STALIN’S HOLOCAUST

  & 'the Falsifiers of History'

 by Christopher Draper

CLICK ON PHOTOs & ENLARGE IMAGEs

HAVING recently reviewed the film 'Mr Jones' for NV I’d now like to examine the 'Holodomor' that forms the backdrop to Agnieszka Holland’s work.  In 1953 Ralph Lemkin, the man who coined the term “genocide”, described Stalin’s Ukrainian famine as 'not simply a case of mass murder' but 'a case of genocide, of mass destruction, not of individuals only but of a culture and a nation'.  For Stalin, starving the Ukraine was the completion of unfinished business, his final solution.

Uppity Peasants

From the outbreak of the Russian revolution Ukrainian peasants fought to not only free themselves from landlords but also from domination by either Austrian troops or Bolshevik commissars.  Armed bands of guerrillas effectively liberated and defended their villages for prolonged periods with the most successful led by anarchist Nestor Makhno.  From 1917 until 1921 the Ukraine maintained its effective independence until finally overwhelmed by Trotsky’s Red Army.

Despite the Bolsheviks’ military victory they never captured the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian peasants who continued to resist forced Soviet collectivization. Determined to industrialise his Russian empire, in 1932-33 Stalin ruthlessly 'appropriated' Ukrainian grain to sell abroad in exchange for machinery.  The 'beauty' of Stalin’s Holodomor campaign was that it killed several million birds with one policy; it earned hard currency, it 'encouraged' peasants to submissively join collective farms in the faint hope of receiving basic sustenance and it offered the prospect of eradicating the last vestiges of independent Ukrainian cultural and political identity.

Saints and Sycophants

Two British journalists, Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge, reported that millions of Ukrainians were being starved to death but most of their press colleagues looked the other way, gazing in admiration at Stalin’s imaginary achievements.  'Useful idiot'  Bernard Shaw celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday at a banquet in Moscow, ridiculing those who’d given him tins of food as he left England, 'They thought Russia was starving but I threw all of the food out the window in Poland before I reached the Soviet frontier'.  As a consequence of Shaw’s pro-Soviet sycophancy, as Gareth Jones noted, 'After Stalin the most hated man in Russia is Bernard Shaw'.

Malcolm Muggeridge reported from Russia in 1932-3 as correspondent of the Manchester Guardian and after witnessing first-hand the starvation of the Ukraine, in March 1933 he contributed three damning articles on the famine. Jones’ reporting promptly echoed and magnified Muggeridge’s observations which provoked the wrath of Stalin’s apologists, led by celebrated New York Times correspondent, Walter Duranty.

Curiously Anne Applebaum in her recent magisterial tome, 'Stalin’s War on Ukraine' (page 324) insists, '…nobody came to Jones’ defence, not even Muggeridge' yet in April 1933 Muggeridge wrote to Duranty’s newspaper challenging his claims and unequivocally backing Gareth Jones.  Muggeridge’s New York Times intervention was subsequently reported in the Western Mail & South Wales News on 10 May 1933 under the headline, 'The Raging Famine in Russia'. Muggeridge couldn’t have been more explicit or outspoken, '…my own observations of the state of affairs outside Moscow…led me to come to precisely the same conclusions as Mr Gareth Jones.'  In his autobiography Muggeridge described Duranty as, 'the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in 50 years of journalism.'

Duranty’s Dad?

Duranty’s coverage of Stalin’s Five Year Plan gained him a Pulitzer Prize and the enduring gratitude of the Soviet regtime. His shady version of events is still occasionally taken at face value by modern biographers; James William Cowl ('Angels in Stalin’s Paradise') swallows Duranty’s absurd claim that he was orphaned as a child when both his parents were killed in a train crash.  Sally J Taylor ('Stalin’s Apologist') is less credulous yet writes that, in 1899 Duranty was suddenly transferred from Harrow public school to Bedford Grammar, 'for reasons never made clear, his father dropped from sight entirely, leaving his mother to take up modest lodgings on her own'(pg 20) 'His father had simply disappeared'(pg 26).  Duranty’s Wikipaedia entry explains, 'He studied at Harrow, one of Britain’s most prestigious public schools but a sudden collapse in the family business led to his transfer to Bedford College.'   

Like Duranty’s press colleagues, his biographers overlooked the elephant in the room.  The truth is that Duranty was no orphan and his father’s disappearance no mystery - on Thursday 27 July 1899 William S. Duranty, aged 52, was convicted of fraud at Liverpool Crown Court and sentenced to 'four years penal servitude', whence prisoner Z.285 was transferred to Parkhurst Prison.  It is a curious irony of Walter’s affection for Stalin, that his father’s middle name was recorded as “Steel”.

A Bed-Full of Liars

Many shared the liars’ bed alongside Duranty and Shaw. Both the British and American governments received secret intelligence of the Holodomor but kept quite, preferring to collude with Stalin for strategic and commercial advantage. Both The Economist and The Times broke undertakings to publish Gareth Jones’ Ukrainian reports.  Jones and Muggeridge were cold-shouldered by colleagues and banned from returning to Russia.  Muggeridge went off to work in India whilst Jones reported first from Germany and then the Far East where he was killed.

Murder!

On 11 July 1935 Gareth Jones ventured north from Bejing into Inner Mongolia on a trip arranged with the help of two locally based Westerners, Adam Purpis and Herbert Muller.  Muller was the North China & Mongolia correspondent of the official German news agency whilst Purpis was local director of 'WOSTWAG', a German trading company, whose firm supplied the two pressmen with a vehicle and Russian driver, Anatoli Petrewschtschew, for their long journey along a route arranged by Muller.

On 25 July they met up with Purpis at a Mongolian trading post where (according to a report Muller despatched to his press agency), 'We were to be the guests of Mr Purpis, a Latvian, “the King of Kalgan” who is the chief trader in inner Mongolia'. 

After enjoying Purpis’ hospitality Jones and Muller continued on their quest until sometime before the end of July they were captured by 'bandits' about eighty-three miles north east of Kalgan, near Paochang. After that, reliable evidence is hard to come by but curiously after a couple of days captivity Muller and the driver were both released, allegedly so they could raise a ransom for Jones’ return, however when a ransom was offered it was refused.  On 16 August Jones’s discarded corpse was discovered by Chinese troops, he’d died from two bullet wounds to the torso and another in the back of the head, the classic assassin’s coup de grace.

The Homodor’s Final Victim?

Newspapers speculated on the reasons for Gareth’s killing but recently released British intelligence files indicate a sinister truth. Jones’ associates were not as they appeared, both Herbert Muller and Adam Purpis were identified by MI5 as Russian agents and WOSTWAG was a Red Army trading vehicle organised to obtain hard currency for the purchase of armaments and also provide cover for Soviet secret agents.  It is not difficult to detect Stalin’s murderous hand in Gareth Jones’ execution but for the sake of balance I would like to conclude by noting that “The Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist)” have recently published their own review of the Agnieszka Holland’s film 'Mr Jones' and arrived at rather different conclusions;

“Far from exposing the crimes of Stalin and the USSR, the new film Mr Jones exposes the utter bankruptcy of modern western cinema and the thoughtless, prejudiced, virulently anticommunist propagandists who fill positions at the Guardian and other such institutions.  These real falsifiers of history need to be exposed and confronted for the barefaced liars that they are.”

Gareth died but Stalin lives on!

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Film Review: STALIN’S OMELETTE

  by Christopher Draper

POLISH DIRECTOR Agnieszka Holland’s important new film tells the story of Gareth Jones’ courageous reporting of Stalin’s murderous 1932-33 “Holomodor”.  This Soviet “holocaust” was alternately ignored and denied by the world’s press and remains so today.  Jones’ reports and reputation were traduced by his press colleagues, orchestrated by Walter Duranty, the celebrated, Pullitzer Prize-winning, resident Moscow correspondent of the New York Times who shockingly trivialised the deaths of four million Ukrainians with the observation, 'You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.'

Mr Jones goes Free-range

Whilst the salaried correspondents of the international press were content to remain in Moscow, wined, dined and accommodated in relative luxury as favoured mouthpieces of Soviet propaganda, Gareth Jones investigated independently as an irregular 'stringer'.  After interviewing, on his own initiative, numerous Russian representatives in Moscow, in March 1933 Jones obtained official permission to travel by rail to visit and report on a 'model' Soviet tractor factory in Kharkiv.  Gareth duly boarded the train in Moscow but got off well before reaching Kharkiv so that he could conduct his own 'unofficial' investigations into conditions on the ground in rural Ukraine.

Already aware of widespread rumours of Stalin’s ruthless treatment of rural Ukraine, Jones, a fluent Russian speaker, trudged forty miles on foot, passing through fourteen villages and everywhere encountering starving people.  Peasants expressed their fierce resentment against Bolshevik battalions corralling them into collectivized farms and then stealing away their pitiful produce with no regard for their former ways of farming, culture, co-operation and exchange.  Despite this mechanistic regimentation of rural labour resulting in a catastrophic diminution of production Stalin demanded and appropriated ever increasing amounts of grain, meat and vegetables.

Inconvenient Truths

Jones left Russia at the end of March and immediately filed newspaper reports and delivered public lectures on the starvation conditions he’d witnessed and just as promptly he came under attack from Stalin’s apologists, led by Walter Duranty.  The first of more than twenty of Jones’ published reports appeared in the Manchester Guardian on 30 March 1933 headlined 'FAMINE IN RUSSIA'.  The very next day the New York Times printed Duranty’s dismissive, 'RUSSIANS HUNGRY, BUT NOT STARVING'.  Referring to Jones by name, Duranty described Gareth’s account as 'a big scare story'.

Holland’s film does an excellent job of raising the profile of the myriad key issues around the Holodomor and its reporting.  The production values are high and visually the picture looks well alongside other 'art-house' productions but characterisation has been sacrificed to inaccurately accentuate a desired narrative.  Like the original reporting of the Holodomor, the film shows signs of clumsy political manipulation.  Absolute integrity and telling inconvenient truths were the essence of Gareth Jones’ reporting yet Agnieszka Holland has taken several absurd liberties with the truth to sex up her picture.  To be specific:

a) There is no evidence that Jones, inadvertently, or otherwise, indulged in or even witnessed any incidents of cannibalism in the Ukraine.

b) Jones explicitly states that he saw no dead bodies lying around unburied.

c) Whilst living in Paris it’s quite possible that Duranty previously indulged in the sort of sex parties depicted, there’s no evidence, and it’s most unlikely, that he did so in Moscow in the 1930’s and placing Jones at such an event is absurd.

d) Jones never met George Orwell, nor is there any evidence that his reporting inspired Animal Farm.

e) The key character 'Paul Klebb' who, in the film, posthumously inspires and informs Jones’ Ukraine journey never existed but was doubtless inserted as a spurious, politically motivated reference to a similarly named individual who was likely murdered on Putin’s orders.

Good Effort but no Cigar

Despite the film’s shortcomings it should be seen and reflected upon.  It’s not unvarnished truth, if that were ever possible, but it’s accessible, reasonably entertaining and essential viewing for anyone with a serious interest in history or politics though it’s far from the last word.

Many lies and inaccuracies about the Holomodor remain to be challenged and as this film exemplifies, new untruths are still being manufactured so in “HOLOMODOR - Part Two” (to be published shortly on this website) I’ll identify false claims made by (amongst others) authors, Anne Applebaum, Sally J Taylor, James William Cowl and the Communist Party of Great Britain and examine Stalin’s role in the 1935 murder of Gareth Jones.

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'THE PRODUCERS' Delivers 'HEIL HITLER' Roar

'Don't be stupid, be a smarty / Come & join the Nazi Party'

Review by Brian Bamford

I STRUGGLED to contain myself from waving a 'Heil Hitler' salute at this superb performance of THE PRODUCERS at Manchester's  Royal Exchange.  When the flighty dame Ulla does the floor show with 'When You've Got It,, Flaunt It', it's a randy Max Bialystock who declares:  .'We may both be seated but you've two standing ovations down here'.

It's now over 50 years since THE PRODUCERS was first released as a film in 1967.  It had mixed reviews with the New York Times reviewer Renata Adler saying:  'Some of it is shoddy and gross and cruel; the rest is funny in an unexpected way.'

It took off only when Peter Sellers, who loved the film. took out and paid for full-page adverts in trade magazines such as Variety, insisting it was the 'ultimate film...the essence of all great comedy combined in a single motion picture'.

In 1996, the film was selected for preservation as part of the US National Film Registry in recognition of the fact that it was 'culturally, historically or aesthetically significant'.

Anti-Heroes from Falstaff to Hitler

Leo Bloom is an accountant sent to do the books for Max Bialystock, a failing Broadway producer, and finds that Bialystock raised $2,000 more than he lost on his last failure. You could make a lot of money by overfinancing turkeys, he muses, a glint in his eye:  'The IRS isn't interested in flops.'

In 2000, the critic Roger Ebert described the film thus: 'The movie was like a bomb going off inside the audience's sense of propriety.  There is such rapacity in its heroes, such gleeful fraud, such greed, such lust, such a willingness to compromise every principle, that we cave in and go along.'

It has been argued somewhere that Shakespeare didn't want Falstaff to become such a popular hero as he did in his play Henry IV, part I and II.  Raz Shaw, the director of the Royal Exchange play, argues that Mel Brooks was a second-generation New York jew who in the musical only wanted to mock the Nazis:
'The only people it really bullseyes into ridicule is the Nazis.  Everyone else, it likes.  It tries to glory in difference.'

'Springtime for Hitler'

Their formula for failure is a musical named 'Springtime for Hitler', with a dance line of jackbooted SS girls and lyrics like, 'Don't be stupid, be a smarty! Come and join the Nazi Party!'  Their neo-Nazi playwright Franz Liebkind roars up to the opening night on a motorcycle, wears a Nazi helmet into the lobby, and tells them, 'It's magic time!'

Is Raz Shaw right to claim that the only people it ridicules 'is the Nazis' or to imply the doesn't have other targets?  After all Mel Brooks who wrote the play, told Susan Stamberg of NPR News:  'The comedy writer is like the conscience of the king.  He's got to tell them the truth, and that's my job-to make terrible things entertaining.'

Vitally Vulgar & Politically Incorrect

My partner who came to see the play at the Royal Exchange said 'It is just so politically incorrect!' 
Indeed it is, just as when somebody farts in Church; for 'The Producers' is cheerfully willing to go anywhere for a laugh.  Or as Mel Brooks responded to a woman who had said 'I have to tell you, Mr. Brooks, that your movie is vulgar':  'Lady' he said, 'it rose below vulgarity.'

And yet is Brooks right when he further tells Susan Stamberg:  'The way to deal with despots like Hitler is not to get on a soapbox and fight (then) with rhetoric, but fight them with ridicule, to laugh at them-laugh them into olbivion.'

I think we've got to grasp that even now, no especially now, that popularism, nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what some would regard as sensible politics.  As George Orwell remarked in his essay entitled 'Wells, Hitler and the World State':  'Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching into the present, and if they are ghosts they are at any rate ghosts which need a strong magic to lay them.' 

Sometimes ridicule may not be enough despite the seduction of the current Royal Exchange production of 'The Producers' and all the wit and cleverness of Mel Brooks.

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'Where There’s Muck There’s Brass’

by Les May

THE Financial Times (FT) recently carried an editorial about Facebook which included the following;

‘The platform does not intentionally cause harm to users.  Too often, however, Facebook’s business model allows harm to occur.  The biggest problem is Facebook’s refusal to acknowledge that to a large degree it is a publisher, not just a digital town square.’

The editors of Northern Voices (NV) carry out their job under the guiding principle that freedom of speech is having the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.  But that does not mean that there is any obligation upon them to publish anything and everything that is sent to them.  As editors, they are treated by the law as the publishers of NV if, for example, someone claims they have been defamed or, an article is considered to incite violence or racial hatred. In other words if an article causes harm the actions of the editor are considered intentional.

As the FT article points out these strictures do not apply to Facebook because it claims NOT to be a publisher. In other words blogs like NV are expected to maintain higher standards in policing, and I use the word deliberately, their content for hate promoting or defamatory material, than Facebook.  Indeed Facebook benefits enormously when such material is posted on the platform because it leads to a backlash from people who disagree.  The more extreme the material, the greater the backlash, the more revenue it generates for Facebook.

The eagerness with which some people resort to calling something ‘hate speech’ or ‘hate crime’ whenever something is said or done which they do not like, only serves to obscure the real problem which is that some Facebook groups use the platform to incite hatred of, and violence toward, other ethnic groups. This played a part in the events in Myanmar where Rohingya and other muslims were targeted and the violence at Charlottesville.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/myanmar-facebook-hate/

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html

There’s an expectation that Facebook will act against the white-supremacist and neo-nazi groups which orchestrated the violence at Charlottesville. (In this case I think the use of the word ‘nazi’ is justified.)

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/25/charlottesville-white-supremacists-big-tech-failure-remove

And who could object if they did take down these posts when and wherever they occurred?  The people posting this stuff are well beyond the pale.  A war was fought to rid the world of ideologies like these.

But wait a minute.  As I have written previously the bar for what constitutes hate speech or a hate crime is constantly being lowered.  Do we really trust a private company to decide what is acceptable?  Do we really trust any government to do it? Here’s why I don’t.

The people who run Twitter have published policies about what constitutes hateful conduct here.

https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hateful-conduct-policy

Scroll down a bit and you’ll find the line, ‘This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.’

In other words if you genuinely believe that someone with a full set of wedding tackle does not qualify to be considered a woman, just because he says he is, you’ll be contravening Twitter’s policies unless you refer to him as ‘she’.

Recently a panel of five judges sitting as the Supreme Court gave a ruling which reinforces our right to free speech and ensures that we cannot be forced to express views that we disagree with.  This was a case in which a Christian couple declined to supply a cake decorated with the words ‘Support Gay Marriage’.

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/2018/10/let-them-eat-cake.html

Twitter disagrees; if you want to use the platform the price you may have to pay is being forced to express a view you disagree with.  Canadian freelance journalist, Meghan Murphy, has been permanently banned for allegedly ‘deadnaming’ a trans person.  When discussing a story of a trans woman who was taking a bunch of beauticians to court for refusing to wax his balls, she used the phrase ‘yeah it’s him’.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2018/11/28/meghan-murphy-and-the-silencing-of-women/

Following the ‘gay wedding cake’ ruling the chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission said:

‘Freedom of expression – including the right not to express a view – and freedom of belief are rightfully protected in a democratic society and this case demonstrates the need for a more nuanced debate about how we balance competing rights’.

A nuanced debate would lead to something between Twitter’s insistence on telling people what they must think if they want to use the platform and Facebook’s ‘we’re not a publisher’.   I doubt there will be one.

I have no axe to grind on this because I use neither Facebook nor Twitter.  And I don’t think I’m missing much!

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Tale of Two Icons: Engels & General Kalashnikov

Manchester & Moscow Monuments: From Engels to
Lt. Gen. Mikhail T. Kalashnikov, designer of the AK-47

WITHIN two months of each other two statues have been unveiled,; one in Manchester of Fredrich Engels, and the other in Moscow of General Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov.

At the unveiling of the Engels statue event on the 16th, July, at the NCP Bridgewater Hall Car Park, with the statue being placed in Tony Wilson Place near HOME in Manchester, Salford Trades Council ended up walking out when they found they were confronted by Showsec Security, an 'anti-trade union body'.

The statue originally situated in Maryanivka, Ukraine, 12 feet tall, had been cut in half and dumped.  But on May 15, the halves were hauled onto a truck and sent on their way to Manchester.  On its travels through Europe, captured on film, the truck stopped in Engels’s birthplace, Barmen, now part of the city of Wuppertal in northwestern Germany.

The Engels resurrection in Manchester, where he conducted research on the working class in the 1840s, is thanks to Phil Collins — the acclaimed artist who has made Engels the centrepiece of his most recent project, 'Ceremony'.

Meanwhile, less than two months later on the 19th, September 2017,  a towering monument to Lt. Gen. Mikhail T. Kalashnikov, designer of the AK-47, the Soviet rifle that has become the world’s most widespread assault weapon, was unveiled on Tuesday in the middle of one of central Moscow’s busiest thoroughfares.

The ceremony took place to the sounds of Russian military folk music, the Soviet anthem, Orthodox prayers and words about how his creation had ensured Russia’s safety and peace in the world.

While the Manchester monument was financed in part by Manchester City Council controlled by the Labour Party,the Moscow monument to Kalashnikov was financed in part by Rostec, the Russian state-owned corporation that owns the Kalashnikov Concern, the weapons manufacturer in Izhevsk where General Kalashnikov worked for decades (and which was renamed for him in 2013).

Sergey V. Chemezov, the chief executive of Rostec, who reportedly became close to Mr. Putin in Germany in the 1980s when Mr. Putin worked for the K.G.B., praised General Kalashnikov as an “example of unwavering devotion to one’s profession and one’s motherland” that should serve as “an example to our younger generation.”

The 'New York Times' reported that the General Kalashnikov’s legacy at the event was also cast in religious terms, in line with the Russian government’s depiction of itself as a protector of the Orthodox Church and of Christianity more broadly.

General Kalashnikov in 2007 with a prototype of his AK-47. Credit Misha Japaridze/Associated Press

Another 'Arab Spring' in Tunisia?

A 'Second Revolt' at El Kamour

COULD an encampment of tents outside a pumping station on the edge of the Sahara in Tunisia be the sign of another Arab Spring?  A second revolution perhaps?

It seems that owing to the impatience of thousands of young people fed-up with poverty and unemployment, protests have broken out and attempts have been made to close down the main oil pipeline at El Kamour.  There have been confrontations with the National Guard, which tried to burn down the protest camp on May 22nd.

Since then a police station was burned down, and one demonstrator was killed.

It's now six years since the revolution that brought down Tunisa's 23-year-old dictatorship of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

The current protests reflect the frustration with the broken promises of the new democratic leaders who have failed to create tangible improvements in the poor regions.

It seems that the demonstrators reflect the spirit of the new generation that has grown up in an age of relative freedom, only now to face the prospect of long-term unemployment.

Well educated out-of-work graduates have now formed a movement in towns and villages throughout Tunisia.  The demonstrator's main demand is jobs.

The government has claimed the demonstrators are linked to terrorists or are being used by the mafia.  

In the desert camps, some 125 miles south of Tataoine, 200 protestors were on a vigil watching the pipeline that remained shut off.  They said that they would stay until the government accepted their 17 demands they had presented to the government.

In Tataouine, the demonstrators were reported to be in control of the streets.  The New York Times journalist, Carlotta Gall reported that they were camp outside the governor's office and at main intersections.  She wrote:  'in scenes reminiscent of the popular uprisings of 2010 and 2011 remnants of burned tires still blocked parts of the roads'

The governor resigned last Tuesday and left town.  The demonstrators have organised mostly on Facebook.  They have avoided the main-stream Tunisian media.

Message from North West TUC

New York Times link to detail on Manchester bomb:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/24/world/europe/manchester-arena-bomb-materials-photos.html?_r=1

Dear Colleagues 

 

Following last night’s horrific attack in Manchester we have been inundated with messages of solidarity and support from trades unionists throughout Europe and beyond....  Our thoughts are with all those affected by the attack and our thanks go to all those workers who have responded to provide emergency and other care to those affected. 

 

 

 Best Wishes

 Lynn Collins

Regional Secretary

+ North West TUC | 4th Floor, Jack Jones House |1 Islington|Liverpool  L3 8EG

' 0151-482-2710|  * LCollins@tuc.org.uk| Twitter - @nwtuc and @lynncollins65

 

Len McCluskey states the obvious about Labour

Media Bias & Public Taste
by Brian Bamford

Len McCluskey Hits the Deck! (photo - Daily Telegraph)

THE leader of the Unite union, Len McCluskey, in a telephone interview with POLITICO magazine*, was merely stating the obvious when he says that it would be 'extraordinary' if Labour won, and went on to say that it was the Labour party leader's problem of his public image that was to blame, and for this he accused the media of 'media bias'.

He blamed all this on the media's 'constant attack' on Corbyn, internal party divisions, and on the consequences of the public support for the Prime Minister Theresa May when she was 'jumping on the bandwagon of hard Brexit.'

He said he was not holding out much hope for an upset victory despite the popularity of many of Labour’s left-wing policies, unveiled at the party’s manifesto launch in Bradford, West Yorkshire, today.

McCluskey claimed the working class voters who say they are going to vote Tory for the first time are doing so 'because their mind is being turned by the constant attack of the media on Jeremy Corbyn and the image that they’ve pinned on Jeremy.'

For McCluskey it is the same old story, as it is for most of the left, blame the media when things go wrong.  How can they be so surprised about media bias?

Meanwhile, today in the New York Times the novelist Joan Smith writes about the sexualisation of British politics in which 'Mrs May lounged on a sofa in a pair of leather trousers for an interview at the end of a momentous year that saw her move to No.10 Downing Street.'

Joan Smith, a feminist, justifiably suggests;  'The public probably knows more about what she wears than it does about what she wears than it does about her policies, confirming just about every sexist stereotype'.

Only a mediocre Marxist mind or a feeble-minded feminist, would expect that the public would find politics more fascinating than fashion and leather pants and especially 'eye-catching footwear'.

Ms. Smith writes:  'Isn't it demeaning, not to say sexist, to focus on how she dresses?'

In summing up Ms. Smith writes:  'This is all the more disappointing at a moment when the Conservative Party has overturned the traditional order of British politics by fielding a competent, personable woman against a male opposition leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who looks and sounds like a throwback to the 1970s.'

Are the media to blame for focusing on what they believe the public like?  Or are the British public to blame for preferring fashion and the sexy style of Mrs. May to the dreariness of Mr Corbyn and John McDonnell?

* Overnight Mr. McCluskey underwent a change of mind on this matter, and on the BBC this morning he said that 'following the launch of Labour's manifesto, which he said had been warmly welcomed by his union's members'.  This only suggests a kind of collective catastrophic psychological condition in which Labour supporters, like McCluskey, don't know whether they are coming or going.

Professor Paul Preston: 'Holocaust Denier'?

Is Paul Preston a soft core 'holocaust denier'?

THE academic, Professor Paul Preston , described in his book ‘THE SPANISH HOLOCAUST’ as ‘the world’s foremost historian of twentieth-century Spain’; in 2012 published an account of what he called ‘inquisition and extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain’.  By the standards of today, as spelled out by the holocaust expert Deborah Lipstadt this week, this comparison of the holocaust now amounts to what she calls 'soft core holocaust denial'. 

In view of recent developments with regard to the Trump administration’s skirmishes with the Jewish community’s claim to ownership of the term ‘Holocaust’, ought we now to be revisiting Pro. Preston’s employment of the word in the context of the Spanish Civil War? 

Deborah Lipstadt is Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies, who wrote 'Denying the Holocaust’ (1993), this week in responding to the recent blunders of the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, she stated in The Alantic journal:

‘The Holocaust was something entirely different. It was an organized program with the goal of wiping out a specific people. Jews did not have to do anything to be perceived as worthy of being murdered. Old people who had to be wheeled to the deportation trains and babies who had to be carried were all to be killed. The point was not, as in occupied countries, to get rid of people because they might mount a resistance to Nazism, but to get rid of Jews because they were Jews...’

What we have here from Deborah Lipstadt is a claim to Jewish exceptionalism, which specifically excludes claims like that of Prof. Preston about the Spanish tragedy in the 1930s. 

In the last century the linguistic philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, critising dictionary definitions, argued that the meaning of a word is in its use.  

Having seen the recent film 'Denial' portraying Deborah Lipstadt's defence in the defamation case brought against her by the historian David Irving, it would seem that Ms. Lipstad wants to control the meaning of certain words in a totalitarian manner, which would put the words like holocaust in a kind of sacred category which demands an iron law defence of the meaning 'holocaust' that would have offended Wittgenstein. 

Thus, Deborah Lipstadt told the New York Times this week:

‘The de-Judaization of the Holocaust, as exemplified by the White House statement, is what I term softcore Holocaust denial. Hardcore denial is the kind of thing I encountered in the courtroom. In an outright and forceful fashion, (David) Irving [another historian] denied the facts of the Holocaust.’

As a conversational analyst I would view this as an attempt by Ms. Lipstadt and others to seize control of certain words like 'holocaust' and to deny use of the use of words to other groups like the gypsies etc. and even to poor Professor Preston's depiction of 'The Spanish Holocaust', as a form of intellectual totalitarianism or bullying..

What we are getting here from Professor Lipstadt and others in the 'holocaust industry', is a kind of tyranny of words, dictated and developed by an ideological group with political vested interests.

Gibraltar, Treaty of Utrecht & political rhetoric

by Brian Bamford

THE International New York Times today carried a report by Stephen Castle declaring that to the 'formidable list of problems facing Prime Minister Theresa May ... as she negotiates the nation's risky withdrawal from the European Union, add one more:  the future of the rocky out-crop of Gibraltar.'
After the Treaty of Utrecht, which established the Peace of Utrecht, the Spanish Crown ceded the territory of Gibraltar in perpetuity to the British Crown in 1713, under Article X of the Treaty, although there were later attempts to recapture the territory.
On May 18th 1966, the Fernando Castiella the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs in the regime of General Franco, made a formal proposal to the British Government requesting the cancellation of the Treaty of Utrecht and the subsequent return of Gibraltar to Spain. 
In response the UK Government held Gibraltar's first sovereignty referendum on September 10th, 1967; the result was: 

For British sovereignty

12,138 votes:  representing

99.64% of the votes cast.

In favour of  Spanish sovereignty

44 votes: representing

0.36% of the votes cast.

As a consequence of this referendum a new constitution for Gibraltar was passed in 1969.  Which has been adopted as Gibraltar's National Day, and has been celebrated annually on September 10th since 1992 to commemorate Gibraltar's first sovereignty referendum of 1967.
In 1969, the General Franco's regime closed the border between Spain and Gibraltar, cutting off all contacts and severely restricting movement.  The border was not fully reopened until February 1985, ten years after Franco's death.
The Gibraltar Chronicle today reported on what Spain’s Foreign Minister Alfonso Dastis is saying:
“The Spanish government is a little surprised by the tone of comments coming out of Britain, a country known for its composure,” Sr Dastis said.
“I think some people in the UK are losing their temper but there’s no need for that.”
Meanwhile, speaking to Reuters this morning, Gibraltar's Chief Minister Fabian Picardo was critical of European Council president Donald Tusk for allowing Gibraltar’s inclusion in the EU draft guidelines.
“Mr Tusk, who has been given to using the analogies of the divorce and divorce petition, is behaving like a cuckolded husband who is taking it out on the children,” Mr Picardo said.
“We are not going to be a chip and we are not going to be a victim of Brexit as we are not the culprits of Brexit: we voted to stay in the European Union so taking it out on us is to allow Spain to behave in the manner of the bully.”
At the same time reports from London in the Spanish daily newspaper El Pais, cover the utterances of the former Tory leader Michael Howard suggesting that Theresa May would be willing to go to war to protect the rights of Gibraltarians.

Insightful Baroness Blames 'Remotenes'

BARONESS Chakrabarti has identified the distant region of Copeland in Cumbria, saying 'It's remote from London'.  And the New York Times journalist, Kenan Malik tell us its 'near the Scottish border'.
The Baroness as the shadow attorney general, a key ally of Jeremy Corbyn, said:
''There was a low turnout in Copeland and having been to Copeland recently, I know that it's a very rural constituency, public transport is not great.'
She continued to excuse the Labour Party suggesting:  'Copeland could in-part be explained by other factors including bad weather, Labour voters being less likely to have a car, low turnout, Brexit divisions, false claims about Mr Corbyn’s views on nuclear power, and ill-treatment in the media.'
The metropolitan elite know it all!

Best Selling Book: George Orwell's '1984'

FOLLOWING President Donald Trump's inauguration, George Orwell's '1984' is the best-selling book on Amazon.com.

Today, on the MailOnline Johne Broich wrote: 

'The hearts of a thousand English teachers must be warmed as people flock to a novel published in 1949 for ways to think about their present moment.'

George Orwell set his story as a dystopian fantasy on England, a place in the novel he called 'Air Strip ONE' situated on a continent named 'Oceania'.

The language promoted in the novel '1984' by the official hierarchy of the regime under Big Brother was know as 'Newspeak'.

It is now being suggested that the surge in sales of the book has something to do with the current political situation with rise of Trump and the victory of Brexit.

In the New York Times yesterday Professor Stefan Collini, a professor of interlectual history and an expert on Orwell at the University of Cambridge, said that readers see a natural parallel between the book and the way Mr. Trump and his staff have distorted facts.

Pro. Collini said:  'Everyone remembers "1984" as containing various parodies of official distortions.  That kind of unreality is what people feel reminded of, and that's why they keep coming back.'

The Banks & other agents of Social Change

Toxic Meltdown Still Has Knock-on Effects on Banks

CRITICISM of the Obama administration still continues, owing to its failure to prosecute Wall Street executives over their responsibility for the bundling and structuring of dodgy mortgages on American homes into sold to investors around the world, which became a highly profitable business for the Wall Street banks as well as European banks before the catastrophic 2008 meltdown.  This represents the latest hangover of the sub-prime property market meltdown.

At the year end, some European banks did deals with prosecutors over historic claims that they pushed toxic mortgage securities in the years in run up to the financial crisis.  Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse will pay-out nearly $13 billion combined to settle with the United States Justice Department.

These banks have now settled and may, according to the New York Times, have benefited from paying billions less than was once anticipated.   The $7.2 billion settlement with Deutsche Bank produced relief among investors who had been upset when it became clear in September that prosecutors were after a penalty of something like $14 billion. 

Deutsche Bank shares, on the news of the settlement, rose by 5% in Frankfurt, before settling up 0.8%.

The UK bank, Barclays, was a smaller operator in the mortgage backed securities market, and it seems to be prepared to wait and take a chance on waiting to see how things work out once Donald Trump takes over as President.  Barclay's shares fell in London trading last week as investors assessed the risk of forthcoming legal action.   Barclay has said it will 'vigorously defend' itself against a complaint brought by the Justice Department after recent settlement talks collapsed.

Holding banks accountable for the sub-prime meltdown is still being debated in political discussions, books and films like 'The Big Short' which came out last year. 

The Banks, mostly American, have already paid out over $100 billion in settlements with the US government.  But though the banks have written cheques but the Obama administration has been criticised for not prosecuting Wall Street executives. 

Last May, a federal appeals court over-turned a $1.27 billion penalty against Bank of America over the sale of  bad mortgages to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  The appeals panel found that prosecutors 'didn't provide enough evidence that        either the bank's Countrywide unit or a former Countrywide executive had committed fraud in a loan program known as “the hustle”.'

The Deutsche Bank settlement lifts the shadow hanging over the bank.  Since taking over in mid-2015, John Cryan, Deutsche Bank's chief executive, has been trying to break with the bank's legacy of the legal woes. 

Banks, Values, & Corruption

In 1961, Philip Holgate wrote in Freedom, which was then the main British Anarchist journal, an essay entitled 'CAPITALISM – The Image of the Truth' in which he noted:  :

'In sentencing executives of two electrical engineering companies, and twenty-one companies themselves, to fines of nearly two million dollars, and terms of imprisonment, an American Federal judge accused them of having “mocked the image” of the nation's free enterprise system by their offences against the Anti-Trust Laws.'

James Pinkerton, a northern anarcho-syndicalist member of the Syndicalist Worker's Federation (SWF)* and its international secretary, used to say that by saying a society was 'corrupt' one hasn't even begun to describe a society, because all societies are corrupt in so far as their members in the nature of things would breach the salient values of that society.  Thus it ought not to surprise us that the bankers in the USA and Europe in 2008,.would shun banking ethics to stoop to either create dodgy sub-prime packages; manipulate benchmark interest rates; or launder Russian money, and that in the same way the electrical engineering companies in 1961 would 'mock' the values of free enterprise by price-fixing to place high tenders to diddle the government's Tennessee Valley Authority.

Mr. Holgate in his 1961 Freedom article, argues that the electrical engineers are simply perpetuating a capitalistic myth of free enterprise which they and other capitalists don't really believe in.  Mr. Pinkerton the anarcho-syndicalist, would I suspect suggest that despite their beliefs in the values of capitalism, the real life capitalists are only human and would breach their own values for practical advantages.

Big or small:  Social Change & the Economy

In an article entitled 'Unfree Enterprise' in Freedom in January 1962, the paper's then 'Italian' anarchist editor, Vernon Richards, wrote:

'We are always pointing out that the capitalist economy is monopolistic, and that all this talk about free enterprise, and the stimulus of competition is just a lot of talk with no basis in fact.'

Mr. Richards then ponders:

'.... from the point of view of those who seek to completely reverse the values of society so far as production and distribution are concerned – does the growth of monopoly make change more difficult or easier?   Are the chances of change greater in a nation of small shop-keepers, small farmers, small industrialists, small businessmen than in one of huge combines in which agriculture has been industrialised, industry virtually internationalised and distribution centralised?'

Vernon Richards' claims 'that the growth of huge impersonal corporations tends to unite the ordinary people in a way which “individualist capitalism” did not'. 

It's strange that Mr. Richards in another essay in the 1960s when comparing the Spanish workers with that of the American, should say that the average U.S. worker usually 'hasn't two radical ideas to rub together'.    Another Italian, Ignazio Silone wrote in his book 'School for Dictators' that perhaps the lack of dynamism of the industrial workers 'is a consequence of the of the growth of big industry.'  Developing this argument Silone argues persuasively:

'Moving from the artisan's shop and the small plant to the great factory, the worker in time undergoes a considerable transformation.  His [sic] mental horizon is broadened and his class consciousness increased, but at the same time he loses his taste for freedom and his readiness for individual action.  The worker in the great factory is apt to be bolder and stronger in mass actions, whether peaceful or violent, whereas he he is generally unable to act alone or in a small group.'

It's worth noting that in the May 1979 General election about a third of British trade unionists voted Conservative.  It was after this election that the communist historian, Eric Hobsbawm, wrote his critique of the traditional labour movement entitled 'The Forward March of Labour Halted', in which he argued that by itself trade union militancy could not automatically create class-consciousness or organise a radical socialist advance. 

Trade Union Bosses &amp the Decline of Industry

In September 1982, the sociologist Tony Lane in a controversial and important article in Marxism Today entitled 'The Unions:  caught on the Ebb Tide' wrote criticizing the 'sectional interests' of the trade unions and their 'a lack of will to fight' causing a 'crisis of legitimacy', further explaining that this had caused a schism between the trade union leaders (including shop stewards) and the rank-and-file members feeling that there was little democracy in the movement.  In his critique Tony Lane wrote censuring the trade union bureaucracy for failing to deal with the significant changes to the manufacturing industry in the UK and decline in large-scale urban factories where traditionally the organised trade union membership was based, and he predicted, almost two years before the Miner's strike, that unless there was clear leadership on how to tackle these problems with more interactive democracy at the workplace, the rank-and-file membership would face 'uncertainty as to whether the unions are worth fighting for'. 

For Tony Lane in his Ebb Tide essay, it was not so much the Thatcher's anti-trade union legislation or the 'resurgent laissez-faire Toryism', but the longer-term economic shifts that were having an impact in undermining the influence of the labour movement.  In the mid-1970s, Tony Lane, then at the University of Liverpool, had been invited by Derek Pattison, now the current President of Tameside TUC, to address a body of northern anarchists and in the North West Worker's Alliance (NWWA) and some members of the Syndicalist Worker's Federation (SWF)**, about the theme of his book  'The Union Makes Us Strong' at a pub on Union Street in Oldham, and Bob Holton had just written his book  'British Syndicalism 1900 to 1914:  Myths & Realities' in 1976.

But Tony Lane by 1982 had identified the dilemma in the British labour movement in so far as it lacked a strategy which proved fatal during the Miner's strike of 1984-85.  It lack a strategy because on the shopfloor the workers during the periodic boom years from the late 1960s until the early 1970s had been able to depend on day-to-day tactics in dealing with their managements: if the worker's loss a fight with their boss one day they could always look forward to fighting another day under more favourable circumstances.  This bumping along approach led to laziness with regard to a strategy for solidarity with other workers.  In the 1980s when the rainy days came and didn't go away they were ill-fitted to take the employers and the state as Tony lane had predicted. 

Curiously in the mid-1970s the northern anarchists in the North West Worker's Alliance around Manchester, were anxious to break with what some saw as the 'sectarian syndicalist' approach of the English anarchists who had failed to impact upon the British labour movement during the period of change from the Roberts Arundel dispute in Stockport in 1967 onwards, the anarchists who had been active on the ban the bomb demos failed to bring anything to the picket lines as was shown by their lack of involvement of either the anarchists or syndicalists in the Pilkington's glass-worker's strike of 1970.

In 1976, Bob Holton had written his book on 'British Syndicalism – 1900 to 1914: Myths & Realities' at a time when shop-floor syndicalism showed some promise .  But Tony Lane by 1982 had identified the real dilemma in the British labour movement in so far as it lacked a strategy which proved fatal during the Miner's strike of 1984-85.  It lack a strategy because on the shopfloor the workers during the periodic boom years from the late 1960s until the early 1970s had been able to depend tactics in dealing with their managements: if the workers loss a fight with their boss one day they could always look forward to fighting another day under more favourable circumstances.  This bumping along approach led to laziness with regard to a strategy for solidarity with other workers.  In the 1980s when the rainy days came and didn't go away they were ill-fitted to take the employers and the state as Tony lane had predicted.

Curiously in the mid-1970s the northern anarchists in the North West Worker's Alliance around Manchester, were anxious to break with what some saw as the 'sectarian' approach of the English anarchists who had failed to impact upon the British labour movement during the period of change.  Despite valiant attempts this group failed to mobilise the dormant core of anarchists in the Syndicalist Worker's Federation (SWF) in Manchester who failed to interact with the struggles of working people in the region.  As Tony Lane has shown in 1982, the British labour movement continues to lack a strategy but tiny groups like the SWF, the Solidarity Federation and the anarchists often show no signs of having any grasp of tactics either.

*    The Syndicalist Worker's Federation was founded in 1954, when it emerged as an anarcho-syndicalist organization from the then Anarchist Federation of Great Britain.  In 1994, it adopted its current name the Solidarity Federation, having previously been the Direct Action Movement since 1979.

**  The rather London-centric Albert Meltzer, in his autobiography 'I Couldn't Paint Golden Angels' wrote: 'The SWF, anarcho-syndicalist but choked by weeds of the neo-leftism surrounding it, disappeared as an organised body soon after Tom Brown's death (Brown was seen as the main London theorist of the SWF), apart from the  Manchester stalwarts.'

This shows Mr. Meltzer's parochial attitude in so far as the genuine anarcho-syndicalist activists in the North at the time were outside of Manchester in traditional industrial and mill towns like Oldham, Ashton-under-Lyne, Middleton, Rochdale, Bury, Burnley.and Bolton.   In 1971, there had been the Arrow Mill strike at Courtaulds in Castleton, Rochdale, involving mostly Asian workers.  During that dispute which included a sit-in strike, an anarcho-syndicalist 'work's counsellor' had been arrested.  After this dispute and the trial that followed, the local publication Rochdale's Alternative Paper (RAP) was founded, and textile trade unionists and syndicalists in the National Union of Textile & Allied Worker's Union (NUTAWU) in the towns to the north of Manchester began a campaign for shop-stewards in textiles.  This campaign was resisted by union bosses like Joe King at the NUTAWU headquarters in Accrington, and Albert Hilton, Arnold Belfield at the local office in Rochdalre and the local official in Oldham.