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. 

The Anti-Semitism Smears and the Tories’ Long History of Racism

On Monday, the Jonathan Goldstein of the Jewish Leadership Council and the President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Jonathan Arkush, wrote a letter complaining that Corbyn had done nothing to tackle what they claimed was the rampant anti-Semitism in the Labour party, and that Corbyn had consistently sided with anti-Semites against Jews. This was accompanied of a mass demonstration outside parliament organised by the two organisations.

Arkush and Goldstein’s claims are frankly lies. Jeremy Corbyn has consistently opposed all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism. He is the only MP, for example, who has been arrested for protesting against apartheid in South Africa. He also has the support of very many Jews, and Jewish organisations, who rallied to support him on social media.

The real issue here, which Arkush and Goldstein’s smears of anti-Semitism are meant to cover up, is Corbyn’s attitude towards Israel. They claim he’s anti-Israel and anti-Zionist. He isn’t, but he is pro-Palestinian. But this is too much for the Israel lobby, who smear anyone, who wants justice and dignity for the Palestinians as anti-Semite. Even if they are proud, self-respecting Jews, who have suffered real anti-Semitic assault and abuse. Or decent, anti-racist gentiles, who have also been the subject of vilification and assault by Nazis.

Arkush is a true-blue Tory, as well as a massive hypocrite. He himself has been very keen to meet racists and anti-Semites, when it suits his agenda. Tony Greenstein on his site has a picture of him enthusiastically greeting Donald Trump and Steve Bannon, one of the anti-Semitic fixtures of the White Supremacist Alt Right. As for the Board of Deputies of British Jews fighting anti-Semitism, Greenstein also points out that when Oswald Mosley was goose stepping about the East End of London with his Blackshirts, the Zionists were telling Jews to keep out of the way and stay indoors. I don’t blame them for it, as Fascism has always been violent and brutal, and they would no doubt have attacked and beaten Jews they found on the street. But Fascists won’t go away if you hide from them. They’ll simply carry on. Fortunately, a number of Jews, trade unionists, and Communists weren’t prepared to leave the streets to them, and fought them head on. The result was the ‘battle of Cable Street’, which ended with Mosley and his squadristi routed from the East End. I am not recommending violence. I don’t approve of it. But sometimes, it’s inevitable. And for all the claim that Mosley wasn’t originally anti-Semitic and was genuinely perplexed at Jewish opposition, he and his wretched party were. And if the Nazis had invaded, or the BUF somehow gained power, it’s very highly likely that he would have aided the Holocaust and the extermination of Jewish Brits.

The Tories have, of course, taken all this as an opportunity to claim that Labour is riddle with anti-Semitism, unlike them. This covers up the fact that the Tory party has a very long history of racism and anti-Semitism going right back to the Die-Hards of the First World War. One of the other left-wing bloggers put up a very extensive list of Tory racist and anti-Semitic organisations, or racist organisations, whose membership was drawn from the Tories.

Like the British Fascists. They were a bunch of right-wingers, founded by a middle-class lady, who’d been emancipated by the Women’s Suffrage Act but had a hatred of organised labour. They modus operandi was to supply blackleg labour during strikes, disrupt socialist meetings and attack left-wingers and trade unionists. They once attacked a van belonging to the Daily Herald. They weren’t really Fascists, but Conservatives, and Mosley called them what they were. He declared they were ‘Conservatives with knobs on’. He asked their leaderene what she thought of the corporate state. Faced with the notion of an industrial parliament which included trade unionists as well as management and capital, she vehemently rejected it as ‘socialism’. Which confirms how little she knew about either Fascism or socialism.

The there’s the various Tory pro-Nazi groups founded in the 1930s – the Anglo-German Fellowship, the Link and a number of others, and on and on. One of the nutters involved in these groups wanted to found a group to purge the Tories of Jews. The Monday Club was riddled with anti-Semites until there was purge in 1970. But as the blogger showed, the anti-Semites were still there, still active.

And while we’re on the subject of racism, why didn’t Arkush and his fellows on the Board protest against the appointment of Toby Young to May’s universities watchdog. I am not accusing Young of anti-Semitism. But he is a eugenics fanatic, and attended a eugenics conference at University College London, which certainly did include real racists and White Supremacists. Eugenics was an integral part of Nazi ideology. Quite often when Nazis and other racists talked about the ‘biologically unfit’ as well as the poor and disabled in general, they also meant non-whites and Jews. But I don’t recall Arkush and the Board making any letters of complaint or raising any natural concerns about Young’s appointment.

And then there’s this election poster from 1902.

Okay, so the foreign master sacking his British worker to make way for his fellow foreigner isn’t explicitly described as a Jew. But the anti-Semitism is very definitely there. It was put up at a time when the Conservatives were worried about the mass immigration of eastern European Jews. They spoke Yiddish, a language descended from the medieval German middle Franconian dialect. Hence the foreign master speaks with a very middle-European accent. And while the term ‘alien’ simply means ‘foreigner’, in the language of the 19th and early 20th centuries it was very often used to mean Jews. The anti-Semitic nature of the poster is very blatant.

As you’d probably expect it to be. This was the era of the British Brothers’ League and other Conservative anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic organisations.

But the Tories want people to forget all this, and just see Labour as a hotbed of anti-Semitism. Despite many Jews in the party having said and written that they have personally never experienced it in the Labour party.

But it’s a good smear against Labour, and Corbyn, and everything he has done for Jewish Brits as well as his desire for a just treatment of the Palestinians. And that’s what Arkush, Goldstein and their friends in the Tories are really afraid of.

A Pro-Nazi Bristol Tory MP

Yesterday I put up a piece about a pro-Fascist piece written by a Conservative MP in the pages of the Daily Mail back in the 1930s, praising Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, and the organisation’s supposed parentage in the Conservative party. The Tory urged that relations between the two organisations should become closer. This was in ‘Gracchus” book, Your MP, which also included a variety of pro-Nazi speeches and sentiments by the Anglo-German Fellowship and the Link, interwar organisations that had been set up to foster good relations with Nazi Germany, whose members naturally included pro-Nazi businessmen and Tory MPs.

One of the Tories quoted in the book as praising Hitler and urging peace with the Third Reich was the MP for Bristol West, C.T. Culverwell. The book states

His speech in the Munich debate “gave the greatest satisfaction in Berlin.” (6.10.38, Evening Standard). He said: “I ask those who hate Hitler … what has Hitler done of which we can reasonably complain? … Let us try to forget his misdeeds of the past, and the methods which, no doubt we all of us deplore, but which I suggest have been very largely forced upon him.”

A year later, when we had been at war with Hitler for twelve weeks, Mr Culverwell asked for a “peace by negotiation…. The only chance of secure and enduring peace is by negotiation, and the only opportunity is now, before the war is intensified.”

He deplored the possibility of a British victory because “the most likely result will be a strengthening of Russia, and the spread of Communism westward. I can even visualise our troops fighting side by side with the Germans to defeat the Bolshevist menace.” (30.11.39) House of Commons). (p. 13).

In the event, the victory of the Allies against Nazi Germany did lead to the spread of Communism into Eastern Europe, though mercifully it didn’t lead to the shame of British troops fighting alongside Nazi forces against the Russians. And yes, Stalin’s dictatorship and the rule of his puppets in the former Soviet bloc was horrific. It was rather less horrific than what Hitler had planned for them, however. After the Fuehrer had exterminated the Jews and Gypsies, he would have worked the Slavonic peoples of the conquered eastern territories – Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Belorussians and Great Russians – to death as slave labour. He makes this very plain in his Table Talk, where he also talks about sending in Jewish salesmen to supply them with contraceptives so they don’t breed.

I put up this piece as it’s an example of how the Tory extreme Right even got as far as my home town. It makes you wonder just what other dirty secrets the local Tories have buried away in the Constitutional clubs.

1930s Tory MP Writes in the Daily Mail about Conservatism and the BUF

It’s very notorious that the Daily Mail was solidly behind Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists in Britain, and Adolf Hitler in Germany, at least initially. Tom Pride over at Pride’s Purge about a year or so ago dug out a whole tranche of quotes of columns from the Heil celebrating and promoting the Blackshirts and the Nazis, while at the same time warning of the impending threat from Jewish immigrants and asylum seekers. This was in response to a hit-piece in the newspaper attacking Ed Milliband’s father, the Marxist academic Ralph Milliband, as ‘the Man Who Hates Britain’. For all that he hated British capitalism and its institutions, Ralph Milliband was a patriot, who fought for his adopted country in the war. As opposed to the father of one of the journos on that esteemed organ, who seemed to have enjoyed a somewhat quieter, less riskier life as its sports correspondent.

And some Tories were also very outspoken in their support for Mosley and the Blackshirts. Lt.-Col. Sir Thomas Moore was the Tory MP for Ayr Burghs. He was also a member of the notorious Anglo-German Fellowship, an interwar organisation consisting of Nazis and British, largely aristocratic, Nazi fellow-travellers, promoting peaceful relations between Britain and Hitler’s Germany. On April 25, 1934, Sir Thomas Moore published an article in Heil praising Mosley’s thugs. He wrote

Surely there cannot be any fundamental difference of outlook between the Blackshirts and their parents, the Conservatives? For let us make no mistake about that parentage … It is largely derived from the Conservative Party … surely the relationship can be made closer and more friendly?

He also praised the BUF squadristi for their ‘pride of race, love of country, loyalty’ and stated that the briefest study of the movement and the most casual examination of its members satisfy one of that it is largely derived from the Conservative . This is perhaps natural for the instincts are the same, loyalty to the throne and love of country.

And he wasn’t the only Tory MP who approved and defended Mosley. During the debate in parliament on Mosley’s interment of the first of December, 1943, Grenfell, a Labour MP, called Mosley a ‘proved enemy of the state’. The Tories’ response were cries of ‘No, no’, and ‘Not proved’. And when Grenfell asked ‘Does anybody are to stand up and say he was not an enemy of the state?’, one Tory MP, Commander Bower, the Member for Cleveland, did indeed do so, saying, ‘I do.’

From ‘Gracchus’, Your MP (London: Victor Gollancz 1944) 47, 48.

The Anglo-German Fellowship and its related organisation, The Link, were ultimately marginal organisations on the Tory fringes. But this certainly shows how far some members of the Tory party did sympathise with Hitler and Mosley. And I’ve no doubt that its an aspect of Tory history they want to suppress in order to promote the image that it was only under Churchill and the Tories that Britain stood to defeat Nazi Germany.