The Mystical Sand Book: Holocaust Revisionism explained for Leftists

I.                     Introduction: Left anti-Semitism?

Recently, the scandal – or pseudo-scandal – of ‘left-wing anti-Semitism’ in Britain has been making headlines around the world. I find the subject somewhat baffling: I am unable to determine whether these left-wingers – who are invariably white British, or Muslim, or Jewish – in the Corbyn Labour Party are real anti-Semites or not. My confusion stems from the fact that I perhaps stand too close to the subject: I have been a fully-fledged anti-Semite (according to the IHRA’s definition) for nearly twenty years, and as a result, I tend to evaluate the newfound anti-Semitism of the British Left (from what I’ve seen so far) as being rather weak and watered-down. But, I am told – by outraged conservatives, and certain sections of the British Left itself – that this new wave of left-wing anti-Semitism is really strong stuff.

It is my observation that what calls itself the ‘Jewish community’ habitually exaggerates anti-Semitism and attempts to make it out as worse than it is, and as a consequence, the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of anti-Semitism goes too far, as it makes virtually any discussion of Jews and Israel by non-Jews ‘anti-Semitic’, and thereby cuts off any criticism of Jews and Israel at the knees before it has left the starting gate. Quite possibly, any rules and regulations against anti-Semitism as defined by the IHRA cannot be complied with: given the definition’s broadness, its scope, one always – whenever one touches upon the subject of Jews, Israel, the Holocaust – runs the risk of falling of falling foul of strictures against anti-Semitism. One thereby has to ask if this effect was intended: did the framers of the definition want any intellectual who talks about the Jewish people to stand in danger of thinking of himself as an anti-Semite and thereby feel an accompanying sense of shame? Some religions strive to induce a false sense of guilt as a means of social control. Is anti-anti-Semitism a religion?

Most of the polemics and the back and forth on the subject of British left-wing anti-Semitism have appeared in the Weekly Worker, which is a left-wing tabloid (run by the Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee)) whose letters pages serve as the closest thing to a free-for-all discussion forum for the British Left – a kind of communist 4Chan: the editors will cheerfully print letters from just about anyone of a Marxist Left orientation, no matter how crack-brained or politically incorrect they are. In this the Weekly Worker shows a tolerance and restraint which is unusual for the Left, which cannot, to save its life, run a left-wing equivalent of Stormfront or 4Chan, because, being traditionally obsessed with control of discourse, it does not like discussion which threatens to wander off the reservation. We find plenty of free and frank talk on Jewish subjects in the Weekly Worker. But, in all the writings there and elsewhere by the British participants in the left-wing anti-Semitism scandal (men such as Tony Greenstein, Moishe Machover, Gerry Downing) and sympathetic onlookers (Jewish intellectuals such as Norman Finkelstein and Gilad Atzmon), I find little to no Holocaust denial: I see that they subscribe to the notion that, during WWII, Germany gassed six million Jews in giant gas chambers. One has to ask why this is so. These men have already travelled a great distance towards anti-Zionism, but will not make the final leap into Holocaust Revisionism. And it is only Revisionism which can defeat Zionism, because, as I will attempt to show in a moment, the Holocaust serves as the metaphysical foundation of the State of Israel, Zionism and Judaism itself.

I am here going to make the assumption that many on the Left stay away from Revisionism because they find it too hard: that is to say, it requires – because of the often poor presentation of its chief arguments on Internet forums – too much effort and time to comprehend, and on the surface of it, never seems to get down to core principles. From the outset, most Revisionists will bombard their readers with facts and figures, and references to documents, eyewitness testimonies and demographic studies which are usually obscure to the non-initiated. Worse, Revisionism seems to revolve around chemistry and engineering: it is not possible to cremate x amount of corpses of y amount of time, or the gas chambers at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor and other camps could not have functioned, were they real, in the way they are described in Holocaust literature. All this tends to overwhelm the casual reader. The average Marxist-Leninist will spend a great deal of time and energy on reading up on, for instance, the intricacies of the October 1917 Revolution in Russia – look at the libraries of commentaries the Revolution has produced  – but he will not waste precious time on Revisionism, a subject which does not lie within his traditional sphere of interest. So here I will try, for the benefit of my reader, to prune Revisionism to its essentials: no degrees in chemistry or engineering are required.

II.                   The Cabbage Fields of Death

To begin with, we must establish what the Holocaust is. It consists of three connected historical theses, none of which can be denied without calling the entire official Holocaust narrative into question. The first is that Hitler and the NSDAP leadership ordered the extermination of Europe’s Jews, as outlined in documents such as the Wannsee Protocol of 1942; the second is that this extermination, which did take place, was accomplished primarily through gas chambers disguised as showers, and (on the Eastern Front) mobile gas chamber vans (there was shooting there as well – this is what is called the ‘Holocaust of bullets’); the third is that six million Jews (or one third of world Jewry) were killed, five million in Europe (nearly 3.1 million of them Polish) and one million in occupied Soviet territory. (As to what happened to the corpses: in Europe, most of these were disposed of in crematoria, and in the USSR, on bonfires).

Now, at this point, alarm bells should start ringing in my reader’s head: your first thought may be, ‘Is that what the Holocaust is? What he says above doesn’t sound right’. In fact, the above sounds a little… implausible, and I may be accused of twisting the story in order to give it that slant. But I can assure the reader that I have given a factual account. The problem of ‘ringing alarm bells’ comes from the fact that the Holocaust story in itself sets up a cognitive dissonance. The lay person who believes in it thinks, ‘Yes, I give this gas chamber story credence because every single book, newspaper, movie, TV show in the world says that it happened; besides which, there are plenty of witnesses who have been there, saw it happen, met Doctor Mengele, and have a tattoo on their forearms’. But on the fringes of their conscious awareness lurks another thought: ‘From my basic knowledge, most mass murders in the 20^th were carried out through starvation, disease and overwork, and to a lesser extent, through shooting and decapitation. I can’t understand why the Germans went about it in such a laborious and inefficient manner, why they used exotic weapons such as the gas chamber, and why they went to so much trouble to dispose of millions of corpses – wasn’t there a war on?’. This can lead to a real conflict in the mind of every person who thinks over the Holocaust for himself.

That conflict is compounded when you learn that the Holocaust story we hear today is a cleaned-up version of the original. Take this news article from the Ohio newspaper, the Youngstown Vindicator, from February 2, 1945 – a few days after the liberation of Auschwitz: ‘Reds liberate thousands in torture plant – Report says Soviets find “Nazi death factory” in south Poland’. Pravda correspondent Boris Polevoy tells us

Dissatisfied with early methods of execution by which victims were machine-gunned in trenches which they themselves had dug, the Germans ‘increased production by mechanizing the murder plant', Polevoy said.

 Perhaps the most elaborate apparatus was an electric conveyor belt on which hundreds of persons could be electrocuted simultaneously, then moved on the belt directly into furnaces.

 ‘They were burned almost instantly, producing fertilizer for near-by cabbage fields’, Polevoy said.

The above sounds like something taken out of a pulp novel, comic book or adventure movie. And it comes from an impeccable source: a Soviet journalist attached to Pravda (which is, incidentally, a Russian word meaning ‘truth’) who was there when the Russians liberated the camp. Peculiarly enough, most of the best evidence we have for the Holocaust -  the wartime reports of Polish exile and Jewish groups, and the evidence heard at the Nuremberg trials - abounds with tales of mass killings carried out by the Germans using cartoonish murder methods. (In the Nuremberg trial transcripts of June 1946, we read that the prosecutor Robert H. Jackson accuses the Germans of killing 20,000 Jews at Auschwitz with an atomic bomb).

Holocaust narratives from this period tend to deconstruct themselves, and the Youngstown Vindicator is a case in point. It starts off well enough, with descriptions which tally with the contemporary accounts we have all heard of the liberation of the camps and the discovery of the atrocities there; it speaks of ‘several thousand tortured, emaciated inmates’, who were ‘ghost-like apparitions blown to the ground by the slightest breeze, ageless and sexless’, of trains arriving in 1941, 1942, 1943 filled with ‘Russians, Poles, Jews, Czechs, French and Yugoslavs’ who were ‘jammed in sealed cars’. So far so good, as this accords with the footage we have all seen of the liberation of Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. But then we read something which sounds a little dubious: ‘Dozens of square miles are saturated with human blood and literally blanketed with human ashes’. Then: ‘The main department was the “smelting furnace” where, after elaborate torture, victims were burned’. Finally we come to the electrified conveyor belt which, after killing ‘hundreds’ of victims, drops them off into a furnace which then turns them into fertiliser for the Auschwitz cabbage gardens. All this could have happened, but seems highly unlikely.

It raises the question as to what the men who put these stories together were thinking: did they really believe that newspaper-reading public was that stupid? They must have, and furthermore, they were correct in their assumption: Europeans and Americans at that time accepted whatever appeared in a newspaper or book as gospel. But one cannot argue with success: mixing in absurdities with facts worked for the Allied and Russian propagandists of the time. In this sceptical age, they would have been howled down.

III.                 The Sand Book

In most essays on the Holocaust, the Holocaust Revisionist will attempt to refute it by reference to forensics, documents and demographics. Here I will not take this route: that is, I will not attempt to ‘refute’ the Holocaust, and as stated before, I will not be discussing autopsies of concentration camp cadavers or the chemical composition of samples taken from Auschwitz chamber walls. I will instead talk about how the Holocaust relates to the Jewish religion.

The most remarkable thing about the Holocaust story is that it matches – to an extraordinary degree – prophecies made in the Babylonian Talmud which were written some 1500 years ago. According to the Talmud, at some time in the future, Gentiles will murder a vast number of Jews by throwing them into ovens and burning them to death. But dead does not mean dead in this case, as the murdered Jews will magically return to life, and God, seeing their sacrifice, will allow them to reclaim the lost Kingdom of Israel. And as to the number of murdered Jews, it is – as you may have guessed – six million. The name given to this event, it is, of course, the Holocaust. (The word Holocaust means ‘burnt offering’ or ‘holy sacrifice’ or ‘burnt offering to God’, and it comes from the Greek word kauston, which means ‘to burn’).

The below 4Chan post sums it up: 

Elie Wiesel in his autobiographical novel Night (1960) records that the Germans tried to kill him four times at Auschwitz, once by throwing him into a giant fire pit in the ground (which he miraculously survived). Wiesel’s use of this image – a Jewish man being thrown into a pit of fire, from which he emerges unscathed – is no accident,  as Wiesel studied the Torah as a youth and evidently incorporated imagery from the Talmud into his account. (Jewish folk literature influenced the writings of Wiesel and other survivors as well: Jewish folk tales often depict extraordinary persecution of Jews by Gentiles and are coloured by an absurdist and surreal tinge. We could call the strange quality of these stories ‘Kafkaesque’, but that would be putting the cart before the horse, as according to the arguments of some literary scholars, much of Franz Kafka’s work stems from motifs drawn from Jewish folklore).   

A number of points arise from all this.

1.       These Talmudic passages explain why the number of Jewish fatalities always stands at six million. If you compare the death toll from, say, the Great Leap Forward in China, or the famine in Ukraine in the early thirties, you see all sorts of figures bandied about. As a science, demography does not always gives us the precision we would like, and it would stand to reason, then, that the Holocaust death toll would fluctuate. But no: it always stays the same. And it must stay the same, because otherwise it would not conform to the prophecy of the Talmud.

2.       We also have the same explanation as to why the official Holocaust narrative insists that the majority of corpses were disposed of in ‘ovens’ and by burning. (Now, crematoria differ from ovens, but the Talmud – if the Holocaust narrative is true – gets it mostly right). The six million needed to be ‘burned’ for the ‘burnt offering’, the ‘burnt sacrifice’, to take place.

3.       If the Germans in WWII did not murder six million Jews, and did not throw the corpses into giant ovens, then reality did not conform to the prophecy, and Zionist Jews – that is, the Jews who wanted to create the lost Kingdom of Israel – have pulled a fast one on God. If I were God, I would be displeased by this, and if I were today’s Jews, I would fear their God’s wrath – as their God, to judge by what is written about Him in the Old Testament, sounds like a vengeful fellow. The Holocaust is sustained by the active belief of Jews and non-Jews, which is why the ‘Jewish community’ seeks to outlaw disbelief in it.

4.       The death and resurrection narrative of the Talmud prophecy explains why so many Jews have ‘survived’ the Holocaust. Given that over one million people died in Auschwitz, survivors of the camp should be as rare as hen’s teeth, and yet, they are legion, and they all have the same story to tell (they all dodged the gas chambers by a whisker, they all met and spoke to Dr Mengele, etc.). To take an analogy from WWII: we know that, according to the official historical record, only a few thousand German soldiers survived the encirclement and destruction of the 200,000 men in the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad in the winter of ’42 – ’43, but let us suppose that soldier after soldier from the Sixth Army had turned up alive straight after that catastrophic defeat: I would begin to doubt either the official record or at least those soldiers’ claims that they had served in the Sixth Army. And yet, when it comes to Holocaust survivors (and Auschwitz survivors in particular), we are not allowed to express any such doubt. The most puzzling thing is that starvation, exposure and overwork in any death camp (with or without gas chambers) would destroy one’s body and lower one’s life expectancy severely, and yet, many of the Auschwitz survivors have lived to a ripe old age some seventy years after the event. But all this can be explained by the religious aspect of the tale. The facts have changed to conform with the religion, because according to the Talmud, millions of Jews must survive the immolation so as to reclaim Israel. And so we must overlook the self-contradictoriness of this miracle.

5.       You cannot believe in the Holocaust without believing at the same time, in Judaism. Suppose that someone tells you that they are not Christian, that they do not subscribe to Christian religious beliefs, but at the same time declares that they believe single word in the Book of Revelations, and that the apocalypse foretold in there is just around the corner – then they would be guilty of a self-contradiction. People who believe in the Holocaust – which is mostly everyone – find themselves in the same boat as that Christian. If they believe that one part of the Talmud is true, then they must believe in the rest – all 22 volumes of it. They are, rightly understood, Gentile followers of Judaism, and they must accede to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 as it was, after all, God’s will.

We understand, now, why the IHRA and other Jewish groups see Holocaust denial as an attack on Jewish identity. The Holocaust can be identified with not only Zionism, but Judaism itself – it can be said constitute the very essence of both. If you deny the Holocaust, you deny Judaism and Israel’s right to exist.

The consequence of this is that, if the Holocaust was disproved and the story was no longer believed in, Israel would be forced to give back the West Bank to the Palestinians, and may even cease to exist altogether - a happy outcome for the Left, which for the most part seems to regard Israel as the most racist and evil state in the world.

IV.                The Bourgeois Influence

But even if, as in the above scenario, Israel were to vanish, and the Palestinians were to be liberated – and have their homeland returned to them – leftists would be aggrieved, as the worldwide spread of Holocaust Revisionism would give a great impetus to the German nationalist (that is, Neo-Nazi) cause and strike a blow against anti-Nazism and anti-fascism. In the past forty years, the opponents of German National Socialism – which is just about everybody of any political persuasion – have, in their efforts to prosecute German National Socialism and propagandise as to why it is a bad thing, invested nearly all of their resources in the Holocaust story. Anti-Nazism has come to pivot on the Holocaust, whereas, during the war, it did not. A survey of all the books, articles, plays, movies, novels, museum exhibitions on the Holocaust will reveal that it only attained its prominence in the decades following the war: as the 4Chan post indicates, while plenty of references to the Holocaust of the Jews and the six million Jewish dead-to-be proliferate in the media dating all the way back to the 19^th century, the Holocaust did not by and large enter the public consciousness until around the 1970s, when it became the central exhibit in the prosecution case against German National Socialism and the main reason for opposing German fascism and for supporting the State of Israel. And because almost everything anti-Hitler is tied up in the Holocaust story, once the buttress which is the Holocaust is removed, the case against National Socialism collapses, and National Socialism’s opponents will need to cast around for other reasons to damn it.

The left-wing reader will interject at this point and note that the Left long opposed German fascism before the Holocaust was said to have occurred, and this is true enough, but the Left in 2019 in its current polemics against fascism has largely forgotten the antifascist writings of the Stalin-Trotsky era; it has come to rely overly much on wartime and post-war atrocity propaganda. The problem with that strategy is that once one experiences doubt regarding the Holocaust, one begins to doubt the associated atrocity stories as well. Take, for example, the case of the unfortunate SS man Oswald Pohl who was convicted at Nuremberg – and then hung – for, among other things, steaming to death inmates of Treblinka in ten steam chambers and making doormats out of their hair. (The steam chambers also appeared in the acclaimed work The Black Book: The Nazi Crime against the Jewish People (1946), in which the Germans were accused of parboiling, frying, electrocuting, and gassing Jews, and also suffocating them to death in vacuum chambers). It is possible that, even if the gas chambers never existed, the steam chambers may have, but that seems unlikely given the lack of hard forensic evidence for both. Could it be, then, that the prosecutors at Pohl’s trial were making it up? And the Jewish groups who authored The Black Book? And what of the wider claims such as the one made by the Poles, who insist (even to this day) that, during the war, the Germans gassed three million Poles as well as over three million Jews? As the Holocaust story unravels, the circumference of doubt widens.

How does all this relate to the Left? The Left has bought the entire Holocaust narrative for what seems to me to be two reasons.

The first is that the Left (and here I run the risk of alienating the left-wing reader) may pride itself upon being free-thinking, rational, and ‘red-pilled’, with the ability to see through the lies perpetuated by the bourgeois and capitalist political and economic system, but the truth of the matter is that it is not as free-thinking and independent-minded as it believes itself to be. It has been more influenced by the Western ‘bourgeoisie’ than it acknowledges. To explain. After the Russian liberation of the camps in Eastern Poland, the Soviet Union helped get the death camp propaganda ball rolling with breathless reports of German atrocities: Red Army war correspondent Vasily Grossman reports that large numbers of Jews were murdered in a basement in Treblinka, in an Edgar Allen Poe-esque ‘chamber of moving knives’ that cut the Jews into pieces; the bodies were cut up, burned and piled into heaps of ashes ‘twenty to twenty-five metres high’. (He also describes ‘In one place Jews had been chased into a pond full of acid… Their screams were so terrible that local peasants abandoned their homes’). But, even though the Soviets turned camps such as Auschwitz into exhibits of fascist crimes, communists in Eastern and Central Europe after the Nuremberg trials seemed largely uninterested in pushing the death camp narrative further: they did not convert it into the Holocaust narrative we are familiar with today. No: it was the Western half of Europe, and America, and the ‘bourgeoisie’ there, that founded the Holocaust story and perpetuated it through an endless campaign of Holocaust ‘education’ (really, indoctrination) which seemed to have reached a peak in the 1990s. The Left in Western countries received the full brunt of this along with everyone else, and it would have been a miracle had the Left not been sucked in by the Holocaust story (I myself remember being profoundly moved watching Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) in the cinema). This highly sophisticated campaign was carried out with a political intent. It goes without saying that the Jewish groups that sponsored the films, exhibits, museums, plays, etc., were all fervently pro-Israel. After all, the underlying message of Holocaust ‘education’ is that the Palestinians will simply have to put up with the theft of their country and their dispossession in the West Bank - because Nazis, because gas chambers, because the six million, because God gave the Jews the land. But times have changed. Now, thanks to the Internet, growing numbers of people (especially insouciant young people) are showing more and more scepticism towards the Holocaust narrative, and this is despite all the mandatory Holocaust ‘education’ classes and trips to the local Holocaust museum. But the Left remains stuck in the 1990s – in the pre-Internet era.

The second reason why the Holocaust narrative holds such sway amongst the Left lies in the Left’s antipathy to German National Socialism (that is a given) but also to Germany. Anti-imperialism forms one of the center-pieces of Marxist doctrine, and Germany, as well as being one of the founders of Western civilisation, was one of the biggest imperialist powers, which makes it one of the world’s worst offenders. (In Leninist speak, ‘imperialism’ refers to the white Western countries which partitioned the world – the coloured world – between them by around 1900; after the onset of the Cold War, it refers to one country only: America; after the end of the Cold War, it refers to – take your pick: America? China? Russia?). The Holocaust narrative fits in neatly with the Marxist narrative: an imperialist and capitalist power descends into madness and turns on an innocent and helpless minority, and carries out a cold-blooded extermination of it using the most modern and advanced industrial methods (insert thought-clichés regarding capitalism, modernity, etc., here). The Holocaust is what happens when you don’t have socialism! (Marxist socialism, that is, not the socialism of the ‘national’ kind). It was too easy, too tempting a target. And the fact that the Holocaust had been carried out by the German National Socialists, among the worst (and most effective) enemies of Marxism, made the story doubly appealing. 

One can understand, then, why the Left normally stays away from Holocaust Revisionism. But in my view they should embrace it, for the simple reason that, as it stands, the Holocaust story is an affront to the most basic standards of reason, evidence, proof.

Suppose that, 75 years ago, a gang of desperadoes rob a bank which is quickly surrounded by police, and, as what was intended to be a quick robbery turns into a siege, the gang takes twelve people at hostage, one of whom dies of a heart attack. The police storm the bank, free the hostages and arrest the gang and put them on trial – not only for armed robbery, but for first-degree murder of the person who died from the heart attack (in what should have been at the most an involuntary manslaughter charge). In addition, the gang are also charged with the premeditated murder of the eleven other hostages, even though all eleven survived. As evidence for this mass murder (which never happened), the prosecutors use photographs of the heart attack victim’s corpse, documents supposedly found at the gang’s hideout, and a confession coerced out of one of the gang’s members by torture or threats to his family. The final piece of evidence, which onlookers regard as the most compelling, is the eyewitness testimony of the eleven murdered people themselves, who all put in an appearance at the trial. At the conclusion of the trial, the gang members are either sentenced to death or life imprisonment. No-one spoke up for them – after all, they were admittedly bad characters, had made many enemies, and should have been in jail for other crimes – and decades later, they are still regarded as guilty, because, among other reasons, the survivors of the siege and their descendants will tell anyone who will listen how the gang took a dozen people hostage and murdered them in cold blood.

The reader can deduce that the above is an allegory for what happened to the Germans after the end of the war: the gang of robbers are the Germans, the police are the Allies and Russians, and the hostages are the Jews (and perhaps the Poles). I think the story can be used to understand why precisely it is that the Holocaust story is so objectionable. Standards of justice and law come into it, and ethics as well – is it right or wrong to use unjust and unlawful methods to take down a criminal gang? But more important than that, in my view, is that normal standards of reason, evidence and proof were breached. We are told that Polevoy’s, Grossman’s, Wiesel’s and Jackson’s obvious lies are in fact true, and axiomatically true, and anyone who professes disbelief in them is either insane or a cynical political operator who is twisting the truth, with malice aforethought, for Adolf Hitler (‘Telling lies for Hitler’, to quote the title of Richard C. Evans’ book on David Irving). This brings about a confusion for which ‘cognitive dissonance’ is too mild a word: a more apt term for it would be a mental rupture which causes a splitting of the mind. (And there is a word for that: schizophrenia).

But this is no accident, as theology tells us that confrontation with absurdities and unreason can assist one in making a leap into religious faith – in the case of the Holocaust, the Jewish religious faith.

V.                  Reactionary and Theocratic

 In his now-forgotten book Strategies of Revolution (1974), Régis Debray surveys some of the insurgencies of WWII and the post-war period: the anti-Nazi resistance in Europe, Costas-Grivas’ EOKA in Cyprus, the FLN nationalists in Algeria, the 26^th July Movement in Cuba, and the Irgun in Palestine. He writes, ‘The techniques of underground resistance are one thing, the various ideologies underlying them quite another’, and characterises the ideology of Irgun as a ‘Reactionary and theocratic Zionism’.

He sums it up correctly, but his choice of words would, were he a British Labour Party member today, lead to his expulsion and blacklisting. The Left in the seventies and eighties could afford to be much more cavalier – and outspoken – regarding Israel and Zionism than it is now; for one, Holocaust indoctrination had not quite sunk in and sensitivities to anti-Semitism – real or imagined – had not been raised to a fever pitch. But now the British Labour Party has been given over to the ideology of Irgun, and any Labour Party leftist who disputes that ideology’s ‘Reactionary and theocratic Zionism’ shall be punished. This state of affairs was brought about, not by Labour’s acceptance of the IHRA’s definition of anti-Semitism, but by the Left’s acceptance some forty years ago of the six million, the ovens, the sacrifice to God: the rot had set in long before Jeremy Corbyn, Momentum, Labour Against the Witchhunt, Jon Lansman...

What, then, is the answer? It certainly is not left-wing anti-Zionism, which has been going on for a long time. Take, for example, this essay from over thirty-five years ago, by the American group Line of March:

The root of the problem is that the progressive, anti-imperialist movement in the US has consistently conciliated Zionism (liberal, ‘progressive’ Zionism of course!) and has refused to break with it as a thoroughly reactionary and chauvinistic movement that, in order to accomplish its dubious political goals, has become the handmaiden of imperialism in the Middle East. Contrary to the biblical nonsense about what God has promised his ‘chosen people’, Israel has, since its establishment in 1948, constituted, in the main, a European settler state and an advanced outpost of imperialist interests in the region. All the fanfare about Zionist ‘socialism’ and kibbutzim (which has conspicuously faded over the past decade) does not alter this fundamental fact one iota. [‘The Palestinian Revolution and the Struggle Against Zionism’, Line of March: A Marxist-Leninist Journal of Rectification #13/14, March-April 1983]

This sounds like something straight out of the Weekly Worker, and no doubt would be deemed ‘anti-Semitic’ (especially with its reference to ‘biblical nonsense’) by the IHRA.

In one remarkable passage, we learn that accusations of ‘left-wing anti-Semitism’ are nothing new:

As Marxist-Leninists we must base our analysis and line on a concrete class and political assessment of the Jewish community and its politics. In doing so we can not allow ourselves to be cowed by demagogic charges of anti-Semitism. Indeed, one of the chief of functions of the Jewish identity movement so far has been the attempt to hold the left hostage to the accusation of anti-Semitism. The mythology promoted by such groups as the New Jewish Agenda is that, at best, the Left has become ‘insensitive’ to anti-Semitism, that it has abandoned the struggle against it, and that it frequently permits its opposition to Zionism to spill over into anti-Semitism.

 Of course, when warnings on anti-Semitism are raised from within the Left, they do not take the explicitly reactionary form of the Perlmutters’ arguments. Indeed, they rarely take a concrete form at all. Rather they are generally raised as a ‘concern’ with the implicit intention of fostering an ideological conciliation of left wing Zionism. Although unspoken, this, we believe, is the real ‘concern’ of those who raise the specter of ‘anti-Semitism on the Left’. And to the extent that the US communist movement lacks a clear and thoroughgoing line and analysis of the Palestinian revolution and the struggle against Zionism, we will continue to remain vulnerable to such demagogic blackmail. [Ibid]

Here we find the theses of left-wing anti-Zionism expressed with admirable clarity and vigour. And the results, nearly forty years later, we can all see: Israel is still standing and left-wing Palestinian sympathisers are still being denounced for anti-Semitism, real or imagined. We can safely say that for the past forty years the Left has scarcely landed a blow against the Jewish State and Zionism. Why is this, one may ask? The answer is that they have not availed themselves of the deadliest weapon against ‘Reactionary and theocratic Zionism’, and that is Holocaust Revisionism. 

Strategy and Tactics for 2015: Winning Over the Left on Islam

I recently penned an article on the Charlie Hebdo massacre for another site. In it I played with a few ideas - booting them around as though they were footballs - and put forward an unusual one: an alliance between the Far Right and the Far Left against Islam.

Definitions are all-important in politics, and in order to clarify what I meant by an 'alliance', I have to define what the 'Far Left' and 'Far Right' (in the West) are. In the article, I analysed the main political tendencies in the West today and identified three: Islam (which has been brought to Western soil by millions of Muslim immigrants); the Far Right (a broad designation which includes everyone from neo-Nazi skinheads to Geert Wilders); and the liberal democrats (socialists, communists, anarchists, progressive liberals on the Left and libertarians, neoliberals and conservatives on the Right). The liberal democrats, or liberals, as I call them, act in partnership with Western and Israeli Jewry.

Both categories (Jewish and liberal) overlap, of course, and we find plenty of Jewish conservatives, neoconservatives, neoliberals, communists and anarchists. But there is a portion of the Jewish intelligentsia which preoccupies itself exclusively with (what Gilad Atzmon calls) 'Jewishness' and for this group within Jewry, 'Jewishness' overrides everything else - including politics. Think of Benjamin Netanyahu or Bernard-Henry Lévi. Even Atzmon himself, I would argue, hasn't managed to escape his 'Jewishness' - most of his writings are about it.

If we were to recap the political history of the West for the past 80 or so years, we would arrive at this summary. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Far Right (fascism and extreme conservatism of the Petain and Franco type) fought a pitched battle against liberals (Roosevelt and Churchill) who worked together, then as now, with Jewry (Roosevelt's and Churchill's political and financial backers). The liberal-Jewish partnership acted in concert with the third force, the communists (who, at the time, served the purposes of a foreign power - Russia). The liberal / Jewish and communist coalition managed to defeat the Far Right, although they couldn't destroy it entirely. As the years passed, the Soviet Union faded away and its followers in the West dispersed. The liberal / Jewish alliance became the winner, the sole power in Europe. But it made a crucial mistake: it allowed millions of Muslims to emigrate and thereby the formation of a new political power on European and Western soil. As we have seen from the Paris massacre, Islam in the West challenges the state's monopoly on coercion and violence; it has been doing so for quite some time and will be doing so for a long time into the future. As to whether or not the liberal opponents of Islam (and their Jewish coalition partners) will emerge victorious from a struggle against Islam, the answer is no, by my estimation. That bleak assessment is shared by many of the liberals, most of whom, of course, won't voice it publicly.

Today's unusual political situation has shaken up the status quo. The Jewish side of the Jewish / liberal partnership usually likes immigration of any sort, but Islamic immigration, and the formation of Muslim ghettoes in Europe, 'makes Jews nervous'. As for the liberals, the dominant faction of that group wants as many as immigrants - Muslim, African, Indian, Mestizo, you name it - as possible, but a minority within the liberal camp is beginning to have second thoughts about the Muslim.

As for the Far Right, the tide is beginning to shift in its favour. The decline of the American empire has led to a slackening of the liberals' grip on Europe; the European Far Right has managed to acquire itself some breathing space. On top of that, Far Right ideas - on race, immigration, Jewry, the Holocaust, WWII - have spread like wildfire. We can see this merely by looking at the comments sections in the online news every day: an establishment media article will appear denouncing PEGIDA, and the comments section will be bombarded by criticisms - from sometimes hundreds of different posters - tearing the article to shreds. The liberals, who organise the anti-PEGIDA, pro-Islam counter-demonstrations, don't compete against this and show no signs of wanting to do so.

Having said that, the Far Right hasn't yet taken power in any Western country, and among the reasons for that is that it lacks allies. Often it's the case that one political tendency will need the aid of another to attain power. The NSDAP needed Hugenberg's DVP (German People's Party) in 1933; the Czech communists, the Czech social democrats in 1948. Even the Bolsheviks relied upon the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries for a time, and Lenin's brand of Marxism was built upon an alliance between the workers and the peasantry.

In order to compensate for its lack of allies, certain sections of the Far Right have - for at least 15 years - attempted to appeal to the Jewish side of the Jewish and liberal alliance. That is, they have tried to steal away Jewry from the liberals by offering them blandishments - more support for Israel, more protection for 'nervous' Jews from Muslims. The parties which take this route - Wilders' Party of Freedom, Åkesson's Swedish Democrats, Le Pen's Front National and others - seek to buy respectability. This has made the liberals furious, because the Zio-Populists are impinging on their territory: the Jews are their friends, not the friends of the right-wing radicals.

This 'Wilders strategy' is leading nationalists down the wrong path, however. The Zio-Populists do more good than harm, and even the professional anti-Islamic intellectuals and publicists (some of them Jews) such as Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, Dr Bill Warner, Bat Ye'or, Daniel Pipes, Ibn Warraq do more good than harm - at the least, they raise the racial consciousness of Westerners. This is why the liberals despise them and accuse them of 'racism' (even though Islam is a religion, not a race). But, even though the Zio-types do raise awareness, and they do infuriate the liberals, we nationalists - especially those of us on the neofascist and neo-Nazi side - shouldn't feel obliged to follow their example. My argument is that, instead of trying to win over the Jewish side of the Jewish / liberal alliance, we could try another target: the radical Left. They, perhaps more than any political tendency, stand to lose the most under Sharia. They will come to a realisation of this, and, I predict, will eventually back away from Islam.

I make this prediction on the basis of Islam's past. During the Islamic invasion of North Africa, Palestine, Syria, Iraq and Anatolia in the 7th and 8th centuries, there were, no doubt, some Christians in those countries who held that, because Islam and Christianity are 'Abrahamic' religions, Christians and Jews would be treated well under Islam; but hopes of a peaceful co-existence were dashed once Muslims achieved absolute power. The Left today belong in the same category as those Christians. Over time, they'll wake up - they'll have to. It's at that juncture that we on the Far Right can step in and offer our hand in friendship.

The Paris massacre constitutes a turning point, because most of the victims belonged
to the Left and the bourgeoisie - the Left's own class. As a result, the Left has begun to withdraw from Islam, albeit at a glacial pace. One can't see any changes yet. The Left keeps a tight lid on debate, if their websites are anything to go by: you don't see any leftists admitting, 'Perhaps we were wrong to invite Muslims to join our rainbow coalition' - no. They stick to the same line: 'The problem isn't Islam, it's Islamophobia'. Nevertheless, one can hear a few dissenting voices.

II.

We find ourselves far away from the tipping point - what the supply-side economist Jude Wanniski calls the 'margin'. The Left aren't going to distance themselves from Islam any time soon. The question is - given that Islam contradicts their doctrine - why they haven't already done so.

The answer lies in the leftist ideology. All followers of Marx to a man, the leftists believe that the capitalist system is exploitative, brutal, wicked and cruel. To them, it resembles the system we see in the classic movie, The Matrix (1999), in which robots - the former slaves of the humans - keep humanity captive in suspended animation and farm them for battery acid. That movie is an allegory of the Marxist view of capitalism, and leftists do really see themselves as being like the rebel heroes Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne. Theirs is a righteous cause which sweeps all before it. They believe that the struggle for 'social justice' is the most important thing in the world and that class - and class war - override all ethnic, national and religious distinctions. They see humans as interchangeable, deindividualised and deracinated economic units. That's why they stand on the side opposite to nationalists, who in their eyes are, like Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving), working to maintain a vile, inegalitarian and exploitative system. Racialism, nationalism, opposition to Islam, only serve to deceive the working classes and divert them from the only thing that matters - revolution.

It's here that we need to distinguish between Marxism and Marxist-Leninism. The former tells us that the revolution against the capitalist system is inevitable: the transition to socialism and the 'dictatorship of the proletariat', and then to pure communism and the 'withering away of the state', constitutes a final progression - as final as the transition from the Cretaceous to the Palaeogene. The capitalist system, the bourgeoisie, opponents of socialism and the revolution, will all wind up in the dustbin of history. Marxist-Leninism improves upon Marxism insofar as that it contends that the Russian revolution of 1917, the Chinese revolution of 1949 and other revolutions stand as confirmations of Marx's theory - they serve as proof that unstoppable global Marxist revolution is on the way, first in the Third World, then the First.

But, in the late twentieth century, the Marxist doctrine suffered two blows: the collapse of the USSR and the Eastern bloc in the period 1989-1992, and the backsliding of China into capitalism after 1976. Marxist theory made no provision for those catastrophic events: according to the theory, socialism could no more de-evolve back into capitalism any more than the Palaeogene could revert back to the Cretaceous.

After the collapse of communism, orthodox Marxist-Leninism (that is, pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese Marxist-Leninism) in the West disappeared virtually overnight. But the Left today makes the claim that the events in Europe and the former USSR didn't affect it at all, because, according to the Left, many of the Marxist-Leninist regimes should never have been regarded as Marxist, or even Leninist, in the first place. Even before the collapse of the USSR, Marxist theorists such as Trotsky, Mao and Hoxha put forward the notion that, after some point in time - either after the ascent of Stalin or Khrushchev - the USSR had become 'Stalinist' and had 'degenerated' into a 'bureaucracy', or had turned 'revisionist', 'bourgeois' and 'state capitalist'. We recall how, at the end of Orwell's Animal Farm (1945), the pigs transform into humans - and capitalists. Orwell intended this to be a metaphor for the USSR after the death of Lenin, and Animal Farm, rightly considered, is a Maoist parable.

As I shall explain later, it's necessary to examine the claims of the Trotskyists and the 'anti-revisionists' in detail. If we are to do so, we shall see that they are wrong (in Marxist terms, that is).

The Trotskyist / Maoist / Hoxhaist theory contradicts Marx and Engels, who never said that a socialist state, after a revolution, would suddenly and magically transform (or rather, de-evolve) back into capitalism as though the revolution had never happened: we've already covered that point. A bigger error is that the theory turns Marx on his head. Maoists and Hoxhaists argued that the USSR had devolved into a 'bourgeois' and 'capitalist' state because of the ideas of its leadership. The 'bourgeois' ideas, the 'bourgeois' essence, of the CPSU leadership (and the leadership of sister communist parties) meant that the Soviet economy had become 'state capitalist'. In their view, the 'bourgeois' and 'capitalist' Khrushchevs and Brezhnevs exploited the Soviet workers and extracted surplus value. But in Marxism, categories such as 'bourgeois' and 'capitalist' are applied only in an economic context and pertain only to economic functioning. They don't refer to thoughts, ideas: one can't think oneself into being a bourgeois or a capitalist. Furthermore, ideas themselves only reflect the economic - consciousness springs from being, not the other way around. If the USSR really had turned 'state capitalist' and the CPSU 'bourgeois' in 1956 (after Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalin), something dramatic must have happened to the Soviet economy: perhaps state enterprises were sold off to capitalist oligarchs, or capitalist enterprises were allowed to compete against state ones. But, as we know, nothing remotely like this happened in the USSR before Gorbachev and Yeltsin.

The 'anti-revisionist' theorists like to argue that even nationalisation of 99% of an economy doesn't equal Marxist-Leninism, which is true enough. But the converse is also true. Let's suppose a hypothetical Marxist-Leninist party could take power in some country and refused to abolish property - should such a country be regarded as socialist and Marxist-Leninist because of the Marxist-Leninist thoughts of its leadership? According to the 'anti-revisionist' theory, the answer is yes. But in reality, the Marxist-Leninist character of a state does depend on the extent of nationalisation, and even a bourgeois-ruled capitalist country which has nationalised 99%, or even 80%, of its economy is well and truly on the path towards some form of socialism or another. Likewise, if a country such as China privatises most of the state assets and allows competition, it can't rightly be characterised as Marxist-Leninist.

The conclusion to be drawn is that the 'anti-revisionist' theories don't hold water. Obviously, the Trotskyites, Maoists and Hoxhaists concocted these theories for political purposes - to argue that only their brand of communism deserved to be called Marxist and socialist.

As to why this so relevant to the political situation of the Left today, before 1991, a number of Western Marxists subscribed to the 'anti-revisionist' theories and formed little sects around them, and after the collapse of the USSR, these micro-parties and sects survived and flourished - they make up the bulk of the left-wing formations in 2015. They still hold to 'anti-Stalinist' or 'anti-revisionist' theories and still believe that they, and only they, are truly socialist, i.e., Marxist-Leninist. The Trotskyite or 'anti-revisionist' view is that, circa 1970, the governments of Moscow, Beijing, Havana, Hanoi, Belgrade, Tirana, Prague, Bucharest, Budapest, Berlin, Sofia, Warsaw may have christened themselves Marxist-Leninist, but they weren't really Marxist - they were 'Stalinist' or 'state capitalist' and 'bourgeois'; the parties in those respective countries may have had millions of members who believed that they were Marxist, but this was a delusion. An insignificant sect in the US or UK has more right to call itself Marxist-Leninist than the parties of Ho Chi Minh, Tito, Ceaușescu, Brezhnev.

Their position represents the height of arrogance. But in all fairness, it's the obtuseness of these sects which allowed them to survive the collapse of the USSR - the mainline communist parties didn't. Perhaps one could explain the one-eyedness of the Left as an evolutionary adaptation. That is, just as certain animals developed sharp teeth and claws to aid them in the struggle for existence, Marxists have learned to block out reality so as to survive. They forever pretend it's still 1972 or 1982, when communist regimes existed and the communist idea still had some validity, and that enables them to keep going. If they did yield to the dreadful facts of 1989-1991, they'd cease existing.

So, in 2015, the Left finds itself in the following quandary. It remains addicted to Marxism - it can't let go of the 19th century Marxist political and economic theory. In turn, it can't let go of the 20th century Leninist model, because, after 1917, a political activist can't not be a Marxist and Leninist at the same time. And that means that the Left is caught in a bind. It has lumbered itself with a theory which postulates the 'inevitability' of revolution, socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat - the final (that is, no turning back) evolution from capitalism to socialism. In support of the theory and its apocalyptic predictions, it found confirming instances in Russia, China, Cuba and elsewhere. But then came along the events of 1989-91, which blew Marxist-Leninism out of the water. As a consequence, a radical left-winger today is restricted to two alternatives: either dump Marxist-Leninism or pretend that Maoism, Trotskyism, Hoxhaism and their variants represent 'true' Marxist-Leninism. Most left-wingers - especially those who have spent decades in the movement - would rather die than choose the first, so they opt for the second.

Surveying the leftist terrain today, then, we see that Marxist-Leninists bury their sands in the sand: they don't face up to reality. They don't answer the difficult questions - such as how would Trotsky have run the USSR differently from Stalin, how would Mao have run the USSR or East Germany in a 'non-revisionist' and 'non-bourgeois' way? How would today's Trotskyites, Maoists, Hoxhaists run a North Korea or Cuba any differently... It never occurs to them that perhaps the Stalins, Ho Chi Minhs, Titos, Kim il Sungs and Castros chose their respective paths out of necessity - that, the situation being what it was, there was no other way for a Marxist to proceed.

But they don't want to think along those lines, because that would require staring at their difficulties in the face and then coming to a realisation of the enormity of the task before them. That is, they would be forced to concede that they have their work cut out for them. This is why they tend to hash over the Russian revolution of 1917 over and over - they prefer to dwell on a time when revolution was easy. It's far more enjoyable to contemplate the Russia of the past than the present. That way, they don't have to ask the question, 'How is a second Bolshevik revolution to occur in Russia today?'. That's a question to which they have no answer, and to which, perhaps, there can be no answer. A return to communism in today's Russia seems unlikely, and one might say that if Bolshevism can't stage a comeback in the land of Lenin, it can't do it anywhere. Putin - a champion of state capitalism if there ever was one - may be a Stalin apologist, but Putin's Russia stands a long way away from communism, Bolshevism, Marxism.

The blinkered attitude of the Marxist Left goes some way to explaining why it can't reconcile with the Far Right on any point. The Left dwells permanently in the past. In regard to race relations in the US, the Left thinks that all of the USA is Alabama, 1963. As for immigration, the Left doesn't see what's happening in the West - wholesale demographic replacement - and persists in comparing the present wave of immigration to previous, far smaller ones, say, the immigration of Chinese labourers into California in the 19th century. On the topic of the Holocaust, the Left doesn't acknowledge that little to no hard forensic evidence for the existence of Hitler's WMDs - the gas chambers - has turned up since 1945. Finally, the Left can't reconcile itself to developments in its own history. It's an old joke on the Left that a Trotskyite is someone who doesn't understand that Stalin died sixty years ago; but all Marxist-Leninists, Trotskyite or not, have difficulty in recognising that there was a USSR after Lenin's death in 1924. After Lenin, the saint of Marxism, died, the USSR to them may as well not have existed - nothing of importance went on there. They likewise disregard the regimes of the Eastern bloc. According to them, communism was never tried in East Germany and Romania for forty years; those regimes were 'state capitalist' or 'bureaucratic' or 'Stalinist', not the socialism that Lenin intended, etc., etc.

Because of its isolation from reality and history, the radical Left has degenerated - it has become a sect. Many of its problems are due to the fact that the socialist idea itself hasn't much of a following since 1991: no mass movement stands behind it. Dramatic upsurges appear - in Seattle in 1999, in Wall Street in 2011 - only to then flicker and die. This represents a change from the past, when the masses found socialism to be a fresh and exciting idea. One could say with some justification that 'the workers' and 'the peasants' really may have wanted communism in Russia in 1917 or in China in 1949 (and more fool they). But hardly any of the 'working classes' in those countries today want communism. Unfortunately for the Left, socialism is an idea whose time has come and gone.

III.

Nevertheless, the Left endures, and one must reckon with it as a political force. The question is, how do we persuade them to join us? The difficulties of such a venture are compounded by the fact that the Left regards us on the Far Right as a race of demons. They dehumanise us. In part this reflects their frustration and pique: they know that the masses are on our side, or at least on the side of conservatives, when it comes to race, immigration and Islam. Whatever the reason, they don't want to talk to us - dialogue of any sort is impossible.

But they find dialogue even amongst themselves difficult. The Left admits that it could never put together a message board like Stormfront, a tremendously popular site where all the factions and tendencies of the Far can come together and engage in a civil (well, not always civil) conversation. The closest the Left have come to an all-encompassing forum is RevLeft, which is run by Trotskyites and sees more splits, quarrels and expulsions than probably any other message board in existence - RevLeft is a Trotskyite party in miniature. Administrative heavy-handedness, and an unwillingness to let any differences of opinion pass, mean that discussion is shut down before it begins.

On that topic, it is significant that many of the Far Left parties don't allow comments on their posts. Such a policy in this day and age - when websites have usurped newspapers - prevents any debate from getting off the ground. Today, participants in left-wing politics are treated as computers which need to be programmed with the 'right' Marxist-Leninist thinking; their role is a passive one. Which explains why so many left-wing sites seem dead.

But while many obstacles exist, there are still plenty of avenues from which to approach leftists for a discussion. As a word of warning (before one enters the strange world of the Left), one must remember that, when dealing with the Left, one can't pick and choose when it comes to the elements of the leftist ideology: leftism is a package deal. In theory, one could be a Marxist and a Holocaust denier at the same time; in practice, it doesn't work out that way. If one buys into leftism, one gets, not only socialism, but anti-racism, feminism, homosexualism and the rest. So a nationalist is not going to feel comfortable talking left-wing people.

(As part of the package deal, a leftist today must take up a hyper-leftism or anarchism on the question of US race relations. Soviet communism had long exploited the negro question in the US as a means of promoting discord and with the intent of recruiting disaffected Afro-Americans into the communist party; we now know the extent of the communist involvement in the civil rights struggle. But events have moved on since those days. Reality has not only caught up with the Soviet communist position on race, it has surpassed it. That is to say, politicians, the churches, the media, academia, entertainment and all the other institutions today stand far, far to the left of the communists at the time of Martin Luther King. The radical Left, then, finds itself made redundant in today's America, which is why it pushes a hyper-leftism. To judge by the Left's propaganda, the Left today demand a) the banning of all US police officers from carrying guns (so as to prevent shootings of Afro-Americans) and b) the release of all Afro-American offenders from jail. To the Left, this would be 'social justice'. But here Marxism has been transmuted into anarchism, and on the topic of race, as on many others, many on the Left have gone crazy).

As to what rhetorical techniques to use, Dr Bill Warner has written an excellent little book, Can We Talk? A Manual of Persuasion about Islam (2010), in which he outlines some strategies for bringing over others (especially progressive, liberal-minded people) to anti-Islam. If a nationalist manages to have a dialogue with a leftist on Islam, Dr Warner's recommendations should be followed. The problem is, however, getting a foot in the door and engaging in a conversation on Islam in the first place. The way to do that is to get the leftists to realise that, like it or not, Islam works against their interests. One simply has to hammer home the point, over and over that while leftism and Marxism believe in progress, Islam does not - that Islam is literally reactionary, perhaps the most reactionary ideology of all. Islam can't be reconciled with Marxist-Leninism. In that regard, an instruction in the finer points of Sharia - especially Sharia in relation to khaffirs - will prove to be revelatory.

IV.

In conclusion, then, I'm fairly certain that, if the Far Right and Far Left in any Western countries were to sit down together and engage in a dialogue - with a view to reaching some sort of political agreement - they would find (surprisingly enough) that they tally on a good many points. Over time the Far Left would grow to appreciate the nationalists' arguments. It seems that many on the Left may be halfway over to our side already. According to the pro-Israel agitators and publicists on the conservative Right, the Left has been infected with anti-Semitism. We on the Far Right are anti-Semitic and have been so for many, many years. So, if the characterisation of the Left as 'anti-Semitic' is correct, the Left is only now beginning to catch up with us. Our job then is to persuade the Left to go the whole hog and embrace anti-Islam as well as anti-Semitism; then they'll come around to our side almost entirely.

Given the commonalities that exist between the Far Left and Right, why is it that they haven't they engaged with us already? The reason is twofold. They have become, since 1991, pathologically quarrelsome, disputatious and sectarian; they can't even reach an understanding amongst themselves, let alone with the evil white supremacists and neo-Nazis, whom they abhor above all. As well as that, they have become cocky and arrogant - and why not, because, in many ways, they are winning - and don't feel the need to negotiate with the Far Right, or, for that matter, any other grouping on the political spectrum. They think that their rainbow coalition of Muslims, gays, lesbians, transsexuals, illegal immigrants, indigenous peoples and environmentalists is sufficient enough to catapult them to political power.

But the fault doesn't lie with them entirely: part of it lies with us. Like the Left, we've forgotten much of our own history. Something we nowadays fail to take note of is the fact that many NSDAP writings were devoted to the problem of how to win over the Left. Today's depiction of National Socialist Germany emphasises only the repressive and coercive measures used to subdue the Left - street brawls with communists, the internment of communists in concentration camps; it neglects the political and intellectual propagandising which was designed to entice the workers and intellectuals away from the communists. In Mein Kampf, we read how Marxist workers will attend a beer hall speech by Hitler with the intention of breaking it up, and coming away, if not wholly converted to National Socialism, at least more thoughtful. Such is the power of persuasion. I think that the Far Right today doesn't believe in itself, or at least, doesn't believe that it has the ability (of a Hitler or a Mussolini) to alter the opinions of its political opponents through oratory. Instead, it has withdrawn into its shell. It's become convinced, or half-convinced, that its views are untenable and ugly - that the entire world is against it and will never, never change its mind.