Tag: nazis
Vote Labour for Genocidal Mass-murder like the Nazis did
UK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers. 
UK Labour Party Shadow Foreign Secretary repeatedly heckled at a speech to the Fabian Society over his and the Labour Party’s support for and complicity in Israel’s genocide of Gaza. 
Vote Labour For Genocide. Black US soldiers fought Nazis and liberated concentration camps—only to be treated like second class citizens back home
Original article by Natalia Marques republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.
Captain Ivan Harrison, Captain Irvin McHenry, and 2nd Lieutenant James Lightfoot of the 761st Tank Battalion (Photo: US Army) The US Army’s all-Black unit has gone down in history for heroism and are referred to by some as the “original Black Panthers”
The US Army’s 761st Tank Battalion, the first all-Black tank unit to see combat during World War II, has gone down in history as “one of the most effective tank battalions” during the war, leaving a legacy of fighting Nazis and liberating concentration camps. Yet due to the realities of racism and segregation in the United States, back home, these Black soldiers were treated like second class citizens. With a bold logo of a snarling black Panther emblazoned with the motto “Come Out Fighting,” this all-Black unit is occasionally referred to as the “original Black Panthers.”
Shoulder sleeve patch of the United States 761st Tank Battalion (Photo: US Military) Heroism abroad, oppression at home
The US Army did not officially desegregate until President Harry Truman signed an executive order after World War II. The Black soldiers of the 761st Tank Battalion were not allowed to serve in the same units as white soldiers. The Battalion’s soldiers also had to train in installations located throughout the highly segregated US South, in states such as Kentucky, Louisiana, and Texas, still under the shadow of Jim Crow.
Institutional racism characterized much of the training experience of the 761st Tank Battalion. Training for the men of the 761st lasted for almost two years, yet white units were sent overseas after far less training. As a result, the 761st Tank Battalion, which had been originally created for the purpose of maintaining support within the Black community for the WWII war effort, developed into one of the better trained units in the army and was later celebrated for its heroism.
61st Tank Battalion preparing for combat (Photo: US Army) “This was [US Army General George] Patton’s best tank unit and they didn’t get any recognition because whites did not look upon blacks as having any competence as fighting men,” writes athlete and author Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in his book about the unit, “Brothers in Arms.”
The soldiers of the 761st Battalion were subject to racist violence from their white fellow soldiers. A bloody “race riot” broke out while 761st soldiers were in training in Alexandria, Louisiana, after Black soldiers from Northern states, unused to the violence of the Jim Crow South, reacted to the brutal arrest of a fellow Black soldier by white military police. Soldiers in the 761st were incensed at the racist violence, and went as far as to commandeer six tanks and a half-track, but were eventually persuaded to stand down by their commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Bates.
The most famous member of the 761st Battalion was Jackie Robinson, who would go on to become the first Black player in Major League Baseball, heralding the end of racial segregation in professional baseball in the US. During 761st’s training in Texas, a White bus driver told Robinson to move to sit at the back of the bus, which Robinson refused—a move that resulted in his arrest. Lieutenant Colonel Bates refused to consider the court martial charges against Robinson. Robinson was subsequently transferred to the 758th Tank Battalion, also an all-Black unit.
761st Battalion member Jackie Robinson would go on to become the first Black player in Major League Baseball (Photo: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution) 761st breaches Nazi defenses
After training for two years in Texas, 761st was finally deemed ready for deployment overseas in 1944. The unit was assigned to General George Patton‘s Third Army. As the unit was about to enter into combat, Patton, himself white, made a speech to bolster their confidence, claiming that “Everyone has their eyes on you and is expecting great things from you. Most of all your race is looking forward to your success.” However, Patton expressed doubts about their abilities to his fellow officers, remarking that “They gave a good first impression, but I have no faith in the inherent fighting ability of the race.”
The 761st would go on to serve in the infamous Battle of the Bulge, the last major German offensive on the Western Front, in which it opened the way for the US 4th Armored Division into Germany, during an action which breached the Nazi German defensive Siegfried Line, rapidly advancing into the Reich. The 761st became one of the first US units to reach Steyr, Austria, which became a meeting point between the Black tank battalion and the Soviet Red Army on May 9, 1945.
Seeing Black soldiers rise out of their tank hatches reportedly put a unique terror into the hearts of the ultra-racist German Nazi soldiers.
Liberation of Gunskirchen camp
The 761st Tank Battalion, alongside the 71st Infantry Division, liberated the Gunskirchen concentration camp in Austria on May 4, 1945, which Nazi guards had fled days before. Captain J. D. Pletcher, a member of the 71st Infantry, recounted his experience at Gunskirchen, “When the German SS troops guarding the concentration camp at Gunskirchen heard the Americans were coming, they suddenly got busy burying the bodies of their victims—or rather, having them buried by inmates,” Pletcher recounted.
“Skin and bone… skin and bone and filthy rags and bodies crawling with vermin… row on row, endless… filling the square. And not a sound. Not one human sound came from those thousands of throats. Perhaps they hadn’t the strength to speak, even in gratitude. Perhaps words of thanks were long forgotten… forgotten under the lash and the pistol-butt, the abysmal degradation.”
Medical corpsmen of the US 71st Infantry Division look on as captured German soldiers remove bodies from inside a barracks in the liberated Gunskirchen concentration camp (Photo: National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD) It was only on January 24 1978 that the 761st Tank Battalion was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation by then-President Jimmy Carter for their service during World War II. Many individual members of the battalion also received individual accolades, including one Medal of Honor, eleven Silver Stars and around 300 Purple Hearts.
761st Tank Battalion staff sergeant Ruben Rivers was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military decoration for valor, his actions on November 16–19, 1944 in France, during which he was killed in combat. The 761st Tank Battalion was historic, as a Black unit striking fear into the hearts of Nazis and liberating victims of the most extreme forms of fascist violence. And yet, the stories of the soldiers’ training period and their challenges of being recognized for their bravery after the war are yet another example of the deep legacy of racism in the United States itself. Recounting the unique story of the 761st becomes even more crucial when marking Black History Month this February, and recognizing the long legacy of Black struggle against racism and white supremacy, at home and abroad.
Original article by Natalia Marques republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.
Will Elon Musk Do to the Federal Government What He Did to Twitter?
https://newrepublic.com/article/191037/elon-musk-destroy-federal-government
An unchecked, unelected oligarch is yanking wires out of the machinery that powers American life—and there’s no telling how many people will get hurt.
It literally sounds like the plot of a dystopian science fiction movie: The richest man in the world befriends—and helps finance—another rich man who becomes president of the United States, who then gives his plutocratic benefactor carte blanche access to the operations of the federal government. The bedlamite billionaire instantly zeroes in on the obscure little office that oversees the writing of all the government’s checks, thus ensuring that he has the power to bring down the U.S. and global economy and even, if he so wishes, topple said president.
Oh, and—he’s also a right-wing extremist who recently spoke to the far-right German political party whose leaders say things like “Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird poop in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.” He told them—with a wink-wink-nudge-nudge—that Germans placed “too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.” And then there’s the matter of that salute, which of course, he denies was what many people—even or especially among those who delighted in it—thought it was.
What does Elon Musk want with control of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service and its computers that write the federal government’s checks? Maybe it’s benign. Maybe he and his team just want to scrutinize the hundreds of millions of payments the government makes to individuals, businesses, other governments, nonprofits, and so on and root out inefficiency.
It seems awfully unlikely that it’s benign. Musk tweeted over the weekend that the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has existed for six decades and spends billions on poverty relief, disaster aid, economic development, and more, is a “criminal organization.” But Musk’s motives aren’t even the main point here. The main point is that even if it is benign, it’s unprecedented and antidemocratic.
…
Will Musk do to the federal government what he did to Twitter? The plundering of that platform was a crime, metaphorically, but at least it was (more or less) victimless. Here, there will be victims—immigrants, refugees, poor people, sick people, and many others who interfere with the schemes of the world’s richest man, who believes Germany should stop apologizing.
Read the complete original article at https://newrepublic.com/article/191037/elon-musk-destroy-federal-government
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then. Morning Star Editorial: Return to the real history and real lessons of the Holocaust
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/return-real-history-and-real-lessons-holocaust While the Morning Star’s copyright on this article is respected, I hope that they will excuse me fully quoting it.
Nazi soldiers separate Hungarian Jews on the ramp at Auschwitz-II-Birkenau in German-occupied Poland, May/June 1944, during the final phase of the Holocaust HOLOCAUST Memorial Day, the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazis’ Auschwitz death camp by the Red Army, is one of the most solemn days in the labour movement calendar.
The industrialised effort to exterminate Europe’s Jews, Roma and Sinti, alongside others the fascists deemed unworthy of life like gay, disabled or mentally ill people, remains the most systematic and calculated genocide in history. It must never be denied or downplayed.
Yet the meaning of Holocaust Memorial Day is increasingly obscured. Partly this is due to the rewriting of history.
Holocaust relativism presents the Nazis’ programme of racist mass murder as just one among many crimes of “totalitarianism,” postulating a false equivalence between Nazi Germany and the country which played the biggest part in its defeat, the Soviet Union.
The result is an equivocation between those who ran the death camps and those who liberated them — something masked in much British media discourse by referring vaguely to Auschwitz’s liberation by “the Allies” rather than the Soviets.
This has already regressed in some quarters into implied support for the Nazis or their local auxiliaries as anti-Russian freedom fighters, as we saw when a Ukrainian Waffen-SS veteran was applauded by MPs in the Canadian parliament, or when Estonia’s Foreign Ministry posted tweets denouncing the 80th anniversary of the Soviet assault on Tallinn, not mentioning the context that Tallinn was under Nazi occupation. Calling out such distortions of history should not, of course, blind us to the manipulation of the memory of the second world war by the present Russian government for its own purposes either.
The removal of context allows the memory of the Holocaust to be deployed cynically by Britain’s rulers too.
The UN resolution establishing Holocaust Memorial Day is clear that its message is a universal one: “The Holocaust, which resulted in the murder of one third of the Jewish people, along with countless members of other minorities, will forever be a warning… of the dangers of hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice.” It also “condemns without reserve all manifestations of religious intolerance, incitement, harassment or violence against persons or communities based on ethnic origin or religious belief.”
This text calls on us to apply the lessons of the Holocaust to all instances of racist persecution and all genocides.
It is disregarded by a British government which will not call out the Islamophobia of the far-right rioters who attacked mosques last summer, and which has been complicit in an assault on the people of Gaza recognised as a genocide by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and as plausibly amounting to one by the International Court of Justice.
Indeed, the memory of the Holocaust is misused to shield the state of Israel from accountability for its acts of war and ethnic cleansing, and it will be interesting to see which British politicians have the courage to condemn Donald Trump’s call this weekend to “clean out” “probably a million-and-a-half people” from Gaza to facilitate its colonisation by Israel.
So far removed are some self-appointed authorities from the reality of the Holocaust as a product of fascism and war that the Anti-Defamation League, quick to accuse Palestine solidarity campaigners of anti-semitism, could only admit to an “awkward hand gesture” when confronted by evidence of a fascist salute by Trump ally and tech tycoon Elon Musk.
Both anti-semitic and Islamophobic hate crimes are on the rise. Confronting that means returning to the real lessons of the Holocaust, as thousands will do at local trade union and political meetings this week, though our government will not.
That does not mean depoliticising it. The Holocaust was political, emerging from the ideology of fascism. When we say “never again,” we must commit ourselves to anti-fascism — which is sadly once again an urgent political cause.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/return-real-history-and-real-lessons-holocaust While the Morning Star’s copyright on this article is respected, I hope that they will excuse me fully quoting it.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then. dizzy: While Musk is correct that Germans should not feel guilt about their ancestors’ actions that’s not reason to erase history, to ignore facts and reality. He is a Neo-Fascist supporting Neo-Fascism.
Elon Musk Expresses Support for Germany’s Far-Right AfD Party—Again
This May Day, workers mobilized for Palestine
Original article by Natalia Marques republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.
Student workers of Columbia organized in UAW 2710 participate in May Day rally. Photo: Wyatt Souers On International Workers’ Day, workers around the world continued to join hands with the student movement to stand with Palestine
On May Day, workers around the world mobilized for the liberation of Palestine. “This May Day, workers of the world are called to declare their solidarity with Palestine, to denounce the Israeli Genocide, and to call for an end to all aggressions in the region and to all wars,” wrote the International People’s Assembly.
“Beyond the call for a ceasefire we must say no to the transportation of arms and arms caches to Israel. Workers in all industries – especially workers in the transport sector – that can withhold their labor in order to halt the continued slaughter of the people of Palestine are emphatically called to do so!”
The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa released a statement calling on workers around the world to mobilize for Palestine. “The working class are the creators of wealth, and it is the united power of the working class that has the power to overthrow hateful, brutal regimes like Apartheid Israel,” wrote the union. “On this Workers Day, we call on workers of the world to unite in defense of Palestine so that its people can be free, from the river, to the sea!”
“The working class in South Africa must celebrate the defeat of Apartheid, because its destruction was due, largely to the unity of workers, who used their labor power to collapse the system through rolling mass action, strikes and protest,” the union added.
Several Palestinian union formations have called the people in the world to action against the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza. This includes the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions, which in March called on US unions in particular to “be our voice and advocate inside and outside America.”
“What our people are experiencing and what workers and unions in particular, are exposed to is the most horrific catastrophe known to humanity in recent decades,” the PGFTU wrote. “We ask that you convey our message and give voice to the suffering of hungry, starving workers and their families—not just to the American people, not just to your unions, but to the entire world.”
Palestinian trade unions have also responded in support of the student movement for Palestine that has taken the world by storm. “The Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC) in Palestine extends our deepest solidarity to you, the revolutionary youth who are changing the world,” reads a statement of support from a prominent Palestine farmworkers’ union, addressed to the students movement around the world that is taking action in solidarity with Gaza. “We write to you from Palestine to tell you that your actions are resonating across oceans. In you, we see the echoes of our struggle, the echoes of our resistance, and the echoes of our hope.”
“Our people, along with all the workers and free people of the world, commemorate the first of May this year, at a time when they are subjected to the most brutal and fierce campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing, surpassing in savagery and bloodiness the fascists and the Nazis, at the hands of a group of murderers calling themselves an army for an invasive replacement entity, under the leadership, partnership, support, cover, and complicity of the American administration and the colonial Western imperial powers, the enemies of humanity,” wrote the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in a pre-May Day statement. “We send a salute of respect and pride to the university students all over the world, especially to the students at American universities, who are protesting against the crimes of the occupation and the support of the American administration for it, and who demand a halt to the aggression against the Palestinian people.”
Within the student movement in the US, university workers are mobilizing their unions to stand with their students in solidarity with Gaza. On April 29, within the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at the City College of New York in New York City, university workers organized under the Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY) held a town hall meeting to deliberate on how to use their labor power to support the five demands of the student encampment. The members attending the town hall organized a wildcat sick-out, in which union members will call in sick en masse to disrupt business as usual at the larger City University of New York (CUNY) system. Workers in the United States face a variety of strike prohibitions, including a nationwide ban on striking for political reasons rather than economic issues such as wages and benefits under the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.
Nevertheless, the PSC faculty at the town hall voted overwhelmingly to stage a sick-out. “At UT Austin, faculty did a one day job action in support of their students. Palestinian trade unions, National SJP, and National Faculty for Justice in Palestine have called for a mass job action on May 1st,” faculty wrote in a statement. “Our students are taking incredible risks to support the Palestinian people. They have asked for our help. We must stand ready to struggle alongside them, and to take these risks.”
Workers organized with the United Auto Workers, which also represents many graduate student workers across the country, staged a rally in Washington Square Park on April 26 in support of their students staging Gaza Solidarity Encampments at NYU, Columbia, and the New School.
Workers engaged in mass mobilizations around the world on May 1.
Thousands took to the streets in major US cities including Washington, DC and Los Angeles. In DC, demonstrators marched to the Gaza Solidarity Encampments at George Washington University.
‼️🇵🇸A massive May Day march in Los Angeles takes the streets for Palestine! pic.twitter.com/YfDrwNiBis
— Party for Socialism and Liberation (@pslnational) May 1, 2024
✊🏽🇵🇸RIGHT NOW: A massive May Day march is en route to the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at George Washington University pic.twitter.com/esXOVUrhqv
— Party for Socialism and Liberation (@pslnational) May 2, 2024
In New York City, unions such as the United Auto Workers and the New York Taxi Workers Alliance expressed explicit support for the Palestinian cause in a march of 20,000, which ended at the New York University Gaza Solidarity Encampment.
Havana, like every year, was flooded with huge crowds on May Day as President Miguel Diaz-Canel sent an explicit message in support of Palestine and the pro-Palestine student movement. “All our solidarity with the students in the United States, who have taken the side of justice, have come out to support the cause of the Palestinian people, and are brutally repressed on their own university campuses. Today our [May Day] is also going through Palestine,” Diaz-Canel wrote.
In Bogota, President Gustavo Petro made a special announcement during the May Day celebration in front of thousands of Colombians: the nation would officially cut all diplomatic ties with Israel.
Original article by Natalia Marques republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.
