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    Tony Greenstein: Richard Seymour's Journey to the Right Continues As He Abandons Class whilst Archived Message

    Posted by sashimi on October 23, 2020, 10:45 am

    - Glorifying the Attractions of Fascism

    (quote)
    There was no attempt by Richard to explain the origins of Labour's
    'antisemitism' campaign. It was if it had appeared by magic. An
    example of political spontaneous combustion. The idea of a
    deliberately co-ordinated and engineered campaign to destabilise
    Labour didn't occur to Seymour. The possibility of state interference
    completely eluded him. Seymour referred to the famous mural by Mear
    One, that was used by Luciana Berger to undermine Labour at the 2018
    local elections, as being automatically antisemitic. Not once did he
    ask how a mural, which had been erased for 6 years, had come into
    prominence just before the 2018 local elections. That, and only that,
    was the issue.

    When talking about Livingstone's remark that Hitler supported Zionism,
    Seymour changed his tune. No longer was it the case that 'at worst he
    made a clumsy attempt to say something that is true.    ' Now Seymour was
    of the opinion that Ha'avara, the Transfer Agreement between the
    Zionists and the Nazi state, was not so much a case of Hitler '
    "supporting" Zionism so much as using every expedient to expel Jews
    from Germany.'

    But this was not true. Ha'avara was agreed to by the Nazis as a means
    of undermining the Jewish led Boycott of Nazi Germany. For a time the
    Nazi government, at the behest of the Zionists, forbade Jews going
    anywhere but Palestine. The Gestapo acceded to the Zionist demands
    that those taking advantage of Ha'avara should only go to Palestine.
    Seymour got all of this horribly wrong. German Jews could always take
    their money out of the country. True there were massive confiscatory
    taxes which only got worse but Ha'avara made it worse, not better for
    Jews seeking to emigrate.

    According to the American Jewish Yearbook less than one in 7 of the
    nearly 450,000 German and Austrian Jews who got out went to Palestine
    (60,000) and that is larger than most estimates. Ha'avara was about
    the richest Jews, who could have gone elsewhere, not poor and working
    class Jews.

    Nor is it true that the Nazis didn't support the Zionist movement.
    They did, vociferously, against the 98% of German Jews who were not
    Zionists. When the Nazis arrested thousands of Jews after
    Kristallnacht, orders came the next day from Heydrich that Zionist
    Jews were to be released immediately. Zionist historian David
    Cesarani wrote describing how 'The efforts of the Gestapo are oriented
    to promoting Zionism as much as possible and lending support to its
    efforts to further emigration.    " (my emphasis)

    ...

    Seymour accused Jackie Walker, by attending the 'training session' of
    the Jewish Labour Movement on anti-Semitism, of waging a 'factional
    war'. Seymour describes her comment that Holocaust Day was not "open
    to all people who experienced a holocaust." as wrong. In fact Seymour
    was wrong. The holocaust in the Belgian Congo and Namibia are excluded
    as are all genocides before 1939.

    One unfortunate characteristic of Seymour is that he tends to
    pontificate about subjects he knows nothing about. For example Seymour
    quoted uncritically from a survey by the far-Right Campaign Against
    Antisemitism without asking whether it was designed to produce certain
    outcomes.
    (/quote)
    -- Cont'd at https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2020/10/richard-seymours-journey-to-right.html

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