Donny Gluckstein

We are daily buffeted by a bewildering mass of bad news stories on the racism front. The most bizarre example to date is Trump, the most powerful person in the world, retweeting the grotesque videos of Britain First, a tiny fascist grouping whose only claim to fame is that the murderer of Jo Cox MP shouted its name as he attacked her. To make sense of such events it helps to clearly understand what nationalism, racism and fascism are, how they are connected, and how they interact.

In October 2014 the Further Education Lecturers’ Association (FELA), a semi-autonomous section of the EIS teachers’ union in Scotland, called for national bargaining to bring equal pay to the level of the highest paid college. In March 2016 strike action began and after just one day these demands were won, along with a pay rise for all and no deduction for striking. By 2019 wages will have risen by 11 percent on average, with the lowest paid lecturers seeing an increase of at least 33 percent. We need to learn the lessons.

Hilary Benn proclaimed, “We are faced by fascists — not just their calculated brutality, but their belief that they are superior to every single one of us… They hold our democracy — the means by which we will make our decision tonight — in contempt.” He continued, “they need to be defeated. It is why, as we have heard tonight, socialists, trade unionists and others joined the International Brigade in the 1930s to fight against Franco. It is why this entire House stood up against Hitler and Mussolini. It is why our party [has] always been defined by our internationalism.”

The Left Side of History: World War II and the Unfulfilled Promise of Communism in Eastern Europe is a moving book, though initially it appears composed of disparate elements that do not comprise a whole.

There is the story of Frank Thompson, brother of historian EP Thompson. A Communist and British army officer, Frank was parachuted into Bulgaria and died as a partisan fighting its pro-Axis government.

The foundations of mainstream politics are crumbling and the results are both exhilarating and troubling. Alongside the recent election victory of Syriza, and with Podemos topping Spanish polls, there is the frightening growth of the far-right in many European countries.

The April edition of Socialist Review reported on a dispute by lecturers in the EIS union at Edinburgh College. A bullying management, led by an intransigent principal, wanted a major increase in class contact hours that would cost jobs and increase already chronic levels of stress. Through an all-out unlimited strike we won a pay increase of 7 percent for most, 22 percent for the lowest paid, plus a reduction in workload. Your readers might like to know what has happened since.

The enormous coverage given to the centenary of the First World War does occasionally recognise the tragedy of the conflict and the horrendous loss of life it engendered. Recent imperialist wars have been so disastrous that treating the First World War with unashamed jingoism would not be convincing.

The strike of further education lecturers at Edinburgh College has been described as "a classic example of how to conduct a strike" by the executive of the EIS, the Scottish education union. The bare outlines of what happened make impressive reading.

The conventional view of genocide is that such events are the product of pure evil, or of the collective insanity of individuals or entire peoples.

Sabby Sagall's Final Solutions: Human Nature, Capitalism and Genocide is an ambitious book which challenges this simplistic approach.

It looks at four examples of genocide (native Americans, Armenians, the Jews and Rwandan Tutsis) and seeks to explain them in a novel way.

This year, 2013, marks a tragic anniversary. It is 80 years since Hitler established his dictatorship over Germany. On 27 February 1933, shortly after his appointment as chancellor, the parliament (Reichstag) burned down in a fire which was probably started by the Nazis. This was the excuse needed to ban the Communist Party and begin mass repression. On 22 March the first concentration camp opened at Dachau near Munich.