Jacob Rees-Mogg Denies Endorsing Far Right Alternative Fuer Deutschland

From the Israeli far Right to the British sort. Jacob Rees-Mogg was in the I today, 2nd April 2019, denying that he had endorsed Germany’s far right Alternative Fuer Deutschland. Mogg had yesterday reposted one of their videos stating that it was no wonder Britain saw bad faith behind every move from Brussels. The article in the I, entitled ‘Rees-Mogg denies far-right support’, runs

Jacob Rees-Mogg has denied supporting a German far-right party after he was criticised for sharing a speech by its leader.

The MP said that the address by Alice Weidel of the Alternative for German (sic) (AfD) party was “of real importance” because it showed a “German view of Brexit”. He shared a clip of the speech on social media. Labour MP David Lammy accused him of “promoting Germany’s overtly racist AfD party”.

Mr Rees-Mogg told LBC radio: “I’m not supporting the AfD, but this is a speech made in the Bundestag of real importance because it shows a German view.” (p. 7).

Zelo Street covered this story when it broke yesterday. In the Sage of Crewe’s account, one of those stating that Mogg had indeed endorsed the far right outfit was Jeremy Cliffe, of the Economist, who described the AfD as ‘racist’. This statement might carry more weight for Tories, as the Economist is the magazine of right-wing free market orthodoxy. The article in Zelo Street also drew on a feature from last September’s Suddeutscher Zeitung to show precisely what kind of party the AfD was. Bjorn Hocke, the leader of the AfD in the Bundestag, was at a demonstration in Chemnitz with Lutz Bachmann, the founder of the rabidly islamophobic movement, Pegida. And that February, Pegida chiefs had visited a convention of the Saxon branch of the AfD in Hoyerswerda. The newly elected state chairman, Jorg Urban, had declared that the two organisations had similar goals, and that AfD state organisations should decide independently whether to work with Pegida.

Musa Okwongo also posted comments on Twitter stating that the AfD has also asked for the reintroduction of Nazi terminology to political discourse, and made speeches that one political commentator in the Bundesrepublik called ‘full-on neo-Nazi’. I’m not remotely surprised. A few months ago I put up a piece about an article in the American radical magazine and website, Counterpunch, on the Alternative fuer Deutschland. That article presented very extensive evidence that the AfD was viciously racist with Nazi connections. Some of its financial backers, who live outside Germany, have connections going back to Nazi Germany. Not only does the party hate and vilify Muslims and other immigrants, it has demanded the return of reichsburgerschaft. This is the Nazi doctrine that only White, ethnic Germans should be citizens, somewhat similar to the NF/BNP doctrine of racial nationalism. Leading members of the AfD have also attacked Germany’s Holocaust memorial as ‘a national shame’, and one has gone so far as saying that if they get into power, they would open ‘underground trains to Auschwitz’. Which sounds very much like they’d like a return of the Holocaust.

Zelo Street’s article also reports that Pegida also has connections to Tommy Robinson. Well, I think Robinson did found, or at least try to get into, Pegida UK. Lutz Bachmann has been friends with Robinson ever since the two met in Tenerife, where Robinson was having a holiday with his family and Bachmann has a holiday home.

Zelo Street also points out that this isn’t the first time Mogg has had connections with the far Right. Way back in 2013, when the Observer embarrassed him by reporting that he had been guest of honour at the annual dinner of the Traditional Britain Group. They’re a far-right, anti-immigrant outfit in the Tory party, whose leaders also have an unpleasant fixation with the Nazis. Mogg had been warned not to attended, but he dismissed the warnings as a smear. He claimed that he checked with Tory HQ, who told him they had nothing on them. Zelo Street comments that this is no excuse, as enough was known about the TBG at the time for Mogg to have known to keep well away. But he didn’t, and so it’s no surprise that he’s now again genuflecting before the far right.

The article concludes

Jacob Rees Mogg gave Traditional Britain Group, a deeply unpleasant convocation of racists and xenophobes, a legitimacy it did not, and does not, merit. He’s now begun to flirt with a group linked directly to the far-right both in its native Germany, and here in the UK.

Yet he remains an ostensibly mainstream Tory MP, is talked of as a candidate for high office, and his views are eagerly sought by media outlets. I’ll just leave that one there.

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/04/rees-mogg-endorses-racists-again.html

The situation becomes much worse when you consider that Mogg is a member of the European Research Group, along with Boris Johnson, who were reported a few days ago as calling themselves ‘Grand Wizards’. As any fule kno, this is one of the grades in the Ku Klux Klan. Laura Kuenssberg, who reported this, then tried to backtrack after it sparked understandable outrage. First she said that the information came from only two sources, and then that the ERG didn’t realise the Fascist connotations of the term when they thought of it. Which I frankly don’t believe. The Tories have a very long history of right-wing individuals dressing up as or behaving like Nazis, even when they don’t have real links to the far right. Like back in the 1980s when the Union of Conservative Students was singing ‘We Don’t Want No Blacks or Asians’ and ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’ and demanding the introduction of racial nationalism as official Tory policy. And then there were the various members of the aristocracy and Tory party, who formed pro-Nazi organisations just prior to the Second World War like the Link and the Anglo-German Fellowship.

If this had been done by someone in the Labour party, there would have been no question that they would have been attacked as a racist and their expulsion demanded. Corbyn did the most of all the party leaders to campaign for remaining in the EU, but he was still pilloried for supposedly not giving his absolute support to the Remain campaign. At the same time, the Right and the Israel lobby are still trying to oust him from the Labour leadership by claiming that he is not doing enough to combat the nonexistent wave of anti-Semitism in the Labour party.

But as Zelo Street has pointed out, Mogg has been now caught several times in connection with the far right, first with the TBG and now with the AfD. But he’s still being considered as a respectable Tory ready for high office, and a suitable subject for media interviews.

This shows exactly the alarming double standards about Fascism and racism in both the Tories and the media. 

Gove and 19th Century British Education Provision

Michael Gove contemplating the government’s destruction of British state education

Unreasoning nostalgia is a British disease,

– Jon Downes and the Amphibians from Outer Space

Earlier this week the NUT staged a one-day strike against the government’s reforms of British schools. As with the rest of Conservative policy, this essentially consists in preparing the system for further privatisation and lowering wages and conditions. They also have their sights set on lowering standards as well. Taking their cue from the assumption of ignorant bar-room bores everywhere, the Tories have the attitude that just about anyone, or almost anyone, can teach without actually needing to be taught how. They are therefore trying to pass legislation to allow graduates to teach in schools without needing to have a teaching qualification first.

I did my first degree at a teacher-training college that also took ordinary degree students. The trainee teachers I knew were conscientious and worked extremely hard, both academically on their specialist subjects, and in the class-room during teaching practice. Often they were put in front of classes that could be difficult, stopping fights between pupils and sometimes with the threat of violence from parents. While there’s a lot of debate just how much of the theory of teaching and child development is relevant – the theories of Piaget have been extensively critiqued and rejected – it is nevertheless not an easy profession by any means. Teachers certainly need good training in how to teach, as well as what. All this will be undermined by Gove’s reforms.

Modern Conservatism is based on the view that laissez-faire, private industry is always best, and so looks back with nostalgia on the 19th century, when Britain dominated the world, we had an empire and industry was expanding. It was also an age of poverty, hunger, disease and overcrowding. And rather than being great, Britain in this respect had one of the worst education systems in western Europe.

France

In France, plans had been drawn up for a national system of primary, secondary and university education as long ago as 1806 under Napoleon. In practice, the regime got only as far as founding the lycees, the boarding schools for the elite. Under the education act of !833 drawn up by the French minister, Guizot, an impressive system of primary education was established. All communes were required to set up schools, which would provide education for local boys free of charge. The communes that could not afford to do so were to be given funding from their department, or, failing, that an annual grant from the Ministry of Public Instruction. As a result, in the thirteen years from 1834 to 1847 the number of primary schools in La Patrie increased from 33,695 to 43,514. By 1849 there were 3 1/2 million children attending primary school. Girl’s schools received much less funding, but nevertheless a law 1836 extended the 1933 Act to provide for schools for girls.

The French educational system was further reformed in 1863 under Napoleon’s minister for public instruction, Victor Duruy. Duruy was the Republican son of a worker in the Gobelins tapestry factory. He proposed to Napoleon III a system for the effective abolition of illiteracy, funding increases for secondary education, and increases in teachers’ salaries. Primary education was made compulsory, and a broader curriculum introduced for secondary schools. In 1866 nearly 66,000 pupils attended secondary school. The state also spent large sums on teachers’ salaries and in establishing good school libraries. In Matthew Arnold’s words, the French education system after Guizot had

given to the lower classes, to the body of the common people, a self-respect, an enlargement of spirit, a consciousness of counting for something in their country’s action, which has raised them in the scale of humanity.

Germany

Prussia had a ministry of public instruction and a system of local school boards from 1817 onwards. By the mid-19th century throughout all the German states primary education was compulsory. In Saxony, Wurttemberg, Bavaria, Baden and Prussia after 1857 parents had to send their children to the local state school. The age when children started school varied from state to state from five to eight years. In some parts of Germany school attendance was compulsory for a further eight years, so that the school leaving age was the same a century later. Unfortunately, education suffered through the use of child labour and widespread poverty, which took children out of the class room.

By 1837 Prussia already had a system of 50 gymnasia, set up to teach the children of the elite from 16 to 19. The curriculum was broader than that in France, and included philosophy, history, geography, arithmetic and geometry, as well as drawing and playing a musical instrument.

Austria

Under the liberal prime minister Auersperg in 1869 education became compulsory for all children from six to fourteen years of age. It has been seen by Harry Hearder, in his Europe in the 19th Century, 1830-1880, as more advanced than the British educational system introduced a year later. (p. 386). The parts of Italy under Austrian rule also benefited from this increase in education. In 1856 Lombardy possessed 4, 427 primary schools.

Switzerland and the Netherlands

The best schools in Europe were those in Switzerland and the Netherlands. Primary education had been made compulsory in most Swiss cantons in the 1830s, and Matthew Arnold considered Swiss schools superior to the French, with the schools in Aargau the very best in Europe.

In the Netherlands a system of state supervision of education had been established in 1806. Dutch schools were hygienic, with well-trained teachers, industrious and happy children, complete religious toleration and no corporal punishment.

Britain

There were a number of schools giving some form of education. These included the Dame Schools, in which an old woman kept a class of children quiet while their parents worked and the charity and Sunday schools. These were essentially religious in nature, and although there were 1 1/2 million pupils in Sunday schools in the 1830s, their pupils were not taught to write or do sums. There result was that there were high rates of illiteracy. By 1851 the literacy rate for men was about 69.3 per cent, and for women 51 per cent.

Under Dr James Kay-Shuttleworth in 1840 schools receiving state grants were obliged to adhere to certain standards, and in 1856 the Department of Education was set up. Nevertheless, a national system of education did not exist until the education act of 1870.

The children of the upper classes attended the grammar and public schools. There was, however, no national system of universal secondary education until 1880, or really, before the 20th century.

University Attendance in England, France, Germany and German Austria

The English universities were intended to produce a small, educated elite, unlike those in France, Italy, German Austria and Germany, which aimed at producing a larger cultured or professional class. As a result, in the 19th century far fewer people in England had the benefit of a university education. In France 1 in 1,900 citizens attended uni. In Italy, this was 1 in 2,200. In Germany and German-speaking Austria, it was 1 in 2,600. In Britain less than half as many had a university education one in 5,800 men.

British Education Dominated by Conservative Aristocratic Bias

Hearder therefore says of the British education system that it suffered from a narrowly aristocratic attitude. If the English upper class was as well educated as that of any other in Europe, the rest of the population remained wretchedly ignorant and neglected. (p. 388).

This attitude still persists in contemporary Tory attitude to education. Cameron, Osborne and Clegg are Toffs, who seem intent on pricing higher education out of the grasp of the lower middle and working classes with their raising of tuition fees. The educational reforms seem designed to wreck state education, leaving it purely run for the profit of private companies and unable to compete with the private schools. This seems partly intended to allow the wealthy to continue to the enjoy their educational and social privileges without having to worry about competition from the poorer children of the state sector.

And supporting this assault on state education is the popular belief, at least amongst some of the electorate, that this must raise standards because private is automatically better, as demonstrated by British imperial and industrial greatness during the 19th century. Britain, however, does not compare well in the sphere of mass education during the 19th century. The state systems of many nations, especially France, appear far better. If we genuinely care about giving a good education to our children, we should be looking to them, not back to a mythical age of imperial glory that promotes an attitude of indifference or active hostility to genuine, popular, state education.

ATOS and the Nazi Murder of the Mentally Ill

So many people now are struggling to support themselves after Atos has thrown them off invalidity benefit, that many see it as an organised attack on the very lives of the disabled themselves. If you read the comments to the Void’s posts about Atos, or those on Vox Political, you find the same thing said again and again: ‘I don’t think there will be any more people in a few years time, because Atos and the government will have killed us all off’. Some of the disabled people in the unemployment course I’ve been on have also said the same thing. People may phrase it differently, but the sentiment remains exactly the same: a feeling that the government is deliberately murdering the disabled as part of their welfare reforms.

The Nazi Euthanasia Order

The Nazi regime had a deliberately policy of murdering the mentally ill in its infamous ‘Euthanasia Order’. It was a secret decree passed by Hitler himself, and back dated to the 1st September 1939. It was implemented by Hitler’s personal doctor, Karl Brandt, and the Chief of the Fuehrer’s Chancellery, Philipp Bouhler. The major figure in the carrying out of this mass murder was Bouhler’s deputy, Oberdienstleiter Victor Brack. Brack was head of the Central Office, which handled, amongst other things, the requests for the ‘euthanasia’ of the incurably ill. Brack’s colleague in this was a Dr Hefelmann.

Brandt, Bouhler and their staff recruited a small group of doctors, who were in favour of euthanasia. These were then given membership of the Fuhrer’s Chancellery and granted promises of immunity from prosecution for their actions through Hitler’s secret decree.

The Reich Working Group for Asylums and Hospitals

The group and its intentions were strictly secret. They operated under the innocuous cover name of ‘Reich Working Group for Asylums and Hospitals’. Their real job was to select the programme’s victims. Under the Reich Health Leader, the former SS doctor Leonhardt Conti, and his subordinate Dr Linden, the head of Asylums and Nursing Homes in the health division of the Reich Ministry of the Interior, questionnaires were sent out, ostensibly for the registration of the sick in the Third Reich’s asylums.

The SS and the Gassing of the Disabled

The regime also set up a cover organisation from the SS transport fleet, The Welfare Transport Company for Invalids Ltd. Their duty was to remove the programme’s victims from their normal asylums to the institutions where they would be murdered. The main institutions for this were Hadamar in Hesse, Hartheim near Linz Grafeneck in Wurttemberg and Sonnestein in Saxony, where chemists from the Institute of Criminal Technology from the Reich Criminal Police Office tried out gassing them with carbon monoxide. The operation was financed through another cover company set up by the Fuehrer’s Chancellery, the Welfare Foundation for the Benefit of Asylums. Only about fifty people knew all the details about the programme. The directors of the asylums from which the victims were taken were only told that they had been transferred for special observation and treatment. The only Reich minister, who was directly informed by Hitler about the secret authorisation of the doctors was the head of administration in the Fuehrer’s Chancellery, Hans Lammers.

Opposition from Roman Catholic Churchmen

The euthanasia programme had to be abandoned in 1941 following opposition from the public, the legal system and the administration. The main opponent of the programme was the Cardinal Archbishop of Muenster, Count Clemens Galen. Galen was fiercely critical of Nazi racism, and had published a critique of The Myth of the Twentieth Century, by the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, in 1934. He publicly attacked the programme in a sermon. Regarding it as a crime, he informed the civil police. His condemnation of the programme was so effective, that it enraged Hitler and Goebbels had to advise the Fuehrer against ordering the Count’s arrest. Nevertheless, the programme had resulted in the medical murder of 70,000 people, by no means all of whom were ‘incurably insane’.

ATOS Not Physically Killing Disabled Like Nazis

However horrendous ATOS are – and they are deeply amoral and horrendous – they are clearly unlike the Nazi euthanasia programme. They do not have the ill and disabled taken away by a state operated private company and murdered in a secret institution, as was done under the Third Reich. The person assessed remains free. All that is done is that their benefits are removed. And at least in theory the most disabled individuals, who cannot work are still supported through benefits.

38,000 A Year Killed by ATOS’ and DWP’s Denial of their Benefits

Nevertheless, ATOS’ administration of the assessments has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths. ATOS have been set secret targets by the DWP to have a specific percentage of claimants thrown off benefits, a quota system that has been implemented across the system to cover people on Jobseeker’s Allowance. The number of people, who have died after their assessment by ATOS remains unknown. Ian Duncan Smith simply refuses to release the figures. Jaynelinney on her blog has estimated that it may be as high as 38,000 per year.

ATOS, DWP, Ian Duncan Smith and Esther McVie Refuse to Take Responsibility for Deaths Caused by Benefit Reforms

This indicates that the government is well aware of the number of deaths that have resulted, and are too ashamed or afraid of the public to release the true statistics. And while the system is not set up for the organised, physical mass murder of the unemployed, the government’s welfare policies are aimed at the removal of large numbers of them from government support, fully aware that for many this will result in their death. As they are not physically murdered, however, the government, the civil servants and ATOS employees and executives involved in the policies do not see themselves as responsible and so do not care.

This is disgusting and unacceptable. Although they have not physically killed anyone, the government’s benefit reforms have nevertheless resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Britain’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens. In this sense ATOS, the DWP under Ian Duncan Smith, the Disabilities Minister Esther McVie, and David Cameron and George Osborne are certainly responsible, and all the more so because they know it is happening and have done nothing to change the policy.

It needs to stop. And stop now.

Let’s hope the protests against ATOS tomorrow help turn public opinion even further against the administration and its lethal policies.