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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

This was… inevitable

hat tip: Tim Evans 😉

25 comments to This was… inevitable

  • Paul Marks

    Indeed.

  • MikeR

    Livingstone is an old red idiot. But he’s historically correct that the Nazi’s initial policy in power was to attempt to facilitate the emigration from Germany to Palestine of German Jews. This was the Haavara (transfer) agreement made between the Nazi regime and Zionist German Jews in 1933.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement

    The policy of wholesale mass murder of Jews really commenced with the invasion of the USSR in 1941 when millions more Jews found themselves trapped in the territory of the 3rd Reich.

    A woeful level of historical ignorance, even among so called historians, of this “Zionist” Nazi policy has been made very evident in the furor of the last few days.

  • Mr Ed

    The Nazi policy towards Jews changed with the invasion of Poland, and became manifest with the attack on the Soviet Union and the Action Groups. The policy of voluntary emigration pre-War had become one of ‘forced emigration’ with the invasion of Poland, and then mass murder, and one should recall that Adolf Eichmann’s job title was something like Head of the Office for Jewish Emigration.

    Quite how Jews were to peaceably emigrate to British-Mandate Palestine in the context of the Mediterranean War and the battle for control of the Med wasn’t exactly clear, and the whole point of Mr Livingstone’s comments is that he suggested that Hitler went mad and started killing Jews, implying that he was rational beforehand.

    To call Hitler’s initial policy ‘Zionist’ is, in my opinion, a calculated effort to conflate Israel and Nazi Germany. There happened to be a co-incidence of wants, Hitler wanted the Jews gone, the Jews wanted to go (unsurprisingly). Any implication that Hitler supported Zionism is absurd and most likely calculated to smear Zionists.

  • Dom

    MikeR, if the Jews did leave Germany and set up there own country, and that country was attacked by the neighboring Moslems, would hitler have sent troops to defend his Zionist vision? Hmmm?

  • Nazi policy was to expel Jews in the early stages and exterminate them when the war meant they ruled enough masses to attempt wholehearted totalitarian rule. (See, for example, Hannah Arendt’s analysis that totalitarian rule needs huge numbers to operate on – that while Stalin could resume Lenin’s work as soon as he had consolidated his rule over the party, Hitler had to wait till the war’s conquests, and expectation of more, gave him enough to work on.)

    A minority of intellectual Nazis (mostly in the SD), attempting to provide Nazi behaviour towards Jews with a rationalisable and presentable face, came up with the idea that maybe Jews were evil because they were aliens – on their own soil, they’d be OK, and thus presented emigration to palestine as Ok-by-us. It was soon realised that a Jewish state might grant Jews in Germany citizenship (which would be horribly inconvenient) and in many other ways would be a nuisance.

    Hitler never took any of this seriously. he always knew measures against Jews would accelerate. The stage in which some fled to palestine was always just a stage.

  • shlomo maistre

    A public service announcement (particularly for the Ken Livingstones of the world):

    ארץ ישראל שייכת לעם ישראל

  • shlomo maistre

    Also… what Mr. Ed said.

  • lucklucky

    “But he’s historically correct that the Nazi’s initial policy in power was to attempt to facilitate the emigration from Germany to Palestine of German Jews.”

    So? He just didn’t killed them at time because it was not politically viable. That has nothing to do with him supporting Zionism or being a Zionist. That is like saying that American Slave holders helped created Blues and Jazz music.

    It is technically true but in either case the moral dimension is negative.

    What Ken Livingston and the Marxists are trying to do is to make a psychological connection,a known tactic of Marxism , but the stupid and connivent media and stupid people go along.

    What is not being said is that Ken Livingstone and other Leftists are what they are now because of Journalism.
    Specially of BBC, The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph and so on…

  • Mr Ed

    An interview on the BBC from the soft Andrew Marr with Labour MP Diane Abbott, who per some reports had an affairs with Mr Corbyn long ago when on a holiday in East Germany, from the excellent liarpolticians channel on YouTube.

    Is it me or is her rebuttal something along the lines of ‘Us, racist? Heil, no!’.

  • If ‘the 1930s expulsion of Jews makes Hitler a Zionist, does the ’20s New Economic Policy make Lenin and Stalin capitalists? Someone should ask Ken to confirm that, by his own logic, the Russian communism he so openly supported in the 80s, when it still ruled, was as capitalist in its early years as the Nazis were ever Zionist.

    The Nazis soon realised that a Jewish state would be a huge nuisance for them. How long will it take Ken &friends. to realise that if their middle-east buddies did in fact ever succeed in expelling millions of Jews from Israell to the US, not all of those Jews (especially after that experience) would vote for Obama or Hillary. Since that could have effects most undesirable for Ken&friends, how long before they, like the Nazis, become aware (insofar as they are not already) that while _talking_ of expelling millions to the US may remain very convenient, a different fate for these people will be necessary.

  • Above, at 6:02 pm, I wrote about “Hannah Arendt’s analysis that totalitarian rule needs huge numbers to operate on” as a resin Hitler delayed starting wholesale extermination of Jews. Although I find her idea interesting, of course, for both Hitler and Lenin/Stalin, there was the simple necessity of consolidating the power they had seized before they could use it on such a scale. The Russian sequence was War Communism, then the relative calm of the New Economic Policy, then the collectivisation of agriculture and after. The German sequence parallels it: brown-shirt brutality, then the relative calm after the night of the long knives, then kristallnacht and after. (Later, Mao was to follow a similar path, especially so to Stalin’s. both in what he did and the duration of the steps.)

  • Hitler once denounced the whole idea of a Jewish State because he didn’t want a “Jewish Vatican”

    I think he made the comment in 1939 or 1940.

  • lucklucky

    I want to precise what is my criticism of Journalism immoral behavior regarding Israel.

    Journalism punish Israel each time it saves their civilians and rewards Palestinian rulers careless and cynically treatment of theirs.

    Every rockets interception, every bunker, every warning signal, every fast medical team response, every live saved works against Israel in the Media.

    Civilization is effectively punished by Journalism.

  • “To call Hitler’s initial policy ‘Zionist’ is, in my opinion, a calculated effort to conflate Israel and Nazi Germany. There happened to be a co-incidence of wants, Hitler wanted the Jews gone, the Jews wanted to go (unsurprisingly). Any implication that Hitler supported Zionism is absurd and most likely calculated to smear Zionists.”

    – Mr Ed.

    Bang on!

  • JohnK

    Whilst there is a kernel of historic truth in Red Ken’s remarks, the offence is caused by his assetion that this showed that at one time Hitler supported Zionism. All Hitler supported was expelling Jews from Germany, after first expropriating all their property.

    Since the Zionists did not control Palestine, and Britain had that dubious privilege, the talks were never going to go anywhere. But supposing, in a parallel universe, Germany’s Jews had been deported en masse to Palestine, and that Britain had lost the Battle of El Alamein. Palestine then would have been at Rommel’s mercy, and does anyone think the SS Einsatzgruppen would have been far behind?

    But then hands up anyone who had not already worked out that Red Ken was a deluded commie boob?

  • lucklucky

    People continue to talk of these guys as such “deluded commie bob” like if he is an old uncle. Would you call a nazi a “deluded nazi bob”? No there is no such condescendence with Nazism.

    Ken Livingstone is a specially bad person.

    I am not trying to single you JohnK but why people think that Marxists are idiots and not bad persons?

    Almost 100 year after the coup in Moscow i think it is already enough time to consider these guys evil instead of stupid.

  • Ash

    Poor Ken. Every week in the Liebore party there is a random draw for who gets to make the most stupid comment, and Ken went and won. Damn…

  • Snorri Godhi

    …why people think that Marxists are idiots and not bad persons?

    Perhaps what they have in mind is “moral idiots”.

  • Nemo

    Ash, that draw must be rigged, considering how many times Ken’s won it.

  • JohnK

    Lucky:

    I don’t know Red Ken well enough to call him evil. He seems to like his dog, but then that does not prove much does it? I seem to remember another fellow who liked dogs, but who wasn’t nice at all.

  • lucklucky

    So it isn’t enough to call him evil by his Communist ideology and whom he rewards with support?

    Also i consider people that support rulers violence against own people evil. If Ken party was ruling Britain there will be a Gulag, Ken also supports Hamas, Heezbolhah that hate and use intimidation against Palestinians and Lebanese if they aren’t like they think they should. Starting with women and going from there.

  • MikeR

    About 60,000 German Jews settled in Palestine between 1933 and 1936 mainly as a result of the transfer (Haavara)agreement between the Nazi regime and German Zionists, probably about a tenth of Germany’s Jews. The opposition to this of Britain as the mandate power in Palestine effectively stymied the programme. Hitler wanted to make Germany “Jew free” and allowed his minions to utliize whatever method was most practical to achieve this – obviously in the early years of the 3rd Reich this could not include the sort of full on genocide programme implemented during the war.

    This does not mean early Hitler was more humane and less fanatical than later Hitler, it certainly doesn’t mean he was a Zionist, it simply illustrates that the Nazis aim of ridding the Reich, and later the expanded Reich, of Jews, led to policies fitted to the prevailing circumstances. For the same reason, the plan to force Jews into exile on Madagascar was abandoned because wartime conditions made it impossible; and the “impractical” wholesale shooting of Jews in the East gave way to “industrially” organized genocide using an extermination camp system, based mainly in Nazi occupied Poland.

  • jsallison

    I think it is thoroughly possible that over the life of the earth, every word ever used by humans at any time, will be encompassed by ‘Steiner’.

  • Johnathan Pearce

    The Telegraph today reports that as many as 50 Labour Party members have been suspended (based on unnamed sources, I should add). This isn’t, despite what some claim, a minor “rotten apples” issue: a significant chunk of Labour members hate Israel and are anti-semitic. I suspect in large part many of such persons are Islamists, such as those descendeded from immigrants or direct immigrants from the Muslim world where such views are sadly all too common.

    To some extent, this whole process has to be healthy in that decent liberal-left people (yes, they exist) can reappraise the kind of people they have associated with, possibly by switching parties, or starting a new one, etc.

  • Johnathan Pearce

    This does not mean early Hitler was more humane and less fanatical than later Hitler, it certainly doesn’t mean he was a Zionist, it simply illustrates that the Nazis aim of ridding the Reich, and later the expanded Reich, of Jews, led to policies fitted to the prevailing circumstances. For the same reason, the plan to force Jews into exile on Madagascar was abandoned because wartime conditions made it impossible; and the “impractical” wholesale shooting of Jews in the East gave way to “industrially” organized genocide using an extermination camp system, based mainly in Nazi occupied Poland.

    It is worth noting that uprooting people from their homes and sending them to places such as Madagascar was done not with any desire to save life, given the gruelling nature of the climate there.