Anthony McIntyre's Blog, page 1161
February 16, 2018
Threat To Internet
Mick Hall makes the point that:
Yvette Cooper threatened Google and Facebook with dire consequences over content while they rob the national exchequer blind.
The internet can no more be policed by state agencies than the printing press was, it's people the spooks spy upon not machines.
When I read or hear the likes of Yvette Cooper claiming the Internet needs to be policed by the State it reminds me of what ruling class toadies they are.
Today this woman is at the forefront of the reactionary campaign for the state to police the WWW. Yet when her party leader Jeremy Corbyn was being smeared and lied about daily on the internet and in the MSM she never said a word about that fake news, indeed on more than one occasion she joined the hounds.
She now prattles on about how politicians from all Westminster parties are being targeted and smeared online. When was it never so whether on the net or via the old media, it doesn’t make it right but it goes with the job and as the saying goes if they cannot take the heat they should get out of the kitchen.
She claims some politicians are intimidated by such behavior. If true which I doubt, then they're clearly in the wrong job. Down the years I have been threatened online with dire consequences including death, been bullied and smeared online and off for expressing my political opinions. But I learned long ago, unless they are an imbecile if someone wishes to do you real harm, which I have sadly experienced, they do not forewarn you, let alone leave a footprint on the internet of them making threats.
What people like Mrs Balls really hate about the Internet is it gives people who had no access to the mainstream media an opportunity to express their opinions and that is what she and her ilk fear. Of course unsavoury elements also use the Web to express their opinions and desires but we already have laws, far to many in my view, and if they break them it is for the police to act.
The fact they rarely do tells us more about the nation we live in than the WWW. The authorities have no problem taking before the courts whistleblowers and hackers who expose the State's dirty dealings, but when it came to the powerful men who were exposed in the latest brouhaha for treating women appallingly by sexually harassing them, as far as I'm aware not one has been brought before a UK court of law.
So much for social media being all powerful.
Besides beyond shutting down the national grid, the world wide web cannot be censored effectively by state agencies and those reactionary governments who have tried have been outwitted by a simply work around.
Mrs Balls claims she is now trying to reign in the big beasts of the Internet, the Facebooks the Google's etcetera, not because they fail to pay their proper share of tax but because she allegedly objects to a tiny amount of their content. It's as if Mary Whitehouse is back from the dead and her name is Yvette.
The bosses of Facebook and Google must be howling with laughter, there they are robbing the national exchequer of billions and she demands they remove what 'she' regards as fake news.
Of course she is doing the ruling classes bidding, she is well aware Britain already has some of the most draconian laws, a bill giving the UK intelligence agencies and police the most sweeping surveillance powers in the western world has passed into law last year with barely a whimper, and without any opposition from the saintly Yvette Cooper.
Not once when a government minister did she demand the removal of Britain's draconian anti strike laws. Indeed she and the government she served all but endorsed them. Thus the low wages, zero hours contract and poor working conditions of today can be directly laid at the feet of Cooper and her New Labour ilk along with the current Tory government and the Tory led coalition.
Indeed when her boss Tony Blair published his dodger dossier Cooper supported his lies and had not a word to say about fake news, let alone the downright lies which sent young British men and women to war, to kill and be killed.
Yet now she also wants the state to police the WWW, making it even more difficult for trade unions whistleblowers and the rest of us to get our opinions out there via social media.
This issue is not about left or right but freedom of expression and our human rights, as Voltaire said "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
Mick Hall blogs @ Organized Rage.
Follow Mick Hall on Twitter @organizedrage
Yvette Cooper threatened Google and Facebook with dire consequences over content while they rob the national exchequer blind.
The internet can no more be policed by state agencies than the printing press was, it's people the spooks spy upon not machines.When I read or hear the likes of Yvette Cooper claiming the Internet needs to be policed by the State it reminds me of what ruling class toadies they are.
Today this woman is at the forefront of the reactionary campaign for the state to police the WWW. Yet when her party leader Jeremy Corbyn was being smeared and lied about daily on the internet and in the MSM she never said a word about that fake news, indeed on more than one occasion she joined the hounds.
She now prattles on about how politicians from all Westminster parties are being targeted and smeared online. When was it never so whether on the net or via the old media, it doesn’t make it right but it goes with the job and as the saying goes if they cannot take the heat they should get out of the kitchen.
She claims some politicians are intimidated by such behavior. If true which I doubt, then they're clearly in the wrong job. Down the years I have been threatened online with dire consequences including death, been bullied and smeared online and off for expressing my political opinions. But I learned long ago, unless they are an imbecile if someone wishes to do you real harm, which I have sadly experienced, they do not forewarn you, let alone leave a footprint on the internet of them making threats.
What people like Mrs Balls really hate about the Internet is it gives people who had no access to the mainstream media an opportunity to express their opinions and that is what she and her ilk fear. Of course unsavoury elements also use the Web to express their opinions and desires but we already have laws, far to many in my view, and if they break them it is for the police to act.
The fact they rarely do tells us more about the nation we live in than the WWW. The authorities have no problem taking before the courts whistleblowers and hackers who expose the State's dirty dealings, but when it came to the powerful men who were exposed in the latest brouhaha for treating women appallingly by sexually harassing them, as far as I'm aware not one has been brought before a UK court of law.
So much for social media being all powerful.
Besides beyond shutting down the national grid, the world wide web cannot be censored effectively by state agencies and those reactionary governments who have tried have been outwitted by a simply work around.
Mrs Balls claims she is now trying to reign in the big beasts of the Internet, the Facebooks the Google's etcetera, not because they fail to pay their proper share of tax but because she allegedly objects to a tiny amount of their content. It's as if Mary Whitehouse is back from the dead and her name is Yvette.
The bosses of Facebook and Google must be howling with laughter, there they are robbing the national exchequer of billions and she demands they remove what 'she' regards as fake news.
Of course she is doing the ruling classes bidding, she is well aware Britain already has some of the most draconian laws, a bill giving the UK intelligence agencies and police the most sweeping surveillance powers in the western world has passed into law last year with barely a whimper, and without any opposition from the saintly Yvette Cooper.
Not once when a government minister did she demand the removal of Britain's draconian anti strike laws. Indeed she and the government she served all but endorsed them. Thus the low wages, zero hours contract and poor working conditions of today can be directly laid at the feet of Cooper and her New Labour ilk along with the current Tory government and the Tory led coalition.
Indeed when her boss Tony Blair published his dodger dossier Cooper supported his lies and had not a word to say about fake news, let alone the downright lies which sent young British men and women to war, to kill and be killed.
Yet now she also wants the state to police the WWW, making it even more difficult for trade unions whistleblowers and the rest of us to get our opinions out there via social media.
This issue is not about left or right but freedom of expression and our human rights, as Voltaire said "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
Mick Hall blogs @ Organized Rage.Follow Mick Hall on Twitter @organizedrage
Lords of Chaos
Christopher Owen once again delves into the world of music to review:
Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Underground by Didrik Soderlind and Michael Moynihan
The world of black metal seems an unlikely subject for a major bestseller, but clearly the appetite of the public for chaos and metal knows no boundaries.
First published in 1998, Lords of Chaos was one of the first books to look at the black metal scene that had spawned in Norway a few years previously. Discussing the music, philosophy, actions and controversies (murder, church burnings) that lie at the heart of the genre, it gave the music and the scene a much wider platform than it had been accustomed to, and has now being turned into a Hollywood movie.
So it's an apt time to revisit this book. But some local context is needed.
Heavy metal (and all it's various offshoots) has long been a subject of derision in Ireland. The general perception is that it is a form of music that socially awkward teenagers get into in order to shock their parents, and that anyone over the age of 21 still into it must have mental deficiencies. This is a very typical Irish attitude. I think it's a societal thing really. There's a social conservatism in this country which makes people reluctant to stand out from the crowd. And in the case of metal fans, most give into the pressure all around them to cut their hair, grow up and fit in. Irish people by our very nature are begrudgers and pisstakers, and individuality or anything different from the norm is frowned upon here a whole heap more than anywhere else.
Of course, this stifling conservatism doesn't just apply to music. Do you think Joyce would have been able to publish 'Ulysses' if he'd still lived in Ireland? What about the various tales of journalists "taking a stand" in order to not be perceived as "fellow travellers?" Even the Belfast Project? The subsequent reaction to it and the ones involved in it is a prime example: what are you doing that for? Why waste your time?
And yet, in spite of this, think of the rock/metal bands who have emerged from this country and made an impact: Taste, Thin Lizzy, Sweet Savage, Mama's Boys, Therapy?, Gama Bomb, Primordial. Meanwhile, we have a bourgeoning underground scene with the likes of Coscradh, Owlcrusher, Stereo Nasty and Nomadic Rituals.
In many ways, the basic story is a typical one: guy feels an outcast in his settings, indulges his hobbies to such a great deal that he becomes a figurehead before it all falls apart. However, it's also a story that stretches back centuries, with resentment towards Christianity in Norway stretching right back to their Viking ancestors, manifesting itself in the mid/late eighties.
Oystein Aarseth (later to rechristen himself as Euronymous) formed a band called Mayhem who became one of the first Norwegian black metal bands. After the underground success of the 'Deathcrush' mini LP, and suicide of vocalist Per Yngve Ohlin (known as Dead), his cult following (known as the Circle) flock around his shop in Oslo.
The appearance of Varg Vikernes (Burzum) moves things up a notch. Churches are burnt, people are murdered. And, finally, Euronymous is murdered himself by Vikernes. Several reasons are trotted out by various people. None of which are probably true and probably lie within the petty rivalries considered important by young men.
What's immediate from reading the book is just how deeply felt Vikernes and Aarseth's loathing for Norwegian society was (and remains in the case of Vikernes) and how it twisted their psyche (Euronymous photographing Dead's corpse). It has been argued by many that this was a reaction to Norway's liberal society which also forced people to conform to social niceties. So while the parents were probably against the Vietnam War, the only route for the likes of Euronymous and Vikernes was to be "evil." And, with the progression of extreme music throughout the mid/late 80's (from hardcore punk to grindcore and death metal), black metal was the next logical step.
The discussions with the likes of Vikernes, as well as bands like Emperor, Mayhem and Darkthrone tend to focus on the events before and after Euronymous' death, and their individual beliefs. And while this can be interesting at times (certainly, Ihsahn from Emperor is a fascinating interviewee, especially when talking about his own beliefs leaning towards Satanism), it's also a downfall. The book really lacks a proper discussion of the music.
Sure, bands like Venom, Bathory and Hellhammer did set the bar, but it's important to stress just how important and genuinely "out there" this music was when it first emerged. While grindcore and death metal saw their productions become more glossy and streamlined (and found increased press and MTV coverage because of it), black metal retained a certain primitivism, a truly outsider's worldview and a genuinely creepy atmosphere. It would have been nice for this to have been framed properly.
The other problem I have is that some of this book is more than a little silly. This ranges from the passage about Euronymous' video collection (read about it and try not to roll your eyes), to genuinely serious discussions about UFO's (surely a by-product of the era the book emerged in). Coupled with the esoteric beliefs and extra curricular activities of some of it's main movers, it's not hard to see why so many would consider the average metal fan to be "challenged."
So, to conclude, it's a landmark book, but also a patchy one.
Christopher Owens reviews for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland.Follow Christopher Owens on Twitter @MrOwens212
Didrik Soderlind, Michael Moynihan, Lords Of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground Feral House. ISBN-13: 978-0922915941
Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Underground by Didrik Soderlind and Michael Moynihan
The world of black metal seems an unlikely subject for a major bestseller, but clearly the appetite of the public for chaos and metal knows no boundaries.
First published in 1998, Lords of Chaos was one of the first books to look at the black metal scene that had spawned in Norway a few years previously. Discussing the music, philosophy, actions and controversies (murder, church burnings) that lie at the heart of the genre, it gave the music and the scene a much wider platform than it had been accustomed to, and has now being turned into a Hollywood movie.
So it's an apt time to revisit this book. But some local context is needed.
Heavy metal (and all it's various offshoots) has long been a subject of derision in Ireland. The general perception is that it is a form of music that socially awkward teenagers get into in order to shock their parents, and that anyone over the age of 21 still into it must have mental deficiencies. This is a very typical Irish attitude. I think it's a societal thing really. There's a social conservatism in this country which makes people reluctant to stand out from the crowd. And in the case of metal fans, most give into the pressure all around them to cut their hair, grow up and fit in. Irish people by our very nature are begrudgers and pisstakers, and individuality or anything different from the norm is frowned upon here a whole heap more than anywhere else.
Of course, this stifling conservatism doesn't just apply to music. Do you think Joyce would have been able to publish 'Ulysses' if he'd still lived in Ireland? What about the various tales of journalists "taking a stand" in order to not be perceived as "fellow travellers?" Even the Belfast Project? The subsequent reaction to it and the ones involved in it is a prime example: what are you doing that for? Why waste your time?
And yet, in spite of this, think of the rock/metal bands who have emerged from this country and made an impact: Taste, Thin Lizzy, Sweet Savage, Mama's Boys, Therapy?, Gama Bomb, Primordial. Meanwhile, we have a bourgeoning underground scene with the likes of Coscradh, Owlcrusher, Stereo Nasty and Nomadic Rituals.
In many ways, the basic story is a typical one: guy feels an outcast in his settings, indulges his hobbies to such a great deal that he becomes a figurehead before it all falls apart. However, it's also a story that stretches back centuries, with resentment towards Christianity in Norway stretching right back to their Viking ancestors, manifesting itself in the mid/late eighties.
Oystein Aarseth (later to rechristen himself as Euronymous) formed a band called Mayhem who became one of the first Norwegian black metal bands. After the underground success of the 'Deathcrush' mini LP, and suicide of vocalist Per Yngve Ohlin (known as Dead), his cult following (known as the Circle) flock around his shop in Oslo.
The appearance of Varg Vikernes (Burzum) moves things up a notch. Churches are burnt, people are murdered. And, finally, Euronymous is murdered himself by Vikernes. Several reasons are trotted out by various people. None of which are probably true and probably lie within the petty rivalries considered important by young men.
What's immediate from reading the book is just how deeply felt Vikernes and Aarseth's loathing for Norwegian society was (and remains in the case of Vikernes) and how it twisted their psyche (Euronymous photographing Dead's corpse). It has been argued by many that this was a reaction to Norway's liberal society which also forced people to conform to social niceties. So while the parents were probably against the Vietnam War, the only route for the likes of Euronymous and Vikernes was to be "evil." And, with the progression of extreme music throughout the mid/late 80's (from hardcore punk to grindcore and death metal), black metal was the next logical step.
The discussions with the likes of Vikernes, as well as bands like Emperor, Mayhem and Darkthrone tend to focus on the events before and after Euronymous' death, and their individual beliefs. And while this can be interesting at times (certainly, Ihsahn from Emperor is a fascinating interviewee, especially when talking about his own beliefs leaning towards Satanism), it's also a downfall. The book really lacks a proper discussion of the music.
Sure, bands like Venom, Bathory and Hellhammer did set the bar, but it's important to stress just how important and genuinely "out there" this music was when it first emerged. While grindcore and death metal saw their productions become more glossy and streamlined (and found increased press and MTV coverage because of it), black metal retained a certain primitivism, a truly outsider's worldview and a genuinely creepy atmosphere. It would have been nice for this to have been framed properly.
The other problem I have is that some of this book is more than a little silly. This ranges from the passage about Euronymous' video collection (read about it and try not to roll your eyes), to genuinely serious discussions about UFO's (surely a by-product of the era the book emerged in). Coupled with the esoteric beliefs and extra curricular activities of some of it's main movers, it's not hard to see why so many would consider the average metal fan to be "challenged."
So, to conclude, it's a landmark book, but also a patchy one.
Christopher Owens reviews for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland.Follow Christopher Owens on Twitter @MrOwens212
Didrik Soderlind, Michael Moynihan, Lords Of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground Feral House. ISBN-13: 978-0922915941
February 15, 2018
The Trials And Tribulations Of Moving House ➽ Part 2
Sean Mallory continues with the horrors of house moving.
Buying – the Purchaser
Location, location, location was everything plus a sunny garden, plus the required space...we thought that we weren’t looking too much!
Several views and ruling out properties due to budget constraints (way out of our financial reach), we happened upon the most ‘fantastic’ house...fantastic being my word. It ticked all the correct boxes with the exception of the garden.....my better half, being a sun worshipper and keen gardener, felt that it was the only aspect that was a serious let down....and it is only now with hindsight we see that it was. Anyway, after much discussion we put in a bid against a cash buyer and anxiously waited on a response...hopefully positive.
While waiting on word of our offer and being made aware by the vendor that they were out to maximise their sale as they were hoping to purchase a new build and that they would not be rushing in to making any quick decisions, we sat back and waited.
Somewhat prematurely and innocently, we discussed all the things positive about the house and how we would make it our own!
In between all this the estate agent acting on the Vendor's behalf and who turned out to be a deceitful loathsome creature which unsurprisingly tends to match public opinion of people in such professions began to mess us around with this. Rudeness and haughtiness were qualities she wore openly.
After a week of no news we decided to ring the estate agent, and enquire as to what stage our offer was at. I think I should point out at this stage that throughout the process, be you a Vendor or Purchaser, you will do all the chasing for information updates....the managers will not ring you!
The loathsome creature in response offhandedly dismissed our offer outright even though we were the highest bidder and said that although the Vendor had not made any decision as yet, they would be recommending to them to accept the cash offer as it was the more lucrative offer to work with since they weren’t caught in a chain.
Although the cash offer was much easier to process than our sale agreed position we believed that our position was just as lucrative as our purchaser was making signs that they wanted to move in as soon as possible. Time was on our side as we wanted to complete as soon as possible also. Still, the cash buyer was outside the chain and that was hard to compete against.
A day later, we received our rejection call which finished with the perk me up consolation second place words, that although the Vendor has gone with the cash buyer, it could still fall through so hang tight for a few weeks! Hang tight my fuck!
Angry and despondent we consoled ourselves with a few beers and in our inebriated dejection sought solace in picking out the negative aspects of the house, the Vendor, the cash buyer (who in their right mind would put so much spare cash in to a house!!!!) and the loathsome creature, and declaring that even if the cash offer did fall through unexpectedly we wouldn’t be interested. ...stubbornness rather than rational thinking.
Also having the annoying old axiom of ‘if it's meant for you, it will not go by you’ repeated to you by various family members and friends did little to soften the blow but more than anything only lead to increasing irritation.
A day or so later we returned to the market to look. There were houses available but they required just as much as the purchasing price to make right which is exactly what we didn’t have, spare cash. Nothing requiring little work other than decorating was available within our desired area and at our budget level and so houses that were out of our league financially were now being looked at. We had to redo our sums and look at tightening the belt around our lifestyle!
After a few visits nothing seemed to jump out at us and we were beginning to worry that we would have to move to an area less convenient for ourselves and our children. The on-line potential house list was quickly diminishing. Our choice was being greatly squeezed. And on top of this our purchaser was making noises again about completing as soon as possible as his purchaser was pushing him.
But once again the market roared at us and a house that I had admired but was initially out of our budget reach, looked attractive enough now.
An arranged visit and my better half was bowled over with it, especially the garden and that it was a suntrap in the evenings, never mind throughout the day! So, after another hastily arranged visit we placed an offer and it was accepted which cheered us up no end. A house viewed and agreed within three to five days!
Unexpectedly and almost forgotten, two weeks to the very day the loathsome creature rang us to ask were we still interested in the house as the cash buyer had fallen through. To say we were gloating at someone's miss-fortune is an understatement and those other old sayings of revenge and something about a dish being served cold and rubbing salt in the wounds really came to mean something. Saying ‘no’ gave us great pleasure but replying that we were sale agreed on a house much more expensive and telling the ever so slight fib that we would have been prepared to go even higher if required was even sweeter. The phone call was ended quite abruptly at her end.
Sean Mallory is a Tyrone republican and TPQ columnist
Buying – the Purchaser
Location, location, location was everything plus a sunny garden, plus the required space...we thought that we weren’t looking too much!
Several views and ruling out properties due to budget constraints (way out of our financial reach), we happened upon the most ‘fantastic’ house...fantastic being my word. It ticked all the correct boxes with the exception of the garden.....my better half, being a sun worshipper and keen gardener, felt that it was the only aspect that was a serious let down....and it is only now with hindsight we see that it was. Anyway, after much discussion we put in a bid against a cash buyer and anxiously waited on a response...hopefully positive.
While waiting on word of our offer and being made aware by the vendor that they were out to maximise their sale as they were hoping to purchase a new build and that they would not be rushing in to making any quick decisions, we sat back and waited.
Somewhat prematurely and innocently, we discussed all the things positive about the house and how we would make it our own!
In between all this the estate agent acting on the Vendor's behalf and who turned out to be a deceitful loathsome creature which unsurprisingly tends to match public opinion of people in such professions began to mess us around with this. Rudeness and haughtiness were qualities she wore openly.
After a week of no news we decided to ring the estate agent, and enquire as to what stage our offer was at. I think I should point out at this stage that throughout the process, be you a Vendor or Purchaser, you will do all the chasing for information updates....the managers will not ring you!
The loathsome creature in response offhandedly dismissed our offer outright even though we were the highest bidder and said that although the Vendor had not made any decision as yet, they would be recommending to them to accept the cash offer as it was the more lucrative offer to work with since they weren’t caught in a chain.
Although the cash offer was much easier to process than our sale agreed position we believed that our position was just as lucrative as our purchaser was making signs that they wanted to move in as soon as possible. Time was on our side as we wanted to complete as soon as possible also. Still, the cash buyer was outside the chain and that was hard to compete against.
A day later, we received our rejection call which finished with the perk me up consolation second place words, that although the Vendor has gone with the cash buyer, it could still fall through so hang tight for a few weeks! Hang tight my fuck!
Angry and despondent we consoled ourselves with a few beers and in our inebriated dejection sought solace in picking out the negative aspects of the house, the Vendor, the cash buyer (who in their right mind would put so much spare cash in to a house!!!!) and the loathsome creature, and declaring that even if the cash offer did fall through unexpectedly we wouldn’t be interested. ...stubbornness rather than rational thinking.
Also having the annoying old axiom of ‘if it's meant for you, it will not go by you’ repeated to you by various family members and friends did little to soften the blow but more than anything only lead to increasing irritation.
A day or so later we returned to the market to look. There were houses available but they required just as much as the purchasing price to make right which is exactly what we didn’t have, spare cash. Nothing requiring little work other than decorating was available within our desired area and at our budget level and so houses that were out of our league financially were now being looked at. We had to redo our sums and look at tightening the belt around our lifestyle!
After a few visits nothing seemed to jump out at us and we were beginning to worry that we would have to move to an area less convenient for ourselves and our children. The on-line potential house list was quickly diminishing. Our choice was being greatly squeezed. And on top of this our purchaser was making noises again about completing as soon as possible as his purchaser was pushing him.
But once again the market roared at us and a house that I had admired but was initially out of our budget reach, looked attractive enough now.
An arranged visit and my better half was bowled over with it, especially the garden and that it was a suntrap in the evenings, never mind throughout the day! So, after another hastily arranged visit we placed an offer and it was accepted which cheered us up no end. A house viewed and agreed within three to five days!
Unexpectedly and almost forgotten, two weeks to the very day the loathsome creature rang us to ask were we still interested in the house as the cash buyer had fallen through. To say we were gloating at someone's miss-fortune is an understatement and those other old sayings of revenge and something about a dish being served cold and rubbing salt in the wounds really came to mean something. Saying ‘no’ gave us great pleasure but replying that we were sale agreed on a house much more expensive and telling the ever so slight fib that we would have been prepared to go even higher if required was even sweeter. The phone call was ended quite abruptly at her end.
Sean Mallory is a Tyrone republican and TPQ columnist
The Destructive Power Of Nationalism
From Tikkun Magazine a book review followed by a response.
The Destructive Power of Nationalism: Eric Weitz reviews Omer Bartov’s Anatomy of a Genocide and Bartov Responds
“Human life is cheap” in Casablanca, says Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt) to Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) in the renowned film. In Buczacz, human life was cheap, and then some – expendable, worthless, targeted for obliteration. As Omer Bartov shows in his extraordinary new book, Buczacz, an isolated, backwater town in what is today western Ukraine, was crisscrossed by all the pathologies of twentieth-century political movements.
The consequences were devastating for the inhabitants, Jews especially, but Ukrainians and Poles as well. Not that they were the passive victims of abstract political forces or of the actions of the major powers, Habsburg Austria, Imperial and Nazi Germany, and Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, that variously dominated the town and region. Perhaps the prime achievement of this book is that Bartov brings to life the people of Buczacz and shows their involvement in mass murder on a devastating scale, including some Jews who collaborated with the Nazis. No one could be a mere bystander amid the various occupations and destructions of two world wars and hyperactive Ukrainian nationalism, Polish nationalism, Soviet communism, and Zionism. Precious few were the heroes and heroines in Buczacz.
Bartov has pored over diaries, letters, interviews, trial transcripts, Jewish memorial books, and more on four continents (even Australia shows up) in an array of languages — German, Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, English. The sources mirror the town. Buczacz, until 1945, was a classic East European multiconfessional, multilingual, and multiethnic place. Bartov, true to his purpose, tells us, in effect, that if we want to understand how the Holocaust occurred, we need to deploy all these languages and sources over decades and centuries.
The town’s beginnings, and subsequent life, were inauspicious, yet it is here that twentieth-century history, with all its thunderous force, unfolded. Buczacz was founded in the thirteenth century by a Polish noble family. Over the centuries, Polish Catholics, Armenians, Jews, Ukrainian Orthodox, Habsburg Germans, and Ukrainian Catholics populated the town and its surrounding area. Ottoman, Polish-Lithuanian, and Habsburg armies fought over it, wreaking havoc on all the inhabitants. Occasional peasant uprisings became grisly affairs, especially for Jews. Yet long periods of calm existed as well. The various communities lived side-by-side, interacted in markets and shops, Poles and Ukrainians sometimes intermarrying. The Russian, Prussian, and Austrian partition of Poland in the late eighteenth century made Buczacz part of the Habsburg Empire. The legal emancipation of Jews soon followed. Buczacz lived the Galician stereotype: Germans officiated, Polish lords dominated the countryside, Ukrainian peasants worked on Polish estates, and Jewish merchants traded horses and grain and distilled the cheap alcohol that they sold in their taverns.
World War I shattered the veil of calm, permanently. Even before the outbreak of war, the three major communities, Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews, had largely retreated into themselves as young people sought a political solution to poverty and oppression in exclusive nationalism, in a Greater Poland, a Greater Ukraine, or a Jewish something somewhere. Socialism was also finding support among younger Jews; Polish socialism was largely restricted to the major cities of Congress (Russian) Poland, while Ukrainians had yet to hear (and would never hear, at least not in Buczacz) the siren song of Marxism. But no one could have anticipated the no-hold-barred conflicts of all sorts, the mix of great power, religious, class, national, and racial violence and the rivers of blood that World War I unleashed and would not be stanched until 1948, when the Soviets finally defeated Ukrainian nationalist fighters.
Russian troops captured and occupied Buczacz twice during World War I. Regular warfare was bad enough for the inhabitants, Russian rule even worse. Cossacks terrorized Jews at random, looted and pillaged everywhere. When the Habsburgs won Buczacz back for the second and final time in July 1917, they found a devastated, nearly lifeless town. Many Buczaczers had been killed, either by the violence of war or by targeted attacks on civilians, thousand more had fled in all sorts of directions, the start of vast population movements that also would not cease until 1948. Habsburg rule would not last long. The Empire soon collapsed amid the wreckage of World War I, while the Bolshevik Revolution added a wholly new dimension to the political conflicts that engulfed the region.
The armistice of November 11, 1918 hardly put an end to the fighting. Ukrainian nationalists were the first to claim Buczacz as their own; they held it for less than a year. The Great Powers at Paris placed the town in the newly constituted Poland, and Polish nationalists secured control in the summer of 1919. Each side made exclusive claims; no one proposed a binational or federal state. Each sought to drive out the other, and both blamed the Jews for everything. To Ukrainians, Jews were closet-Polish nationalists; to Poles they had been too close to the Germans. And that was the political tip of the iceberg of antisemitic accusations that Poles and Ukrainians wrote and spoke, in endless, mind-numbing repetition, all the accusations and charges that we know only too well. And they killed. They killed Jews and they killed one another, oftentimes in drawn out, sadistic fashion. In word and deed, each side said: this is my land, be gone or be dead.
It is in regard to this period, twenty years before the onset of the Holocaust, that Bartov’s deep reading of the sources in many languages offers readers a visceral account of life in Buczacz in all its chilling detail. For the most part, he lets his informants speak without much commentary. We get widely contrasting accounts and interpretations. A Jewish soldier in the Russian army, a Polish schoolmaster, British officers (they really are everywhere) — each tells us something different about the city and its inhabitants; all of them reveal a society fractured into its component parts.
The fractures only deepened in the interwar years, even though direct violence waned as the Polish state established its rule. Many young Jews could only see a way out of the bleak conditions through emigration to Palestine (including Bartov’s mother; before World War I the famed novelist S. Y. Agnon, one of Buczacz’s few luminaries, had also left for Palestine). A few others found hope in communism. Meanwhile, Ukrainians chafed under Polish rule, while the Polish authorities were not reticent to use beatings and extra-judicial detention against Ukrainian activists.
A sense of impending doom infuses the arc of Bartov’s narrative. We know the villain, as we do in a Hitchcock film, yet we read on just as we continue to watch the screen. First come the Soviets, not quite the villains but bad enough. Buczacz lay in the domain granted them by the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, signed in August 1939. The world turned upside down. Many Jews greeted their arrival, a form of protection, they hoped, against the Polish and Ukrainian nationalists who oppressed them and the Nazi war machine, churning ever closer to Buczacz. Ukrainians were happy to see Poland dismembered and Polish authority shattered, thinking that their political moment had now arrived amid the chaos engendered by Soviet occupation. Poles grieved at their loss. Revolution from the East often came in the form of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, who deported and killed those of all three groups whom they suspected of anti-Soviet activity. As was its wont, the NKVD threw its net broadly, snaring many innocents in the process. Yet many Jews would survive the ensuing horror because they found protection under Soviet rule. A few Jews actively collaborated with the Soviets, something for which Ukrainian and Polish nationalists have never forgiven Jews as a whole.
The “Anatomy of a Genocide” of the title comes, strictly speaking, in the second half of the book. But the pathway has been lain for us by the pre-1940 history of competing nationalisms, ethnic prejudices of the worst sort, and massive violence. The Holocaust was a German creation, Bartov suggests, but it fed on local patterns that long predated the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe. Nor were the “bloodlands” invented by Hitler and Stalin; Ukrainian and Polish nationalists, Ukrainian peasant rebels, Polish authorities, and the imperial Russian army in World War I had already seen to that. Amid it all were the Jews, battered by all sides.
The account Bartov offers of the Holocaust in Buczacz is harrowing, excruciating at times, even for one who has read legions of histories and eye-witness accounts. Here again, he lets his interlocutors speak. The strength of the narrative lies in the agglomeration of sources in multiple languages — Jewish survivors, Polish and Ukrainian rescuers, Soviet investigative agencies, postwar German prosecutorial evidence, perpetrator testimonies. It is all there, the utter devastation of a community in all its cruelty, most Jews murdered in direct, face-to-face killings, often by Ukrainian auxiliaries, some in the Belzec extermination camp.
Yet even the end of this war did not bring an end to the killings. Once again, Poles and Ukrainians vied for power, both blaming the Jews for all that had gone wrong. It took the Soviets a good three years before they finally crushed the Ukrainian nationalist army, and remnants kept fighting until the early 1950s. Buczacz was now a part of the Soviet Republic of Ukraine; little of its Jewish and Polish past remained. Jews were dead or gone. In yet another of the twentieth century’s ethnic cleansings, Polish and Ukrainian populations were “exchanged.” The millennium-long history of Buczacz as a multiconfessional, multiethnic, and multilingual community was over.
The great, powerful force of Bartov’s book lies, again, in its rich vein of first-person materials. Only in the second half of the book does Bartov venture to comment and interpret. When he does so, his is an eloquent and commanding voice. One learns, for example, about all the ambiguities and ambivalencies of individual actions during the Holocaust: rescuers who saved Jews for a price, or saved them for a while only to turn them over for execution in the very last days of the war; Jews who provided Nazi officials with names of fellow Jews to be deported; killers who survived the war quite nicely with utterly clear consciences; people who blamed Jews for their own destruction. “For those who had lived through a daily routine of genocide,” writes Bartov, “observing from nearby the systematic murder of men, women, and children, partying with their killers, benefiting from their services, occasionally helping them out or even befriending them, at other times denouncing, robbing, or killing them, their capacity to emerge into the postwar era with a clean conscience was nothing short of astonishing” (228). Indeed. But can we say more? How does this mechanism work in human psychology? And was it typical, not only for Buczacz and the Holocaust, but for other genocides as well?
In Bartov’s vivid account, the long-standing distinction made in the historiography and literature on the Holocaust among victims, bystanders, and perpetrators, breaks down. To be sure, the majority of Jews were only victims, and many were the absolute perpetrators. Yet for the annihilation of the Jews to succeed, certainly in the dimensions the Holocaust became, the full range of human motivations and actions had to come into play. One is left wondering, once more, if “never again” is merely a hollow slogan, whether all the efforts at diversity education, tolerance, and genocide prevention are hopeless, or whether the problem lay in the very specific conditions of life and politics in Buczacz and the blunt force of Nazi power. It would have been good to read Bartov’s considerations on the matter.
Were alternate pathways ever possible? The historian William W. Hagen wrote a penetrating article in 1996 that demonstrated how the conditions of Jewish life were deteriorating all across Eastern Europe in the interwar years. Poland, Hungary, and other countries adopted antisemitic measures in the 1930s not all that different from Nazi policies in that same decade, prior to the onset of the Holocaust. Exclusive nation-states and nationalizing capitalism left no room for Jews, Hagen argued. Even if we imagine a past without the Third Reich — as difficult as that is — the prospects for East European Jews in the first half of the twentieth century appear exceedingly bleak. Does that mean that in the end, the Zionists were correct, that in the modern world, dominated by the political form of the nation-state, Jews could only survive and prosper in a Jewish state? Here too it would have been good to read Bartov’s views.
Human life was cheap in Buczacz, but human corpses were not. As Bartov shows in his eloquent, powerful, and disturbing book, they were the currency by which Ukrainian nationalists, Polish nationalists, and Nazis measured their victories, however fleeting.
Eric D. Weitz
Distinguished Professor of History
The City College of New York
RESPONSE from Omer Bartov
Response to Eric Weitz
Omer Bartov
I would like to thank Eric Weitz for his thoughtful review of my book. He has provided the gist of a complex narrative, and highlighted the main argument of a decades-long endeavor with admirable clarity and brevity. I am also glad to be given the opportunity to address some of the important questions he raises toward the end of his essay.
Weitz asks, “How does this mechanism” of routine, intimate mass murder of people, followed by decades of post-genocidal existence with a completely clean conscience, “work in human psychology?” He wonders, “was it typical, not only for Buczacz and the Holocaust, but for other genocides as well?” This is a big question and I obviously do not have a simple answer. To my mind, the most important contribution of the book in this regard is to identify and document this phenomenon rather than to speculate about it. We would like to think that those who perpetrate genocide are uniquely evil or distorted human beings, that the bystanders are appalled by what they witness, and that the victims are pure and innocent. But when we observe the workings of genocide on the local level, it does not look like that at all, as I have documented for Buczacz. That things were quite similar in hundreds of other multiethnic towns throughout Eastern Europe is, I think, indisputable.
Similarly, as we have known for decades, certainly since the 1974 publication of Into That Darkness, Gitta Sereny’s study of extermination camp commandant Franz Stangl, the Germans and Austrians who organized genocide had no pangs of conscience.
What my book shows is that others, much smaller fry among the perpetrators and the administrators on the local level, including their wives and mistresses, parents and friends and colleagues, appear to have emerged from the bloodbath they made possible unscathed. Conversely, the survivors were marked for the rest of their lives with a profound sense of guilt and shame. In the present context I cannot analyze the psychological mechanism that makes for this grotesque consequence of genocide, but to the extent that I know about many other genocides, ranging from the 1904 mass killing of the Herero by the German military in Southwest Africa, through the Armenian genocide by the Ottoman regime in 1915, all the way to the postwar genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia, it appears that with few exceptions what occurred in Buczacz was hardly unique. Indeed, I began conceiving of this book in the 1990s, not least under the impact of the events in the former Yugoslavia and the horrors of the mass murder of the Tutsis.
Weitz goes on to ask if, ultimately, “’never again’ is merely a hollow slogan, whether all the efforts at diversity education, tolerance, and genocide prevention are hopeless, or whether the problem lay in the very specific conditions of life and politics in Buczacz and the blunt force of Nazi power.” As he well knows in view of his own important contributions to the study of this issue, the “never again” vows of 1945 failed to prevent numerous genocides since.
To be sure, every genocide has its own particular causes, circumstances, and consequences. But genocides also have some elements in common, not least of which is the identification of certain groups as different, undesirable, less then human, and pernicious. In the case of Buczacz, the strife between Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews, which produced the preconditions for fraternal violence, was superimposed by the Soviet and then Nazi urge to cleanse, reorder, and remove those groups they identified as their enemies, and to do so with the help of local elements, which only exacerbated the already rampant animosity between these groups.
But we can identify similar mechanisms in other genocides, such as the use of the Kurdish population against Armenians by the Ottoman authorities, the mix of ethnic and class factors in the Cambodian genocide, and the relationship between the recent colonial past and increasingly rigid ethnic categorizations in Rwanda.
Yet none of this means that genocide is a phenomenon we must learn to live with and cannot prevent. The most important element to my mind in preventing genocide is to struggle always against the political and mental removal of certain groups in our midst and among our neighbors from the sphere of shared humanity and responsibility. Many regimes and political leaders, not least the current resident in the White House and his minions, are engaged in such practices, whether for short-term political gain or for reasons of prejudice and ideology. It is such tendencies in one’s own society that one must fight against tooth and nail, before it is too late, especially in countries who population is and has always been diverse.
Finally, Weitz asks, “Were alternate pathways ever possible?” As he rightly notes, “Even if we imagine a past without the Third Reich… the prospects for East European Jews in the first half of the twentieth century appear exceedingly bleak. Does that mean,” he writes, “that in the end, the Zionists were correct, that in the modern world, dominated by the political form of the nation-state, Jews could only survive and prosper in a Jewish state?”
To this I would say that in the wake of the Holocaust this certainly was the point of view of the Zionists, not least of the Yishuv leadership in Palestine. It was a view that played an important role in the decision to recognize a Jewish State by a majority of the states represented in the newly established United Nations. But in the 1930s there were of course many other options, and most Jews would have apparently chosen them if they only could, as they had done in the last few decades before World War I, and when well over two million of them emigrated to the United States, coming from what US legislators in the early 1920s would have described, had they been as crass as the current incumbent of the White House, as “shithole countries.”
The Immigration Act of 1924 was geared to preserve so-called American homogeneity and as a result increasingly sealed the gates of emigration for Jews trying to flee Eastern Europe in the 1930s. Hitler would have been able to do much less damage to European Jewry had Congress not passed that act. This is perhaps one more important lesson in genocide prevention.
Omer Bartov is the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History and Professor of History and Professor of German Studies at Brown University.
Omer Bartov, 2018, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz. Simon & Schuster. ISBN-13: 978-1451684537
Tikkun
is a magazine dedicated to healing and transforming the world. Its founding editor is Rabbi Michael Lerner.
The Destructive Power of Nationalism: Eric Weitz reviews Omer Bartov’s Anatomy of a Genocide and Bartov Responds
“Human life is cheap” in Casablanca, says Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt) to Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) in the renowned film. In Buczacz, human life was cheap, and then some – expendable, worthless, targeted for obliteration. As Omer Bartov shows in his extraordinary new book, Buczacz, an isolated, backwater town in what is today western Ukraine, was crisscrossed by all the pathologies of twentieth-century political movements.
The consequences were devastating for the inhabitants, Jews especially, but Ukrainians and Poles as well. Not that they were the passive victims of abstract political forces or of the actions of the major powers, Habsburg Austria, Imperial and Nazi Germany, and Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, that variously dominated the town and region. Perhaps the prime achievement of this book is that Bartov brings to life the people of Buczacz and shows their involvement in mass murder on a devastating scale, including some Jews who collaborated with the Nazis. No one could be a mere bystander amid the various occupations and destructions of two world wars and hyperactive Ukrainian nationalism, Polish nationalism, Soviet communism, and Zionism. Precious few were the heroes and heroines in Buczacz.
Bartov has pored over diaries, letters, interviews, trial transcripts, Jewish memorial books, and more on four continents (even Australia shows up) in an array of languages — German, Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, English. The sources mirror the town. Buczacz, until 1945, was a classic East European multiconfessional, multilingual, and multiethnic place. Bartov, true to his purpose, tells us, in effect, that if we want to understand how the Holocaust occurred, we need to deploy all these languages and sources over decades and centuries.
The town’s beginnings, and subsequent life, were inauspicious, yet it is here that twentieth-century history, with all its thunderous force, unfolded. Buczacz was founded in the thirteenth century by a Polish noble family. Over the centuries, Polish Catholics, Armenians, Jews, Ukrainian Orthodox, Habsburg Germans, and Ukrainian Catholics populated the town and its surrounding area. Ottoman, Polish-Lithuanian, and Habsburg armies fought over it, wreaking havoc on all the inhabitants. Occasional peasant uprisings became grisly affairs, especially for Jews. Yet long periods of calm existed as well. The various communities lived side-by-side, interacted in markets and shops, Poles and Ukrainians sometimes intermarrying. The Russian, Prussian, and Austrian partition of Poland in the late eighteenth century made Buczacz part of the Habsburg Empire. The legal emancipation of Jews soon followed. Buczacz lived the Galician stereotype: Germans officiated, Polish lords dominated the countryside, Ukrainian peasants worked on Polish estates, and Jewish merchants traded horses and grain and distilled the cheap alcohol that they sold in their taverns.
World War I shattered the veil of calm, permanently. Even before the outbreak of war, the three major communities, Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews, had largely retreated into themselves as young people sought a political solution to poverty and oppression in exclusive nationalism, in a Greater Poland, a Greater Ukraine, or a Jewish something somewhere. Socialism was also finding support among younger Jews; Polish socialism was largely restricted to the major cities of Congress (Russian) Poland, while Ukrainians had yet to hear (and would never hear, at least not in Buczacz) the siren song of Marxism. But no one could have anticipated the no-hold-barred conflicts of all sorts, the mix of great power, religious, class, national, and racial violence and the rivers of blood that World War I unleashed and would not be stanched until 1948, when the Soviets finally defeated Ukrainian nationalist fighters.
Russian troops captured and occupied Buczacz twice during World War I. Regular warfare was bad enough for the inhabitants, Russian rule even worse. Cossacks terrorized Jews at random, looted and pillaged everywhere. When the Habsburgs won Buczacz back for the second and final time in July 1917, they found a devastated, nearly lifeless town. Many Buczaczers had been killed, either by the violence of war or by targeted attacks on civilians, thousand more had fled in all sorts of directions, the start of vast population movements that also would not cease until 1948. Habsburg rule would not last long. The Empire soon collapsed amid the wreckage of World War I, while the Bolshevik Revolution added a wholly new dimension to the political conflicts that engulfed the region.
The armistice of November 11, 1918 hardly put an end to the fighting. Ukrainian nationalists were the first to claim Buczacz as their own; they held it for less than a year. The Great Powers at Paris placed the town in the newly constituted Poland, and Polish nationalists secured control in the summer of 1919. Each side made exclusive claims; no one proposed a binational or federal state. Each sought to drive out the other, and both blamed the Jews for everything. To Ukrainians, Jews were closet-Polish nationalists; to Poles they had been too close to the Germans. And that was the political tip of the iceberg of antisemitic accusations that Poles and Ukrainians wrote and spoke, in endless, mind-numbing repetition, all the accusations and charges that we know only too well. And they killed. They killed Jews and they killed one another, oftentimes in drawn out, sadistic fashion. In word and deed, each side said: this is my land, be gone or be dead.
It is in regard to this period, twenty years before the onset of the Holocaust, that Bartov’s deep reading of the sources in many languages offers readers a visceral account of life in Buczacz in all its chilling detail. For the most part, he lets his informants speak without much commentary. We get widely contrasting accounts and interpretations. A Jewish soldier in the Russian army, a Polish schoolmaster, British officers (they really are everywhere) — each tells us something different about the city and its inhabitants; all of them reveal a society fractured into its component parts.
The fractures only deepened in the interwar years, even though direct violence waned as the Polish state established its rule. Many young Jews could only see a way out of the bleak conditions through emigration to Palestine (including Bartov’s mother; before World War I the famed novelist S. Y. Agnon, one of Buczacz’s few luminaries, had also left for Palestine). A few others found hope in communism. Meanwhile, Ukrainians chafed under Polish rule, while the Polish authorities were not reticent to use beatings and extra-judicial detention against Ukrainian activists.
A sense of impending doom infuses the arc of Bartov’s narrative. We know the villain, as we do in a Hitchcock film, yet we read on just as we continue to watch the screen. First come the Soviets, not quite the villains but bad enough. Buczacz lay in the domain granted them by the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, signed in August 1939. The world turned upside down. Many Jews greeted their arrival, a form of protection, they hoped, against the Polish and Ukrainian nationalists who oppressed them and the Nazi war machine, churning ever closer to Buczacz. Ukrainians were happy to see Poland dismembered and Polish authority shattered, thinking that their political moment had now arrived amid the chaos engendered by Soviet occupation. Poles grieved at their loss. Revolution from the East often came in the form of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, who deported and killed those of all three groups whom they suspected of anti-Soviet activity. As was its wont, the NKVD threw its net broadly, snaring many innocents in the process. Yet many Jews would survive the ensuing horror because they found protection under Soviet rule. A few Jews actively collaborated with the Soviets, something for which Ukrainian and Polish nationalists have never forgiven Jews as a whole.
The “Anatomy of a Genocide” of the title comes, strictly speaking, in the second half of the book. But the pathway has been lain for us by the pre-1940 history of competing nationalisms, ethnic prejudices of the worst sort, and massive violence. The Holocaust was a German creation, Bartov suggests, but it fed on local patterns that long predated the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe. Nor were the “bloodlands” invented by Hitler and Stalin; Ukrainian and Polish nationalists, Ukrainian peasant rebels, Polish authorities, and the imperial Russian army in World War I had already seen to that. Amid it all were the Jews, battered by all sides.
The account Bartov offers of the Holocaust in Buczacz is harrowing, excruciating at times, even for one who has read legions of histories and eye-witness accounts. Here again, he lets his interlocutors speak. The strength of the narrative lies in the agglomeration of sources in multiple languages — Jewish survivors, Polish and Ukrainian rescuers, Soviet investigative agencies, postwar German prosecutorial evidence, perpetrator testimonies. It is all there, the utter devastation of a community in all its cruelty, most Jews murdered in direct, face-to-face killings, often by Ukrainian auxiliaries, some in the Belzec extermination camp.
Yet even the end of this war did not bring an end to the killings. Once again, Poles and Ukrainians vied for power, both blaming the Jews for all that had gone wrong. It took the Soviets a good three years before they finally crushed the Ukrainian nationalist army, and remnants kept fighting until the early 1950s. Buczacz was now a part of the Soviet Republic of Ukraine; little of its Jewish and Polish past remained. Jews were dead or gone. In yet another of the twentieth century’s ethnic cleansings, Polish and Ukrainian populations were “exchanged.” The millennium-long history of Buczacz as a multiconfessional, multiethnic, and multilingual community was over.
The great, powerful force of Bartov’s book lies, again, in its rich vein of first-person materials. Only in the second half of the book does Bartov venture to comment and interpret. When he does so, his is an eloquent and commanding voice. One learns, for example, about all the ambiguities and ambivalencies of individual actions during the Holocaust: rescuers who saved Jews for a price, or saved them for a while only to turn them over for execution in the very last days of the war; Jews who provided Nazi officials with names of fellow Jews to be deported; killers who survived the war quite nicely with utterly clear consciences; people who blamed Jews for their own destruction. “For those who had lived through a daily routine of genocide,” writes Bartov, “observing from nearby the systematic murder of men, women, and children, partying with their killers, benefiting from their services, occasionally helping them out or even befriending them, at other times denouncing, robbing, or killing them, their capacity to emerge into the postwar era with a clean conscience was nothing short of astonishing” (228). Indeed. But can we say more? How does this mechanism work in human psychology? And was it typical, not only for Buczacz and the Holocaust, but for other genocides as well?
In Bartov’s vivid account, the long-standing distinction made in the historiography and literature on the Holocaust among victims, bystanders, and perpetrators, breaks down. To be sure, the majority of Jews were only victims, and many were the absolute perpetrators. Yet for the annihilation of the Jews to succeed, certainly in the dimensions the Holocaust became, the full range of human motivations and actions had to come into play. One is left wondering, once more, if “never again” is merely a hollow slogan, whether all the efforts at diversity education, tolerance, and genocide prevention are hopeless, or whether the problem lay in the very specific conditions of life and politics in Buczacz and the blunt force of Nazi power. It would have been good to read Bartov’s considerations on the matter.
Were alternate pathways ever possible? The historian William W. Hagen wrote a penetrating article in 1996 that demonstrated how the conditions of Jewish life were deteriorating all across Eastern Europe in the interwar years. Poland, Hungary, and other countries adopted antisemitic measures in the 1930s not all that different from Nazi policies in that same decade, prior to the onset of the Holocaust. Exclusive nation-states and nationalizing capitalism left no room for Jews, Hagen argued. Even if we imagine a past without the Third Reich — as difficult as that is — the prospects for East European Jews in the first half of the twentieth century appear exceedingly bleak. Does that mean that in the end, the Zionists were correct, that in the modern world, dominated by the political form of the nation-state, Jews could only survive and prosper in a Jewish state? Here too it would have been good to read Bartov’s views.
Human life was cheap in Buczacz, but human corpses were not. As Bartov shows in his eloquent, powerful, and disturbing book, they were the currency by which Ukrainian nationalists, Polish nationalists, and Nazis measured their victories, however fleeting.
Eric D. Weitz
Distinguished Professor of History
The City College of New York
RESPONSE from Omer Bartov
Response to Eric Weitz
Omer Bartov
I would like to thank Eric Weitz for his thoughtful review of my book. He has provided the gist of a complex narrative, and highlighted the main argument of a decades-long endeavor with admirable clarity and brevity. I am also glad to be given the opportunity to address some of the important questions he raises toward the end of his essay.
Weitz asks, “How does this mechanism” of routine, intimate mass murder of people, followed by decades of post-genocidal existence with a completely clean conscience, “work in human psychology?” He wonders, “was it typical, not only for Buczacz and the Holocaust, but for other genocides as well?” This is a big question and I obviously do not have a simple answer. To my mind, the most important contribution of the book in this regard is to identify and document this phenomenon rather than to speculate about it. We would like to think that those who perpetrate genocide are uniquely evil or distorted human beings, that the bystanders are appalled by what they witness, and that the victims are pure and innocent. But when we observe the workings of genocide on the local level, it does not look like that at all, as I have documented for Buczacz. That things were quite similar in hundreds of other multiethnic towns throughout Eastern Europe is, I think, indisputable.
Similarly, as we have known for decades, certainly since the 1974 publication of Into That Darkness, Gitta Sereny’s study of extermination camp commandant Franz Stangl, the Germans and Austrians who organized genocide had no pangs of conscience.
What my book shows is that others, much smaller fry among the perpetrators and the administrators on the local level, including their wives and mistresses, parents and friends and colleagues, appear to have emerged from the bloodbath they made possible unscathed. Conversely, the survivors were marked for the rest of their lives with a profound sense of guilt and shame. In the present context I cannot analyze the psychological mechanism that makes for this grotesque consequence of genocide, but to the extent that I know about many other genocides, ranging from the 1904 mass killing of the Herero by the German military in Southwest Africa, through the Armenian genocide by the Ottoman regime in 1915, all the way to the postwar genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia, it appears that with few exceptions what occurred in Buczacz was hardly unique. Indeed, I began conceiving of this book in the 1990s, not least under the impact of the events in the former Yugoslavia and the horrors of the mass murder of the Tutsis.
Weitz goes on to ask if, ultimately, “’never again’ is merely a hollow slogan, whether all the efforts at diversity education, tolerance, and genocide prevention are hopeless, or whether the problem lay in the very specific conditions of life and politics in Buczacz and the blunt force of Nazi power.” As he well knows in view of his own important contributions to the study of this issue, the “never again” vows of 1945 failed to prevent numerous genocides since.
To be sure, every genocide has its own particular causes, circumstances, and consequences. But genocides also have some elements in common, not least of which is the identification of certain groups as different, undesirable, less then human, and pernicious. In the case of Buczacz, the strife between Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews, which produced the preconditions for fraternal violence, was superimposed by the Soviet and then Nazi urge to cleanse, reorder, and remove those groups they identified as their enemies, and to do so with the help of local elements, which only exacerbated the already rampant animosity between these groups.
But we can identify similar mechanisms in other genocides, such as the use of the Kurdish population against Armenians by the Ottoman authorities, the mix of ethnic and class factors in the Cambodian genocide, and the relationship between the recent colonial past and increasingly rigid ethnic categorizations in Rwanda.
Yet none of this means that genocide is a phenomenon we must learn to live with and cannot prevent. The most important element to my mind in preventing genocide is to struggle always against the political and mental removal of certain groups in our midst and among our neighbors from the sphere of shared humanity and responsibility. Many regimes and political leaders, not least the current resident in the White House and his minions, are engaged in such practices, whether for short-term political gain or for reasons of prejudice and ideology. It is such tendencies in one’s own society that one must fight against tooth and nail, before it is too late, especially in countries who population is and has always been diverse.
Finally, Weitz asks, “Were alternate pathways ever possible?” As he rightly notes, “Even if we imagine a past without the Third Reich… the prospects for East European Jews in the first half of the twentieth century appear exceedingly bleak. Does that mean,” he writes, “that in the end, the Zionists were correct, that in the modern world, dominated by the political form of the nation-state, Jews could only survive and prosper in a Jewish state?”
To this I would say that in the wake of the Holocaust this certainly was the point of view of the Zionists, not least of the Yishuv leadership in Palestine. It was a view that played an important role in the decision to recognize a Jewish State by a majority of the states represented in the newly established United Nations. But in the 1930s there were of course many other options, and most Jews would have apparently chosen them if they only could, as they had done in the last few decades before World War I, and when well over two million of them emigrated to the United States, coming from what US legislators in the early 1920s would have described, had they been as crass as the current incumbent of the White House, as “shithole countries.”
The Immigration Act of 1924 was geared to preserve so-called American homogeneity and as a result increasingly sealed the gates of emigration for Jews trying to flee Eastern Europe in the 1930s. Hitler would have been able to do much less damage to European Jewry had Congress not passed that act. This is perhaps one more important lesson in genocide prevention.
Omer Bartov is the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History and Professor of History and Professor of German Studies at Brown University.
Omer Bartov, 2018, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz. Simon & Schuster. ISBN-13: 978-1451684537
Tikkun
is a magazine dedicated to healing and transforming the world. Its founding editor is Rabbi Michael Lerner.
February 14, 2018
Gleneaney House: The Trouble With Landlordism
Finnian O Donnell of People Before Profit Donegal and creator of Facebook page, No Bones About It, talks about how truly difficult it is to catch and expose a rogue landlord. Here he speaks from a personal capacity.
A few weeks back I received a text message from a friend of mine trying to get back on his feet. He sent me pictures of mold rising up behind a radiator and plaster peeling off the walls of a room. My Friend then told me of the state of the building in Letterkenny. He told me of the dire conditions he had to live in and informed me of the rogue landlord letting out the rooms of Gleneaney House. I was also informed of the lack of heating and hot water for the tenants of the building when he told me that the heating would only be turned twice a day for an hour and sometimes not at all. These rooms being rented out are previous hotel rooms and still contain a bedroom and bathroom and nothing more. All for 65 euro a week.
To help out my friend who was trying to get his life together and find some stability, I decided to post the pictures he sent me with a message explaining the situation to highlight this issue. To my surprise, we received many similar message and comments below the post. The same theme of mold, lack of hot water and heating, high rent, bullying and even theft by the rogue landlord of tenants possessions such as electric radiators kept popping up. One gentleman commented that he had to pay up to 200 euro a month on electricity bills.
The very next night, after the high exposure of the post, I got a late night call from my friend and he told me The landlord of the building, accompanied with two Garda Siochana, evicted him and left his belongings outside in the cold. The next morning I went to Gleneaney were my friend was holding a one man protest outside the building. He informed me of the situation and I took pictures of him at Gleneaney with his belongings still remaining outside. I then posted again on the PBP Donegal page. The two posts together had reached over 100,000 people in total. To highlight the issue even further PBP Donegal held a public protest outside Gleneaney House. We had managed to expose this rogue landlord and were confident that something was going to be done. We had used social media and people power out on the street to address this issue but still nothing was being done. It was all well and good posting on Facebook and shouting from a mega phone on the streets of Letterkenny however, more direct action was needed and we knew it.
Tumbleweeds come to mind
Myself and another member of PBP Donegal called local councillors and TD’s to see what they could do. I emailed local independent councillor Dessie Shiels and even Facebook messaged him four times to see if he could look into this matter and help out in anyway. No Reply. Local Sinn Fein councillor, Gerry Mc Monagle was also contacted. No Reply. Independent TD, Thomas Pringle was emailed and facebook messaged also. Yes you guessed it, No Reply.
I, along with another PBP Donegal member, called the local council office to see if any inspections could be done on Gleneaney. When I asked if I could talk to anyone about the council making an inspection of the premises, the lady on the phone told me that only current tenants can make a complaint about their residence and there was nothing I could do. The other PBP member was told the same. Due to the rogue landlord’s past and current behavior towards the tenants of Gleneaney House, those still residing in the building, who had privately messaged PBP Donegal, were too afraid to speak out in case they too were evicted immediately, leaving them with nowhere to go.
We were then left with two more options. Inform the Fireservice of Donegal to see if they could make an inspection of the place and call the RTB (Residential Tenancies Board) to check if the building was registered. I called the fire service and they informed me that I would Have to email them with a complaint. I did so but once again, No Reply.
Last resort
And so now we were clutching at straws here. We had exhausted any social media exposure through facebook, we had gathered the people and held a protest outside Gleneaney, we had informed time and time again the one TD and Councillors we thought would help us, we exhausted all avenues through the local council and local fireservice and still nothing has been done. Until maybe now.
After calling the RTB, I asked the gentleman on the phone if Gleneaney house was a registered tenancy. He informed me that unless the premises is under a different name, Gleneaney House would be in fact, not registered. The penalty for a non registered tenancy is 4,000 euro fine or 6 months in prison or both.
After the phone call with the RTB, I emailed the Registration Enforcement Section, filled in a referral form, sent it and have received an emailed that the RTB will ‘‘actively pursue the Landlord in question’’ . So, all we do now, is wait.
Questions to be asked?
This is why it is so difficult to catch a rogue landlord. When exposure through social media with over 100,000 views isn’t enough. When a public protest with over 30 people with placards and banners and mega phone speeches isn’t enough. When two members of PBP Donegal, calling on behalf of frightened tenants isn’t enough. When Councillors ignore your calls and the fire service doesn’t even reply a simple email isn’t enough then isn’t it about time we all realise that the current system doesn’t work for the people of our communities but rather protects those who profit from the poor and the vulnerable?
If the RTB do pursue Gleneaney House and expose its rotten corruption, It will have nothing to do with the local authorities because they done nothing to help. I fear that the full force of the law will not fall hard on these rogue landlords. No prison time for the corruption they continue to deal in, no change in how they treat their tenants. A few grand to pay to which they will sign off as loose change, no doubt.
Finnian O Domhnaill
is a political writer from Donegal, currently living in Derry. He is the creator of the political page No Bones About It.
[image error]
A few weeks back I received a text message from a friend of mine trying to get back on his feet. He sent me pictures of mold rising up behind a radiator and plaster peeling off the walls of a room. My Friend then told me of the state of the building in Letterkenny. He told me of the dire conditions he had to live in and informed me of the rogue landlord letting out the rooms of Gleneaney House. I was also informed of the lack of heating and hot water for the tenants of the building when he told me that the heating would only be turned twice a day for an hour and sometimes not at all. These rooms being rented out are previous hotel rooms and still contain a bedroom and bathroom and nothing more. All for 65 euro a week.
To help out my friend who was trying to get his life together and find some stability, I decided to post the pictures he sent me with a message explaining the situation to highlight this issue. To my surprise, we received many similar message and comments below the post. The same theme of mold, lack of hot water and heating, high rent, bullying and even theft by the rogue landlord of tenants possessions such as electric radiators kept popping up. One gentleman commented that he had to pay up to 200 euro a month on electricity bills.
The very next night, after the high exposure of the post, I got a late night call from my friend and he told me The landlord of the building, accompanied with two Garda Siochana, evicted him and left his belongings outside in the cold. The next morning I went to Gleneaney were my friend was holding a one man protest outside the building. He informed me of the situation and I took pictures of him at Gleneaney with his belongings still remaining outside. I then posted again on the PBP Donegal page. The two posts together had reached over 100,000 people in total. To highlight the issue even further PBP Donegal held a public protest outside Gleneaney House. We had managed to expose this rogue landlord and were confident that something was going to be done. We had used social media and people power out on the street to address this issue but still nothing was being done. It was all well and good posting on Facebook and shouting from a mega phone on the streets of Letterkenny however, more direct action was needed and we knew it.
Tumbleweeds come to mind
Myself and another member of PBP Donegal called local councillors and TD’s to see what they could do. I emailed local independent councillor Dessie Shiels and even Facebook messaged him four times to see if he could look into this matter and help out in anyway. No Reply. Local Sinn Fein councillor, Gerry Mc Monagle was also contacted. No Reply. Independent TD, Thomas Pringle was emailed and facebook messaged also. Yes you guessed it, No Reply.
I, along with another PBP Donegal member, called the local council office to see if any inspections could be done on Gleneaney. When I asked if I could talk to anyone about the council making an inspection of the premises, the lady on the phone told me that only current tenants can make a complaint about their residence and there was nothing I could do. The other PBP member was told the same. Due to the rogue landlord’s past and current behavior towards the tenants of Gleneaney House, those still residing in the building, who had privately messaged PBP Donegal, were too afraid to speak out in case they too were evicted immediately, leaving them with nowhere to go.
We were then left with two more options. Inform the Fireservice of Donegal to see if they could make an inspection of the place and call the RTB (Residential Tenancies Board) to check if the building was registered. I called the fire service and they informed me that I would Have to email them with a complaint. I did so but once again, No Reply.
Last resort
And so now we were clutching at straws here. We had exhausted any social media exposure through facebook, we had gathered the people and held a protest outside Gleneaney, we had informed time and time again the one TD and Councillors we thought would help us, we exhausted all avenues through the local council and local fireservice and still nothing has been done. Until maybe now.
After calling the RTB, I asked the gentleman on the phone if Gleneaney house was a registered tenancy. He informed me that unless the premises is under a different name, Gleneaney House would be in fact, not registered. The penalty for a non registered tenancy is 4,000 euro fine or 6 months in prison or both.
After the phone call with the RTB, I emailed the Registration Enforcement Section, filled in a referral form, sent it and have received an emailed that the RTB will ‘‘actively pursue the Landlord in question’’ . So, all we do now, is wait.
Questions to be asked?
This is why it is so difficult to catch a rogue landlord. When exposure through social media with over 100,000 views isn’t enough. When a public protest with over 30 people with placards and banners and mega phone speeches isn’t enough. When two members of PBP Donegal, calling on behalf of frightened tenants isn’t enough. When Councillors ignore your calls and the fire service doesn’t even reply a simple email isn’t enough then isn’t it about time we all realise that the current system doesn’t work for the people of our communities but rather protects those who profit from the poor and the vulnerable?
If the RTB do pursue Gleneaney House and expose its rotten corruption, It will have nothing to do with the local authorities because they done nothing to help. I fear that the full force of the law will not fall hard on these rogue landlords. No prison time for the corruption they continue to deal in, no change in how they treat their tenants. A few grand to pay to which they will sign off as loose change, no doubt.
Finnian O Domhnaill
is a political writer from Donegal, currently living in Derry. He is the creator of the political page No Bones About It.[image error]
Gleneaney House: The Trouble With Lanndlordism
Finnian O Donnell of People Before Profit Donegal and creator of Facebook page, No Bones About It, talks about how truly difficult it is to catch and expose a rogue landlord. Here he speaks from a personal capacity.
A few weeks back I received a text message from a friend of mine trying to get back on his feet. He sent me pictures of mold rising up behind a radiator and plaster peeling off the walls of a room. My Friend then told me of the state of the building in Letterkenny. He told me of the dire conditions he had to live in and informed me of the rogue landlord letting out the rooms of Gleneaney House. I was also informed of the lack of heating and hot water for the tenants of the building when he told me that the heating would only be turned twice a day for an hour and sometimes not at all. These rooms being rented out are previous hotel rooms and still contain a bedroom and bathroom and nothing more. All for 65 euro a week.
To help out my friend who was trying to get his life together and find some stability, I decided to post the pictures he sent me with a message explaining the situation to highlight this issue. To my surprise, we received many similar message and comments below the post. The same theme of mold, lack of hot water and heating, high rent, bullying and even theft by the rogue landlord of tenants possessions such as electric radiators kept popping up. One gentleman commented that he had to pay up to 200 euro a month on electricity bills.
The very next night, after the high exposure of the post, I got a late night call from my friend and he told me The landlord of the building, accompanied with two Garda Siochana, evicted him and left his belongings outside in the cold. The next morning I went to Gleneaney were my friend was holding a one man protest outside the building. He informed me of the situation and I took pictures of him at Gleneaney with his belongings still remaining outside. I then posted again on the PBP Donegal page. The two posts together had reached over 100,000 people in total. To highlight the issue even further PBP Donegal held a public protest outside Gleneaney House. We had managed to expose this rogue landlord and were confident that something was going to be done. We had used social media and people power out on the street to address this issue but still nothing was being done. It was all well and good posting on Facebook and shouting from a mega phone on the streets of Letterkenny however, more direct action was needed and we knew it.
Tumbleweeds come to mind
Myself and another member of PBP Donegal called local councillors and TD’s to see what they could do. I emailed local independent councillor Dessie Shiels and even Facebook messaged him four times to see if he could look into this matter and help out in anyway. No Reply. Local Sinn Fein councillor, Gerry Mc Monagle was also contacted. No Reply. Independent TD, Thomas Pringle was emailed and facebook messaged also. Yes you guessed it, No Reply.
I, along with another PBP Donegal member, called the local council office to see if any inspections could be done on Gleneaney. When I asked if I could talk to anyone about the council making an inspection of the premises, the lady on the phone told me that only current tenants can make a complaint about their residence and there was nothing I could do. The other PBP member was told the same. Due to the rogue landlord’s past and current behavior towards the tenants of Gleneaney House, those still residing in the building, who had privately messaged PBP Donegal, were too afraid to speak out in case they too were evicted immediately, leaving them with nowhere to go.
We were then left with two more options. Inform the Fireservice of Donegal to see if they could make an inspection of the place and call the RTB (Residential Tenancies Board) to check if the building was registered. I called the fire service and they informed me that I would Have to email them with a complaint. I did so but once again, No Reply.
Last resort
And so now we were clutching at straws here. We had exhausted any social media exposure through facebook, we had gathered the people and held a protest outside Gleneaney, we had informed time and time again the one TD and Councillors we thought would help us, we exhausted all avenues through the local council and local fireservice and still nothing has been done. Until maybe now.
After calling the RTB, I asked the gentleman on the phone if Gleneaney house was a registered tenancy. He informed me that unless the premises is under a different name, Gleneaney House would be in fact, not registered. The penalty for a non registered tenancy is 4,000 euro fine or 6 months in prison or both.
After the phone call with the RTB, I emailed the Registration Enforcement Section, filled in a referral form, sent it and have received an emailed that the RTB will ‘‘actively pursue the Landlord in question’’ . So, all we do now, is wait.
Questions to be asked?
This is why it is so difficult to catch a rogue landlord. When exposure through social media with over 100,000 views isn’t enough. When a public protest with over 30 people with placards and banners and mega phone speeches isn’t enough. When two members of PBP Donegal, calling on behalf of frightened tenants isn’t enough. When Councillors ignore your calls and the fire service doesn’t even reply a simple email isn’t enough then isn’t it about time we all realise that the current system doesn’t work for the people of our communities but rather protects those who profit from the poor and the vulnerable?
If the RTB do pursue Gleneaney House and expose its rotten corruption, It will have nothing to do with the local authorities because they done nothing to help. I fear that the full force of the law will not fall hard on these rogue landlords. No prison time for the corruption they continue to deal in, no change in how they treat their tenants. A few grand to pay to which they will sign off as loose change, no doubt.
Finnian O Domhnaill
is a political writer from Donegal, currently living in Derry. He is the creator of the political page No Bones About It.
[image error]
A few weeks back I received a text message from a friend of mine trying to get back on his feet. He sent me pictures of mold rising up behind a radiator and plaster peeling off the walls of a room. My Friend then told me of the state of the building in Letterkenny. He told me of the dire conditions he had to live in and informed me of the rogue landlord letting out the rooms of Gleneaney House. I was also informed of the lack of heating and hot water for the tenants of the building when he told me that the heating would only be turned twice a day for an hour and sometimes not at all. These rooms being rented out are previous hotel rooms and still contain a bedroom and bathroom and nothing more. All for 65 euro a week.
To help out my friend who was trying to get his life together and find some stability, I decided to post the pictures he sent me with a message explaining the situation to highlight this issue. To my surprise, we received many similar message and comments below the post. The same theme of mold, lack of hot water and heating, high rent, bullying and even theft by the rogue landlord of tenants possessions such as electric radiators kept popping up. One gentleman commented that he had to pay up to 200 euro a month on electricity bills.
The very next night, after the high exposure of the post, I got a late night call from my friend and he told me The landlord of the building, accompanied with two Garda Siochana, evicted him and left his belongings outside in the cold. The next morning I went to Gleneaney were my friend was holding a one man protest outside the building. He informed me of the situation and I took pictures of him at Gleneaney with his belongings still remaining outside. I then posted again on the PBP Donegal page. The two posts together had reached over 100,000 people in total. To highlight the issue even further PBP Donegal held a public protest outside Gleneaney House. We had managed to expose this rogue landlord and were confident that something was going to be done. We had used social media and people power out on the street to address this issue but still nothing was being done. It was all well and good posting on Facebook and shouting from a mega phone on the streets of Letterkenny however, more direct action was needed and we knew it.
Tumbleweeds come to mind
Myself and another member of PBP Donegal called local councillors and TD’s to see what they could do. I emailed local independent councillor Dessie Shiels and even Facebook messaged him four times to see if he could look into this matter and help out in anyway. No Reply. Local Sinn Fein councillor, Gerry Mc Monagle was also contacted. No Reply. Independent TD, Thomas Pringle was emailed and facebook messaged also. Yes you guessed it, No Reply.
I, along with another PBP Donegal member, called the local council office to see if any inspections could be done on Gleneaney. When I asked if I could talk to anyone about the council making an inspection of the premises, the lady on the phone told me that only current tenants can make a complaint about their residence and there was nothing I could do. The other PBP member was told the same. Due to the rogue landlord’s past and current behavior towards the tenants of Gleneaney House, those still residing in the building, who had privately messaged PBP Donegal, were too afraid to speak out in case they too were evicted immediately, leaving them with nowhere to go.
We were then left with two more options. Inform the Fireservice of Donegal to see if they could make an inspection of the place and call the RTB (Residential Tenancies Board) to check if the building was registered. I called the fire service and they informed me that I would Have to email them with a complaint. I did so but once again, No Reply.
Last resort
And so now we were clutching at straws here. We had exhausted any social media exposure through facebook, we had gathered the people and held a protest outside Gleneaney, we had informed time and time again the one TD and Councillors we thought would help us, we exhausted all avenues through the local council and local fireservice and still nothing has been done. Until maybe now.
After calling the RTB, I asked the gentleman on the phone if Gleneaney house was a registered tenancy. He informed me that unless the premises is under a different name, Gleneaney House would be in fact, not registered. The penalty for a non registered tenancy is 4,000 euro fine or 6 months in prison or both.
After the phone call with the RTB, I emailed the Registration Enforcement Section, filled in a referral form, sent it and have received an emailed that the RTB will ‘‘actively pursue the Landlord in question’’ . So, all we do now, is wait.
Questions to be asked?
This is why it is so difficult to catch a rogue landlord. When exposure through social media with over 100,000 views isn’t enough. When a public protest with over 30 people with placards and banners and mega phone speeches isn’t enough. When two members of PBP Donegal, calling on behalf of frightened tenants isn’t enough. When Councillors ignore your calls and the fire service doesn’t even reply a simple email isn’t enough then isn’t it about time we all realise that the current system doesn’t work for the people of our communities but rather protects those who profit from the poor and the vulnerable?
If the RTB do pursue Gleneaney House and expose its rotten corruption, It will have nothing to do with the local authorities because they done nothing to help. I fear that the full force of the law will not fall hard on these rogue landlords. No prison time for the corruption they continue to deal in, no change in how they treat their tenants. A few grand to pay to which they will sign off as loose change, no doubt.
Finnian O Domhnaill
is a political writer from Donegal, currently living in Derry. He is the creator of the political page No Bones About It.[image error]
February 13, 2018
Bibi's Son Or: Three Men In A Car
The Uri Avnery Column thinks much explaining is needed in the case of Ya'ir Netanyahu.
Yet here I am, writing about Ya'ir, damn it. Can't resist.
And perhaps it is really more than a matter of gossip. Perhaps it is something that we cannot ignore.
It Is all about a conversation between three young man in a car, some two years ago.
One of the young men was Ya'ir, the eldest of the two sons of the Prime Minister.
Ya'ir is named after the leader of the "Stern Gang", whose real name was Abraham Stern. The original Ya'ir split from the Irgun underground in 1940, when Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany. While the Irgun stopped its actions against the British government for the time being, Stern demanded the very opposite: exploit the moment in order to get the British out of Palestine. He was shot by the British police.
The modern Ya'ir and his two friends were on a drunken tour of Tel Aviv strip-tease joints, an appellation which often seems to be a polite way of describing a brothel.
Somebody took the trouble to record the conversation of the young men – the sons of the Prime Minister and two of the richest "tycoons" in the country.
This recording has now surfaced. Since the publication, hardly anyone in Israel is talking about anything else.
According to the recording, Ya'ir demanded from of his friend, Nir Maimon, 400 shekels (about 100 dollars), in order to visit a prostitute. When the friend refused, Ya'ir exclaimed: "My father gave your father a concession worth twenty billion dollars, and you refuse to give me 400 shekels?"
The concession in question concerns the rich gas fields out in the sea near Israel's shores.
In an especially disgusting display of his utter contempt for the female sex, Ya'ir also offered to provide all his friends with the sexual services of his ex-girlfriend.
This Recording raises a whole pile of questions, each more unpleasant than the next.
First of all: who made it? Apart from Ya'ir and his two pals, there were only two persons present; the driver of the car and a bodyguard.
This raises some more questions. First, why is the 26-year old man provided with bodyguards at all, and for a tour of strip-tease joints in particular?
Ya'ir has no official function. No son or daughter of any former prime minister has ever been provided with bodyguards. No known danger threatens this particular son. So why must I pay for one?
Second, what about the driver? Ya'ir was riding in a government car, driven by a government driver. Why? What right has he to a government car and to a government driver, in general - and in particular for such an escapade?
The episode has drawn the attention of the public to this son of privilege.
Who is Ya'ir Netanyahu? What does he do for a living? The simple answer: Nothing.
He has no profession. He has no job. He lives in the state-owned official residence in Jerusalem and eats at the state's expense.
What about his record? The only service he ever performed was as a soldier at the office of the army spokesman – not much risk of meeting flying bullets there. You need a lot of pull to land such a cozy job in the army.
Every reader can ask himself or herself: where was he or she when they were 26 years old?
Speaking for myself, at that age I had behind me several years of service in the Irgun underground, a year of continual fighting in a renowned army commando unit, a battle wound, and the beginning of my career as the editor-in-chief of a belligerent news magazine. I have earned my living since the age of 15. That is not something special to be proud of – many young people of my generation have the same past (except the journalistic part, of course.)
Still, This part of the story can be explained by the character of this particular young man. Can a parent be held responsible for the character of his offspring?
Like many politicians, Netanyahu had no time for his children. It's the mother who bears most of the responsibility.
Sarah Netanyahu, known as "Sarah'le", is generally disliked. A former airplane stewardess, who "caught" Binyamin at an airport duty-free shop and became his third wife, is a haughty and quarrelsome person, who is in perpetual conflict with her government-paid household personnel. Some of these quarrels reach the courts.
So this is all a family affair, except that it raises some profound political questions.
What is the social setting of the Prime Minister, himself the son of a poor university professor and a government employee for almost all his life?
His offspring consorts with the sons of the country's richest peoples, who are enriching themselves with the active help of the Prime Minister, - Netanyahu influences the government funding of big projects. At the moment, the police are conducting at least four separate investigations into Netanyahu's personal economic affairs.
Practically all of Netanyahu's personal associates and friends are under police investigation. His closest friend, lawyer and relative is under investigation concerning the acquisition of immensely expensive German-made submarines. The navy claims that it does not need all of them.
In his private life, Netanyahu is being investigated for receiving for a long time cases of the most expensive Cuban cigars from super-rich "friends", for whom he provided some services. Sarah'le is investigated for receiving, on demand, a regular supply of very expensive pink champagne from another billionaire, whom she also asked to buy her jewelry.
This Entire atmosphere of public and private corruption at the top of the state is very much removed from our past. It is something new, reflecting the Netanyahu era.
One could not even imagine anything like this in the times of David Ben-Gurion. His son, Amos, was implicated in some affairs which my magazine exposed, but nothing even remotely resembling this.
Menachem Begin lived for many years as an MK in the same two-room apartment where he had hidden as the most wanted terrorist in British Palestine. Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres all lived in modest circumstances.
Public humor calls Netanyahu "king" and even "emperor" and speaks of the "royal family". Why?
One reason is certainly the time factor. Netanyahu is now in his fourth term of office. That is much too much.
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, as Lord Acton remarked. One can replace "absolute" with "long-term".
A person in power is surrounded by temptations, flatterers, corruptors, and as time goes by, his resistance wanes. That, alas, is human.
After the endless presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a relatively honest and effective chief executive, the American people did something extremely wise: it limited a president to two terms. I also have come to the conclusion that eight years is exactly right.
(That applies to myself, too. I was a Member of Parliament for ten years. In retrospect I have drawn the conclusion that eight years should have been enough. During my last two years I was less enthusiastic, less combative)
I Don't hate Binyamin Netanyahu, as many Israelis do. He does not really interest me as a person. But I believe that he is a danger to the future of Israel. His obsession with clinging to power makes him sell out our national interests to interest groups, not just to billionaires but also to the corrupt religious establishment and many others.
Such a man is unable to make peace, even if he wanted to. Making peace demands strength of character, like taking the risk of being overthrown. Such audacity does not even enter Netanyahu's mind.
Tell me who your son is, and I'll tell you who you are.
Uri Avnery is a veteran Israeli peace activist. He writes @ Gush Shalom
Yet here I am, writing about Ya'ir, damn it. Can't resist.
And perhaps it is really more than a matter of gossip. Perhaps it is something that we cannot ignore.
It Is all about a conversation between three young man in a car, some two years ago.
One of the young men was Ya'ir, the eldest of the two sons of the Prime Minister.
Ya'ir is named after the leader of the "Stern Gang", whose real name was Abraham Stern. The original Ya'ir split from the Irgun underground in 1940, when Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany. While the Irgun stopped its actions against the British government for the time being, Stern demanded the very opposite: exploit the moment in order to get the British out of Palestine. He was shot by the British police.
The modern Ya'ir and his two friends were on a drunken tour of Tel Aviv strip-tease joints, an appellation which often seems to be a polite way of describing a brothel.
Somebody took the trouble to record the conversation of the young men – the sons of the Prime Minister and two of the richest "tycoons" in the country.
This recording has now surfaced. Since the publication, hardly anyone in Israel is talking about anything else.
According to the recording, Ya'ir demanded from of his friend, Nir Maimon, 400 shekels (about 100 dollars), in order to visit a prostitute. When the friend refused, Ya'ir exclaimed: "My father gave your father a concession worth twenty billion dollars, and you refuse to give me 400 shekels?"
The concession in question concerns the rich gas fields out in the sea near Israel's shores.
In an especially disgusting display of his utter contempt for the female sex, Ya'ir also offered to provide all his friends with the sexual services of his ex-girlfriend.
This Recording raises a whole pile of questions, each more unpleasant than the next.
First of all: who made it? Apart from Ya'ir and his two pals, there were only two persons present; the driver of the car and a bodyguard.
This raises some more questions. First, why is the 26-year old man provided with bodyguards at all, and for a tour of strip-tease joints in particular?
Ya'ir has no official function. No son or daughter of any former prime minister has ever been provided with bodyguards. No known danger threatens this particular son. So why must I pay for one?
Second, what about the driver? Ya'ir was riding in a government car, driven by a government driver. Why? What right has he to a government car and to a government driver, in general - and in particular for such an escapade?
The episode has drawn the attention of the public to this son of privilege.
Who is Ya'ir Netanyahu? What does he do for a living? The simple answer: Nothing.
He has no profession. He has no job. He lives in the state-owned official residence in Jerusalem and eats at the state's expense.
What about his record? The only service he ever performed was as a soldier at the office of the army spokesman – not much risk of meeting flying bullets there. You need a lot of pull to land such a cozy job in the army.
Every reader can ask himself or herself: where was he or she when they were 26 years old?
Speaking for myself, at that age I had behind me several years of service in the Irgun underground, a year of continual fighting in a renowned army commando unit, a battle wound, and the beginning of my career as the editor-in-chief of a belligerent news magazine. I have earned my living since the age of 15. That is not something special to be proud of – many young people of my generation have the same past (except the journalistic part, of course.)
Still, This part of the story can be explained by the character of this particular young man. Can a parent be held responsible for the character of his offspring?
Like many politicians, Netanyahu had no time for his children. It's the mother who bears most of the responsibility.
Sarah Netanyahu, known as "Sarah'le", is generally disliked. A former airplane stewardess, who "caught" Binyamin at an airport duty-free shop and became his third wife, is a haughty and quarrelsome person, who is in perpetual conflict with her government-paid household personnel. Some of these quarrels reach the courts.
So this is all a family affair, except that it raises some profound political questions.
What is the social setting of the Prime Minister, himself the son of a poor university professor and a government employee for almost all his life?
His offspring consorts with the sons of the country's richest peoples, who are enriching themselves with the active help of the Prime Minister, - Netanyahu influences the government funding of big projects. At the moment, the police are conducting at least four separate investigations into Netanyahu's personal economic affairs.
Practically all of Netanyahu's personal associates and friends are under police investigation. His closest friend, lawyer and relative is under investigation concerning the acquisition of immensely expensive German-made submarines. The navy claims that it does not need all of them.
In his private life, Netanyahu is being investigated for receiving for a long time cases of the most expensive Cuban cigars from super-rich "friends", for whom he provided some services. Sarah'le is investigated for receiving, on demand, a regular supply of very expensive pink champagne from another billionaire, whom she also asked to buy her jewelry.
This Entire atmosphere of public and private corruption at the top of the state is very much removed from our past. It is something new, reflecting the Netanyahu era.
One could not even imagine anything like this in the times of David Ben-Gurion. His son, Amos, was implicated in some affairs which my magazine exposed, but nothing even remotely resembling this.
Menachem Begin lived for many years as an MK in the same two-room apartment where he had hidden as the most wanted terrorist in British Palestine. Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres all lived in modest circumstances.
Public humor calls Netanyahu "king" and even "emperor" and speaks of the "royal family". Why?
One reason is certainly the time factor. Netanyahu is now in his fourth term of office. That is much too much.
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, as Lord Acton remarked. One can replace "absolute" with "long-term".
A person in power is surrounded by temptations, flatterers, corruptors, and as time goes by, his resistance wanes. That, alas, is human.
After the endless presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a relatively honest and effective chief executive, the American people did something extremely wise: it limited a president to two terms. I also have come to the conclusion that eight years is exactly right.
(That applies to myself, too. I was a Member of Parliament for ten years. In retrospect I have drawn the conclusion that eight years should have been enough. During my last two years I was less enthusiastic, less combative)
I Don't hate Binyamin Netanyahu, as many Israelis do. He does not really interest me as a person. But I believe that he is a danger to the future of Israel. His obsession with clinging to power makes him sell out our national interests to interest groups, not just to billionaires but also to the corrupt religious establishment and many others.
Such a man is unable to make peace, even if he wanted to. Making peace demands strength of character, like taking the risk of being overthrown. Such audacity does not even enter Netanyahu's mind.
Tell me who your son is, and I'll tell you who you are.
Uri Avnery is a veteran Israeli peace activist. He writes @ Gush Shalom
Empty Platitudes
Mick Hall protests that:
A gesture towards the victims of the Grenfell tower fire would have been nice, instead we got empty platitudes from Britain's royal family.
No room at the palace for victims of Grenfell tower fire. While some ordinary folk with a spare bedroom took in homeless young people for a night or two over Christmas the English queen and her offspring cried crocodile tears for the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire. While many of the survivors families are still stuck in hotel rooms, one would have thought the least the royal family could do was offer them a room or two in one of their many homes over the Christmas period for a spot of R&R over the holiday period.
Charles Windsor the heir to the throne has Clarence House as his official London residence along with his wife, son Harry and his family.
Highgrove House near Tetbury, Gloucestershire is his 'family home' where he lives with his wife the so called Duchess of Cornwall.
Birkhall in Scotland is another residence of the Prince of Wales and his wife. The former home of the Monarch's mother on the Balmoral estate was once described it as a ‘little big house’. Not big enough it seems to put up a family of Grenfell survivors over Christmas.
Llwynywermod, near Llandovery in Carmarthenshire is yet another one of this overhoused couples many 'homes.' Why this man needs so many only he can say, but one thing is certain despite his exalted status like the rest of us who have a roof over our heads, he can only live in one home at a time.
All of the homes mentioned above, along with Buckingham palace stood empty this Christmas as Betsy and her brood spend Christmas and the New Year at Sandringham House. The Monarch's grace and favor country estate in Norfolk.
By the way his mother apparently has 52 bedrooms in her London palace, but there was no room at her inn either.
If the royal family truly cared they would have understood just how difficult a Christmas this was for many who survived the Grenfell fire, and offered them the run of their unoccupied homes.
After all they made much of the trauma they felt when Windsor Castle, one of their many homes burnt down in 1992.
I could go on but I see little point as the monarchy is clearly part of the problem, it sits at the pinnacle of the British class system in all its wretchedness, democratic deficit, class prejudice, unfairness, and minority privilege. It's time the British people created a democratic republic and placed this weird and over paid family into the dustbin of history.
It would hardly be a surprise as the fabled dustbin is where so many of the Windsor's relations ended up after being rejected by those they once lorded over.
Mick Hall blogs @ Organized Rage.
Follow Mick Hall on Twitter @organizedrage
A gesture towards the victims of the Grenfell tower fire would have been nice, instead we got empty platitudes from Britain's royal family.
No room at the palace for victims of Grenfell tower fire. While some ordinary folk with a spare bedroom took in homeless young people for a night or two over Christmas the English queen and her offspring cried crocodile tears for the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire. While many of the survivors families are still stuck in hotel rooms, one would have thought the least the royal family could do was offer them a room or two in one of their many homes over the Christmas period for a spot of R&R over the holiday period.Charles Windsor the heir to the throne has Clarence House as his official London residence along with his wife, son Harry and his family.
Highgrove House near Tetbury, Gloucestershire is his 'family home' where he lives with his wife the so called Duchess of Cornwall.
Birkhall in Scotland is another residence of the Prince of Wales and his wife. The former home of the Monarch's mother on the Balmoral estate was once described it as a ‘little big house’. Not big enough it seems to put up a family of Grenfell survivors over Christmas.
Llwynywermod, near Llandovery in Carmarthenshire is yet another one of this overhoused couples many 'homes.' Why this man needs so many only he can say, but one thing is certain despite his exalted status like the rest of us who have a roof over our heads, he can only live in one home at a time.
All of the homes mentioned above, along with Buckingham palace stood empty this Christmas as Betsy and her brood spend Christmas and the New Year at Sandringham House. The Monarch's grace and favor country estate in Norfolk.
By the way his mother apparently has 52 bedrooms in her London palace, but there was no room at her inn either.
If the royal family truly cared they would have understood just how difficult a Christmas this was for many who survived the Grenfell fire, and offered them the run of their unoccupied homes.
After all they made much of the trauma they felt when Windsor Castle, one of their many homes burnt down in 1992.
I could go on but I see little point as the monarchy is clearly part of the problem, it sits at the pinnacle of the British class system in all its wretchedness, democratic deficit, class prejudice, unfairness, and minority privilege. It's time the British people created a democratic republic and placed this weird and over paid family into the dustbin of history.
It would hardly be a surprise as the fabled dustbin is where so many of the Windsor's relations ended up after being rejected by those they once lorded over.
Mick Hall blogs @ Organized Rage.Follow Mick Hall on Twitter @organizedrage
Republicanism, Sovereignty and the Right to Life.
Anne Mc Closkey, MB, makes a case for maintaining the 8th Amendment.
A Labour Party delegation visited local pro-abortion advocacy groups last week to offer help and support to bring we backward paddies into the bright new world they enjoy, where an abortion takes place every three minutes, one in five pregnancies are deliberately ended, and 90% of those with Down’s syndrome are “terminated”. These policies have cost the NHS 0.6 billion pounds, yes that’s 600,000,000 in the last decade, almost all of which was paid to private providers.
And where are the Republican voices protesting at this shameful denial of self-determination? Obediently silent, that’s where. Of course New Republicanism actively welcomes this. Their zeal for abortion means they can countenance even such a blatant insult to their precious Executive without protest. There are many who historically have voted for SF who are deeply uncomfortable with their position on this issue. But the Party is paramount, dissent is not tolerated, no votes of conscience will be allowed. It’s a far cry from the republicanism I was reared with.
Of course, this is not about the health and safety of women. Abortions are legally and appropriately carried out in every hospital in the land, when required, as part of appropriate medical care for women.
The laws on this island have historically been based on a particular vision of the common good, which places a high value on personal freedom, while limiting the deliberate ending of innocent human life. Protecting both women and their unborn children as far as humanly possible is not backward or regressive, but compassionate, ethical and hopeful. In the six counties, the lack of abortion on demand has saved the lives of 100,000 people. These are our friends, colleagues, family members, neighbours. It is a dangerous fallacy to measure rights or progress by our ability to end the lives of our unborn children. Choice must always balance individual autonomy with the rights of others.
The arbitrary selection of who is worthy of life, the reduction of the preborn child to offal, sex-selective foeticide, the weeding out of those who may have disabilities, or are “chromosomally challenged”, this, it seems is the ethos which should prevail when Ireland takes its place among the nations of the earth, and Robert Emmett’s epitaph can be written.
What is the point of having national self-determination, if we discard the values which have shaped us as a nation and as a people, and follow slavishly in the ways of the coloniser? Was this worth one life, not to mention the thousands who have given everything?
Surely the essence of republicanism should be to protect human dignity by whatever means are necessary. This obviously requires change to the current social order, but progressive change, not the culture of death. Irish women and men deserve better.
Our vision and objective should be to cherish all of the children of the nation equally, according to our own genius and traditions. We should not be ashamed of what our people suffered so much for. And if political republicanism moves away from this, then it leaves many of us behind.
Anne Mc Closkey works as a GP in Derry. Lifelong republican and community activist, mother and grandmother, stood as Independent candidate in 2016 Assembly election, polling over 3k 1st preference votes, founder member of Cherish all the Children Equally, a republican progressive organisation founded to give pro-life socialists and Republicans a voice and to campaign against repeal of the constitutional right to life in 8th amendment.
A Labour Party delegation visited local pro-abortion advocacy groups last week to offer help and support to bring we backward paddies into the bright new world they enjoy, where an abortion takes place every three minutes, one in five pregnancies are deliberately ended, and 90% of those with Down’s syndrome are “terminated”. These policies have cost the NHS 0.6 billion pounds, yes that’s 600,000,000 in the last decade, almost all of which was paid to private providers.
And where are the Republican voices protesting at this shameful denial of self-determination? Obediently silent, that’s where. Of course New Republicanism actively welcomes this. Their zeal for abortion means they can countenance even such a blatant insult to their precious Executive without protest. There are many who historically have voted for SF who are deeply uncomfortable with their position on this issue. But the Party is paramount, dissent is not tolerated, no votes of conscience will be allowed. It’s a far cry from the republicanism I was reared with.
Of course, this is not about the health and safety of women. Abortions are legally and appropriately carried out in every hospital in the land, when required, as part of appropriate medical care for women.
The laws on this island have historically been based on a particular vision of the common good, which places a high value on personal freedom, while limiting the deliberate ending of innocent human life. Protecting both women and their unborn children as far as humanly possible is not backward or regressive, but compassionate, ethical and hopeful. In the six counties, the lack of abortion on demand has saved the lives of 100,000 people. These are our friends, colleagues, family members, neighbours. It is a dangerous fallacy to measure rights or progress by our ability to end the lives of our unborn children. Choice must always balance individual autonomy with the rights of others.
The arbitrary selection of who is worthy of life, the reduction of the preborn child to offal, sex-selective foeticide, the weeding out of those who may have disabilities, or are “chromosomally challenged”, this, it seems is the ethos which should prevail when Ireland takes its place among the nations of the earth, and Robert Emmett’s epitaph can be written.
What is the point of having national self-determination, if we discard the values which have shaped us as a nation and as a people, and follow slavishly in the ways of the coloniser? Was this worth one life, not to mention the thousands who have given everything?
Surely the essence of republicanism should be to protect human dignity by whatever means are necessary. This obviously requires change to the current social order, but progressive change, not the culture of death. Irish women and men deserve better.
Our vision and objective should be to cherish all of the children of the nation equally, according to our own genius and traditions. We should not be ashamed of what our people suffered so much for. And if political republicanism moves away from this, then it leaves many of us behind.
Anne Mc Closkey works as a GP in Derry. Lifelong republican and community activist, mother and grandmother, stood as Independent candidate in 2016 Assembly election, polling over 3k 1st preference votes, founder member of Cherish all the Children Equally, a republican progressive organisation founded to give pro-life socialists and Republicans a voice and to campaign against repeal of the constitutional right to life in 8th amendment.
February 12, 2018
The Summer That Changed Everything
Mick Hall writes about a documentary he recently watched:
The Summer That Changed Everything and exposed the treachery of three Labour MP's.
It's not often we get to see Labour MP's who have plotted and schemed against the Corbyn leadership in all their ignominy, but David Modell's documentary film broadcast on BBC2 was a gem. (watch it above) Inadvertently it showed these MP's as shallow, out of touch with their constituents and much of the nation at large. It also displayed why the BBC and filmmakers like Modell are taken in by the chatter within the Westminster bubble.
The decision of Lucy Powell, Ruth Cadbury, and Stephen Kinnock to trash the Corbyn leadership and refuse to have him on their election leaflets was replicated across the UK by some of the party's centre right candidates. It was sad to see Sarah Champion a decent woman and MP echoing this rancid mood in the documentary.
In my own constituency during the general election campaign the candidate refused to have Corbyn's name on his campaign literature, a senior member of the constituency party was overheard aping the MSM by slagging Diane Abbott off, and before the manifesto was released another told a campaign meeting "Jeremy Corbyn's economic policies were deluded."
When a member pointed this out he was smeared as being divisive, not a thought was given to how he and other supporters of Corbyn might consider such behavior as in itself extremely divisive.
Despite all this, and a candidate who was not popular in parts of the constituency, Labour came within 345 votes of winning the seat after Momentum flooded the constituency with their activists.
But I digress.
There are scenes in the film which almost take your breath away, at the beginning Stephen Kinnock tells Modell that Corbyn will have to take “a long, hard look in the mirror.” After the exit poll was announced he was left speechless. When he regained his composure and was ready to talk he was firmly told by his wife what to say to the waiting media.
Which basically boiled down to whatever you do, just don't mention Jeremy. Given Kinnock had spent much of the campaign slagging Jeremy off to the same journalists one could almost see him go weak at the knees. He had nothing prepared as the speech in his pocket was about telling Jeremy to take a hard look at himself and resign. What a pitiful man, like father like son.
Next up was Lucy Powell, who is also seen in the film pouring out bile about Corbyn. When the election exit poll came in she seemed in a state of shock but her face like Kinnock's told exactly how she felt. All she could say was "Oh Wow" which told us all we needed to know about her politics.
Both expected a poor result for Corbyn Labour and they couldn't hide their disappointment. Despite their bluster they clearly preferred a strong Tory victory as they saw it as the only way to remove Corbyn and further advance their careers.
For the film maker Modell the penny finally began to drop. It was Corbyn's personality, and Momentums energy which helped get the Labour vote out. It was their activists enthusiasm on the doorstep which convinced millions to vote for Corbyn Labour. Not enough for sure but enough to make Jeremy Corbyn's position as Party leader unshakable.
On a visit to Momentum’s HQ, Modell was surprised to learn the group’s Facebook page had 16 million likes. He clearly preferred to listen to gossip and bile instead of checking out Momentums web site.
As Daisy Wyatt wrote on iNews daily Briefing:
Mick Hall blogs @ Organized Rage.
Follow Mick Hall on Twitter @organizedrage
The Summer That Changed Everything and exposed the treachery of three Labour MP's.
It's not often we get to see Labour MP's who have plotted and schemed against the Corbyn leadership in all their ignominy, but David Modell's documentary film broadcast on BBC2 was a gem. (watch it above) Inadvertently it showed these MP's as shallow, out of touch with their constituents and much of the nation at large. It also displayed why the BBC and filmmakers like Modell are taken in by the chatter within the Westminster bubble.
The decision of Lucy Powell, Ruth Cadbury, and Stephen Kinnock to trash the Corbyn leadership and refuse to have him on their election leaflets was replicated across the UK by some of the party's centre right candidates. It was sad to see Sarah Champion a decent woman and MP echoing this rancid mood in the documentary.
In my own constituency during the general election campaign the candidate refused to have Corbyn's name on his campaign literature, a senior member of the constituency party was overheard aping the MSM by slagging Diane Abbott off, and before the manifesto was released another told a campaign meeting "Jeremy Corbyn's economic policies were deluded."
When a member pointed this out he was smeared as being divisive, not a thought was given to how he and other supporters of Corbyn might consider such behavior as in itself extremely divisive.
Despite all this, and a candidate who was not popular in parts of the constituency, Labour came within 345 votes of winning the seat after Momentum flooded the constituency with their activists.
But I digress.
There are scenes in the film which almost take your breath away, at the beginning Stephen Kinnock tells Modell that Corbyn will have to take “a long, hard look in the mirror.” After the exit poll was announced he was left speechless. When he regained his composure and was ready to talk he was firmly told by his wife what to say to the waiting media.
Which basically boiled down to whatever you do, just don't mention Jeremy. Given Kinnock had spent much of the campaign slagging Jeremy off to the same journalists one could almost see him go weak at the knees. He had nothing prepared as the speech in his pocket was about telling Jeremy to take a hard look at himself and resign. What a pitiful man, like father like son.
Next up was Lucy Powell, who is also seen in the film pouring out bile about Corbyn. When the election exit poll came in she seemed in a state of shock but her face like Kinnock's told exactly how she felt. All she could say was "Oh Wow" which told us all we needed to know about her politics.
Both expected a poor result for Corbyn Labour and they couldn't hide their disappointment. Despite their bluster they clearly preferred a strong Tory victory as they saw it as the only way to remove Corbyn and further advance their careers.
For the film maker Modell the penny finally began to drop. It was Corbyn's personality, and Momentums energy which helped get the Labour vote out. It was their activists enthusiasm on the doorstep which convinced millions to vote for Corbyn Labour. Not enough for sure but enough to make Jeremy Corbyn's position as Party leader unshakable.
On a visit to Momentum’s HQ, Modell was surprised to learn the group’s Facebook page had 16 million likes. He clearly preferred to listen to gossip and bile instead of checking out Momentums web site.
As Daisy Wyatt wrote on iNews daily Briefing:
To not understand how social media “won” the election for Labour is to fail to grasp how Corbyn has won a groundswell of support among the most marginalised, who feel Facebook has given them a voice.
Mick Hall blogs @ Organized Rage.Follow Mick Hall on Twitter @organizedrage
Anthony McIntyre's Blog
- Anthony McIntyre's profile
- 2 followers
Anthony McIntyre isn't a Goodreads Author
(yet),
but they
do have a blog,
so here are some recent posts imported from
their feed.
