.I
listen on Radio 4 to research on the red zones of World War one battle fields. One hundred years later there are still empty areas where gas shells have polluted the area. It's where grenades and shells still lay active in the soil. It's a historical nightmare and those of us who know history are doomed to watch the storm clouds to gather. The whiff of Weimar is in my nostrils but as I look at the comments on social media and see the right wing trolls completely unaware. I have long loved history I have read it for well over 50 years. I can see in my mind quite easily the changes of people's and frontiers from the rise of Rome to last week.
If we do not know of rise and fall. If we do not know that Gibbons history of the fall of Rome has lessons and insights for every Imperial kingdom and Republic. It tells us much about Trumps America as it does about the 1950s in the UK. There is no manifest destiny there is no Empire on which the Sun never sets. There is no Empire that was different from any other All fall and jingoism and "bread and circuses' have been used over and over to control and keep quiet so many. All were united by a perceived threat and a partial knowledge. Yet be they the Athenian sailors or the Kippers of the beloved right the method is the same. The problem is that those of today know not if the predecessors. The Tommy Robinson campaign devotees of the shaved heads and a get could so easily be the proto members of the SA or SS. Yet they know nothing of their historical roots.
Then I think of the skeletons of the French and German workers still below the soil if northern France. War, capitalism and the arms trade kill them and some who survive are seduced by Fascism. A poll in yesterday's Sunday Times showed that 25% would support a far right anti Islamic party. Aaron Banks knows that ...Steve Bannon knows that as does the present UKIP leadership. But it's victims and dupes know not they were not taught history and the bread and circuses worked. My Grandfather fleeing rural poverty fled to the army . Had the German assault been 200 yards further to the right I would never have been. More soldiers died in World war one than in all the preceding wars of humanity. Fascism originated in this period and those embracing it know nothing of it.
There is a brutal period of history coming again and the Far Right cannot be resisted from the centre it can only be resisted from the left.. and can only be fought by Socialism. Those who claim that their is equivalence between fascist and anti fascist breed fascism . You cannot be neutral or moderate to the rise of fascism. If you support the right of fascist to promote hate speech tben you grow them in petrie dishes. It is nothing to do with free speech and like nice liberals throughout history you will be eaten alive. We must educate inform and explain how history works, develops and changes us all. The problem is that the political right do not want an educated critical electorate and the Far Right knows it. Yep it sure is a time of historical vertigo.....getting your country back ? means learning your place again...bread and circuses over and over again..
listen on Radio 4 to research on the red zones of World War one battle fields. One hundred years later there are still empty areas where gas shells have polluted the area. It's where grenades and shells still lay active in the soil. It's a historical nightmare and those of us who know history are doomed to watch the storm clouds to gather. The whiff of Weimar is in my nostrils but as I look at the comments on social media and see the right wing trolls completely unaware. I have long loved history I have read it for well over 50 years. I can see in my mind quite easily the changes of people's and frontiers from the rise of Rome to last week.
If we do not know of rise and fall. If we do not know that Gibbons history of the fall of Rome has lessons and insights for every Imperial kingdom and Republic. It tells us much about Trumps America as it does about the 1950s in the UK. There is no manifest destiny there is no Empire on which the Sun never sets. There is no Empire that was different from any other All fall and jingoism and "bread and circuses' have been used over and over to control and keep quiet so many. All were united by a perceived threat and a partial knowledge. Yet be they the Athenian sailors or the Kippers of the beloved right the method is the same. The problem is that those of today know not if the predecessors. The Tommy Robinson campaign devotees of the shaved heads and a get could so easily be the proto members of the SA or SS. Yet they know nothing of their historical roots.
Then I think of the skeletons of the French and German workers still below the soil if northern France. War, capitalism and the arms trade kill them and some who survive are seduced by Fascism. A poll in yesterday's Sunday Times showed that 25% would support a far right anti Islamic party. Aaron Banks knows that ...Steve Bannon knows that as does the present UKIP leadership. But it's victims and dupes know not they were not taught history and the bread and circuses worked. My Grandfather fleeing rural poverty fled to the army . Had the German assault been 200 yards further to the right I would never have been. More soldiers died in World war one than in all the preceding wars of humanity. Fascism originated in this period and those embracing it know nothing of it.
There is a brutal period of history coming again and the Far Right cannot be resisted from the centre it can only be resisted from the left.. and can only be fought by Socialism. Those who claim that their is equivalence between fascist and anti fascist breed fascism . You cannot be neutral or moderate to the rise of fascism. If you support the right of fascist to promote hate speech tben you grow them in petrie dishes. It is nothing to do with free speech and like nice liberals throughout history you will be eaten alive. We must educate inform and explain how history works, develops and changes us all. The problem is that the political right do not want an educated critical electorate and the Far Right knows it. Yep it sure is a time of historical vertigo.....getting your country back ? means learning your place again...bread and circuses over and over again..
On
Auswhitz day...One third of Americans believe the holocaust never
happened.Steve Bannons foul words echo around social media and Tommy
Robinson's supporters perform Nazi salutes and behave like a proto SA.
The Far right who killed millions in the 30s and 40s rise again and we
discover that today is Auschwitz memorial day. Last week I watched the
film Denial. It dealt with the libel case brought by Holocaust denier
David Erving against Professor Lipstadt, a distinguished academic of the
Holocaust.
David Irving is a well know figure on the political right. He is a prominent speaker at far right wing and neo Nazi meetings. The trial led to a destruction of his reputation as a historian and revealed him to be anti Semitic and racist. There is no doubt that the Holocaust happened and yet many deniers of its reality seek to question its very existence be apologists for Hitler and the Nazis.
One must always ask what does anyone gain from a particular position? Irving`s position was by debting the reality of Auschwitz. If he could show that Auschwitz was false he could question the whole of the Nazi Killing machine. Auschwitz was originally built as a prison camp and then later was converted to a concentration camp filled with gas chambers. To the far right Auschwitz seemed a means to deny the systematic madder of six million Jews. To the far right this is a propaganda opportunity
Auschwitz is the most infamous of all Nazi camps, and we commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January, the date of its liberation by Soviet troops. Over 1.1 million people were murdered at this site, over 90% of the victims being Jewish.
Auschwitz was a network of several camps, combining forced labour and extermination camps. In late summer 1941 the Nazis began experimenting with a new killing method – a poison gas called Zyklon B. Increasingly larger poison gas chambers were constructed at the camp as the war progressed, after Auschwitz was selected as the main killing site for European Jews – because of its location and access to the rail network. In 1942 Jews from across Europe began to be transported to Auschwitz. The peak of the slaughter occurred in 1944, when more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews were killed in just two months.
Arrival in the camp started with a selection process – men, women and children were removed from the trains and had their valuables taken away. Men were separated from women and children. A Nazi physician would quickly assess whether each person was healthy enough to survive forced labour, and based on this visual inspection, individuals were sent to the camps or to the gas chambers. The disabled, elderly, pregnant women, babies, young children or the sick, stood little chance of surviving this selection.
Those who were selected for death were led to the gas chambers, and, in order to prevent panic, some victims were told they were going to the showers to remove the lice from their bodies. They were made to hand over any remaining valuables and remove all of their clothes. After being ushered into the gas chambers, the doors would be shut and bolted. The poison took up to 20 minutes to kill those in the chambers. Camp prisoners were then forced by the SS guards to remove the corpses from the chambers and to remove hair, gold teeth and fillings. The corpses were then burned in crematoria
tTe deniers say it never happened
Holocaust deniers are people who contend that the Holocaust - the attempt by Nazi Germany to annihilate European Jewry during World War Two - never happened. According to the deniers, the Nazis did not murder six million Jews, the notion of homicidal gas chambers is a myth, and any deaths of Jews that did occur under the Nazis were the result of wartime privations, not of systematic persecution and state-organised mass murder.
Deniers dismiss all assertions that the Holocaust took place as conscious fabrications, or as psychotic delusions. Some even claim that Hitler was the best friend the Jews had in Germany, and that he actively worked to protect them. According to deniers, Jews have perpetrated this hoax about the Holocaust on the world in order to gain political and financial advantage, and it was in fact Germany that was the true victim in World War Two
Documented genocide
Holocaust denial is a form of anti-Semitism, positing that Jews have concocted a giant myth for their own ends. It persists despite the fact that the Holocaust is one of the best documented genocides in history, with a wide array of evidence documenting virtually every aspect of it.
For example, approximately a million Jews on the Eastern Front were shot during 1941-42, and buried in large pits. This is known partly because the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that coordinated these massacres, prepared detailed reports on the murders - reports that contained precise death tolls, broken down into men, women and children.
These reports were sent to high ranking officials in Berlin, and to army, police and SS officers, as well as diplomats and even prominent industrialists. This wide distribution suggests that the perpetrators felt no shame at what they did. Had these killings not been part of Berlin's policy, the reports would never have been so widely distributed.
Deniers argue that evidence such as this was forged, after the end of World War Two, by people working for world Jewry. They claim that forgers created these and other documents - complete with complex internal reference markings, on typewriters that perfectly matched those used by the various German units said to have written the documents - and then planted thousands of these perfect forgeries in numerous different archival collections (in exactly the right file and in precisely the right sequence) all over Europe.
Not only is such a scenario fantastically improbable, it fails to explain why these supposedly incredibly talented forgers did not succeed in producing the one piece of paper that deniers demand as 'proof' that genocide took place under the Third Reich - an order from Hitler authorising the destruction of the Jews.
David Irving`s books are selling dramatically in America and recently we have seen the rise of new denials of the Holocaust. This is an obscene travesty of the truth....tbose whi know no history are doomed to repeat it and we stand on the edge of an abyss...
David Irving is a well know figure on the political right. He is a prominent speaker at far right wing and neo Nazi meetings. The trial led to a destruction of his reputation as a historian and revealed him to be anti Semitic and racist. There is no doubt that the Holocaust happened and yet many deniers of its reality seek to question its very existence be apologists for Hitler and the Nazis.
One must always ask what does anyone gain from a particular position? Irving`s position was by debting the reality of Auschwitz. If he could show that Auschwitz was false he could question the whole of the Nazi Killing machine. Auschwitz was originally built as a prison camp and then later was converted to a concentration camp filled with gas chambers. To the far right Auschwitz seemed a means to deny the systematic madder of six million Jews. To the far right this is a propaganda opportunity
Auschwitz is the most infamous of all Nazi camps, and we commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January, the date of its liberation by Soviet troops. Over 1.1 million people were murdered at this site, over 90% of the victims being Jewish.
Auschwitz was a network of several camps, combining forced labour and extermination camps. In late summer 1941 the Nazis began experimenting with a new killing method – a poison gas called Zyklon B. Increasingly larger poison gas chambers were constructed at the camp as the war progressed, after Auschwitz was selected as the main killing site for European Jews – because of its location and access to the rail network. In 1942 Jews from across Europe began to be transported to Auschwitz. The peak of the slaughter occurred in 1944, when more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews were killed in just two months.
Arrival in the camp started with a selection process – men, women and children were removed from the trains and had their valuables taken away. Men were separated from women and children. A Nazi physician would quickly assess whether each person was healthy enough to survive forced labour, and based on this visual inspection, individuals were sent to the camps or to the gas chambers. The disabled, elderly, pregnant women, babies, young children or the sick, stood little chance of surviving this selection.
Those who were selected for death were led to the gas chambers, and, in order to prevent panic, some victims were told they were going to the showers to remove the lice from their bodies. They were made to hand over any remaining valuables and remove all of their clothes. After being ushered into the gas chambers, the doors would be shut and bolted. The poison took up to 20 minutes to kill those in the chambers. Camp prisoners were then forced by the SS guards to remove the corpses from the chambers and to remove hair, gold teeth and fillings. The corpses were then burned in crematoria
tTe deniers say it never happened
Holocaust deniers are people who contend that the Holocaust - the attempt by Nazi Germany to annihilate European Jewry during World War Two - never happened. According to the deniers, the Nazis did not murder six million Jews, the notion of homicidal gas chambers is a myth, and any deaths of Jews that did occur under the Nazis were the result of wartime privations, not of systematic persecution and state-organised mass murder.
Deniers dismiss all assertions that the Holocaust took place as conscious fabrications, or as psychotic delusions. Some even claim that Hitler was the best friend the Jews had in Germany, and that he actively worked to protect them. According to deniers, Jews have perpetrated this hoax about the Holocaust on the world in order to gain political and financial advantage, and it was in fact Germany that was the true victim in World War Two
Documented genocide
Holocaust denial is a form of anti-Semitism, positing that Jews have concocted a giant myth for their own ends. It persists despite the fact that the Holocaust is one of the best documented genocides in history, with a wide array of evidence documenting virtually every aspect of it.
For example, approximately a million Jews on the Eastern Front were shot during 1941-42, and buried in large pits. This is known partly because the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that coordinated these massacres, prepared detailed reports on the murders - reports that contained precise death tolls, broken down into men, women and children.
These reports were sent to high ranking officials in Berlin, and to army, police and SS officers, as well as diplomats and even prominent industrialists. This wide distribution suggests that the perpetrators felt no shame at what they did. Had these killings not been part of Berlin's policy, the reports would never have been so widely distributed.
Deniers argue that evidence such as this was forged, after the end of World War Two, by people working for world Jewry. They claim that forgers created these and other documents - complete with complex internal reference markings, on typewriters that perfectly matched those used by the various German units said to have written the documents - and then planted thousands of these perfect forgeries in numerous different archival collections (in exactly the right file and in precisely the right sequence) all over Europe.
Not only is such a scenario fantastically improbable, it fails to explain why these supposedly incredibly talented forgers did not succeed in producing the one piece of paper that deniers demand as 'proof' that genocide took place under the Third Reich - an order from Hitler authorising the destruction of the Jews.
David Irving`s books are selling dramatically in America and recently we have seen the rise of new denials of the Holocaust. This is an obscene travesty of the truth....tbose whi know no history are doomed to repeat it and we stand on the edge of an abyss...
No comments:
Post a Comment