I'm trying not to feel too depressed about politics. Unfortunately, my view of politics, looking at world politics over the millennia, is that we have been unusually fortunate in the UK for a long time and turned a blind eye to the cost to others around the world. I'm not confident those in power would have any qualms at all about squashing us if they thought that's where their advantage lay. As I type this, I think in some ways maybe we were better off when monarchy had more power and wars and nastiness were as between kings (e.g. WW1 between close relatives ruling Britain, Russia & Germany) because we could reward them with glorification, fancy uniforms, big parades etc.
It's all too easy, though, for any politician to get us to think we're nicer than others and therefore that we're right and whoever they paint as demons are wrong.
Let me show a different angle. It relates to the build up of Nazism and to logic not morality. Food for thought about now. For a moment, forget the nastiness that happened later, just focus on how the Nazis got support, on the build-up. You know all that stuff about the Weimar republic and inflation with wheelbarrows of cash? It was their part of what was variously labelled the Great Depression (American) or, for us now, with classic British understatement, our interwar years. Note that "The Great Depression" doesn't blame the American Government, nor our phrase now "The Interwar Years" but who mentions the same epoch in Germany without mentions of Weimar?
Now think of your ordinary, suffering, interwar German. He or his family went off to fight WW1. He was subject to the same propaganda as other soldiers. He had no reason to suppose the German cause was any worse than our cause, and it wasn't even the Germans that started the whole Europe-wide fighting, but boy did we make them suffer under the Treaty of Versailles. A treaty which, incidentally, the French and Germans broke before the Germans did.
So you're an ordinary German who's suffering. You see part of your suffering coming from the French and British. Good, politicians will be able to mobilise you against them, which will be particularly useful in the fight for third world domination by the German empire as against the British and French empires.
But who are you afraid of next to them? People with financial power and, from the other side of your country, in a pincer grip with the British and French, the Communists/Stalinists. The best known early communists were Jewish. You've got Jewish immigrants from the pogroms coming your way as well. Are they bringing their strange clothes, customs, politics?
And finance. There are those big bankers, aren't there? Rightly or wrongly, the Rothschild name has been known for a very long time now, well before that era, for its influence in banking across various countries. So the 'name' you, as a man in the street know, is a Jewish one.
Then there are the shops. Any of you here old enough to remember the days when if you were skint, you didn't use a credit card, you bought on tick? Or you could pawn stuff, which you still can. Now just for a moment think Shakespeare. Shylock in the Merchant of Venice. What am I on about? For a very long time in many Christian countries, usury was a no-no for Christians so Jewish people usually did it. For us now Jew = usurer is a strange mental association, but in the Blackshirt days of the 30s over here it would also have been a mental association, albeit not such a strong one.
So what do we get? The Nazis play to these fears. Curiously, Hitler protected some Jews, including his old family doctor, which suggests to me that it wasn't actually hatred of all that started it, it was fear and hatred of some Jews with a sense that you couldn't tell which. It also explains his support for zionism until it became evident that the Jews weren't going to get their Israeli homeland just yet.
And even in the early days of persecution, it was mostly about driving out, then about interning, and the 'final solution' was just that, a sort of "Oh hell, let's just be done with it." Not an original plan, a drift.
So I would argue that it was morally wrong, something we mustn't repeat, something we must learn from; but also that the danger is that it was logical.
Ah, but we wouldn't do something that was morally wrong just because it seemed logical, would we? Hmm, so it wasn't wrong, then, when Churchill diverted food away from Bengal, part of the British Empire, and turned down offers of food aid for them from two allies, saying it was more important to feed the 'sturdy Greeks', who, incidentally, were our allies, but not our responsibility unlike our king's subjects in Bengal. Still, the Bengalis were just brown-faced foreigners. Not like us white people. It was ok if 3 million of them died so we could fight our war. But no, our decisions weren't based on a fear of being defeated or on prioritising one ethnicity over another, were they?
So when I'm frightened of the way politicians and, more to the point, media moguls and their friends, play one group against another, one religion against another, one ethnicity against another, it's partly because people keep telling us about the morality, or rather amorality of the holocaust, not about the logic that led up to it.
Let me think, now, foreigners in strange dress with different accents and a different religion coming here as refugees from countries whose key players we're told are a threat to us? Hmm, is that 30s Jews or 2018 Muslims with darker skin? People with great financial power we're given to understand are having a big influence on us? Hmm, is that 30s Jews in communist countries, or is it 2018 Muslims in whichever's the oil country of the moment? At least we'll never have a Kristallnacht smashing up Muslim-owned shops, will we? Er...
No, it doesn't map on precisely, but I'm just saying that the lesson we never seem to learn from the past is not the danger of behaving immorally, but how seemingly rational behaviour can turn out to be immoral. We think we'd always make the 'right' decisions.
One reason I've been so upset about some of the Jewish groups in the UK piling into the anti-Corbyn campaign is that I think our best chance of keeping ourselves safe is different religions standing together. Here's wishing I were still religiously active (I stopped going to church a few years back because I got too angry with God) because if I were, I'd be trying to get more visible Jew + Christian + Sikh (etc) + Muslim unity going on. I see it in my own community. I've participated in a demonstration in the heart of our neighbourhood with spiritual leaders and community members together. Sure as hell, the media weren't interested. Gosh, vicar, priest, elder, rabbi, imam, humanist all together making speeches and waving placards? No, couldn't publish that.
A Jewish friend of mine died a year or so ago, so I'm not sure what's happening in his synagogue now, but there was some sort of set-up whereby local Muslims cooked meals for hungry people that were eaten in the synagogue and there were Christian food parcels or something. I'm not sure how it worked, but again sure as hell you wouldn't read about it in most of the MSM. That same synagogue had a rabbi who was very, very vociferous about what was happening with the demonisation of sick and disabled people. Again, a reason why I want the Jewish community not divided.
I don't know what the answer is. People like me that think a lot and analyse a lot aren't much use outside a media or academic environment. I don't have what it takes to be a politician. I just hope that if we have another Battle of Cable Street, I'll have the guts to turn up. I was too busy feeling sorry for myself over something to turn up to the anti-Iraq war protest/march and part of me knew the invasion was wrong.
