Historical Amnesia:
antisemites of the world, unite!


The BNP is is a far right and and whites only political party in the UK. The BNP, its former leaders and present leader, Nick Griffin, have promoted antisemitism and Holocaust denial or revisionism in the past.

The SWP is the largest political party of the far left in Britain that stands in the revolutionary socialist tradition.

In a recent leaflet, the SWP has published against a BBP event in Derbyshire, they say that the BNP should be opposed because:

"They deny the holocaust where thousands of LGBT people, trade unionists and disabled people were slaughtered..."

This explanation, says David Hirsh, on Engage, of the Holocaust [with a small 'h'] makes no mention of Jews and it numbers the victims in the thousands rather than the millions. Jews are not mentioned at all in this anti-Nazi text. (my emphasis)

A possible explanation for this omission is offered by Z-word blog on the same subject:

So what was it: a typo? Or is it just another normal day at the pro-boycott, pro-Hamas Socialist Workers Party, the initiators of this petition?

The SWP are doing their own version of Holocaust denial by simply leaving out the racial victims of the Holocaust, prominently Jewish (6 millions) and Gypsy (the estimates range from 220,000 to 500,000).

Imagine a teacher giving an assignment to her students to research the Holocaust. She tells them to go to the Library and look at some books but limits them to reading only certain books, pre-selected by her, books that make no mention of Jews or Gypsies when discussing Nazi history. "Class, " she would say, "you may find a hundred rows of books about the Holocaust. You are not to pay any attention to them. Just concentrate on the one, or two, or ten, books, on row # 67, from 657A to 789b, that discuss what the Nazis did to the disabled and the trade unionists. The rest of the books do not matter and do not apply to our topic, which is the Nazi holocaust..., small "h" mind you remember that ... "

Not exactly book burning but a more "civilized", modern day kind of violence: Simply remove or forget chunks of knowledge and recorded history....

"Where they burn books, they will also in the end burn human beings" - Heine

Heine's warning about the evils of book burning applies just as much in cases like this, of deliberate and selective moral outrage.

The gist of this petition is a grotesque mimicry of the famous Niemöller poem:

"First they came for the Communists,
- but I was not a communist
so I did not speak out.

Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, -
but I was neither, so I did not speak out.

Then they came for the Jews, -
but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out.

And when they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out for me"

They are doing their version, a sort of ironic reversal of Niemoller's bidding, speaking up for murdered trade unionists and disabled people, but ignoring the Jews.

Niemoller's lamentation explained that the extermination of the thousands of the disabled and the trade unionists was but the dry run for the actual Euthanasia project, which in itself was to be the first chapter in the greater project of the thousand year Reich.

It is hard for me to get into the minds of such people but I imagine their intention is to reassert the memory of all those whom they feel were short-changed by the Jews hogging the Holocaust memory all to themselves, the greedy bastards...

It is a well known tactic of Holocaust deniers and trivializers, to "care" for the memory of the "other" holocaust victims...

This is a perfect place to draw my readers' attention to the quote defining the interest of my blog:

"Capitulation to dogma over the spirit of open inquiry leads to the very catastrophes that the unconscious proponents of dogmatism most fear--thus we have the book-burners of both left and right joined in common cause."

And the above story shows how the Far Right and the Far Left are joined in common cause, when the common cause is pro-antisemitism... The difference being in the colour of the dress the lady wears, not its shape or cut.