Simon Guy and Rob Ferguson spoke to Leslie Baruch Brent, who fled Nazi Germany as a child, about how quickly racist ideas can take hold and why it’s crucial we continue to challenge them today.
What are your memories of your childhood in Germany in the 1930s and how the climate changed?
With negotiations over Britain’s future relationship with the EU now under way, Theresa May still hasn’t spoken out to unilaterally guarantee the rights of EU nationals currently living in Britain. Instead the Tory government has stated that it wants to wait until it gets an offer from EU member states securing the rights of British nationals abroad. People’s lives, their relationships, homes and future plans, are all being used by politicians as bargaining chips.
The rise of Donald Trump is symbolic of a growing confidence on the populist right. With elections approaching in Europe and Theresa May heading into the Brexit negotiations with the aim of restricting migration, Michael Bradley lays out a plan for the kind of anti-racist movement we need.
The election of Donald Trump has sent shockwaves across the world. For many, Trump’s victory is part of a seamless growth in support for the populist right. His demagogic rants about “building a wall” and protecting US workers by “putting America first” have been reflected by similar figures in country after country.
To lead is to foresee, someone once said. This applies to phenomena such as the Football Lads Alliance (FLA), covered in Socialist Review last month. Too many either ignore the FLA or have a complacent attitude to what is a serious matter.
There have been protests by anti-racists against the election result in Germany last month. Far right Alternative for Germany (AfD) received 12.6 percent of the vote.
This gave them 94 MPs in the German pariliament. Although one, a former leader, immediately left the party and became an independent.
The MPs include Beatrix Von Storch who found infamy when she supported shooting refugees who approached the border. When defending her comments she said, “The use of firearms against children is not permitted,” but “women are a different matter.”
Claims about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party have corrupted the need to not only confront the real anti-Semitism initiated by Donald Trump’s administration but, as John Rose argues, the need to campaign for national dialogue between Palestinians and Israeli Jews.
‘Everything is allowed to him [the member of the gang], he is capable of anything, he is the master of property and honour…if he wants to, he can throw an old woman out of a third floor window together with a grand piano, he can smash a chair against a baby’s head, rape a little girl while the entire crowd looks on… He exterminates whole families, he pours petrol over a house, transforms it into a mass of flames… There exists no tortures, figments of a feverish brain maddened by alcohol and fury, at which he need ever stop… The victims…kiss the soldiers’ boots…[only to hear] drunken laughte
The election of a bigoted, right wing billionaire to the position of President of the US was a shock. Lewis Nielsen interrogates the various explanations being put forward for Trump's win.
Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election in November ranks as one of the biggest political earthquakes of recent times. People around the world are predictably shocked and disgusted that a racist billionaire bigot now holds the highest elected office. Trump’s words and actions in the two weeks since his election have sent deliberately mixed messages — but mostly they have been pretty horrifying. He has welcomed White Supremacists, anti-abortionists and rabid warmongers into his circle (not to mention family members).
The acquittal at Sheffield Crown Court of ten Asian men accused of violent disorder is a victory for anti-fascists everywhere.
The men were arrested along with two others following their involvement in an anti-fascist protest in Rotherham in September 2015.
In the aftermath of the Rotherham child abuse scandal, the town had become a target for fascist groups, who were escorted by police in a series of provocative marches in the town.
Inspired by the US, the Black Lives Matter movement took off in Britain over the summer. Harold Wilson looks at the issues that sparked the protests and at the activists who found themselves leading the charge.
A summer of street protests called in response to police killings of African-Americans began at the skate park on London’s Southbank in July. What began with 100 people or so gathered momentum, doubling in size. Soon 1,000 were on the move spilling onto Waterloo Bridge. Parliament Square was choked with protesters.
Other cities in the UK followed: Sheffield, Leeds, Huddersfield, Nottingham, Manchester, Leicester.
The rise of Black Lives Matter in the US marks an end to the Civil Rights movement's claim that black people in high places could be the solution for all, writes Brian Richardson
“Hands up, don’t shoot!” “I can’t breathe.” These slogans have emerged based on reports of the last desperate actions and words uttered by Michael Brown and Eric Garner before they died at the hands of the police in Ferguson Missouri and New York City in 2014. In the wake of these atrocities, a new movement, Black Lives Matter, was born and protests erupted across the US.
