Harry’s Place

There’s no defence; those who belong to the British Left and support
the Nazis do so either because they are stupid enough to believe Nazi propaganda or else because they think anti-Semitism may serve a ‘higher’ purpose.

I had an educational experience on YouTube last night. I was looking for a clip of Not The Nine O’Clock News’s song about Oswald Moseley. After finding that, I also turned up Moseley’s BUF manifesto.

What was educational was not so much the comments (”I think he is just what the UK and Europe needs right now;” “LOL fascists”) but the other clips from the same person who is clearly a bit of a fan of the British Far Right.

One of them was an audio recording of George Galloway castigating a female caller to his ghastly radio show who called him an anti-semite.

I’m not great fan of Trots having had negative experiences with that nest of vipers and liars called the SWP but I must say fair play the US Trots for confronting the antisemitism of a project that they had previously supported.

All we need now is for the UK Trots to grow some balls and tackle the antisemites within their own ranks and amongst those who sometimes support them.

Mrs Trellis said: “Not The Nine O’Clock News’s song about Oswald Moseley”

I remember that that was a good one.

Not as good as ‘Nice Video. Shame about the Song’ though

The song was mostly written to string together various effusive comments about Moseley from The Guardian, Times and Daily Telegraph.

Still, it was naive of me to think that YouTube did not have a fascist underbelly. It’s also noticeable that the comments tend to be gramatically correct and properly spelled - gave me the odd image of moustachioed, uniformed BUF members dictating them to a typist.

If the headline read ” Yesterday a Totalitarian, today STILL a Totalitarian”, it would be far more apposite. Communism and Fascism/Nazism are but two slices of the same cake, distinguishable only by the colour of the icing. Both forms of totalitarianism are anti-democratic, anti personal freedom and put the “State”, ie the oligarchy and their sycophants, before the well-being of the inhabitants of their Country. Is it really possible to draw a distinction between, Stalin, Hitler, Chairman Mao, Pinochet and the Argentine Junta except by degree?

“Is it really possible to draw a distinction between, Stalin, Hitler, Chairman Mao, Pinochet and the Argentine Junta except by degree?”

Regarding the Argentine Junta you are spot on. Argentina’s oficial anti-communist ideology was all about the enemy inside, propagating subversion like a virus, infecting the Argentinian body of the Nation, etc, etc, etc… No different from Communist propaganda against the kulaks.

Dear me, you chaps have had it on the brain these few weeks.

Served up today an obscure story about El Salvador, a quote dug out from Respect Renewal, fitted together clunkily, with HP’s standard hyperbolical peroration - and HEY PRESTO! we have another “scary story” about Nazis taking over the left.

One looks a bit closer and finds the usual generalisations and non sequiturs, the grinding of axes; moreover, as is tradition, we hear the chuntering about tiny ultra-leftist sects which are irrelevant anyway - even if one could make the argument that they are all goose-stepping Nazis.

Us middle-of-the-road folk are left wondering if HP has either become a rather bizarre alternative conspiracist site - not Jews taking over the world, but antisemites around every corner… or rather more prosaically a place for ex-lefty trainspotters, comrades reunited, to refight old battles endlessly.

Of course antsemitism is a problem, like all racism, but these last few weeks you’ve been laying it on a tad thick, haven’t you chaps?

We know you don’t take racism seriously, and don’t care at all about the proliferation of racists in professedly anti-racist and left wing organisations.

So don’t bother to comment on it.

I have written about my hatred of communism previously. Fascist, nationalist and right wing dictatorships do have differences with Communist dictatorships, even though both are prone to killing many folk.

Of course, historically, people who actually had a material effect supporting right-wing dictatorships were folk actually in power (Kissinger) or, for example, residing in Chicago University, Milton Friedman, and a large band of Chicago boys who fanned out across South America to support these dictatorships. Not Respect Renewal.

In Chile’s case, at least, this process actually began before the US sponsored coup, where the eggheads scribbled an entire economic policy delivered to the generals’ desks the very day they murdered themselves to power. The only way these extreme policies could have been implemented was through the barrel of a gun.

http://www.socialistunity.com/?p=2779

John Game commenting on Derek Wall’s defence of Jenna Delich on Socialist Unity seems to say that any movement can morph into any other - there’s no particular predisposition in today’s Socialists to become antisemitic per se, it’s only that people like HP and Engage selectively carp on about antisemitism as if it were actually important. Michael Rosen questions whether antisemitism is really very important in the grand scheme of things - a fart in a jar - and implies people who make a big deal of it should concentrate instead on poverty and starvation while unconvincingly denying entering into any kind of oppression olympics.

Reminds me of the old guidelines for giving blood pressure medication on the basis of cardiovascular risk. By the time your risk factor had passed a certain threshold your arteries were wrecked already.

The concept of nipping a problem in the bud is lost on these people.

We know you don’t take racism seriously, and don’t care at all about the proliferation of racists in professedly anti-racist and left wing organisations.

I supported HP over Delich, but as you must have noted from my comments, I was concerned about some of the methods used and their implications. I clearly condemned Delich linking to DD and agreed that the article she linked to was antisemitic (after you provided a link to said article). However, I do not agree that boycotters of Israel are necessarily antisemitic; I agree with Martin Shaw of Democratiya on that. I also think, generally speaking, antisemitism needs to be fought within an arena of open free speech - I think that’s the best way of dealing with it.

Flesh Everywhere

Derek Wall did nor defend Delich as far as I know. He expressed solidarity with HP, but then posted something by Noah Tucker offering an alternative view.

Benjamin, yes. Posting other people’s analyses of sensitive situations is a habit of Derek’s which appears to me to be a distancing strategy. So if he posts a defence of Delich without commentary, then I infer that he approves.

Derek Wall expressed “solidarity with HP” thru gritted teeth, so its not quite the same, old chap.

as for the SU blog article it is a way of re-tracing his steps, funny how they fail to mention Ms. Delich sending crap from Dr. Polya?

Every time Benji says “What’s the big deal?” what he means is “I don’t understand.”

Modernity,

I do realise that it’s necessary for you to say that, but this is what Wall wrote on his own blog:

“I am horrified by the fact that a legal threat is being made to shut the blog down and I think it is important to spread the word and give a bit of solidarity.”

He then quoted approvingly from, and linked to, Phil’s defence of HP at SU.

Not sure that is ‘gritted teeth’.

Flesh Everywhere

Posting other people’s analyses of sensitive situations is a habit of Derek’s

Yes, but that’s not what you said, which was:

Derek Wall’s defence of Jenna Delich

I have not read a defence of Delich by Wall. What he posted was a piece by Noah Tucker. In the intro he said:

“I may be a staunch defender of Harry’s Place or to be precise I think Jenna Delich was wrong to link to David Duke and to have HP closed down but I appreciate that there is another view, this is from Noah Tucker”

That is clearly not “Derek Wall’s defence of Delich”. Just thought I would correct the record.

politics, old chap, it is politics, do keep up (see thru the obvious)

Politics, indeed, Modernity. That’s why its necessary for you to ’spin’ like that. I am just being polite when I say ’spin’ of course.

benji, you always, but always assume BAD faith in others, and want your own tedious and not too bright contribution. to be seen in the best of lights.

NO I didn’t spin it, I couldn’t give a flying fuck either way, just I have been watching the people that supported HP, those that didn’t, some who did and WHY?

that’s the real question: WHY

not that you’ll understand why it is

now fuck off, benji

Benjamin.

I think Jenna got it wrong on 3 counts.

1) She gave eyeballs and traffic to the far right without recognising them as foe
2) She directed the UCU Activists to antisemitic conspiracy material, twice, with unalloyed approval.
3) (we think) she tried to get Harry’s Place closed down.

Sure, Derek criticises her for 1) and 3) - this is easy for him because uncontroversial. Then he posts a defence relating to 1). Sure it’s a defence. That’s alright - 1) was the least of her errors. Why, Noah Tuck has done something similar himself! So has Sue Blackwell! And even Jim Jepps.

So much for 1) - what about 2) - 2) is the biggest problem. Why the silence on 2)?

More than Jenna not getting it I’m worried by all her more experienced defenders who have missed the point.

Gotta go.

I am starting to wonder whether it is possible to have any discussion on HP that does not degenerate into a back-and-forth with Benjamin.

Bejnamin has a right to his opinions, but between him and the replies it’s deja vu all over again in every single topic. :(

In these circumstances, is it any surprise that some sections of the British Left include people who take their politics from the extreme Right?

Why do you keep calling Nazis “extreme right”, David? The Nazi agenda was essentially the emancipation of the working classes, which to a great degree and with remarkable efficiency, they succeeded with. You fatuously and reflexively assume that when a member of the Left adopts violent methods they have suddenly dumped all their Marxist mumbo-jumbo and adopted a policy of brainless control, coercion and suppression. Bullshit! Mark well, these guys, like Mafia bosses, are anything but brainless and they know very well what they are doing.

They just lost patience with democratic and consensus methods. Guys like Lenin, Trotsky, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, Castro and Chavez all subscribe to an essentially Marxist agenda, but the difference between these guys and decents like Obama, Blair and Mitterand is they they know the ordinary man-in-the-street wants none of their Marxist Utopian fantasies, and that the man-in-the-street will just have to be forced. Pol Pot learned this from the likes of Brecht and Sartre.

All Left-wing agendas involve coercion, how the hell else are you going to take money from “the Rich” to give to “the Poor”? In today’s Britain, “the Rich” are now the hard working middle classes and “the Poor” are Labour’s client state - beholden to a Labour administration and its overweening bureaucracy who pay their Welfare. But look how quickly “the Poor” dump Labour when they get an alternative, as in Glasgow East. It wasn’t the rich who put Mussolini and Hitler into power.

But guys like Lenin and Mao know better, and they don’t have democrats to get in their way. The “decents” who help get them into power are dumped (usually physically) as soon as (or before - just in case) they work out what is going on and that “the Revolution” has been betrayed. It happened in Russia and it happened in Iran - get rid of the hated Shah and get something ten times worse.

As for anti-Semitism, there is a stark contrast between the Nazis, who demonised the Jews, and the Fascists, who protected them from the Nazis - until Fascism collapsed and the Nazis invaded Italy. So to describe anti-Semitism as “Fascist” is ahistorical and facile.

Let me quote from a respondent to a similar article by Oliver Kamm: I can only shake my head sadly at his failure to mention that parts of the “Left” going over to the “far Right” is nothing new. I am sure he knows very well that Baathism was born as a branch of socialism; that Oswald Mosley left the Labour Party because it was not “left-wing” enough; that Mussolini used to be the great hope of European socialism; and that anti-semitism and apology for genocide can be found in Marx, Engels, and Proudhon.

On such issues, the Left has made a Faustian bargain in its dream of Utopia and lost its soul. The minute you surrender people to ideology you are lost. To truly help people you don’t need politics, you need hard work and technology - which over the past few centuries has done far more for the common man than politicians. The trouble is that it also requires humility and patience.

Not as good as ‘Nice Video. Shame about the Song’ though

Spots knocked off by I Believe and, for sheer delight in anti-taffy racism, Failed In Wales.

Terrorist chic!

Alcuin: The Nazi agenda was essentially the emancipation of the working classes, which to a great degree and with remarkable efficiency, they succeeded with.

erm … by locking up their union leaders in concentration camps, you mean?

As for anti-Semitism, there is a stark contrast between the Nazis, who demonised the Jews, and the Fascists, who protected them from the Nazis - until Fascism collapsed and the Nazis invaded Italy.

You are aware of the 1938 Italian racial laws, right?

erm … by locking up their union leaders in concentration camps, you mean?

Do you posit that such a policy uniquely identifies the Right? Good luck with that. The Nazis also locked up priests, lunatics and Gipsies - for inadequacy or political opposition (real or imagined) but not specifically because they were union leaders.

A nice try at deflection, since you cannot challenge the fact that most political monsters (as opposed to plain gangsters like Saddam and Amin) derive their political justification if not their motivation, from theories of the Left.

Neither Nazis nor Fascists were nice people, but the Fascists refused to pass their Jews to the Nazis, and in this respect were better than the Vichy French.

Not as good as ‘Nice Video. Shame about the Song’ though

How prophetic that the song and video “I want to do Big Jobs” was written for Obama. Ah, nostalgia, its not what it used to be. “American Express Sir……”

The argument that the Nazis were Leftists is, forgive me, a red herring.

The underlying philosophy of racial hatred and the supposed superiority of “Nordic” people has nothing to do with liberation of the working people. For that matter I don’t think it has anything per se to do with corporate control of governments.

It is, however, the power behind traditional Nazi judenhass - which in turn is probably based at least partially in traditional European Christian hatred of the Jew for not being a Christian. Similarly, the Soviet Union/Russia were also though obviously not exclusively rooted in a religious culture that explicitly rejected Judaism.

Both the Nazis and “The Protocols” blamed Jews for controlling all the money, causing wars, etc, and in addition they rejected/murdered Christ. Thus it was acceptable to murder them. I have heard this explained to me, very calmly, by my WWII era German in-laws: The Jews were rich, therefore….

Neither the Western Left nor the Western Right can really escape that prejudice unless it’s openly discussed. Putting Left/Right labels on the same essential culture is futile. And, it isn’t ordinary fear of “the other”, or ordinary racism, because of this religious aspect.

Both racism and xenophobia are obviously bad but in most cases they aren’t also accompanied by specific religious proscription, which makes them far more dangerous to their intended victims, and far more difficult to handle rationally - because the underlying cause of the animus isn’t rational to begin with and it’s fraught with ideas of holiness and salvation and blood libel - deicide - thus exponentially worsening ordinary “fear of the other”.

Islamic antisemitism is also religiously based, but in the 20th century was made infinitely more virulent by the importation of European antisemitic memes including Nazism and of course the mother of all conspiracy theories, “The Protocols”. And, in my experience, Eastern Christians are very antisemitic also. I don’t know if there has been any attempt, as the Vatican has recently tried, to reconcile with Judaism - from what I’ve read about Sabeel, I doubt it. The concept that G*d has abandoned Israel (in the sense of the Jewish people) for Christians, ie replacement covenant, is a powerful and damaging aspect of Christian theology and it is useful for whipping up blood libels and hatred.

I don’t believe that modern antisemitism including anti-Israel propaganda can be effectively confronted unless the bigotry against the Jewish religion per se, by its two powerful offshoots, is acknowledged.

Meanwhile, Right/Left squabbling is just that: two wings of political/economic thinking that grew within the same overarching culture. Thus neither is inherently immune from inherited antisemitic prejudice.

As for the people who try to dismiss antisemitism as just another form of everyday racism: I think you’re wrong. Antisemitism is a constant, underlying feature of Western civilization - it’s a kind of disease that has periodically wiped out a huge percentage of the Jewish people, who today represent only a tiny fraction of the world’s people. And the Jewish state itself is under constant and repeated threat of extinction, whether by political or military means.

There’s nothing ordinary about that and the “look over there at Pol Pot” argument is truly ridiculous. If Hitler were a one-off maybe it would be germane - but he wasn’t.

Finally I have been hearing an absurd and deeply offensive argument lately: that Jewish fears of the Holocaust, or repeats thereof, are causing antisemitism - along with Israel of course, and supposed Jewish guilt for the presence of US troops in Iraq.

I am hearing this from people who should know better: lifelong American Democrats, who decry racism. Their hypocrisy and ignorance are absolutely shocking.

Maven, let me rub your tits. Got a laugh from me in the debauched 2008.

I agree with most of what you say, Sophia. I was just pointing out that it is facile and ridiculous to say that a Leftie who adopts violent methods has “gone over to the Right”, particularly by those who seem unable to identify what this “Right” agenda consists of. However:

Islamic antisemitism … was made infinitely more virulent by the importation of European antisemitic memes including Nazism

I strongly dispute “infinitely”. Pogroms of Jews by Muslims has a very long pedigree.

“look over there at Pol Pot”

Not sure what point you are making here. If you refer to my reference to Pol Pot, I was not making a point about anti-Semitism, merely that he got his political ideas from his stay in Paris. Sartre, in particular, was dangerously ambivalent on the use of violence for political ends.

Heh. I can see Benjamin in the 1930s flapping his smoking jacket as he sips on another dry martini, opining: “Oh, golly gosh, my, oh my, those Jews are getting hysterical again, as is their wont. Why don’t they just calm down and concern themselves with important things like the economy rather than constantly track this silly little Austrian Clown and his idiotic writings about which they seem so obsessed”.

As I said, Benjamin is the perfect bystander.

‘he got his political ideas from his stay in Paris’

Alcuin, Have you got a reference for that, beyond Jonah Goldberg ,that is?

‘Fascists refused to pass their Jews to the Nazis’ - When?

For some real writers on fascism, see the list i left on the Puerile Politics thread

In these circumstances, is it any surprise that some sections of the British Left include people who take their politics from the extreme Right?

Alcuin has made a lot of good points: please let us all remeber that fascism and bolshevism are heresies of the social democratic movement at the turn of the last century. As as noted by several former Nazis, the ideological hurdle from National socialism to bolshevism was much easier than the one to liberal democracy.

As regards to the irrational hatred of the “other”, be they Jews, arabs or whatever, we should consider that while we are not doomed to always do this, we seem to be very prone to this, no mater what our politics. Let’s not let any epicurean delusions about the perfectability of man, transmitted via Marx, to blind us to some possibly ugly biology. Hate can be fun and addictive; how much sweeter it is when we mask it as virtue, or in the service of justice, etc.

“The underlying philosophy of racial hatred and the supposed superiority of “Nordic” people has nothing to do with liberation of the working people”

And the Soviet gulags do, of course.

Pol Pot in Paris.

‘Fascists refused to pass their Jews to the Nazis’ - When?

Perhaps you will believe the Jews themselves.

“A lie repeated often enough becomes the truth” - Lenin (later used by Goebbels). So it is with Fascism and Nazism in the minds of the Left - parked in a nasty hole at the back of the mind, not to be critically examined, but to be spat at conservatives as a brainless jibe, and it often works, because no one will defend it, and most conservatives do not understand the moral inversions involved in Left wing discourse.

In fact the dictators of the 1930s - Stalin (Russia), Franco (Spain), Salazar (Portugal), Mussolini (Italy), Horthy (Hungary), Hitler (Germany) and Antonescu (Romania) were quite a varied bunch. Some wanted radical change, some wanted to preserve the old order of (one or more of) Church, Army, landowners and Aristocracy, fearing that change could lead to anarchy. Such is China today, such is what Russia is becoming.

‘parked in a nasty hole at the back of the mind, not to be critically examined’ - Ladies and Gentlemen, just as many Socialists have sought to euphemise away and seperate the crimes of Stalin, Kun, Mao and Pol Pot and many Liberals have forgotten the clear heritage they owe Barnave or Brissot or Robespierre and the blade, the right have a similar heritage of contortion. It wasn’t Turati or Gramsci or Wels or Braun who nutured the Kraken, it was von Papen, Victor Emanuel, Carol II and Gömbös. It wasn’t Mills and Kautsky, but Maurras and Spengler that sought out their political space. Because Lenin and Goebbals, competitors in the same business, a totalising and horrific experiment, shared words does not maketh a case.

I would of course be amazed if you could make even a flimsy case that Franco, Salazaar, Horthy, Alexander of Yugoslavia, Carol II, Antonescu and Kimon Georgiev Stoyanov were left wing fellow travellers.

An initial reluctance on the part of the PNF to ‘part’ with its Jews as with the Antonescu’s or Horthy’s regimes is hardly philo-semitic

For a look at the ‘kind and gentle’ way that Jews in Italian controlled Dalmatia were treated - Z Loker, ‘The Testimony of Dr. Edo Neufeld: The Italians and the Jews of Croatia’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 7/1, 1993

grumpy old man

“Is it really possible to draw a distinction between, Stalin, Hitler, Chairman Mao, Pinochet and the Argentine Junta except by degree?”

Absolutely. Pinochet and the Argentinian Junta merely wanted to turn the clock back. They were arch-conservatives. They were trying to “save” Chile and Argentina. Every killing was a step away from their ideal society. Which meant they did not kill that many.

Stalin, Hitler and Mao on the other hand were not conservative. They were radicals. They wished to destroy to rebuild. Every murder was a step towards paradise. Which means they did kill a lot of people. That was the point it is inherent in their ideology in a way it is not for Pinochet. Killing was a necessary evil for people like Pinochet. It was a positive good for the radicals.

It is also possible to draw a parallel between the type of murders committed. Hitler wanted to murder all the Jews. Stalin and Mao wanted to murder all the counter-revolutionaries and splittists and so on. Which means that if you were not a Jew, you were better off in Hitler’s Germany than Stalin’s Russia. It is noticable that most of East Germany’s leadership spent the war in Hitler’s prisons. Because had they gone to the USSR Stalin probably would have had them shot. I have exact figures somewhere - German Communists were safer with Hitler than Stalin. That is not even mentioning liberals or democrats or monarchists. Hitler was a more targetted killer, Stalin could murder anyone with cause.

Fabian from Israel

“Regarding the Argentine Junta you are spot on. Argentina’s oficial anti-communist ideology was all about the enemy inside, propagating subversion like a virus, infecting the Argentinian body of the Nation, etc, etc, etc… No different from Communist propaganda against the kulaks.”

I flatly do not believe that Communist propaganda about the kulaks was similar but if it was there is one important difference here. The lies about the Kulaks were not true. The Communists were actually setting off bombs in Chile and Argentina. Arming worker’s militia in Chile even with the help of Cuba and the East Germans. So the military had a half-true claim against them which Stalin did not have with the kulaks. All they were guilty of was being good farmers.