Solidarity 094, 1 June 2006

Anti-Jewish riots in Britain, 1947

What follows is an account of the anti-Jewish pogrom in Manchester in August 1947. Britain still occupied Palestine and Jewish guerrillas were at war with the colonial power. Two British army sergeants were captured and, in reprisal for Britain’s hanging of captured Jewish fighters, hanged. A great outcry followed, the Mosleyite fascists found a new resonance for their anti-semitism. There were pogroms against Jewish communities in Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester. The text is from a book, Jerusalem Your Name is Liberty, by Walter Lever. Lever had been a member of the British Communist Party...

Why conspiracy theories sell

Thomas Carolan looks at the politics behind the Da vinci code “What crudeness, insolence, nastiness! A shop for miracles, a business office trafficking in grace.... But best of all is the papal blessing broadcast to Lourdes by — radio. The paltry miracles of the Gospels side by side with the radiotelephone! And what could be more absurd and disgusting than the union of proud technology with the sorcery of the Roman chief druid? Indeed, the thinking of mankind is bogged down in its own excrement.” Leon Trotsky, 1935 The Catholic Church, not too surprisingly, does not like The Da Vinci Code. It...

The life of Rachel Corrie

Robin Sivapalan reviews My Name Is Rachel Corrie, now showing at the Playhouse Theatre London It is three years since American International Solidarity Movement activist Rachel was deliberately ploughed down by an Israeli Defence Force bulldozer in Gaza while trying to stop Palestinian houses from being demolished. The ISM have now disbanded. Palestinian homes are still being demolished. And Rachel Corrie’s diaries have been adapted into a performance monologue. It is a genuinely moving play, and Rachel Corrie’s life and outlook is inspiring. The title comes from video footage of the activist...

A left dressed in feathers from Cold War hawks

Tom Unterrainer reviews Anti-Totalitarianism: The Left-Wing case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy, by Oliver Kamm “Intervention in Iraq was not strictly a ‘humanitarian war’: it was an anti-totalitarian war. It was a war in the cause of liberty.” Oliver Kamm’s work, characterised by this statement, is an energetic and closely argued polemical “left-wing” justification for Bush and Blair’s war on Iraq. His starting point is the historical precedence of opposition to fascism and the emergence and support for “collective security”. The “left” Kamm supports is the British Labour Party and its...

Sheridan declares civil war in SSP

ON 29 May Scottish Socialist Party leader Alan McCombes was freed from jail, where a judge had sent him after he refused to hand over SSP Executive minutes called for by the News of the World in the libel case brought by former SSP Convenor Tommy Sheridan. On 28 May, the SSP National Council had voted down the SSP Executive’s call on Sheridan to abandon the libel case, and decided to release the minutes. Sheridan had issued an open letter accusing fellow SSP members of the Scottish Parliament Rosie Kane, Carolyn Leckie, and Frances Curran of being “an unsavoury cabal of comrades at the core of...

Will be the human race

A more inspiring note to end on. At a recent protest outside Campsfield detention centre in Oxfordshire, an AWL comrade who has a particularly deep and booming voice sang the Internationale loud enough for those locked up inside to hear — and was met by a distant chorus of voices joining the song in their own languages.

Anyone but England?

I’m generally uninterested in anything connected to football — but a recent article by the SWP’s Keith Flett in tankie rag the Morning Star is really worth reading. Flett is quite literally a “man of letters” — he has a letter printed in the Guardian at least every couple of weeks, and apparently repeats this feat with numerous other publications, both bourgeois and leftist. Anyway, his latest wheeze on behalf of the SWP seems to be sucking up to the Stalinists via football commentary. Flett will not be supporting England in this year’s world cup. There are often racists attacks after England...

Our man in Havana

If a queue of Iraqi socialists and democrats is forming to volunteer for the assassination of George Galloway, there may be a few teachers’ union activists and anti-war campaigners to boost its numbers. It is widely known that Galloway failed to turn up when the Government secured its one-vote majority for “anti-terror” legislation in November 2005. Less well known, so far, are the votes he missed in May 2006, on the Education and Armed Forces Bills. 67 Labour MPs rebelled in an attempt to amend the Government’s plans to flog off our school system, but Galloway was not with them in the lobby...

Galloway blasts Blair

“Would the assassination of, say, Tony Blair by a suicide bomber, if there no other casualties, be justified as revenge for the war on Iraq?” According to George Galloway, who was being interviewed in the ‘upmarket’ lads’ mag GQ, such an assassination would be “morally justified” and “entirely logical and explicable” — and “morally equivalent to ordering the deaths of thousands of innocent people in Iraq”. As so often with Galloway, the first words to pop into my head were “Where do you start”? The most bizarre aspect of all this is the implication that Galloway thinks that the mass slaughter...

Taking the initiative

A new AWL branch organiser wrote in this week: “In addition to the ‘Stop the BNP’ meeting on Tuesday we leafleted rush hour bus users with a Workers’ Liberty leaflet on today’s strike, went down to the picket line this morning and did a paper sale in town. Working the bus queues and dropping leaflets to drivers was very effective (we distributed something like 500 of the leaflets), the T&G steward gave an interview for the paper this morning and we picked up a number of contacts for Iran/Iraq union solidarity on the stall — in addition to selling papers. We’re planning to call a solidarity...

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