How Does the Ban on Teaching Anti-Capitalist and Extremist Materials Affect Mainstream Textbooks?

Yesterday, Gavin Williamson, the secretary of state for education, issued his departments guideline informing schools what they could not teach. This included materials from organisations determined to end capitalism, as well as anti-Semitic material, opposition to freedom of speech and which approves of illegal activity. The Labour Party’s John McDonnell pointed out that this would mean that it’s now illegal to teach large sections of British history and particularly that of the Labour Party, trade unions and socialism, because all these organisations at different times advocated the end of capitalism. He is, of course, right. In 1945 or thereabouts, for example, the Labour Party published an edition of the Communist Manifesto. He concluded

“This is another step in the culture war and this drift towards extreme Conservative authoritarianism is gaining pace and should worry anyone who believes that democracy requires freedom of speech and an educated populace.”

The economist and former Greek finance minister, Yanis Varousfakis, who has also written a book, The Crisis of Capitalism, also commented this guidance showed how easy it was for a country to lose itself and slip surreptitiously into totalitarianism. He said

“Imagine an educational system that banned schools from enlisting into their curricula teaching resources dedicated to the writings of British writers like William Morris, Iris Murdoch, Thomas Paine even. Well, you don’t have to. Boris Johnson’s government has just instructed schools to do exactly that.”

Quite. I wonder how the ban affects even mainstream textbooks, which included anti-capitalist or other extremist literature. For example there are any number of readers and anthologies of various political or historical writings published by perfectly mainstream publishers for school and university students. Such as the one below, Critics of Capitalism: Victorian Reactions to ‘Political Economy’, edited by Elisabeth Jay and Richard Jay, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 1986). This collects a variety of writings authors such as John Francis Bray, Thomas Carlyle, Marx and Engels, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Hill Green, William Morris and George Bernard Shaw. These texts obviously document and illustrate the reactions to the rise of economics as an academic subject in the 19th century, and several of the authors are titans of 19th century British culture, literature and political philosophy, like the art critic Ruskin, the socialist, writer and artist, William Morris, the playwright George Bernard Shaw, the liberal political philosophers John Stuart Mill and Thomas Hill Green, and Matthew Arnold, the headmast of Rugby, the author of Culture and Anarchy. This is quite apart from Marx and Engels and John Francis Bray, who was a socialist and follower of Robert Owen. Carlyle’s now largely forgotten, but he was a philosopher and historian who was massively influential in his day.

Clearly this is an entirely respectable text from a very respectable publisher for history students. But, thanks to the government’s new guidelines, you could well ask if it’s now illegal to teach it in schools, thanks to its anti-capitalist contents.

The same question also applies to very respectable histories by respectable, mainstream historians and political scientists, of extremist movements and ideologies like Fascism, Nazism, Communism and anarchism. For example, one of the books I used while studying the rise of Nazism at college was D.G. Williamson’s The Third Reich (Harlow: Longman 1982). It’s an excellent little book published as part of their Seminar Studies in History range. These are short histories of various periods in history from King John and the Magna Carta to the origins of the Second World and the Third Reich, which include extracts from texts from the period illustrating particularly aspects and events. Williamson’s book is a comprehensive history of the Nazi regime, and so includes extracts from Nazi documents like Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Goebbel’s diaries and as well as eyewitness account of Nazi war crimes and individual acts of heroism and resistance. It presents an objective account of Hitler’s tyranny including its horrors and atrocities. There is absolutely no way it, nor other books like it, could remotely be considered pro-Nazi or presenting any kind of positive assessment of Hitler’s regime.

But if schools are now forbidden from teaching anti-capitalist, anti-Semitic, racist and anti-democratic material, does this mean that they are also forbidden from using books like Williamson’s, which include the writings of the Nazis themselves to show the real nature of the regime and the motivations of the men behind it. I hope not, and Owen Jones in his tweet attacking the new guidelines quotes them. From this, it should be possible to make a distinction between texts produced by extremist organisations and extracts from them in mainstream histories or editions from mainstream publishers. According to Jones’ tweet, the guidelines state

Schools should not under any circumstances use resources produced by organisations that take extreme political stances on matters. This is the case even if the material is not extreme, as the use of it could imply endorsement or support of the organisation. Examples of extreme political stances, include, but are not limited to

1. a publicly stated desire to abolish or overthrow democracy, capitalism or end free and fair elections.

2. opposition to the right of freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, or freedom of religion and conscience.

3. the use or endorsement of racist, including anti-Semitic language or communications.

4. the encouragement or endorsement of illegal activity.

5. a failure to condemn illegal activities in their name or in support of their cause, particularly violent actions against people and property.

Responding to Jones’ tweet, Jessica Simor QC asks this very pertinent question

Do the fourth and fifth bullet points mean that schools should not accept Government money?

Good point.

I also have no doubt that the vast majority are going to be extremely careful about which organisation’s materials they use because of the danger of using extremist or otherwise inappropriate material.

But I can also how sometimes it may also be necessary for schools to use such materials in order to criticise them and educate their pupils about their dangers. For example, in the 1980s the BNP or NF tried to appeal to schoolchildren by launching a comic. Other extremists have also turned up at the school gates on occasion. When I was at school in Bristol during the ’81/2 race riots, a White agitator with a beard like Karl Marx’s turned up outside the school entrance with a megaphone trying to get the kids to join in. We ignored him and the headmaster next day in assembly said very clearly that any child who did join the rioting would be expelled.

Nazis are also known for lying and deliberately distorting history. If some Nazi group, for example, produced a pamphlet aimed at schoolchildren and teachers found it being passed around the playground one of the actions they could take, as well as simply banning it and punishing any kid who tried to promote it, might be for a suitably qualified teacher to go through it, pointing out the deliberate lies. When Hitler himself seized power, one Austrian university lecturer embarrassed the fuhrer by showing his students how Hitler took his ideas from the cheap and grubby neo-Pagan literature published in the back streets of Vienna. One of these pamphlets claimed that the ancient Aryans had possessed radio-electric organs that gave them superpowers like telepathy. I think it was highly unlikely that anyone listening to this professor’s lectures on Hitler ever came away with the idea that Hitler had some deep grasp of the essential forces of human biology and and natural selection.

I see absolutely no point to this legislation whatsoever. Teachers, parents and educators are already careful about what is taught in schools. In the past few years most incidents of this type have come from fundamentalist religious schools. These have mostly been Muslim schools, which have been caught teaching their students to hate Christians, Jews and non-Muslims, but there was also a Jewish school which became the centre of controversy for its opposition to homosexuality. In the 1980s Thatcher and the right-wing press ran scare stories about Communist teachers indoctrinating students with evil subversive subjects like peace studies. I am not aware that anyone with extreme left-wing, Communist or Trotskite views has been trying to indoctrinate children. But there are concerns about Black Lives Matter, which I have heard is a Marxist organisation. If that is the case, then the guidelines seem to be an attempt to ban the use of their materials. BLM did produce materials for a week of action in schools, which was thoroughly critiqued by Sargon of Gasbag, aka Carl Benjamin, the sage of Swindon and the man who broke UKIP. Sargon has extreme right-wing Conservative views himself, though I honestly don’t believe that he is genuinely racist and his criticisms of the BLM school material was reasonable. Williamson’s guidelines look like a badly thought out attempt to stop them being used without causing controversy by tackling the organisation’s anti-racism or its critique of White society.

But it also marks the growing intolerance of the Tories themselves and their determination that schools should be used for the inculcation of their own doctrines, rather than objective teaching that allows children to come to their own. Way back in the 1980s Thatcher tried to purge the universities of Marxists by passing legislation making it illegal for them to hold posts in higher education. They got round it by making a subtle distinction: they claimed to be Marxian rather than Marxist. By which they argued that they had Marxist culture, but weren’t actually Marxists. It’s a legal sleight of hand, but it allowed them to retain their teaching posts.

These new guidelines look like an extension of such previous legislation in order to preserve capitalism from any kind of thorough critique. Even when, as the peeps Mike quotes in his article, show very clearly that it is massively failing in front of our eyes.

Schools are now for indoctrination, not education, as teaching of non-capitalist ideology is forbidden

Duce Trump Fascistizes American Education

Yesterday Mike put up a piece about Donald Trump’s proposal to attack the ‘liberal indoctrination of America’s youth’ by making American education even more patriotic. Trump made his announcement in a Constitution Day speech at the White House Conference on American History at the National Archives Museum. CNN quoted the Orange Generalissimo as saying:

“We must clear away the web of twisted lies in our schools and classrooms and teach our children the magnificent truth about our country. We want our sons and daughters to know that they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world,” Trump said.

He also denounced the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for its aim to teach American students about slavery, ‘toxic propaganda’.

Trump is instead going to launch a national commission to promote patriotic education, which will be called the 1776 Commission.

Mike and a number of the peeps on Twitter naturally aren’t impressed, making the obvious comparison to the Hitler Youth, the perverted Nazi version of the boy scouts.

https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/09/18/donaldtrump-accused-of-launching-us-version-of-hitleryouth/

In fact, it looks far more to me like the way Mussolini’s Fascists and the Nazis reformed the Italian and German school system to indoctrinate their countries’ young people with their perverted ideas and values. For example, Declaration 1 of the Italian Fascist School Charter of 1939 states

Schools are the cornerstone of the solidarity that binds together all social forces, from the family to the corporation to the party. They shape the human and political conscience of new generations in the moral, political and economic unity of the Italian nation whose full realization is found in the fascist state.

Fascist schooling has as its aim to introduce a popular culture inspired by the eternal values of the Italian race and its civilisation, into the realm of practice by means of study (understood as the shaping of mature human subjects). Through the promotion of work, schools bring this culture to bear on the concrete activities carried out by the trades, arts, professions, sciences and armed forces.

Olivia E. Sears, trans., ‘Excerpts from the School Charter: The Twenty-Nine Declarations: Principles, Goals and Methods of Fascist Schools (1939)’, in Jeffrey T. Schnapp, ed., A Primer of Italian Fascism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 2000), 314-7, p. 314.

I don’t think Trump’ll go as far as the Nazis in their reform of the German education. They introduced special courses on the origins of the Nazi party and biology, stressing Mendelian genetics. I also don’t think that, unlike the Nazis, he’ll start issuing school leavers with a 10 point eugenics plan for their lives, telling them ‘health is a precondition of eternal beauty – choose not a playmate but a comrade for marriage – wish for as many children as possible’. Though Toby Young’s a supporter of eugenics, so you wonder about him. Trump also won’t go as far as introducing the history syllabus suggested in the Nazi National Socialist Educator, in which senior secondary schoolchildren were to be taught that everything from the industrial unrest and profiteering of pre-First World War Germany, it’s defeat and the chaos and dismemberment afterwards were all caused by the Jews. In weeks 25-28 on that course the poor souls got to be taught about Adolf Hitler and National Socialism, declared to be ‘Judah’s Foe!’. In weeks 33-6 to they had ‘National Socialism at grips with crime and the underworld’ foisted on them, which was supposed to teach them about ‘Jewish instigators of murder’. The course finally ended with ‘Germany’s youth at the helm! The victory of faith.’ This was described as ‘The last fight against Judah’. The syllabus recommended the appropriate reading matter for each section. For Adolf Hitler this included Mein Kampf, and at the end included the Reich Party Congress.

(See ‘A Nazi History Syllabus’ in D.G. Williamson, The Third Reich (Harlow: Longman 1982) p. 86.)

I bet the poor kids could hardly contain their boredom. On the other hand, Trump’s supporters and cabinet officials also included members of the White supremacist Alt Right, some of whom were anti-Semites. It’s a good question then, what they’d like to inflict on the minds of America’s kids.

History can be a particularly controversial area because of its role in shaping national identity and self-image. That’s especially true when it comes to issues of race and persecution. And that’s not confined to America. A few years ago one of the Conservative Australian politicos caused a furor when he declared that he was sick of the ‘black armband’ view of Australian history. By which he meant that Australians should constantly be taught about and feel guilty for the genocide of the Aboriginal people. The Tories would like to do the same thing with our education system. Michel Gove a few years ago also managed to annoy people, when he said he didn’t want the ‘Blackadder’ view of the First World War taught. Which neglects the fact that Blackadder is very definitely comedy.

The Tories want to impose on British schoolchildren a flag-waving, patriotic view of our country’s past and what it did around the world. But this would be to falsify history. Historians recognise that you can never get to an absolutely objective view history. But nevertheless, that is what you aim for as far as is possible. And you need to understand the history behind present-day political and social movements in order to make sense of them. You don’t have to be supporter of Black Lives Matter, for example, to recognise that it’s a powerful movement that does have the support of very many people, and that the movement’s rise can be explained through the history of persecution of American and British Blacks.

Trump’s announcement also seems to follow some of the movements among the local, state schoolboards in the US. A few years ago the Republican administration in Arizona voted to take the civil rights movement of the school syllabus, arguing that it was decisive or some such nonsense. What did they decide to replace it with? Readings from the speeches of Ronald Reagan. We’re almost back to Nazi Germany and the enforced reading of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in schools, and the various other wretched dictatorships around the world, whose citizens had to consume their leader’s literary efforts. Like Chairman Mao and his little red book in China. Reagan at least praises freedom and democracy, but the reality for the South American victims of the American empire was Fascism and mass murder during his tenure of the White House.

A week or so ago Trump banned the teaching of critical race theory to the police and other departments of the American state. And I think he was quite right. Critical race theory states, quite overtly, that all Whites are racist and that any institution established by Whites is therefore automatically discriminatory to people of colour. It is itself a nasty, racist doctrine that should have no place being taught for the same reason that White supremacist ideology shouldn’t either. But Trump’s demand that American schooling should be even more patriotic is wrong and deeply troubling.

He seems to want Americans to support their country ‘right or wrong’. Which brings to my mind a line from the 1980s British space detective series Star Cops. Interviewing a suspect, the hero Nathan Spring remarks of the other’s patriotism, ‘My country right or wrong, eh?’

‘There are worse philosophies.’

‘Yes, most of them start with that one.’

It’s the same with Trump’s view of history. This is another, troubling move towards Fascism with ideology taught as fact. It is not education. It is indoctrination and propaganda.

Shame of Jewish Chronicle’s Attack on Letter Written by Jewish Labour Supporters

Just like the rest of the Conservative establishment, just when you think the Jewish Chronicle can’t go any lower, they do. This afternoon Mike put up a piece reporting and commenting on a story from the Skwawkbox about that rag’s attempts to discredit a letter published in the Sunday Times written by 12 Holocaust survivors in support of the Labour party and its leader, Jeremy Corbyn. As part of its attempt to rebut the letter, the JC has tried attack the credentials of one its signatories. This individual, it claimed, couldn’t be a proper Holocaust survivor because they left Germany in 1939 when they were two years old.

But as Steve Walker of the Skwawkbox and Mike in his article point out, this claim is nonsense as the definition of Holocaust survivor used by the Yad Vashem centre in Jerusalem is any Jew, who lived for any time under Nazi domination and survived. And that definition must therefore include those, who lived in Germany in the ’30s.

I suspect here that the Jewish Chronicle probable considers a Holocaust survivor as someone who survived the the system slaughter of the Jews carried out under the Final Solution from 1942 until the end of the War. However, the Nazis began their persecution of Jews and other ethnic, religious and political groups almost from the moment Hitler seized power in 1933. The Boxheim scandal of 1931 showed that the Nazis were intending to set up concentration camps, and the first at Esterwegen and Dachau were established in 1933. By August 1941, four months before the infamous Wannsee Conference of January 1942, there were 10 main camps with 25 satellites. In April 1933 there was a boycott of Jewish businesses and legislation was passed expelling Jews from the civil service and the universities. This was followed in October by the passage of the Reich Chamber of Culture and the Press Law, which prepared from the removal of the Jews from journalism. 1935 saw the passage of the infamous Nuremberg Laws and the Reich Citizenship Law, which restricted German citizenship only to full-blooded gentile Germans. Marriage and extra-marital sex between Jews and non-Jews were forbidden. This was followed by legislation in 1937 permitting Jewish businesses to be confiscated without any legal justification. All German anti-Semitic legislation was applied to Austria after that country was annexed in 1938. This was succeeded by further laws passed in April demanding the registration of Jewish wealth, the Munich synagogue was destroyed in June, and the Nuremberg in August. That same month Hitler issued a decree demanding that all male Jews should be called ‘Israel’ and all female ‘Sarah’. In October all Jewish passports had to be stamped with the letter ‘J’ for Jude, the German for Jew, and 17,000 Polish Jews were expelled from Germany. After the assassination of the German diplomat Ernst von Rath by Herschl Grynszpan in Paris came the horrific pogrom of Kristalnacht. 20,000 German Jews were imprisoned as businesse, homes and synagogues were attacked and looted. Further decrees expelled the Jews from the economy and demanded them to pay a collective fine of 12,500 million marks to pay for the destruction. At the same time, Jewish students were expelled from schools. In December, non-Jews were allowed to take over formerly Jewish companies. In April 1939 all Jewish valuables were confiscated and the law on tenancies passed, which supposed to force Jews to live together in ‘Jewish Houses’. In September the curfew was introduced forbidding Jews from being out after dark, and all their radios were confiscated in order to prevent ‘treachery’. The first deportations of Jews from Germany, mainly from Pomerania in what is now northern Poland, began the next year in February 1940.

See: D.G. Willliamson, The Third Reich (Harlow: Longman 1982) pp. 39-40.

James Taylor and Warren Shaw, A Dictionary of the Third Reich (London: Grafton Books 1988), ‘Anti-Semitism’, pp. 37-8; ‘Concentration Camps’, 88-91; ‘Crystal Night’, 92-3; ‘Jews in Nazi Germany’, pp. 190-2; ‘Nuremberg Laws’, 261.

It’s therefore very clear that even before the commencement of the Final Solution in 1941/2 Jews were under immense persecution in Germany and then Austria. A Times journalist reported that the situation in the latter was so desperate that some Jews were contemplating suicide. See The Faber Book of Protest. And the entry for ‘Final Solution’ in Taylor and Shaw, above, states that it is still uncertain whether the term ‘resettlement’ was also used as a euphemism for murder when it was used of the Jews in the late 1930s. (p. 126).

Mike also notes in his article the Ha’avara Agreement signed between Nazi Germany and the German Federation of Zionists to send Jews to Israel, making the point that the only reason the Federation signed the agreement was fear of Nazi persecution. It allowed the escape of 60,000 Jews to Palestine, then under the British Mandate, who are therefore also Holocaust survivors.

The short-lived collaboration between the Zionists and Nazis were what allowed the witch-hunters to smear and demand the suspension of Ken Livingstone. However, it is verifiable fact, documented by Zionist historians of the Holocaust like David Ceserani, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Centre, and mentioned in Taylor and Shaw, who write

At the outset the Nazis had tried to drive the Jews out of German living space, and were briefly in collaboration with the zionist movement. (p. 38).

Mike also believes that the Jewish Chronicle’s article may itself be anti-Semitic. He writes

In fact, the JC piece may itself be described as anti-Semitic. The IHRA working definition of anti-Semitism includes among its examples “denying the fact, scope, mechanisms… or intentionality of… the Holocaust”, and the accusation in this piece certainly does so.

He also states that the Jewish Chronicle has tried to suggest falsely that many of the signatories didn’t know what they signing. But they did, and some even suggested alterations. Mike concludes

What a weak response from people who have trumpeted their righteousness for years! And what will they try next?

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/03/19/mainstream-bid-to-take-back-initiative-from-anti-witch-hunt-campaigners-with-lies-may-be-anti-semitic/

I don’t know what the witch-hunters will try next, but it’s going to be foul. They’ve already shown they’re not averse to falsifying history, as John Mann did when he denied that Hitler signed any agreement with the Zionists. Just as they have shown they abuse and smear their Jewish opponents using rhetoric that would be unhesitatingly denounced as anti-Semitic if used by non-Jews. But they are given a free pass on this by a complicit British establishment and media.

Moeller van den Bruck, the Nazis and Revolutionary Conservatism

I’m published many articles on this blog attacking the claim that Nazism was a form of socialism. It’s essentially a Conservative smear, intended to put people off anything remotely socialist, like state medical care, strong trade unions, an extensive and effective welfare state or the nationalisation of important industries, by associating these policies with the horrors of the Third Reich. The standard arguments for the socialist nature of the Nazi party is that they called themselves socialists and there were socialist elements in the 1922 Nazi party programme. In practice, however, Hitler was very firmly for private industry and was only willing to consider nationalisation if a business or agricultural estate was failing. He considered businessmen part of the biological elite following Social Darwinist ideology, and definitely did not want the workers to share in the profits of the companies they worked for. He was also bitterly opposed to ‘Marxist’ socialism, which meant not only Communism but the reformist socialism of the SPD, anarchism and the trade unions. The anti-capitalist elements of Nazi ideology were based on the Italian Fascist corporate state, which had its roots in syndicalism, but also in Italian Nationalism. And even then the Nazis in power did not create anything resembling the Italian corporatist system.

But aside from styling themselves ‘socialist’ to steal the clothes of the genuinely socialist parties and movements, the Nazis were also strongly influenced by extreme right-wing radical ideologues, who saw themselves as Conservatives. One of these was Moeller van den Bruck, whose 1923 book, The Third Reich, provided the Nazis with the name of their new order. Hitler met van den Bruck a year before the book’s publication, and was greatly impressed. So impressed that he wanted van den Bruck and himself to work together. But van den Bruck refused. Van den Bruck also called for a form of patriotic, indigenous German socialism, but considered himself a revolutionary Conservative. Noel O’Sullivan describes his views on pp. 144-7 of his book Fascism (London: J.M Dent & Sons 1983). He writes of van den Bruck’s view of Conservatism and revolution

Moeller’s starting-point, like that of other radical conservatives, was the belief that the only relevant form of conservative doctrine in the modern world is one which begins by accepting and embracing revolution, instead of by rejecting or suppressing it. ‘Conservatism and revolution co-exist in the world today’, Moeller wrote, with the result that the task now is to evolve ‘a conservative revolutionary thought as the only one which in a time of upheaval guarantees the continuity of history and preserves it alike from reaction and from chaos’. In the same context, he explained that ‘conservatism and revolution would destroy each other, if the conservative had not … the political wisdom to recognise that conservative goals may be attained even with revolutionary postulates and by revolutionary means’. The essence of the new, radicalised conservatism, then, is that it ‘seizes directly on the revolution, and by it, through it and beyond it saves the life of Europe and of Germany’. (pp.144-5).

On the following pages he describes the similarity between Moeller’s radical conservatism and Nazism. These were

1. Revolutionary conservatism was not the ideology of a party, but an entire worldview.
2. Revolutionary conservatism has no doctrine, but was a ‘war for life, for the nation’s freedom’.
3. Revolutionary conservatism was against rationalism and thus parliamentary democracy, capitalist economics and Bolshevik socialism.
4. This was to be achieved through a native, corporate German socialism which had descended from the remote past in the form of guilds and professional bodies.

This last point seems to me to be an attempt to find a suitable model from German history for corporate state of the type Mussolini was creating in Italy.

O’Sullivan then goes on to discuss how radical conservatism like van den Bruck’s could easily lead into Nazis, and van den Bruck’s reasons for rejecting the older, traditional form of conservatism. This was the older conservative ideal was too static to gain the support of masses. Hence the fall of the Second Reich of Bismarck and the Kaiser. The Third Reich, however, would have as its task the conquest of the political apathy of the masses. O’Sullivan concludes

In this respect, the affinity between the Nazi ideal, on the one hand, and Moeller’s vision of a ‘conservative revolution’ which could create a Third Reich, on the other, needs no comment: both envisaged a Third Reich based on the activist fervour of the masses. (p. 147).

Clearly van den Bruck’s revolutionary conservatism differs considerably from modern, parliamentary conservatism. Van den Bruck’s conception of it was an attempt to create a revolutionary, socialistic form of the old conservative opposition to political liberalism, based as this was on parliamentary democracy, laissez-faire capitalism, and ‘Bolshevik socialism’, which meant everything from Communism to democratic, reformist socialism. Modern Conservatism, however, has borrowed considerably from 19th century Liberalism in its promotion of free trade capitalism and parliamentary democracy, even if this latter is becoming increasingly restricted through legislation designed to keep the poor and ethnic minorities from voting under the pretext of combating voter fraud. On the other hand, modern Conservatism still retains the vehement hostility to trade unions and genuine socialist politics, which are being condemned by the right on both sides of the Atlantic as ‘cultural Marxism’. And there is a section of the Tory party, whose views and membership frequently intersect with the overtly Fascist parties and organisations.

This therefore poses a problem for those, who maintain that the Nazis must be socialists, because they claimed they were. By that standard, the conservative element in Nazism must also be taken seriously and accepted, because Moeller van den Bruck, whose ideas paralleled theirs and which they partly adopted, saw himself as a Conservative, albeit of a radical, revolutionary type. But don’t expect anyone in the Republican Party in America and the Tories over here to do so. Despite their support for Fascist monsters like Pinochet and other Latin American butchers and torturers, they’re very keen to deny they have any connection to real Fascism, which is really just socialism. At least, for the purposes of public propaganda.

Israel Is Doing to the Palestinians What the Nazis Did to the Poles

One of the methods the Israel lobby uses to silence comparisons between their decades long maltreatment and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and the Nazis’ persecution of the Jewish people, culminating in the Shoah – the Holocaust – to proclaim very loudly that such comparisons are hurtful and particularly offensive to them as Jews, the Nazis’ victims. This doesn’t mean that the comparisons aren’t there. Critics of Israel have pointed out that Israel’s policies towards the Arabs certainly does resemble the Nazi persecution of the Jews up until 1942, when Hitler and the rest of his murderous gang decided on the infamous ‘Final Solution’. The Conservatives and other, self-proclaimed opponents of ‘Political correctness’ have made it very clear that hurt feelings should not be used to silence plain speaking and honest debate. This is true, although by plain speaking it usually means standing up for the type of people, who see nothing wrong with using racist epithets and making very racist remarks about Blacks, Asians and any other ethnic groups they don’t like. See the mouthings of the Daily Mail on this issue for further information.

But the Jews weren’t the only people the Nazis regarded as subhuman. They also despised the Slavonic peoples of Eastern Europe. Hitler made it very clear that in his invasion of Poland, Ukraine and Russia, he was merely continuing the medieval ‘Drang Nach Osten’, or ‘Drive/ Penetration to the East’ of the German medieval kings to conquer the Slav tribes. Prussia was one such state to be Germanised through conquest during the Middle Ages. The Pruzzi, from whom the German state took its name, were a Baltic tribe, and the area was also occupied by the Wends, a Slav people, whose language still survives today around the town of Cotbus in the former East Germany. They also waged war against the Poles. This finally ended with the collapse of Poland in the 17th century, and its annexation by Prussia, Austria and the Russian Empire.

Hitler’s plan for the conquered eastern European territories was to establish a series of German colonies in areas seized from the indigenous peoples. In those areas free of colonisation, the Slav peoples were to be reduced to an uneducated, peasant class, who would provide their German masters with foodstuffs.

D.G. Williamson, in his book The Third Reich (Harlow: Longman 1982) writes

Hitler’s primary aim in eastern Europe was to found a series of new German colonies. In the former Polish territory, which had been annexed by the Reich in 1939 a start was made in resettling German refugees from the Baltic States and eastern Poland, which had reverted to Russian rule in 1939-40. By 1943 the RKFDV had expelled about a million Jews and Poles and brought in roughly the equivalent number of ethnic Germans, of whom only about half were settled on the land. The remainder spent the war in refugee camps. Hitler wished to reduce the Polish population to a semi-illiterate mass whose main function would be to serve the interests of Greater Germany, and to allow the economy to deteriorate into what he called ‘the Polish chaos’. (p. 63).

Further information on the Nazi ethnic cleansing and enslavement of the Poles is provided by Norman Davies in his book, Heart of Europe: A Short History of Poland (Oxford: OUP 1984). He writes

As a result of the September Campaign, the whole of Poland passed under the occupation of Nazi and of Soviet forces. the Polish government and High Command took refuge in Romania, and on 30th September, a new Government was constituted abroad under General Sikorski, first in France, and later in England. On the western side of the Nazi-Soviet demarcation line along the Bug and the San, the Germans established a ‘General Government’ with its headquarters in Cracow. May districts of pre-war Poland, including Suwalki, West Prussia, Wielkopolska, and Upper Silesia, were directly incorporated into the Reich. (P. 65).

According to the outlines of the Generalplan-Ost, the Nazi aimed to redistribute the entire population between the Oder and the Dneiper. German settler were to be introduce by the million. the Poles were destined either for Germanisation where suitable, or for expulsion beyond the Urals. The residual Slavs were to be turned into a pool of half-educated slave labourers. Inferior or useless human beings-Jews, gypsies, recalcitrant prisoners of war, imbeciles and invalids-were to be eliminated….

German resettlement schemes were already under way in West Prussia,, where 750,000 Polish peasants had ben expelled to make way for Germans transferred from the Baltic States. Now the same methods began to be applied in central Poland, notably in the region of Zamosc. In 1942-3, over 300 villages were cleared in this region alone. There remained 400 villages intact simply because the SS could not spare the manpower to clear them. The evictions were attended by unspeakable burnings, beatings and butchery. The well-known fate of the one Bohemian village of Lidice, where 143 men were murdered by a Nazi reprisal order, was visited on Poland not once, but hundreds of times over.
(Pp. 69-70).

Map of Nazi occupied Poland, from Davies’ Heart of Europe, page.69.

Okay, there are some major differences between the Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, like the Nazis and the Nazi occupation of Poland, quite apart from the fact that they haven’t set up death camps to murder them as they did to Polish Jews. The Israelis aren’t interested in retaining the Palestinians as an enslaved peasant class. They just want to expel them. But this has been done through massacre, land seizures and horrific persecution. And Gaza has been compared to a wartime Jewish ghetto.

I am in no doubt that such comparisons will be just as unpalatable to the Zionist lobby in this country, as the comparisons to the Nazi persecution of the Jews before 1942 and the ‘Final Solution’ are. But that does not mean that they aren’t there, and valid.

The truth often hurts, but real history, not propaganda, is about facing up to them, to explain and explore history and recognise what really happened in the past. Not to purvey cosy, patriotic myths about what we’d like to believe happened. This applies to everyone, regardless of nationality, religious creed or race.

Screaming that the comparisons between the Nazi occupation of Poland and the ethnic cleansing and enslavement of its people, or claims that such comparisons must be anti-Semitic aren’t arguments. It’s just more libel and abuse. It’s time for Israel’s supporters to wake up to the facts, and stop their support for Israeli imperialism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing.

Germany, the Rise of the Nazis and the Commemoration of the

I think yesterday was Holocaust Memorial Day, when the world, or at least, Europe gathers to remember Hitler’s extermination of the Jews in the hope that the commemoration of this most appalling of atrocities will never be repeated. There was a piece about on the radio today, in which one woman pointed out that Hitler felt he could go ahead with it with impunity because the Allies in the First World War had made no move to prevent or protest against the genocide of the Armenians by the Turks. Hitler himself asked, ‘Who remembers the Armenians?’ And so the world remembers the Holocaust in order to prevent it ever recurring.

I’ve blogged a lot about Nazi crimes and atrocities in eastern Europe in the past few days. As I said, I’m not trying to stir up resentment against the Germans, but to show how authoritarian Britain and the other countries are going as our constitutional freedoms are sacrificed in the interests of national security and the surveillance state. I’ve also blogged about the Nazi persecution and mass-murder of the Slav peoples of eastern Europe, particularly because Fascism and the Far Right is also growing over there. No-one with any self-respect should have anything to do with any Fascist or Nazi party, and especially not the Slav peoples, such as Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Belorussians, Ukrainians and Russians. After the Nazis had conquered their countries, the Nazis intended to deport them from an area extending from part of Poland into the Ukraine and Russia. 30 million Slavs were to be slaughtered, and the rest were to work as slave labourers cultivating agricultural produce for their German masters. About seven million people were rounded up to work as slave labourers in Germany, while another seven were forced to work for the occupying Nazis in their countries. Himmler compared the process to the Western European occupation and colonisation of Africa. He declared that eastern Europe ‘was our Africa, and the Slavs are our negroes’.

I don’t believe that the rise of the Nazis was inevitable, or that it was the natural culmination of German history. Indeed, in the 19th century there was less anti-Semitism in Germany than in France or England, and some of the pseudo-scientific elements of Nazism – the perverted racial theory and eugenics, were part of the general intellectual climate in the West at the time. The Nazis boasted that they had invented nothing. They based their own eugenics legislation on contemporary American laws intended to prevent the biologically unfit from breeding, while their 19th century predecessors in the various anti-Semitic organisations also based their demands for legislation separating Jews and gentiles on American laws governing Chinese immigrant workers.

Nor did all Germans quietly acquiesce as the Nazis seized power. In the last democratic elections held before the Nazi seizure of power, the Nazis themselves only won 44% of the vote. They only gained a bare majority through their alliance with the Nationalists, who only polled 8%. And this was after a campaign of intimidation throughout Germany and the banning of the German Communist Party, the KPD. The mainstream German Socialist party, the SPD, continued to resist the Nazis until the very end. They only lost a single seat, and ended up with 120 in the German parliament. The Catholic Centre Party, another of the major pillars of the Weimar coalition governments, actually increased the number of seats they held by three to 73. In the end, however, it was only the SPD, which voted against the Enabling Act. Otto Wels read out the SPD’s gave the party’s farewells to the previous era of Human Rights and humanity and gave its good wishes to political prisoners and the enemies of the regime, who even then were being rounded up and put in the camps. The address’ conclusion ran:

At this historic hour, we German Social Democrats pledge ourselves to the principles of humanity and justice, of freedom and Socialism. No Enabling Law can give you the power to destroy ideas which are eternal and indestructible. You yourself have declared your commitment to Socialism. The Socialist Law [of 1878] did not succeed in destroying Social Democracy. From this new persecution too German Social Democracy can draw new strength. We send greetings to the persecuted and oppressed. We greet our friends in the Reich. their steadfastness and loyalty deserve admiration. The courage with which they maintain their convictions and their unbroken confidence guarantee a brighter future.

There have been problems after the War with the persistence of Neo-Nazi groups, like the National Democratic Party and the German Republican Party. There has also been the injustice that many Nazis did escape and were not prosecuted for their crimes against humanity. And one of the complaints by some foreign writers was that the collective guilt about the Nazi past made many Germans unwilling to discuss it with their children, leaving some unprepared when they encountered it and its legacy.

On the other hand, the Germans have enacted legislation to protect democracy against the rise of totalitarianism. Under the terms of the Basic Law, the Grundgesetz, the only parties and political movements which are permitted are those which recognise the basic principles of democracy. And it has been invoked to ban neo-Nazi movements, most notably in the 1970s when it was used to outlaw the National Democrats. And there have been exhibitions and books discussing the Third Reich, its rule through fear and intimidation, and commemorating its victims.

One such is the book at the top of the page, Topographie des Terrors: Gestapo, SS und Reichssicherheitshauptamt auf dem >>Prinz-Albrecht-Gelaende<< Eine Dokumentation, ‘Topography of Terror: Gestapo, SS and Reich Security Main Office at the >>Prinz-Albrech-Site<< A Documentation (Berlin: Verlag Wilmuth Arenhoevel 1988)'. This was published as part of an exhibition following negotiations about the redevelopment of the site and the commemoration of its past as the headquarters of the Nazi security organisations in 1979/80. Mike brought my copy of the book back with him when he went there with his old college.

The book has the following chapters:

Introduction.
1. Headquarters of the SS State: Addresses and Institutions.
2. History of that party of the City and the Building.
2.1 A quite district on the City’s Edge (1732-1880)
2.2 The Quarter’s Career.
2.3 Departure and Crisis

3. Institutions of Terror
3.1. The Reichsfuhrer of the SS and his Reich
3.2. Seizure of Power and Early Terror
3.3 The Secret State Police
3.4 The Reichfuhrer-SS’ Security Service
3.5 Reich Security’s Main Office
3.6 ‘House Prison’ and Political Prisoners (1933-39)
3.7 ‘Protection’.
3.8. Concentration Camps.

4. Persecution, Annihilation, Resistance
4.1 The Fate of the German Jews 1933-38.
4.2 The Fate of the German Jews 1939-45
4.3 The Fate of the Gypsies.
4.4. Nazi Rule in Europe – Poland
4.5 Nazi Rule in Europe – the Soviet Union
4.6 Nazi Rule in Europe – Other Countries
4.7 Political Resistance and ‘House Prison’ (193945)

5. From Destruction to Rediscovery
5.1 Bombs and Rubble
5.2 The First Year after the War.
5.3 History Made Invisible.
5.4 The Return of the Repressed.

6. Appendix
6.1 Bibliography
6.2. Abbreviations
6.3 Lists of Texts
6.4 Lists of Illustrations
6.5 Register of Names.

Among the illustrations are the following pictures of the Reich’s atrocities.

Forced labour at Neugamme Concentration Camp

Roll-call at Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

Gypsies being deported.

Pogrom initiated by members of Einsatzgruppe A in Kaunas/ Kowno.

In addition to the well-known opponents of the regime, many ordinary Germans also risked their lives to rescue the Jews. Some 5,000 Jews survived in Berlin after being hidden by gentile friends and neighbours. One Jewish woman left this memoir of how she was hidden by a Germany lawyer.

I was constantly sent for by the Gestapo. In 1942 these interrogation sessions became even more threatening and therefore went underground. In the middle of May 1942 I went to Silesia and stayed in several places without officially registering myself. I lived in Breslau, Gleiwitz, Hindenburg, in the countryside and Spahlitz (in the district of Oels). It was here that I remained hidden for months at the house of a German lawyer … (Later after I was arrested this brave amn had another Jewish woman hidden in his house)…

(Wiener Library, Eye Witness Accounts, PIIc, no. 153. In D.G. Williamson, The Third Reich (Harlow: Longman 1982) p. 95.

The horrors of the Third Reich need to be remembered, but so too does the heroism of the people, who did their level best to stop, and at least save those they could from its barbarism.