Vivienne Westwood and the messy, racist tensions in Punk

Was Punk Aware of Racism?

Westwood, who has just passed away, pioneered a counter-culture fashion and culture in the 1970s overwhelmingly centred on a young white English mainly working class community in the 1970s whose appetite and push for for rebellion was predicated on three things: 1, their alienation of a capitalist-colonial Britain in clear economic decline after the post-war boom, and an country and culture that was still very grey and traditional in that typically weird, awkward english manner; 2, the global space for rebellion opened-up primarily by the Vietnamese resistance and victories culminating in 1975, and 3, Black-rebellion especially but not solely in the USA which was also in considerable part radicalised by the Vietnamese communists. 

Westwood teamed-up with the opportunist businessman Malcolm Mclaren and opened up her clothes shop initially called SEX and then by the end of the 1970s was called World's End. Westwood wanted to further radicalise and contribute to this youth rebellion in culture through her art and fashion design, and she did so quite effectively. These attempts were encapsulated by her 'destroy' t-shirt which had a massive Nazi swastika on it with the word destroy and also a fainter upside down Christ on a cross and also a picture of Queen Elizabeth II. Clearly Westwood's design was arguing to destroy these things, as she explained her motivation more recently: "We hated the older generation and it wasn't young people, but old people we felt were responsible for the mismanagement and cruelty in the world still going on... To us, it was a way of saying to the older generation, 'We don't accept your values or your taboos.'" 

The problem with the t-shirt is that in the Punk scene and other related and overlapping cultural groups of Rock culture the symbol of Hitlerite Nazism were already evident: Peter Fonda in the 1966 film The Wild Angels wears an Nazi 'iron cross' around his neck; the Hell's Angel racist gang proudly display all kinds of nazi symbols. The Rolling Stones on 5th July 1969 at their Hyde Park concert had got the far-right Hell's Angels gang to be their 'security'. Into the 1970s, Punk culture in England proudly displayed symbols of Nazism. Did they do this to shock the conservative oldies that they blamed for their alienation? Yes. But let's look into this social context a little more, as London in the 1970s was not a city only of grey/white people. 

London had the largest concentrations of Black and Brown working class people in the country, areas like Southall, Peckham, Brixton, Whitechapel, Tottenham, Ladbroke Grove/Notting Hill and other large swathes of the city had high and visible concentrations of Black and Asian communities. 1950s, '60s, '70s London going into the 1980s and even into the 1990s was a difficult place for our communities to live because of overt, vicious and intense racism on all levels. Racist street attacks and racist murders were frequent, open racist abuse by teachers, police and other people 'in authority' was just routine. Overt racism was the norm all the time on TV, too. 

Black and Brown people were largely excluded from access to cultural and musical activities that were open and welcoming to white people so we largely constructed our own in Reggae sound-system culture and dances, 'blues parties' which was when Black people organised their own dances often in residential homes; Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis etc organised their own 'welfare centres' where they also had their own concerts. Through all this we syncretised increasingly with each other and also more slowly with Rock and Punk etc. 

We were attacked a lot by racist white people from all the 'new' sub cultures of Teddy boys, Skinheads and Punks. These white sub-cultures however arguably only came about because they saw Black and Asian youth pioneer their own resistance including culturally which made a massive spectacle in the otherwise largely culturally-dead and boring white England. Our food was pungent, our dress and music was loud and proud and from time to time we would rise-up and smash-up our oppressors in the police and white civilian racists. WE opened up this space for rebellion globally and locally, and white people followed behind but failed to address the central issues of racism that existed for everyone to see everyday. 

In this context the emerging Punk movement just failed to give any understanding or respect to these social contexts and the experiences of their non-white neighbours. In their project to reject their parent's generation by use of the swastika, it should be reflected empathetically as to how Black and Brown communities may have felt about this. If we take the least-problematic cultural product of Westwood's 'destroy' t-shirt, from a few metres onwards the t-shirt looks like a massive emblazoned Nazi symbol. Our parents and grandparents and young people who have some understanding of the violent white supremacist racism that it represents were not made to feel more at ease by it, they would have felt at unease by it. And that's just unacceptable. The reality is that many other white punks would use racist iconography all over themselves. More recently a few months ago British rapper (a light-skinned Black brother) Slow-Thai, with the most anti-fascist of intentions, wore Westwood's 'destroy' t-shirt at a concert a few months back, but all anyone could see from the crowd was a big Nazi swastika leading Slow-Thai to apologise and reiterate it was meant to be an anti-fascist message. 

An on-going controversy which is instructive to these issues is the Oi/Punk concert on 3rd July 1981 in Southall. Southall through the 1960s like other parts of London became increasingly a town of racialised immigrants. The new mainly Indian Punjabi arrivals faced racism on all levels including by 1976 the racist murder of teenager Gurdip Chaggar. Then the Labour Government backed a meeting of the far-right National Front at Southall Town Hall and they instructed the police to conduct a vicious para-military operation on those resisting the racists by beating us and arresting hundreds and killing a local teacher Blair Peach. Indian children in the 1970s in Southall also faced a horrific 'bussing' abuse, whereby the authorities would bus children out of the area as white racists thought the sight of our children was sullying what their slowly disappearing middle class white Southall. After all this a bunch of Punk bands decided to have a concert at a pub at the Hayes-end of Southall high street in July 1981. Local Asian youth and their friends launch an attack on the pub where the white skinheads were having their event and burn the place down. July 1981 in Southall became a leading moment of Black resistance in Britain along with uprisings in Handsworth, Toxteth, St Pauls, Brixton, and other places.

To this day we have punks defending the concert and basically blaming the local Asian community and totally ignoring and erasing all the contexts of what was taking place for decades in that community.  This white racist arrogance and conceit reflects a large part (not the entire part!) of these white-dominated cultural scenes. Yes, there were a few Black and Asian skinheads in the venue as they were in that scene, but it was a scene that was totally and proactively ignorant of racism. It's like the odd Asian or Black person who joined Tommy Robinson's / Stephen Yaxley-Lennon's English Defence League, yes there are a few non-white people in that milieu, but that social group is a racist white space and gives no respect to actual racist experiences and societal realities. 

Even what might appear to be a less racist space like the 1990s British Indie scene or the usa-based Grunge scene tended to be a white culturally defined space although by this point many Black and Brown people are delivering the scene as in the case of Cornershop, Asian Dub Foundation, Fun>da>mental, State of Bengal (albeit the last three are fusions of Hip-Hop/Rap, Reggae and Rock and Punk with sounds from the Indian subcontinent), and also in the case of Grunge and related Punk / Hard Rock: The pioneers of Bad Brains (from 1974!), Kim Thayyil of Soundgarden, Fishbone, 24-7 Spyz, Chuck Mosely of Faith No More, Ray Ahn and Keish DaSilva of the Hard-Ons, and of course the trailblazing pioneer Zack De La Rocha of Rage Against the Machine amongst many others. 

The Clash did perhaps more than most in the Punk scene to explicitly address anti-racist challenges head-on, especially with songs like Guns of Brixton and White Riot. And then Grove-based dread, activist and cultural figure Don Letts forms Big Audio Dynamite with Mick Jones who was previously in The Clash. The Clash on their 1983 album cover feature an iconic scene of the Notting Hill Uprising with Don Letts walking across a line of police. Interesting to note that Letts encouraged Bob Marley to look into the London Punk scene which inspires Bob Marley to make his song Punky Reggae Party with the lyrics including the following:"It's a punky reggae party

And it's tonight

It's a Punky Reggae Party

And it's alright

What did you say?

Protected by society

Treated with impunity

Protected by my dignity

I search for reality

...

"New wave, new craze

New wave, new phrase

I'm saying

The Wailers will be there

The Damned, The Jam, The Clash

Maytails will be there

Dr. Feelgood too

Ooh

No boring old farts, no boring old farts, no boring old farts

Will be there, singin'

...

"A bubble, a bubble

Looking for no trouble

But if you trouble, trouble

We'll give it to you double

Let me tell you

It takes a joyful sound

To make the world go round..."

However, because the white-dominated (racist on an either conceited-level with Oi/Punk/ Skinheads or 'lazy-racist' in the case of Indie and Grunge) cultures were largely excluding Black and Brown youth, these youth just got-on and made their own cultural musical movements that came to dominate the country and then the world in the form of Jungle Drum n Bass, and other genres. In hindsight and with the all-important principle that these spaces *should* have been always open to ALL youth of all backgrounds, and as such things only become a bit more healthy in these dynamics if Black and Brown youth take the lead. Black and Brown youth historically have always welcomed the participation of their white counterparts in their cultural spaces, but this has not been a reciprocal relationship.

The roots of Punk and Rock are also in Black music in Jazz, Rhythm and Blues, Gospel and Folk. MC5 were one of the first hard rock primitive Punk bands who were closely associated with the Black Panther Party. Which makes all this racist conceit and ignorance all the more wrong and unethical. The instances of racism in alternative Rock genres through the 1980s and 1990s are frequent and sometimes shocking as in the example of Axl Rose's / Guns n Roses 1988 song One in A Million in which Roses mouths-off against 'faggots, immigrants, n****s' and Muslims. See here: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/may/08/guns-n-roses-remove-song-homophobic-racist-language-one-million-reissue-album

In conclusion it's clear in the case of Westwood's attempts at radicalising the Punk scene through her 'destroy' t-shirt was definitely well-intentioned but in the absence of a concerted attempt at understanding and then navigating the leading-role of racism then mistakes will be made by even radical-minded people who try and attempt to contribute something to the struggle. Westwood herself went on a journey of becoming a celebrated figure of the establishment and collected her 'Order of the British Empire' from the Queen back in 1992. It's no surprise that she then said: "What I learnt from punk rock was that you don't change the establishment by attacking it." Clearly she thinks having become an establishment figure she can effect some 'change'. Whatever. Selling-out to the cause is nothing new, John Lydon from The Sex Pistols has turned, like many of his generation of the Punk scene, into a cliched gammon Brit nationalist. Mensi from the Angelic Upstarts, who even fronted a documentary for Anti-Fascist Action in the early 1990s, ends up an open sleazy racist in Thailand before his passing last year. None of this is to take away or distort Westwood's good intentions in the 1970s and her contributions to fashion and culture. That aside but connected: the bottom-line is that a community of people is either interested in understanding their place in society to fight oppressions from the system including racism, or they are not. It's just as simple as that. To be able to understand and traverse these complexities means pro-actively and appropriately keeping your doors wide open to anti-racist thinking, action and pro-active inclusivity to Black and Brown youth, and taking a lead from racialised communities amongst whom you will find those with understanding and experiences of the on-going fight against rising racism and fascism. 

Appears that Putin/Dugin Implicated in Fascist Coup in Germany

Red-Browners serve as the facilitators of fascism and fascism coups be it Jan 6th and now apparently Germany

In what some people might see as an extraordinary historic development but no surprise to anyone following the fascist project globally and specifically to Putin and Dugin's leadership of it, it seems that the German state and intelligence services have foiled plans for a fascist coup. They have conducted 135 raids in Austria, Italy and Germany. They have arrested some 25 people including of members of a far-right 'Citizens of the Reich' organisation that reports state has some 20,000 members, a senior members of the Putin/Dugin-backed Alternative for Germany Party (AFD), a Heinreich the 8th part of an old regional royal family in Germany, a Russian national called Vitalia B (more details to emerge about this) and a former AfD member of Germany's Bundestag, Birgit Malsack-Winkemann who was currently a serving judge and it is alleged she was being lined up as the new justice minister in the new government. Kevork Al-Massian, an Armenian heritage Dugin-paid operator was in the AFD. Was Kevork Almassian aware or involved in this the fascist coup? Berlin hosts a number of media platforms including Redfish (ran by our old comrade turned fascist collaborator and grifter Lizzie Phelan), Ruptly and other similar platforms. Socialism and anti-imperialism is not won through collaborating with, having dinner parties with, backing and promoting the far-right and their leadership. 

The pattern of fascism has become clearer and clearer, when it comes to Orban, Trump, Boris/Sunak Tories: the preferred approach of the modern fascist is to achieve power through official channels of the system of government albeit in a context where the far-right are in the ascendancy and then once having captured political power in the state to attempt to change and purge the organs of the state to turn them into a fascist state. Trump/Bannon's Jan 6th attempt at a coup is the model when the fascist project feels so emboldened that it attempts full fascist takeover. Germany is Europe's and the EU's most important state, Germany has made it clear to Putin that it won't be pressured by means of the Russian war of invasion, occupation and annexation of Ukraine. Germany turning fascist and pro-Putin would be a devastating development for the working class and oppressed people in Germany and globally. The outcomes of such a fascist coup are darker beyond our imagination.

This is a hugely important historic development and points to where history seems to be taking us currently: towards fascism brought to life by a global joint enterprise between particularly the Trump/Bannon-led western fascists and neo-nazis and the Putin/Dugin-led global leadership of far-right politics and forces. 

It's interesting to see the reaction of the western imperialist media to this coup attempt in Germany, currently at this time it's number EIGHT on the headlines on the colonial liberal Guardian news website. It is not seeing rolling coverage on the imperialist TV news media either. The western ruling classes in-general as well as the red-brown fascist collaborators don't really want to see this problem, the former because they are compromised and don't want to raise the alarm lest people take a militant anti-fascist approach that would radicalise socialist and anti-imperialist forces and raise their capacity, and the red-browner collaborators want to downplay the new fascism because they are committed to twisting as much fascism into 'socialism' as possible or to just attempt to bury the issues like Jan 6th and the broader global fascist project. 

The German state like many other western states (see France) is in a precarious state as increasing numbers of their masses want fascism. However, there is also clearly a conflict within the German state as to whether they should take a full fascist approach like many of the pro-MAGA ruling classes in the usa, or not. At the moment the German state seems to have decided that they are not going to tolerate a total fascist takeover. If the German state has been the force to stop a fascist coup, then this is highly significant. It doesn't make the German state a political entity for Black Communists etc to support, but at the same time we have to state things as they are and recognise the weakness of Black communities and the general class struggle that isn't really playing an actual anti-fascist role anywhere in the 'West'.

As we go forward it will be interesting to see what more comes out of the investigations and prosecutions of the German state against this attempted fascist coup. What was the role of the usa state and the British state, if any? Russian state spokesperson Peskov has stated: “This appears to be a German internal problem. There can be no question of any Russian interference,” which reminds one of the saying 'nothing is true until it's been officially denied'. Russia has the biggest agenda to gain out of a fascist coup in Germany led by a far-right movement with senior elements of its proxy AFD party there. 

As ever, smash the red-browners, smash fascism. The global class struggle of the black working classes will not be able to gain capacity until this global fascist project is challenged to its defeat. 

On the White Racist Attack on Dover Immigration Processing Centre

Further Far-Right Tory Weaponisation of War on New Migrants

The toxicity borne out of the growing and deepening crises of global capitalism continue to play-out amongst the Tories in Brexit Britain. This level of toxicity sees the strange situation whereby Black and Brown leading Tories in government are the promoters of this new fascism but also its targets especially in the instance of Rishi Sunak. Indian East African heritage Suella Braverman as Home Secretary attempts to shore up her own flimsy position by whipping-up the worst of Brit racism and racists and its support to her weaponisation of newly arrived migrants supported by Brit Prime Minister and Indian heritage Rishi Sunak who himself is the target of growing Tory and right-wing grassroots attacks as being a 'globalist' and for 'blocking Boris' return'. The constantly deepening war on migrants in Britain took a massive jump forward with the victory of the Brexit vote that opened-up a higher intensity of constant far-right racist anti-migrant media propaganda that has inspired the racist attack on a immigration processing centre last Sunday October 30th in Dover and the inhumane conditions at Manston processing centre.

Braverman's position as Home Sec is constantly on the verge of total collapse following shortly after her messy demise as Home Sec for 41 days under the most farcical Prime Ministerial rule of Liz Truss. Braverman seems utterly desperate to use the far right-wing culture war of using the most oppressed people in our society - newly arrived immigrant families who have come via small boats across the Channel  - to agitate mass support from the Tory and general far-right to attempt to perpetuate her political position as Home Sec. Braverman seems utterly desperate in trying to hold-on to her position and seems to rely purely on whipping up fascist fervour against migrants to enable herself which involved claiming there is an 'invasion' of England's shores by migrants. Using the term 'invasion' on the beaches of England seeks to plug into the mass racist nationalism harking back to the British war with Germany which the latter tried unsuccessfully to invade Britain. 

The concept of 'invasion' of migrants also skews the reality of the fact that the problem is the vicious anti-working class system that attacks us all rather than still relatively small numbers of people entering into this country. A basic position of humanity informs us that the British state is involved in a collective neo-colonialism around the world that continues to loot the wealth of labour and land and in this devastation some people refuse to be subjected to super-exploitation in the global south and instead decide to follow the looters to their own base being the 'West'. Migration is perhaps the central political issue of our times which is in the context of the fact that the world is dominated by western imperialism and its partners. Anyone who isn't a basic racist scumbag stands with the oppressed and their right to enter the colonial centre in a safe and supported manner. Any position against migrants means tying oneself to the pole of imperialist oppression and looting in a period of growing global fascism.

The racist attacker against the immigration processing centre in Dover was a 66yr old white man from 100 miles away in man in High Wycombe and the attacker has reportedly been investigated for child sex offences and threatened to kill himself while being questioned by police. The attacker committed suicide in a nearby garage after his attack on the immigration processing centre. The actual act of racist firebombing of an immigration centre is inspired directly out of the growing racist atmosphere and hysteria that the Tory leadership are committed to continuing to scapegoat migrant communities and attempt to divide people and distract from the growing working class anger around the cost of living crisis. 

The Tories have an open racist policy of 'hostile environment' for migrants as official policy since 2010 which is a kind of preemptive racist terror to deter people trying to even come here. Of course this isn't going to work as nearly everyone coming here is not going to be put off by any of the Tory actions against migrants. The most vicious elements of these racist policies are the attack on the Windrush migrants from the Caribbean, the threat to permanently expel migrants to Rwanda and running down immigration detention centres like the Napier army barracks and the outbreak of disease and massive overcrowding at Manston, which even chief inspector of prisons in Britain says the conditions there are unacceptable. 

These are openly fascist policies being promoted proudly by the Tories, but they, like so many other growing oppressions in our society, are not being countered by movements of people in protest. The left is failing to mobilise people against this despite some positive grassroots spontaneous actions in Kenmure Street, Glasgow last year and a few incidents in London which all resist attempts by the Home Office to kidnap people they deem 'illegal'. The direct action movement of Just Stop Oil shows that there are people willing to take risks from the left against the state, it's just that we don't have what we should have in a similar waves of people willing to disrupt and confront growing Tory fascism on issues such as the attacks on migrants and racist police brutality. The Tory weaponsation of migrants is being used as fascism always does for the most rapacious elements of the rich to attack and control us further so they can amass more wealth and power. Although largely absent at present, resistance on all levels is needed urgently to scupper their oppressive plans. 

Rishi Sunak: Brown-skinned carrier for growing fascism that the fascist mob hates

Rishi Sunak is the embodiment of a white supremacy Brit racist stereotype of a particular kind of Indian boy / man. Not the Indian / South Asian kid who is ready to fight-back, who finds other resistance youth and cultures and integrates as quickly into that resistance culture ready to smack-back any racist white boy, ready to slap-back any racist teacher and face the suspension or school expulsion etc.

No. Here comes another kind of white supremacist colonial-created Indian boy, the nerdy geeky kid with the awkward body language and walk, top of his class in exams and grades, over-eager to please the teacher, the more white and rich and male the teacher the more crawling this Indian boy is to him. If that teacher abuses him and even makes fun of him in a racist manner, this particular Indian pupil wants the love of the white man even more, it doesn't matter what racist humiliation the system and people following it subjects him to, his desire to be white and have a career of riches enables him to eat-up the racist humiliation as the norm. 

The Indian boy is weak and snivelling, easy to bully and beat up. He takes the beating and goes off quietly. He knows there's more important things than standing up for his own humanity, there is the possibility of sitting next to the colonial white man and once he is there at the pinnacle of his success in life, he can finally put-out what he has internalised: a deep hatred for anyone poorer and darker than he. 

Rishi Sunak is at one time an East African Indian (Punjabi Hindu) heritage brown person, as well as one of the leading carriers of the British (brexit) type of growing white supremacy racism and fascism. Sunak is ready to eat-up the growing vicious racism against him only to try and prove to those who would love to lynch him Thomas Mair-style while shouting "britain first!" as the racist attacker hacks away at Sunak's face. 

Sunak is ready to publicly lick the hand of the man who has put him deeper into the clutches of the growing racist lynch-mob - Boris Johnson. Boris is the Trump of the fascist masses, the nasty sleazy woman abuser and child/pregnancy-denier/terminator hero of the Brit masses. 

Boris in his statement that he wasn't going for PM the other day openly sniped at Sunak basically blaming him for Boris' own inability and decision to attempt to become PM again. In so doing, Boris has exposed Sunak to his baying racist mob, and the fascist mob understood the cue perfectly and have been rabidly attacking Sunak as the "globalist", neo-nazi code for: 'loyal to the global Jewish bankers' who they argue control everything while far-right white-trash nationalist Vladimir Putin is the hero against the globalists! 

Sunak is the embodiment of that pathetic Brit racist stereotype, a racist stereotype that is seeing classic old 1970s Brit racism to rise again as in the meme about the footwear being left at the doorstep of 10 Downing Street that has been spread widely by people across the political spectrum including Nato culture lickspittle Mehdi Hasan.

Sunak's response that like typical Indian boy who thirsts for white supremacy responds to the fascist mob who want him dead by trying to love them more by means of sacrificing the working classes at their feet but especially the most marginalised sections of the working classes: the immigrant, refugee, 'without papers'. 

Sunak brings in a similar brown-skinned fascist nut job Cruella Braverman to lick the fascist mob with him in bringing back the 'Rwanda policy', one of the most fascist immigration policies we have seen since the Labour government in the late 1970s were conducting virginity tests on South Asian women at Heathrow Airport. Perhaps one shouldn't remind Sunak and Cruella of that lest to give them ideas.

Boris has played a good hand for himself: let the black and brown idiots take-up the poisoned chalice, let society collapse further by means of Tory race-class escalating wars, let things fall apart further and perhaps Boris will step-in later to save the day for Neo-Nazi Brexit Britain. 

The trade unions aren't a worry, for the day Sunak takes the position of PM the RMT leadership do their own fascist advocacy and posture by cancelling their strike on Nov 9 at the feet of Brit militarist colonialism. Public sector workers in unions are struggling to adequately feed and clothe their children, heat their homes, the RMT second sellout in as many months indicates there is deep collusion between the trade union leaders and the Brit intelligence services and Tory state.  Someone contact the Irish Republican parents and ancestors of Lynch and Dempsey to come and take these wayward scummy sellouts  to the proverbial dark alley to do what the unrepentant Fenian Bhoys would suggest. 

The Tories reflecting the system which they promote is in perpetual and deepening crises, but for the poorest and most exploited Black working classes have always lived in crises while for the ruling classes their riches continue to peak like at no other time in history. Considering the state of political affairs in the Tory community and its central growing racist anger against the new Black and Brown alliance of the PM and cabinet will be blamed by the fascist mob no matter how much Sunak & Co try to serve the fascist mob in the culture more with more fascism. All the while, the working class grassroots are sleeping as they are further crushed under it all.

Kanye West and Modern Fascism

Kanye West as a Strategic Facilitator to White Supremacy and Fascism

There's nothing especially new to Kanye West's open association and collaboration with modern fascism in the form of the Donald Trump-led movement. Long-gone is the old Kanye West who was at one point against the genesis of the growing fascist threat in the midst of the brutal 'war on terror' / 'shock and awe' years. In Sept 2nd 2005 Kanye West nervously but correctly denounced George Bush that 'George Bush doesn't care about black people' in the context of the structural and institutional racism to the Katrina disaster and relief measures. 

Kanye West is a very talented musician having helped to make further beautiful Hip-Hop music. He considers himself a genius, while we can all have our opinions to the extent of his creativity the point to be made here is that Kanye West clearly thinks of himself as genius who has failed to get the recognition he deserves and this dynamic has played upon his mental health in a negative and descending trajectory to say the least. His relationship with Kim Kardashian and its fall-out involving their children has added to his mental health challenges all in the context of his riches and the industry of narcissism and ego which is the upper echelons of the colonial entertainment industry. However, is his mental health really that bad to justify all of this utterly detestable postures? 

Frankly the combination of failed relationships (possibly involving children), frustration with one's career paths, feelings that one isn't respected by society coupled with the growing fascist global community since the 1990s is an extremely common one. Whole swathes global populations since children and young pepole in this last few decades have been infiltrated with far-right views through on-line gaming, the endless YouTube far-right conspiracy videos and its connected leading advocates like David Icke, Prison Planet/Alex Jones and others. 

Kanye West's descent into open fascist advocacy is common place amongst our peers. We have lacked effective anti-racist anti-fascist leaders and advocates for several years now which has created a growing fascist community which has great momentum and a very powerful world network and joint enterprise including Donald Trump, Brexiteers (especially the ERG group), leaders in Europe like Orban, Putin and others. 

Reflecting back to his comments on Bush and Katrina, Kanye said in April 2020 that: "'This white person didn’t do something for us'. That is stemmed in victim mentality ... Every day I have to look in the mirror like I’m Robert De Niro and tell myself, ‘You are not a slave.’". While Kanye is correct narrowly that no-one is a slave in the humanity-affirming sense or that no one can be solely defined as a slave, the comment is actually meant to deny historic white supremacy (including enslavement by colonisers) and its contemporary forms. 

Kanye doesn't, like many other oppressed people, want to be treated outside the framework of whiteness, but oppressed people don't have the power to just wish-away an objectively existing historic and current colonial system which still centrally uses white supremacy to facilitate its power and growing wealth from the labour and land of the world's oppressed and nature.

It seems instead of committing oneself in a collective struggle to counter act colonialism and white supremacy, Kanye has chosen to fold into modern fascism and seeks to benefit from it. Where else does Kanye have to go? Where is the modern movements and struggles anti-colonial black power struggles that Kanye can join that isn't attached to the other indirect wing of modern fascism - liberal imperialism? There isn't a place for him to go in this regards, it has to be constructed and someone like Kanye like everyone else in the establishment isn't going to be the one to lead it. This is a major crisis of our times. 

In his frustrations and narcissism Kanye has denied white supremacy and instead done the classic far-right trick to then scapegoat another group of people generally kept outside the framework of whiteness by colonialism: Jewish people. 

The establishment of the colonial settler state of Israel which has and continues to oppress and annex Palestinians and their land does not change the relationship of Jews to whiteness, what changes with the state of Israel in 1948 is a *Zionist* movement which has some influence amongst some Jews but like supremacism one has to totally resist right-wing/far-right naturalising or essentialising of an entire people who aren't in the realm of whiteness. Jews are an easy target for this for a number of reasons not least that due to their own oppression (something that is reflected in parts of the African heritage Black community) they are disproportionately represented in certain areas of society including the entertainment industry. 

The anti-Jewish comments and postures of Kanye and his denial of anti-Black racism are often in the framework of far-right / Neo-Nazi politics two sides of the same fascist coin: “When you hear about slavery for 400 years that sounds like a choice.”

Kanye's well publicised and televised meeting with Donald Trump in the White House was another depressing occasion when Kanye says of the event: "There was something about when I put this hat on [MAGA hat] it made me feel like Superman. "You [Donald Trump] made a Superman - that's my favourite superhero - you made a Superman cape for me."

Kanye in the depths of his own confusions and ego sees an empowerment in attaching himself to Donald Trump and his political project, the dynamics of subservience to the 'white man' is rather loud and clear here. A denial of Black peoples experience of current and historic racism, an attachment to the most infamous figure and leader of global rising fascism and the attacks on an 'other' in the form of Jews and according to Kanye the 'false BLM narratives'. The BLM movement has a heavy dose of colonial liberalism to in in-part in terms of its funding and the way it places itself in the politics in world, there *is* a legitimate critique to be made of it from a more radical perspective that comes out of the traditions of the 'Black radical tradition' / 'Black marxism' / 'third world socialism / black socialism' etc. The attack on BLM and 'woke' politics however is hegemonised (totally controlled more or less) currently by the growing fascist community and as such is no critique at all as it's a totally bad faith approach with an agenda of manipulation and deceit at the service of the most vicious capitalist global ruling classes. 

Reflecting Kanye's own cowardice to take responsibility for his own mistakes and to decide to look in the counter-opposite direction to the long standing black liberation movement and its liberation ideologies and the general ease by which people are slipping into the white supremacist fascist project the recent Kanye interview reflects something else about our times: too many are making excuses for people they know and their own descent into fascist madness. We have all experienced sitting together socially with friends and some mad fascist nonsense comes out of the mouths of one of our friends, perhaps against African people, or against Asian people, or against Jewish people or perhaps against more than one oppressed group of people. In these contexts often people allow the madness to pass without opposition or critical engagement. The same thing is happening here whereby people are making all kinds of twisted and nonsensical excuses for Kanye's sell out. If the root base of your stuff is bat-shit crazy fascism then everything else that might have a drop of truth in it is just materiel for the bat-shit crazy fascism. 

Cowardice and sellout at the feet of growing fascism is the buzz of our era. It's where people seem to want to be as they think everything else is just a bit of an effort not worth making for whatever cheap and expedient excuses they give themselves. A few of us will not submit, and like the sellouts we too can clearly see what's going on it's just that we aren't going to sellout to the mass collapse into global fascism and racism. Some of us know our traditions that lead to liberation, and we know what leads to our further oppression.

On South Asian Divisions in Leicester and Agendas of the Far-Right State and Orgs

For decades, Leicester built communal walls. Waves of immigrants made it more toxic

East Ham and Waltham Forest are Pakistani Punjabi, Luton is Kashmiri Muslim, Southall is Punjabi Sikh, and Tower Hamlet is Bangladeshi. Each walled off their neighbourhoods to other immigrants.

The first petrol bomb was lobbed through the windows of the Shri Pragati Mandir in Birmingham’s inner-city area Sparkbrook. Fire burned through the carpet at the Krishna Temple in Coventry, and the doors of the Veda Temple run by the Vishva Hindu Parishad were damaged in a blaze. The Shri Krishna Temple in West Bromwich, among the largest in the UK, was gutted in a similar attack. A Hindu priest in Derby had a narrow escape when his temple was firebombed.

Earlier that week in December 1993, the Babri Masjid had been demolished by Hindu karsevaks.  Iqbal Sacranie—among the key figures in the anti-Salman Rushdie movement that exploded across England in 1988—alleged some Hindus in Bradford had distributed sweets. The wave of fire-bombings across the Midlands and North of England—the first attacks on religious institutions in England since Luftwaffe bombs tore apart historic churches in 1942—was meant as revenge.

The still-simmering Hindu-Muslim violence in Leicester, mainly pitting young ethnic-Gujarati Hindus against young Gujarati Muslims, judging by details so far released by the police, should provoke introspection on why homeland hatred casts such a dark shadow overseas. Toxic competition between Islamism and Hindutva has sharpened communal battle lines in England, but the tensions aren’t new. Thirty years ago, Hindus and Muslims exchanged petrol bombs in Blackburn after a cricket match—exactly as they have now done in Leicester.

Allah-o-Akbar, Jai Shri Ram: The aggressive displays of religious identity by young men in Leicester is the product of the self-segregation of England’s South Asian diaspora into ethnic-religious ghettos. The ghettoisation has ended up reproducing the dysfunctional Hindu-Muslim relationship in the homeland.

Leicester’s communal walls

Fifty years ago, following what he claimed were instructions from God given to him in a dream, dictator Idi Amin Dada ordered the mass expulsion of Uganda’s mainly Gujarati Indians. Within three months, some 50,000 people were forced to leave their homeland for the UK and Canada. Even the 8,000 or so Indians Amin’s laws theoretically allowed to remain were threatened by being dispatched to dig shambas, or vegetable gardens, or with mass deportation to the waste-lands of Karamoj.

Ever since the completion of the colonial trans-Uganda railway in 1902, the Gujaratis had come to occupy a critical position in the economy, selling consumer goods in the country and shipping out cotton and coffee to ports. The Indians earned great wealth, historian Vali Jamal has written, but their fortunes earned them the hatred of Ugandan Africans.

Leicester, which had grown a small East African Gujarati population through the 1960s, seemed an attractive destination. But the Labour-led city council, conscious of the sentiments of its White working-class constituency, proved less than welcoming. “In your own interests and those of your family,” an advertisement by the council bluntly proclaimed, “[do] not come to Leicester.”

The arrival of the Ugandan Gujaratis had been preceded by a deepening of racial fractures across the United Kingdom.  Enoch Powell, a prominent Conservative politician, prophesied in an inflammatory 1968 speech of the coming race war. Edward Heath, who became prime minister in 1970, promised to control immigration, but the far-Right grew steadily through the decade, culminating in pitched battles with police in 1977.

South Asian self-segregation

Even though Leicester now celebrates itself as the UK’s most diverse city, the self-image is deeply problematic. Educated, relatively-affluent Hindus immigrants from East Asia soon began to move out of the Highfields neighbourhood into the White working-class Belgrave. Belgrave Road—site of the so-called Golden Mile, where the recent clashes took place—rapidly grew into a thriving business hub. Working-class Highfields remained mired in poverty, as industrial Leicester imploded in the 1980s.

Three decades ago, scholars Deborah Phillips and Valerie Karn observed “the spatial polarisation of Hindus and Muslims in Leicester.” Each urban ward had evolved clusters around markers of religious identity, like temples and mosques.  The new enclaves, research on Gujarati immigrants by anthropologist Kenneth Hahlo showed, sometimes mirrored homeland divisions right down to the level of village and caste.

East African Hindu estate agents and solicitors grouped together to block other immigrants from buying into their new enclaves, Phillips and Karn wrote. The discrimination wasn’t one-way. “Muslims,” they recorded, “have been have been known to refuse council house offers because of the proximity of Hindu tenants.”

The same segregation process, scholar Apurba Kundu has observed, was evident elsewhere in the UK. East Ham and Waltham Forest in London are Pakistani Punjabi, Luton is Kashmiri Muslim, Southall is Punjabi Sikh, and Tower Hamlet is Bangladeshi.  Each community grouped together as protection against White racism, but also walled-off its neighbourhoods to other immigrants.

Following 9/11, new conflicts emerged. Muslims registered consistently lower attainment in education and employment than other groups, official data showed. They blamed it on religious discrimination. Hindus and Sikhs complained that counter-terrorism programmes provided disproportionate funding for Muslim groups.

A toxic competition

Leicester’s complex demographics helped fuel communal competition. In 2001, some 15 per cent of the population was Hindu, and 11 per cent Muslim. In the 2011 census, the percentage of Hindus remained similar, and still does today. But the Muslim population share went up to 18.6 per cent, driven by the arrival of Somali and Kurdish immigrants. Immigrants of Indian origin remained the largest single block—28.3 per cent —and Gujarati the most-spoken language after English.  Islam and Hinduism, though, became competing categories for State patronage.

The competition, the work of scholar Sean McLoughlin shows, expressed itself in a surge in applications for the construction of religious sites in Leicester. Funding from the Leicester city council also ended up reinforcing particular constructions of identity—for example, Garba events—over trans-community projects, like youth football.

For the children of the diaspora, lacking the wider cultural context and linguistic affiliations of their parents, religious identity had become the principal marker of identity.

Large-scale proselytising activity by homeland fundamentalists tore through the diaspora in the coming decade. The now-internationally proscribed terrorist, Masood Azhar Alvi, visited the United Kingdom in 1993, lecturing at mosques on “jihad, its need, training and other related issues.” Large numbers young people from the UK travelled for training at jihad camps in Pakistan, up to the 7/7 bombings of London’s transport system.

The Hindu-nationalist movement also grew dramatically in the United Kingdom through this period, political scientist Chetan Bhatt has recorded.  Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) units—first founded overseas  by Jagdish Chandra Sharda in 1947, on a Kenya-bound ship—slowly grew across the United Kingdom. Long struggles to build Hindu temples, notably the Swaminarayan Mission in north London and Bhaktivedanta Manor at Letchmore Heath, helped mobilise a new generation of Hindu immigrants around faith.

Few of the leaders of South Asian communities understood the dangers of these divisions in the 1980s. Faced with race tensions in the 1970s, the British State had turned to multiculturalism—outsourcing its engagement with issues of identity to political contractors who gained their status from their communal constituency, not advocacy of the wider community. Instead of the political and social equality they were seeking, ethnic and religious minorities ended up getting institutional patronage to maintain their differences.

The violence in Leicester will empower no-one except White supremacists, who’ve long argued immigrants import their homeland conflicts. For decades, Leicester’s Gujarati immigrant families struggled to overcome their traumatic exodus from Uganda. Their children, blinded by hatreds they barely understand, seem determined to walk into the trap they’ve laid for themselves.

[source]

Leicester South Asian divisions: Old British colonial divide & rule and new far-right Brexit Tory State divide & rule proving successful

Leicester South Asian divisions: Old British colonial divide & rule and new far-right Brexit Tory State divide & rule proving successful

- Politics of Brit colonial partition of India alive and kicking in Leicester

- Brit state with people like Tommy Robinson/Yaxley Lennon see strategic successes in Leicester clashes

- Brit state employed and directed TR/Yaxley-Lennon/EDL etc to exactly achieve manipulation of far-right in Hindu community against all Muslims

- Brit state cultivated right-wing/far-right forces in ALL religious/national communities 

- Brit state has nurtured the divisions which we now see in the open in Leicester

- Divisions hide growing South Asian exploitative and parasitic landlords and employers

- Ideal optics for the racist & colonial Brit state to see brown youth fighting while Brit govt/NF/EDL etc all laugh at them/us

- Historic failure of secular-oriented radical grassroots communities to develop leadership amongst South Asian youth

[Pictured: Malcolm X talking to Bengalis in England / EDL racist provocations / Leicester police line and South Asian youth]

What a sorry state of affairs that some in the Hindu, Muslim and Sikh communities in Leicester are playing-out in September 2022 the old British colonial policy of encouraging their colonial victims to divide themselves around right-wing/even far-right frameworks of abusing religon to, not fight their common oppressor in the British colonial state, but against the 'other' who lives in the same conditions of poverty and racism. As we see the actual reach of the UK monarchy across the planet this is an that divisive forces in the Hindu and Muslim community are not acting independently of themselves as there is a much bigger and global power at play in all of this which are the ruling classes of the British state. 

The collapse into pathetic colonial divisions in the South Asian community is linked to the global balance of forces as manifest in the region with far-right religious movements developing in India with the BJP government and RSS, in Pakistan and other places in South Asia with the rise of the Pakistani Taliban, return of the Afghan Taliban and similar movements, in Sri Lanka and Myanmar of right-wing nationalist manipulation of Buddhism, and in the Sikh community of the supremacist right-wing movement of 'Khalistan'. 

The forces of unity and socialism have dwindled decade by decade in South Asia and also in their diasporic communities in the 'west' including in England. The need for secular and atheistic movements that respect all religious cultures and faiths and correctly interpret them as a force for unity and solidarity are desperately needed, and we must remind people that only a secular and united movement of all peoples based primarily as working class racialised human beings is the only framework to push-back on these colonially-imposed divisions. In South Asia it is only the secular socialist, anti-caste, pro-tribal peoples, communist and other similar forces who have provided unity in struggle in previous generations and continues to do so. Although including many political forces, the recent victory of Indian Punjabi farmers show the continued ability of communist and socialist forces leading successful social struggles that benefit ALL communities of peasants from all religious backgrounds.  

The British state has in recent decades achieved the cultivation of right-wing forces in all these religious communities. The connections between the right-wing sectarians who use and abuse Hinduism in the BJP have high-level relations with the Tories and the Labour Party. The Tories especially see an affinity with the BJP as both are part of a global fascist revolution that facilitates their exploitation of the working classes so as to achieve their pursuit of fascsit power and capitalist exploitation of the masses. Vicious racist and former Tory Home Office minister Priti Patel calls BJP leader Modi "our dear friend" and praises his "dynamic leadership", indicating a joint enterprise and relationship between the senior Brit tories and their junior helpers in the BJP to achieve their common goals of scapegoating oppressed communities in order to pursue power, money and sexual exploitation. October 2017 saw RSS-supporting Tapan Ghosh of the National Council of Hindu Temples (NCHT) UK and Tory MP Bob Blackman meet Tommy Robinson/Yaxley-Lennon and a former BNP leader. Ghosh argued excitedly at the global fascist revolution at an event at the time in Parliament that  Modi, Trump and Putin had been "raising hopes amongst people against Islamic aggression".

British authorities have through a long policy of 'collusion' developed a caricature of Islam and Muslims in its open support for Al-Qaeda and Daesh and other similar factions in its policy of recrtuiting and grooming thousands of Muslims to join its foreign policy agendas in fighting in death squads in Libya, Syria, Iraq etc openly exposed in the Arab Sting years. Majid Freeman who is interfering in Leicester at the moment was a well-known recruiter for British interests in encouraging Muslims to join death squads in Syria and today he continues his divide and rule role for the state by inciting religious hatred against "Hindu mobs" similarly to the other oppurtunist - Mohammed Hijab who has advocated along explicitly bigoted lines in Leicester recently: "If they (Hindus) believe in reincarnation, what a humiliation of them to be reincarnated into some pathetic, weak, cowardly people like that." Of course Roshan Salih Muhammad, a long-standing promoter of violent sectarian divisions within the Muslim community, decides to positively platform people like Freeman on his sectarian grifting racket which is the  '5 pillars' platform, with the Brit intel services no-doubt nodding in satisfaction at these antics. One might have wondered how the British intelligence services were going to again deploy their actors in their collusion racket after the Arab Sting horror, and here we can see the useful role these fools are playing for the British state.

The British state has facilitated and directed the work of Tommy Robinson/Yaxley-Lennon since June 2007 in the forming of the English Defence League (EDL)  to attempt to manipulate Black and Hindu communities against the Muslim community playing upon many colonially-imposed divisions and tensions between the respective communities. Britain First, UKIP, and many other factions of the far-right play a similar role. The events in Leicester recently with masked-up youth from South Asia allowing themselves to be divided and fighting not the white racists, richest employers, landlords, monarchy and ruling classes that oppress them all, but to engage in fighting each other. When we are going deeper into a cost of living crisis and inflation amongst other capitalist crises the British ruling classes love to see some of us diverting from the real problems and real culprits of our conditions and attacking our neighbours that we have lived amongst for centuries in the homeland. Now in recent years and decades we leave the homeland to come here because the Brit white man stole everything from us and made us poor so we have left our ancestral homes and live in deprived areas on a grey, cold, depressing and unfriendly island. Fighting your neighbour for the benefit of the richest white man is not what our ancestors and our faiths inform us to do, rather they inform us to protect the oppressed and exploited and unite together to fight common oppressors. The racist state and its minions like the EDL are exactly designed to keep us divided and easy pickings for further poverty. 

The real terror and oppression impacting BOTH Hindu, Muslim and Sikh working class communities is institutional racist poverty. In a population of 357,394 some 40,000 children in Leicester live in poverty. When you get into areas of high concentrations of Black and Brown people like in the area of Spinney Hill Park where the recent divisive tensions have flared-up child poverty rockets to around 50%. This is in a city which has the highest population of non-white people in the country with self-defined white people being just over half of the population. In a survey a few years ago of hundreds of children and young people in the city one in five said they worried about having enough to eat every single day. Leicester, like so many migrant working class areas, has massive potential in terms of what people could be doing if they were to unite and pool their creativity into grassroots socialist action for the community. 

The reason why the grassroots in our community don't get together and deliver unity and happiness to each other is exactly because of the agendas of the British state that through its racist overt and covert actions keep us divided and depressed. Sikh, Muslim and Hindu working classes are all terribly exploited in factories and warehouses in the city, a scandal that made headline news for the manner in which people were terrorised by the employers at work through the covid pandemic. Look to the deprived neglected streets where unemployed young people struggling with mental health and lack of cultural, sports, social facilities take to the streets to numb the pain and hang-out socially, there is nothing but superficial differences between working class youths nominally from different heritages and faith communities. 

A massive issue that very few people are talking about is how these abusers of faith and religion to cause division and conflict are a cover for the growing class conflicts within the South Asian community. While we have to keep very clear that the 'greater enemy' who has power in and guide these divisive trends are the British authorities, at the same time there is a growing parasitic exploitative class (of South Asian heritage) who are running slum housing, oppressive employment practices and other forms of exploitation that prey on the poor. There are millions of people in this country who are new migrants and who are 'illegal' being paid down to £1 an hour and who go home to live in squalid overcrowded conditions. Due to their relatively extreme precarious situation they have no political voice and no-one to advocate for them in terms of a joint class struggle to resist these oppressions. The rise of tensions in Leicester are in the interests of the bigger white ruling classes of this country but also the more localised parasitic capitalist class of landlords and employers. These parasites can deflect from their own oppressive role and unjustly and manipulatively point fingers at poor, often young working class members of another faith group.   

Look at this historic context of these tensions going back generations to the anti-colonial struggle in undivided India. These communities came from traumatised ones from a land that was recently partitioned in 1947 whose architects also designed and delivered how Punjabis killed, raped and abudcuted 1 million of each other for the agenda of the British, as well as people of Kashmir being partitioned both peoples partitions continue to play into the colonalists aims of divide and rule. Another horrific war conducted by major nato-ally Islamabad/ (west) Pakistan conducting a supremacist genocidal war against those who won the independence of Bangladesh (formerly 'east Pakistan'') in December 1971. 

These communities then came over here to England and many of their first and second generation children united with each other and other Black people to fight-back police brutality and poverty from the 1960s until the early 1990s. The Pakistani Workers Association, Kala Tara and Asian Youth Movements, Indian Workers Associations of many factions (especially important was the leadership of Jagmohan Joshi in the IWA), Organization of Women of Asian and African Descent (OWAAD) in Brixton and many other grassroots political formations saw South Asian communities unite with other Black people against racism. The challenge remains to develop this unity again on the basis of socialism and secularism that remains supportive of religious faith stripped of the manipulation, use and abuse by right-wing oppressive misogynists who use their corrupted religious opportunism for their own petty pursuit of power, money and often sexual abuse of women, girls and boys. 

United grassroots working class self-organisation is desperately needed in poor neglected Black and Brown communities like in Leicester and across the country in the Lancs, Birmingham, Hayes and Southall, Luton, Ilford, Peckham, East Ham, Tower Hamlets, St Pauls & Easton and many other communities. There are always tensions between nefarious operators manipulating religion backed by the Brit government, media, intelligence services and the far-right movements under their direction. Although Pakistan was a major colonial victory of division nonetheless the people of South Asia only became independent by means of relative unity and struggle, of mobilising the masses of poor on the basis of solidarity and collective action and organising which remain the challenges today. 

We need to see groups bringing ALL the flags of South Asian nations to fraternise together and celebrate unity, also when there is a big cricket match, or street celebrations for Eid/Vaisakhi/Diwali and independence days of the respective South Asian countries. The amplification of those that conduct racist divide and rule should not mean that we forget that there are many if not more people in our communities who want to see a unifying movement of all working class people to address our common issues. We should remember that there are a lot of young and older grassroots-oriented people who want to see a working class community unity and not this ugly nonsense whereby we become a laughing-stock for the NF/EDL and Tory state.

We encourage young people from South Asia to reject the politics of colonial racist divide and rule, to instead take a socialist interpretation and inspiration from all faiths revolutionary movements and ideologies that unite the oppressed and serve the oppressed towards united resistance against colonial-capitalism and for unity and socialism. We know there are a lot of young people in all oppressed communities who want this. We encourage you to form your own grassroots organisations. We also apologise that the socialist forces able to do this are so small and so many elder activists have failed their historic duties in creating effective projects and initiatives on the ground. 

We in the Malcolm X Movement and our friends have tried since 2014/2015 and continue to contribute to fulfilling these urgent challenges and tasks. Probably there are young South Asians on both sides of the clashes in Leicester who might be involved in the trade union 'strike wave' which would show the direct interest in unity-in-struggle that we all have as working class youth. Back in the homeland we have increasingly have everything to unite around and especially on the issues of overcoming right-wing movements of all kinds, the devastating impact of climate change which is increasingly migrant flows internally and to the 'west' (and the pro-migrant challenges that these flows bring), unliveable hot temperatures, floods all in the context of capitalist crises that brings further poverty around the 'cost of living crisis'. Unite and fight our common challenges and oppression, reject those who are using and abusing religion for their own and the British state' narrow and manipulative agendas. Reject TR/Yaxley Lennon's agenda becoming successful in our communities!

 

Further reading/listening:

Malcolm X - Message to the Grassroots - http://www.csun.edu/~hcpas003/grassroots.html

Black Panther Party Serve the People programs - https://youtu.be/Yspaulg-tSM + https://caringlabor.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/hilliard-ed-the-black-panther-party-service-to-the-people-programs.pdf

Shaheed Bhagat Singh - https://www.marxists.org/archive/bhagat-singh/index.htm

British state collusion with death squads in the Muslim world - https://danglazebrook.com/2017/05/26/british-collusion-with-sectarian-violence-part-one-with-sukant-chandan-2/

Southall Asian Youth Movement - https://youtu.be/OGWX233kHPg

Bradford 12: https://youtu.be/iLZ6Lbz6C04

Injustice (police killing of Black people) - https://vimeo.com/34633260 

So Did Hitler Really Support Zionism?

In the recent growing political maelstrom in Britain around the imperialist and allied Zionist (supporters of the colonial settler entity of Israel) bullying against the Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party with one of the party's most important figures - Ken Livingston - being suspended in the midst of this with hunt, the following related comment is interesting. In this comment by As'ad Abukhalil from the Angry Arab blog, he lays out some research as to the relations of Palestinian leaders with the Nazis and the Nazis attitudes towards the Zionist movement. For the part of the Malcolm X Movement, we are against all forms of colonial supremacism, be it against Black people, Muslims, Jews, and all those who are unjustly colonially racialised by colonialism and now imperialism today.





Hitler and Hajj Amin and the Western and Arab falsification of history

Hitler said: "Jews should seek their human rights in their own state in Palestine, where they belong"

I don't think that we should be dragged into a discussion of the fool, Hajj Amin Husayni.  But the entire discussion about him (in the West and East) has become burned by vulgar and crude Zionist propaganda.  I wrote an article about the matter in Arabic for today's Al-Akhbar so I will just summarize key points. 1) The propaganda about Hajj Amin has only been intensifying: not motivated by history but by the desire to besmirch and stigmatize the Palestinian people and their just cause.  Netanyahu is borrowing from the body of propaganda trash literature produced by Zionists.

Witness this book by Barry Rubin and Wolfgang Schwanitz: Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East.  It says on page 6: "After their (Hajj Amin and Hitler) meeting, they concluded the pact of Jewish genocide in Europe and the Middle East, and immediately afterwards, Hitler gave the orders to prepare for the Holocaust". The worst part is that this trash was published by Yale University Press.  I mean, we have a record of the meeting and there was no discussion of the Holocaust and Hajj Amin discussed very specific political matters, and he typically asked for support but he was too dumb to realize that Nazi government was not in any way interested in lending a hand to the Arab people.

In his definitive biography of Hiter, Ian Kershaw does not even mention Hajj Amin once in his massive book. Not once. Notice in the Zionist historiography, Alfred Rosenberg, the real anti-Semitic genocidal "thinker" of the Nazi regime, and the one who had an impact on the hateful mind of Hitler, takes a back seat to Hajj Amin.

Look at this reference in Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the rise of Radical Islam by David Dalin and John Rothmann about Hajj Amin's days in Berlin: "As the Mufti was driven down the Wilhelmstrasse, adoring crowds of Palestinian Arab expatriates lined the streets to cheer and pay homage to their revered leader, the Grossmufti von Jerusalem". (p. 5).  Adoring crowds of Palestinian Arab expatriates in Berlin? How many of them were there? 3 to 4 Palestinians exactly?  Worse, notice that Hajj Amin becomes Hitler's Mufti. Pretty soon Zionist fabricators will render it like this: Hitler will become Mufti's Hitler.  All these writings are really Nazi apologia of the likes you see in the writings of David Irving and other Holocaust deniers.

2) Hajj Amin was not the only Arab who met his Hitler or Nazi leaders because he was the enemy of the enemies of the Arabs in the Arab East.  Shakir Arsalan also met with Nazi leaders and established relations with the Nazi regime.  (Read the account in William Cleveland about the relationship between Arsalan and Nazi leaders although Cleveland makes it clear that Arsalan was less corrupt financially than Hajj Amin who kept asking the Germans for more funding in his fancy dwelling in Berlin.  In fact, Arsalan prepared perhaps the first comprehensive Arabic translations of Mein Kampf but it was never published (see Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World by Jeffrey Herf, p. 42).  We don't know if a manuscript still exist and why the Nazis never used it.  Is it because Fritz Grobba (a key Middle East expert at the German government) warned of how Arabs will see the racism against them in the book?  Not sure.

Palestinian leader, Musa Alami, also met with German officials although we don't have a record of the meeting and Alami never mentions the matter in Musa Alami: Palestine is My Country: the Story of Musa Alami.  But the worst meeting by an Arab official and Hitler is by far the official representative of King Abdul-`Aziz, Khalid Al-Hud Gargani.  We have a record of the meeting: that was an Arab who basically discussed genocidal anti-Semitic plans with Hitler. The man even compared Hitler to Muhammad and told him that his battle against Jews is not different from the battle between Muhammad and Jews of Medina.

King `Abdul-`Aziz wanted to pursue a relationship with Hitler but was impeded by 1) his subservience to the British; 2) his desire to have one of his sons become King of Jordan and he wanted British support for that.  4) Arabs have been largely misled by Zionist propaganda which led many to think that Hitler was a friend of the Arabs and foe of Zionism.  Not true at all.  The Nazi regime in fact pursued a Zionist policy in the Middle East and supported the creation of Jewish state before it was formed (Rosenberg was the only raising a stink about that given his firm belief in the trashy Protocols of the Elders of Zion).

As Nicosia pointed out in The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, Hitler overruled his aids even after 1937 Peel Commission when Britain made it clear that it was pursuing a Jewish state in Palestine and called for continued support of Jewish immigration into Palestine. Nazi regime even indulged Zionist organizations in Germany because both were working for the flight of Jews into Palestine.

People in West and East miss a key aspect about Nazism: that its anti-Semitism was consistent with its Zionism: and that is true of many Western Zionists, including US and British officials and even southern Baptists of the US.  In one speech from 1920, Hitler said: "Jews should seek their human rights in their own state in Palestine, where they belong" (p. 28 in Nicosia).  Hajj Amin is guilty of ignorance and stupidity among other political sins.  I can go on but just wanted to share this.  And the Havana Transfer Agreement has been discussed in the literature.  If we rightly speak of (and against) appeasement to Hitler, the Zionists were clearly among those appeasers.

4) Zionist movement and later state tried hard to extract "confessions" from Nazi officials after war to basically admit that indeed Hajj Amin was the guy who founded the Nazi ideology and regime.  They tried so hard with Eichamann to get a confirmation and were very disappointed with his mention that he met him once in passing.  As for the constant references to Eichamann's deputy, Dieter Wisliceny, of course, he was more than willing in Nuremberg to basically say that it was not Hitler or the German Nazi were were responsible but that Hajj Amin did it all.