New Holocaust Memorial Announced for London – Sargon and Co Ask Why

First off, I’m sorry I haven’t posted anything for a few days. I’ve been busy with other things down here, but normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. Yesterday, our Tory government announced that they were going to put a new memorial up commemorating the Holocaust. And Sargon of Gasbag, the man who broke UKIP, and his mate Callum over at the Lotuseaters Youtube channel have asked the obvious question: why? The proposed memorial has received widespread approval, especially from the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who were highly delighted. They claimed it was needed because Holocaust denial was growing in the UK and we needed to be reminded of our part in the Shoah, the great crime against the Jews, and also against the disabled, gays and the Roma. But as the commenters on the Lotuseaters video have pointed out, they said nothing about the Slav peoples of eastern Europe, who were also massacred. This is true. Hitler hated the Slavs, and in his Tabletalk he makes it clear he was looking forward to the extermination of the Czech. After the Jews, the Poles formed the largest number of the victims of Nazi massacre and extermination, particular Polish Roman Catholic clergy. Slavs were considered subhuman under the Nuremberg race laws. Their lands were targeted for German colonisation, and those Poles, Russians and Ukrainians lucky enough to survive were to serve as an uneducated peasant class producing agricultural goods for their German masters.

The Lotuseaters are men of the right, and the extreme right at that. I find their videos difficult to watch because of the idiot sneering at the Labour party, idiot ‘woke’ lefties and similar comments that also come out of the mouth of the mad right-winger, Alex Belfield. Particularly annoying in this video was all their jokes about Jeremy Corbyn and anti-Semitism, and how he especially wouldn’t like the memorial and agrees with Holocaust denial. It’s just right-wing libel. Corbyn, like George Galloway, has never denied the Holocaust and has a proud record of standing up for the Jews in this country, as he has done for Blacks and other ethnic minorities. His crime wasn’t anti-Semitism, but standing up for the Palestinians. The Israeli state and the ultra-Zionists, like the Board of Deputies, can’t justify it, so they smear those criticising their ethnic cleansing of Israel’s indigenous population as anti-Semites. This include proud, self-respecting Jews, who are tarnished and demonised as ‘self-hating’.

But the Lotuseaters are right to ask why we need such a memorial. They say we entered the War to stop the persecution of the Jews, when the Nazis and USSR had signed a non-aggression pact to divide Poland between. Callum even claimed that when the Soviets took over their part of Poland, they handed over its Jewish inhabitants to the Nazis to massacre. Well, I haven’t heard that before and neither did Sargon, but it doesn’t surprise me. Stalin was a vicious anti-Semite, and during the Weimar period western Communists were ordered to collaborate with Nazis despite the Nazis hatred of Marxist socialism and their persecution of the KPD under the Third Reich. It’s wrong to say we entered the War to save the Jews. We didn’t. We declared war on Nazi Germany because of our defensive alliance with France and Poland. Although there was little outright anti-Semitic persecution in Britain, low-level anti-Jewish sentiment was widespread and acceptable. There was considerable sympathy for Nazism amongst the British aristocracy, with various high-ranking individuals joining pro-Nazi organisations like the Anglo-German Fellowship. The father of Geordie Grieg, editor of the Heil, was a member of one such group. On the other hand, the Fascist parties and groups remained generally small. Britain passed laws banning the stirring up of racial hatred, and once war was declared Oswald Mosley, the head of the BUF, was sent to the Tower of London and his stormtroopers interned on the Isle of Man along with other enemy aliens. And our troops did liberate some of the concentration and death camps, along with the Russians and our other allies, and we did save the survivors from starvation, or as many as we could. There were Nazi sympathisers who served as auxiliaries in the Waffen SS, the British division of which served as the basis for neo-Nazi organisation the League of St. George. But as far as I know, there was absolutely no British state involvement with the Holocaust and I haven’t heard of any British commercial involvement with it, either. I’m therefore puzzled when the Board says it was needed to remind us of our role in it.

As for anti-Semitism in Britain, only 7 per cent of Brits have negative view about Jews. The majority have positive views of them, and a smaller number consider them no better or worse than anyone else. The Lotuseaters state that the Holocaust is taught as part of the British history curriculum. There are Holocaust deniers knocking around, but there are very few of them, at least among the vast majority of severely normal Brits, who despise them. I wondered if behind the cloaked language which didn’t name anybody in particular, the real fear was about the possible growth in anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial amongst Muslims. It’s rife in the Middle East because of the Israeli colonisation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and the humiliation inflicted on the Arab nations during the Six Day War. I have the impression that the majority of British Muslims despise Israel for its maltreatment of the Palestinians. However, Tony Greenstein has pointed out that the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism offer no supporting statistics or information on their website for their statement that the majority of anti-Semites are Muslim.

David Cameron apparently approved the monument five years ago in 2016, but Boris has only just given it the go-ahead. My impression is that this has precious little about commemorating the Holocaust for itself, and everything to do with generating support for Israel. Peter Oborne in his documentary for Channel 4’s dispatches 11 years ago described how the Israel lobby had effectively captured Britain’s political parties, and especially the Tories, through parliamentary friendship groups, sponsored trips to Israel and donations from pro-Israel Jewish businessmen. Any British paper or broadcaster, including the Beeb, that dared to cover atrocities by the Israelis and their allies, like the Lebanese Christian Phalange, were attacked and smeared by the Board as anti-Semites. Hence the attacks on the Labour party and Jeremy Corbyn, and the capture of the party of Keir Starmer, who has declared himself to be ‘100 per cent Zionist’. Hence also the foundation of front organisations claiming to represent Jews and combat anti-Semitism, but which are really concerned with persecuting and smearing critics of Israel, like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Labour Movement, previously Paole Zion, Workers of Zion. These two organisations were founded to combat the rise in anti-Israel sentiment following Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. My guess is that Israel and it’s satellite organisations and mouthpieces in the UK have been rattled by British support for the Palestinians following the riots around the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian districts in east Jerusalem ready for Israeli settlement. This all looks to me very much like the Israel state exploiting the Holocaust to garner support on the one hand, and the Tories using it to signal their compliance with Israel and its genocidal attitude to the Arabs on the other.

The Holocaust was a monstrous crime against humanity and it is entirely right that British schoolchildren are taught about it. But this new memorial looks like it has nothing to do with remembering the victims of the Shoah, but is simply a PR exercise to shame Brits into supporting Israel and its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

Moronic Nazi Troll Joshua Bonehill charged with Hate Crime against Labour’s Luciana Berger

Mike today has also put up a piece from the BBC News reporting that Joshua Bonehill-Paine has been charged with a racially or religiously aggravated hate crime for harassing Luciana Berger, the Labour MP for Liverpool Wavertree, and the party’s shadow mental health minister by sending her hate messages via Twitter.

Mike asks the $64 million question: is this the ‘moronic Nazi troll’ Joshua Bonehill-Paine?

See: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/06/23/man-charged-with-hate-crime-against-mp-luciana-berger/

Mike won’t be surprised to learn that yes, I’m afraid it probably is. And it’s about time this idiot was stopped for good.

Bonehill, unfortunately, has previous for this. He has been posing for years now as the Fuhrer-in-waiting of British Fascism, if only the other stormtroopers would wake up and rally to his supreme, racially-pure genius. He had his own small Fascist party going, for which he styled himself ‘Founder’, and was appealing to similar morons, who wanted to serve in his ‘founderguard’, presumably the Bonehillist version of the Liebstandarte Waffen SS, Hitler’s bodyguard in the Third Reich. He also held a very small rally in a park in Trowbridge, if I recall correctly, essentially consisting of himself, in which he unanimously announced to the gentlemen of the press, who outnumbered him, that he was successfully launching a new, mass Fascist party. In a pub somewhere else, the location of which he could not reveal. He was also telling the world at one time that he was the messiah of the White race prophesied by the ancient prophet Aryanus.

In fact, it all seems to me that much of this is just extremely tasteless play-acting. Bonehill has said in one of his past blog posts that his posture as a neo-Nazi ‘Founder’ is all a stage persona, inspired by David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust. Basically, he’s what the real racial nationalists in the far right call a ‘Hollywood Nazi’: somebody who merely acts the part. As for David Bowie, there’s a recording of him, which every now and then gets played on various TV or radio documentaries, of the great man saying that he was putting himself forward for the 1975 elections as the Fascist candidate. In mitigation, Bowie at that time does seem to have been close to a very severe mental collapse, and nothing in his career since then suggested that he had any real sympathy for the Nazis and their ideals. This is clearly shown by his marriage. His wife, Iman, I think is Somali. Her name means ‘Faith’ in Arabic. If he was a genuine Nazi, he would never have married her.

Bowie as musician and actor – he was in The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Hunger and Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence – gave people a lot of pleasure with his performances. Unfortunately, this cannot be said of Bonehill, who has shown himself to be a serial nuisance instead. He has an impressive string of convictions and arrests, several for harassing people. He was sent to jail for harassing a young woman after she spurned his romantic overtures, and was also arrested for sending hate mail and harassing the staff at a pub. He has also been arrested for trying to break into a police station to steal a uniform and equipment, as well as attempting to defecate in the meat section of one of the supermarkets. He is not so much an Aryan superman, more a stupid prat.

This does not, however, make any of his daft, unpleasant and thuggish antics any better. He has still harassed and threatened people, mainly women. The tweets he sent to Berger were reported to be anti-Semitic. If so, then they were definitely not a joke. Berger’s Jewish. I don’t know if she’s like many other British Jews in having lost family in the Holocaust, but even if she wasn’t, receiving racist hate messages from a self-professed Nazi isn’t remotely funny.

Looking at Bonehill’s antics, the way he keeps going despite being repeated hauled up before the beak, actually makes me wonder if he really doesn’t have some kind of psychological disorder. It’s clear he has an obsessive, compelling need for attention, and gets perverse pleasure from seeing others upset and distressed by his Nazi posturing. He’s a troll, but this has gone beyond simple trolling. Many of the idiots, who get similar kicks from being gratuitously offensive, would have given up after the first time they got sent to the slammer. That’s the point at which, even to the densest troll, things have become too serious. Prison’s no fun, and it’s no place to try to get pleasure from offending people, not when there are hard men around you who will rape, maim and kill you for it.

But Bonehill carries on regardless, leaving me wondering if he’s bonkers, or just to stupid to realise that it’s long past the time he gave up all this up, and started to try, as far as his meagre powers allow, to live as a decent citizen. And I do wonder how long it will be before all this catches up with him, and he’ll find himself in prison or in psychiatric care for much longer than he’s used to.

Vox Political on Goldsmith ‘Divide and Rule’ Tactics for London’s Asians

Mike over at Vox Political has put up a very interesting piece from Naujawani, which I think is a specifically Sikh website. Entitled ‘Refuting London Mayoral Candidate’s Divide and Rule Tactics’, the piece’s author is bitterly critical of Goldsmith’s tactics of trying to stir up old ethnic divisions amongst the London Asian community to get Hindus and Sikhs to support him against his Muslim rival, Sadiq Khan. The author, Sukhraj Singh, states that Goldsmith’s just using the old British imperialist methods of divide and rule, and compares his attempt to smear Khan simply because of his religion to the Nazis recruitment of Slavonic non-Germans to the Waffen SS by playing on their hatred of the Jews. Singh describes Goldsmith’s divisive electoral strategy as

‘ruthlessly dehumanising, patronising and exploitative of the socio-historical tensions that still exist, but have diminished significantly among the Punjabi-Sikh, Hindu-Gujarati and Pakistani-Muslim communities in recent years, which is why even for Conservatives this attack is below the belt.’

If you follow Mike’s link to the original article, you’ll find they’ve also put up a short video explaining why should you vote for, well, anybody else except Goldsmith. They’re particularly concerned as Sikhs to oppose Goldsmith and his nasty tactics, because as Sikhs they’ve been on the forefront of Islamophobic attacks. This is absolutely true. The first victims of hate crimes against Muslims after 9/11 were Sikhs, because Sikh men wear turbans, just like Osama bin Laden. And so perfectly innocent people were singled out and attacked, simply because of the way they dressed.

Just as Goldsmith is now trying to stir up racist fears against Mr Khan, simply because he’s a Muslim. And hence the vile smears against the man in which he’s been declared ‘radical’ and the libellous accusation that an imam, who supported him, was also a supporter of ISIS. Which was completely and utterly the opposite of the truth.

But just to remind everyone how deeply racism goes in the Tory party, Mike’s also put up on this page this election poster from 1960.

This was the era of the infamous slogan, ‘If you want a N*gger for a neighbour, vote Labour’. And it wasn’t that long ago that the Tories were sending the vans round, offering to repatriate any immigrants, who didn’t want to be here any longer. That was over fifty years ago, but unfortunately, they’re still trying to play on racial prejudice.

Mike’s article is at: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/05/03/refuting-london-mayoral-candidates-divide-and-conquer-tactics-naujawani/

For the original article, clink on the link at the bottom of the page.

The Countries that Voted ‘No’ to UN Ban on Glorification of the Nazis

One of the most frightening developments in contemporary international politics is the rise of extreme Right-wing, nationalist and indeed, explicitly neo-Nazi movements across Europe – from Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France, PEGIDA and the Alternative fuer Deutschland in Germany, and similar regimes in Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Ukraine. Germany has some legal protection against extremist radicalism in the Basic Law. Under the Grundgesetz, the only political organisations that are tolerated are those which recognise democracy. It was introduced after the War as part of the denazification process, and has been used against the extreme Right and Left. It was invoked in the 1970s to ban the NPD, or National Democratic Party, a neo-Nazi outfit, and earlier in the 1950s it was invoked against the KPD, the German Communist Party. They survived by reforming, and inserting a clause into their constitution stating that they recognised a period of democracy in the development towards Socialism. I also wonder if some of the Islamist firebrands that were thrown out of the Federal Republic a few years ago weren’t also deported because their preaching violated the Basic Law. After all, if anything violates a law protecting democracy, it’s the preachers’ violent denunciation of it and demands for the establishment of an absolute caliphate.

There have been attempts by the UN to pass laws against the glorification of the Nazis and the Third Reich. Michelle, one of the commenters on this blog, posted this comment about them, and the countries that either voted against the motion or abstained.

Countries at the UN vote on fighting the forces of international Nazism “Combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance”

In 2014 3 countries voted ‘NO’ Canada, USA and the Ukraine!: http://www.un.org/en/ga/third/69/docs/voting_sheets/L56.Rev1.pdf then in 2015 the same countries votes ‘No’ plus one more Palau, hard to believe, here’s the document: http://www.un.org/en/ga/third/70/docs/voting_sheets/L.59_Rev.1.pdf

And if that is still hard to believe the 2015 UN voting sheet is listed here fourth from the bottom: http://www.un.org/en/ga/third/70/votingsheets.shtml

Interestingly the UK abstained both times…

For most people and nations, passing laws against the glamorisation of the Nazis and everything they stood for really isn’t a problem. The horrors committed by the Third Reich are widely known, at least in the West, and the regime has been consistently condemned by mainstream media and politicians since the War and its attendant horrors, particularly the Holocaust.

In the case of Ukraine, it’s not hard to see why the country voted against the ban. Modern Ukraine’s national hero is Stepan Bandera, who led the campaign against what he viewed as the Russian/ Soviet occupation of his country during the Second World War. Ukraine had broken away and tried to seek independence after the First World War, but was then annexed by the emerging Soviet Union under Lenin. Unfortunately, Bandera attempted to gain Ukraine’s independence by allying and collaborating with the invading Nazis, though he was briefly interned in a concentration camp. See this documentary.

It’s less obvious why supposedly democratic nations, like America and Canada, that have never had to make a terrible choice between occupying totalitarian governments, should vote against the motion. Or why Britain should have abstained. One solution to the problem is that since before the Second World War, the British and American security agencies have recruited extreme Right-wing eastern European nationalists as part of their strategy to contain the Soviet Union and the rise of Communism. John Burns in his review of Stephen Dorril’s MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations (Fourth Estate: London 2000) in Lobster 40 notes the involvement of both the British and French intelligence services in the Intermarium movement. This was a Roman Catholic lay organisation, formed in Paris in the mid-1930s, which had as its goal the creation of a federation of stretching from Lithuania in the north to Croatia in the Adriatic, with Poland at its centre. The organisation’s chief, Otto von Habsburg, was given a subsidy of £50,000 a month by the head of MI6, Menzies. Habsburg later moved to the US, and the British tried to get the Americans to take over its funding. It officially died the death when Molotov rejected it on the grounds that it was anti-Soviet, a view which was then conceded by the US.

The scheme was supported after the War by the Vatican, where many senior priests and clergy took the leadership of the organisation. It became one of the first organisations that openly campaigned for the release of Waffen-SS Prisoners of War. The movement’s headquarters moved to Rome after the French lost interest in 1946. They then moved to the US, where they were heavily involved in CIA anti-Communist front organisations, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation. The article states that these became the bases for the liberation movements in those countries sponsored by the CIA and MI6.

The article also discusses the involvement of the British and American intelligence services in the Promethean League. This was formed shortly after the Russian Revolution, and was a conspiratorial independence movement for all of the minorities in the Soviet Union. However, the most prominent members were the Ukrainians and Georgians. By 1925 it was also receiving financial support from MI6’s Menzies. Kim Philby and Guy Burgess were also involved in this, and duly kept their Soviet masters well informed. It ceased to exist by 1949, but supplied many of the personnel for later, anti-Soviet eastern European nationalist groups, most notably the Belorussians and Ukrainians. These formed another organisation, INTEGRAL. This, according to Dorril, was a deliberate attempt to invoke the memory of the ‘integral nationalists’ of 1930s Europe, who held Fascistic views about race and culture. Stephen Dorril himself, writing in Lobster 15, states that MI6 used former collaborators with the Nazis in its anti-Communist operations in Latvia and Albania. See his review of Anthony Cavendish’s Inside Intelligence (Palu Publishing Ltd 1987), pp. 1-3, (p.1). Lobster’s long term editor, Robin Ramsay, also discusses the very strong Nazi element in WACL – the World Anti-Communist League, which includes Conservatives, anti-Semites, Nazis and the leaders of South American death squads. He states that CIA involvement in the organisation has always been strong, and that every now and then there are hints that the dividing line between it and the Agency has now ceased to exist. Ramsay also notes that Radio Liberty, one of the CIA financed stations broadcasting to the Soviet Union, was transmitting increasingly anti-Semitic material from Ukrainian emigres.

Ramsay also states that it the Ukrainian community in Britain, which formed the backbone of the World Anti-Communist League. It was led here by Yaroslav Stetso. Stetso styled himself the former Ukrainian Prime Minister. He was also the head of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, or ABN, which was formed after the War and financied by the British and US intelligence agencies. In Ukraine itself, Stetso had been part of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, which had collaborated with the Nazis and took part in pogroms and atrocities against the Jews. At WACL’s AGM in 1986, General Singlaub told the assembled Rightists that Stetso’s widow had received a personal message of condolence from Ronald Reagan praising her husband’s contribution to the struggle against tyranny.

The same issue of Lobster also carries a review of Scott and Jon Lee Anderson’s Inside the League (Dodd, Mead and Co., New York 1986), on WACL. This again notes that in this country, the League was headed by Stetso and the ABN ‘a bunch of Nazi-collaborators, murderers and anti-Semites funded after WW2 by the US and British governments’. It also is very pessimistic about Britain actually doing anything about the remaining former Nazis living in the UK, as to do so would risk exposing their links to MI5, MI6 and the mandarins at Whitehall.

There is also a review of ‘Date-Line Washington: Anti-Semitism and the Airwaves’, by Lars-Erik Nelson in Foreign Policy 65, Winter 1986. That also discusses the way the involvement of Ukrainian ex-pats in Radio Liberty under Reagan has also resulted in the broadcaster becoming anti-Semitic, while at the same time these groups are whitewashing history, claiming that they didn’t collaborate with Nazis, form a Ukrainian division in the SS, or assist in the persecution of the Jews and the pogroms.

From this, it looks very much like ‘No’ vote by the US and Canada, and Britain’s abstention, was due to a desire to preserve the links between the intelligence services and extreme Right-wing groups in countries like Ukraine. As well as to avoid anyone starting to do anything dodgy, such as invoking such a law to examine such links.