From PooterGeek:
HAVING DRIVEN JEWS INTO SEA, MIDDLE EASTERN GOVERNMENTS NOW TURN TO TASK OF BUILDING THEIR DEMOCRACIES. GIGANTIC OCEAN-GOING HOVER-VESSEL FULL OF FORMER ISRAELIS BRANDED “APARTHEID ARK” BY UK ACADEMIC.
Leon Greenman was the only English man to be sent to Auschwitz. His wife and son were gassed there. He survived. His obituary is published in The Times:
As well hauling bricks and cement, Greenman worked as a barber, and he believed that it was this skill, along with his fitness, that allowed him to survive. In the evenings he would also sing to entertain the “kapos”, the prisoners who led the work gangs. In September 1943 he was transferred to the Monowitz industrial complex within Auschwitz, where he remained for a year and a half. In his autobiography, An Englishman in Auschwitz (2001), Greenman described the grinding horror of life in the camp — the constant hunger, the search for water in snow and wet grass, the sickness and lice, the regular cullings of the weak, the sight of desperate prisoners scrabbling in the dust for scraps of potato peeling. Greenman was subjected to medical experimentation on his genitals and many beatings. He remembered the SS officers as particularly cruel, but they were not the only ones. “The kapos were the bullies who dealt out beatings to us. Ex-professional murders, rapists, criminals. . . these were the ones who made our lives a misery.” Of the 700 passengers on the train from Westerbork, only Greenman and one other man survived.
[…]
Greenman became a vociferous campaigner against the far Right in any form. In the 1990s he took a leading role in a 60,000-person march demanding the closure of BNP headquarters in southeast London, and was involved in many protests against giving the party platforms to spread its views.For his stand, Greenman had bricks thrown through the window of his house in Ilford, East London, and was forced to install mesh shutters. He received regular death threats and Christmas cards expressing disappointment that the Nazis had not finished the job. Having seen one seemingly civilised society collapse into murderous barbarism, Greenman could not believe Nazism was part of the past. “My purpose now — my duty — is to tell people what happened,” he said in 1998. “Whatever some historians say, it happened. And it could happen again.”
Thank fuck I don’t live in London. Not only are you presented with two prize assholes who represent the cheesy and somewhat sleazy celebrification of our politics - you also have to torture yourselves over the choice. Here’s David Aaronovitch, for example:
“Clearly, at the empathic level, one prefers the Tiggerish mammal. What is not to like about Boris?”
I dunno but I’d have thought if you even found yourself thinking such things, never mind writing them, it might be worth while asking yourself, “What the fuck am I doing?”
It’s not that I don’t understand the appeal of Boris. On the plus side, he has:
1) Floppy hair.
2) He’s funny - usually unintentionally.
3) He rides a bike.
On the downside:
1) He’s a fucking Tory.
So you don’t vote for him. Simple.
I was over on Comment is Free looking for the new Charlie Brooker and–shock of shocks–came across across something that was actually worth my time. And it’s on Israel/Palestine no less. Here’s Haneen Maikey on LGBTQ Palestinians:
Palestinian society is in many ways deeply conservative and traditional, so those who identify as LGBTQ often face harsh reactions from their families and communities, ranging from social ostracism to physical violence. At the same time, LGBTQ Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories regularly face discrimination, denials of civil and human rights, and other forms of violence and inequality as a result of their Palestinian identity.
LGBTQ Palestinians are often urged to choose between being Palestinian and being queer, but these problems are not separable: as LGBTQ Palestinians, our sexual/gender identities and our national/cultural identities are inextricably linked - both in how we understand and identify ourselves and in the struggles we face as individuals and as a community.
Maikey directs an organisation called Al-Qaws (The Rainbow) that is working “to promote transformation and change in Palestinian society by, on one hand, challenging social attitudes and religious taboos about sexuality and gender and, on the other hand, advancing the social engagement and contributions of LGBTQ Palestinians through empowerment, education, and the development of leadership skills.” I’d love for The Graun to have more about this. In the meantime, read the entire thing here.
Sudan’s Minister of Information, outing himself as a Guardian/Independent reader, says of the criticism of his country:
“I think the west has double standards when you consider what has happened in Iraq,”
Not at all.
The West, well the principled parts of it, are currently fighting a jihadist terrorist element within Iraq that has been responsible for indiscriminate murder and bombing of civilians.
Whereas Sudan is currently helping elements carry out indiscriminate murder and even does a bit of bombing for them on occasions.
But kiddie fiddling has not made it onto the (dis-)approved list.
Fifteen hundred years after they were first formulated, the Church of Rome (prop.: J Ratzinger) has updated the list of transgressions that endanger souls unless the perpetrators of these so-called “mortal sins” repent before a priest.
But for some strange reason Dr Ratzinger’s revised list does not appear to include child sex abuse. Even though the cleric and eminent theologian insists that paedophilia has exposed the “human and institutional fragility of the Church”.
So what’s new on the mustn’t do index? Fouling the natural world, tinkering with DNA, smoking the odd spliff and allowing one’s bank balance to exceed an unspecified amount are all a sure path to Hell, we are warned.
Oh, and “making do without God”.
Hat tip: Will
“However difficult the task of grasping and confronting global capital might be, it is crucially important that a global internationalism be recovered and reformulated. . . . The Left should be very careful about constituting a form of politics that, from the standpoint of human emancipation, would be questionable, at the very best, however many people it may rouse.”
– Moishe Postone, “History and Helplessness” (2006)
“Concerning Hitchens, I have to confess a fundamental sympathy with him: although I disagree with his stance on Iraq, and on the war on terror, I infinitely prefer him to standard liberal-leftist anti-American ‘pacifism’. Hitchens is an adversary worth reading — in contrast to many critics of the war on Iraq (sic) who are much better ignored.”
– (Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, Slavoj Žižek, Verso, 2004)
William Rees-Mogg argues that the failure to provide the British public with a referendum on the EU treaty is a betrayal. I have some sympathy with this view. Even if you believe, as Oliver Kamm does, that a referendum was not required, the failure to provide a referendum will be largely viewed as a betrayal whether it is technically one or not. This is a matter of opinion, facts do not enter into it. Betrayal is in the eye of the beholder.
I would have had a referendum, and would have voted in favour of the treaty. Of course the treaty would not have been passed, but there are more fundamental long-term threats to the EU. It is in danger of being perceived as a organisation outside of democratic controls. If it, and by that I mean the institution, was on the losing side every so often, its standing might improve. This disconnect between the EU demos, if such a thing exists, and the institution is a crippling handicap to its long term credibility and success. Still this is not the point of this post, except to note that support for a referendum on the EU treaty is not a marker for a swivel-eyed-loon.
Some time ago, this blog linked to a you tube video in which Nick Cohen was assailed by 9-11 Conspirazoids. The harassers of Cohen were from We are Change UK. This group has also harassed Alistair Campbell. So what is this to do with the EU referendum?
Well, We are Change UK were behind the crane stunt that obtained a large amount of publicity:
On Sunday 2nd March 2008, Rob Little and Simon Moore; activists from We Are Change UK penetrated the security of the Guildhall building on Parliament Square Westminster, opposite the house of commons, and scaled a 250ft crane. At approximately 2am on Monday, Little and Moore unfurled large banners reading “Referendum Now, and Give Us Our Vote” in reference to the vote in the house of commons on whether to give the UK public a vote on the Treaty of Lisbon, which if ratified will transfer large amounts of power to the European Union and also pave the way for greater transfers of power in the future.
That’s from the We are Change UK website, but We are Change also got into the Telegraph and The Times. We are Change are a loosely affliated 911-truther movement. This sympathetic article, which I do not endorse, gives an insight into their politics and outlooks (as well as a glimpse into the 911-truther infighting).
We are Change’s international website states that their primary aim is to reveal the truth about the US government’s involvement in 911, but also to:
“fill the vacancy left by those who swore to preserve, protect and defend The Constitution against all enemies – foreign and domestic. We seek to expose the fraud of the left/right paradigm and reveal that the world truly functions on a top/down hierarchy that threatens to destroy free society as we know it. We Are Change works to educate, motivate, and activate those striving to uncover the truth behind the private banking cartel of the military industrial complex that is directing the majority of U.S. policy, and that is actively seeking to eliminate national sovereignty and replace it with a “one world order.“
I could take a guess at who they think the private banking cartel is run by, but their analysis is similar to those right wing militia groups in the 1980s rather than the left-wing truther variant that has been more common in the past. The UK We are Change group does express support for the NO2ID, their support presumably stemming from their concern about the risk of totalitarian politics. We are Change Ireland believe that the UK government was responsible for the running of the IRA in order to impose a Police state on the UK. They believe the EU is a nascent totalitarian superstate, and that the fate of half a billion people is in the hands of the Irish public who are the only people able to prevent the death of democracy in the EU’s member states.
Yes, there is a global movement of right-wing conspiracy nerds with social difficulties. It’s Web 2.looney.
