English reactions to immigrants now and 70 years ago

In 1917 the ‘Jewish‐Bolshevik’ threat replaced the Jewish‐German’ menace in British popular opinion. The Morning Post and The Times were in the forefront of the campaign to promote White Russia and attribute the Bolsheviks' rise to power as part of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. The press's antisemitic agitation was, however, limited in scope and, with the exposure of The Protocols in 1921, was relegated to extreme‐right publications.     

An NPD encyclopaedia

Henry Stimson, American Secretary of War during the Second World War, though not a rabid antisemite, strenuously opposed allowing Jewish war refugees into the US and objected strongly to American recognition of the Jewish right to a state in Palestine.     

Books

Some extreme right groups in Britain have become concerned about the possibility of nuclear war and are encouraging their members to organize for survival after an attempted ‘Marxist takeover’. With the extreme right's poor performance at the polls this move can be seen as a way of mobilizing fresh support.     

Germans who have learnt a lesson

Rabbi Meir Kahane's Kach party in Israel is unashamedly and aggressively racist. The first part of this article looks at how a minority Jewish ‘self‐defence’ movement in New York became a political party with a seat in Israel's parliament.     

‘Revisionists’ at odds

Two leading Jewish defence agencies were at loggerheads over the constitutionality of a statute permitting ‘religious corporations’ to discriminate on the basis of religion in all their hiring.     

Capturing Facades in ‘Conflict-Time’: Structural Violence and the (Re)construction Vukovar's Churches

Abstract

The siege of Vukovar in 1991 set the precedent for the urban warfare which characterised the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia. The destruction of urban religious heritage during the siege played a key role in ethnicising the conflict. Although the war is over, peace remains elusive—the city remains in ‘Conflict-time’ marked in part by competitive (re)construction; strategic neglect; and ‘neutralisation’ of religious architecture and sacral heritage. This article questions why Vukovar's churches became and remain flashpoints of contestation and seeks to understand their spatial and visual impact on this contested city.     

Jews in the Christian Gaze: Munich's Churches before and after Hitler

Abstract

Kauders sets out to examine three interrelated topics: the nature of antisemitism after the Second World War; the continuity in thinking about the Jews in the twentieth century; and the problem of responsibility inherent in any analysis of the events surrounding the Holocaust. In what follows, emphasis is placed on the Catholic and Protestant churches in the Bavarian capital of Munich, whose reactions to Jew-hatred before 1933 and after 1945 are studied in some detail. Several conclusions emerge from this investigation. Both churches embraced völkisch thinking before 1933, without approving of violent manifestations of racialist thought. Both Catholics and Protestants, whenever they defended the Jews before the rise of Hitler, did so in order to safeguard Christian dogma, and in particular the value of the Old Testament as well as the Jewish origins of Jesus and Paul. After 1945 clerics employed language that ignored events between 1933 and 1945, describing the ‘Jewish question’ as if the issue was still embedded in Weimar politics; they did so because they assumed that a majority of Germans had been innocent of any wrongdoing, so that a pre-1933 image of ‘the Jew’ (which did not allow for extremism and violence) could be re-adopted with impunity after 1945. Christian views began to change in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Jews were increasingly seen as Others who were to be respected as such. Although German-Jewish irreconcilability was thereby cemented, this shift also entailed an acceptance as opposed to a denial of the Jew as different from Christians and ‘Germans’.     

Revitalizing and de-territorializing fascism in the 1950s: the extreme right in France and Italy,and the pan-national (‘European’) imaginary

ABSTRACT

In this article Mammone explores a still relatively neglected story in the history of post-war neo-fascism, notably the attempts by some French and Italian right-wing extremists to revitalize fascist ideology after the war by means of two interconnected strategies, namely, radicalization (rejection of the democratic system) and ‘de-territorialization’ (in the sense of converting narrow fascist nationalism into pan-European nationalism). Mammone describes these project(s), as well as the influence of thinkers such as Julius Evola and Maurice Bardèche, and their location in the wider ideological context of the extreme right in the 1950s. The immediate outcome of this ‘de-territorialized fascism’ was the creation of an extreme-right international association, the Mouvement Social Européen, in which French and Italian activists played a central role. Mammone breaks new ground regarding the non-national dimension of extreme-right thought, a topic too often studied within the boundaries of a given geographical territory and nationalist ideological landscape. By utilizing a transnational framework, he also shows the continuous connections and interactions between the Italian and the French extreme rights.     

The technique of finding hostages

Most of the Austrian press was uniformly indignant about what it saw as ‘unjustified interference’ by the World Jewish Congress in the domestic affairs of Austria. The neo‐Nazi German press agreed. Elsewhere, the major newspapers and weeklies had no sympathy for the willingness of Austrians to hide from the consequences of Kurt Waldheim's deceptions.     

Eyes on the street: Civilian Joint Task Force and the surveillance of Boko Haram in northeastern Nigeria

Abstract

What does the ‘war on terror’ mean in a volatile local context in which soldiers have scant knowledge of the terrain and the identity of an adapting and potent guerrilla force that resembles the noncombatant population? This overriding question is addressed through a field-based study of the Civilian Joint Task Force (Civilian JTF) in northeastern Nigeria, a hybrid vigilante network of local ‘youth with sticks’ (kato da gora) and local hunters (yan faratua) working closely with the Nigerian military to identify and capture members of Boko Haram in their communities and in the surrounding bush. The article underscores the key role of the Civilian JTF as ‘knowledge brokers’ in sharpening up the counterterrorism surveillance of the Nigerian military.     

Tyndall's elite

The hidden language of race in British politics Frank Reeves, British Racial Discourse: A Study of British Political Discourse about Race and Race‐Related Matters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. viii +287pp. Appends. Bibl. Inds. £22.50.

Fascism on the periphery: ineffectual and insignificant John D. Brewer, Mosley's Men: The British Union of Fascists in the West Midlands. London: Gower, 1984. xii+159pp. Notes. Bibl. Ind. £13.50.

Intellectual ‘angst’ of the powerless Stanley Diamond (ed.), ‘The Jewish Question’. A special issue of Dialectical Anthropology, vol. 8, nos. 1 &; 2, October 1983.     

From apathy to obsession: the reactions of A. K. Chesterton and the British far right to imperial decline

ABSTRACT

Mulhall sets out to explain how, contrary to what one might expect, imperial decline was rarely a pressing issue for the British far right, usually falling below both the perceived threats of Communism and immigration on their list of priorities. By first explaining these unexpected findings and then placing them in an international comparative context, new evidence emerges that supports those imperial historians who subscribe to the ‘minimal impact’ orthodoxy regarding the effect of empire on the metropole. In addition, however, those aspects of the radical right that did concern themselves with imperial decline, namely A. K. Chesterton and the League of Empire Loyalists, are explored in depth, revealing a peculiarly British form of conspiratorial antisemitism that blamed imperial decline on secret Jewish power. This strand of conspiracy thinking, best articulated by Chesterton, is traced back to its origin so as to illuminate the continuity of ideas and ideologies between the interwar and post-war periods within the British far right. The result is an article that contributes to several existing historiographical debates and provides an exploration of a less well-known aspect of the work of A. K. Chesterton and conspiratorial antisemitism more generally.     

Neo‐Nazis’ hopes of Russia

Reporting on race: the ‘power to confirm a perspective’ Barry Troyna, Public Awareness and the Media: a Study of Reporting on Race, London: Commission for Racial Equality, 1981. 95pp. Notes. Append. Bibl. £2.00.

The universal basis of modern Zionism Shlomo Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism: the Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981. x + 244p. Notes. Ind. £9.95.     

Enoch Powell's appeal to the left

The campaign against the so‐called ‘ritual slaughter’ of animals has been hijacked by right‐wing extremists, including members of the National Front, in a bid to incite racial intolerance of Muslims and Jews. The arguments and the terminology used by some animal rights supporters, including the well‐known national organization, Compassion in World Farming, tend to encourage xenophobia and racism, engendering an ‘us’ and ‘them’ approach to the animal rights debate.     

No room at the inn: American responses to Australian immigration policies, 1946–54

ABSTRACT

After the Second World War, Australia introduced a new immigration policy based on the concept of ‘populate or perish’. Through the International Refugee Organization (IRO), 170,000 DPs migrated to Australia between 1947 and 1950, funded by the United Nations and the Australian government. Jews were largely excluded from this programme and the Minister for Immigration even prohibited the IRO from continuing to support the migration to Australia, based on family reunion, of individual Jewish survivors. In addition, the Australian government introduced other discriminatory policies that ensured that Jews remained only 0.5 per cent of the overall population. Based on archival research in the files of the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society and the American Joint Distribution Committee, Rutland and Encel analyse the entrenched racism in Australian society that contributed to these policies, and the reactions of the American Jewish leadership to them.     

Early post-war Holocaust knowledge and the search for Europe’s missing Jews

ABSTRACT

Lambertz discusses the post-war failure to trace nearly all missing Jews who had been trapped in Europe during the war, which underlines the extent of Nazi violence. Missing person enquiries provide evidence for how Jewish survivors, refugees and immigrants across the globe understood what had happened during the Nazi era. The correspondence arriving in post-war Jewish community offices across Germany in the late 1940s reveals highly fragmentary knowledge of wartime events, both on the part of far-flung former community members and the officials who attempted to assist them.     

How to stay populist? The Front National and the changing French party system

Abstract

The main aim of this contribution is to assess the relevance of the notion of ‘exclusionary populism’ for the characterisation of the Front National (FN) in France. Since its emergence in the 1970s, several categories or notions have been applied to this political party. Once considered as the resurgence of a traditional extreme right, it has since been classified as a case of a new European right-wing extremism, or as one of the neo-populist parties that obtained electoral successes in the 1990s. The recent evolution of the party has also been described as a sort of ‘normalisation’. Is therefore ‘exclusionary populism’ still a category that can grasp the evolution of the party, as well as its present position in the French party system? To answer this question, this article examines political discourses and various electoral platforms of the Front National to gather some empirical evidence. The argument is twofold: The Front National, despite its ‘dédiabolisation’ strategy, is still a classic populist party characterised by exclusionary populism and a sort of ‘catch-all populism’; its evolution is, however, dependent on the recent evolution of the French party system.     

Tensions in Belgium

ABSTRACT

Musolff's study applies methods of cognitive metaphor analysis to Hitler's antisemitic imagery in Mein Kampf, especially to the conceptualization of the German nation as a (human) body that had to be cured from a deadly disease caused by Jewish parasites. The relevant expressions from the conceptual domains of biological and medical categories form a partly narrative, partly inferential-argumentative source ‘scenario’, which centred on a notion of blood poisoning that was understood in three ways: a) as a supposedly real act of blood defilement, i.e. rape; b) as a part of the source scenario of illness-cure; and c) as an allegorical element of an apocalyptic narrative of a devilish conspiracy against the ‘grand design of the creator’. The conceptual differences of source and target levels were thus short-circuited to form a belief-system that was no longer open to criticism. The results cast new light on central topics of Holocaust research, such as the debates between more ‘intentionalist’ and more ‘functionalist’ explanations of the origins of the Holocaust, and the question of how the Nazi metaphor system helped gradually to ‘initiate’ wider parts of the German populace into the implications of the illness-cure scenario as a blueprint for genocide. The Nazi antisemitic metaphor system thus provides a unique example of the cognitive forces that can be unleashed in the service of racist stigmatization and dehumanization.     

Judgment on the ‘Hitler Diaries’

As the full story of the forged ‘Hitler Diaries’ unfolded, the euphoria of the far right soon evaporated.     

The ‘Othering’ of ‘Red Ed’, or How the Daily Mail ‘Framed’ the British Labour Leader

This article takes as its starting point the attack on the late Ralph Miliband, the left‐wing intellectual and father of the current Labour leader Ed Miliband, by the Daily Mail in late 2013. It argues that this attack was a response by the Mail to its failed campaign to dub the Labour leader ‘Red Ed’. The article demonstrates that ever since Miliband won the Labour leadership in 2009, the Mail has sought to ‘other’ him by presenting him as ‘alien’—this by constant references to his Jewish background, his upbringing in a wealthy North London intellectual milieu, his supposed extreme left‐wing views and his ineffable ‘oddness’—at least, an oddness as characterised by the newspaper. The paper will conclude by asking why the Daily Mail's ‘Red Ed’ moniker failed to catch on, while noting that their ‘Odd Ed’ moniker seems to have had more resonance.