Simon Webb’s Speech to the Traditional Britain Group: A Critique

One of the great commenters on this blog asked me the other day if I’d watched Simon Webb’s speech to the Traditional Britain Group, which has been posted up on YouTube. Webb is the man behind History Debunked, in which he criticises, refutes and comments on various historical myths and distortions. Most of these are against Black history, as well as racial politics. Occasionally he also presents his opinions on gay and gender issues. Like other YouTubers and internet commenters, you need to use your own discretion when watching his material. Sometimes, when he cites his sources, he’s right. At other times he’s more probably wrong. As much of his material is against mass immigration, particularly Black and Asian, and he believes that there is a racial hierarchy when it comes to intelligence, there’s some discussion of the man’s political orientation. He’s definitely right-wing, reading the Torygraph and attacking Labour as ‘high spending’. But it’s a question of how right-wing. Some people have suggested he’s English Democrat or supports a similar extreme right fringe party.

The other day he gave a speech at the Traditional Britain Group, which is a particularly nasty set of rightists within the Conservative party. There was a scandal a few years ago, you’ll recall, when Jacob Rees-Mogg turned up at one of their dinners. Mogg claimed he didn’t know how far right they were, but was shown to be somewhat economical with the actualite when someone showed that he’d actually been warned against associating with them. They are fervently against non-White immigration and some of them have a dubious interest in the Nazis and the Third Reich. I’ve also been told that their members include real Nazis and eugenicists, which is all too credible. They also want to privatise the NHS. I found this out after finding myself looking at their message board a few years ago. They were talking about how they needed to privatise the health service, but it would have to be done gradually and covertly because at the moment the masses were too much in favour of it. Which has been Tory policy for decades.

Webb’s speech is about half and hour long, and takes in slavery, White English identity and how Blacks have taken ownership of the subject so that it’s now part of theirs, White guilt over it and the industrial revolution and how White Brits are being made to feel ashamed of imperialism. He also blamed Tony Blair for mass immigration and claimed that it was due to this that the health service was collapsing.

The British Empire

He started off by saying that when he was young, everyone believed that the British Empire was a good thing and that we had brought civilisation to Africa and other parts of the world. I don’t doubt this. He’s older than me, and so I can believe that the received view of the Empire in his time was largely positive. Even the Labour party broadly supported imperialism. Its official stance was that Britain held these countries in trust until they were mature enough for self-government. This has changed, and there is a general feeling, certainly on the left, that it’s something we should be ashamed of. But this has come from historians and activists discussing and revealing the negative aspects of colonialism, such as the genocide and displacement of indigenous peoples, enslavement, forced labour and massacres. The end of empires tend to be particularly bloody, as shown in the various nationalist wars that ended the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans and the French possession of Algeria. Britain fought similar bloody wars and committed atrocities to defend its empire, as shown in the massive overreaction in Kenya to the Mao Mao rebellion. Jeremy Black, in his history of the British Empire, also argues that support for the empire fell away from the 1970s onwards as British youth became far more interested in America. I think the automatic condemnation of British imperialism is wrong and one-sided. It’s also somewhat hypocritical, as the same people condemning the British Empire don’t condemn other brutal imperial regimes like the Ottomans. It’s also being used by various post-colonial regimes to shift attention and blame for their own failings. But all this doesn’t change the fact that some horrific things were done during the Empire, which politicians and historians have to deal with. Hence the shame, although in my view there should be a space for a middle position which condemns the atrocities and celebrates the positive.

Britain and Slavery

He then talks about how slavery is now identified solely with Black transatlantic servitude. But he argues that the White English can also claim slavery as part of their identity. He talks of the first mention of the English in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, when pope Gregory the Great saw some English children for sale in the slave market in Rome. Asking who such beautiful children were, he was told they were Angles. At which Gregory punned, ‘Non Anglii, sed angeli’ – ‘Not Angles but angels’. At the time of the Domesday Book 10 per cent of the English population were slaves. And the mob that tore down Colston’s statue in Bristol were unaware that the city had been exported English slaves over a millennium before. These were shipped to the Viking colonies in Ireland – Dublin, Wexford and other towns – from whence they were then trafficked internationally. Slavery existed long before Black transatlantic slavery. The first record we have of it is from 4000 years ago in the form of document from the Middle East recording the sale of slaves and pieces of land. While they weren’t aware of transatlantic slavery at school, they knew slavery existed through studying the Bible. The story of Joseph and his brothers, and the Israelites in Egypt. But slavery has now become identified exclusively with Black slavery and is part of the Black identity. It’s because we’re supposed to feel guilty about slavery and feel sorry for Blacks that Black people over overrepresented in adverts, on television dramas and even historical epics, such as the show about the Tudors where half the actors were Black.

Webb is right about slavery existing from ancient times. There are indeed documents from the ancient near eastern city of Mari in Mesopotamia recording the sale of slaves along with land and other property, as I’ve blogged about here. One of the problems the abolitionists faced was that slavery existed right across the world, and so their opponents argued that it was natural institution. They therefore also claimed that it was consequently unfair and disastrous for the government to abolish it in the British empire. He’s right about Pope Gregory and the English slaves, although the word ‘Angli’ refers to the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes that settled and colonised England with the Saxons and Jutes after the fall of the Roman Empire. Angles in Anglo-Saxon were Englas, hence Engla-land – England, land of the Angles, and Englisc, English. Bristol did indeed export English slave to Ireland. Archbishop Wulfstan preached against it in the 11th century. We were still doing so in 1140, when visiting clergy from France were warned against going for dinner aboard the Irish ships in the harbour. These would lure people aboard with such promises, then slip anchor and take them to Ireland. The Irish Vikings also imported Black slaves. One chronicle reports the appearance of a consignment of blamenn, blue or black men in Old Norse, in Dublin. David Olasuga has also claimed that they imported 200 Blacks into Cumbria. Bristol’s export of White English slaves is mentioned in a display about it in the city’s M Shed Museum, which also contains the statue of Edward Colston. I do agree with Webb that there is a problem with popular attitudes towards slavery. Its presentation is one-sided, so that I don’t think many people are aware of it and its horrors outside the British Empire, nor how White Europeans were also enslaved by the Muslim Barbary pirates. I very strongly believe that this needs to be corrected.

Black Overrepresentation on TV

I don’t think it’s guilt over slavery alone that’s responsible for the large number of Black actors being cast on television, particularly the adverts. I think this is probably also due to commercial marketing, the need to appeal to international audiences and attempts to integrate Blacks by providing images of multiracial Britain. Many adverts are made for an international audience, and I think the use of Blacks has become a sort of visual shorthand for showing that the company commissioning the advert is a nice, anti-racist organisation, keen to sell to people of different colours across the world without prejudice. At home, it’s part of the promotion of diversity. Blacks are, or are perceived, as acutely alienated and persecuted, and so in order to combat racism the media has been keen to include them and present positive images of Black life and achievement. There are organisations dedicated to this task, such as the Creative Diversity Network, as well as systems that grade companies according to how they invest in multicultural enterprises, such as television and programmes with suitably racially diverse casts. Webb has himself talked about this. He’s also stated that Blacks are disproportionately represented on television, constituting only 6 per cent of the population but a very large proportion of actors in TV programmes and adverts. This might simply be because other, larger ethnic groups, such as Asians, aren’t so concerned with entering the entertainment industry and so aren’t represent to the same extent. Hence, Blacks sort of stand in for people of colour as a whole. As for adverts, I’ve also wondered if some of this might be purely commercial – a concern to sale to an emergent, affluent, Black market, perhaps. It also struck me that it might also be a make work programme. As I understand it, there are too many drama graduates for too few roles. This is particularly going to hit Blacks and other ethnic minorities because Britain at the moment is still a White majority country. There have consequently been demands for colour blind casting, as in Armando Iannucci’s recent film version of Oliver Twist. A year or so ago one Black actor announced that there should be more roles for Blacks or else they would go to America. As for the casting of a Black woman as Anne Boleyn, this seems to follow the theatre, where colour blind casting has existed for years. I think it also follows the tacit demand to create an image of the British past that conforms to modern multicultural society rather than how it really was. And some of it, I think, just comes from the feeling that as modern Blacks are as British as their White compatriots, so they should not be excluded from appearing as historical characters who were White. I think these considerations are just as likely, or more likely, to be the causes of the disproportionate number of Blacks appearing on camera than simply pity for them as the victims of slavery.

Blair Not Responsible for Mass Immigration

Now we come to his assertion that Blair was responsible for mass immigration. When he made this declaration, there were shouts, including one of ‘traitor’. I don’t believe that Blair was responsible for it, at least, not in the sense he means. The belief that he was, which is now widespread on the anti-immigrant right, comes from a single civil servant. This official claimed that Blair did so in order to change the ethnic composition of Britain and undermine the Tories. But did he really? This comes from a single individual, and without further corroboration, you can’t be sure. In fact Blair seems to have tried to cut down on immigration, particularly that of non-Whites. In order to dissuade people from coming here, he stopped immigrants from being able to apply for welfare benefits. The food banks now catering to native Brits were originally set up to feed those immigrants, who were no longer eligible for state aid. I also recall David Blunkett stating that they were going to cut down on immigration. The Guardian also accused Blair of racism over immigration. He had cut down on non-White immigration from outside Europe, while allowing White immigration from the EU and its new members in eastern Europe. The right had also been concerned about rising Black and Asian immigration for decades, and in the 1980s Tory papers like the Depress were publishing articles about unassimilable ethnic minorities. This started before Blair, and I don’t think he was deliberately responsible for it.

But I believe he was responsible for it in the sense that many of the migrants come from the countries Blair, Bush, Obama and Sarco destroyed or helped to destroy in the Middle East, such as Libya, Iraq and Syria. Blair had made some kind of deal with Colonel Gaddafy to keep migrants from further south in Libya, rather than crossing the Mediterranean to Europe. This was destroyed when Gaddafy’s regime was overthrown by Islamists. The result has been the enslavement of Black African migrants, and renewed waves of refugees from North Africa fleeing the country’s collapse.

He also stated that the industrial revolution, which was something else that was traditionally a source of pride, is now considered a cause for shame instead. Britain had been its birthplace and given its innovations to the rest of the world. However, we are now expected to be ashamed of it through its connection to slavery. The cotton woven in the Lancashire mills came from the American slave south, while sugar came from the slave colonies of the Caribbean. We’re also supposed to be ashamed of it because it’s the cause of climate change, for which we should pay reparations.

The Industrial Revolution and Climate Change

Okay, I’ve come across the claim that the industrial revolution was financed by profits from the slave trade and that it was based on the processing of slave produced goods. However, this is slightly different from condemning the industrial revolution as a whole. You can lament the fact that slavery was a part of this industrialisation, while celebrating the immense social, technological and industrial progress itself. After all, Marx states in the Communist Manifesto that it has rescued western society from rural idiocy. The demand that Britain should feel ashamed about the industrial revolution because of climate change comes from Greta Thunberg. It is, in my view, monumentally stupid and actually shows an ignorance of history. It’s based on an idealisation of pre-technological societies and an idealisation of rural communities. It’s a product of European romanticism, mixed with contemporary fears for the future of the planet. But the agrarian past was no rural idyll. People in the agricultural societies before the urbanisation of the 19th century had very utilitarian attitudes to the environment. It was a source of resources that could be used and exploited. The nostalgia for an idealised rural past came with the new generation of urban dwellers, who missed what they and their parents had enjoyed in the countryside. And rural life could be extremely hard. If you read economic histories of the Middle Ages and early modern period, famine is an ever present threat. It still was in the 19th century. The Irish potato famine is the probably the best known example in Ireland and Britain, but there were other instances of poverty, destitution and starvation across the UK and Europe. Industrialisation has allowed a far greater concentration of people to live than would have been possible under subsistence agriculture. Yes, I’m aware that overpopulation is a problem, that industrial pollution is harming the environment and contributing to the alarming declining in animal and plant species. But technological and science hopefully offer solutions to these problems as well. And I really don’t want to go back to a subsistence economy in which communities can be devastated by crop failure.

The call for climate reparations, I think, comes from Ed Miliband, and in my view it shows how out of touch and naive he is. I have no problem the Developed World giving aid to some of those countries threatened by climate change, such as the Pacific islands which are threatened with flooding due to the rise in sea levels. But some countries, I believe, are perfectly capable of doing so without western help. One of these is China, which also contributes massively to carbon emissions and which I believe has also called for the payment of climate reparations. China is an emerging economic superpower, and I see no reason why the west should pay for something that it’s doing and has the ability to tackle. I am also very sceptical whether such monies would be used for the purposes they’re donated. Corruption is a massive problem in the Developing World, and various nations have run scams to part First World donors and aid agencies from their money. When I was at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum one of these was a scheme for a hydroelectric dam in Pakistan. The Pakistani government was calling for western aid to finance the project. Britain refused, sensing a scam, for which we were criticised. Other countries happily gave millions, but the dam was never built. All a fraud. I suspect if climate reparations were paid, something similar would also happen with the aid money disappearing into kleptocrats’ pockets. There’s also the problem of where the tax burden for the payment of these reparations would fall. It probably wouldn’t be the rich, who have enjoyed generous tax cuts, but the British working class through indirect taxes. In short, it seems to me to be a colossally naive idea.

But these ideas don’t seem to be widespread. When he announced them, there were shouts from the audience to which Webb responded that it was coming, and they should wait a few years. Perhaps it will, but I’ve seen no enthusiasm or even much mention of them so far. They were mentioned during the COP 27 meeting, and that’s it. Thunberg’s still around, but after all these years I think she’s somewhat passe. At the moment I don’t think these ideas are issues.

Mass Immigration Not the Cause of NHS Crisis

Now let’s examine his statement that it’s due to immigration that the NHS is in the state it’s in. This is, quite simply, wrong. He correctly states that while Britain’s population has grown – London’s has nearly doubled and Leicester’s grown by 30 per cent – there has been no similar provision of medical services. No new hospitals have been built. As a result, where once you could simply walk into your doctor’s and expect to be seen, now you have to book an appointment. And when it comes to hospitals, it’s all the fault of immigrants. He talks about a specific hospital in London, and how the last time he was in that area, he was the only White Brit in the queue. This was because immigrants don’t have GPs, and so go to the hospital for every problem. We also have the problem of sick and disabled people from the developing world coming to the country for the better services we offer. A woman from the Sudan with a special needs child will therefore come here so that her child can have the treatment it wouldn’t get in the Sudan.

I dare say some of this analysis is correct. Britain’s population has grown largely due to immigration. One statistic released by a right-wing group said that immigration was responsible for 80 per cent of population growth. It’s probably correct, as Chambers Cyclopedia stated in its 1987 edition that British birthrates were falling and that it was immigration that was behind the rise in the UK population. I don’t know London at all, and I dare say that many of the immigrants there may well not have had doctors. I can also quite believe that some immigrants do come here for our medical care. There was a case a few weeks ago of a Nigerian woman, who got on a flight to London specifically so that she could have her children in a British hospital. I think this was a case of simple health tourism, which has gone on for years, rather than immigration.

But this overlooks the fact that the problems of the NHS has been down to successive Thatcherite regimes cutting state medical care in Britain all under the pretext of making savings and not raising taxes. Thatcher closed hospital wards. So did Tony Blair, when he wasn’t launching his PFI initiative. This was supposed to build more hospitals, but led to older hospitals being closed and any new hospitals built were smaller, fewer and more expensive. Cameron started off campaigning against hospital closures, and then, once he got his backside in No. 10, carried on with exactly the same policy. Boris Johnson claimed that he was going to build forty hospitals, which was, like nearly everything else the obese buffoon uttered, a flat lie. And Tweezer, Truss and Sunak are doing the same. Doctors surgeries have also suffered. Many of them have been sold off to private chains, which have maximised profits by closing down those surgeries that aren’t profitable. The result is that people have been and are being left without doctors. If you want an explanation why the NHS is in the state it is, blame Thatcher and her heirs, not immigrants.

Conclusion

While Webb has a point about the social and political manipulation of historical issues like the slave trade and the British Empire, these aren’t the reasons for the greater appearance of Black actors and presenters on television. Blair wasn’t responsible for mass immigration, and it’s underfunding and privatisation, not immigration, that’s responsible for the deplorable state of the health service. But he’s speaking to the wrong people there anyway, as the TBG would like to privatise it.

I am not saying it is wrong to discuss these issues, but it is wrong to support a bunch of Nazis like the TBG, who will exploit them to recreate all the social inequality, poverty and deprivation of pre-modern Britain.

Jacob Rees-Mogg Denies Endorsing Far Right Alternative Fuer Deutschland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The article concludes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tory MP Condemns Tory Students for T-Shirts Revealing their True Nature

Oh dear! It seems the attempts of the Tory party in the 1980s and ’90s to purge the offensively extreme right-wing element among the party’s youth and student organisations hasn’t entirely been successful. According to today’s I, Thursday, 4th October 2018, a group of students from Plymouth University Student’s Union Conservative Society have been condemned by the Tory MP Robert Halfon after a photo of them appeared in yesterday’s Mirror wearing very offensive T-shirt. These showed what they really thought of the NHS and Adolf Hitler.

The article on page 8, by Serina Sandhu, reads

Students Condemned for Explicit T-Shirts

A Conservative MP has condemned a group of students believed to be part of a Tory university society for wearing T-shirts with explicit wording including “f**ck the NHS”.

An image of the group from the University of Plymouth on a night out was published by the Daily Mirror yesterday.

The students wore blue T-shirts with hand-written slogans and messages. One also appeared to have drawn a Hitler-style moustache on his face.

Denouncing the behavior, Harlow MP Robert Halfon said the image reinforced people’s stereotypes of the party.

The image came to light on the final day of the Tory conference but contrary to speculation, the picture was not taken at the event. It is not clear how many of the students are part of Plymouth University Students’ Union Conservative Society.

So, it seems that some Tory students, at least, are going back to the old days, when members of the Union of Conservative Students used to go around singing ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’ and ‘We Don’t Want No Blacks and Asians’, the latter to the tune of Pink Floyd’s ‘Brick in the Wall’.

But it’s wrong for Halfon to complain that they’re presenting a stereotyped image of the party. While they are indeed reinforcing an established, negative view of the party, it’s also one that is also true.

The Tories are trying to privatise the NHS, whatever they say to the country. You only have to look at the stats showing the hospitals that have been given over to private firms to manage, and the operations and other NHS functions that have also been contracted out to private firms. And then there’s the speeches and attitudes of leading Tories themselves, beginning with Maggie Thatcher. Thatcher really did want to privatise the NHS, and was only prevented from doing so by a back-bench revolt and the findings of her own private secretary, Patrick Jenkin, about how dire the American private healthcare system was. So she contented herself with trying to get a certain percentage of the British public to take out private health insurance, and her party embarked on a forty-year programme of privatizing it by stealth. Which was also continued by Blair and his cronies when they were in power. And it wasn’t just Maggie. The Dorset Tory MEP Daniel Hannan also wants the NHS privatized. Philip Hammond, before he became health secretary, wrote that he wanted the health service to disappear and be merged with private healthcare. And I remember the furore a few years ago when another Tory privately declared that in a few years the NHS would cease to exist. Then someone at Tory Central Office took fright, and declared that the comments attributed to him in the press were incorrect, and that what he really said was that the Tories were cutting down on bureaucracy and combatting inefficiency. The usual Tory lies.

As for Nazism, there always has been a section of the party which supports the Far Right. Despite Cameron cutting links with the Monday Club and purging members with connections to the BNP. The Traditional Britain Group, whose annual dinner a few years ago was attended by Jacob Rees-Mogg, is led by a Tory activist with a very strong fascination with Hitler and the Third Reich. The Libertarians in the party, of which Paul Staines, AKA Guido Fawkes, was a part, invited over to their annual dinners the leaders of South American Fascist death squads. The late Alan Clarke insisted that he was a Nazi, and called his Rotweilers Himmler and Goering.

Quite apart from the barely disguised racism of Tweezer’s own administration – its unjust deportations of Windrush migrants, its hostile atmosphere policy to deter immigrants and the far right rantings of the Tory press, like the Heil and the Scum.

However embarrassing the students and their wretched T-shirts were for the Tory party, they honestly showed what a sizable, influential chunk of the party really thinks.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Anti-Semitism and the Aristocracy

Last night I put up a piece debunking the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, based on the chapter about this vile book in Jon E. Lewis’ The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups (London: Constable & Robinson 2007), pp. 433-50. The Protocols are a notorious anti-Semitic forgery, probably concocted by Matvei Golovinski of the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, to make his master, Nicholas II, even more anti-Semitic and to intensify the persecution of the Jews.

The Protocols purport to be the minutes of a secret meeting of a group of elite Jews, intent on destroying all non-Jewish religions and conquering and enslaving Christians and gentiles. They claimed that the Jews were at the centre of a massive conspiracy controlling the banks and were encouraging the downfall of Christian civilization by promoting liberalism, democracy, socialism and anarchism. At the same time they were distracting gentiles from uncovering this plot through using alcohol, gambling, games and other amusements.

There is absolutely no truth in any of this whatsoever. But the book became an immense success and was read and influenced many Fascists and anti-Semites. These included Adolf Hitler, who made the book a compulsory part of the German school syllabus.

Like much of Fascism, it’s a rejection of modernity – the mass society of modern politics that emerged in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Modern politics and secular ideologies were attacked. At one point, the Protocols claim that Darwinism, Marxism and Nietzscheanism have been successful because they have been promoted by the conspiracy. (Lewis, Mammoth Book of Covers-Ups, p. 444). The forger’s own view of what constitutes the best society is revealed very clearly in another passage, in which the conspirators celebrate their destruction of the aristocracy.

The people, under our guidance, have annihilated the aristocracy, who were their one and only defence and foster-mother for the sake of their own advantage, which is inseparably bound up with the well-being of the people. Nowadays, with the destruction of the aristocracy, the people have fallen into the grips of merciless money-grinding scoundrels who have laid a pitiless and cruel yoke upon the necks of the workers. (p.446).

Historically, some of the persecution of the Jews in the later Middle Ages was due to the fact that a large number of the aristocracy had become seriously in debt to Jewish bankers, and tried to get out of their obligation to pay it back by urging for their persecution and expulsion.

A significant number of aristocrats and the upper middle class were supporters of Nazism before the Second World War. The leader of the British Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley, was a baronet. Aristocrats and landlords joined pro-Nazi and appeasement organisations like the Anglo-German Fellowship. Martin Pugh on his book on British Fascism between the Wars describes how the aristos welcomed members of the Nazi elite at dinner parties on their estates, when the swastika was discreetly flown from the flagpoles.

And there still seems to be a fascination and dangerous sympathy with Nazism even today. Way back in the 1990s and early part of this century, Private Eye published a number of stories about one Cotswold aristocrat, who had very strong anti-Semitic, racist and anti-immigrant opinions.

And then there’s the Traditional Britain Group on the far right of the Tory party. These also have the same, genuinely Fascist attitudes, and one of their leaders is fascinated with the Nazis and the Third Reich. It was the Traditional Britain Group, who invited Jacob Rees-Mogg to their annual dinner, which Mogg accepted. When the Observer published the story, Mogg claimed that at the time he hadn’t known anything about them. If he had, he wouldn’t have gone. Which doesn’t really sound convincing, as people don’t normally accept dinner invitations from organisations and people they know nothing about. But perhaps Mogg, as well as being viciously right-wing, is also very naïve.

As for the Tories being good friends of the Jews, as the current head of the Board of Deputies, Marie van der Zyle claimed in a speech, David Rosenberg posted up in response a series of incidents across the decades which put the lie to it. These showed very clearly how anti-Semitic the Tories had been, and which parts of it may very well still be.

And one of the attractions of anti-Semitism, apart from sheer racism, is that, in the form of conspiracy theories like the Protocols, they blame the Jews for all the forces of modernity that threaten the aristocracy and the upper middle class, and celebrate the aristocracy itself as the people’s saviours, and so appealing very strongly to certain types of Tories.

Hope Not Hate on Anti-Semitism, Homophobia and the Islamophobes Speaking in Support of Tommy Robinson

On Saturday the islamophobic far right held a march to protest against the arrest and jailing of Tommy Robinson, the founder of the EDL, and former member of the BNP and Pegida UK, for contempt of court. Robinson had been livestreaming his coverage of the trial of a group of Pakistani Muslim men accused of child abuse. There are very strict laws governing press coverage of trials, which Robinson broke, just as he had broken them a year or so before in Canterbury. This had earned him a suspended sentence, which automatically kicked in when he repeated the offence last week in Leeds. Robinson was arrested, convicted and jailed.

The laws Robinson broke are there to make sure that everyone gets a fair trial, and apply to all cases, not just those of Muslims accused of paedophilia. But Robinson’s supporters decided that he had been the victim of state censorship and imprisoned for his political beliefs by an establishment determined to protect paedophile Muslims and persecute Whites, hence the march. This was addressed by some of the most notorious islamophobes in Britain and the Netherlands.

Hope Not Hate have an article at their site identifying the speakers, and giving a brief description of their political careers and their very racist views on Islam and Muslims. They included the notorious anti-Islamic Dutch politician Gert Wilders; Anne-Marie Waters, who was formerly a Labour party member before joining Pegida with Tommy Robinson. In October last year, 2017, she launched another far right party, the For Britain Movement; Raheem Kassam, a former advisor to Nigel Farage and editor of Breitbart’s London branch. He’s also the direct of Student Rights, which claimed to be a campus monitoring group dedicated to combating extremism. In fact, it has no student members or links to student unions, though it is linked to the extreme rightwing American group, the Henry Jackson Society. It has also been criticised by several London student unions for targeting Muslim students, and the Institute of Race Relations also noted that its work was used by far right groups to target a Nuslim student event. He’s also the editor of another, Neoconservative news site, The Commentator.

And then there’s the extremely islamophobic UKIP MEP, Gerard Batten, who in 2011 addressed the Traditional Britain Group, the far right outfit that invited Jacob Rees-Mogg to their dinner. Mogg attended, but now claims he only did so because he didn’t really known what they were like. Which sounds very unlikely to me.

As well as vile views on Muslims, the article also describes the vicious hatred towards other groups of some of those associated with the speakers. Like Mandy Baldwin, a member of Waters’ For Britain Movement, who posted homophobic material from a Nazi website on a social media site. For Britain also includes several former members of the BNP and other Fascists, such as Sam Melia, who was a former member of the banned terrorist group, National Action. Another member, Stuart Nicholson, posted extremely anti-Semitic material on his Twitter account before it was withdrawn. In one of these, he retweeted a post that read “National Socialism is the alternative to degeneracy we currently face. It is a pathway to freedom and prosperity. It is an escape from Jewish Tyranny. It is the Future of our people.”

https://www.hopenothate.org.uk/2018/06/08/march-tommy-robinson-extreme-anti-muslim-activists-line-speak/

It’s probably no surprise that some of those, who joined the anti-Islam movement also have a bitter hatred of gays and Jews, and openly support Nazism. All the stuff Nazis write about ‘Jewish tyranny’ is a vile lie, responsible for justifying the Holocaust under the Nazis. And Nazism never brought freedom and prosperity. For the German working class, is meant low wages and complete subordination of the workforce to the bosses as part of Hitler’s Fuhrerprinzip, or Leader Principle. Just as it meant the absolute political, social and economic dominance of the Nazi party and the proscription of all competing parties and organisations, whose members were rounded up and sent to the concentration camps.

I don’t doubt that not all members of the anti-Islam movement have views as extreme as these. But it does seem to show that if these people have their way and ban Islam and persecute or expel Muslims, sooner or later they will move on to attack other groups. Like gays and Jews.

Trust in GPs Lowest for 35 Years, And That’s the Way the Tories Want It

A few days ago, a report in the news concluded that people’s trust in their doctors was at lowest for 35 years. I’m not surprised, and I have absolutely no doubt that people’s dissatisfaction with their GPs is part of their ongoing assault on the NHS. The Health Service is immensely popular. It’s been described as the closest thing our increasingly secular society has to a god. Which is why the Tories want to destroy public confidence in it so that they can privatise it and replace it with one where we’ll all have to pay the likes of BUPA, Circle Health, and Beardie Branson’s Virgin Health for treatment, while taking out expensive and unaffordable medical insurance from the likes of Unum.

I’ve already put up on this blog a video I found on YouTube, which featured an academic stating that the way the Tories will do this is by running down services so that the middle class – those that can afford private treatment – will abandon it, as a way of creating the public disenchantment necessary to make its privatisation anything less than electoral suicide. Margaret Thatcher, despite the self-serving lies in her autobiography, did want to privatise the health service, and was only prevented by a massive cabinet revolt. Afterwards, she merely confined herself to wanting to increase the proportion of Brits with private health insurance to 25 per cent or so. Jeremy Hunt has made it clear that he hates state medicine and the NHS. As does Daniel Hannan, the Europhobic Tory MEP for Dorset, who is flagrant his use use of untruths that Guy Debord’s Cat calls him ‘The Lyin’ King’.

And the Tories are privatising the NHS. 70 per cent of NHS contracts are going to private firms, despite the fact that these offer worse service and are much less economical that state medicine. They also want to make it possible for private firms to run whole regions. It won’t be long before they sell it off completely, if they have their way.

And some rightwing sites are very honest about it. While the Tories lie through their teeth about what they’re doing to the Health Service, claiming to ‘treasure’ it, in Hunt’s mendacious little words, some groups and blogs are quite open about their longed-for destruction of this most precious British institution. A couple of years ago I found a piece posted from the Traditional Britain Group, which said that they wanted to privatise the NHS. But it was so popular they were afraid it would have to be retained for reasons of electoral expediency. The Traditional Britain Group, I needn’t remind you, were that bunch of Nazi toffs, whose annual dinner Jacob Rees-Mogg happily attended before the Independent published the pics. Then he tried to excuse himself, saying that he didn’t know anything about them when he accepted their invitation. Which is a likely story.

And way back as the London Olympics, I found the Canadian Tory blog, Five Feet of Fury, moaning about Danny Boyle’s celebration of the NHS in the opening ceremony. After ranting about how terrible this was, the transatlantic rightists then began to discuss how they could destroy public confidence in it. They decided that the way to do so was to encourage people to complain about it, because that would apparently break our socialist brainwashing that makes us all praise it.

No, it’s not because we’re all brainwashed or conditioned to accept the NHS unconditionally. It’s because we know what a colossal train wreck private medicine is, if you don’t have socialised medicine. And many people in this country can still remember how expensive medicine was before the NHS.

So despite what the Tories may so to the contrary, I’m very sure May, Hunt and the rest of her corrupt gang and their supporters and donors in private medicine are absolutely delighted by this new. If you don’t want to see the NHS privatised, vote Labour and Corbyn, as he has promised to renationalise the Health Service. And that terrifies them, the Blairites and the right-wing press. It’s why Paul Dacre and the bizarre Barclay Twins have spent so much ink vilifying him as a Trotskyite.

CAA Chief Stephen Pollard Defends Tory Thug, Who Punched Girl Anti-Fascist Protestor at UWE

I’ve been watching Dick Coughlan’s video on YouTube, ‘Daily Mail Readers = Bonkers Mental Nazi Rapists’, in which Coughlan goes through the comments section on the on-line version of the Daily Heil, and shows you precisely why it’s got that nickname. Coughlan himself is very anti-racist and anti-Nazi, as well as pro-feminist and supports LGBT and trans rights. He’s put up a number of videos about the historical reality of the Holocaust, refuting the assertions of the various Nazis out there that it never happened. I’ve reblogged some of these here. And so it’s no surprise that the comments he reads out here are from Mail readers with extreme right-wing views ranting on about immigrants.

And one of them is Stephen Pollard, the head of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, the foul group of liars that have libelled Mike as an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier.

Remember the fracas that occurred a few weeks ago when the Young Master, Jacob Rees-Moog – whom Coughlan says looks like Lord Snooty from the Beano – turned up to give a talk at the University of the West of England here in Bristol? A group of antifa were present to protest. Snooty, sorry, Mogg in 2014 attended a dinner of the far right Traditional Britain Group, which is very anti-immigrant, viciously anti-Muslim, and at least one of its members does have a fascination with the Nazis. They also want to sell off the NHS. When news of this was published in the Independent, Mogg issued a statement that he went ’cause he didn’t really know who were they were. They just issued him an invite, and so he went along. Well, that’s his excuse. I find it unconvincing. As other people have pointed out, you hardly go to a formal dinner of an organisation without knowing at least something about them. But the incident explains why the antifa were protesting him.

One of them, a young woman, shouted ‘Racist! Nazi!’ at Mogg as he walked past. One of Mogg’s Tory fanboys then stood in front of her and punched her in the mouth. He also tried to hit her again. Coughlan also makes the point that this character was also photographed wearing a Nazi uniform. This was at a fancy dress party, admittedly. However, you can’t hire Nazi uniforms from costume shops. You have to buy them online. This is another point Coughlan makes, which leaves it a good question about how much sympathy this thug really does have with the Nazis.

Amidst all the controversy, Pollard had a piece commenting on it published in the Heil. And guess what? He declared that the real Nazis were the left-wingers making accusations of racism.

This tells you all you need to know about Pollard and his grubby crew in the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. Pollard and his comrades have zero interest in tackling real anti-Semitism. As has been pointed out by Tony Greenstein, he’s true-blue Tory Jewish establishment. The CAA’s website has little to say about real Nazis and anti-Semites, like the BNP and National Action. Nor is there much criticism of the Tories. There is far more criticism of the Labour party for alleged anti-Semitism. And it’s the CAA and its counterpart in the Labour party, the Jewish Labour Movement, who are responsible for pushing the anti-Semitism smears and libels.

And their metric for deciding who is an anti-Semite is risibly simple: it’s support for Israel. It doesn’t matter how right-wing someone is, if they support Israel, Pollard will appear and defend them as not anti-Semitic at all. Like he did the Polish government, despite the anti-Semitic character of several pieces of legislation criminalising blaming Poles for the crimes of the Nazis. Among those the Israel lobby has smeared as anti-Semites are self-respecting Jewish people, who have, or whose families have, suffered real anti-Semitic abuse and racially motivated assault. But because they have been critical of Israel and its seven decades long campaign of persecution of the indigenous Palestinians, Pollard and his cronies have libelled them as anti-Semitic.

And so this squalid, amoral liar defends the Tory thug, who punched an anti-racist protester, and smears her, and people like her, as Nazis. Because she and they are left-wing, and so a threat to the Tories and his own organisation. The CAA desperately needs to position itself as the leading organisation tackling anti-Semitism. They aren’t, not by a very long chalk. They’re only interested in anti-Semitism in so far as accusations of it can be weaponised against Jeremy Corbyn, Momentum and the true Labour moderates, to defend Thatcherism domestically and Israel abroad. And they are afraid of Antifa as these people challenge their appropriation of anti-racism and anti-Fascism.

As for Antifa themselves, the Christian minister, Harvard lecturer and left-wing activist Cornell West stated that it was them who saved him and the other people from across the faith and ethnic spectrum, including Jews, from being killed by the Alt-Right and Nazi stormtroopers in Charlotteville as they attended an interfaith service.

Pollard and the Jewish Labour Movement couldn’t care less for real victims of anti-Semitism. They just wish to stamp out criticism of Israel, and so will smear decent non- and anti-racists, including Jewish victims of racist assault, and defend right-wing thugs, in order to do so.

But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at Pollard defending a right-wing thug and attacking left-wing anti-racist activists. Jonathan Hoffman, a former president of the Zionist Federation of Great Britain, was photographed in the company of Paul Besser, Britain First’s intelligence office, when they were both out protesting against a Palestinian convention and expo in London.

Hypocrite Rees-Mogg Profits from Company Making Drug Used for Illegal Abortions

A little while ago I put up a post commenting on Jacob Rees-Mogg, the aristocratic Tory MP for north-east Somerset just south of me, his vile voting record and his disgusting views on abortion. Mogg caused massive offence when he appeared on television and stated that, as a Roman Catholic, he did not believe in gay marriage nor abortion under any circumstances, even when the mother was the victim of rape or incest.

Even when abortion was banned as an illegal operation in this country, it was still permitted in exceptional circumstances, such as when the pregnancy posed a threat to the mother’s life and situations like those above. The British public, and especially women, were extremely vocal in their condemnation of his views. This includes the great commenters on this blog, who were very much aware of the suffering this would inflict on women, who had suffered those assaults. And this is quite apart from the issue of a woman’s sovereign right over her own body. As one of my cousins remarked ‘F**k him! It’s my body! He’s not telling me what I can put in it!’

I also said in my article that I was sure that, the Tory party being what it is, there is probably more than a little hypocrisy in Mogg’s attitude. I hope his wife and daughters never suffer these attacks, but if they were raped and became pregnant, it would not surprise me if his lordship discreetly made arrangements for a termination.

Mercifully for Mogg’s family, this hasn’t occurred. But he has shown himself to be a massive hypocrite. Mike today put up the story, broken by the Sunday Mirror, that Mogg’s investment firm, Somerset Capital Management, has £5 million worth of shares in Kalbe Farma, an Indonesian pharmaceutical company, which manages a drug used in illegal abortions.

The drug is intended to treat stomach ulcers, but abortions are illegal in Indonesia. It is also known to trigger abortions, and is used to do this in the country’s illegal abortion clinics.

Mogg, however, has defended himself by stating that abortions are illegal in Indonesia, a condition which would satisfy the Vatican. And he can’t really help it, as ‘the world isn’t as we would wish it.’ So he’s not a hypocrite.

As Mike states, this isn’t a defence, and Mogg very definitely is.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/10/02/jacob-rees-mogg-has-shares-in-abortion-pills-and-it-does-make-him-a-hypocrite/

I think Mogg’s attitude is actually rather worse than simple hypocrisy, but active complacency when it comes to what can be a life-threatening operation when carried out by the untrained. The clinics that use the drug to induce abortions are illegal, which casts very severe doubts on the medical competence of those performing them. When the operation was illegal here and elsewhere in the West not so long ago, women did die from bleeding and other injuries when they were forced to have backstreet abortions. It’s horrific that this may be happening in Indonesia.

I have to say, I share some of Mogg’s distaste for abortion. I believe in the fundamental sanctity of human life, and would rather the operation wasn’t used simply for contraceptive purposes. Not when contraception in various forms is legal and easily available. But the world isn’t as I would like it, and Mogg’s views are hypocritical and repellent. And in this case, they are a real danger to women’s health.

Mogg himself is being touted by the Tories as a possible replacement for Theresa May. He shouldn’t be. His voting record shows that he is consistently for making the poor poorer, and keeping those of his own class as rich as possible. He started his political career by touring Fife as its Tory candidate, telling the guid folk up there why they should vote to keep an hereditary House of Lords. In 2014 he attended the annual dinner of the Fascist Traditional Britain Group, and when this was exposed he tried to excuse himself by saying he didn’t know what they stood for when he got the invitation. Which I find ‘a likely story’ (heavy irony). Abortion has been legal here for decades, and whatever he thinks of it, I hope it has preserved vulnerable women from death and mutilation at the hands of untrained quacks. His views are not just offensive, but a real danger to the health of the women of this country. He should be kept away from power, not given it.

Thomas Klikauer: Nazism Enters the Reichstag with the AfD

The German elections two days ago saw the extreme right-wing Alternative fuer Deutschland gain 12 per cent of the votes, and has become Germany’s third largest political party behind the Christian Democrats, Germany’s equivalent to the Conservative party, and the Social Democrats, their equivalent of Labour. The party’s militantly xenophobic with a deep hatred of Muslims. Thomas Klikauer today published a very frightening analysis of the party and its history in Counterpunch. He states categorically that they’re Nazis, backing up this claim with a chilling amount of supporting evidence. Some of which is absolutely horrifying, such as a speech made by one of these modern stormtroopers in which he announced that they would ‘build a subway to Auschwitz’.

Klikauer states that the Alternative fuer Deutschland has all the racism, stupidity and anti-intellectualism of the original Nazis. Their nickname across the Nordsee is the Alternative for the Dumb, here in the American meaning of ‘stupid’. He argues that the party has its roots in Germany’s failure to denazify after the War. When the Cold War began c. 1950, the arrest and prosecution of Nazi officials and collaborators ceased, and many were recruited by the allies into senior positions in politics, the judiciary and civil service. He also makes the point that like the old Nazis, whose rise was assisted by the Hugenberg press, a compliant media has also helped the AfD. All the main TV stations in Germany invited their members on to speak, asking them about immigration. This was the first time a neo-Nazi party had been invited onto the media, just as this is the first time since the War that Nazis, in the guise of the AfD, have entered the German parliament. Many Germans have been shocked by the fawning treatment given them by the media, and one person commented that the first part of a 100-minute debate on them looked like an advert for them instead.

He also links the party’s rise to an upsurge in racist and political violence. Between 1990 and 2013, 184 people were killed in right-wing attacks. The victims were Turkish Germans, Muslims, the homeless, punks, and refugees, amongst others.

The part was founded in 2013 by Bernd Lucke, a nationalistic capitalist, in Klikauer’s phrase, as a more rightwing party than the Christian Democrats. However, more extreme right-wing elements soon entered and took it over in a process that included the election of Frauke Petry as its leader in 2015. From 2014 onwards it has had its representatives in several of the governments of Germany’s constituent laender. it is bitterly opposed to abortion, racist, ultra-nationalist, fiercely xenophobic and embraces the Nazi past. Petry herself wishes to reintroduce the volkisch ideology of the Nazis, along with Reichsburgerschaft: racial citizenship. Alice Weidel, one of the party’s chief activists, has denounced Merkel and her cabinet as ‘pigs’ and ‘puppets of the winners of World War II’, and claiming that Germany was not ‘sovereign’. Klikauer doesn’t mention it, but this is very much like the Nazis’ denunciation of the chief parties of Weimar coalition – the Catholic Centre Party, the Social Democrats and the two Liberal Parties as the ‘November criminals’ following Germany’s defeat in the First World War and the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles. Klikauer states that Pegida is the AfD’s modern equivalent of the old Nazis’ SS and SA. The head of the party’s youth wing, Markus Frohnmaier has connections to the German Defence League. He also made a speech saying that the AfD ‘would clean Germany out’, which he states is very much the language of the Nazis.

Like the American Nazis in Charlottesville, the stormtroopers of the AfD believe that there is a Jewish plot to replace Europeans with peoples from outside the continent, mainly the Middle East. The AfD author Wolfgang Gedeon blames the world’s evils on the Jews, America, Zionism, Muslims, gays and the left. One of the other leading figures in the AfD, Stephan Brandner, declared that Angela Merkel should be locked up, just like Trump raised the same chant against Hillary Clinton. And like Trump, he claimed that the Antifa are the modern equivalents of the SA.

Frank Magnitz, one of the party’s people in Bremen, put up a picture on a net with a red button and group of praying Muslims, saying, ‘If you could push a button and wipe out all Islam, you’d do it. Yes!’ The genocidal language and ideology as the Nazis. The party’s second-in-command, Alexander Gauland, said at a neo-Nazi meeting at Kyfferhausen, another Nazi pilgrimage site, that he was extremely proud of German soldiers in the First and Second World War. Klikauer makes sees this as an affirmation of the Holocaust, as the Wehrmacht was involved in the Final Solution, along with the rest of the German security apparatus.

Like Nazis everywhere, they also deny the Holocaust. Bjorn Hocke has described Germany’s Holocaust Memorial as ‘a memorial of shame’, while Wilhelm von Gottberg, an outright Holocaust denier, was an electoral candidate in Anhalt-Saxony. The party’s supporters also shout the old Nazi slogans of ‘Germany Awake’ and ‘Whatever it takes for Germany’, both of which are illegal.

He also notes the party’s connections to big business. The Alternatives are funded by the Movenpick ice cream company, and the ‘Swiss Goal Corporation’. It is also funded by the billionaire August von Finck, who bought the company name Degussa. Degussa was the company that delivered the Zyklon B to Auscwitz, and then extracted the gold teeth from the bodies of the murdered Jews. Finck’s father was also responsible for the removal of Jews from Germany’s banks under the Third Reich. Von Finck has supported a number of right-wing parties, as has Beatrix von Storch, who used to run a ‘citizen’s’ movement against the German welfare state.

He notes the work of BuzzFeed’s Marcus Engert in analyzing the extreme right-wing views of 396 of the Alternatives’ candidates, and the fears of a German academic, Hajo Funke, that the modern German parliament is incapable of dealing with this threat. The article briefly touches on the recruitment of former members of the Nazis party by the authorities during the Cold War. These include Hans Globke, the architect of the German race laws, who became a minister under Germany’s first post-War president, Konrad Adenauer; Georg Kiesinger, who served as chancellor from 1966-9, and who was slapped by the great anti-Nazi, Beate Klarsfeld. Other Nazis include Hans Filbinger, the Christian Democrat premier of Baden-Wurttemberg from 1966 to 1978, and Carl Carstens, the German president from 1979-1984.

Klikauer’s article concludes

Since 24th September 2017, Germany has Nazis in its parliament. Contrary to the 1960s, these days Germany has not yet seen another Beate Klarsfeld who will tell the AfD’s anti-Semites, racists, and Holocaust deniers that their politics will not go unchallenged. Today, Nazism is much more widespread compared to the 1960s. Today, we have many young and still a few old Nazis joining forces in an unprecedented way. In the 1960s, old Nazis never had a chance to form their own party and to be elected. In the year 2017, AfD Nazis have already fulfilled some of their ideological missions: honouring the Nazi Wehrmacht, denying the Holocaust, and fighting against democracy and the left.

Being furnished with parliamentarian status will only encourage Germany’s new Nazis. Like in 1933, they will not moderate themselves. If history is anything to go by, the gravest danger for Germany, the left and ultimately Europe and the world comes not only from the new Nazis. It comes also from a conservative coalition government that includes the new Nazis (AfD). By 1933 Hitler’s Nazi party was already in decline in electoral polling. His Nazis actually came to power through a conservative coalition government making Hitler Reichskanzler (chancellor). It was German conservatism that made Hitler possible. In 2017, one might hope that German conservatism has learned its historic lesson.

It isn’t hard to see from this that the notorious ’70s terrorist group, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, or to give them their official name, the Rote Armee Fraktion, had a point. They too felt that Germany had never denazified, and were enraged that so many of them had not been prosecuted for their crimes, but instead settled down into very comfortable lives in the new Germany. And so they rose up in arms and carried out a wave of assassinations and bombings.

And Red Ken also devoted a chapter or two in his 1987 book, Livingstone’s Labour, to discussing and condemning the recruitment of Nazis during the Cold War, including those responsible for the Holocaust and pogroms against the Jews. Livingstone clearly and unequivocally condemned all forms of racism in the book, including anti-Semitism, and prejudice and discrimination against Blacks and the Irish. Yet last year he was smeared as an anti-Semite by the Blairites and Israel lobby within Labour, because he stood up for Naz Shah and said, quite rightly, that Hitler supported sending Jews to Israel. Which Hitler did for a time.

Meanwhile, those responsible for the smears, the Jewish Labour Movement and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, have defended genuine anti-Semites, like the Hungarian premier Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party, because they support Israel. As Tony Greenstein has pointed out, the Zionists have shown themselves repeatedly willing to ally themselves with real Nazis against Diaspora Jews, in the hope that their victory will result in more Jews emigrating or fleeing to Israel. Thus we’ve had Richard Spencer, the head of the Alt-Right, and Andrew Anglin, the head of the Nazi website the Daily Stormer, appearing on Israeli TV. And Sebastian Gorka, another Trump aide, who’s been active amongst the Hungarian extreme right and who sports a medal commemorating Admiral Horthy, the Hungarian dictator, who collaborated with the Nazis during the Holocaust, was invited to a big conference of Israel’s military establishment.

The AfD aren’t unique to Germany. You can see the same type of genocidal rhetoric and images on American and British anti-Islamic ‘counterjihad’ websites. There’s one showing a gigantic blast crater centred in Saudi Arabia, which annihilates most of the countries in the region as far as Egypt in the West. This has the caption ‘Problem Solved’. And the victory of the extreme right in one country will encourage its activists elsewhere in the West.

We have to help and assist our friends and partners in Germany and elsewhere tackle the AfD and the rest of the Nazis, just as we have to tackle the racists, anti-Semites and Islamophobes in Britain, like Britain First, National Action, the BNP, London Forum and the Traditional Britain Group, as well as the Anglo-American Alt right, whose British members include Paul Joseph Watson, Carl Benjamin, AKA Sargon of Akkad, Milo Yiannopolis and Katie Hopkins.

And to do it properly we need people like Ken Livingstone and the others like him, who are prepared to talk frankly about real anti-Semitism, western imperialism and racism, and stand for Jews and the other ethnic minorities threatened by these thugs, who wish to remain in Britain and the other countries in which they were born, or to which the fled to escape genocide in their countries of origin.

Hope Not Hate Infiltrates the Alt Right

The anti-racist/ anti-religious extremism website and magazine, Hope Not Hate, has posted up a piece by their contributor, Patrik Hermansson, describing his year-long mission to infiltrate the Alt Right both in Britain and in America. Mr. Hermansson is a young, gay and very anti-Nazi Swede. During his year amongst the assorted Nazis and Holocaust deniers, he met and became close to the far right London Forum and its leaders, Jez Turner, Stead Steadman and Mick Brooks. He also encountered smaller, associated Nazi groups like the Extremists Club and various Nazi Odinist groups, which worship the Norse gods.

He also met the Traditional Britain Group and its founder, Gregory Lauder-Frost. This has links, as has the London Forum, with the Nazi publisher, Arktos Media, and has hosted meetings, whose speakers have included other members of the international New Right such as Alex Kurtagic and Tomislav Sunic, John Morgan, formerly of Arktos, now working for Greg Johnson’s Countercurrents, Marcus Willinger of Generation Identity, and Richard Spencer and Mark Tait of the Alt Right. The Traditional Britain Group has also had links to Breitbart. The TBG has also hosted events attended by the UKIP MEP Gerard Batten, and Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who later apologized for attending.

Johnson has also set up groups like the London Forum in New York and Seattle. Guests and speakers at these events have included the anti-Semitic editor of the Occidental Observer, Kevin MacDonald, and the British Alt Right vlogger Colin Robertson, who vlogs under the monicker ‘Millennial Woes’. In Seattle, he also met the infamous Nazi ceramicist, Charles Krafft. Amongst other things, Krafft makes teapots of Adolf Hitler, one of which is shown. The Seattle Forum is Whites only, and is attempting to purchase land on which to found an all-White colony, Cascadia. He also met Jason Reza Jorjani, the co-founder of Alt Right Corporation and editor of Arktos Media, who later resigned his position at both to concentrate on overthrowing the Islamic Republic of Iran. Jorjani’s middle and surname suggest that he’s of Iranian heritage, so it’s no surprise that he wants to destroy the Islamic Republic and create an Indo-European world order. Many of the Iranian languages, like the majority language, Farsi, are Indo-European, the same as the Indian languages derived from Sanskrit. The father of the former Shah decided on renaming his country Iran, instead of Persia, following a suggestion from the Nazi ambassador in the 1930s. ‘Iran’ is derived from ‘Aryan’.

These groups attempt to offer a complete, parallel society to that of the mainstream, so that the people within it not only attend political events with their fellow Fascists, but also socialize and go to and organize cultural events with them.

They also have links to the White House, and its current denizen, Donald Trump.

The article also includes a diagram of the various groups and organisations making up the Alt Right, and the links between them.

Hermansson also describes how he found the year within the movement emotionally numbing. These are viciously racist groups, with a violent and genocidal hatred of Jews, non-Whites, gays and feminists. They deny the Holocaust and joke about the murder of the Jews by the Nazis. They also cheered at the new of the Orlando shooting, when a sexually repressed and conflicted gay Muslim took out his anger and self-loathing by murdering people at a gay nightclub, many of whom were Latinos/Latinas. Hermansson describes how meeting and immersing himself in this milieu every day has the effect of normalizing their extreme and disgusting views. He states

I learnt a huge amount about how people and groups are connected, how the movement operates and what it was planning. I found out how the movement interacts internationally and how important the social aspect of activism is in radicalising and retaining members. These groups attempt to become all-encompassing organisations that go far beyond politics, into art, religion and social life making them incredibly difficult to leave. Tragically I’ve seen how social pressure inside these groups can make ordinary people support genocide.

The far right is often treated with complacency. Should we let them into the public debate? Their views might be different, but aren’t they just other opinions

What’s obvious after a year inside the alt-right is that we cannot become complacent. These are not just opinions. These are organisations that actively foment hate and promote violence towards large groups of people. They are dangerous and their dangerous ideology must be confronted, wherever it appears.

The article concludes with his description of the events in Charlottesville.

In addition to the diagram, there are also numerous photographs taken by the author.

https://alternativeright.hopenothate.com/my-year-inside-the-international-alt-right