I was involved in the organisation of the 50th anniversary commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz, while First Secretary at the British Embassy in Warsaw. The 50th did not receive anything like the media coverage given to the 70th, of which more later.
Senior British visitors to Poland invariably included a concentration camp on their itinerary, and from escorting people around I visited camps a great deal more often than I would have wished. I found the experience appalling and desolate. The first I ever saw was Majdanek and I recall that I just had to sit helpless and shivering for some time. One thing the experience left me with – including meeting survivors and both Polish and German eye-witnesses, and seeing the architects’ plans for camps – was a contempt for those who claim the whole thing did not happen, or was an accident, or was small scale.
It in no way diminishes the genocidal attack on the Jews to remember that a vast number of Poles also died in the camps, as well as gypsies, homosexuals, the disabled and disparate political prisoners. I tried sometimes to diminish the horror I felt at involvement with the camps, with attempts at humour. I was present at a meeting listing the guests of honour; the President of Lithuania was included. I whispered that he was coming to represent the camp guards. That was offensive, and I apologise. But there is a real problem that to this day Eastern Europe – including Poland itself – has not come to terms with historical truth about collaboration with anti-Jewish genocide and other attacks on minorities. I recommend this website, which tackles these issues very honestly and is well worth a lengthy browse.
It requires bigotry not to be able to understand why nationalist resistance movements against Russian occupation became allied with Germany during World War II. That would be reprehensible only in the same sense that allied collaboration with Stalin might be reprehensible, but for the added factor of enthusiastic collaboration with genocidal and master race programmes and fascist ideology. That is what makes the glorification of Eastern European nationalist figures from this period generally inappropriate.
I fear however that the real reason that the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz received so much more coverage than the 50th is a media desire to reinforce the narrative of the War on Terror and Western policy in the Middle East by invoking the spectre of massive anti-Semitism. There have been isolated but deplorable, apparently anti-Semitic attacks of a small-scale terrorist nature in France and Belgium in recent years. But to conflate this into stories of a wave of popular anti-Semitism in Europe is a nonsense. Maureen Lipman’s claim that she may have to leave the UK is not just silly but disingenuous. I do not believe she feels in personal danger of attack – there is absolutely no reason why she should – she is rather making a political point.
There are two factors which could exacerbate anti-Semitism at present. One is the appalling behaviour of Israel and its indefensible action in continually seizing Palestinian land and using its military superiority to dominate and occasionally massacre Palestinians. Regrettably, there are a very small minority of people who wrongly blame Jews in general for the actions of Israel.
The second factor is of course the terrible economic hardship wrought across the whole world by irresponsible banking practices, and the fact that the bankers luxury lifestyles were maintained at the cost of everybody else. There are still a tiny minority of people stuck in the medieval mindset associating banking with the Jewish community. There is in fact a very plausible argument that if any “race” has a disproportionate influence on the development and character of international banking since the mid eighteenth century, it is the Scots! But those who see banking as a racial issue are nutters.
You could construct an argument from these factors, and you could identify that anti-Semitic people do exist. They certainly do. They dominate the very small category of people who get banned even from this free speech blog. But are their opinions intellectually respectable, promoted in the mainstream or able to be expressed openly without fear of either social or legal consequences? No, no and no. Anti-semites are fortunately a tiny and strange minority. I might add that in my numerous and frequent social contacts in the British Muslim community, I have never encountered anti-Semitism (unlike, say, Poland and Russia where I encountered casual anti-Semitism quite frequently).
The final point, is of course, the conflation of anti-zionism with anti-Semitism. That seems to me the fundamental design of the media campaign exaggerating the scale of anti-Semitism at the moment. Yes, we must always remember the terrible warnings from history and it is right to remember those who died in the concentration camps, Jewish, Polish, Romany, Gay, Communist or any other category. But we should be aware of those who wish to manipulate the powerful emotions of horror thus evoked, for present objectives of the powerful.
“Usbek In The UK; 12:42 pm
“Zionists do not imprison and torture those in opposition to them.
Zionists do not call (not yet at least) for extermination of any particular group of people.
Zionists do not have hunger for world domination.”
Are you completely & utterly insane?”
-No, he is Uzbek zionist in the UK. You don’t have to be born a jew to be zionist, you can become it. This nutter сопляк is a present proof.
Good old “Lysias” :
“”that the actual number of Jews killed was significantly (typically an order of magnitude) lower than the historically accepted figure of 5 to 6 million.”
One order of magnitude lower than 5 to 6 million would be 500,000 to 600,000.”
_________________
Funnily enough, Lysias’s preferred order of magnitude is similar to that of the grand-daddy of Holocaust deniers, the French geographer Paul Rassinier (check him out, guys). According to this gentleman the other millions either never existed in the first place, got lost or emigrated before the war.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I will confess to also being a Denier. I have the gravest doubts that Lysias is an Oxford graduate in Greats. I believe he also never existed and that the Oxford college he allegedly attended emigrated before the non-existent Lysias never attended it.
Perhaps Habbabkuk, but until then……
And as to that last post, tbh i’ll have to come back to it. It’s a bit much in one take for me.
But let’s be clear, never expect any agreement to temper my temper about some things.
On initial reading I do think I want a better word. I make distinctions and also see close similarities.
well said Sverdlov, Uzbek is off his rocker and needs his tappets adjusting.
The numbers game is so irrelevant but its always the first argument brought up. The inconsistencies of the argument is obvious as Arabs are semites too and for Israel to steal Palestine and not being accused of ant Semitism that these atrocities and the drip drip Apartheid do not even feature, is very telling of the one sided Shoa show.
‘It’ wrote
“There are quite a few Castellos in the London phone directory and no doubt more in the other UK phone directories.
Would you therefore please supply your first and any middle name so that you can be properly identified.
(A question of balls…..)”
Your balls should be spit roasted for this insolence, threaten people with exposure like a little boy telling all.
I can tell you that the Castellos stick together as a family and that you best stop digging now before you get your neck shaved, you piss poor person.
Je
28/01/15 7:14 pm
“The idea that “the early Christian church was antisemitic.” seems stranger than that the Roman’s might have been. The early Christians were Jews.”
The Gospel according to Matthew 27: 15-26
[Now it was the governor’s custom at the festival to release a prisoner chosen by the crowd. At that time they had a well-known prisoner whose name was Barabbas. So when the crowd had gathered, Pilate asked them, “Which one do you want me to release to you: Jesus Barabbas, or Jesus who is called the Messiah?” For he knew it was out of self-interest that they had handed Jesus over to him.
While Pilate was sitting on the judge’s seat, his wife sent him this message: “Don’t have anything to do with that innocent man, for I have suffered a great deal today in a dream because of him.”
But the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowd to ask for Barabbas and to have Jesus executed.
“Which of the two do you want me to release to you?” asked the governor.
“Barabbas,” they answered.
“What shall I do, then, with Jesus who is called the Messiah?” Pilate asked.
They all answered, “Crucify him!”
“Why? What crime has he committed?” asked Pilate.
But they shouted all the louder, “Crucify him!”
When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. “I am innocent of this man’s blood,” he said. “It is your responsibility!”
All the people answered, “Let his blood be on us and on our children!”
Then he released Barabbas to them. But he had Jesus flogged, and handed him over to be crucified.]
This has always struck me as a remarkably anti-Semitic passage in the Christian Gospels. The reference to the chief priests and elders persuading the crowd to call for crucifixion presumably means that the “crowd” is to be regarded as Jewish. My understanding is that for hundreds of years this particular passage has been cited as a justification for the murder and persecution of Jewish people, as bearing hereditary responsibility for the execution of the Saviour throughout history.
Kind regards,
John
Craig @ 6.34pm
‘The problem with those arguing whether it was 4 or 6 million is that very often it is a code for what they really want to say’.
“The deliberate attempt to destroy systematically all of Europe’s Jews was unsuspected in the spring and early summer of 1942: the very period during which it was at its most intense, and during which hundreds of thousands of Jews were being gassed every day at Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor and Treblinka”. ‘Auschwitz and the Allies: Martin Gilbert; 1st edn; 1981.
That’s a minimum plural of 200,000 per day, i.e. 1 million per 5 days for 4 months = 120 days = 24 million, with no allowance for Auschwitz. Is this a code for what Gilbert really wanted to say in his “scrupulously researched” volume? Hardly. A new edition was rushed out with the offending statement deleted without explanation or apology as though it had never been made; which is surely both the definitive example of Chutzpah and an unassailable ‘own goal’ debunk of the Shoah.
Faurisson, who pointed out the grotesque error, was jailed for ‘holocaust denial’. Gilbert was knighted by Her Majesty for his prolific services to the ‘holocaust industry’.
Disappointed in you here, Craig, but still hold you in the highest regard (FWIW!)
The words of the late Howard Zinn who was Jewish and who lived in America come to mind.
A larger consciousness
By Howard Zinn, ZNet Commentary, 10 October 1999
Some years ago, when I was teaching at Boston University, I was asked by a Jewish group to give a talk on the Holocaust. I spoke that evening, but not about the Holocaust of World War II, not about the genocide of six million Jews. It was the mid-Eighties, and the United States government was supporting death squad governments in Central America, so I spoke of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of peasants in Guatemala and El Salvador, victims of American policy. My point was that the memory of the Jewish Holocaust should not be encircled by barbed wire, morally ghettoized, kept isolated from other genocides in history. It seemed to me that to remember what happened to Jews served no important purpose unless it aroused indignation, anger, action against all atrocities, anywhere in the world.
A few days later, in the campus newspaper, there was a letter from a faculty member who had heard me speak—a Jewish refugee who had left Europe for Argentina, and then the United States. He objected strenuously to my extending the moral issue from Jews in Europe in the 1940s to people in other parts of the world, in our time. The Holocaust was a sacred memory. It was a unique event, not to be compared to other events. He was outraged that, invited to speak on the Jewish Holocaust, I had chosen to speak about other matters.
[..]
The Holocaust might serve a powerful purpose if it led us to think of the world today as wartime Germany – where millions die while the rest of the population obediently goes about its business. It is a frightening thought that the Nazis, in defeat, were victorious: today Germany, tomorrow the world. That is, until we withdraw our obedience.
/..
`300 words
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/60/145.html
Winkletoe @3:36/3:37. 🙂
Troglodytae non vescendi sunt.
@ Fred Fuck off and die retard.
Fred, do you have fantasies of being a concentration camp guard? You certainly have the lingo for it.
‘Auschwitz and the Allies’: Martin Gilbert; 1st edn; 1981; bottom of p.26
I thought the Holocaust figures for the number of Jews killed was based upon the difference between known Jewish population in Europe before & after the war.
This guy gives good arguments where Craig is wrong to censor Holocaust denial;
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100254824/holocaust-denial-is-despicable-but-its-wrong-to-ban-it/
The list of contributors on the website that Craig recommends in his piece includes the name of the arch Zionist Labour Friend of Israel and convicted fraudster Denis MacShane.
http://defendinghistory.com/
Nothing written recently. Perhaps they have dropped him.
http://defendinghistory.com/category/macshane-denis
Habbabkuk
The figure of Jewish deaths in the Holocaust is generally accepted by most historians to be between 5,5 – 6 millions irrespective of the exact number killed at Auschwitz.
______________
Sorry matey, but that is plain silly. How can the figure be ‘irrespective’ of how many were killed at Auschwitz? If the numbers killed at Auschwitz were substantially revised down—as they have been—then it follows that the total of Jews killed must also be revised down.
Or what am I missing?
See The Telegraph for my comments about that..I didn’t go there…I wrote this instead..
In my experience, The Greek people were the nicest most welcoming people my wife and I ever met, when we had to leave Lancashire and Move South To London To Work and Earn when Margaret Thatcher Closed Down The North Of England 1979-81..and We were Immigrants To London..Yes They Were Dead Nice..But when we first..well even before..we went to Greece..The Greek Islands…On our Honeymoon and when we had our Babies…Our Children Grew Up in Greece in The Summer in Their Holidays..we always went to Greece..and Sure Thesalloniki..That Museum..Blew Me away _ I can tell you//The Gold Jewellery ..Blimey..so old and so beautiful …right next to you…
Be Nice To The Lovely Greek People
They Were So Nice To Us
I Know They’ve Been F,cked Over..Even Happened to Me in Athens..the last time we were there..But It Wasn’t The Greeks..In Fact The Greek Women Were Absolutely Wonderful To Us..The Greek Police USELESS..
The Ordinary Greek People are not Ordinary..They are Exceptionally Lovely
And You American Neocon C.NTS are SERIOUSLY F.kin Them Over
Just Like You Are Doing In an Even More Aggressive Way To The Ukraine..after getting Away With Yugoslavia..
You US Neocons..Are The Slime Of The Earth
And Soon You Will Have China, Russia, and Europe..Coming For Your Guts..you won’t know it.
Tony
“Fred, do you have fantasies of being a concentration camp guard? You certainly have the lingo for it.”
So which part of “fuck off and die retard” didn’t you understand then cunt?
Good Howard Zinn quote Mary
The Holocaust might serve a powerful purpose if it led us to think of the world today as wartime Germany – where millions die while the rest of the population obediently goes about its business.
Describes very well the public reaction to “The War Against Terror,” which amazingly is now being perpetrated in the Name of Ukrainian Nazis, who even more amazingly are mainly backed or led by Jews, e.g., Soros, Kolomoisky, (Chair of the European Jewish Union, who is currently soliciting the murder of Ukrainian Presidential candidate, Oleg Tserov, with an offer of a $1-million-dollar bounty), and Julia Tymoshenko, who wants personally to machine-gun all Russian-speaking Ukrainians, or nuke them.
Fred, thanks for confirming the diagnosis of severe paranoid psychopathology.
They are at it again. We’ll have WW111 if we don’t watch out.
How Islamist rebels engineered Israel’s oil grab in Syria
Nafeez Ahmed
28 January 2015
Israel’s ambitions to conquer the Golan Heights and western hopes to topple Assad raise probing questions regarding the discovery of oil in the Golan
A US oil company is preparing to drill for oil in the Golan Heights.
Granted the license in February 2013 by Israel, Afek Oil and Gas is a subsidiary of Genie Energy Ltd., whose equity-holding board members include former US Vice President Dick Cheney, controversial media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and financier Lord Jacob Rothschild. Also on the board is Brigadier General Effie Eitam, a former Israeli minister for infrastructure who currently resides in the Golan Heights himself.
Afek, which has exclusive rights to a 153 square mile radius in the south of the Golan Heights, started “dirt works” in December 2014, to prepare the first site for drilling.
/..
http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/how-islamist-rebels-engineered-israel-s-oil-grab-syria-740568063
PS The author is the writer who was sacked by the Guardian for daring to write about Israel’s grab of Palestinian marine gas. |The Jonathan Freedland factor played a part in the sacking.
http://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2014-12-04/why-the-guardian-axed-nafeez-ahmeds-blog/
“Troglodytae non vescendi sunt.”
Lysias
I’m assuming you’re trying to say, “Don’t feed the trolls”. But from what I remember of my Latin you’re actually saying “The trolls are not feeding”.
I think what you want is something along the lines of, “non dant cibum troglodytis” or “non cibos troglodytarum”.
I think!
I’m sorry, I rarely post here..but I do look..Clark and Glenn wrote some really good things last night..but guys you ..there’s about 10 of you may be 20 tops..you’ve been supporting Craig Murray’s blog For..well I think I came across it nearly 10 years ago..when Dreolin and Mary were best of Friends..and Now The Cat’s seem to be trying to Scratch Each Other’s Eyes out..
How did that happen..I’m sorry..with this cat fight..I’m on Mary’s side.
I think She is Quality.
What’s The Problem Dreolin..You don’t fancy Habbabkuk (La Vita È Bella) do you?
He is Far Worse Than I Ever Was.
I was Never as Boring as Him Was I??
Well Maybe a Bit..but even then I was nice.
Tony
I do find discussion of these nuances, well I stay out of them.
It was a particularly disgusting European event, among many other disgusting European and world events. They thought they could get away with it, it was not like today was it? media wise. And they did plan on writing history one assumes.
If some want to deny ‘The Holocaust’. I don’t know…………..How to walk in dignity with throw-up on your shoe?
I don’t answer ridiculous questions, Tony.
Why don’t you go to bed, you’re pie-eyed – as usual.
Just checking on what the official, i.e., Jewish historians of the Holocaust have to say and came across this candid statement by Yahuda Bauer of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem:
“In reference to the conquest of Canaan by the ancient Israelites, which resulted in the massacre of the Amalekites and Midianites, genocide historian Adam Jones has quoted Bauer: ‘As a Jew, I must live with the fact that the civilization I inherited … encompasses the call for genocide in its canon.'” (Source)
So there’s nothing truly unique about the Jewish Holocaust, a terrible crime, but one of dozens, hundreds, probably thousands that were similar.
Bauer also notes the willingness of many Israelis to genocide the Palestinians, but in the Wikipedia article there is no indication of his estimate of numbers if he has one.
Raoul Hilberg, who devoted a lifetime of scholarship to the Jewish Holocaust estimated the number killed was 5.1 million, but as there are literally dozens of other Holocaust scholars one can probably find justification for just about any estimate one likes.
With so many earning a living from it, it is inevitable that the Holocaust is often described as unique, most important ever, etc., etc. But for the individuals affected, it was just like any other genocide, a hideous crime.
“Vescor” was a deponent verb “to eat” (taking the ablative, by the way, not an accusative direct object) in Classical Latin. But it also picked up the meaning “to feed” as a transitive verb “vesco” in later Latin. Look it up in a lexicon. With that meaning, my use of the gerundive has, I think, the meaning I wanted.
Using the gerundive, one of the suggestions you made could also be adapted: “Cibus troglodytis non dandus est.”
Perhaps I’ll use that sentence in the future, since I believe it is Classical Latin without any doubt.
So thank you for the suggestion.
David Cameron announces new Holocaust memorial will be built in London
Marcus Dysch, January 27, 2015
http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/128960/david-cameron-announces-new-holocaust-memorial-will-be-built-london
Cameron set up a Holocaust Commission which Davis chairs. He is the very rich South African who also chairs the Jewish Leadership Council.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mick_Davis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Leadership_Council
Also funded Fox and Werritty
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/oct/18/adam-werritty-pro-israel-funders
Clegg and Miliband support the memorial of course.
‘An independent UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation will be formed to immediately begin work on purchasing land for the memorial and to start documenting survivors’ stories.’
Mirvis quoted in the JC article is spoken of here on Medialens –
Outrageous Ephraim Mirvis article in the Grauniad today
Posted by Morrissey on January 27, 2015, 1:50 am
Look at the last paragraph especially. The author is beneath contempt….
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/26/70-years-trauma-auschwitz-lessons-holocaust?commentpage=1
Hilberg’s figure, if memory serves, was based on census figures and the like, and did not depend on any estimates of the numbers killed in the death camps. So it should be unaffected by a revision downward of the number of people killed at Auschwitz.
Dreoilin,
Our Irish Friend was 64 Years Old Yesterday – Her Birthday..Sure she has loads of kids now all grown up..About This Time Last Year..She is a Good Friend..She came round our house and said I have already booked my flight to Moscow..and then I am planning on going on The Trans Siberian Express To Mongolia and China..Can you help me Plan it..
We spent 4 hours with her finding out all the difficulties..not just the weather..You are Going To Freeze To Death Girl…just do it a few weeks later..and we changed the date of her flight to Moscow..so that she would have the time to get the welcome visa..which includes the people and their addresses where she was going to stay during her 3 month’s trip..
She did it all by herself….
Now THAT Is IRISH COURAGE..not writing Crap on a Computer Screen..Being an Ambassador For Ireland..and Using Her Irish Charm..She is Slim and Beautiful..and Tough as Old Boots..She’s a Tree Surgeon.
Lovely Girl..One of Our Mates.
Tony
I’m probably going to be told off now, and banned again.
Mr Cameron, while we are at it can we have a memorial built to remember all the innocents in the middle east that you and your like murdered very recently you fucking hypocrite!