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100% agree – thank you for this post
Agree 100% Richard.
Just back from a ‘Buxton Festival Fringe’ talk about Shirley William’s mother – Shirley William’s mother was a pacifist and I am sure would have condemned genocide – Shirley Williams went to Somerville (Oxford) in 1948 to read PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) and was the first woman Chair of the Oxford Labour Club, but how many know who her mother was and what she did? Her mother was a well known person, she grew up in Buxton and close locality. ; she trained as a nurse in Buxton, but the main details about her in Buxton are in the local Wetherspoons! – although there is a blue plaque a little up the road from where I live – this mother (Vera Brittain – 29 December 1893 – 29 March 1970) was an English Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse, writer, feminist, socialist and pacifist – her experiences in World War I led her to become a passionate pacifist. She did attend Oxford, but with the 1st World War (during which her brother, her fiancé and many friends were killed) she did not gain her degree until 1921- she did later marry, but her beliefs and experiences, along with her husband’s political views, made them a target of the Gestapo, who considered them a threat to Nazi Germany. I never met Vera Brittain, but the last time I saw her mother (Shirley Williams), she was sitting alone outside Buxton Opera House – I am sure that she admired her mother, but so sad that there is so little in Buxton to commemorate her mother, or indeed Shirley herself. I am sure that both mother and daughter would be horrified by the present ways of the world, and that both would have condemned genocide. Certainly Vera Brittain was not antisemitic, and I am sure that neither was Shirley. I was considering this during the talk – Diane Abbott is giving a talk on Saturday (literary side of the Buxton Festival), and certainly she knows the history, but I am sad that Diane did not experience this evening’s talk – a fascinating insight into, amongst other things, pacifism and the tolls of war, and it was well attended (talk by Kathryn Ecclestone – author). Meanwhile I recommend Diane’s book ‘A Woman Like Me’ – open, honest, in places funny, and well written. – I think that Vera would have approved.
That sounds fascinating.
Shirley Williams was the most chaotic politician I have ever met.
Vera Brittain wrote a best-selling memoir called “Testament of Youth”.
It was adapted for a BBC series which was broadcast in 1979. You can find some of it on YouTube.
It (the book) was very god. I don’t recall seeing the programme.
agreed @Andrew Bowers – she did write that – it was 1st published in 1933. Indeed I believe that she wrote 29 books. The book that was the subject of the talk yesterday was titled ‘Testament of Lost Youth’ (published November 2024), much of which was collated from Vera Brittain’s diaries, her letters and various historical sources. She would have been appalled by genocide.
I never thought I would live in a world where states are building concentration camps again, openly. So openly, they are touring them on social media and selling merchandise.
Are visions of Gaza causing anyone else to lose sleep? Night after night.
V timely. Thanks.
And thus we have come to a point where this needs to be stated.
The decendants of the victims of genocide committing genocide.
Given the right propoganda conditions/right ideology (othering) any group or nation is capable of committing it.
But we knew that from 1979 – Cambodia (arguably not so different from the Nazi one – mostly internal victims)
Wacthing Adam Curtis’ “Shifty”. He misses out a reality: Thatcher/the tories supported Pol Pot = she supported a genocidist (which was why the Daily Mirror appeal had to fly the food bought by the appeal from Luxembourg).
How times don’t change – current gov not just supporting Israeli genocide but arresting those in the UK that protest against it. (Germany +/- the same).
There are a range of reasons for this. Which I won’t go into now.
I suggest that Israel has pushed the button that potentially will lead to its own destruction.
Had it exercised restraint and had its supporters called for restraint then it may have had a decent future.
Absolutely.
Although, unfortunately, “pro-life” as a phrase has now been perverted by right-wing ideologues such that it is almost synonymous with misogyny.
Caitlin’s current post details the proposed prohibition of all support for Palestine/criticism if Israel in Australia. Churchill’s vaunted English Speaking Peoples are united in their collaboration with genocide, whatever the cost to supposed “values”, the rule of law and democracy.
This from Jonathan Cook:
‘First, the British establishment chose to conflate “Israel” and “the Jews” – actually an antisemitic sleight of hand that makes all Jews responsible for Israeli crimes, even those Jews who reject the notion that Israel represents them.
Now, the establishment wants to conflate “the IDF”, Israel’s army slaughtering children in Gaza, with “the Jews” – an even more antisemitic sleight of hand that makes all Jews responsible for the genocide currently being committed by Israeli soldiers.
There is a converse process.
First, those people, including Jews, who rejected Israel as a colonial, apartheid state – one oppressing and ethnically cleansing Palestinians – found themselves smeared as “antisemites”.
Now, those people, including Jews, who struggle against western collusion in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, like members of Palestine Action, find themselves smeared as “terrorists”.
All of this verbal deceit is designed with one end in mind: to unmoor us from reality, leaving us confused, passive and ripe for manipulation by a western establishment feeding us lines from their script.
Don’t fall for their ruse.
It looks like a genocide because it is a genocide.
And Israel looks like a violent, settler-colonial state precisely because it is a violent settler-colonial state’
Much to agree with
I would ask every Labour MP who has remained silent about Israeli war crimes (every member of the government and far too many backbenchers), especially if they are or have been supporters of LFI, to read up on the story of the Warsaw ghetto.
One is not permitted to draw parallels between the behaviour of the Israeli government in the Occupied Territories and that of the Nazis, under pain of being accused of “Holocaust Reversal” so of course I do not do so.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto
This Wikipedia account (do read it all because it is the totality of the account that affected me)- it made the hair on the back of my neck prickle, as I read it, but of course there are no parallels whatsoever with any current situation in the Middle East.
Not the initial bombing attacks on densely populated Jewish areas of central Warsaw, not the forced relocations in both directions, of Jews and Poles, not the fence, not the wall, not the planned starvation, calculated to the calorie, not the executions, not the forced transfer to transit and extermination camps. No parallels at all.
It’s a horrible story. In the 1940s the rest of the world stood together to oppose it at great cost globally, then and now. But we were too late for the 400,000 Jewish victims of the Warsaw ghetto.
And because of that and other horrors, the West vowed, “never again”.
So of course, nothing like it has ever happened again. Because if it had, the Allies who developed all those post WW2 Conventions and Courts would make a bloddy loud noise about it, wouldn’t they? They would want to stop it, wouldn’t they?
So nothing like the Warsaw ghetto is happening. If it was, we’d be all over it wouldn’t we? Calling out war crimes and genocide. Because we said, “Never again”.
So I don’t need to worry about Holocaust Reversal accusations. The Warsaw Ghetto and its uprising, and its destruction was a unique, never to be repeated event, isn’t that so Mr Lammy?