Tory Party ironies from London to Poland

Ironies can be beautiful or ugly. I’ll go with ugly for this one. A few days ago Tory ministers were fuming about students at the LSE who had the temerity to protest at the presence of an out and out racist, a believer in ethnic cleansing, a defender of an illegal occupation that daily inflicts human rights abuses on Palestinians. The protesters against Israeli Ambassador Tzipi Hotovely, who included Jewish students, were ludicrously condemned by these ministers for “antisemitism”.

Today those Tory ministers are defending a decision to send a team of UK troops to Poland to assist a government widely condemned for its antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, and misogyny in recent months and years, in its efforts to prevent asylum seekers crossing the border into Poland, into the EU from Belarus. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/nov/12/british-troops-sent-to-poland-to-assist-with-belarus-border-situation?fbclid=IwAR01rA4SWUhcGJyiKdzsFvM9T8wBxxvkHrsuduo-U0y8Ly4MXHUscYYT61M

The point of attempted entry is in the forests on the Poland/Belarus border. In recent weeks the Polish border guard presence has multiplied. They have created a two-mile deep militarised zone where they have been building a razor-wire fence creating dozens of checkpoints, and keeping human rights observers away.

And here the ironies multiply too. In October 1943, 300 inmates of Sobibor, the Nazi death camp, who led an uprising and mass escape ran for safety into those same forests. Only a few dozen survived, Most were hunted down by groups of Polish partisans in the forests who were against German occupation, but were also deeply antisemitic.

Today, Poles in local villages there are urged to report on those “who look like they don’t belong” to border guards.

The British Government will claim that their military team are merely giving “engineering” support to the Polish government against a dastardly plan by Belarus, but in reality they are colluding with a far right government in actions against the human rights of asylum seekers.

If the Tories want to chat more with their Polish government counterparts, why don’t they ask them about what happened elsewhere in Poland two days ago (11 November), when that government overruled the decision by Warsaw’s (more liberal) mayor to ban a provocative ultra-nationalist independence Day march through Warsaw’s capital in which neo-Nazi organisations played a very prominent role.

Why don’t they ask them about events in Kalisz Western Poland that same day where a similar demonstration took place and witnessed virulent antisemitism? There were chants of “Death to Jews”, and cheering as a replica of the “Calisian statute” of 1264, which protected Jewish autonomy and safety there, was symbolically burned.

The Tory Party are adept at imagining antisemitism on an anti-racist protest at LSE, but have long closed their eyes to antisemitism stoked by their allies in Poland’s ultra-nationalist right wing government, and the forces further right that Poland’s “Law and Justice” government tolerates and fuels.

Replica of Calisian Statute, 1264, being burnt at ultra-nationalist rally, Kalisz

Fear in the Forests of Sobibor in 1943 and 2021

My talk on a panel at the international Conference of Stand Up To Racism on Uniting Against Fascism Far Right, Antisemitism and Islamophobia, online on 16/17 October 2021

This week saw the anniversary of a remarkable act of anti-fascist resistance in 1943 in Sobibor, a Nazi death camp surrounded by a forest, near the Polish-Belorussian border. In just 17 months, 167,000 Jews, and some Roma Gypsies too, were exterminated there. On 14 October 1943, some 300 Jews took part in an uprising. They overpowered guards, seized weapons, and escaped. Around 80 died on the surrounding minefields, others were shot by German and Ukranian guards, but many reached the forests to fight on as partisans.

In the forests though, they were hunted by Polish partisans who opposed German occupation, but hated Jews. The few dozen Jewish escapees who survived until liberation either found some friendly partisans, or sheltered with Polish peasants.

Three days ago, my facebook friend, Jan Grabowski, a Polish historian of Catholic and Jewish heritage, living in Canada, graphically described what is happening in those forests right now: He said:

“Today, the Sobibór forests are filled with Polish border guards, police and army, looking for illegal migrants from Africa and the Middle East… A two-mile zone has been declared… a ‘martial-law area’, off limits to humanitarian organizations and journalists. Official Polish state media warn the population about illegal migrants: we are told they rape animals… they are terrorists.  Local Poles are asked to alert police and border guards whenever they see: ‘anyone who clearly does not belong here’. You can guess… having a darker colour of skin clearly places you outside the group of people ‘who belong here’… Tomorrow, when we think about the Jewish refugees dying in the forests around Sobibór, we might want to reflect on the people who face death today, in the same forests, due to forces of hatred and prejudice.”

Grabowski himself has faced repression and abuse in recent years from the right-wing Polish authorities and far-right agitators, for his work revealing Polish antisemitism during the Holocaust, not just individuals, but institutions too: Polish auxiliary police, who helped Nazis round up hidden Jews.

In Poland today many forms of racism feed each other – anti-black, anti-refugee, anti-Roma racism, Islamophobia, antisemitism. It’s similar in Hungary. Yet our Tory government has the warmest relations with the governments of both Poland and Hungary. In the Council of Europe, Tories sit in a bloc with their Polish and Hungarian government counterparts, and with ultra-right representatives from AfD in Germany, Salvini’s Lega Nord, the Danish People’s Party, Bulgarian Patriots and Vox in Spain.

“Poland was and is Slavic and will never be Muslim” – banner at demonstration against refugees

The right-wing British media who profess concern at antisemitism, but twist its meaning to include political criticism of Israel or Zionism, show no interest at all in the deep, pervasive antisemitism and Islamophobia, and elevation of the Christian family and Christian Europe that is part of the racist mosaic of Poland and Hungary today. Neither are they interested in our government’s collusion with them.

When Donald Trump led America, people made simple equations between him and Johnson, while ignoring Johnson’s other role models. Both he and Priti Patel are fervent admirers of authoritarian-populist, majoritarian, ethno-nationalist regimes from Poland and Hungary to India and Brazil. We need to offer real solidarity to anti-fascists resisting these pernicious regimes.

Our movement needs to broaden and update its analysis. We have traditionally drawn a clear line between the mainstream political right and the fascists, while noting how the former often help to provide political space for and breathe life into the latter. But those lines are increasingly blurred by a new authoritarianism fast emerging from a Tory government that Shami Chakrabarti characterises as a Far Right government.

It’s direct targets are innovative protest movements such as Extinction Rebellion, and Black Lives Matter, human rights lawyers standing up for refugees, and one minority the government think few people will stand up for – Gypsies, Roma Travellers.

Our challenge is to integrate our campaigns against every form of racism with work against this new authoritarianism. As we seek to build anti-racist majorities in society we must simultaneously build anti-authoritarian majorities while we still can.

He kept the memory alive!

“Those who were killed in action had done their duty to the end, to the last drop of blood that soaked into the pavements of the Warsaw Ghetto. We, who did not perish, leave it up to you to keep the memory of them alive – forever”

(Marek Edelman, The Ghetto Fights)

Today on the 77th anniversary of the beginning of the three-week long resistance known as the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, I want to pay tribute to a Polish-Jewish, working class activist, who was in the same organisation as Edelman – the Jewish Workers’ Bund.  This activist came to Britain as a refugee after the war, and did more than most to keep the memory of the ghetto uprising and the spirit of resistance that existed among Polish Jews alive.

His name was Majer Bogdanski, a tailor, born in Piotrkow in 1912, where he became active as a trade unionist and a Bundist by his late teens. He moved to Lodz in 1935. After  the war he continued to work in London as a tailor. He lived in the East End, at first, just off Brick lane and later behind Cable Street. He was active in the Labour Party and, from the mid-1980s, also in the Jewish Socialists’ Group, where he was a living link with the political tradition we were closest to.

I first encountered Majer in the early 1980s at an incredibly moving Warsaw Ghetto commemoration in the East End, which he was chairing, conducted entirely in Yiddish. Yiddish was the mother-tongue of most of those incarcerated into the ghetto, the first language of most of those deported from there to the death camp at Treblinka, and the language of most of the resistance fighters. This annual commemoration, organised by the Friends of Yiddish – a group he chaired for around 20 years – was the only regular Ghetto commemoration in Britain conducted in Yiddish.

At the time, I was one of a small number of young people there in our 20s. My Yiddish was fairly rudimentary then, but developing. There were some people in their 40s and 50s and several who were Majer’s age (he was 70 at the time), or older. Like Majer, they were post war refugees who had grown up in Poland and were in their 20s or 30s when the Nazis invaded.

Some were Holocaust survivors, others had a different trajectory like Majer himself, who had been conscripted to the Polish army when he was 21, in the early 1930s, and called up again as war broke out in 1939. Stationed in the part of Poland that was taken over by the Soviet Union, he spent a year and a half in a labour camp in Siberia, the fate of many Poles both Jewish and non-Jewish, before an agreement was eventually signed that freed the Poles and enabled them to form army units that subsequently took part in many battles against the Nazis during the rest of the war. Majer arrived here with other Polish soldiers in 1946.

In the photos above, you can see Majer with handwritten notes. Each year, he would write something new for the Friends of Yiddish ghetto commemoration, and later also for annual ghetto commemorations organised by the Jewish Socialists’ Group (JSG), as well as giving talks to other groups about anti-Nazi resistance in the ghetto. He joined the JSG in the mid-1980s and remained a member until he died in 2005.

Although he always added new insights and reflections to his talks each year, certain strong themes and formulations always returned. I remembered from that first event I attended onwards, he would close his talk with a series of individuals and groups he especially wanted to mention, beginning each sentence “Mir gibn op koved…” (We honour..), and unlike some of the bigger more establishment-oriented commemorations in the Jewish community, he would always include koved for Gypsies whom, he said, “were murdered in the same way and for the same reason as the Jews”. He would always include the fighters themselves, all who engaged in cultural resistance, and he would give a special mention to a courageous individual Bundist, with whom he used to have daily contact in late 1930s Lodz – Szmul ‘Artur’ Zygielbojm – who committed suicide in London as a protest when he knew that the Warsaw Ghetto uprising had been finally crushed.

Majer would also talk with rage at those such as the “historian” David Irving who sought to minimise or even deny the Holocaust. To Majer, who had lost his wife, Esther Wolstan, almost his entire large extended family, so many close friends and comrades, and neighbours, it was unbearable. In 1935 he had married Esther Wolstan, also a Bundist, and from a family of prominent Bundist activists. They upset many of their more religious relatives by getting married in a secular civil ceremony. They were committed atheists and didn’t want either rabbis or God to be present at such an occasion. Under family pressure, they eventually had a second ceremony in a synagogue.

While Majer was incarcerated in Siberia, Esther was part of the underground resistance in Lodz. Majer later found out after the war that she had been murdered at Auschwitz. Prior to that she had been arrested and tortured but had not betrayed her fellow Bundist resisters.

Another devastating theme that recurred in Majer’s Ghetto commemoration talks was about children. He emphasised that among the 6 million Jews who were exterminated there were more than a million children. The Bund had a youth movement in Poland – Tsukunft (Future), and a children’s movement, Sotsialistisher Kinder Farband (Socialist Children’s Union/Association), known as SKIF. Majer had been a group leader at SKIF camps, known as Socialist Children’s Republics, and once wrote a beautiful piece in Jewish Socialist magazine, about being part of this evolving project of helping to nurture young people with secular, socialist, internationalist and humanitarian values. When he was active in the Labour Party here, he became a school governor and visited schools frequently.

His own childhood had been a terrible struggle against poverty. He told me once that he attributed his survival in the Siberian labour camp to the fact that in his younger life he endured weeks where his family had gone without food sometimes two or three times a week. He was used to great hardship so he developed exceptional resilience.

He had been apprenticed as a tailor when he was 13 years old, and had some income, but it was meagre. His family were worried that he might pick up the habits of other young people facing great hardship and get into pickpocketing or other petty crime, to enhance his income. As a moral counter to this, they insisted he went to evening classes at a Yeshiva (Jewish religious seminary). He went for a year. He told me that, of a class of 30 children, by the end of the year, almost none of them believed in God, quite a few became communists, some became Zionists and he gravitated towards the Bund!

His exposure to very religious Judaism, though, had an unexpected product. He was always interested in singing and music. Post-war he undertook adult education classes in music theory and learned to play the violin. He also had a magnificent singing voice which he illustrated in songs he sang at ghetto commemorations, usually songs written by Yiddish-speaking Jews under Nazi occupation He remembered many cantorial tunes from his time at the Yeshiva. After the Holocaust many of those melodies were simply lost. A culture was destroyed as well as people. But he transcribed more than 50 of the tunes he remembered and deposited them with YIVO, the Yiddish Institute in America; deeply religious tunes salvaged by the most secular of Jews. He also self-published via the radical/anarchist Freedom Press in Aldgate East, four volumes of melodies he had put to Yiddish poems.

His telling of the events of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was also enriched by his personal experience in Poland of the fight against antisemitism especially in the decade before the Nazi invasion. He was very proud that the Bund had led this fight, and also deeply appreciative of the cooperation they were able to develop in this struggle with the mainly non-Jewish socialists of the left-wing of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS). He also retained a strong anger and disappointment at those who didn’t take part in this struggle, including both the ultra-orthodox, who believed God would intervene, and the Zionists, who, apart from a small very left faction, “Left Poale Zion”, did not believe that antisemitism could be combated and were concentrating more on training young people to emigrate to Palestine.

Majer’s fundamental opposition to nationalism, including Zionism, stayed with him throughout his life. And while he recognised that in the ghetto itself, Zionists, Communists and Bundists cooperated in a united fighting organisation, he was very keen to emphasise the consistent role of the Bund of militantly combating antisemitism throughout its history, from its self-defence squads against pogromists in the early 1900s, through to the efforts of its militia in the maelstrom of 1930s Poland, and then its later physical resistance in the ghettoes and in partisan units. He praised the Bund also for its work to promote secular Yiddish culture and for its continued determination to build a world free of nationalism and oppression.

And so today, on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, we should remember those who resisted in so many different ways in the ghettoes, physically, culturally, spiritually, and we should be remembering those like Majer who gave so much to the task of keeping their memory alive.

 

 

 

 

Who’s afraid of Jeremy Corbyn?

With an election around the corner, accusations, allegations and inferences of antisemitism have hit the headlines of media outlets once more, especially those known more for their sensationalism than their serious commitment to combating this evil.

Last Thursday evening I had the privilege of being among a group of 60 people who genuinely cared about antisemitism. They were people so committed to deepening their knowledge about it, that they had travelled to Poland to attend a 4-day educational programme that included a day at Auschwitz/Birkenau, where we could see at first hand the harrowing evidence of what European antisemitism led to in the 1930s and ’40s.

From 6^th form students to pensioners our group spanned several generations and ethnic backgrounds, Asian, African, South American, European. There were at least seven Jewish people there. One among them had two relatives who stepped off the cattle truck when it arrived at Birkenau in 1944: her mother who survived, was later transferred to a slave labour camp in Germany and then Belsen from where she was eventually liberated; and her grandmother who was exterminated most likely within hours of disembarking at Birkenau. Another of the Jewish participants lost her grandmother there and probably an aunt too.

The majority of the participants on this trip – organised by the campaigning group Unite Against Fascism – were trade unionists, and many of them were also Labour Party members and activists. The same Labour Party that has had its name dragged through the mud by the right-wing media, and others with easy access to that media, who casually libel the Party from top to bottom as antisemites.

I am Jewish and also a Labour Party member. I gave the keynote presentation on that first evening that would frame our visit, talking about the features and challenges of Jewish life in Poland especially in the frenetic period between the two world wars. I gave graphic examples of the virulent antisemitism in Polish society that was escalating through the 1930s. I described the shock brought about by the Nazi invasion and occupation, the policies to enforce the separation of a very longstanding segment of the population through the creation of ghettos, and I highlighted the courageous resistance that took place in indescribable conditions inside the ghettos and by Partisans outside.

But just before I spoke, we watched a video message that had been filmed in one of the busiest weeks of Jeremy Corbyn’s year. The election had only just been called but he found time to record a message to wish our group well on our visit. This was not electioneering. This was not a social media post to be broadcast by Labour’s Press Team for sharing far and wide. It was simply a private, personal, heartfelt message to our group, from someone who has spent their life confronting racism and fascism and posing an alternative to hatred.

“Your visit to Auschwitz,” Corbyn told us, “will be a poignant experience. I have been there myself.” He described antisemitism as an “evil cult that has to be destroyed in all forms.” He recalled a visit he made, in summer this year, “to a small Jewish museum in Romania next to a railway line, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were rounded up in 1944 and deported to their deaths.” He closed by calling on us to “unite as people to say we will not tolerate racism in any form in our society, be it antisemitism, be it Islamophobia, be it homophobia or any other kind of discrimination.”

I would have dearly loved Rabbi Jonathan Romain to have been a fly-on-the-wall on that first night of our programme. In general terms, Rabbi Romain has been an intelligent and relatively liberal figure among Britain’s rabbinical establishment, welcoming partners in mixed marriages, urging them to play a part in Jewish life; critical of the separatist logic of faith schools, urging schools instead to reflect Britain’s modern multicultural society; supportive of same-sex marriage, and so on. Yet he has fallen hook, line and sinker for the right-wing propaganda that has thrown wild and unsubstantiated allegations of antisemitism at Jeremy Corbyn.

Rabbi Romain wrote a piece for The Times last Friday where he acknowledged that it was not the task of rabbis to suggest which way their congregants should vote, but added: “This needs to change for the coming election. The antisemitism that has come to the fore within the Labour Party during the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn means that normal considerations are superseded. It is astonishing that a mainstream party should have such associations, and that the evidence of it is serious enough for Labour to be investigated by the Equality and Human Rights Commission… I shall therefore be advising my congregants, and anyone else who cares to ask, to vote for whichever party in their constituency is most likely to stop Labour from winning that seat, even if they would never normally support that party.”

To make his statement even more pointedly, he added: “This is not a stance against Labour in perpetuity but against Corbyn-led Labour and will be abandoned the moment he is no longer at the helm.”

As has been all too often the case with such statements from high-profile critics of Corbyn, we are in an evidence-free-zone. Innuendo and circular arguments are treated as sufficient by the mainstream media. Romain, evidently, is prepared to give a clean bill of health to any anti-Labour forces that might beat a Labour candidate. In most Labour marginals across the country their closest rivals are the Tories – the party that created the Hostile Environment, a shameful initiative that has devastated the lives of longstanding Caribbean communities, and continues to act against migrant and refugee communities, not least through a network of oppressive migrant detention centres. This is the party led by Boris Johnson who has been widely, and rightly, condemned, not just by minority communities, but across the board, for his racist remarks about “Picanninies with watermelon smiles” and his ridiculing of Muslim women as looking like “letter boxes or bank robbers”.

As for those who consider themselves seriously committed to anti-racism but have fallen for the shallow arguments about Labour’s “tarnished” reputation around antisemitism, and believe that their Liberal Democrat candidate might just win out over their Labour candidate, they need to understand what the Lib Dems record was in coalition. It was not just the cruel austerity measures that the Lib Dems voted for, with their disproportionate impact on minority ethnic communities, but every abhorrent aspect of David Cameron’s and Theresa May’s Hostile Environment policy too. Swinson & Co may not have come up with the idea of “Go home” vans, but they consistently voted for every single measure that built and reinforced that system of racist treatment entailed by that Hostile Environment.

Some of us with longer memories might recall the role of the Liberal Democrats in Tower Hamlets in the early 1990s where Lib Dem leaflets linked the presence of Black and Asian people with the housing shortages, giving further credibility to the overtly racist BNP who were polling well. Other leaflets distributed by the Lib Dems accused Labour of diverting funds towards the area’s Asian communities. In the end the BNP won that seat, and the Lib Dems locally were widely seen as playing a despicable and racist role.

I don’t know if any participants on our trip took any notice of Rabbi Romain’s article in The Times. I am fairly sure that none of them give credence to the pro-Tory outpourings of the Sunday Telegraph. On the morning after our day at Auschwitz, I made the mistake of looking at twitter, where I saw an image of the front-page Telegraph headline: “Jews will leave if Corbyn wins”. This is not the first time this ridiculous claim has been made, a claim greeted with derision and disbelief from other Jewish people on our trip – people who have a a very good reason to be extremely sensitive to antisemitism.

Was it the Telegraph itself that authored this message? No, they were quoting James Cleverly, Chair of the Conservative Party, one-time chair of London’s Waste and Recycling Board, which is probably the most appropriate body to deal with a front page story such as this. It has certainly been recycled, and is full of shit!

The clear inference in this and similar stories is that Jewish people who fear a Corbyn-led government that is accused of antisemitism will pack their bags and head to the welcoming arms of the Jewish state, Israel, where they will supposedly feel safer. In fact, year on year since Corbyn became party leader, figures confirm that fewer British Jews have been moving to Israel. But the more serious point contained in this suggestion is the not-so-subtle antisemtism of both the Telegraph and Cleverly.

In essence they argue that a Corbyn government will launch a vengeful attack on wealth. Those most committed to private enterprise fear being squeezed by a radical Labour government, and the suggestion seems to be that the Jewish community, often stereotyped as an overwhelmingly rich, business-orientated community, will especially feel that pinch. It is an argument that has been rehearsed by the very right wing Jewish Chronicle editor, Stephen Pollard, who gave space in December 2018 for an appalling article in his paper by Alex Brummer with a headline you might have expected to see in a fascist journal: “The thought of Jeremy Corbyn as PM has Jewish investors running for the hills”.

Three months earlier, Pollard himself, had attacked a tweet by Jeremy Corbyn in which Corbyn said that the people who caused the financial crash of 2008 “call me a threat. They’re right. Labour is a threat to a damaging and failed system rigged for the few.” Pollard tweeted: “This is ‘nudge, nudge, you know who I’m talking about don’t you? And yes I do. It’s appalling” In response I tweeted: “Stephen Pollard and Jeremy Corbyn. One of them seems to think all bankers are Jews. Clue: it is not Jeremy Corbyn.”

But when I read this drivel, stereotyping the Jewish community as capitalists, I think of the many Jews I know well who work in the health service and caring professions who will be boosted by the prospect of a Labour government that is committed to funding their sectors rather than selling them off. I think of the struggling Jewish single parents and pensioners I know, and unemployed Jews, who have every reason to welcome a Corbyn-led government that would boost welfare payments rather than cut them, and would undertake other serious anti-poverty measures. I think of Jews I know who are users of mental health services, whose provision has been cut to the bone by the Tories. I think of elderly Jewish acquaintances living in the East End for whom repairs to their council housing and a well resourced health service are very high on their agendas. These people need a Labour government to be returned on December 12^th as much as as their non-Jewish counterparts.

On the same day that I read the Telegraph lead story, I was cheered by seeing announcements of two new initiatives by young Jews in Britain, one called “Vashti media” which is advertising itself as a “a microphone for the Jewish left”; and the other called “Jews Against Boris” – whose politics I think are self-evident.

We concluded our visit to Poland with two meetings on the Sunday morning, one of which was addressed by a Andrzej Zebrowski, a Warsaw-based socialist and anti-fascist. He described the gains both of the left and the far right in the recent Polish elections, while acknowledging that the populist-right Law and Justice Party (PiS) had consolidated its control. He spoke of the mobilising efforts of anti-fascists to counter next weekend’s annual nationalist march through Warsaw which in recent years has been flooded with far-right activists.

As we sat in a cab driving to the airport on Monday, we passed a wall graffitied with a crossed out Star of David in a circle. The populist right and far right in Poland, and other countries central and eastern Europe, have been drawing support from right wingers in Western Europe including Britain’s Tory Party. Those elements in Britain that are leading the false charge against Jeremy Corbyn, as if he were some sort of threat to Jews in Britain, need to stop playing dangerous factional political games and face up to where the threats are really coming from.

 

Hope for a different future on Warsaw’s streets

Warsaw 19^th April, 2019, 12 noon. Crowds gather either side of the 11 metres high Ghetto Fighters’ monument made of granite that, ironically, was sourced by the Nazis. They intended to build a monument to mark their victory in Warsaw. They never did. Warsaw was a city of resistance. They would have had to build it on rubble in any case. Their only way of suppressing the people of Warsaw, ultimately, was by destroying large sections of it. They ghettoised the Jews who had made up a third of the city’s pre-war population, and deported most of them to the death camp at Treblinka. They put down a remarkable, three-week long guerrilla campaign by hundreds of barely-trained fighters aged from 13-40 years of age. They terrorised Warsaw’s non-Jews, defeating the uprising they led 16 months later. Small numbers of Jews who survived the burning of the ghetto in 1943 were hidden but emerged to fight in the ’44 city uprising.

Sirens blast out for one minute, during which we are united in silence, but the ceremonies on either side of the memorial are remarkably different.

On one side, armed soldiers, uniformed choirs, and the national flags of Poland and Israel, two countries whose current governments are themselves part of a tide of ultra-nationalism that threatens to bring back the dark days of the 1930s.

On our side of the memorial, the hope for a different future manifests itself. A bright pink/purple banner has the slogan “We will outlive them!” in several languages including Yiddish – the mother tongue of Warsaw’s Jews that Hitler’s forces tried to to bury with the Jews. But on this day, nearly 75 years after Hitler died, Yiddish words are again sung on Warsaw’s streets.

Our flags and banners are internationalist and anti-nationalist. Red flags with the symbols of the Jewish Socialist Bund, who fought for better lives for oppressed workers from their inception in 1897, and who, together with other left-wing currents, were the backbone of resistance in Nazi-occupied Poland. Alongside the Bund flags is one with the International Brigade colours celebrating those who left Poland to fight Franco’s fascists in Spain. One side of the banner is in Yiddish – underlining the role played by internationalist Jews in the Naftali Botwin company of the Dombrowski Battalion.

I am there myself as part of a contingent of the Jewish Socialists’ Group (JSG) in Britain acting to express international solidarity and to strengthen our own links to the Bundist past and present. We have spent a study week in Warsaw, choosing this particular week so that on the Friday we could be part of this alternative ceremony.

After a short initial speech from Zuzanna Hertzberg – one of the key organisers – a choir from a Warsaw school that emphasises its multicultural curriculum, sings resistance songs in Yiddish. Few, if any of them, are Jewish but their diction is perfect and their identification with the meaning of what they sing shines through. Some songs are familiar, others new to us. We had spent the previous evening  with  “Warszawianka” – a revolutionary choir who led a workshop with us in the working class district of Praga.

Britain’s Jewish establishment disdain Yiddish in favour of Hebrew, representing Israel’s national culture as “Jewish culture” in the diaspora too. They help to repress the fighting history of the Bund in favour of “heroic” Zionist narratives. But we return to Britain with new Yiddish songs, learned in Poland from the revolutionary choir and the school choir.

In contrast to the strict and militaristic order being maintained by the more static “official” commemoration, ours is free-flowing. When we move, it is like a gently moving wave, which flows outwards then together again along our route to several stopping points. People, young and old, are wearing ordinary clothes. Friends greet each other warmly. Our own improvised JSG placards, made an hour before the ceremony, attract lots of positive attention.

We stop on the corner of the square that holds the Fighters’ Monument, for more songs before we move over to the sculpture of a shattered world to represent the courageous Bundist, Szmul Zygielbojm who committed suicide in London as a political act, having read of the final destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, and the allies’ failure at the Bermuda Conference to propose drastic rescue action. This monument is particularly poignant for us, as it was our group working together with Bundist survivors, who established a plaque for Zygielbojm in London in the 1990s. Here the cracks in the shattered world are soon crammed with daffodils, the flower resembling the Yellow star in bloom, which Nazis made Jews wear in Germany, and some other lands under Hitler’s regime. The Bundist, Marek Edelman, the last surviving member of the command group that led the Ghetto Uprising, brought daffodils to such ceremonies until he died in 2009

There are poems and readings in Polish. A young choir performs “Es brent” – “It is burning”: a call to arms, written by the Krakowian songwriter, carpenter and socialist, Mordkhe Gebirtig, in the wake of pogroms committed by Poland’s National Radical Camp in  the 1930s. Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party is today working to rehabilitate the reputation of the National Radical Camp of the 1930s. And here by Zygielbojm’s monument the authorities have placed the flags of Poland and Israel. Zygielbojm was as fierce a critic and opponent of Jewish nationalism as he was of Polish nationalism. He would be turning in his grave if he could see them.

From there we move towards the stark monument on a small hill at Mila 18, where most of the exhausted and hungry survivors from nearly three weeks of battles with the most powerful of armies, were trapped in a bunker surrounded by the Nazis. They did not let the Nazis have the pleasure of killing them: they killed themselves, but a group led by Marek Edelman dissented and sought to escape through the sewers. As we walked towards Mila 18 we were found among the crowd by Hania Szmalenberg,  who earlier in the week walked us through the memorials and showed us how she had re-landscaped the original memorial and and added one in English, Polish and Yiddish closer to the road.

Here, the choir sing Zog nisht keynmol as du geyst dem leytstn veg, (Never say you are going down the last road), and powerful poems and readings are performed. The crowd probably some 400 or 500 strong by now winds round into Stawski Street and ends its walk where thousands upon thousands of ghetto Jews of 1942 were forced to assemble – at the deportation point, the Umshlagplatz – whose beautiful memorial was also designed by Hania. More songs and meaningful words fill the air, including a recording of Marek Edelman reading Zygielbojm’s suicide note, before the crowd gradually disperse.

It had been the most incredibly powerful act of remembrance, empathy and solidarity. To see the symbols of the Bund on flags and t-shirts and hear the words of Bundists sung and spoken by a new generation of activists, 70 years after they finally disbanded their organisation in Poland under pressure from its new rulers, was truly moving and uplifting. As one of our placards read: Zol lebn der Bund! Long live the Bund!

Sadness and rage: Auschwitz 2018

We placed chairs in a circle and waited to see who would come. Half an hour earlier our group of 60 anti-racists and trade unionists had returned from a day visiting Auschwitz and the remnants of the vast expanse of crumbling barracks, cut through by a railway line, that had been the death camp of Birkenau.

This was my third consecutive year on the organising team of Unite Against Fascism (UAF) for this visit. We usually encourage people to share their reflections on our return to the hotel, but that is voluntary. Some prefer to be alone immediately afterwards. Others just want to lie down in their rooms, and let the experience wash over them. This year the circle was full, and we had to add more chairs.

I wrote some prompts on a sheet: What surprised you? What made this different from reading books about the Holocaust? What emotions did you feel? What will you take back into your normal life…?

The participants began to unpick and analyse the shattering experience they had just been through. Two main emotions predominated: deep sadness but also rage and anger that the world could let such a thing happen. That people in power had failed to heed credible reports of what was unfolding, or intervene by bombing railway lines to the camps or the gas chambers, even though they had aerial photographs of them.

Our group included people with strong personal ties to this history. One participant’s mother and grandmother arrived together in 1944 in a crammed cattle truck. As they disembarked, her mother, Esther, just 16, was advised by another transportee to lie about her age. She said she was 18 and was put in a line for slave labourers. Esther’s mother could not hide her age, and probably looked even older than her 44 years, having endured starvation in the Lodz Ghetto. She was placed in the line for immediate extermination.

Esther survived, just. She was transported to a slave labour camp in Germany. As the war was ending, the Nazis force-marched the remaining slaves to the notorious Bergen-Belsen camp. There, Esther contracted typhus and shared a bunk with three other young women in a similar condition. She slept right through the day of liberation and then awoke next to three corpses.

The traumatised father of another group member was in a British army unit that helped liberate Belsen. The only Jewish member of his unit, he witnessed the piled up corpses and was tasked with guarding the captured SS men who remained at the camp.

The connections were not only with the victims. Another group member of had grown up very close to her Austrian relatives who were unrepentant Nazis.

The nearest major city to Auschwitz is Krakow – the base for our visit. Only a small proportion of Krakow’s pre-war Jewish population of 68,000 (26% of Krakow’s residents) were sent to Auschwitz. Most were deported to Belzec, 190 miles away.  The Nazis tried to to hide the reality of extermination from the local population, but they did not hide their brutal policies of separation, discrimination, and ghettoisation of the Jewish residents of various cities under occupation. Some Catholic Poles benefited materially from the Nazis’ antisemitic policies in the short term, though they too would ultimately suffer huge losses. The walls of one block in Auschwitz 1 camp – converted into a museum – are lined with photos of mainly non-Jewish Polish political prisoners who perished there.

In several cities Jews had formed an even larger proportion of the population than Krakow, such as the textile town, Lodz, and the capital, Warsaw. In both, Jews comprised a third of the pre-war population. Warsaw had been a cosmopolitan, multicultural city, and Yiddish was one of eight main languages you could hear on the streets. Not so today. Poland’s menacing far right groups try to induce paranoia about migrants, refugees and “Muslim invaders”, among the white, mainly Catholic, Poles who make up 96% of the national population.

Auschwitz attracts thousands of visitors every day, both educational groups and tourist day-trippers. In our reflections we discussed the merits of short visits. Some questioned the motives of day-trippers –horror as entertainment – or thought their experience could only be superficial, but others felt that even such superficial exposure would have a significant impact on them.

What makes UAF’s trip outstanding, though, is the painstaking attempt to provide crucial context in the 36 hours before we visit Auschwitz, and follow-up sessions to deepen reflection on the experience and focus on Europe’s growing far right today, not least in Poland.

I gave the opening talk – on Jewish life, death and resistance in Poland – tracing moments in the 1,000-year history of Jews in Poland, but focusing most on antisemitic policies and the growth of far right movements in the 1920s and ‘30s, and the resistance both before and during the Nazi occupation. I highlighted the courageous role of Bundists (Jewish Socialist) resisters and described the incredible bravery of the few hundred fighters aged 13-40 who led the three-week Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943.

The next day, Mary Brodbin led the group on a walk around the old Jewish quarter of Kazimierz, where synagogues hundreds of years old survive intact. The Nazis did not bomb Krakow because they planned to turn it into a German city. Mary took us over the river to the walled ghetto where the Nazis forced Krakow’ Jews to resettle. Fragments of the ghetto wall – shaped by the Nazis to mimic Jewish gravestones – survive to this day. We saw the poignant artistic monument created at the Umschlagplatz (where Jews were assembled for deportation) of 70 large wooden chairs across this square, each one symbolising 1,000 pre-war Krakow Jews, who died in death camps, in the Krakow ghetto, or at the nearby slave labour camp. The walk ended at a museum on the site of Oskar Schindler’s factory, telling the detailed story of how the Nazis subjugated and separated Krakow’s population and ghettoised the Jews before deporting them for extermination. That evening, a further talk by Donny Gluckstein, dissected the economics and politics of 1930s Europe, to analyse how the Holocaust could have been possible.

The most harrowing material evidence of mass murder is displayed at Auschwitz 1, but it is in the bleakness of Birkenau that the sheer scale of the industrial slaughter hits home. Beyond the railway line is a monument with the same inscription on stones in more than 20 languages, representing the nations from which Jews were transferred. We gathered by the stone inscribed in Yiddish, the language of most deportees, and collectively sang the Hymn of the Partisans written by Hirsh Glik who was murdered aged 22 years old. It ends with the words, “Mir zaynen do!” – We are here!

Our post-Auschwitz reflection session was followed the next morning by Lorna Brunstein, telling her mother’s life story. Esther Brunstein survived Auschwitz and Belsen but died in 2017. Lorna showed film clips of her mother re-living her traumas to educate young people about her experiences, through Anti-Nazi League events, school visits and TV interviews. Our final session in the early evening brought the past into the present. UAF’s Co-Convener, Weyman Bennett, was joined by Robert Ferguson, whose Jewish Hungarian mother survived the war but lost several relatives in 1944 at the hands of the Nazis assisted by Hungarian authorities. Together they illustrated the continuities in the way antisemitic ideology is weaponised, and the newer forces organising particularly around Islamophobia.

During that day news was filtering through from Warsaw about the planned nationalist march to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of Polish independence, sponsored by the ruling PiS (Law and Justice) Party, a populist right wing party that has itself inflamed Islamophobic, antisemitic, anti-Roma and anti-refugee sentiments while also opposing gay rights and women’s rights.

In recent years, Independence Day marches have attracted a growing far right presence. Many municipalities are controlled though, by Civic Platform, a liberal-conservative opposition formation. Warsaw’s Mayor sought to ban far-right bodies and neo-Nazi-banners. This was overturned by the High Court. The PiS – the principal partner of Britain’s Conservative Party in its European Parliament group – then negotiated with the far-right’s representatives over their presence on the march. Government officials led the march and were separated by ranks of military police from the far-right groups including the National Radical Camp – who have revived the name of a virulently antisemitic organisation of the late 1930s – and All-Polish Youth, who combine ultra-nationalism especially with homophobia.

Contingents from the Italian Forza Nueva marched alongside them, as did Generation Identity activists from Britain, and a group wearing hi-vis jackets sporting the slogan “Free Tommy”. Young Polish soldiers were pictured marching close to the Polish Far Right contingents, as more than 200,000 people took to the streets. But the spirit of anti-fascist resistance was also present in Warsaw as progressives held an alternative march and anti-fascist rave. This march was led by two banners in Yiddish and Polish held side by side, translating to “For your and our freedom”. This slogan was first used in a Polish rising against the Tsarist Empire in 1831, then revived in the Spanish Civil War by the Botwin Company of the Dombrowski Battalion, and later by Bundists in the Warsaw Ghetto resistance.

We came back from our visit determined to share the knowledge we had gained, and play a greater role in actively opposing racists and fascists, starting with the national unity march against racism and fascism in London today. Our discussions affirmed that we need to operate on an international level and also broaden the ways in which we challenge the far-right, recognising they don’t rely purely on street activity but are recruiting many adherents through online platforms. During the visit we formed a WhatsApp group to share reflections. On the day we departed, one participant who came with her son, messaged: “Thank you so much for an unforgettable experience… so well organised. Hope that Saturday is so big that we won’t bump into any of you.”

This article was also published in the Morning Star 17th November

Don’t be disappointed, get angry!

Even if you feel internationally minded, and you like to move in cosmopolitan circles, here is a group of people you might choose not to socialise with: Poland’s Law and Justice Party, Italy’s League, Ukip, the French National Front, the Sweden Democrats, and Austrian Freedom Party. The common factor among all of them is of course that commentators regularly refer to them as “extreme right”, “far right”, or “right wing populist”.  The last three have a further similarity. They all have their roots in post-war pro-Nazi circles formed by people either didn’t think the Holocaust happened or that it was no bad thing. But they have sought to rebrand and present themselves now in a more respectable way. Nevertheless, they are still described by commentators as “far right” especially for their extreme nationalism and very negative attitudes towards migrants.

These are also the main unsavoury groups that Tory MEPs had no scruples about lining up with, in a whipped vote, to defend the populist Hungarian regime, led by Viktor  Orban from censure and possible sanctions. Like those movements listed above, his regime draws support from those who appreciate its Islamophobic and viciously anti-migrant and refugee rhetoric and actions, and are equally happy when he adds open antisemitism and anti-Roma prejudice to the mix.

You could say that this hasn’t gone down too well with some of the Tories’ loyal supporters. Marie Van der Zyl, the President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who just a couple of weeks ago was telling an Israeli news channel that the Conservative Party has “always been very friendly to the Jews”, (pause for hollow laugh) issued a statement yesterday that fell short of “condemnation”, but nevertheless expressed “disappointment”, and found it “concerning” that Tory MEPs voted to support Hungary in this vote.

Clearly Van der Zyl cares about the sensitivities of the Tories much more than she does about those sitting in power in Hungary. She didn’t mince her words about them: she attacked Orban’s description of migrants as “Muslim invaders” and “poison” and decried his “vivid antisemitism” expressed in a “relentless campaign against Jewish philanthropist George Soros.”

I am rather hoping she will copy this statement to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu who recently hosted his good friend Viktor Orban on a state visit, but never seems to draw any official criticism from the Board, whether for his apartheid policies within Israel, repression in the West Bank and Gaza, or his very cosy alliances with far right governments. It’s a funny old world.

On the day before the vote happened, Orban arrived in Strasbourg later than scheduled, and then made a bullish speech saying Hungary was being punished simply for not becoming a “country of migrants”. He reminded MEPs (and no doubt the minority populations in their countries, such as Muslims and Jews,) that Hungary had been part of the “family of Christian nations for a thousand years.” Appeals to Christianity and defence of the Christian family are going down well with white working class voters in central and eastern Europe.

Our Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May, regularly stretches credulity when claiming anti-racist credentials, and she knows it, do, but what does she do when she sees her MEPs taking the side of the racists and fascists? She refuses to take any responsibility for the way her MEPs were voting to defend such a man, and such a regime.

She insists it is nothing to do with her. But who then is it to do with? Her predecessor David Cameron clearly had enough authority to remove the Tory MEPs from the Euro group they previously inhabited, and place them in a new group (Conservatives and Reformists) that the Tories were fashioning together with the Polish Law and Justice Party. Why doesn’t she have the same authority? And if not now when? (in the words of someone probably dismissed by Orban as “not national, but international… not generous but vengeful.”)

While any distance that appears between the Board of Deputies and the Tories, over matters of antisemitism and other forms of racism, is welcome, it is hard not to notice a very stark contrast between the gently expressed “disappointment” with their “friends”and the much more strident, even rabid attack on Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn when allegations of antisemitism surface. He is incidentally believed to be responsible and castigated for every person around the globe who says something stupid but claims to be a Corbyn supporter. She gets away with saying that the Conservative Prime Minister has no say on what Conservative MEPs do.

And while Labour’s press team have rightly contested allegations of antisemitism where any hard evidence is wanting, these real and verifiable links between the Tories and antisemitic and Islamophobic parties in Europe are plain for all to see.

Even apart from the way the Tories’ MEPs voted to defend Hungary, they (with their partners in crime, the Polish Law and Justice party) are also guilty of welcoming  the Sweden Democrats into the Conservatives and Reformists Group  and of using this group to build alliances with a range of ultra nationalist, populist, far right parties that stretch back several years, with none of the media establishment batting an eyelid.

A previous slightly left-leaning president of the Board of Deputies, Vivian Wineman, expressed concern in 2010 about David Cameron’s decision to link with the Polish Law and Justice Party in founding the Tories’ current Euro Parliament group. Unfortunately that seems to have been the very last time the Board commented negatively on Tory behaviour and alliances in Europe. There is really no excuse for the Board of Deputies’ shameful silence that has persisted until this week’s events. And there are certainly no excuses now, having expressed concern, for the Board of Deputies not to demand some action by the Tories now that the vote has taken place .

It was discontent with the Board having the temerity to speak out in 2010 that led a group of Jewish businessmen and professionals to announce the formation of the (unelected) Jewish Leadership Council as a rival source of authority in the Jewish community.That Jewish Leadership Council, the Campaign Against Antisemitism, Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, who all enthusiastically waded into rows over Jeremy Corbyn and alleged antisemitism have been strangely quiet since the Tories lined up with some of the ugliest right-wing forces in Wednesday’s vote in the European Parliament. Maybe it has been a Jewish holiday that I didn’t know about where you are not allowed to criticise Tories – or maybe it is just the case that their concern about antisemitism is more politically selective, and they certainly haven’t wanted to upset either the Tory Party or their friend Benjamin Netanyahu.

Labour meanwhile, in keeping with its traditions, has reiterated its opposition to all racism. Its MEPs voted unanimously against Hungary this week, with the same determination that their MPs in Westminster, led by Diane Abbott, David Lammy and Dawn Butler, are chasing down  the treatment of minorities and migrants in Britain, be they the shamefully treated and destitute citizens of the Windrush generation or the brutally treated inmates of immigration detention centres.

At least momentarily our national debate over racism, which has taken some very weird pathways recently, has returned to normal and we can see all too clearly who is on which side.

The “wrong” sort of survivor?

The controversies that emerged this week, over the  harsh words about Israel uttered by

Marek Edelman

a Holocaust survivor at a meeting eight years ago, have made me think about Marek Edelman, the last surviving member of the command group who led the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.  He died in 2009. I was fortunate and privileged to meet him briefly at a conference in Warsaw in 1997. In the current “debates” I have no doubt that in some people’s warped minds he too would be derided and disdained as the “wrong kind of Holocaust survivor”.

Edelman was a Bundist (Jewish socialist) – a lifelong anti-nationalist and internationalist,

Mustafa Barghouti

and opponent of Zionism. He remained in Poland – his homeland – after the war, fought against the post-war Stalinist regime from a left-wing and democratic position, and continued to struggle for a better and more humane world. His work in this regard included befriending Palestinian students in Poland, and making professional contacts (he trained as a cardiologist) through international conferences, with Palestinian doctors, especially Mustafa Barghouti, a founding member of the the secular left-wing Palestinian National Initiative. They corrersponded about the possiblity of intiating a joint civil society project towards Palestinian and Israeli coexistence with equality and justice.

During the post-war decades, Edelman suffered appalling treatment by Israeli leaders, spokespersons and media for daring to remain an opponent of Zionism, and criticise its increasigly brutal rule, and for daring to declare that in the ghetto he and his comrades had “fought for dignity and freedom, not for a territory nor for a national identity”.

In 1945, he wrote a gripping and astonishingly detailed account of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in Polish. It was published in Yiddish and English in 1946. It took another 55 years to be translated into Hebrew by an Israeli publisher.

When Israel hosted the Eichmann trial in 1961, a key event in recording the horrors of the Holocaust, but in a manner that emphasised Israeli ownership of Holocaust history, many key witnesses were invited to Jerusalem. But not Edelman. Accounts of the Eichman trial were translated into more than 20 languages, but not Yiddish, the language of the people who were incarcerated with Edelman in the ghetto.  For several decades in Israeli schools students learned about Zionist resisters, and not of the more numerous non-and anti-Zionist resisters.

At various times he was nominated to receive honorary degrees from Israeli universities, but that was blocked by key people in Israel’s official Holocaust remembrance establishment. When Edelman came to Israel to visit fellow Holocaust survivors he had stayed in touch with, his presence in the country was often greeted with very hostile press campaigns.

Back in Poland his clashes with the Stalinist authorities often led him to boycott official ceremonies of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and he began a tradition of alternative ceremonies that continues today.

By the time the 50th anniversary commemoration for the Warsaw Ghetto came around, though, in 1993, Poland was a liberal democracy under the presidency of former trade union leader, Lech Walesa, who knew Edelman very well. Under Walesa’s premiership there was no need for Edelman to hold an alternative ceremony, but Walesa knew Edelman principally in the Polish context and hadn’t realised he had stepped into a minefield when he invited a delegation from Israel led by then Labour Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to the commemoration.

Ghetto resisters’ monument, Warsaw

The Israeli delegation told Walesa they would refuse to participate if they had to stand alongside and meet the anti-Zionist Marek Edelman. This was the attitude of Labour Zionists to a hero of the Jewish reistance to Nazism. Walesa was astonished but didn’t want to get embroiled in an internecine Jewish quarrel so he sought a diplomatic solution. Before the platform speeches took place, he performed a very public wreath-laying ceremony at Warsaw’s striking stone memorial to the ghetto fighters. He walked towards the memorial with arms linked on the one side to Marek Edelman and on the other side to Edelman’s grandchild. It was a very powerful moment. And then Rabin, without having to meet or shake any anti-Zionist hands, took his place among the platform speakers.

The Israeli delegates included left-winger Shulamit Aloni, who had a less jaundiced view

Yitzhak Rabin

of Edelman. During the visit she persuaded Rabin to have a private meeting with Edelman – which he did – and, according to Aloni, he emerged very struck by Edelman’s personality. Before he left Warsaw, Rabin had met Edelman again, over breakfast with Walesa. In the conversation Edelman reminded Rabin that, from his reading, he knew that Rabin himself had a Bundist uncle from Vilna. Rabin looked a little uncomfortable. He then urged Rabin to make a proper peace with the Palestinians. Edelman recounted later that Rabin gave an embarrassed smile.

The threat that Edelman posed in the eyes of Zionists like Rabin was a challenge about how the past might more authentically be read, after it had endured a Zionist makeover, but it was even more so a challenge in the present. He legitimised the continuity and integrity of an anti-Zionist perspective, which he emphasised in a memorable interview when he said that to be a Jew means “always  being with the oppressed never with the oppressors”.

Zionist ideologues, and the crass “Israel right or wrong ” brigade here, who dominate the political institutions of the Jewish community in Britain have chosen to defend the indefensible. They have chosen the side of the oppressors. That they also seek to use their narrow nationalist reading of the Holocaust to deny the struggles for Palestinian human rights in the present, is beneath contempt. Small wonder that they face a growing challenge from dissident Jews in many countries, committed to social justice and their counterparts within Israel itself.

Speech: at Arise Festival workshop on uniting against racism and fascism 28.7.18

Last November I helped to lead an educational visit to Krakow for 50 anti-racists and trade unionists, through Unite Against Fascism, which included a day at Auschwitz. We were trying to understand what happened in Europe in the 1930s and ’40s to bring that awareness into the present.

Just days before we landed, 60,000 ultra nationalists had a riotous Independence Day march through Warsaw. Marchers on this day have largely been right wing conservatives but more recently the fascist presence has grown substantially. Last November fascist groups were the most active mobilisers, with flags, banners, flares, chanting slogans. One banner said “Pray for Islamic Holocaust”.  Groups were chanting “Jew-free Poland”. The fascists welcomed  overseas visitors including Tommy Robinson.

A taste of things to come here, in Britain, where fascist groups have risen then fallen, beaten back by strong anti-fascists resistance, aided by the incompetence of the fascists groups themselves. For several years now they have mustered little more than a few hundred on the streets, but last month that changed.

15,000 marched and rioted through central London in support of Tommy Robinson, vastly outnumbering less than 300 anti-fascists. Remnants of every small deeply ideological Nazi group from the last 30 years were there, joined by large groups of Islamophobic football thugs,  Polish fascists and UKIP. UKIP’s temporary leader Gerard Batten makes speeches indistinguishable from the BNP – weaving together crude Islamophobia, anti-refugee sentiment with more subtle antisemitism.

They had hi-tech equipment – flash screens, powerful PA systems. Among the bonehead thugs were sharply-dressed, educated young men from the European-based Generation Identity movement and the American Alt-Right who were bankrolling it. Far right politicians were there from Holland and Belgium and a speech from American white supremacist Steve Bannon conveyed on screen.

A real step change – a new, threatening coming together of the far right in bigger numbers than anything we faced in the NF marches in the 1970s.

What has changed to help bring this about? The election of Donald Trump and the ascendancy of populist far-right movements and parties in several central and East European countries. Events in Britain are ripples from that wider international movement plus austerity and neglect.

Such movements normally arise during an economic crisis, although in Hungary, Czech Republic, and Poland there is no economic crisis; quite the opposite. Those movements have considerable working class support. There is something more deeply ideological happening. Islamophobia, antisemitism, anti-Roma racism are rife. So are homophobia, attacks on women’s rights, and defence of the Christian family. Fascists are increasingly versatile. They can switching their main targets, or attack several targets at once. We have to be just as versatile in the forces we bring in and unite together

We need to improve our our analysis and rethink our strategies.

Back in the 1980s I worked in the East End with Revd Ken Leech an Anglo-Catholic priest on the Marxist/anarchist spectrum and a great anti-racist activist. He wrote:

Ken Leech

“The battle against racism and fascism cannot be won by outsiders who march into an area, chant slogans, and then march out again; it can only be won by the most dedicated, rooted and persistent commitment to undermine and destroy the injustice and neglect on which such movements thrive.”

Which is where Labour comes in. Only Labour is organised in every locality, can change people’s lives around, and combat injustice and neglect. It is not enough to moralise and say racism is evil. We need to embed the fight against racism in our struggles for better housing, health, employment, education for all. We also need to mix politics and culture. The most successful anti-fascist initiatives of the 1970s and ’80s mixed politics with culture.

We were taken by surprise in June partly because of another situation that emerged in April/May this year around the scandalously treated Windrush generation, victims of Theresa May’s deliberately hostile environment. They had also been neglected by the anti-racist movement who took more notice of the frequent attacks on Muslim communities. We have to be sensitive to how each group experiences racism but always keep the big picture in mind. Alongside Islamophobia, deep racism against communities of Caribbean heritage continues.

As we organised with, and in support of the Windrush generation, we found enormous sympathy across society. Minorities instinctively support each other but suddenly it felt like the majority were on our side.

So the opposite movement around Tommy Robinson was a serious reality check.

Another reality check for anti-racists: problems we thought had disappeared but haven’t: I became active in the mid-1970s, animated by slogans such as “black and white unite and fight”, “self-defence is no offence”, “here to stay here to fight”, but one slogan bothered me then: “Yesterday the Jews today the Blacks’, because I instinctively knew then what I am much surer about today– that antisemitism is a very light sleeper. Every so often it awakes with a real jolt. The idea of world Jewish conspiracy that explains the economic system and politics remains crucial to the ideology of fascist groups today.

All the ridiculous mainstream media headlines about antisemitism try bizarrely to pin it on the left and Jeremy Corbyn. Make no mistake, antisemitism is alive and kicking – on the far right of politics. The far right have flooded the internet with Jewish conspiracy material (some of it thinly disguised as opposition to bankers, some of it thinly disguised as pro-Palestine). Unfortunately some on the left are sharing it. We cannot allow any space for antisemitism, we cannot allow antisemites to taint the Palestinians’ cause

When the Tories goad Corbyn about antisemitism in the Labour Party and paint themselves as friends of the Jews, we need to hit back hard and show how the Tory Party is directly linked through the Conservative and Reformists groups in the European Parliament to openly antisemitic, Islamophobic, anti-Roma, anti-refugee , homophobic parties in Poland, Latvia, Bulgaria, Denmark and others.

Jacob Rees Mogg at a TBG dinner

We need to expose Tory-led groups here like the Traditional Britain Group – thoroughly racist, friendly to Holocaust deniers, and recommending Mosley’s books.

I want to finish where I started – with the group of anti-racists and trade unionists visiting Poland. In those few days we uncovered the processes through which the situation of minorities worsened until anything could be done to them: labelling, scapegoating, discriminating, dehumanising, isolating… and so on. We can recognise aspects of these in our society today against different minorities.

But these stages are not inevitable. They can be challenged and interrupted. In the 1930s many people enthusiastically joined the oppressors, others just went along with it –  as by-standers. Too few resisted. Don’t be a by-stander, be an up-stander!

 

Anti-fascists must face the present with honesty and imagination

“There were those who said: ‘Bash the fascists wherever you see them’. Others among us asked ourselves: How was Mosley able to recruit Stepney workers? This, in spite of our propaganda exposing the fascists. If they saw in the fascists the answer to their problems, why? What were the problems? Did we, in our propaganda, offer a solution? Was propaganda itself sufficient? Was there more that ought to be done?”

“The battle against racism and fascism cannot be won by outsiders who march into an area, chant slogans, and then march out again; it can only be won by the most dedicated, rooted and persistent commitment to undermine and destroy the injustice and neglect on which such movements thrive.”

Two very honest quotes from different moments of the 20th century encounter with fascism which still ought to speak to us today, just after thousands of jubilant far-right supporters of Tommy Robinson, including the  Democratic Football Lads’ Alliance (DFLA) marched and rampaged around London with only a tiny number of anti-racists bravely opposing them.

The first quote was written in the 1940s by a Jewish communist, Phil Piratin, about the 1930s, when the threat came from Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. The second was a comment  by Ken Leech, a very left-wing Anglo-Catholic priest. He was writing in 1980 about events just two years earlier, when the National Front were successfully recruiting from all classes of the population and terrorising local immigrant communities. I was privileged to work professionally with Ken in the East End in the late 1980s.

In both the 1930s and the 1970s, though, anti-fascists were ultimately successful in creating energetic, creative and courageous mass movements to push back the fascists. Both eras had their iconic moments: the Battle of Cable Street 1936, the Battle of Brick Lane 1978, whose significance cannot be under-estimated, but neither should they be over-estimated.

There is a difference between a battle and a war. The war against fascism in both those decades was not won on a single day with one huge mobilisation, but through a variety of means, by developing grassroots alliances, using a diverse range of tactics, and also through making mistakes, discussing and reflecting on them and building more sophisticated responses.

The victory at Cable Street was cemented by the solid day to day work over the following three years, by the Stepney Tenants Defence League, a very imaginative housing campaign established by anti-fascists who understood the need to connect the fight against antisemitism with the fight for better living conditions for all.  The Communist Party, in which Phil Piratin played a prominent role, was at the heart of London’s anti-fascist movement. It had 550 members in the East End but had a strategy for spreading its influence by addressing the concerns and immediate needs of all working class people.  The Stepney Tenants Defence League (STDL) was led by Communist and Labour activists and had 11,000 members by 1939, many of whom had taken part in successful rent strikes in that period after Cable Street. In one famous case the STDL saved two working class fascist families from eviction after they fell behind with their rent. After being helped they tore up their membership cards of Mosley’s fascist party. The STDL leafleted many estates about this victory as a demonstration of what united working class communities could achieve.

Rent strike, Langdale Mansions, East End 1939

The battles that were won in Brick Lane in 1978  owed much to day to day local self-organisation by young people in the community most under attack, who were supported by trade unionists, left wingers, radical church people (like Ken Leech) but also by a national movement, the Anti-Nazi League, which won the endorsement and active participation of people well beyond a small far-left bubble. And this movement was intimately tied to a brilliant and energetic cultural initiative, Rock Against Racism, which brought large swathes of young people of all backgrounds into contact with anti-racist politics, and gave those people the space to shape that initiative.

Many were shocked by the events of last weekend in central London. I felt frustration and paralysis more than shock. The writing has been on the wall for a while, but the organisations that have been doing most to warn us what we will soon be facing, showed us both their strengths and their weaknesses.

A variety of circumstances prevented me from being there. A fall two days before, which left me nursing very painful ribs, meant I was in no fit state to attend a demo that was bound to be physically demanding. I absolutely admire the courage of those who went and stood their ground, while being so overwhelmingly outnumbered.

In the immediate aftermath, the highest estimate I heard for our side was 400; the highest for theirs, 30,000. More reliable estimates I have obtained since place the DFLA numbers at 12-15,000, but put our side’s numbers as little more than 200. And even if they were 400, this could only be a token, symbolic response. And their side, unlike ours, has serious money and organisation backing their foot-soldiers, most likely from both the American and European Far Right/identitarian forces they are clearly working closely with.

To their credit, the largely overlapping bodies Unite Against Fascism (UAF) and Stand Up To Racism (SUTR) have been trying to explain to a wider audience, over the last year, the serious danger presented by the Football Lads Alliance (and its larger splinter – the DFLA). At first , many dismissed the FLA as a flash in the pan outburst from a motley collection of thugs. But UAF/SUTR, have kept a close eye on developments in continental Europe,  noting how quickly the street movement Pegida  mushroomed and then gave birth to Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD). They also noted how a new generation of fascists are cooperating and strengthening each other between eastern and western Europe.

Panel at West Mids TUC/SUTR conference 2nd June 2018

Both UAF and SUTR and have tried to generate greater awareness and support. I have been part of this – speaking at local and national meetings and mobilisations called under their umbrella, most recently an excellent discussion event in Birmingham on 2 June co-organised with West Mids TUC. I have played a significant part in their very worthwhile educational initiatives to take anti-racists and trade union activists to Auschwitz, and will continue to do so, but in the face of the forces we are confronted with, there needs to be a serious and honest reckoning with reality. This applies not just to UAF and SUTR,  but to everyone who is committed to understanding the conditions and range of factors that are feeding the growth of the far right in order to take effective action to challenge them. Street confrontations matter, but they can only succeed if we can draw people from beyond the existing pool of active anti-racists and anti-fascists. That also means seeking to persuade and win over those who are being attracted by simple, hate-filled, inhuman explanations for the deepening problems and inequalities that confront them every day.

It is quite a few years since any counter-demonstrations by anti-fascists have numbered more than a few hundred.  With a very fractured far right who could frequently fail to reach three figures themselves that was sufficient. But not now. SUTR and UAF have organised considerably larger numbers at rallies called on their own terms, but have  often counted feet rather than heads in the attendance claimed. Inflating the size of our demonstrations for PR reasons does us no favours. And as we are discovering now, when we urgently need real numbers, it is a political liability. These inflated claims may raise the profile of our organisations but they don’t give us an accurate picture of where we are or what we can do next.

No one can doubt their efforts to mobilise in strength, but turning out numbers consistently and at short notice is very difficult. It is very simple to blame those sections of the broader left movement that weren’t there, call for numbers and for “unity” and claim we would have swept our opponents off the streets if only….  I’ve heard it all week on Facebook. It is harder to ask ourselves to account more objectively for why other forces weren’t there when they were needed – like last weekend. But if we don’t ask that question with honesty and listen to people’s genuine answers, then we are all in trouble.

The day after the far right march last Saturday, I went to Poland for a short visit, a country where the conventional right wing is lurching further rightwards, and becoming more authoritarian; where far right forces who openly express antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-Roma racism, are growing in confidence, and maintain contact with our far right, . Our conversation with Polish leftists, who are numerically weak, showed us that that they understood the variety of reasons why large numbers of working-class Poles were voting for the right and some supporting the out and out fascists. They also understood that challenging and undermining the right does not mean responding to every provocation but it does mean doing patient grassroots work on their own terms to generate real gains for working people and offer alternative perspectives.

When I spoke at the Birmingham SUTR/West Mids TUC conference, one participant asked me to comment on the relative success of German anti-fascists who had mobilised 72,000 people recently. I responded that the German anti-fasicst movement has always been more diverse politically and in its tactics. I also pointed out that the largest portion of the 72,000 were mobilised through an initiative that mixed music with politics

Which  brings me back to those quotes at the beginning. We can’t only be reactive, and go chasing round the country at great speed and in ever decreasing numbers to where the DFLA or other far right forces are marching, at the expense of doing work in our own communities – that “dedicated, rooted and persistent work” that Ken Leech talked about.

We have to find ways to intervene that address the reasons why struggling working class people are getting drawn to groups like the DFLA and offer them potential ways of changing those circumstances. That is done best through local campaigns. It may sound heretical but what the DFLA/other pro-Tommy Robinson forces get up to in central London may be less significant than what they attempt to do in local communities. We also need to continually highlight their international connections and make our own international anti-fascist connections

One of the great successes of the Anti-Nazi League when it was launched in 1977, was winning the endorsement of figures in sport, music and film who were influential in the lives of many young people. I would urge my comrades in UAF and SUTR to use their resources and experience and collaborate in building a bigger and broader national umbrella for national anti-racist and anti-fascist activity. But it is our ability to do patient work in our localities, that continually links and embeds the fight against racism and fascism with the fight for better lives for all – at work, in schools, in housing, in health – that will be decisive. Time is running out.