to misquote oscar wilde

One must have a heart of stone to read this without laughing.







fuck 'em all!

Resist 9/11 Conspiracy Theories

This month has seen a concerted push for respectability by the 9/11 ‘truth’ movement.

Around the seventh anniversary of the attacks in New York, some more ostensibly rational ‘truth’ activists such as Ian Henshall, Belinda McKenzie and Ian Neal, along with the ex-MI5 spy Annie Machon, are looking to hang out in press rooms and have attempted to buy major advertising space in at least one national newspaper.

Whilst cloaked in the language of opponents of US/UK foreign policy (among which we include ourselves) it should be understood that behind their charm offensive are the all too familiar shrill voices and oddballs who tell us 9/11 was carried out by the US government, Mossad, beam weapons, remote control planes, controlled demolition etc, etc

The ‘truth’ movement seeks to rebrand itself under the banner of ‘Reopen 9/11’ and ‘Make War History’ because people were repelled by the absurd arguments, cult like behaviour and rampant anti-semitism that characterised their previous incarnation – the UK and Ireland 9/11 Truth Movement.

Perhaps most worryingly of all the 9/11 truth movement has spawned mutant offspring, with theories looking to blame anyone but the actual perpetrators of subsequent terrorist outrages such as the 2004 Madrid bombings, the July 2005 London bombings and even the attack on Glasgow Airport. Any future bombings will no doubt be explained away in the same manner.
What price social cohesion if we cannot even recognise the challenge events like 7/7 pose to all our communities?

Encouragingly some former activists are beginning to see the danger of the 9/11 ‘truth’ movement. One such person, Mick Meaney, comments:

"In my experience, the truth movement provides a safe haven for anti-Semitism and is a breeding ground for ludicrous theories that only serve to divert attention away from the valid concerns about the War on Terror and the erosion of our civil liberties."

"During my involvement with the truth movement I have seen first hand racism and prejudice towards the Jewish people. Influential members of the movement will often label those who oppose this fascism as “shills” or other government agents, making the problem almost impossible to combat as those in prominent positions refuse to acknowledge its disturbing presence."

"Attacks against those who refuse to share their conspiracy theories have become all too common as journalists, terrorist attack victims (and their families), politicians and members of the public have been subjected to harassment, insults and slurs. What could have once been a credible campaign for justice and freedom has festered into a shameful display of aggression, racism and ignorance."
Heidi Svenson, on behalf of 9/11 Cultwatch, London.

New Coat for the end of the world

Given that mad scientists are due to end the world tomorrow I popped downtown and bought a new coat.
assuming that a mini black hole does not eat all of reality tomorrow, then I look forward to modelling it at a riot soon.

Meeting: Class, Climate Change and Clean Coal- 1st November 2008

Labour Movement Conference;
Class, Climate Change and Clean Coal


The Climate Campers and The unions.
The Upstairs Lounge
The Bridge Hotel
Castle Garth
Newcastle Upon Tyne

1st November 2008
11-30 - 5-30
Speakers and Agenda

Davie Hopper, Gen Sec, Durham Miners Association
(NE Area NUM) Chair and introduction to conference

David Douglass, IWW (and retired NUM official)
A brief overview on ‘the environment’ and class in the politics of energy

Rachel Whittaker, Wrekin Anarchist Group, Climate
Direct actionist;

Arthur Scargill Hon President National Union Mineworkers. Which way for energy?

Paul Chatterton; Leeds University and Climate Camp Activist. Why Not Coal?

Debate and Discussion on first half of conference.
Dinner Break 1-30 / 2-30
(There are a great number of cafes and restaurants within five minutes walk of the conference
or the grounds of St Nicholas Cathedral & the Bigg Market is handy for eating bait)


Chris Kitchen; General Secretary NUM
Chair and introduction to second half

Mr Bob Crow, General Secretary, Rail, Maritime and Transport Union; How we view it.

Kev Grey, Green Anarchism and Climate Camp direct actionist. How we see it.

Ian Lavery, President NUM and International Energy and miners Organisation; Prospects for Coal Production and consumption worldwide.

Paul Morrison; Greenpeace and Climate Camp Activist.

Stan Herschel, Regional Organiser RMT. On or off
the rails on Energy and Climate.

Davie Guy, President North East Area of NUM (and DMA) Prospects for revival of the Great Northern
Coalfield.
Discussion and debate and questions from the floor End of conference 5-30 Social 7-30 with live bands in The Bridge, or the delights of the ‘the toon’ on a Sat night, or stay downstairs in the bar for a more leisurely drink (Invited but not confirmed at time of publicity UNITE, Community, GMB, Powerfuel).

Organised by IWW Tyne and Wear in conjunction with The NUM and consultation with RMT and the ‘Green’ movement.

Yang Jia is our friend, is our friend

(thanks to Paul for this)
China has it's own Harry Roberts
Yang Jia, a 28-year-old unemployed man from Beijing, appeared in court in Shanghai charged with an alleged attack against the police on July 1, the anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.

Mr Yang is said to have thrown molotov cocktails into a police station in Zhabei, a northern suburb of the city, before entering the building and attacking a group of unarmed officers with a knife. He was arrested at the scene.

However, instead of condemnation, he has received widespread approval from Chinese internet users, or netizens, for his apparent act of defiance.

He has become a symbol for the growing number of people who are attacking Chinese police in protest at the brutality of the state.

Mr Yang has even been compared to Wu Song, one of the greatest heroes in Chinese literature, who killed a tiger with his bare hands.

One message left on his MySpace page said: "You have done what most people want to do, but do not have enough courage to do".

The prosecution said Mr Yang had acted out of "revenge" after he was caught by police riding an unlicensed bicycle last October and interrogated. He later sued the Shanghai police for 10,000 yuan (£803) for psychological damage, but his claim was rejected.

Mr Yang is rumoured to have been badly beaten and maimed by police.

One blogger, Zi Bingyue, wrote: "Yang Jia is not bad. He has no previous criminal record. On the contrary, he has a strong sense of the law. He gave seats to older people on the bus and carried luggage for weak travellers."

His father, Yang Fu, said his son must "have been greatly wronged" and added that he hoped Mr Yang's almost inevitable death sentence would help spur the Chinese legal system to change in the future.

Another blogger, Qing Feng, wrote that Mr Yang had been ground down by the reality of being unemployed in China. "He would have self-destructed one way or another since he has lost hope. He has no job, no degree, no income, no background, no relationship or normal family," he said.

Since Mr Yang's arrest, his lawyers have been uncontactable. An attempt by the Telegraph to trace them to a second-floor office in north Shanghai was met with a simple note saying that the office would be closed for the foreseeable future.

In addition, blogs mentioning Mr Yang have been deleted and bloggers have been told by websites that sensitive articles will be blocked
from the Daily Telegraph

Dave cocks a snook

me and Dave discuss Red star commando in happier times

Its getting lonely on here.

The others stopped blogging a long while back- Mostly because they kept forgetting how to log in.
Dave and me were the only ones posting at all.
Now Dave has started his own blog where he brings his own brightness and jollity to the world, as seen through the prism of Yorkshire curmugeonlyness.
Dave's contributions to this blog have been the best part of it in the past and I hope he will still pop round occasionally.

professional contrAryans?

After the interweb kerfuffle that surrounded the story of ‘Harry Potter and the goosestepping academics',there has been a great deal of discussion about how a certain section of the Left have developed a selective blindness towards anti semitism,
Just to prove that the 'anti- imperialist left' don't have a monopoly on scarcely concealed anti semitism, I have just received a email with this weeks missive from those 'jolly japesters’ at spiked-online and found this about Jerry Springer's BBC programme Who Do You Think You Are

But how many more times must we be told that the Nazis weren’t very keen on Jews? Why not have a documentary on the Pope not being a Protestant? Or on ursine bowel movements in arboreal regions? It’s been told time and time again.

Leaves a distinct queasy feeling in the guts.
But do fear as All is apparently ok as;

I’m not anti-Jewish. In fact, I am exactly the opposite. I’m very pro-Israeli, because I think the Jews are a nation of geniuses. You can always spot a loser in life if he is anti-Semitic. This is the politics of envy. Hitler hated the Jews because he thought they were clever; the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche loved the Jews because he thought they were clever. Hitler, the über-anti-Semite, was an über-loser. Never trust anyone who hates Jews

A great improvement on ‘some of my best friends are Jewish’ –‘some of my favourite nations are jewish.’
And I always thought that at the heart of modern anti-Semitism was not some idea that Jews were inferior but that they were geniuses (who ran the world).

But

(Why is there always a BUT?)

But Holocaust stories have become very tiresome,

Those Jews do keep on about it don’t they?

especially when people alive today claim victimhood status on behalf of their ancestors, which is not only boring but despicable. Jerry Springer shed many a tear on behalf of his grandparents who were rounded up by the Germans in Czechoslovakia. But what about the people who actually survived Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and the like, or the children of the survivors and the dead who do actually remember the trauma they endured? This programme felt like an insult to genuine Holocaust survivor
These were the cheap words of a cheap TV presenter who has made his career from deriving cheap thrills from the misfortunes of others. He has made a living from parading and creating ‘victims’ by humiliating them on American and international TV, and now parades himself as an ersatz victim on the BBC.

I have a confession to make, I like Jerry Springer!! I have always found his show sympathetic and decent, not unjudgemental, but never treats its guests as victims, in fact it has been for many years one of the few programmes on which american working class people get to speak for themselves.
Mr. West finishes his piece apparently equating the industrialised murder of Jerry Springer’s grandparents, and millions of others with his own family experiences;

All families have skeletons in their closets. My direct paternal ancestor was Lord North (yes, the surname is no joke), the incompetent prime minister who lost Britain the War of Independence against the American colonies. My grandfather Douglas West was features editor of the Daily Mail in the 1930s, where he championed Mosley’s fascist Black Shirts. My maternal grandparents in Dublin used to host dinner parties for the German ambassador in the 1940s.
But then again, my mother was a leading feminist in Ireland in the 1960s who brought condoms from Belfast to Dublin, and my father was a veteran journalist in Vietnam at the same time and was one of the first to say that the US campaign there was actually correct. He was also one of the very last journalists to leave Saigon before the final US retreat in 1975.
But I am not ‘traumatised’ by any of these events, nor informed by them. We are who we are, not who our ancestors were

I dislike this man.

Anti Semitism seems to be this year’s black.

Class War Bonfire Party November 5th

superb promotional video now out for this years bonfire party

Nazi loving academics- Fuck off!

UPDATE- Harry's place is currently offline
UPDAte 2- temporary Harrys place at http://jennadelich.blogspot.com/

the blog Harry's Place is under threat after revealling that an academic happily reprinted articles from the Nazi, former Klu klux Klan leader, David Duke's website on her Trades Union's internet discussion board.
the idiotic nature of the 'anti- imperialist' left in its opposition to zionism now means that the racist rantings of neo- nazis are acceptable if they oppose the jewish state.

the post that caused the trouble


The University and College Union maintains an email list for its activists, which is administered and monitored by the union. As Harry’s Place readers know, the email list traffic is dominated by political extremists and almost entirely given over to their obsessive and nasty campaign to boycott Israeli academics.

The extremists are countered by a small number of Jews and anti-racists, many of them supporters of Engage. They are routinely defamed as racists, imperialists, Apartheid supporters, liars and conspirators. Quite a few of the Jews and anti-racists have been chucked off the list by the UCU administrators, arbitrarily, and usually for making public their complaints about the racism on the list.

There have been complaints to UCU about racism on its activist list. UCU has dismissed them all as baseless.

One of the formal complaints was made in relation to a series of particularly poisonous and nasty emails written by a Sheffield-based UCU activist called Jenna Delich. That complaint was also dismissed.

Yesterday Jenna Delich wrote the following message on the activist list in order to support a boycott of Israeli academics:

John,

In support to your link this may be a long but also an interesting reading:

http://www.davidduke.com/general/humanitarian-disaster_595.html

No comment necessary. The facts are speaking for themselves.

Jenna



The website which she links to is the website of David Duke, who is the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and perhaps the most notorious racist and anti-semite in the world. The article itself was originally posted on an extremist conspiracy nut website, but appears only on David Duke’s website. It is therefore reasonable to infer that Jenna Delich reads and takes her information on world events from neo Nazis.



So, in a nutshell, the position is this. The UCU refuses to take action against viciousness against Jews and anti-racists on its own activist list, and endorses their exclusion from that email list when they defend themselves. Meanwhile, the UCU is circulating links to David Duke’s website on behalf of Delich.

What a wonderful institution UCU is.

NUM'S PAST MASTERS OF DEBATE TAKE ON THE CLIMATE CAMPERS

NUM'S PAST MASTERS OF DEBATE TAKE ON THE CLIMATE CAMPERS - 17 AUGUST 2008
from the yorkshire NUM website
Dave Douglass former NUM Yorkshire Area Executive member writes this report of his visit to the so called Climate Camp."

In August, me an Arthur Scargill enter another big field to fight the corner for the miners and coal our industry and cause. Last time it was that field at Orgreave, this time it’s the Climate Camp at Kingsnorth Power Station and instead of thousands of cops there’s thousands of eco-warriors who now believe coal is killing the planet and want to stop all new coal stations.

If truth were known, they want to close down all coal stations per sae. This time there is only Arthur, and me, we have no squads of pickets, no marching bands and no flying banners. It is in many respects as daunting a prospect, but it shows the quality of this man, our differences aside, he came into the teeth of opposition with an unpopular and untrendy message, among people who are hardly receptive to his old school brand of Marxist-Leninist socialism but prepared to debate till the cows come home why the NUM and clean coal technology are allies in the struggle for a socialist ecology and a just world.

Arthur is now 70 and I am 60, I think we present a figure of two rather battered and scarred alley cats come for a peace conference with the league of dogs. This is a sad and confusing conjuncture of forces. I have never in my life experienced a situation where the miners and what we do is the unpopular foe except among the ruling class and Tories.

Outside of the Young Conservatives, I have never known young people regard mining and pit heads as their enemy. What is worse is that these are my traditional constituency on the Anarchist left, they have the aura of the hippies, they aspire to the freedoms and love of life, which our 60s/70s generation did. I come across the Newcastle and Scottish camp, and know many of the activists from the Toon scene and demonstrations. Previously we have always held each other in a silent mutual respect, now there is a mutual distance, coolness, a sort of mutual Et tu Brutus. However, I see here also the mortified conviction of my own anti-nuclear youth. The conviction that myself and the world were on the brink of extinction. The certainty that if we delay we are all doomed to a wretched and painful end. Now it is climate change, and the gathering speed with which the earth is crashing toward climatical obliteration ironically for all carbon based creatures and vegetation on the earth as we know it. A change, which will cleanse us all from the surface of the globe for eternity.

The camp like some latter day Woodstock; they are a commonwealth, locked in debate and dedication, little communities with kids romping through the fields, longhaired, dreadlocked, singing and dancing. It is deeply wounding to be the enemy.

This is an anti-Durham gala, everywhere are Workshops on mining, on resistance around the world to mining of all descriptions, pictures of headgear and open cast, industry and miners, and the campaigns against them. It is like a Durham miner’s gala on bad acid. Instead of everywhere a celebration of the miners, our work, our communities, are protests for its end. I am shocked that many left groups are now Groupies to the eco movement and have abandoned all attempts at class analysis.

Arthur’s worst critic in the field is the local secretary of The Socialist Party, who tells him the NUM and miners’ struggle was yesterday’s cause, this was where the struggle was now, that Eon and the big generators to facilitate their profits are using us. I argue the opposite that every attack on coal feeds the nuclear agenda, sets the agenda for government policy. I remind them too that they are enthusiastic supporters of EON when it comes to ramming wind turbines down the throats of protesting locals resolved not to have them.

Around the tent, are dotted Trade Union members of the SWP are they now ready to bury him having once been full of his praise? For a month, the Weekly Worker has carried uncritical adverts for the camp while the Morning Star warned me I was underestimating the forthcoming climate holocaust and declined my article criticising the camp.

I have the honour to have wrote the official NUM bulletin The Miners and The Climate Camp, which Ken Capstick the Miner’s editor has managed to reduce from 8 sides to four with a bit of clever editing. I’ve humped 2000 of them in a huge bag from Doncaster and have spent the morning spreading them round the field, where they are received with less than enthusiasm. About 150 protesters turn up to the tent, where Arthur and I are speaking from 1500 in the field. Their bottom line argument is we shouldn’t be generating so much power anyway, it should be cut by 50% and we need to get use to not having electricity.

Arthur gets one of the Greens scientific officers to admit she was talking about taking out all nuclear and coal capacity, which would leave Britain virtually without power generation of any sort.

They are non-plussed by the fact that we both accept practical renewables, that we see solar energy as the long-term future for the planet. That many other clean sources, as long as they are not equally environmentally damaging (like land wind turbines) should be deployed along with mass insulation projects and energy saving programmes. But that coal should be the base supply agent and buy the world a breathing space so long as we developed carbon capture systems to burn it cleanly.

There is sympathy for the miners generally accepted as the most exploited people in Britain over the last century, but there has to be losers if we are to save the Planet, and we have been chosen to be it. Few people believe that CO2 capture works, and anyway will not be ready ‘in time’ to stop the climate going into free fall.

At the same time as facing the Climate Camp and linked to it across the left and green movement, more and more people are coming over to the Government programme for nuclear power, and an end to coal mining and coal burning in Britain. I have argued far and wide that clean coal is the alternative to a civil nuclear programme. I am stunned to be told the NUM’s new policy supports both coal and nuclear although I still claim this to be untrue. It needs urgent clarification, because this is a central plank in our defence.

I am asked to give a Workshop on the relevance and importance of the great 84/5 coal strike, nine people come. The relevance clearly isn’t too well established.
‘The Earth’ becomes an abstraction, humanity is some sort of foreign and alien invader and the storm troops, this time not of the TUC but of tidal waves, poverty and death, are the miners.

Of course, Arthur’s arguments are not totally mine, he talks of ‘dirty foreign coal’ and unfair competition, slave labour and child labour, these are not my arguments. Import controls are not a progressive answer, in my view, but I am for a level playing field of subsidies and a ‘fair trade’ standard of terms, conditions and union rights, which would be, for the millions of coal miners abroad as much as for us. We agree though that clean coal technology is an achievable science now, and it is vital that it is applied wholesale across coal generation.

The cops are arseholes as usual I am stopped and searched two sometimes three times a day, against my consent and often with force. Indeed, I am almost arrested, which would have been proved interesting in court. They could hardly argue they had reasonable grounds for suspecting I was going to sabotage the Power Station when I had gone down two thirds of the country with half a tonne of literature in its defence.

They attack the camp on numerous occasions and lay into protesters with truncheons; day after day, they line people against the fence from the very youngest toddlers to very old people, and search and harass them. Arthur makes a very strong Statement to the media at the gate, in defence of the right to protest and welcomes the protesters invitation to him and to debate this vital issue.

It was a privilege to stand with Arthur again, in the teeth of opposition again, though we could have done with thousands more supporters so short sighted ‘greens’ are not allowed to dominate this crucial debate.

I am trying to put together a Labour Movement Conference on Climate, Class and Clean Coal in Newcastle for the end of the year, and very much hope the NUM sponsor it and supply key speakers. Watch This Space.

was there resistance in the Lager?

Was there resistance inside the Lager?
Primo Levi maintained that resistance for the ordinary Haftling inside the concentration camp, was impossible. Romantic ideas about the unity of the oppressed were, in the extreme circumstances of Auschwitz, untenable, and each prisoner was alone in the daily and unequal struggle to simply exist .
The Nazi process of dehumanisation; systematic theft of personal belongings, the replacement of names with tattooed numbers, the loss of dignity and personality associated with the cropping of hair and replacement of personal clothing with ill fitting and ‘clownish’ uniforms combined with the trauma of the constant presence of sudden death and murder all combined for Levi to make the prisoner less than a man , “To Destroy a man is difficult almost as difficult as to create one: It has not been easy or quick, but you Germans have succeeded. Here we are docile under your gaze; from our side you have nothing more to fear; no acts of violence, no words of defiance, not even a look of judgement.” Returning to the question of Resistance in the books Afterword, Levi acknowledges that some sporadic acts of resistance did take place inside the camps, but insisted that these were carried out only by ‘privileged’ groups amongst the camp population and that for the ordinary prisoner resistance was not an option as; “people in rags do not revolt” . For Levi, those who gained positions of privilege within the camp, as ‘notables’; Kapos, or other officials, were morally compromised; complicit in the oppression of the rest.
Levi gives a number of other reasons that would inhibit resistance; the constantly changing population of the camps, as selections and transfers prevented any established community to emerge, language barriers between different groups of prisoners, exemplary executions of anyone who showed defiance, combined with random and extreme violence kept the prisoners in a constant state of disorientation and terror. For Levi, the Jewish prisoners were especially unable to resist, worn down as they were by long periods of hunger and oppression in the ghettos before even arriving in the camps. Levi dislikes the image of docile Jews patiently lining up for the gas chamber, but maintained that, “no one rebelled” . Levi cited the Germans use of Soviet Prisoners of War as guinea pigs to test the gas chambers, if these “young, army trained, politically indoctrinated, (and) not encumbered by women and children” did not resist then how can anyone expect the frighten beaten and cowed Jews?
However despite Levi’s denial of the possibility of resistance there is a great deal of evidence from the testimonies of other survivors that resistance to the Nazi genocide did exist and went far beyond a few scattered outbreaks.
In accessing the evidence for resistance inside the Lager it is useful to actually define what is meant by resistance, and as such it is possible to discuss three, distinct but overlapping, levels of resistance and defiance.
First, there was the struggle to survive. In a regime of annihilation, ‘the common struggle for survival’ itself becomes an act of defiance. For many the impetuous was to survive to bear witness to what had been done to them. Similarly, in a system which stole every facet of human identity from its captives, the maintenance of personal pride , through washing or the observance of daily exercises, for example , or the reassertion of a level of individuality, of personality through alteration or re-tailoring of the camp uniform was a minor act of rebellion.
Another, if not the ultimate, form of individual defiance was the taking control of the moment of ones death. In the Lager where every other right and dignity had been stolen from them, to take ones own life in a matter of ones own choosing was for some prisoners a last final act of defiance.
The second level of defiance and resistance was collective. The Nazis enforced upon their prisoners their own warped and racialised form of social Darwinism, prisoners were categorised and ranked according to the Nazis racial typography, ‘Aryans’ above ‘non-Aryans’, criminals above ‘politicals’, with Jews at the bottom. By pitching each against all the Nazis sought to ensure that the prisoners would keep each other in line as they scrambled for the smallest crumbs of privilege over their fellow unfortunates. This was encouraged by appointing criminal prisoners as Kapos over Jews and punishing any act of common decency and compassion.
For Levi and many other survivors the first shock of arrival at the camps, the very alien and insane nature of the Lager convinced them that all human decency and links of comradeship had been shattered; “…(I)n the Lager things are different: Here the struggle to survive is without respite, because everyone is desperately and ferociously alone.” Comradeship and solidarity reasserted themselves quickly; whether through political, regional or national ties different groups of prisoners sought to protect themselves and each other by bonding together. In terms of political organisation, the communists were most successful as they deliberately sought to gain positions of influence in order to lessen the worst effects of camp life upon their comrades. As communists organised amongst both gentiles and Jews, they were able to provide a network of mutual solidarity that cut across the Nazis’ racial categories, which provided the springboard for later resistance efforts . Zionist groupings and the Jewish socialist Bund were also able to give similar support, especially by providing common language (Yiddish and/or Hebrew) and values for prisoners from widely different nations. National ties were also important, especially for prisoners who were a part of large Jewish populations in their home countries and therefore within the camps. For example Rudolf Vrba got his job in Canada partially because of his ability with languages, and partially because he recognised a fellow prisoner as from his old town . Even those who fell outside of these social and political ties were not abandoned; Vrba tells of the thief in his blockhouse who was discovered stealing bread from a Musselman, a prisoner at the very bottom of the Auschwitz social scale. The other prisoners beat the thief to death; “It was rough justice, but it was fair, for to deprive a man of food was to murder” .
Another form of collective defiance was the self sacrifice of those who gave their lives rather than abandon others, such as the Dutch nurses who were offered the chance to return to Holland but instead chose to remain with their patients, mentally and physically handicapped children, and so perished with them in the gas chambers . There were also those who abandoned positions of power and safety within the camps so that they might assist those who were suffering around them, for example the non-Jewish Kapo Franz, who when in charge of the S.S. stores sacrificed his position and put his life in jeopardy in order to provide some food for some starving Jewish women .
The third level of resistance was actual physical resistance to the Lager regime, this ranged from acts of sabotage and ‘go-slows’, only working as little as to avoid a beating, to full scale insurrections and mass breakouts.
Opportunities for acts of resistance within the camp were limited. “For the Jews, resistance almost always ended in death.” But there were uprisings in Treblinka, where the prisoners set fire to the camp and killed the chief of the S.S. as well as 15 other guards; in Sorbibor, where, led by a Soviet prisoner of war, Alexander Pechersky, Jewish prisoners killed 11 guards before some 300 prisoners were able to escape, in Birkenau, where the Sonderkommando working the crematoria rose up destroying crematorium IV by setting fire to its roof, and blowing up crematorium III with explosives which had been smuggled in by Jewish women prisoners working at the Union explosives factory, whilst prisoners at crematorium II attempted a mass break out. It was one of these fighters that Levi witnessed being executed .
There were individual acts of resistance as well, such the Dancer Horowitz, one of a number of Polish Jewish women who were being led to the gas chamber, ordered to undress she smashed a Nazi in the face with her shoe, took his pistol and shot him and another guard, the other women then started to beat the guards, scalping one and tearing the nose off another, who were forced to flee for reinforcements. The women were gunned down at the very entrance to the gas chamber.
Levi maintained that resistance was confined to the most privileged of the prisoners, the prominents, yet as approximately 90% of those sent to Auschwitz never entered the camps, but were sent directly to the gas chambers, everyone who had not initially selected could be said to be ‘privileged’ to one degree or other.
The major problem for those attempting to resist the mass murder was that resistance within the camp was far too late. The place to resist Auschwitz had to before the deportations, thus the emphasis for resistors was to escape and warn Jewish communities of what was happening, so that they could frustrate the Nazis attempts to deport them. Levi claimed that of the 600 official escape attempts from Auschwitz many were prisoners randomly shot by guards wishing to claim the bounty for foiling escape attempts, however, as some 300 or so escapes succeeded then a great number of real escape attempts must have succeeded.
The greatest asset the Nazis had in their plans to exterminate Europe’s Jews was incomprehension at the true enormity of their criminal intention. Even when confronted with clear evidence of what was happening, Hungary’s Jewish leaders preferred to believe the assurances of the ‘cultured’ S.S. officers, rather than the reports of eyewitnesses.
Revolts did take place in a number of Jewish Ghettos, but here again the Jewish fighters were isolated, cut off from a beaten and cowed general population and could only provide for the people of the Ghettos the right “to die as human beings”
Much has been made of the alleged anti Semitism of the non Jewish Polish resistance, and its failure to support the uprising, however one of the participants of the Ghetto uprising in Warsaw, Marek Edelman pointed out that in 1943 the Polish Home Army had only just been organised and had virtually no weapons for its own members let alone any for the fighters inside the Ghetto.
Whilst Poland and the Baltic states did have a history of anti Semitism it is worth noting that after the war the Israeli govt. honoured more Poles as ‘Righteous Gentiles’- non Jews who had risked their lives to save Jews- than any other country.
The most effective acts of resistance were those in communities where the Nazis had been unable to separate and demonise Jews from the mass of the population. In Denmark the resistance were able to organise the evacuation of 8,000 Jews to safety in neutral Sweden to prevent their deportation . In Bulgaria, German pressure to deport its Jewish population, led to mass protests; farmers threatened to lie down on the railway lines, and appeals called for people to “Take your stand in front of your Jewish neighbours homes and don’t let them be led away by force! Hide their children and do not hand them over to executioners!” Even the German born king intervened and Bulgarian opposition ensured that Bulgaria was the only country in Europe whose Jewish population actually increased during World War II.
Most of the obstacles to resistance that Levi identified were real and made effective resistance far harder, However despite all the obstacles placed in their way the Jews did find ways to fight back against the attempts of the Nazis to eradicate them from History . Where they could not defy the Nazis by surviving, then they sought to defy them by refusing to die as animals, but instead as Human beings.

back from holiday

got back yesterday from a weeks holiday with the family in salou, catalunya. This was our first ever foreign holiday and we loved it.

Will the real Colonel Despard please stand up? Historiography and Politics: A case study.

When thinking about history we often hold two parallel definitions: History is both the sequence of events which we believe to have happened in the past and also the attempts of historians to interpret and reinterpret those events in order to gain new understanding of the past. When historians seek to reinterpret the past they unavoidably bring their own interests and contemporary concerns to those past events, this, as Christopher Hill pointed out, is not problematic as current interests can stimulate new directions and new avenues for historical study and new questions for historians; for example, the growth of the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s and 70s stimulated a expansion in interest among historians in the role of women within history. Hill warned that although contemporary concerns can create new questions for historians they should take care to avoid finding contemporary answers .
To examine the way in which different historians writing at different times and with different political interests have used the same historical evidence to come to widely different conclusions it is useful as a case study to examine the way in which the history of the British colonel and war hero turned revolutionary conspirator and condemned traitor, Edward Despard has been examined and interpreted by different historians and suggest how those historians’ own political and historical approaches have affected their interpretations.
It is fair to say that, beyond the efforts of a few modern social historians who have specialised in the study of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the story of colonel Despard, his conspiracy and trial is today almost completely unknown. However at the time of his trial Edward Despard was a most notorious and reviled traitor whose sorry end was an example and warning for all who conspired against the natural order which was broadcasted from pulpit and chapbooks across the country . Despard’s death mask, fashioned in wax and lit in lurid light was a centrepiece of Mme Tussauds’ early travelling waxworks show (ironically this was destroyed in the fires lit during the insurrectionary rioting in Bristol that accompanied the introduction of the 1832 reform act).
The decline of political agitation following the failure of the Great Chartist demonstration of 1848 and the increase of prosperity in Victorian society had convinced elements of the ruling class of the safety of extending the franchise and this allowed the development of a stable and confident new trades union movement (and its accompanying bureaucracy) this in turn assisted the development of a new historical discipline of labour history, which pursued a very definite ideological agenda, a distinct English working class tradition, uninfected by violent foreign ideologies from which sprang a uniquely English socialism that was grounded in Methodism not Marxism, its forerunners were the Tolpuddle Martyrs, who had endured their transportation with pacifistic Christian stoicism rather than the armed direct action of Luddites or ‘Captain Swing’s’ rick burners, their ancient inspiration the patrician cautiousness of a Quintus Fabius Maximus rather than the servile insurrectionism of a Spartacus. These new labour historians adopted a ‘Whig’ approach to the ‘Forward March of Labour’ in which a slow, but inevitable, evolution towards the ‘promised land’ allowed no room for insurrectionary adventurers.
In order to explain the trials and repression that undoubtedly did take place and still maintain this image of a docile and pacific lower order these Fabian historians emphasised the role of the immense army of informers employed by the state, and maintained that men such as Oliver the Spy, exploited the gullibility of frightened magistrates by fabricating most, if not all, of the conspiracies. Those who were caught up in these conspiracies were either the innocent victims of the agents provocateurs, or were deluded or deranged mavericks .
The formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain under the inspiration of the Bolshevik revolution may have challenged the basis of Fabian gradualism in politics, but the Comintern’s crude and formalistic Marxism continued with the same essentially ‘inevitablist’ approach to Labour history; albeit one in which a ‘disciplined’ proletariat could be marched onto the field of History and off again as required. Thus Raymond Postgate’s and G.D.H. Cole’s book The Common People dismissed such uncomfortable and unruly expressions of working class rebellion as the Luddites or the Despard’s conspiracy as ‘desperate’ or as receiving ‘microscopic’ support, as simply juvenile extravagances before the class was able to learn its ‘proper’ place in the long march to a labour victory in 1945.
The first historian to seriously examine Despard and the conspiracy around him was the distinguished historian Sir Charles Oman. A stalwart of the establishment, and a militant conservative in both politics and in history, Oman was a history professor at All Souls’ where he also served for sixteen years as one of the university MPs . Oman received his knighthood for his work in the foreign office press office during the Great War.
It was whilst working there that Oman got the opportunity of attending the trial of the Irish rebel (and former British consul) Sir Roger Casement, it was during the trial he recounts that he was first reminded of what he considered as a comparable act of treason from a servant of the crown; that of Colonel Despard.
Later historians have cited Oman as being dismissive of Despard as being “of marginal historical importance” , however, Oman wrote his essay in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, and had witnessed the radicalisation which had been created by that war: the Bolshevik uprising, the toppling of the royal houses from half of Europe, and the threat caused to the very heart of the Empire by industrial unrest, internal sedition and the armed rebellion in Ireland. Oman used this recent History to reassess the threat that Despard’s conspiracy presented to the crown and for four reasons concluded that that threat was real.
Firstly, the Irish threat; Despard, like Casement, was connected to a wide ranging and real Revolutionary movement in Ireland. On his return to the British Isles from Honduras Despard was in contact with Wolf Tone and the United Irishmen, for which he was interned by the Pitt govt. During the uprising, Tone’s uprising in 1789 had been defeated but the UI and their British offshoot the United Englishmen remained active and as Emmett’s uprising in 1803 showed they remained a real force. There were clear parallels between the conspiracies of Tone, Emmett and of Despard with a revolutionary insurrection planned to take place in concert with a French Invasion.
Secondly, Despard sort to organise his rebellion among the rank and file of the Grenadier Guards, stationed at that time in the city of London, outlandish it may seem to have attempted to ferment mutiny within the British army in the heart of the Capital, but Oman pointed to both contemporary and more recent history to take the threat very seriously. He drew direct parallels between the mutinies that had presaged the fall of the Romanov and Hohenzollern dynasties and Despard’s plans and described Despard’s conspiracy as aiming to constitute a “soviet of soldiers and workmen” . He also pointed out that less than 3 years previously the British had faced their greatest crisis of the entire revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars; when the ‘wooden walls’ that had protected Britain’s shores from invasion had collapsed when mutinies at Nore and Spithead had left the country undefended for a month and caused panic within the establishment.
Oman acknowledged that the conspiracy that Despard had gathered around him were far too weak to be capable of to have been able to challenge the establishment, however this did not necessarily negate its threat to the establishment, Despard expected that the seizure of the Tower, with its cache of arms, and the capture or killing of the King would be the spark that would trigger a wide ranging uprising, both in London and across the Industrial North. Oman showed that Despard was convinced that the industrial regions were ripe for rebellion, and whilst believing that Despard and his co conspirators were the most desperate and impatient of the “British Jacobins” , he rejected the assertion of Whig and Labour historians that Despard was a lunatic. Oman noted that, less than 20 years before Despard’s conspiracy was hatched, London had for 8 days been at the mercy of the Mob which although roused by a sectarian firebrand, Lord Gordon, to oppose catholic emancipation, had taken on the distinct character of a class uprising which terrified both establishment and radical politician alike. This, Oman said, made Despard’s plan a realistic one in the terms of the day.
Oman completed his work on Despard by saying that: “there can be no doubt that he was a typical British Jacobin, and a most dangerous personage.”
Oman, when beginning his work about Despard, writes that he was reminded of the case whilst attending the trial of Sir Roger Casement (in 1916), however the references within the essay itself to Bolsheviks and Soviets suggest that it was in fact written much later. If that is the case there is a possible explanation for what directed Oman toward reviving the memory of the “unfortunate Colonel Despard”.
The senior officer in charge of the Home front in 1916, and thus the officer responsible for both the capture of Roger Casement and the suppression of the Easter Rising was Major General Sir John French, who later during the Irish war of independence was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. In that role French was responsible for the formation and deployment of the infamous ‘Black and Tans’, and thus made himself the number one hate figure and target for the nationalist forces. One of the more famous of these, living in the shadow of French’s residence in Dublin Castle, was French’s older sister- Charlotte Despard. Charlotte French had married Maximillian Despard in 1870 and, following his death in 1890 had become active in philanthropic works in London’s East End, her work rapidly radicalised her and she became prominent in socialist and suffragette politics and on the outbreak of the first world war had joined with Sylvia Pankhurst on a resolutely anti war and socialist platform. Charlotte was a supporter of both Bolshevik communism and of the Independence movement in Ireland . The tension between the general and his rebellious sister was common knowledge (Sir John refused to speak to his sister ever again) and may well have stimulated Oman’s interest in a previous errant member of the Despard family.
Charlotte Despard was unable to long to enjoy Ireland’s freedom from British rule, Connolly’s prediction that a divided Ireland would cause “a carnival of reaction north and south” was proved true and Charlotte who had been disheartened by Irish nationalism in the fraternal bloodletting of the civil war, and placed her hopes in communism. She was forced to flee Dublin in 1933 when a catholic mob attacked her home and found shelter in the British ruled north.
The next Historian to take seriously the conspiracy of Colonel Despard was the Marxist historian Edward Thompson.
Thompson had joined the Communist Party in 1942 whilst at university, influenced by reading Christopher Hill’s Marxist analysis of the English Civil War, and by the example of his older brother, Frank, a party member and SOE operative who died whilst fighting alongside the partisans in Bulgaria. Thompson became a member of the Communist Party Historians group, which brought together Historians like Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, Leslie Morton and Eric Hobsbawm . The revelations in Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ of the crimes of Stalin’s rule combined with the shock of the Russian Intervention that crushed the workers uprising in Hungary shattered Thompson’s loyalty to the party and convinced him of the necessity to restore the human element to socialism, which he believed Stalinism had jettisoned.
Thompson also sought to refashion a Marxist approach to history that reject the mechanical and “inevitablist” form of history that had become common among Marxists, instead he adopted a humanistic interpretation of Marxism that took its inspiration from the early Marx: “History does nothing, it “possesses no immense wealth”, it “wages no battles”. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; “history” is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.”
In his classic work, The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson sought to challenge the various ‘orthodoxies’ which had dominated the writing of labour and social history; the Fabian orthodoxy, that saw the mass of the poor as passive victims of laissez faire, awaiting their far sighted saviours (like Francis Place), the orthodoxy of the “empirical economic historians” who saw the poor as data in statistical series, or finally; “the ‘pilgrim progress’ orthodoxy, in which the period is ransacked for forerunners-pioneers of the welfare state, progenitors of a Socialist Commonwealth or (more recently) early exemplars of rational industrial relations.” Of this orthodoxy, Thompson said; “only the successful (in the sense of those whose aspirations anticipated subsequent evolution) are remembered. The blind alleys, the lost causes, and the losers themselves are forgotten.” Thompson’s history was about how real men and women reacted both individually and collectively to the birth pangs of the industrial revolution and how those reactions; accommodation, collaboration or resistance, contributed to the development of a distinct working class consciousness.
For Thompson Despard was a Janus figure, who through his association with Jacobin conspirators looked back to an eighteenth century form of radical practise, and in his links with the new secret underground in the industrial North, the “Black Lamp” , presaged a new, working class and collective resistance movement, which Thompson linked directly to the industrial direct action of the Luddites a decade later.
Thompson’s work was highly influential it: “...redefined the subject matter of social and labour history, and pushed open more than one door of historical closure.” And a generation of historians, many of whom had been Thompson’s students were inspired to deepen and expand on his work. When they did so they were affected by the political events around them and this was reflected in their work. Marianne Elliott efficiently refuted the attempts by critics who attacked Thompson’s work on Despard and questioned whether there was sufficient, or indeed any, evidence for these nationwide conspiracies. Writing in the aftermath of strikes which had destroyed power sharing at Stormont and had brought down the Tory government of Edward Heath Elliott could easily demolish Dinwiddy’s argument that there was no connection between trade union activity and radical and subversive politics.
The escalation of the civil right movements into the armed struggle in the six counties created a renewed interest in the history of the previous nationalist movements in Ireland this led Marianne Elliott and Roger Wells to reassess both Despard’s and Emmett’s roles as parts of a far wider conspiracy of which neither of whom where the true central players but whose capture fatally weakened the overall plot.
The struggles for social equality and against discrimination by women, black people and gays were amongst the most significant outcomes of the revolutionary upsurges of 1968. These struggles highlighted and inspired historians to study and explore previously ‘hidden histories’, establishing new historical disciplines.
Two American former students of Thompson, Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, took inspiration from these new avenues of study and taking as their starting point Marx’s comment about capitalism being born from ‘blood and filth’ and Raymond Williams’ work on the financing of the industrial revolution through the slave trade Rediker and Linebaugh examined the lives and the communities of those at the front line of the Atlantic ‘Triangular trade’.
Rediker and Linebaugh found that all along the Atlantic coast communities of “...dispossessed commoners, transported felons, indentured servants, religious radicals, pirates, urban labourers, soldiers, sailors and African slaves” formed a multiracial and polyglot “many headed Hydra” of resistance to the attempts of the emerging imperial states to impose order on the Atlantic trade.
Linebaugh and Rediker’s Despard was at the centre of this ‘Motley crew’, extending his story outward from London and Ireland to the West Indies and Central America. It was there, at the source of the Slavocracy’s wealth, whilst fighting against French and Spanish alongside black former slaves and white former American revolutionaries, that Despard learnt both his egalitarianism and met his wife, the African- American Catherine Despard.
Linebaugh and Rediker rescued Catherine from the shadows into which she has been thrust; they showed that beyond the snobbery of the Despard family who described Catherine as ‘the deluded woman who calls herself a wife’ Catherine was a stalwart fighter and organiser in her own right, coordinating the campaign for the release of Despard and the other Habeas corpus prisoners, and later, during Despard’s trial impressing Nelson so much that he successfully petitioned for her to receive an officer widow’s pension ( which was withdrawn after Despard’s inflammatory speech at the scaffold, which Catherine was believed to have conspired with Edward in authoring.
Rediker and Linebaugh showed the links between Irish and American revolutionaries, the London mob, and slave rebellions in the Caribbean and placed the Despard’s at the very heart of them.
When the radical movements of 1968 began to run out of steam in the late 1970s through a combination of economic uncertainty, rising unemployment and ‘the crisis of militancy’: in which both the annoying failure of the revolution to materialise, and the inexplicable refusal of the workers to accept the leadership of the ex-student vanguard led many of those who had formed the central organisation of ‘the movements’ to conclude that in order to ‘make a real difference’ it was necessary to pursue their careers by going to work in social welfare agencies, Social Democratic local government or into the academy.
Separated from the struggles that did exist, and increasingly acting as the point of contact between the state dole and the needy poor, these former radicals found increasingly that they were more in sympathy with the state than with surly and ungrateful ‘proles’. However, in order to retain the illusion of radicalism both in academia and local government the left became increasingly preoccupied with identifying and challenging the language of oppression rather than the oppression itself. In their role as both petitioners for, and distributers of, state aid they encouraged the development of a ‘victim culture’ in which the poor, the needy, the oppressed were seen not as active agents in their own liberation but as helpless and voiceless victims awaiting the advocacy and largesse of professional carers.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc deepened the radicals disillusion with any progressive alternative to capitalism and accentuated their love/hate relationship with the liberal state. For them, the state was both the defender of the suffering created by capitalism’s crimes; of war, imperialism, racism, poverty, etc. and the only hope of relieving some of that suffering.
The most recent study of the life of colonel Despard is firmly rooted within this political current; for Mike Jay, author of The Unfortunate colonel Despard: hero and traitor in Britain’s first war on terror (2004) Despard’s story has immediate resonance with today’s ‘war on terror’; like the inmates at Guantanamo Bay, Jay’s Despard was an innocent victim of an all powerful state, martyred for being different and to justify state terror. Jay rejects all the previous historians who have examined Despard’s case and asserts that Despard, who suffered years in jail and a horrific death for his beliefs, did not really want the revolutionary overthrow of the state and whose cause was actually met by the passing of the Reform Act in 1832! Jay has further claimed that Despard was in fact “better characterised as patriotic and strongly conservative” . Although Jay happily ransacks the work of the social Historians he rejects all of their conclusions as in his view “E.P. Thompson et al” sought to “crudely” incorporate Despard into a direct line of working class resistance and “Chartism/ socialism/ Marxism” (which shows that even if Mike jay has actually read any Thompson, he has certainly not understood him!).
Instead Jay returns to the method of the nineteenth century patrician Fabian historians in seeing the masses as essentially passive and helpless victims, at risk from the spies and machinations of the all powerful state, but whose only relief was, and is to place ones trust in the liberal humanity of that same state. His attempt to shoehorn contemporary political parallels into the Despard story leaves Despard stranded out of time.
It might be argued that to compare Mike Jay with the other historians who have studied Despard is unfair- after all he isn’t a professional historian and his work is designed as a piece of popular non-fiction. However Jay’s book is the most readily available work on the subject, available in a paperback edition and copies are found in many libraries, and it displays perfectly the warning made by Christopher Hill: “It is right and proper that historians should ask new questions, and such questions may well be stimulated by happenings in our own society. I see no harm in this so long as our answers do not derive from the present.”
Each of the other historians, even if one can disagree markedly with their interpretations or conclusions, increased our understanding and have brought us new insights into the period. Jay, on the other hand, by dismissing the work previously done so that he can mould the facts to fit his own contemporary world view, hides the reality and brutality of the times and in doing so diminishes the courage and achievements of both Edward and Catherine Despard.

Snowdonia, the cops graveyard

Thank fuck for North Wales, keep up the good work.

A police officer who was cleared of wrongdoing after punching a woman while trying to arrest her has died after being found in north Wales.

Pc Mulhall's death comes just four months after Michael Todd, the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, was found dead on Mount Snowdon.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/south_yorkshire/7515251.stm

A night at the Races

on friday mrs redstar and me celebrated our 17th wedding anniversary with a night out at Newbury Races, lovely food, good racing, inspired(!?!) betting, and beautiful company, a perfect night! An 8-1 win in the first, a 7-2 in the second and a 12-1 win in the last meant it was also a damned cheap date! after the races UB40 played in the Paddock, brill!

The 43 Group- fighting the fascists

mugabe and friends

Gordon Brown has described Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe's regime as a "criminal and discredited cabal" which "should not be recognised by anybody".

But old Rob has alot of friends happy to shake his hand.

Rob and Jack

Rob and Chuck

Rob and Thatch

fat cop, little cap

What the f***! Let me get me kebab!

one asylum seeker who is definately not welcome here

congratulations to the Nepalese for Kicking out their parasitical leech of a king and declaring their country a republic.

An excellent Idea which should be copied everywhere- however, this means that another bunch of aristocratic spongers are loose on the World cadging stage.

We say Piss off you Bastard you aren't welcome here!

here is a hint for anyone with surplus Royals

making Holocaust revisionism respectable

for a while now there has been a serious weakness at the heart of mainstream liberal and leftist politics. The Idea that in opposing imperialist war it is the duty of leftists to support uncritically any and all who stand against U.S. or other Western interests. This has led the anti war movement to embrace and cheerlead for some decidedly unsavoury charactors and movements- whether the embarrassment of "We are all Hesbollah!" or the presence of the spokesmen for Hamas and Al Sadr's Mahdi Army on 'Stop The War' podiums. In recent weeks this has even led some to defend the murderous dictatorships of the Generals in Burma and Mugabe in Zimbabwe, because if the British and Americans are against them then they MUST be supported.
Given these anti-imperialists other fixation, with Israel and Palestine, and the supposed power and influence of the 'zionist' lobbys on western politics, it isn't all that surprising that eventually they would seek to exonerate the reputation of earlier opponents to American and British imperialist designs and the powerful Zionist forces that controlled them.
Last month the Guardian's forum CiF printed an article by the former editor of the New Statesman Peter Wilby which trumpeted a new book by the American author Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke, which argued that the Nazis were not responsible for the Holocaust, and if it was not for the brutal warmongering of the British under Churchill and the US under Roosevelt, goaded on by the Zionist Lobby then Hitler would have peacefully relocated Europe's Jews to Madagastar. Nazi occupation and domination of all of Europe and colonisation of the East were to be prefered to fighting the fascists.
David Aaronovich's interview with Baker in yesterdays Times is fascinating showing how far such Idiot anti- imperialism can go; twisting history to fit into their conspiracy laden world view.