is completely unrepentant of the actions and policies of the BUF. He considered them justified at the time, and says so in his book. If Mosley had seized power, Britain would have become another wretched Fascist dictatorship in which the individual would have no rights, political parties and genuine working class trade unions would be smashed and illegal. Opposition politicians would be attacked and incarcerated and Jewish Brits would either be expelled or exterminated. I’ve no doubt that he would have collaborated with Hitler in the Holocaust. After Hitler became the international star of Fascism, eclipsing Mussolini, Mosley changed the name of his gang of thugs to the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists. His Fascist Quarterly, set up as a rival to Gollancz’s Left Book Club, contained pieces by leading Nazis as well as other Fascists.
While I like the idea of an industrial parliament, Fascism itself is a murderous tyranny which has to be fought everywhere.
A few days ago I watched another video put up by Jim Boobeh, the main man behind the right-wing YouTube channel Correct, Not Political, and a fellow rightists, called O’Looney. Correct, Not Political are the bunch who believe that the World Economic Forum are at the at the heart of a global conspiracy to take over the world and make us all serfs under green communism, owning nothing, confined to 15 minute cities and eating insects for the good of the planet. Many people on the right have similar views, like Carl Benjamin and the Lotus Eaters. But I wasn’t prepared for just how paranoid Correct, Not Political was.
That they’re a bunch of far right conspiracy theorists is obvious, as shown by their videos of them protesting gay rights marches, drag queen story hour, trades union and environmental protests, pro-refugee demonstrations, and events held by socialists and ‘commies’. How right wing they are is also demonstrated by the video they show introducing their live streams, which are old footage of Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts marching about. They also don’t like the Freemasons and there’s more than a touch of anti-Semitism there, as I think they’re also into the stupid myths of the Jewish banking conspiracy. But they’re also worried about a military invasion by the Channel migrants. Yup, these are not poor unfortunates fleeing war and persecution in their homelands, but undercover UN soldiers. Now, many members of the anti-immigrant right have said that most of the Channel migrants are military age men, and are suspicious of them because they don’t include similar numbers of women and children. Which is what you would expect to see if people were fleeing war and persecution, or at least what the sceptical peeps of the right would. But there was an interview with one Channel migrant a little while ago who said that he, and many others were running away from conscription, and hoped to bring their women and families over later when they had settled. I also think that many of the military age men are actually young blokes hoping to find work and greater opportunities in the West. The impression I’ve had reading various bit and pieces of information on the current state of the Middle East and talking to more knowledgeable friends is that there’s a real problem with large scale unemployment in many of the Arab countries. A little while ago there was a piece in one of the news blogs that the economic situation in Egypt had deteriorated to the point where many families could no longer afford basic staples. There was a similar situation among Sunni Muslims in Syria, where they were very firmly at the bottom of the social pile and faced with grinding poverty, less educated and with poorer prospects than the Shi’a, Alawi and Christian Syrians. Hence their support for radical Islamist movements and the rebellion against Assad. But Correct, Not Political really do believe that we’re being literally invaded.
Boobeh and O’Looney spoke about how they’d heard from a number of people that the Channel migrants were really undercover UN soldiers. One man had sent a drone off to spy on them, and had seen them being trained by the Black Watch. They were here, ready to take over the country. The two also speculated about the outbreak of a nuclear war, and stated that the elite would be all right as they would be safe in their luxury nuclear bunkers 2- 3 miles underground. That was certainly true of the Soviet elite. After the Fall of Communism it was revealed that a whole city, complete with shops, had been built underground for the Communist rulers in the event of a nuclear war. I dare say that something similar may have been secretly built in the west. One of the TV travel shows, in which a celeb goes round a part of the world talking about the interesting bits, showed the world’s most expensive nuclear bunker. I think it was built by a businessman in Nevada, and was so luxurious it even had a swimming pool. I don’t know if other big businessmen built themselves similar bunkers, but as during the Cold War ordinary Americans were told to build fall-out shelters in their yards it really, really wouldn’t surprise me.
Going back to the weird idea of the migrants as UN troopers, it looks like a mutant British version of some of the rumours that were going around America’s paranoid fringe in the ’90s. This held that the Soviet Union had not in fact collapsed, but had a staged a careful ruse. There were supposed to be secret Soviet military bases on the Canadian and Mexican borders, from which Russian tanks would roll into America once the invasion started. Here the Red Army has been replaced by the Channel migrants and the United Nations, who are the centre of similar fears on the American right. It’s all part of the plan to set up the evil, satanic one-world communist government. The current paranoia about the World Economic Forum is part of that, and indeed Boobeh himself put it into context by mentioning the other groups that have also been seen as part of the global conspiracy, like the Trilateral Commission.
The extent of this section of the far right’s alienation from mainstream society was shown by Boobeh and O’Looney talking about how they’d like to set up parallel societies, complete with a separate healthcare system, independent of the mainstream. Well, the anarchists and other left-wing radicals they despise have also felt the same way, and tried to something like it, but have been unsuccessful. They, or at least Boobeh, also were against voting, because all the parties were compromised, but neither did they want to start a violent revolution. Which was reassuring. Mosley’s their hero, but they don’t want to follow him down the road of trying to attempt a Fascist seizure of power along the lines of Mussolini and Hitler.
I don’t know how many of them there are in Correct, Not Political. Probably not many, as even at their height the extreme right-wing groups in this country were numerically small. The BNP claimed to have 2,000 members, but researchers have suggested that they only had about 200 core members. Most of the others left after about a year, probably because although they were against non-White immigration, they didn’t have any interest in Fascist ideology. But I suspect that there are many other groups and individuals, like Godfrey Bloom, who shared their fears about the WEF and the UN.
As for the notion that the Black Watch were training the migrants, it seems to me that they may have been sent to guard them. Some of them came over with guns, as reported a few months ago. But if any kind of training was going on, I wonder if it could be because these are western-allied soldiers, who were disguised as civilians, perhaps to flee Afghanistan after the Taliban took over. Or perhaps as part of some undercover global security operation which uses the migrant networks. Of course, this is just speculation and it may well be rubbish, and no training of any kind is going on. But I wonder.
There may be a genuine conspiracy here, which has nothing to do with the UN, WEF or Masonic Jewish bankers.
I spent some time Saturday evening watching a couple of videos posted by the far right YouTube outfit, Correct, Not Political. One was of their man Jim walking around the demonstrators and supporters at Drag Queen Story Time in Colchester asking them awkward, ‘Socratic’ questions. The other was an interview between Jim and another fixture of the British far right, Godfrey Bloom. Both were weirdly interesting, but only for the light they cast on these two men’s conspiracist views. I’ve already written about how Correct, Not Political has the classic paranoid idea that the Masons are behind a massive conspiracy. His interview with Bloom, and the comments he made talking to some of the people in Colchester confirmed it. It also revealed him to be a mad anti-vaxxer who thinks they’re putting something in it to kill people as part of the WEF’s goal to reduce the human population on the planet.
The drag queen reading to the kids in Colchester was Edward Wilcox, who performs under the name ‘Ann Nemic’ or something similar. Talking to various members of the crowd, Jim said that ‘Nemic’ had been vaccinated twice, and given blood 92 times. He didn’t want to say too much, as he didn’t want his channel to be banned, but didn’t this tell you something. Er, yes. It demonstrates that he was like everyone else and did as the government and medical authorities advised. He got vaccinated to protect himself. As for giving blood 92 times, one of the women at the demonstration pointed out that it made him a good person and that surely you want people to give blood? His stage name also shows that he has a sense of humour: Ann Nemic/ anaemic. It doesn’t say anything more than that, unless you’re so paranoid you think he was actively trying to spread whatever it is in the vaccine which you think is a poison by donating his contaminated blood. Sadly, I think Jim really is that bonkers.
Looking at the crowd, he declared, ‘There isn’t half a lot of sodomy going on here!’ This was probably because they were quite a few gay people and people waving pride flags, not because gay men were having sex in the street. He then went round warning people that drag queen story hour was a plot to indoctrinate kids with gender ideology and abuse from paedophiles. Here he has a point. James Lindsay has read out a paper co-written by a drag queen and queer activist, which states that the purpose of these shows is to queer the children’s minds and upset gender norms. And yes, the founder of Queer Theory, Judith Butler, did support paedophilia and the breaking down of barriers between adult and child. But this doesn’t mean that every drag queen, library or school which stages these sessions holds such views or is even aware of their existence. They may just be doing it because they genuinely feel it is spreading tolerance towards gay and trans people whilst encouraging children to read. No more than that.
Walking around the demonstration was a bald bloke, who looked a bit like the Matt Lucas character George Daws, selling copies of the Socialist Worker. So Jim immediately called him a Communist, asked whether he was trying to get people to sign up for Communism, and then asked people to tell him if there was a country in which Communism had ever succeeded. Well, technically the man was a Trotskyite, which is a slightly different form of Marxism. And I actually agree with him in that there hasn’t been a country where Communism has been successful. China has been doing very well of late, but that’s also thanks to a capitalist component in its economy. But from where Britain stands at the moment, capitalism isn’t working very well either. Far from improving people’s living standards, they’re being lowered. However, the right haven’t given up the refrain that this generation has it far better than anyone else at any time in history, and capitalism has raised more people out of poverty than socialism has. The first part of that statement is utterly wrong, and the second needs serious qualifications.
The drag show, Jim said, was all about promoting equality. But this was equality under communism, where everyone didn’t have life equally good, but equally bad, except for those at the top. Again, this seems to come from critiques of the woke ideology from James Lindsay and the EDIJester. It’s certainly present in those ideologies, though its equity – equality of outcome – rather than equality of opportunity. There were a couple of examples of this in the American education system a month or so ago. One teacher, in the interest of equality, gave all her students an ‘A’. Another one just gave the average award to a series of excellent students, who actually deserved much higher marks to take them into one of the prestigious American universities to study science. This was eventually revealed after an inquiry and possibly legal action. I have yet to hear of a case like this in this country, however.
Jim also got shirty with the Trotskyite because the man called him a Fascist and a Nazi. Jim told him that was libel, to which the fellow rightly pointed out that it was slander, as he’d know if he’d actually had any knowledge of the law. As Jim has prefaced several of his livestreams with old footage of Oswald Mosley and the BUF, and that Mosley changed his benighted organisation’s name to the ‘British Union of Fascists and National Socialists’, it could be said that what the man said was fair comment.
When someone asked who was behind this plot to corrupt Britain’s kids, Jim replied that, again he didn’t want to say too much, but it was the Freemasons, citing a couple of 19th century authors, who, he said, were themselves 33rd degree members of the brotherhood. I’ve forgotten just who they were, but their names rang a bell among the sources cited by those convinced of such a conspiracy. Finally, after bothering the good burghers of Colchester for about an hour, and nearly being assaulted by some particularly angry LGBTQ+ rights demonstrators, he went off in search of something to drink. Going through the town’s back streets, he complained about the number of ‘weirdos’ there were and that it was all coffee houses. Quite what he has against coffee houses I don’t know. Perhaps he was afraid that if he went inside, left-wing intellectuals would all jump on him like the characters in Fraser all those years ago.
His conspiracist views became much clearer in his conversation with Godfrey Bloom. Bloom announced himself has having been an investment banker for 40 years and at one time a member of the defence council or something like that. He was thus well-placed to know that capitalism was about to collapse. Actually, there’s a Marxist economics professor on YouTube, Richard Wolf, who has being saying exactly the same thing. And if it hadn’t been for Brown in 2008, I’m sure it would have collapsed. The two then shared their views on the World Economic Forum wishing to depopulate the planet, set up Green Communism and make us all eat bugs. The WEF has captured all our institutions, including the monarchy. Prince Philip also believed there were too many people on the planet. Well, the late Duke of Edinburgh was the head of the World Wide Fund for Nature, so his views are hardly a surprise. The WEF are Malthusians, which means that they believe that population always outstrips the supply of available food, as suggested by the 19th century economist Thomas Malthus. Malthus and his followers believed that when this happened, starvation and war would inevitably result. In order to prevent this, they recommended birth control and were active promoting contraception. As did the Duke, who on one of his official visits to some tribe showed the men how to put on a condom using a spear. However, the WEF were going much further and planning to wipe out a sizable chunk of humanity using a manufactured disease or its vaccine. Those who survived would be under the WEF’s new communist order.
This made me wonder if Jim knew about the wretched views of the late zookeeper John Aspinall, best known for his big cats killing and mauling people. Aspinall also believed that there were too many people around. He said the British population should be only eight million. However, he definitely wasn’t a communist of any description. He declared that what the country needed was a ‘counterrevolution, Francoist in spirit.’ So his green views were closer to Hitler’s than the WEF. And almost certainly pretty close to Jim’s and Bloom’s.
Correct, Not Political’s Jim therefore seems to have read or watched much material about the woke ideology, especially Queer Theory, and mixed this up with old conspiracy theories about the masons. I also think there might be a touch of anti-Catholicism in their as well. When he was voicing his objections to drag queens reading to children as getting them used to nonces, one woman asked him about Roman Catholic priests abusing children. He didn’t agree with that, either, but said he didn’t agree with established religions as ‘they’re from Satan’. But some of the other things he has said, and they’re nothing I can put a precise finger on, suggests that he might have the same conspiracist views about the Catholic church, which is supposed to be doing the work of the antichrist, as some as the bigoted Protestant writers of the 19th century.
Correct, Not Political aren’t physically violent, and while Jim’s sneers about socialism are irritating, he personally has an affable manner. I can’t say that they present a physical danger, unlike National Action or the BNP, for example. What is dangerous is the mad anti-vaxxer views and the deranged paranoia about the WEF, which he also shares with the Lotus Eaters, Alex Jones and any number of others on the right. And these views are a danger to democratic politics, if only because the undermine proper democratic views in favour of suspicion and paranoia.
WatchMojo is a YouTube channel that specialises in lists of the most (insert adjective) of whatever subject they’re covering. This is usually popular culture, like films, TV programmes and comics. But in this video from their British offshoot they delve into the very murky world of British tabloid and red top newspapers to discuss the six worst of them. And so, imagine if you will, this run down of the very worst of British journalism accompanied by the old style Top of the Pops theme as that sadly missed programme went down the music charts.
Coming last at No. 6 is the Daily Star for its coverage of weird paranormal stories like black-eyed ghost children, their libelling of the Liverpool fans at the Hillsborough disaster and getting sued by the McCanns for its malign take on the disappearance of their daughter. They also blamed video games for Raoul Moat’s shooting spree, despite the entire lack of evidence showing that video games are responsible for real world violence, and for making up an interview with Duane ‘the Rock’ Johnson.
Coming in at no. 5, pop-pickers, is the Mirror, showing that it’s also left-wing papers that can have appalling low journalistic standards. This is there because of its owner, Robert Maxwell, raiding his employees’ pension funds, and Piers Morgan publishing fake photographs of alleged atrocities by British troops in Iraq. This part of the video shows some of the other headlines from the paper, such as its ‘Achtung! Surrender’ to the Germans at the 1996 World Cup as other illustrations of its lack of taste and anything resembling decent attitudes.
At No. 4 in this chart of journalistic infamy is the Daily Mail, as illustrated by its article ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’ praising Mosley’s BUF and its owner, Lord Rothermere’s trip to Germany and praise of the Nazi regime. The video also states that it’s been suggested that the paper’s pro-appeasement stance convinced Hitler that Britain would not retaliate if he invaded Poland, thus causing World War II. More recently the paper has also been sued for libel or inaccurate reporting by celebs such as Melania Trump, Alan Sugar and Elton John. The video also shows some of its racist headlines opposing the decolonisation of mathematics and opposition to non-White immigration.
The Daily Express is at No. 3, again because of such low points as being sued by the McCanns, scaremongering stories about the world being wiped out by aliens or killer asteroids, and its weird fixation on conspiracy theories about Princess Diana and her death, often at the expense of more current and important stories. In 2010 its editor said that he was appalled by some of the stories it ran, and was going to reign in its islamophobia.
No. 2, the late, unlamented News of the Screws. This was always controversial, but lasted 150 years, even claiming at one time to be the world’s best newspaper. That was until it was brought down by the phone-tapping scandal, whose victims not only included celebrities, royalty like Princes William and Harry, but also murder victims and dead soldiers. It was forced to fold after all its advertisers deserted it.
But the top slot in this catalogue of filth and sleaze merchants is the Scum. This rag’s viciously low reporting has made it notorious around the world, but what foreign viewers may not know is that it’s particularly hated in Britain for its smearing of the Liverpool fans at Hillsborough, like its fellow tabloid the Depress. Instead of the Liverpool fans being responsible for the carnage, it was found that the police were responsible for the 96 deaths. This anti-Liverpool venom is the reason it’s still banned in the city, despite the paper having made some half-hearted apologies afterwards. It also claimed the Birmingham 6, a group of Irish men wrongly imprisoned for an IRA terrorist atrocity, were guilty. On top of this it was also sued for libel by Wayne Rooney. But what makes it especially hated is its staunch support of Margaret Thatcher, the infamous ‘Gotcha!’ headline for the sinking of the Belgrano during the Falklands War, and its claim that it was responsible for Thatcher’s electoral victories with its headline ‘It was the Scum Wot won it’.
Of course this list leaves out some other instances of tabloid wrongdoing. The Scum has had any number of complaints for racism upheld by the former Press Complaints Commission, including one in which it compared Arabs to pigs. Piers Morgan has also been involved in the phone hacking scandal, though it’s possible the video mentions this and I’ve just forgotten it did. And I’d say the worst British tabloid was the Sport in its various editions for its mixture of sleaze, stories about freaks and daft stories following the Weekly World News style of journalism, like its claim that there was a B52 bomber on the Moon. The Sport was set up by David ‘the Slug’ Sullivan, according to Private Eye, a pornographer with convictions for running girls. But the paper has a low circulation compared to the others here, and so is far less influential.
As for the Scum coming first as Britain’s worst tabloid, I agree entirely, although I doubt this is an accolade the Scum would want to boast about on its front page. But when it comes to malign, biased reporting and racism, it is indeed the Scum wot wins it.
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 