Here’s a bit more information that might explain what’s going on at the Wellcome Collection. Webb on his offending video put up a link to the Wikipedia page about Grace Ndiritu – not Enduritu, as I spelled her name – which states that she is indeed an artist and shaman, whose worked with a number of important museums.
‘Grace Ndiritu (born June, 1982) is a British-Kenyan visual artist. In 2009, her art was on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection in New York. This gained her a place in Phaidon’s The 21st Century Art Book published in 2014 and Time magazine in 2020. She is a member of BAFTA and also the winner of The Jarman Film Award 2022 in association with Film London.’
‘In 2012, Ndiritu began creating a new body of works under the title Healing The Museum. It came out of a need to re-introduce non-rational methodologies such as shamanism to re-activate the “sacredness” of art spaces. Ndiritu believes that most modern art institutions are out of sync with their audiences’ everyday experiences and the widespread socio-economical and political changes that have taken place globally in the recent decades, have further eroded the relationship between museums and their audiences and she believes museums are dying. Ndiritu sees shamanism as a way to re-activate the dying art space as a space for sharing, participation and ethics. From prehistoric to modern times the shaman was not only the group healer and facilitator of peace but also the creative; the artist.
In 2019 Ndiritu led a group of museum directors, academics, activists and artists, in a reading group with meditation at the controversial AfricaMuseum in Tervuren, Belgium, as part of conference Everything Passes Except the Past organized by Goethe Institut, on the restitution of objects and human remains from Europe back to Congo.
Ndiritu declared that 2020 was The Year of Black Healing. In honor of this, she led a year long programme of exhibitions, performances and talks in collaboration with institutions across the world, which was featured on The Sunday Times radio show with Mariella Frostrup and Elephant magazine.]‘
‘Since 2013 Ndiritu has been doing shamanic performances as part of her visual art practice, as a result of her training in esoteric studies such as shamanism, which she began over 16 years ago. In 2017 she was invited to give a talk on her work at Fondation Ricard in Paris, alongside other renown speakers such as Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev – director of Documenta 13 art exhibition and Fabrice Hergott – director of Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris.
She has also written essays about museums and exhibition making Healing The Museum (2016), Ways of Seeing: A New Museum Story for Planet Earth (2017) and Institutional Racism & Spiritual Practice in the art world (2019). Her most ambitious shamanic performance to date A Meal For My Ancestors: Healing The Museum, included staff members of the U.N., NATO and EU parliament, activists, and refugees at Thalielab, Brussels (2018).A briefing paper on climate change and refugees directly inspired by the performance, written by one of the participants, has now been published by the EU Parliament Research Services (May 2018).To date Ndiritu’s performances have taken place at Fundacion Tapies, Barcelona (2017),Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Paris (2016), Glasgow School of Art (2015), Galveston Artist Residency Garden, Texas (2015), Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2014), Musee Chasse & Nature, Paris (2013), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2013).’
Mike’s just put up a short piece this afternoon commenting on the fact that a protester was arrested by the rozzers for holding a placard up outside the Tory party conference calling Priti Patel and nasty name. No, it wasn’t anything racist or personally vicious. It was just a comment on her politics. The placard just said ‘Priti Fascist’. Nadia Whittome has posted this Tweet aptly summing up Patel’s policies:
To summarise her conference speech, Priti Patel wants to:
– push back boats of refugees, risking lives
– make our asylum system even harsher
– further criminalise peaceful protesters
– penalise people with drug addiction issues.
A brutal, authoritarian vision for our country.
As Mike says, the demonstrator was right. Patel is a Fascist. Quite so, but she’s not as far down the line to real goose-stepping Nazism as some would like. Yesterday mad right-wing YouTube Alex Belfield in one of his videos reported that the French cops had shot at the channel migrants with rubber bullets. He felt we should be doing the same, and mocked the lefty snowflakes who would complain if we did. Simon Webb of History Debunked put up a piece stating that the Polish army had been stationed at their border to repel unwanted migrants after 1,000 had tried to enter the country illegally. Why can’t we do the same, he opined.
I think there are a number of reasons why such highly authoritarian behaviour is more acceptable in Poland but not over here. England hasn’t been conquered since William the Conqueror and the Normans in 1066. Britain went on from the sixteenth century onwards to conquer an empire in the Americas, Africa and Asia. Even after decolonisation, we see ourselves as historically the conquerors and imperial rulers, not as the subjects. It’s because of this history that demands for action against racism and the remains of colonialist attitudes have been successful.
Poland doesn’t have that history. Following the reign of Jan Sobieski, who defeated the Turks at the siege of Vienna in the 17th century, Poland was conquered and divided between Prussia, Austria and Russia. The Russians had a policy of russification. Polish was not taught in schools. If it was, it was taught as a foreign language. The country only gained its independence following the First World War. It was conquered again by the Nazis during the Second World and its people subjected to horrific atrocities. Poles, like all Slavs, were regarded as subhuman. They were rounded up to be used as slave labourers and racist laws put in place to prevent them marrying or having sexual relations with Aryan Germans. At the same time, the SS looked for Aryan bloodlines in the Polish population. Children with blonde hair were stolen and given to German Nazis to raise because of their assumed Aryan racial heritage. Polish villages were razed ready for German occupation and settlement. After the war Hitler planned to destroy their educational system and professional and intellectual classes and reduce them, along with the other Slavonic peoples like Russians, Ukrainians and Belorussians, to peasant farmers producing agricultural goods for the German settlers and overlords. After the Jews, the Poles formed the largest proportion of Nazi victims in the concentration camps.
After the War Poland was again under Russian domination as a satellite of the USSR. Stalin was brutal in his treatment of them and the other subjects of his new empire. Anyone who had been to the West was rounded up and massacred or sent to the gulags. There is also the infamous Katyn massacre. Initially blamed on the Nazis, this was the slaughter of Polish troopers by the KGB preparatory to the Soviet conquest. Stalin also deliberately held his troops back from liberating Warsaw so that the Nazis could finish putting down the uprising there.
Given this experience of foreign rule and conquest, I’m not surprised that the Polish government, which is extremely right-wing, reacted with such intolerance towards illegal immigration. Which, of course, doesn’t make it right.
My fear is that, with everything else the Tories are doing to erode and destroy British democracy, the approval of the use of such military force will lead, but by bit, to the establishment of real Fascism in Britain.
As for the arrest of someone simply for holding up a placard calling her one, I fail to see how that constitutes any kind of offence. He wasn’t violent nor did the placard incite anyone to violence. I don’t even think you can call it libellous, as people with intolerant, authoritarian personalities are called Fascists and Nazis all the time. This is shown very well in Godwin’s Law, the saying that every debate on the internet will always end with someone from one side or the other comparing their opponent to the Nazis. Unless someone made a serious claim that someone was a real member of a Nazi group, like the NF, BNP, British Movement, Column 88 or such like, I really wouldn’t have thought it qualifies as libel. And I certainly concur with Mike. In the case of Priti Patel it’s fair comment.
It seems to me that the arrest of this man for nothing more than expressing a reasonable opinion on a viciously intolerant Tory minister is itself an act of Fascism.
As I said a few days ago, the Tories must be desperate. They and their allies in the press have fallen back to the old smears of anti-Semitism against Jeremy Corbyn. A Reform Rabbi, Jonathan Romain, wrote an article in last Friday’s Times warning its readers not to vote for Labour, because he was afraid of the terrible consequences of a Corbyn-led government for Britain’s Jews. And Stephen Pollard, the non-Jewish, goysplaining editor of the Jewish Chronicle, has written an article aimed squarely at gentile Brits, urging us not to vote for Corbyn because ditto.
David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialist Group has written another excellent reply to the latest round of smears. Rosenberg himself has been the subject of smear attacks and protests by ultra-rightwing Zionists. A few days ago Jonathan Hoffman, a former leader of the Zionist Federation, was doing his usual schtick of marching around screaming about anti-Semitism in protest at a talk Mr Rosenberg was given to the East London Humanists. Whom he also accused of anti-Semitism, because they’re militant atheists and are anti-Judaism. Well yes, they are. They are also anti-Christianity, anti-Islam, anti-Hinduism, and anti-religion generally. That does not mean that they stand for the persecution of Jews, or Christians, Muslims, Hindus or anyone else. As for Rosenberg being an anti-Semite himself, his piece, ‘Who’s Afraid of Jeremy Corbyn’, begins with him describing a journey he made as part of a group of sixty people on a four day educational visit to Poland. It was organised by Unite Against Racism and many of the people on it were trade unionists and members of the Labour party. They also ranged from sixth former to older people, including Holocaust survivors, some of whose terrible experiences he briefly describes. Rosenberg was a speaker at the event, but before he did, they were treated to a message by Jeremy Corbyn. It was not electioneering, but a private message, meant for the travelers alone. Rosenberg writes
But just before I spoke, we watched a video message that had been filmed in one of the busiest weeks of Jeremy Corbyn’s year. The election had only just been called but he found time to record a message to wish our group well on our visit. This was not electioneering. This was not a social media post to be broadcast by Labour’s Press Team for sharing far and wide. It was simply a private, personal, heartfelt message to our group, from someone who has spent their life confronting racism and fascism and posing an alternative to hatred.
“Your visit to Auschwitz,” Corbyn told us, “will be a poignant experience. I have been there myself.” He described antisemitism as an “evil cult that has to be destroyed in all forms.” He recalled a visit he made, in summer this year, “to a small Jewish museum in Romania next to a railway line, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were rounded up in 1944 and deported to their deaths.” He closed by calling on us to “unite as people to say we will not tolerate racism in any form in our society, be it antisemitism, be it Islamophobia, be it homophobia or any other kind of discrimination.”
Rosenberg goes on to criticise Romain’s article, which was part of the media’s general evidence-free argument against the Labour party. He also discusses how the Tories have been responsible for deliberately racist policies such as the Hostile Environment policy, and are now led by Boris Johnson and his vile remarks about ‘grinning picaninnies’ and women in hijabs. He also reminds voters thinking of switching from Labour to the Fib Dems because of the smears of racism just how racist the Lib Dems themselves are. They not only supported Tory austerity policies, which disproportionately affect ethnic minorities, they also supported the Hostile Environment. And they did some extremely racist campaigning themselves in Tower Hamlets. He writes
Some of us with longer memories might recall the role of the Liberal Democrats in Tower Hamlets in the early 1990s where Lib Dem leaflets linked the presence of Black and Asian people with the housing shortages, giving further credibility to the overtly racist BNP who were polling well. Other leaflets distributed by the Lib Dems accused Labour of diverting funds towards the area’s Asian communities. In the end the BNP won that seat, and the Lib Dems locally were widely seen as playing a despicable and racist role.
He also attacks the Torygraph article which quotes Conservative chairman James Cleverly that British Jews are preparing to flee Britain if Corbyn gets in. He notes that three years into Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party, fewer Jews than ever are actually leaving for Israel. But he also notes the anti-Semitic undertones of the Torygraph and Jewish Chronicle’s article. Both stereotype Jews as rich capitalists. He writes
But the more serious point contained in this suggestion is the not-so-subtle antisemtism of both the Telegraph and Cleverly.
In essence they argue that a Corbyn government will launch a vengeful attack on wealth. Those most committed to private enterprise fear being squeezed by a radical Labour government, and the suggestion seems to be that the Jewish community, often stereotyped as an overwhelmingly rich, business-orientated community, will especially feel that pinch. It is an argument that has been rehearsed by the very right wing Jewish Chronicle editor, Stephen Pollard, who gave space in December 2018 for an appalling article in his paper by Alex Brummer with a headline you might have expected to see in a fascist journal: “The thought of Jeremy Corbyn as PM has Jewish investors running for the hills”.
Three months earlier, Pollard himself, had attacked a tweet by Jeremy Corbyn in which Corbyn said that the people who caused the financial crash of 2008 “call me a threat. They’re right. Labour is a threat to a damaging and failed system rigged for the few.” Pollard tweeted: “This is ‘nudge, nudge, you know who I’m talking about don’t you? And yes I do. It’s appalling” In response I tweeted: “Stephen Pollard and Jeremy Corbyn. One of them seems to think all bankers are Jews. Clue: it is not Jeremy Corbyn.”
But when I read this drivel, stereotyping the Jewish community as capitalists, I think of the many Jews I know well who work in the health service and caring professions who will be boosted by the prospect of a Labour government that is committed to funding their sectors rather than selling them off. I think of the struggling Jewish single parents and pensioners I know, and unemployed Jews, who have every reason to welcome a Corbyn-led government that would boost welfare payments rather than cut them, and would undertake other serious anti-poverty measures. I think of Jews I know who are users of mental health services, whose provision has been cut to the bone by the Tories. I think of elderly Jewish acquaintances living in the East End for whom repairs to their council housing and a well resourced health service are very high on their agendas. These people need a Labour government to be returned on December 12th as much as as their non-Jewish counterparts.
Absolutely. I’ve met Jews, who’ve despised the Tories for what they’ve done to the Health Service because they’ve, or their parents, have worked in it.
He also gives more news that you won’t find in the lamestream media. Apparently here are two new initiatives by British Jewish young people to tackle the Tories. One is Vashti Media, which states that it is a ‘microphone for the Jewish Left’, and another is ‘Jews Against Boris’.
He also discusses a talk the group were given by a Polish socialist and anti-fascist, who talked about the current political situation in his country and the mobilisation of anti-Fascists to combat the recent nationalist marches through Warsaw. His article concludes by commenting on the way the Fascist and Nationalist right in Poland and eastern Europe are being supported by right-wing forces across the continent, including Britain’s Tories.
As we sat in a cab driving to the airport on Monday, we passed a wall graffitied with a crossed out Star of David in a circle. The populist right and far right in Poland, and other countries central and eastern Europe, have been drawing support from right wingers in Western Europe including Britain’s Tory Party. Those elements in Britain that are leading the false charge against Jeremy Corbyn, as if he were some sort of threat to Jews in Britain, need to stop playing dangerous factional political games and face up to where the threats are really coming from.
As Rosenberg and other, genuine anti-Fascist activists both Jewish and gentile have made clear, Jeremy Corbyn is not an anti-Semite. Since he’s been leader of the Labour party, the level of anti-Semitism has been at the lowest its ever been for years. Anti-Semitism, like racism generally, is always strongest on the right. And that means the very same Tories, who are trying to smear Corbyn as a Jew-hater.
Jonathan Hoffman is a fanatical Zionist activist, who regularly protests against and tries to disrupt pro-Palestinian meetings and events because they are, to him, ‘anti-Semitic’. Even when the events are organised by Jewish and other organisations, who are very careful to exclude real anti-Semites and neo-Nazis. He and his bizarre antics have been all too frequently discussed and documented by Tony Greenstein, not least because of the extreme right-wing company he keeps. Tony has many times put up photographs showing Hoffman parading around in the company of extremist, islamophobic outfits like the EDL and Britain First. He was photographed outside demonstrating against one pro-Palestinian meeting next to Paul Besser, Britain First’s intelligence officer. Which must surely be a contradiction in terms, coming from that organisation. A few months ago Hoffman and one of his mates, to my recollection, lost a court case and were convicted of harassment. According to Tony’s article today, it was of a Palestinian woman. But Hoffman evidently hasn’t learnt his lesson, because he’s been out disrupting meetings again.
This time it was the turn of East London Humanists, who are affiliated to the National Secular Society, who felt his ire. They’d committed the heinous crime of inviting David Rosenberg, of the Jewish Socialist Group, to speak about anti-Semitism. Hoffman duly lost his fragile mind once again, and turned up with six other ‘vigilantes’ as he describes them, to disrupt the meeting. Tony has a photo on his blog of him with a couple of them standing next to two Israeli flags. Why the anger? Because David Rosenberg’s another Jewish critic of Israel’s barbarous treatment of the Palestinians. Thus, according to Hoffman, he’s an anti-Semite and a ‘renegade Jew’, and the East London Humanists are guilty of anti-Semitism for inviting him there, apparently. Hoffman complains that as the Humanists actively oppose religion, they are a pain to the Jews. As Tony himself points out in the article, the Humanists oppose all religions, not just Judaism. I certainly don’t support either Humanism or the National Secular Society, who, in my opinion, can be extremely intolerant in their attempts to force religion out of the public sphere. But I don’t think you can accuse them of racism. Nathan Johnstone’s book on New Atheist myths, which I reviewed a few days ago, attacked Dawkins and co. for their vitriolic rhetoric, which he believed could all too easily spark vicious persecution. But he acknowledged that Dawkins and the others, including Sam Harris, were actually humane people, who genuinely sympathised with the oppressed and marginalised. I also have the impression that there’s a split between the old-fashioned Humanists and the New Atheists about their rhetoric. Many Humanists and atheists are disgusted with the New Atheists because of their intolerance, which they associate with religion. So while I don’t doubt that Humanists object to Judaism as a religion, along with Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and the other faiths, I’m sure that they’re genuine supporters of the Jewish people’s right to live in peace, equality and safety, along with people of other races and ethnicities.
Also, David Rosenberg himself is very far from being any kind of ‘renegade Jew’ or anti-Semite. I’ve blogged about several articles from his excellent blog, Rebel Notes. Rosenberg is, like Tony, a very firm opponent of racism and anti-Semitism. He has spoken at meetings in Britain and abroad against racism and Fascism. He was in Warsaw a few months ago, attending a ceremony commemorating the heroes of the Jewish uprising against the Nazis. This included children from the local schools singing one of the rebels’ songs in Yiddish. He also posted another piece on his blog about the speech he gave at an anti-racism meeting in Manchester, in which he praised the local Jewish, Socialist, Communist and trade union activists in that great city for sticking it to Mosley and his stormtroopers when they tried to goosestep around it. He has also posted pieces about an exhibition at the London Jewish Museum on Marxism and Jewish identity, in which he viewed Marx as in the line of Jewish prophets and campaigners against oppression and exploitation. It’s glaringly obvious that Rosenberg wouldn’t do any of this, if he were a genuine anti-Semite.
But Hoffman and his fellows have decided Rosenberg is a Jew-hater, because his socialism is informed by the stance of the pre-War Jewish Bund. This was the Jewish socialist party in eastern Europe and the former Russian Empire. They saw the Jewish people’s homeland as whichever countries they lived in. They had no intention of supporting a separate Jewish state, and actively campaigned against Zionism. They demanded instead that Jews should live as equal fellow citizens with their gentile neighbours. This was by far the majority view of European Jewry at the time. But it runs counter to the right-Zionist message, which is that true Jews have always wanted their own state. And so Zionist extremists like Hoffman smear activists like Hoffman, Tony and Jackie Walker, as anti-Semites.
Hoffman is also upset ’cause he doesn’t like Tony mentioning how he keeps company with people, who could be described as Fascists. So Tony’s put up photos of him marching around with the EDL and their Jewish division, the JDL, as well as Paul Besser and a few other extreme right-wing Zionists.
Don’t be misled. It’s people like Hoffman and other extreme right-wing Zionists, both Jewish and gentile, who are behind the anti-Semitism smears against pro-Palestinian activists. Those they attack and smear are very frequently genuinely anti-racist opponents of anti-Semitism. Tony states that he has never seen Hoffman protest against genuine racists and Fascists. He has pointed out over and over again that the Zionist right will collaborate with real anti-Semites in order to advance their goals of getting more Jews to emigrate to Israel. Which is why the Conservative Jewish establishment in this country, like the Conservative establishment generally, has done everything it can to smear Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour party as anti-Semites, even when Corbyn and they have a proud record of combating racism and supporting the Jewish community. And they can be especially vicious in their attacks on genuinely left-wing Jews, who support the Palestinians.
The real fanatical bigotry here didn’t come from Rosenberg or the East London Humanists. It comes from Hoffman and those like him. They’re responsible for smearing decent people, and their lies are being used by a right-wing political establishment and media to prevent a Corbyn government getting into power. Because it would actually do something for British working people, who naturally include Jews.
Last Saturday’s edition of the I also carried a story reporting that a Polish paper was planning to print stickers attacking gay rights. The article, ‘Paper prints anti-LGBT stickers’, by Samuel Osborne, on page 31, ran
A Polish newspaper plans to hand out “LGBT-free zone” stickers in its next issue. Gazeta Polska tweeted a preview of the stickers, which show a rainbow flag with a black cross over it.
The weekly publication, which has a circulation of about 11,000, openly supports the conservative governing Law and Justice Party (PiS). The stickers are due to be distributed on Wednesday with next week’s issue.
Georgette Mosbacher, the US ambassador to Poland, criticised the move.
She tweeted: “I am disappointed and concerned that some groups use stickers to promote hatred and intolerance.
“We respect freedom of speech, but we must stand together on the side of values such as diversity and tolerance.”
Earlier this year, another right-wing newspaper in Poland published an article on its front page on “how to recognise a Jew.”
This is chilling stuff, showing how quickly the Law and Justice Party, and similar governments in the rest of eastern Europe, are quickly dragging their nations into very real Fascism and anti-Semitism. This is the same government, remember, which against the express wishes of the mayor of Warsaw, allowed far right, Fascist organisations to march alongside ordinary, patriotic Poles on their national holiday celebrating Poland’s liberation from German, Austrian and Russian imperialism. The Law and Justice Party is strongly anti-gay, nationalistic and with a strong current of anti-Semitism. There was an international outcry a few years ago when they introduced a law criminalising the mention or discussion of Polish collaboration in the Holocaust. I gather, however, from a Polish commenter to this blog that the law doesn’t, however, prevent all discussion of Polish collaboration in this most horrendous of war crimes.
However, as with Viktor Orban’s similarly intolerant and Fascistic Fidesz government in Hungary, there’s been precious little denunciation of the Polish government’s increasing turn to Fascism from the official Jewish bodies in this country, like the Board of Deputies, or papers like the Jewish Chronicle. Why? Poland, Hungary and other eastern European countries are purchasing arms from the Israelis. And so readers of the Groaniad a few years ago were treated to a nauseating piece by Stephen Pollard, the Jewish Chronicle’s non-Jewish editor, informing them that Poland’s government wasn’t anti-Semitic. They were ‘good friends of Israel’.
Yes, they are ‘good friends of Israel’. And that’s a major cause of offence to many Israelis. Jewish bloggers and commenters like Tony Greenstein and David Rosenberg over here have reblogged stories from Israeli papers about Israeli human rights activists, who are outraged by the way any number of very real Fascists from right across the globe have been welcomed by the Israeli state. All they have had to do is pay an official visit to the Holocaust monument at Yad Vashem, and their own mass murders, assassinations, torture and mass imprisonments are discreetly overlooked.
Let’s also make it very clear that while anti-Semitism and racism is rising in eastern Europe, just as it is over here, not all Poles or eastern Europeans are racists or sympathetic to the far right. Way back in April, David Rosenberg put up an article describing a ceremony the previous day held at the Ghetto Fighters’ monument in Warsaw, celebrating the heroic uprising against the Nazis during World War II. The folks assembled for the event flew the red flags of the Jewish Bund, the Jewish socialist group, along with one for the International Brigade from the Spanish Civil War. This celebrated the Poles who left their country, to fight against Franco and the Fascists. One side of this flag was in Yiddish, commemorating the Jews, who fought in the Naftali Botwin company in the Dombrowski battalion. There was also a choir from one of the Warsaw schools, which has a multicultural curriculum. These were mostly, if not almost all non-Jewish, but they proudly sang the Yiddish songs of the Jewish resistance, like “We will Outlive Them!’
There were Poles, who courageously defied the Nazis and aided and rescued Jews, and are commemorated with their own memorial in Poland. And the Polish nation itself, along with the other Slav peoples, suffered their own horrific persecution under the Nazis. Hitler considered the Slavs, like the Jews and Gypsies, to be subhuman. An area of land extending deep into Ukraine was to be cleared of its traditional inhabitants and colonised by Germans. If the Nazis had won, the Slavs would have been reduced to an agricultural peasantry, whose only function was to provide food for their Nazi masters. Non-Jewish Poles were massacred, pressed into force labour, and had their villages destroyed. And Hitler had worse planned. He said that the war against the Poles would be a war of extermination.
But the re-emergence of real, vicious racism and intolerance in eastern Europe, which extends not just to gays and Jews, but also to Muslims and other non-Whites, is being ignored by the British Jewish establishment and the Israeli state. David Rosenberg has blogged about his concern for these nations’ Jewish minorities, as have other Jewish commenters, including senior academics. But the very real threat these communities face is ignored, because the Israeli state and the British Jewish establishment that supports it, is more determined to destroy genuinely anti-racist critics of Israel through false charges of anti-Semitism.
Which shows just how hypocritical organisations like Jewish Chronicle, the Board of Deputies and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism really are.
This is another video from the Boston-based Real News network. It’s a report on the steady march towards the extreme right by the Polish government’s Law and Justice party, and their collaboration with Fascism and Holocaust revisionism. The country’s a member of the EU and NATO, and is bitterly hostile to Russia, from whom it has requested America provide protection. Donald Trump is thus considering building a new NATO base there, named after himself. Naturally.
The video discusses the march through Warsaw last month, November, 2018, to commemorate the centenary of Poland’s independence. 200,000 people attended. The march was, however, initially organized by the Far Right, and attended by extreme right-wing groups from all over Europe. The march was then co-sponsored by the government, and the president, Andzrei Duda, marched in front of a number of explicitly Fascist organisations.
The programme talks about this with Dr. Dovid Katz, an academic specializing in the rise of Fascism in eastern Europe, who is rightly alarmed by these developments. He states that Fascism exists in many countries, but it bodes badly for democracy when the government partners with it. He describes how the Polish government has been increasingly taking the country towards Fascism. Katz says that this is ‘so sad’ because Poland was the first major country invaded by Hitler, with no disrespect to Czechoslovakia. It’s thus particularly alarming to see Nazis marching on Poland’s hallowed national day, along with the president and thousands of other, non-Nazi people, who nevertheless felt comfortable marching with the Far Right. He pays tribute to the mayor of Warsaw, Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, who tried to prevent the march from going ahead, but was overruled by the rest of the council. As well as leading politicians, the Groaniad reported that the Polish armed forces also marched side by side with Fascist organisations like the National-Radical Camp, or ONR, the successor to a pre-War anti-Semitic organization, as well as the Italian Fascist organization, Forza Nuova.
Gronkiewicz-Waltz apparently came from the Centrist party, but her attempt to ban the march was overturned by Duda, who announced that it would go ahead as the Rightists had originally planned. A court also overturned the ban, effectively combining the government and Fascist marches. The government put a cordon of military police between the two marches, but Katz argues that this really did nothing to distance the government from the Fascists. Katz states that the governments collaborating with the Far Right, such as those in the three Baltic states, use similar tactics, but they don’t morally make any difference. He makes the point that on this sacred day, the government is showing that it’s in solidarity with people who believe in Aryan purity, who hate Jews, Blacks, Roma and gays. In other words, all the same people the Nazis hated.
The documentary notes that the Law and Justice party began as a nominally centre right party with a strong Christian orientation. Since taking power in 2015 it has moved further right. This year, 2018, it purged the supreme court of a third of its members, and reappointed their successors in October, provoking protests. It has also become increasingly nationalistic. Katz states that as centre-right party, it was ostensibly like the British Tories and American Republicans. But its far-right character has been revealed by its neutralization of democracy through the attacks on the independence of the judiciary. He states that it’s to Poland’s credit that there is a vibrant opposition which has led to the situation being covered, unlike similar events in the Baltic states.
But parallel to the attacks on democracy is the rise of ethnic nationalism and an emphasis on the racial purity of the Polish people. This has also come with a rise in anti-Semitism. The video shows a clipping from a newspaper report about a hostel that declared that it was only for Poles, Jews were forbidden. This is despite the majority of Polish having been either killed or fled during the Holocaust. In February this year, Duda passed a law criminalizing the mention of Polish complicity in the Holocaust. This effectively made Holocaust revisionism mandatory, and anyone who discussed the reality of Polish complicity in the Holocaust could be jailed for up to three years. Katz states that it is important to recognize that most Poles aren’t anti-Semites and never were. In the case of the Holocaust, a quarter of the Righteous Gentiles, the rescuers of Jews, in Europe during the Nazi era came from Poland. He also states that for hundreds of years, the Polish kingdom and then the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth provided a haven for Jews and other minorities. But these new Fascist forces are tapping into the worst forms of Polish nationalism and Roman Catholicism, which also had a deep anti-Semitic theological tradition built into them, which the Nazis were easily able to exploit. And the term ‘Christian’ here is being used as a dog-whistle for ‘ethnic Poles’. Katz states that Poland is a very ethnically homogenous country. There is no challenge to Polish ethnic identity. It’s the Far Right attempt to create and exploit problems, which don’t exist. And the real victims of this attempt to create a Fascist state are the Poles.
Katz goes on to say that Poland was different from the Baltic states and western Ukraine, in that it was the victim of the Nazis, and so has nothing to fake history about. The law banning any discussion of Polish involvement in the Holocaust was also expressed in blatantly anti-Semitic terms. In the Baltic states, however, the wording of similar laws is much more deceptive. The equivalent law in Ukraine talks about equal evaluation of totalitarian regimes. Which means that if someone says that only the Nazis committed genocide, and that the Soviet crimes, as horrific as they were, don’t constitute genocide, then they can be sent to prison. In Latvia this is five years, 2 years in Lithuania, three in Hungary and 10 in Ukraine.
The international outcry that followed the passage of Poland’s Holocaust law forced the government to amend it to make it less severe and remove the jail sentences. But this problem isn’t confined to Poland. Katz is a member of the web journal, Defending History, which tracks Holocaust revisionism in eastern Europe. They stress that Fascism is appearing elsewhere in eastern European NATO member states. The anti-Semitism in the Baltic isn’t overt – the government sponsors Jewish plaques, conferences and memorials, but there is still the Fascist emphasis on ethnic purity and the desire to falsify the history of the Holocaust.
Katz is an excellent speaker, who clearly has a deep respect for Poland and its people. He’s also right about Poland providing a refuge for the Jews during the centuries of persecution. And there are monuments in Poland to those, who helped the Jews in the Holocaust.
Poland was the victim of genocide and ethnic cleansing under the Nazis. Hitler himself said that the war against the Poles would be one of extermination. Of the gentile Christians, who were persecuted by the Nazis, the majority were Polish Roman Catholics. The Nazis despised the Slavonic peoples of eastern Europe as non-Aryan subhumans. The handbooks issued to the Hitler Youth urging them to keep themselves racially pure had diagrams showing the typical features of the peoples of Europe. Those of the Slavic peoples, beginning with the Poles, are shown has becoming increasingly east Asian, with high cheekbones and slanted eyes, until they finally merge into those of the peoples of China and the other Asian countries.
Nevertheless, there is a deep strain of anti-Semitism and xenophobia in these countries that is being exploited. I wonder how much of the trend towards Fascism in Poland is being driven by the same economic and psychological forces behind the rise of the Far Right in Hungary. Poland’s another state that had to fight for its independence against domination by the German, Austiran and Russian Empires, and was threatened by the Turkish conquest of the Balkans and expansionism from the 15th to 17th centuries. I’m left wondering if the Polish people also suffered through the collapse of Communism, like those of Russia and Hungary. And if they also, like Hungary, were badly hit by the 2008 financial crash.
And despite their affected concern with defending Jews from anti-Semitism, Israel and its lobbyists in Britain will not attack the Polish government. Because Poland, like Ukraine and Hungary, has bought Israeli arms. Thus Stephen Pollard, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, appeared in the pages of the Guardian to deny that the Law and Justice Party was anti-Semitic, because they were good friends of Israel.
One of our uncles was Polish, a man who worked his way across Europe from Germany to France until he came to Britain. He was a decent man, who worked hard to support his family. It’s horrifying that his country is going down the same path towards Fascism, and that Nazism is rising again in eastern Europe with connivance of these nations’ governments.
Everyone in the West has to join together to fight it, before it undermines all of western civilization.
This is a report from RT, broadcast last Thursday, 15th November 2018, about the protests in Edinburgh against Steve Bannon’s address to the European Broadcasting Union.
Bannon, you will remember, was another Far Right activist and member of Trump’s cabinet, before the Orange Generalissimo gave him the heave-ho. He was interviewed in Edinburgh by journos from the Beeb. The video has a clip of Bannon’s speech, in which he states that present media coverage at the White House is at the level of playground gossip. There is no real coverage of the issues, partly because of economics but also because of a lack of investigative journalism.
The report states that he was met with protests from anti-racism demonstrators, which include United for Grenfell. The protesters chant ‘Stop Trump’, hold placards with the slogan, ‘Ban Bannon: Racists Never Welcome’ and ‘No To Racism, No To Trump’. Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s First Minister, withdrew from the even in protest, and the anti-racism group, Stand Up To Racism, has asked those involved in the interview to complain to the BBC.
There’s a clip of the joint head of Stand Up To Racism, Sabby Dahlu, explaining that they don’t agree with him being given a platform and treated as a normal journalist. He isn’t. He may have had links with Far-Right websites like Breitbart, but he was also Donald Trump’s chief of staff, and chief political strategist. He was sacked, but is now building a Far Right political movement across Europe, including Britain. Bannon has met Michael Gove, Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Tory right, and funding the Fascist Free Tommy Robinson campaign. She therefore questions why the Beeb is presenting him as a respectable journalist when he isn’t. And the real danger is that if people like Stand Up To Racism don’t speak out, organisations and individuals like them will be treated as normal. And that is how Nazism started.
The European Broadcasting Union said it had a duty to present all views and give him a platform. They said that he was a key influencer in the rise of populism, one of the dominant political trends of our time. He was invited to News Xchange this year because his views are relevant to today’s society at large and therefore to the media industry. They also said it was their journalistic responsibility to scrutinize and share a variety of relevant viewpoints in the framework of balanced debate.
The Beeb defended their decision to be part of this with a statement that
Good journalism in a world of fake news and disinformation is more vital than ever. Journalism is about asking tough questions and understanding what is happening in the world and why. A conference designed to analyse the big issues impacting that world isn’t an endorsement of anyone or anything – it is a function of what journalism is.
In fact, this isn’t the first time that the Beeb and the British media has chosen to interview a Fascist, not by a very long chalk. Some of us can still remember the controversy the Beeb caused when they invited Nick Griffin, the-then head of the BNP, to appear on Question Time. And Buddy Hell has made the point over at Guy Debord’s Cat that the media is always soft when it comes to interviewing the Far Right, illustrating this with an interview with John Tyndale, the head of the National Front, in the ’70s.
And Sabby Dahlu’s right: there are real dangers to this approach. The number of people voting for the Nazis in Weimar Germany was derisory, comparable to the number of people voting in Britain for the BNP and the other bizarre Fascist grouplets today. One of the factors which aided their rise to power until they became a mass movement with a membership in the millions was that influential members of German society took them up and promoted them.
And there are real questions too about the impartiality of Edinburgh council. One protester was arrested on a charge of breach of the peace for holding a placard saying ‘Nae Nazis in Edinburgh’. Tony Greenstein pointed out that under Scots law, this isn’t a minor offence. It can carry an unlimited sentence. He also wondered what was so offensive or dangerous about the placard that the man holding it was arrested.
Bannon is a White supremacist and a real menace to civilized European society, and to its ethnic minority citizens. A week ago, on the 12th, Hope Not Hate put up a report about a mass march in Warsaw organized by the Fascist National Radical Camp or ONR, named after a viciously anti-Semitic organization in the 1930s, and All-Polish Youth, another Far Right outfit that is also militantsly homophobic as part of the celebrations commemorating the centenary of Poland finally gaining its independence in 1918. The march also included foreign fascists like the Italian Forza Nueva, a group of British skinheads, the Canadian Alt-Right YouTube personality Stefan Molyneaux, and Tommy Robinson and a group of his stormtroopers. 200,000 people attended the march.
Jewish anti-racist activist David Rosenberg has also described this procession in a moving article about a tour of Auschwitz and a tour of Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter of Krakow, which he was involved in organizing. He notes that as well as the Nazis, anti-Fascists also made their presence felt. He writes
But the spirit of anti-Fascist resistance was also present in Warsaw as progressives held an alternative march and anti-fascist rave. This march was led by two banners in Yiddish and Polish held side by side, translating to “For your and our freedom”. This slogan was first used in a Polish rising against the Tsarist Empire in 1831, then revived in the Spanish Civil War by the Botwin Company of the Dombrowski Battalion, and later by Bundists in the Warsaw Ghetto resistance.
Fascism is on the march again, and Bannon is a part of it. And if you want to see what real Fascism does, contrary to all the nonsense Richard Spencer has spouted about a ‘peaceful ethnic cleansing’, all you need to do is look at Auschwitz. Or simply read the rest of Rosenberg’s article above.
Fascism and Nazism aren’t simply just another political movement. They are a direct threat to democracy and the lives and dignity of millions of people. Their leaders should never be given a platform from which to spread their vile doctrines.
I’ve been blogging quite a bit recently about the frightening rise of the far Right in Europe, and especially eastern Europe. I put up a video yesterday about the cult of Stepan Bandera, the great, modern nationalist hero of Ukraine. Bandera fought for his country’s freedom from the Soviet Union during World War II. However, he did so by allying himself and collaborating with the invading Nazis. Poland has also seen the emergence of extreme Right-wing groups, such as the National Rebirth of Poland, which is now actively trying to recruit members from the Polish expatriate community living and working over here.
This piece from VICE is a report about this years Polish Independence Day march. This is held annually, and attracts crowds of extreme nationalists. In previous years it’s been marked by violence between these Fascist groups and the police. Many of the nationalists come from gangs of football hooligans. VICE’s reporter shows the march’s stewards, who are themselves drawn from the far Right, training under a bridge in Warsaw to deal with violence, including being bombarded with smoke bombs or CS gas.
After that, he then goes to the town of Lodz in the company of a member of the Ultras, the violent supporters group for the Widzew lower league team. Lodz appears to be quite a grim town. The reporter says it’s quite picturesque, but the area inhabited by the Ultras seems to be quite run down. It’s got an unemployment rate of 12 per cent, which, the presenter states, compares well with the national average, but there is little to distract its young men away from nationalism and violence. As they’re driving through it’s slightly run-down streets, the Ultra he’s with points out the two supporters of a rival team, and states quite plainly that if the presenter wasn’t there, he’d go after and attack them.
The presenter also states that it’s not a mystery that there is so much nationalist sentiment and antagonism to refugees and Islam in Poland. The country now has a new government, and politicians have been appearing on television talking about the threat from Muslim refugees. The documentary shows television footage of one particular Polish politician stating that refugees don’t respect their host countries’ culture or ways of life, and once they’ve become firmly settled there, they then begin to make their sensitivities clear. The reporter then goes to the muster point for the march. This is at a Roman Catholic church, where the reporter says that they’re to thank God for Poland’s independence, and get Him on their side for the day. During the service the priest thanks the biker gangs that are in attendance for joining them. Standing outside the church are bikers and skinheads with Polish flags and armbands. The reporter states that he thinks the Nazis have ruined armbands, and that after them, no-one can wear them without it looking dodgy.
The march itself this year is strangely quiet and uneventful. There are no battles with the police. This is remarked upon approvingly by a couple of older ladies, who have joined the march. The marchers from Lodz carry their banner, showing their support of Widzew, which they made earlier down in the basement of one of the tower blocks. Along with the Polish flag, which the reporter’s companion from the Ultras has told him is ‘sacred’ to the Poles, are other banners for the National Rebirth of Poland. Several are explicitly anti-Islam. Some simply have the slogan ‘Stop Islam’, while others show a mosque with ‘stop’ traffic sign across it, familiar from Western anti-Islamic groups like the EDL over here and PEGIDA in Germany. The speeches at the march, included in this report, are also overtly anti-Islam. A young voice is heard over the loudspeaker system shouting, ‘Pride, pride, pride. We don’t want rape. We don’t want violence. The Gospel, not the Qu’ran!’ The reporter also briefly interviews a middle-aged Polish man, who makes it clear that the people there fear the influx of Muslim refugees. The man states that they don’t want immigrants to arrive in their country, ‘as we aren’t prepared for them. He also says that they don’t know who they – meaning the immigrants – are, and that they should have to wear armbands identifying them for two or three years. It’s exactly the same kind of rhetoric that’s coming out of Trump and Ted Cruz across the Atlantic in America.
Vice’s reporter ends the documentary by saying that although there hasn’t been any violence between the marchers and the police that day, if felt like a victory parade for the Polish far Right after they had conquered the state. The documentary itself ends with the statement that since it was made, hundreds of thousands have taken part in anti-government protests, and the EU is looking into the state of democracy in Poland.
The rise of the nationalist extreme Right in Poland, and the consequent increase in xenophobia and fear of Islam, and the deep link between Polish national identity and Roman Catholicism can partly be explained by the country’s history. Following the rule of Jan Sobieski, the Polish king who broke the Turkish siege of Vienna, Poland was conquered and divided between Prussia, and the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires. They only gained their independence after the First World War, when they finally became a united nation once more under Marshal Pilsudski. They have had to fight for their survival as a people and nation in a way which we Brits, or at least, the English, are fortunate not to have to. In the Russian ruled areas, the official language, including that of the schools, was Russian. If schoolchildren were taught Polish, it was as a foreign language.
Secondly, the redistribution of territory following the First and Second World Wars, including the loss of parts of Ukraine, meant that Poland’s population were almost uniformly Roman Catholic. 98-99% of the Polish population belong to the Church, which became the focus of opposition to the Communist regime following the expansion of Soviet power as the Russians pushed the Germans back across Europe at the end of the War. The result is a powerful sense of national identity, which itself is deeply identified with Roman Catholicism, as well as a terrible sense of insecurity and threat from outsiders.
The specific fear of Muslim immigration can strike Western Europeans as peculiar, given that Poland isn’t the destination of choice for refugees from Africa and the Middle East. These mostly want to settle in the more prosperous west of the continent. This, however, seems to be part of a general rise in Islamophobia in eastern Europe – in Hungary, and the Czech and Slovak Republics. There’s an interesting report linked to by the anti-Fascist, anti-Islamist organisation, Hope Not Hate, on the rise of militant anti-Islamic politics in the Slovak republic. This also comments on the fact that Slovakia is off the main migration route. However, the article traces the rise to the fact that the Slovaks, compared to Britain, Germany, France and Italy, are a small nation. There are only five million of them. They therefore fear that they will be swamped by mass immigration. And their politicians are also partly responsible, even the left-wing Socialist party, as they have attempted to boost their electoral support by playing on the fears of a mass influx of immigrants from outside Europe. The result has been the resurgence of ugly strands of nationalism, last seen in the collaborationist regime of Monsignor Tiso during the Second World War. Tiso was the Roman Catholic cardinal, who governed the country during its alliance with the Nazis, and was partly responsible for sending his country’s Jews to their deaths in the Holocaust. Tiso himself seems also to have been a hero of the Slovakian far Right for a very long time. I can remember reading in one of the Communist/ Trotskyist newspapers a friend of mine bought in the 1980s an article about the rise of the Fascist right in the Soviet bloc then. Along with a discussion of the notorious, and now defunct Russian Nazi group, Pamyat’, the article also mentioned with horror that the Slovaks were also putting a statue up to honour Tiso.
And finally, I think some of the rise of the extreme Right in eastern Europe is due to the social dislocation following the collapse of Communism. The democracy the peoples of Europe waited for did not bring the prosperity they expected. In fact I can remember talking to a girl, whose parents were Polish, who said that actual conditions in Poland seemed to her to have deteriorated after the Fall of
Communism, to the point where she didn’t feel safe travelling through the country. This was in the 1990s. It was about this time that the Russian economy also went into meltdown due to Yeltsin’s mass privatisation of the state industries. Millions were made unemployed, in a country which had no unemployment support system, as under Communism full employment, provided you kow-towed to the party, was guaranteed. It wouldn’t surprise me if something similar had also happened in the former Soviet satellites and break-away states. And with economic insecurity comes the desire to find a scapegoat, a terrible ‘other’, who can be blamed, or made the focus for all the fear and insecurity. And so in some of the former eastern bloc, it’s back to anti-Semitism and a hatred of the Jews, and now a fear of Muslims.
This is another topic on which I could say much, much more. It isn’t just in America that Fascism appears to be rearing its ugly head. It’s also on the rise in eastern Europe. A few weeks ago Hope Not Hate covered mass demonstrations against Islam which were expected to be held one weekend in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. They also reported that Nick Griffin, having received the heave-ho from British voters and his own party, the BNP, has gone to dine out at other’s expense in Poland.
It’s chilling. A friend of mine, who very definitely isn’t anti-Polish – he’s British, but also goes to get some of the delicacies on sale at his local Polish shop – caught sight of the Polish Far Right hold a demonstration in the street a few months ago when he visited the country of Copernicus and Chopin’s father. As well as many of the Free Polish pilots, who did so much to keep this country free of the Nazi threat during the Battle of Britain in World War II.
He can’t speak Polish, but there was a group standing in the street, making speeches to a watching crowd. They seemed to be ranting about Communists and inevitably, the Jews. When he got back, he asked one of the Polish people at work if they were the extreme Right. His co-worker confirmed it. He noticed that the people in the crowd weren’t what you’d expect. They were well-dressed, young, with families. Not the same type as the grizzled skinhead hard men you tend to get over this side of the Baltic.
And you can find similar scenes right across eastern Europe. The current nationalist government in the Ukraine includes neo-Nazi storm troopers, and neo-Nazis have also resurfaced in Russia since the 1980s.
The anti-Communist resentment is understandable. This was a dictatorship imposed on the Poles and other peoples by Stalin, and backed by military force from the Soviet Union. In Russia, the Bolsheviks took power through a coup, rather than popular revolution. Under Stalin, they killed millions. As for the hatred of the Jews, some of this comes from traditional eastern European anti-Semitism, the same anti-Semitism that saw vicious pogroms in the 1890s, and which led members of the conquered eastern European nations to collaborate with the Nazis in the Holocaust. In Poland, some of it also might come from the way Stalin, himself a vicious anti-Semite, used Jews in his secret police as he felt that they would have little sympathy for the gentile population.
The anti-Semitism is vile enough, but the outright support for the Nazis shows a profound ignorance of the nature of the Third Reich and their racism. They weren’t just anti-Semitic. They also considered the speakers of Slavonic languages, such as Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Belorussians, Russians and Ukrainians, to be racially inferior. After these areas were conquered and the Jews exterminated, the indigenous inhabitants of these areas were to be worked to death as slaves. In Poland, the Nazis compounded the horrors through a deliberate programme of resettlement and ethnic cleansing similar to that inflicted on the Jews. They also scoured its people looking for ‘Aryan’ bloodlines. Blonde Polish children and babies were held to have ‘Germany’ ‘Aryan’ ancestry, and so were taken from their parents to be raised in German families.
Hitler made no secret of these policies. His intention to conquer eastern Europe is laid out in Mein Kampf:
And so we National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy tendency of our pre-War period. We take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze towards the land in the east. At long last we break off the colonial and commercial policy of the pre-War period and shift to the soil policy of the future. If we speak of soil in Europe, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states.
– cited in D.G. Williamson, The Third Reich (Harlow: Longman 1982) 88.
Between 1941 and 1942 two million Russian prisoners of war died of starvation and maltreatment in Nazi concentration camps. Here is a description of such atrocities at the POW camp at Blizin in Poland, by an eye witness.
The camp consists of four huts, situated in the fields near the village, so that everything that happens there can be observed by the neighbours. Train-Loads of prisoners which arrived here had taken over a fortnight to reach the new camp and were without food or water. Each wagon when opened contained scores of dead bodies. The sick who could not move were thrown out. They were ordered to sit down on the ground near the camp and were shot by the S.S.-men before the eyes of the rest. the cam contains about 2,500 prisoners. The average daily death rate is about 50. The dead bodies are thrown out onto the fields and sprinkled with lime, often lying some days after that unburied … The prisoners received 1/4 kg of bread made of horse-chestnut flour and potato-skins, and soup made of rotten cabbage.
in Williamson, above, p. 92.
Williamson also includes the entry from Goebbels’ diary on resettlement policies in Poland.
Zoerner has resigned as governor of Lublin. He called on me to give the reasons for his resignation. He had succeeded on the whole in squeezing an unusual amount of food out of the Lublin district. Understandably so, for this district is the most fertile in the entire General Government. Suddenly, however, he received orders for resettlement that had a very bad effect upon morale. Some 50,000 Pole were to be evacuated to begin with. Our police were able to grab only 25,000, the other 25,000 joined the partisans. It isn’t hard to imagine what consequences that had for the whole area. Now he was to evacuate about 190,000 more Poles. This he refused to do, and in my opinion he was right. His district will now be governed from Warsaw by Governor Dr Fischer. Although Dr Frank, the Governor General, agreed with Zoerner’s views he hasn’t the authority to put his foot down on the encroachments of the police and the S.S. it makes you want to tear out your hair when you encounter such appalling political ineptitude. At home we are waging total war with all its consequences and are subordinating all philosophical and ideological aims to the supreme aim of final victory: in the occupied areas, however, things are done as though we were living in profound peace….
Williamson, p. 93.
No self-respecting person from eastern Europe should ever join one of these Nazi parties. Ever.
Image from the Guardian article ‘Fracking the Nation: the Dash for Gas beneath rural Britain’ from 28 June 2013. The picture is captioned ‘From this to this … ? The village of Compton Martin in Somerset, left, and a Cuadrilla shale gas drilling rig near Blackpool’.
In my first post attacking Cameron for his lies about the floods in Somerset, I received this comment from Amnesiaclinic
The DM found the 2008 document put out by the EA to comply with the EU directive on habitats. There is also the trojan horse of Agenda 21 stalking in the shadows. The general idea is that areas are left to go back to nature (costs less) without letting the locals in on what has been decided. So dredging and pumping, very expensive are out as they are expensive and unnatural. So I say stop all the flood defences for london – far too expensive and let them sink or swim.
Also, there were lake villages in Somerset with houses on stilts – that might be useful! Plus coming together as communities and buying up all the EA equipment and doing it themselves.
People are very angry as they have seen this coming.
Other commenters concurred. Kathrynd posted this comment, pointing to an article from the Central Somerset Gazette
This links to an article reporting the arguments by Richard North, who runs the Defence of the Realm and EU Referendum blogs. North argued that there was a deliberate policy by the Environment Agency to allow increased flooding in Somerset and elsewhere as a form of flood management. This was intended not just to replace flood defences, but also to replace intensive farming with new, and diverse forms of managing the countryside. Part of this was the intention that part of Somerset’s wetlands should be allowed to regenerate naturally and revert to the wild. This new environment was to be termed ‘washland’.
The policy was first proposed at an EU meeting in Warsaw in 2003. This seems to have influenced a Defra document, published the next year in 2004, entitled Making Space for Water, setting out the same policy. On page 23 the document acknowledged that the same issues were being discussed in the EU. The EU’s policy was published in a COM final (2004) 472. The policy then became European law under directive 2007/60/EC of 23rd October 2007. This stated in recital 14 that as well as preparation, protection and prevention, river management should also be conducted “with a view to giving rivers more space, they should consider where possible the maintenance and/or restoration of floodplains, as well as measures to prevent and reduce damage to human health, the environment, cultural heritage and economic activity”.
North then goes on to make the following points
Just so that there should be no doubts as to where the policy thrust law, DG Environment in 2011 issued a note, stressing that flood risk management “should work with nature, rather than against it”, building up the “green infrastructure” and thus offering a “triple-win” which included restoration (i.e., flooding) of the floodplain.
By then, the Environment Agency needed no encouragement. In its March 2008 plan it had decided that, “providing a robust economic case for maintenance works on the Somerset Levels and Moors remains a challenge” (p.131).
We believe, the Agency said, that “it is appropriate to look again at the benefits derived from our work, particularly focussing more on the infrastructure and the environmental benefits, which previous studies have probably [been] underestimated”.
We have, they said, “international obligations to maintain and enhance the habitats and species in the Somerset Levels and Moors, and it is within this context that all decisions have to be made”.
And, with that, they were “doubtful that all the pumping stations on the Somerset Levels and Moors are required for flood risk management purposes. Many pumping stations are relatively old and in some cases difficult to maintain. It is necessary to decide which ones are necessary particularly in the context of redistributing water”.
Of six policy options, the Agency thus adopted the sixth, to: “Take action to increase the frequency of flooding to deliver benefits locally or elsewhere, which may constitute an overall flood risk reduction”. This policy option, they said, “involves a strategic increase in flooding in allocated areas” (p.141). The Levels were to be allowed to flood, as a matter of deliberate policy.
North is obviously a Eurosceptic, highly critical of the Green movement and its environmental policies in Somerset. However, there is another possibility why the floods have been allowed to occur, quite apart from environmental concerns: fracking.
Owen Williams suggested this in his comment
I don’t suppose I’m the only one thinking about the coincidence that the Somerset Levels sit on top of a large Shale Gas deposit, am I? Can it really be pure coincidence that the Levels have been allowed to flood so severely – and it has been allowed, the EU edict more or less confirms it – just as the Fracking industry rears its head in the UK? I’m not saying that the Government deliberately flooded the Levels – no man can control the weather – but that they knew that the Levels would eventually flood with such severity as they have, and that they seem too well-prepared to exploit the opportunity.
What happens next will be as simple as it will be brutal to the people who live on these flood plains: the Government will make the requisite level of noise about helping these poor souls, while actually doing nothing at all; this will be to first encourage them to leave of their own accord, before setting up a buyout scheme to relieve people of their property and ‘help them to move on’; the people will only be offered a mere fraction of what their land or property is actually worth in its damaged state. And then, finally, the Government will issue a Compulsory Buyout Order to forcibly grab the land, and take action to remove those who can’t or won’t leave on their own. They’ll then quietly auction off the rights to commence the fracking process on the land, in return for a share of the profits, all of which will line their own coffers, rather than go into the public purse.
In short, the Somerset Levels will become an industrialised disaster area poisoned beyond repair by fracking, and the people who’ve lived there for however many generations will be unjustly displaced and robbed of their livelihoods with no-where to turn. The Government will continue to sit pretty above “commoners’ problems” as it always does, and Big Industry will continue to profit off the backs of people’s misery.
Meanwhile, down on earth, everyone else loses everything horribly, through no fault of their own.
What a pleasant country we live in. ¬_¬
When I replied to Owen, I thought it was unlikely that this was a deliberate policy, but found it quite credible that the fracking industry would move in after the area’s population had been cleared out due to the disaster.
Now I’m inclined to believe that Owen’s right, and that there may indeed be a definite policy at work here.
I was talking to a friend yesterday, and she recalled reading an article in either 2003 or 2007 – she couldn’t remember which – in which it was stated that the affected areas in Somerset should be abandoned to flooding so that fracking should begin. This confirms what Owen said in his comment.
Now without any documents to prove this, it’s all just hearsay and speculation. The memory does play tricks on people, though not as often as it appears to affect members of the Coalition, who regularly deny having said or done anything that conflicts with their policies. However, as the picture at the top of this post shows, there is a campaign to begin fracking in Somerset. This has provoked angry opposition from local people, concerned about the possible effect on the environment and drinking water.
The proposed fracking fields at the moment are in the Mendips, as shown in the map below
This covers a long list of communities and villages in Bristol, Bath and north-east Somerset. A list of them can be found at this website here: http://somersetfrackgate.blogspot.co.uk/p/coalbed-methane.html. Proposed sites for fracking include Keynsham, a small town between Bath and Bristol and the hometown of the comedian Russell Howard, and near Chew Valley Lake, a local reservoir in the Whitchurch and Chew Magna area just down the road from South Bristol. Among the groups campaigning against fracking in this part of Somerset are Frackfree Somerset, based in Saltford and Keynsham.
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Fracking, almost needless to say, has the backing of David Cameron and the government. More sinisterly, the Somerset County Gazette reported in its 27th January 2014 issue that the government was considering reforming the trespass laws so that fracking companies can drill under people’s homes without their permission. This contradicts the Conservative stance on both sides of the Atlantic that, apart from big business, the stand for the property rights of the small businessman and ordinary people. Remember all that stuff Margaret Thatcher used to say about small businesses and how she remembered living above the shop when she was small? I also remember Clint Eastwood stating that part of the ideology of the Western was having your own land. This disproves it. The Conservatives stand only for the property rights of big business. Like the corrupt cattle barons fought in Westerns by the likes of John Wayne, they’re quite prepared to use any and all means to force others off their property so that they can move in.
BBC News this morning reported that some of the victims of the Somerset floods wish the government to buy their properties at market rates. I don’t know if this will happen or not, though I’m sure that the government will buy their land, and then start to develop it. And it’ll be interesting to see if this includes fracking.
busiest weeks of Jeremy Corbyn’s year. The election had only just been called but he found time to record a message to wish our group well on our visit. This was not electioneering. This was not a social media post to be broadcast by Labour’s Press Team for sharing far and wide. It was simply a private, personal, heartfelt message to our group, from someone who has spent their life confronting racism and fascism and posing an alternative to hatred.
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