I’ve put up several pieces already this week commenting on and critiquing some of the videos put up by mad internet radio host Alex Belfield. Belfield is very much a man of the right, who rails against ‘namby-pamby pinko liberal Guardian-reading lefty-twirlies’ and entitled ‘whippersnappers’ in just about every one of his videos. I very much do not share his political views, especially when he demands the privatisation of the NHS. But sometimes he says something with which I agree and believe to be absolutely correct.
This is one of them. In his piece below, Belfield expresses his concerns about the police’s announcement that they will be increasing the use of computer facial recognition systems. Belfield’s worried about the privacy issue here. He points out that it will be used to track you on the motorway, and that it is also being used in some of the cashless stores now being trialled. In these stores, you are watched by the CCTV cameras and the machines make note of your purchases. You walk out of the store without handing over cash, but simply use your card to pay. As Belfield points out, the police can use the information from facial recognition systems and CCTV footage to reconstruct your day, including where you went and what you bought. And it’s not just adults being targeted. Critics have attacked plans to introduce CCTV surveillance in schools.
These are real, pressing issues that have been around for a long time. Back in the late 90s at the beginnings of Blair’s reign I read a book I’d taken out of the library which criticised the use of CCTV cameras and the electronic bourse. This was supposed to be the new form of cashless payment. Everyone would have a card which contained their biometric details and money, which would be used to pay for everything from groceries to trips on the bus. Tory Tony Blair was very much interested in forcing a biometric ID card on us all. The book and organisations such as Privacy International argued that this would lead to a surveillance state. A recent edition of Panorama, ‘Are You Worried Yet, Human?’, examined dangerous developments in AI. These included computer systems that could pilot jets remotely so that they performed better than when they were flown by human pilots. But most of the programme concentrated on the threat posed by computer surveillance. The Chinese are building computer systems and centres to gather data so that their citizens are constantly monitored. The programme spoke to Chinese dissidents who had been arrested and detained using such computer-collected footage.
This is exactly the type of totalitarian society depicted in Science Fiction dystopias. The first season titles of the classic BBC SF series, Blake’s 7, started with a CCTV camera followed by a black-suited soldier, faced hidden by helmet visor and gas mask. This was a trooper of the Federation, the totalitarian galactic empire against which Blake and his crew of former criminals fought. Comics legend Alan Moore has expressed his own worries about CCTV surveillance. He has said in interviews that he deliberately put them in the Fascist Britain he depicted in V For Vendetta in order to scare readers. What worries him is that these cameras have now become completely accepted. Moore’s an anarchist, but Tory Niall Ferguson has said the same thing. He recalls coming back from China and being shocked to find CCTV surveillance being used here, but ignored and accepted by everyone.
Belfield says that these systems and cashless electronic payment are being used to track us, and to keep records of what we’ve bought by companies so they can sell us stuff. That’s only part of the story. Another reason the electronic payment is being pushed instead of cash is so that governments can use it to track what we’re purchasing and seeing if we’re doing anything illegal. Privacy International was dedicated to combating such threats to our liberty. But I’m not aware that this is anything more than the viewpoints of a small number of individuals at present. Blair was prevented from introducing biometric ID cards, but the increased use of facial recognition systems and the push towards cashless payment suggests that the people who were calling for its introduction 20 years or so ago really haven’t gone away.
Belfield is absolutely right to point out that this is a threat to our liberty. It’s just a shame that he is one of the small number of people who are doing so.
This is the video I’ve just put up on YouTube for another of the books I’ve self-published with Lulu, For A Worker’s Chamber. This argues that parliament is dominated by the rich at the expense of working people, and so we need a special parliamentary chamber to represent working people, composed of working people themselves.
Here’s the blurb I’ve put up on YouTube.
This is another book I published with Lulu. It was a written as a challenge to the domination of parliament by the rich. 75 per cent of MPs, according to a recent book, are millionaires, including company directors. As a result, parliament under Tony Blair, David Cameron and now Theresa May has passed legislation favouring the rich and big business.
The result has been the destruction of the welfare state, privatization, and increasing misery, poverty, starvation and homelessness.
The book instead argues that we need a chamber for working people, elected by working people, represented according to their professions, in order to give ordinary people a proper voice in parliament. The Labour party was originally founded in order to represent working people through the trade unions. The Chartists in the 19th century also looked forward to a parliament of tradespeople.
Later the idea became part of the totalitarianism of Fascist Italy, a development that has ominous implications for attempts to introduce such a chamber in democratic politics. But trade unions were also involved in determining economic policy in democratic post-war Europe. And local councils in the former Yugoslavia also had ‘producers’ chambers’ for working people as part of their system of workers’ self-management. Such as chamber would not replace parliamentary democracy, but should expand it.
I discuss in the video just how Tony Blair allowed big business to define government policy as directed by corporate donors, and how staff and senior managers were given government posts. He particularly favoured the big supermarkets and other firms under the Private Finance Initiative. This is extensively discussed by the Guardian journalist, George Monbiot, in his book, Captive State. I make the point that this wouldn’t be quite so bad if New Labour had also acted for working people. But it didn’t. And it has become much worse under Cameron and Tweezer. In America the corporate corruption of parliament has got to the extent that a recent study by Harvard University downgraded America from being a functioning democracy to an oligarchy. I also point out that, while I’m not a Marxist, this does bear out Marx’s view of the state as the instrument of class rule.
I discuss how the Labour party was founded to represent working people by the trade unionists in parliament, who were originally elected as part of the Liberal party, the ‘Lib-Labs’, who were then joined by the socialist societies. The Chartists at one of their conventions also saw it as a real ‘parliament of trades’ and some considered it the true parliament. I also talk about how such a chamber became part of Mussolini’s Fascism, but make the point that it was to disguise the reality of Mussolini’s personal rule and that it never actually passed any legislation itself, but only approved his. Trade unions were strictly controlled in Fascist Italy, and far greater freedom was given to the employers’ associations.
I also say in the video how trade unions were involved in democratic post-War politics through a system which brought trade unions, employers and government together. However, in order to prevent strikes, successive government also passed legislation similar to the Fascists, providing for compulsory labour courts and banning strikes and lockouts.
There are therefore dangers in setting up such a chamber, but I want to empower working people, not imprison them through such legislation. And I think that such a chamber, which takes on board the lessons in workers’ self-management from Communist Yugoslavia, should expand democracy if done properly.
This is another video from the Boston-based Real News network. It’s a report on the steady march towards the extreme right by the Polish government’s Law and Justice party, and their collaboration with Fascism and Holocaust revisionism. The country’s a member of the EU and NATO, and is bitterly hostile to Russia, from whom it has requested America provide protection. Donald Trump is thus considering building a new NATO base there, named after himself. Naturally.
The video discusses the march through Warsaw last month, November, 2018, to commemorate the centenary of Poland’s independence. 200,000 people attended. The march was, however, initially organized by the Far Right, and attended by extreme right-wing groups from all over Europe. The march was then co-sponsored by the government, and the president, Andzrei Duda, marched in front of a number of explicitly Fascist organisations.
The programme talks about this with Dr. Dovid Katz, an academic specializing in the rise of Fascism in eastern Europe, who is rightly alarmed by these developments. He states that Fascism exists in many countries, but it bodes badly for democracy when the government partners with it. He describes how the Polish government has been increasingly taking the country towards Fascism. Katz says that this is ‘so sad’ because Poland was the first major country invaded by Hitler, with no disrespect to Czechoslovakia. It’s thus particularly alarming to see Nazis marching on Poland’s hallowed national day, along with the president and thousands of other, non-Nazi people, who nevertheless felt comfortable marching with the Far Right. He pays tribute to the mayor of Warsaw, Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, who tried to prevent the march from going ahead, but was overruled by the rest of the council. As well as leading politicians, the Groaniad reported that the Polish armed forces also marched side by side with Fascist organisations like the National-Radical Camp, or ONR, the successor to a pre-War anti-Semitic organization, as well as the Italian Fascist organization, Forza Nuova.
Gronkiewicz-Waltz apparently came from the Centrist party, but her attempt to ban the march was overturned by Duda, who announced that it would go ahead as the Rightists had originally planned. A court also overturned the ban, effectively combining the government and Fascist marches. The government put a cordon of military police between the two marches, but Katz argues that this really did nothing to distance the government from the Fascists. Katz states that the governments collaborating with the Far Right, such as those in the three Baltic states, use similar tactics, but they don’t morally make any difference. He makes the point that on this sacred day, the government is showing that it’s in solidarity with people who believe in Aryan purity, who hate Jews, Blacks, Roma and gays. In other words, all the same people the Nazis hated.
The documentary notes that the Law and Justice party began as a nominally centre right party with a strong Christian orientation. Since taking power in 2015 it has moved further right. This year, 2018, it purged the supreme court of a third of its members, and reappointed their successors in October, provoking protests. It has also become increasingly nationalistic. Katz states that as centre-right party, it was ostensibly like the British Tories and American Republicans. But its far-right character has been revealed by its neutralization of democracy through the attacks on the independence of the judiciary. He states that it’s to Poland’s credit that there is a vibrant opposition which has led to the situation being covered, unlike similar events in the Baltic states.
But parallel to the attacks on democracy is the rise of ethnic nationalism and an emphasis on the racial purity of the Polish people. This has also come with a rise in anti-Semitism. The video shows a clipping from a newspaper report about a hostel that declared that it was only for Poles, Jews were forbidden. This is despite the majority of Polish having been either killed or fled during the Holocaust. In February this year, Duda passed a law criminalizing the mention of Polish complicity in the Holocaust. This effectively made Holocaust revisionism mandatory, and anyone who discussed the reality of Polish complicity in the Holocaust could be jailed for up to three years. Katz states that it is important to recognize that most Poles aren’t anti-Semites and never were. In the case of the Holocaust, a quarter of the Righteous Gentiles, the rescuers of Jews, in Europe during the Nazi era came from Poland. He also states that for hundreds of years, the Polish kingdom and then the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth provided a haven for Jews and other minorities. But these new Fascist forces are tapping into the worst forms of Polish nationalism and Roman Catholicism, which also had a deep anti-Semitic theological tradition built into them, which the Nazis were easily able to exploit. And the term ‘Christian’ here is being used as a dog-whistle for ‘ethnic Poles’. Katz states that Poland is a very ethnically homogenous country. There is no challenge to Polish ethnic identity. It’s the Far Right attempt to create and exploit problems, which don’t exist. And the real victims of this attempt to create a Fascist state are the Poles.
Katz goes on to say that Poland was different from the Baltic states and western Ukraine, in that it was the victim of the Nazis, and so has nothing to fake history about. The law banning any discussion of Polish involvement in the Holocaust was also expressed in blatantly anti-Semitic terms. In the Baltic states, however, the wording of similar laws is much more deceptive. The equivalent law in Ukraine talks about equal evaluation of totalitarian regimes. Which means that if someone says that only the Nazis committed genocide, and that the Soviet crimes, as horrific as they were, don’t constitute genocide, then they can be sent to prison. In Latvia this is five years, 2 years in Lithuania, three in Hungary and 10 in Ukraine.
The international outcry that followed the passage of Poland’s Holocaust law forced the government to amend it to make it less severe and remove the jail sentences. But this problem isn’t confined to Poland. Katz is a member of the web journal, Defending History, which tracks Holocaust revisionism in eastern Europe. They stress that Fascism is appearing elsewhere in eastern European NATO member states. The anti-Semitism in the Baltic isn’t overt – the government sponsors Jewish plaques, conferences and memorials, but there is still the Fascist emphasis on ethnic purity and the desire to falsify the history of the Holocaust.
Katz is an excellent speaker, who clearly has a deep respect for Poland and its people. He’s also right about Poland providing a refuge for the Jews during the centuries of persecution. And there are monuments in Poland to those, who helped the Jews in the Holocaust.
Poland was the victim of genocide and ethnic cleansing under the Nazis. Hitler himself said that the war against the Poles would be one of extermination. Of the gentile Christians, who were persecuted by the Nazis, the majority were Polish Roman Catholics. The Nazis despised the Slavonic peoples of eastern Europe as non-Aryan subhumans. The handbooks issued to the Hitler Youth urging them to keep themselves racially pure had diagrams showing the typical features of the peoples of Europe. Those of the Slavic peoples, beginning with the Poles, are shown has becoming increasingly east Asian, with high cheekbones and slanted eyes, until they finally merge into those of the peoples of China and the other Asian countries.
Nevertheless, there is a deep strain of anti-Semitism and xenophobia in these countries that is being exploited. I wonder how much of the trend towards Fascism in Poland is being driven by the same economic and psychological forces behind the rise of the Far Right in Hungary. Poland’s another state that had to fight for its independence against domination by the German, Austiran and Russian Empires, and was threatened by the Turkish conquest of the Balkans and expansionism from the 15th to 17th centuries. I’m left wondering if the Polish people also suffered through the collapse of Communism, like those of Russia and Hungary. And if they also, like Hungary, were badly hit by the 2008 financial crash.
And despite their affected concern with defending Jews from anti-Semitism, Israel and its lobbyists in Britain will not attack the Polish government. Because Poland, like Ukraine and Hungary, has bought Israeli arms. Thus Stephen Pollard, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, appeared in the pages of the Guardian to deny that the Law and Justice Party was anti-Semitic, because they were good friends of Israel.
One of our uncles was Polish, a man who worked his way across Europe from Germany to France until he came to Britain. He was a decent man, who worked hard to support his family. It’s horrifying that his country is going down the same path towards Fascism, and that Nazism is rising again in eastern Europe with connivance of these nations’ governments.
Everyone in the West has to join together to fight it, before it undermines all of western civilization.
On Saturday I put up a number of extracts from Robert A. Brady’s The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism (London: Victor Gollancz 1937) to show that, contrary to what the Republicans in America and the Tories in this country would have us believe Nazism was firmly capitalist, not socialist. Brady argued that Nazism was, economically, monopoly capitalism with businessmen put in charge of the economy, very much like the corporatist capitalism introduced by the Tories, the Republicans and Blair’s New Labour.
Brady also argued that the autocratic social structure of Fascism was based very much on the hierarchical structure of business and the armed forces, including the businessmen’s contempt for the low paid. He wrote
With respect first to the condition, it has been pointed out in the first chapter of this study, and illustrated in subsequent chapters, that the German business community did not depart one iota from tried and true “business principles” when they underwrote the Nazi programme. Every business practices towards its own staff the “leader” and the “authority” principles, and it undeviatingly aspires towards the “total” principle. That is to say, all officers and staff members are appointed and removed from on top entirely at the discretion of management (leader principle), and authority is from the top down, responsibility from the bottom up (authority principle). And every employer attempts to control so far as humanly possible the attitudes, beliefs, and points of view (weltanschauung) of his employees and every section of the public with which he comes in contact (total principle).
Every business establishment is, in other words, completely autocratic and completely undemocratic in structure, ideology, and procedure. It is, by the same token, completely intolerant of all opposition within or without, or of any criticism which does not redound to the advantage of the profit-making possibilities of the enterprise. The enterprise may be compelled, it is true, to make important concessions on all points, but it should not be forgotten that these are concessions, not departures from principle.
Furthermore, every employer regards the gradation of pay and authority amongst the staff over which he presides as being essentially just and sound, because each indicates the relative ability he or she possesses by the position occupied. The criteria are not productive, but acquisitive. Each is paid according to his ability to acquire or “get ahead”, not according to his contribution to output. If the two – contribution to output and contribution to acquisition – happen to go together, well and good. If they do not, it matters little, since their juxtaposition is a matter of accident, not of interdependence.
The condition of society in which the business men would rule would be that one which is natural to them. It would, as a matter of course, be centralized, autocratic, and intolerant, and it would be so constructed that each would get exactly what he deserves for the simple reason that according to the rules he deserves whatever he can get. It is the well accepted business view that most, if not all of the unemployed are shiftless, worthless, irresponsible, and undisciplined. it is taken as axiomatic that the lowest wage-earner receives all that “is coming to him,” since if he could get more by any means which does not disturb business routine it is obvious that he would. His failure is the measure of his incompetence, and with that all has been said about it that may be mentioned by gentlemen of good breeding and respectable station!
This condition is one that would normally appeal to the conventional army officer. The military is the only other completely undemocratic, completely autocratic, and completely intolerant – completely “leader”, “authoritarian”, and “totalitarian” – organization in modern society. Provided due allowance is made for recognition of the military hierarchies of “authority” and “duty” in the fascist state, it can be fitted into the pattern of the businessman’s ultima thule without a single tonal jar. The moods, attitudes, points of view, values, and appraisals of human worth are fundamentally the same.
It is for this reason that it seems so easy for the military and business hierarchies to get together as they have in Italy, Germany, Portugal, Hungary, and many other places. But the significance of this natural alliance is that the military holds the key to political power. Once the alliance takes place, fascism is here unless the elements arrayed against it-as in Spain-possess superior force. It does not follow that the army rank and file will follow their officers any more than it does that labourers will follow their employers. But, if they do, fascism is practically certain to gain the ascendancy. (pp. 335-7).
The shared values of business, the military and Fascism helps explain why the British stock exchange applauded at the news of the Fascist revolt in Spain, at least according to Orwell, and why sections of Conservative party have always overlapped with the Fascist fringe, such as the National Front and the BNP. And why the Libertarians, like the Freedom Association, formerly the National Association for Freedom, or NAAF – make your own jokes up – backed murderous Fascist regimes in South and Central America. Of course, Milton Friedman, the founder of Monetarism, Thatcher’s favourite economic theory, and the Chicago School supported right-wing dictators like General Pinochet because they reasoned that it would only be through a Fascist coup that their programme of completely destroying the welfare state and state economic interference could be implemented.
And it exactly explains the Conservative and New Labour hatred of low wage workers and the unemployed, and why Thatcher was so keen on supporting the police and military against strikers. And it’s also a very strong argument for introducing some measure of industrial democracy – workers’ control – in order to make this country truly democratic.
And this is quite apart from the imperialism that is at the heart of Fascism – the wars fought for the benefit of American and western multinationals, from the coups in Latin America to the latest, so-called humanitarian interventions in the Middle East.
We desperately need a programme like Corbyn’s, which offers both industrial democracy, and a better deal for the unemployed and those in work in Britain and an end to wars abroad. Because without it, as we’ve seen, is the road to real Fascism, as shown in the militantly racist and anti-Semitic parties gaining strength in Europe.
I found this very ominous story in today’s I, for the 12th November 2018. It seems some firms are inserting microchips into their employees, and employers’ groups and trade unions have rightly come together to condemn it. The article reads
Both the employers and trade unions representative bodies have expressed alarm at reports that UK firms are considering implanting staff with microchips for security. UK firm BioTeq says it has already fitted 150 implants while Swedish firm Biohax has claimed it is in discussions with several UK firms. (p.2).
This is deeply sinister stuff, straight out of the X-Files. Never mind the bonkers conspiracy theories about aliens inserting implants into our bodies to control us, ordinary human capitalism is beginning to do that. From the article it seems that the chips are simply there to make sure employees are who they say they are, but this is nevertheless a real totalitarian move. As it stands, employees in some companies are very closely monitored. Private Eye printed a story a few months ago about how the weirdo Barclay Twins, who own the Torygraph, wished to have motion sensors attached to their hacks desks to make sure they weren’t moving around too much. They had to abandoned this intrusive and hare-brained scheme because it was resented so much by the hacks. Nevertheless, if this goes ahead uncontested, I can see more firms adopting the practice, right up to the government. After all, what better way to cut down on crime, identity theft and illegal immigration than have everyone implanted with a microchip containing all their biographical and biometric details. Blair’s government was, after all, considering passing legislation to establish compulsory electronic identity cards carrying biometric information. And I’ve no doubt other, deeply authoritarian regimes around the world would be all too enthusiastic about adopting the policy.
It also reminds me of the one part of the millennialist beliefs held by Fundamentalist Christians about the End Times and the one world global superstate they’re afraid of. In this myth, which has been around since the 1970s, once the global Satanic dictatorship is established with the Antichrist as its head, it will order barcodes to be marked on everyone’s hands and forehead. Those who don’t have the barcodes will be unable to buy or sell. It’s how they believed the prophecy in the Book of Revelation in the Bible that the Antichrist would have everyone marked with the number 666 on their hands and foreheads would come true in the modern world.
I really don’t believe in the religious right’s millennialist fears. One interpretation of the Book of Revelation is that it’s a coded description of the persecution the early church was experiencing under the Roman Emperor Nero. Both the Romans and Jews used various number codes, in which letters of the alphabet had certain numerical values. These could be used in ordinary secular ways, as well as in number mysticism, in which people tried to discern a deeper meaning in religious or mystical texts through adding up the numerical value of particular words. 666 corresponds to ‘Neron’, a form of Nero. He’s also believed to have been the person described in the Book of Revelation as ‘the great beast’, because as a young prince, before he got into power, he and his cronies thought it was jolly japes for him to go round Rome dressed as a beast and attack people. I think this is probably the right way to interpret that part of the Bible, rather than seeing it as a literal prediction of an imminent end of the world.
But even so, when faced with reports that the firms are trying to implant their workers with microchips, and Blair and authoritarian politicians after him would like to make it compulsory for us all to carry biometric electronic identity cards, I do wonder if the Fundamentalists have a point.
In an article attacking the decision of the Green members of Brighton and Hove’s council to adopt the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism, Tony Greenstein quoted a number of senior Israeli figures – Naftali Bennett, the minister for education, Avigdor Liberman, Netanyahu’s wretched defence minister, to show how they matched Nazi pronouncements against the Jews. In so doing, they conformed to what the Israeli Orthodox religious scholar, Yeshayahu Leibowitz termed ‘Judeonazism’. Greenstein wrote
In an interview with The Times of Israel it was reported that Israel’s Education Minister, Naftali Bennett, had stated that ‘he would instruct the IDF to shoot and kill any Palestinians who cross into the country from Gaza’. When questioned as to whether or not that would also apply to children Bennett responded ‘“They are not children — they are terrorists. We are fooling ourselves. I see the photos.” Bennett says IDF should shoot to kill Gazans who cross border [8.10.18]
The statement of Bennett, who is the leader of HaBayit HaYehudi (Jewish Home), a religious settlers’ party, is that of a Nazi. It is reminiscent of Himmler’s speech to Nazi leaders in the Polish city of Posnan on October 6th 1943 when he explained why the killings had to include Jewish children: “I did not assume to have the right to exterminate the men… and have the avengers personified in the children to become adults for our children and grandchildren.”[Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, p.259]
Palestinian children to Bennett are no different from Jewish children to Himmler. To both they represent the devil in child form. That was why Israeli polymath and orthodox religious scholar, Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz described the settlers as Judeo-Nazis. Naftali Bennett is a prime example of a Judeo-Nazi. He subscribes to a racial philosophy of Jewish supremacism no different from Nazi ideology.
But under the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’ can be anti-Semitic even though Israelis regularly make such comparisons themselves. For example even Deputy Chief of Staff General Yair Golan at a Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration two years ago caused a storm when he stated that
‘If there’s something that frightens me about Holocaust remembrance it’s the recognition of the revolting processes that occurred in Europe in general, and particularly in Germany, back then – 70, 80 and 90 years ago – and finding signs of them here among us today in 2016. IDF Deputy Chief Likens ‘Revolting Trends’ in Israeli Society to pre-Holocaust Germany.
Another member of Netanyahu’s Cabinet, Defence Minister Avigdor Liberman remarked that he would like nothing more than to see the drowning of thousands of Palestinian prisoners in the Dead Sea. Again the label Judeo Nazi would be apt. His Deputy as Defence Minister, Rabbi Eli Dahan is also no slouch. In a radio interview he explained that to him Palestinians ‘“are like animals, they aren’t human.” and that “A Jew always has a much higher soul than a gentile [non-Jew] , even if he is a homosexual,”
To understand the full import of the above it is important to recognize that for Orthodox Jews being gay is an abomination which merits the death penalty, but even a gay Jew has a ‘much higher soul’ than a non-Jew. These are just some of the people who inhabit the present Israeli cabinet. Yet to call them what they are, Judeo-Nazis is anti-Semitic under the shabby, incoherent and contradictory collection of words that goes under the title of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.
Greenstein’s article contains links to a piece in the liberal Israeli paper, Haaretz, describing just how Netanyahu’s administration and the Israel it has created conforms to Professor Leibowitz’s concept, and to the Wikipedia entry on him.
Leibowitz was professor of biochemistry, organic chemistry and neurophysiology at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, as well as a prolific writer on Jewish and Western philosophy. He also passionately believed in the separation of religion from state. In a 1968 essay, ‘The Territories’, he predicted a chilling future for Israel as a totalitarian, colonialist surveillance state. According to Wikipedia, he wrote
The Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police—mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the State of Israel. The administration would suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other. There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Forces, which has been until now a people’s army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who will have become military governors, resemble their colleagues in other nations.
While the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism forbids comparing Jews to Nazis as anti-Semitic, the comparisons are there, as Greenstein has pointed out many times. And Israeli politicians, including Netanyahu’s domestic opponents, have regularly accused each other and the Israeli premier of being Nazis.
The I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism also forbids holding Israel to higher standards than other countries. This again is intended to prevent or stifle criticism of Israel and its barbarous treatment of the Palestinians. But as far back as 1905 H.G. Wells attacked Jewish racism alongside that of the English, the Germans and the Italians in his book, A Modern Utopia. The book is a quasi-science fictional description of Wells’ ideas about what would constitute the ideal state. Wells himself believed passionately in a global, world government, in which all the races of humanity would share a common language and culture, and would live, work, study and move around the globe freely in peace and harmony. The chapter ‘Race in a Modern Utopia’ is one long diatribe against racism and racial prejudice which still remains acutely relevant. It is marred only by the fact that Wells was a eugenicist, who did believe that the undeserving poor and ‘inferior’ races should be prevented from breeding. In practice, however, he felt that even those races considered inferior at the time, Australian Aborigines and the Khoisan peoples of South Africa, would still contain skilled individuals, who would be allowed to have children and contribute to this new, global civilization.
About the growing European racism in his time, he wrote
And just now, the world is in a sort of delirium about race and the racial struggle. The Briton forgetting his Defoe, the Jew forgetting the very word proselyte, the German forgetting his anthropometric variations and the Italian forgetting everything, are obsessed by the singular purity of their blood, and the danger of contamination the mere continuance of other races involves. True to the law that all human aggregation involves the spirit of opposition to whatever is external to the aggregation, extraordinary intensifications of racial definition are going on; the vileness, the inhumanity, the incompatibility of alien races is being steadily exaggerated. The natural tendency of every human being towards a stupid conceit in himself and his kind, a stupid depreciation of all unlikeness, is traded upon by this bastard science. With the weakening of national references, and with the pause before reconstruction in religious belief, these new arbitrary and unsubstantial race prejudices become daily more formidable. They are shaping policies and modifying laws, and they will certainly be responsible for a larger proportion of the wars, hardships and cruelties the immediate future holds in store for our earth. (pp. 118-9, my emphasis).
Wells’ predictions have horrifically been born out. In Africa, just a few years after Wells wrote this, the Germans embarked on a deliberate campaign to exterminate the Herrero in Africa. Then there were the Armenian massacres by the Turks, which convinced Hitler that he could murder the Jews without consequence from the other nations. And even after the War, Mosley was drawing on respected scientists to show that certain races were inferior, and therefore Blacks and other peoples should not be allowed to mix and intermarry with White Britons.
And across the world, including Israel, Fascism is rising again. Including Israel, which is quite prepared to support the Fascistic regimes in Poland and Hungary with their venomous hatred of Jews, Muslims, immigrants and Roma. Dr. Who last Sunday remined us of the courage and achievement of Rosa Parks in challenging racial oppression. And H.G. Wells, one of the ancestors of the series through his The Time Machine, still remains acutely relevant in his denunciation of racism today.
And as Wells, Prof. Leibowitz and Tony Greenstein, amongst others, have shown, Jewish Fascism exists alongside its gentile forms, and all have to be fought and combated.
One of the books I was reading in hospital was Clive James’ The Crystal Bucket (London: Picador 1981). As I said in a previous blog post, James was the TV critic for the Observer. He started out on the radical left, and ended up a Conservative, writing for the Torygraph. During the 1980s and 1990s, he had his own show, first on Channel 4 with Sunday Night Clive, and then on the Beeb with Monday night. In these, he zoomed up and down the information superhighway to bring you satirical comment on the news and interview stars like Peter Cook, William Shatner, and Sylvester Stallone’s weird and highly embarrassing, at least for him, mother.
James could be witty and intelligent, and in The Crystal Bucket he reviewed some of the programmes then being shown on the serious issue of the time. Like old Nazis and Fascists like Albert Speer and Oswald Mosley talking about Nazi Germany or their career as Fascists, without once admitting that they were genuinely persecutory anti-Semites, responsible or in Mosley’s case, criminally supporting a regime that murdered people in their millions for no other crime than their ethnicity or political orientation.
James also reviewed David Frost’s interview with Richard Nixon, in which America’s most notorious president until Trump tried to sound repentant for the horrors of his foreign policy, while actually not denying or repudiating them at all. This was the interview that was recently filmed as Frost/Nixon.
Frost also interviewed the man responsible for Nixon’s genocidal foreign policy, Henry Kissinger. Kissinger brought chaos, torture and death across the globe from the overthrow of Allende in Chile to the support of another Fascist thug in Pakistan. Of whom Nixon himself said that this thug was ‘a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch’. Kissinger’s massive bombing campaign was responsible for the rise in power of the Khmer Rouge, who became the leading opposition group against the Americans. And after they seized power came the genocides and massacres of Pol Pot’s Year Zero, in which 1-2 millions died.
The review’s particularly interesting for this passage. James was not a total opponent of the Vietnam War, and seems to have believe that the Americans were right to fight against the Viet Cong because of the horrors they would inflict on the rest of the country when they gained power. He criticised Frost, because he thought Frost had bought the whole anti-Vietnam War argument, and states that the Americans were justified in bombing North Vietnamese bases in Cambodia. They were just too brutal, as was Kissinger’s foreign policy generally, and his overthrow of the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, was criminal.
James wrote
Indeed Frost’s questioning, though admirably implacable, was often wide of the mark. Frost had obviously bought the entire ant-war package on Cambodia, up to and including the idea that the North Vietnamese had scarcely even been present within its borders. They were there all right. There was considerable military justification for US intervention in Cambodia, as even some of the most severe critics of Nixon and Kissinger are prepared to admit. ‘Now jusd a minude,’ fumed Kissinger, ‘with all due respecd, I think your whole line of quesdioning is maging a moggery of whad wend on in Indo-China. ‘
Well, not quite. Nixon and Kissinger might have had short-term military reasons for their policy in Cambodia, but the ruinous long-term consequences were easily predictable. Nor, despite Kissinger’s plausible appeal to international law, was there anything legal about the way he and his President tried to keep the bombing secret. In fact, they conspired to undermine the United States Constitution. Kissinger’s personal tragedy is that his undoubted hatred of totalitarianism leads him to behave as if democracy is not strong enough to oppose it.
Unfortunately his personal tragedy, when he was in power, transformed itself into the tragedy of whole countries. The most revealing part of the interview was not about South East Asia, but about Chile. It transpires that a 36 per cent share of the popular vote was not enough to satisfy Kissinger that Allende had been democratically elected. Doubtless remembering Hitler, who had got in on a comparable share of the total vote, Kissinger blandly ascribed Allende’s electoral victory to a ‘peculiaridy of the consdidution’. But Margaret Thatcher is Prime Minister of Great Britain by the same kind of peculiarity, and presumably Kissinger, if he were still ruling the roost, would have no plans to topple her. By what right did he topple Allende?
Kissinger couldn’t even conceive of this as a question, ‘Manipulading the domesdig affairs of another goundry’, he explained, ‘is always gombligaded.’It is not just complicated, it is often criminal. The Nixon-Kissinger policy in Chile was an unalloyed disaster, which delivered the population of that country into the hands of torturers and gave Kissingers’ totalitarian enemy their biggest propaganda boost of recent times. You didn’t have to be Jane Fonda to hate the foreign policy of Nixon and Kissinger. all you had to be was afraid of Communism.
(‘Maging a Moggery’, pp.226-228, 4th November 1979).
This shows up two things. Firstly, the sheer murderousness behind Hillary Clinton. Posing as the ‘woman’s candidate’ in the Democratic presidential election contest, and then again in the elections proper against Trump, she showed none of the deep feminine, and feminist concerns for peace and humanity, which have seen women across the world lead marches and protests groups against war and Fascism. Like the women in Chile who formed a group campaigning for the release of information on the victims of Pinochet’s coup who ‘disappeared’. I remember Sinead O’Connor singing ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ back in the 1990s as part of a programme celebrating them and protesters like them. Hillary, instead, has shown herself every bit as much a military hawk and anti-democrat as the generals she surrounded herself with. I’ve no doubt that if she had won the election, we would now be at war with China and Russia. She’s also the woman, who glowingly boasted how she went on holiday with Kissinger, something that did not impress Bernie Sanders in the presidential debates.
It also shows up the Times. A few weeks ago, I posted up a bit I found in a book on the right-wing bias of the British media. This was an extract from the Times, in which one of their lead writers declared that Pinochet’s coup was entirely justified, because Allende only had 36 per cent of the vote and he couldn’t control the country.
Well, Thatcher had the same proportion of the vote, and there was widespread, determined opposition to her in the form of strikes and riots. But instead, rather than calling for her overthrow, the Times celebrated her election victory as a return to proper order, economic orthodoxy and the rest of the right-wing claptrap.
It shows just how thuggish and hypocritical Murdoch’s Times is, and just how much Hillary certainly didn’t deserve the support of America and its women. She’s been whining about how she’s been the victim of left-wing ‘misogyny’ ever since. But if you want to see what she really represents, think of Nixon, Chile’s disappeared, it’s campaigning women and Sinead O’Connor’s performance. O’Connor herself, in my opinion, is no saint. But she’s the better women than Hillary.
Here’s another injustice, this time nothing to do with Israel. Also this week Mike put up a post about how the Tory council at Windsor had got around the ban on their plans to clear the beggars off the streets of their borough. The plans had been shelved due to massive public outrage. But Tories are Tories, and so they’ve come up with a plan to get round it: they had the cops come round to seize their possessions, meaning their sleeping bags, and put them in storage, so they couldn’t sleep on the streets. This was supposed to be ‘helping’ them.
I can remember a political commentator stating that we now live in an age of ‘inverted totalitarianism’. In the past, the dictator or the authorities in a totalitarian state told people what to do, and the penalty for not complying was brutally clear. Now the authorities also dictate to you, but do it with mealy-mouthed words about helping you.
You can see the same process at work in the sanctions system and work capability tests. Oh no, we’re not leaving people to starve to death, or commit suicide out of despair. We’re incentivising those that can to find work.
Look, so far we’ve helped all these people find jobs. This was followed by statistics, that actually showed you had a better chance of finding work if you didn’t go on their wretched workfare programme.
And the same lying verbiage used to give a veneer of humanity to the Tories’ murderous welfare reforms has been adopted to clear the beggars off the streets. And this is especially hypocritical today, because many of the well-wishers come down to cheer on the royal couple at the wedding today were camping out on the streets. Which is illegal, but no-one was moving them on.
Here’s Chunky Mark making his comments about this, and the Tories wider policy about supporting high house prices for the benefit of rich vulture capitalists in tax exile in Bahamas. He argues that it’s all about pushing down at the people at the bottom of society. They need homelessness and deaths, like the 78 homeless people, who died last year, to keep house prices high in accordance with the law of supply and demand.
More on the steady progress of western industrial management towards Orwellian totalitarianism. In this clip from the Jimmy Dore Show, Dore and his guest, Ron Placone, discuss the invention by Amazon of a wristband, which uses information technology to monitor where workers are in a building. The wristband is intended to be worn by warehouse workers. If they don’t have their hands in quite the right place when they’re reaching for a product on the warehouse shelves in order to fulfil an order, the wristband vibrates in order to nudge them in the right direction. The company is promoting this as a way of getting its workers to get the requested goods from their shelves and off to the customer, and then move on to the next order.
Dore and Placone make the point that this is indeed deeply totalitarian, with Placone mentioning the theory of inverted totalitarianism proposed by one academic. This states that while previous totalitarianisms were all about the state ordering you what to do, the new, inverted totalitarianism is also all about absolute control, but this time it’s done for your convenience and benefit.
They also make the excellent point that Amazon is a company worth billions, but in America many of their workers are so poorly paid that they have to subsist on food stamps.
They also joke that this wristband will allow Amazon to control exactly what their workers are doing, right up to the point when they decide to replace them all with robots.
I put up a piece last week about the growing threat of totalitarianism in the workplace, noting the ways various companies from call centres to the Torygraph are using technology to try to control their workers’ movements. In the case of call centres, it’s done through motion detectors fixed to desks, so management can tell when their galley slaves are moving about. The weirdo Barclay twins, who own the Torygraph, tried to introduce it there, but the hacks revolted and their bonkers plan had to be abandoned. These schemes are increasingly getting to resemble the fictional, evil totalitarian corporations in dystopian Science Fiction, like that in Jack Womack’s cyberpunk novels Ambient, Heathern, Random Acts of Mindless Violence and Elvissey.
And it also gives Brits another reason to despise Amazon, apart from the fact that despite doing much of its business over here, it doesn’t pay any corporation tax.
There are a number of programmes next week marking the centenary of the passage of the Representation of the People Act, which gave some women the right to vote. One of the most interesting of these looks like a programme on Radio 4 on Monday, 5th February 2018, at 8.00 pm, Sylvia Pankhurst: Honorary Ethiopian. The brief description of it in the Radio Times runs
Suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst got involved in the Ethiopian cause following its invasion by Italy in 1935 , and would later be recognised as an honorary citizen and given a state funeral. Here, Helen Pankhurst explores her grandmother’s role in the fight for Ethiopian independence.
Bristol and Bath have a connection to Ethiopia’s struggle for independence, as those cities were the home of Haile Selassie’s children during the War. They used to go to Victoria Park, though I think this was the one in Bath rather than Bristol.
There were some western intellectuals, who sided with the Italians during their invasion. One of these was Lady Kathleen Simon, who wrote a book on slavery. The Ethiopian emperor, Menelik II, had formally ended slavery in the country, but slaving still went on. British officers like Major Darnley, the author of Slaves and Ivory, complained that Ethiopian slavers were crossing the border to abduct the indigenous peoples of Uganda, then very much part of the British empire. His book was an account of his undercover mission into Ethiopia and a description of the way various provinces had been devastated by slave raiding by the Ethiopian aristocracy. It was partly written as a piece of polemic. Darnley was incensed that the authorities were taking no action against the slavers, and that in fact an area in Uganda around the border with Ethiopia had been declared a ‘no-go zone’ to British personnel. At the end of his book he argued that we should invade and conquer Ethiopia in order to halt their raiding into British territory, as well as the horrors of slavery and the slave trade in Ethiopia itself.
I don’t think Darnley supported the Italians, but Simon certainly did. At the end of her book, entitled simply Slavery, she also discusses Ethiopian slavery and slave raiding, and praises the Italian invasion as she believed that it would put a halt to it. I don’t think Mussolini had much of an interest in slavery, if any. He was far more keen to build a mighty new Roman empire. And issues like personal freedom certainly were very much not the concern of the man, who invented totalitarianism. Still, Simon’s book shows how some members of the British aristocracy supported Italian Fascist imperialism for ostensibly liberal motives.
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