Holocaust Memorial Day – what we must remember.
JVL Introduction
We are pleased to publish David Rosenberg’s speech given at Stand Up To Racism’s event commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day. You can see the presentations here. David refers to many sympathisers at the time and so we must remember that it could have happened here in the UK; Nazism was not a uniquely German phenomenon. We can think about how few of the persecuted were able to find safety in the UK or most other countries. And what about now? What is being remembered and what forgotten? Consider how often we hear the rhetoric of “othering” and see the modern day treatment of refugees which gives the lie to the oft repeated statement that Britain is a welcoming and tolerant country. Leaving aside the limitations of being “tolerated”, we also see other elements most associated with the far right, ongoing racist practice and also the clamp down on Trade Union rights that was an important part of the Nazi policy and practice.
We must remember that: “Auschwitz and other death camps were the very end of the process. Anti-racists and anti-fascists need to focus on the beginning – the labelling, discrimination, exclusion, scapegoating, dehumanisation and brutalisation of particular communities… Wherever we see these processes against any minority we need to intervene, and be upstanders, not by-standers.”
This article was originally published by Rebel Notes on Tue 24 Jan 2023. Read the original here.
Time To Decolonise The Holocaust
Talk by David Rosenberg on the Holocaust Memorial Day panel organised by Stand Up To Racism on 24 January 2023
Loading article text…
The main ‘community’ (in Britain) who have been labeled and discriminated against and excluded and dehumanised AND smeared during the past seven years or so are left-wingers; ‘transformed’ into antisemites and homophobes and bullies and thugs etc. Collectively, we have been turned into personae non gratae.
It’s not until you visit Birkenau and witness the vast scale of it, that you have to accept, this is in all of us
It’s time to move on and say to Germany, it could have been us
Stop putting fear into the children, for the love of God, give them a clean break
Teach us all, never to forget the entirety of history, to ensure it never happens again, anywhere in the world
Start now, any politician who states they are prepared to press the button and end life on this planet, should be locked up for eternity
The lesson that Zionism and Israel draws from the Holocaust is not an anti-racist and anti-fascist one. Never Again to Zionism means that it must never happen again to Jews.
As Gideon Levy wrote:
‘I have yet to hear a single teenager come back from Auschwitz and say that we mustn’t abuse others the way we were abused. There has yet to be a school whose pupils came back from Birkenau straight to the Gaza border, saw the barbed-wire fence and said, Never again. The message is always the opposite. Gaza is permitted because of Auschwitz.’
When Ha’aretz journalist Nir Gontarz approached Yad Vashem in 2018 about Netanyahu’s expulsion of African refugees, he described how he rang them and asked them to publicly condemn Netanyahu’s attempt to deport the refugees. He wrote:
‘One after the other of the senior staff there, including Mr. Avner Shalev [the director], slammed the phone down on me’. https://tinyurl.com/y4f27o5n
Tomorrow, the 27th January at 6.30 pm the Socialist Labour Network is holding a meeting ‘Reclaiming the Memory of the Nazi Holocaust’ Speakers will include Jewish holocaust survivors Suzanne Weiss and Stephen Kapos, as well as Roma specialist Dr Adrian Marsh, Ali Abunimah and myself.
The registration link is
https://tinyurl.com/3nmpruyd
My father came from Torun , close to Warsaw . He was taken at 14 , but prior to that , he remembers the cattle trucks full of innocent people .pulling up into the station of his city . The heat in the summer was unbearable , and with soldiers , who would shoot anyone who helped . He was taken , and lived the horrors . He , and another boy escaped .They climbed trees , and tied themselves in and slept by day . Then moved on by night . He arrived in the U.K. at the age of 17 , having lived through three years of if . He joined the Polish free army , and fought . He had nightmares , mood swings and depression right up until he died . I have grown up , watching how fast the situation can change .With many migrants coming to the U.K. the comments are , “Why are they allowed in , can we not put after our own first ” . The hate is there , and is being stirred by political leaders .
Growing up in Germany, we had to research our history ourselves, because we were perplexed that history stopped in 1933 and then restarted in 1945. You would not find anything in our history schoolbooks. It was around 1967/1968 when we started asking questions. Teachers did not explain, when asking family we got mixed reactions ranging from deadly silence, denial to passive aggressive behaviour /statements. This made some of us very curious indeed. Somehow we found out about it from relatives in the GDR, who were actually far more forward coming than our nearest and dearest. To say it was a shock to the system is an understatement. We learned the meaning of “never again”, we saw the dangers of patriotism, the risks of racism through negative bias towards others and discrimination against them, and we did not want any part in it. We embraced internationalism, and would answer with European when asked where we were from. When at Uni I was involved in setting up an exhibition about the Holocaust in commemmration of 30 years of end of WW2 and the liberation of survivors from concentration camps with Leo’s guidance. Leo was not only my contact at VVN, but also a life-long fighter for Freedom and Justice. He helped to make sense of the past, and patiently answered my questions. He spoke
about his experiences during this time which had left him traumatised for the rest of his life. Sadly, Leo passed over in 1996.
Then spool forward 40odd years and you have a Labour frontbencher publicly admiring a nazi-sympathiser (Nancy Astor). And that person (Rachel Reeves) was being invited to be the main speaker at the CLP I was a member of. I found that unacceptable, so wrote a letter to the EC, giving my reasons why.
Happy to say, I was not the only member writing to the Clp EC .As was to be expected we did not get a reply.
‘The Black Lives Matter Movement’ rightly tell us that we need to decolonise the telling of history, but as a retired ex-history lecturer I find this simpistic nonsense and just an opportunity for the author to shine his ‘liberal badge’. The teaching of history in any educational institution follows a set syllabus , with specific reference books to provide the ‘correct’ answers and any ‘idiosyncratic’ versions of history penalised, especially if they do not conform to the markers’ personal beliefs or as indicated in the mark scheme.
British history is taught differently in England to Scotland, but in exactly the same way…………..Monarchy and the nobility, aka the aristocratic landowning elites of society who are born to rule without question, with their own place in Parliament reserved especially for them; the great and the good, the protectors and guardians of our traditional values and morality. The class struggle is eliminated from history, history and culture, because any closer examination will demonstrate how unjust and unfair ‘the system’ really is and the last thing education can be about is asking awlward questions. Just another control mechanism.
Plus ca change. Then it was the Jews, now it is ‘immigrants’ (but not, please note, immigrants from Australia etc). And the Mosley’s of the 1930s have morphed into the Farages of today.
Note too what happened after the war to the perpetrators. We all know about the Nuremberg Trials, which dealt with some of the leading German protagonists of mass murder – but not about the tens of thousands of other active participants who were never investigated, or put on trial, or where investigations/trials were arbitrarily ended.
Why, because it was more important for ‘the West’, especially the UK and the US to build up Germany as part of its Cold War strategy. More than a few of those who had a significant role as actors or collaborators in the genocide ended up in the UK living out their lives peacefully and anonymously. The 1945 Labour Government was actively complicit in this.
So when we who criticise Israel are described as antisemitic, remember the ‘Allies’ who denied any kind of legal justice to those who were butchered, but who now weep crocodile tears for those Jews, and who, if they remember the others who were murdered, do so as a mere afterthought.
Allan Howard is correct. Not only that, but the witch-hunting, persecution and extermination of Leftists in the Holocaust remains the annual Elephant in the Room. If we’re really intent on ‘decolonizing the Holocaust,’ we need to get beyond respectful nods to minority groups and focus on what it was really, mainly about.
More important than the few academics and ‘academics’such as David Irving – is the prevalence amongst NATO populations – including the Germans – that Nazism was peculiarly German. An easy get-out for all such populations in different ways…