Tag: nazis

The Holocaust must Never Happen Again

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly Comment in the daily Plymouth Herald, on Holocaust Memorial Day 27th January 2026. I have witnessed that some Leftists who are rightly campaigning against the racist creed of Zionism are falling into antisemitism, blaming the genocide in Gaza on all Jews. In doing so they are effectively regurgitating the fascist ideology falsely alleging an international Jewish conspiracy for global domination. I wanted to write to say that’s wrong, but where would you start? 

It cannot be assumed that everyone knows details of the Holocaust. It also cannot be assumed that there is general recognition of the Very acute differences between Zionism and Judaism.  And just as it is not antisemitic to expose and condemn the genocide perpetrated by the far-Right Israeli State, so it is antisemitic to allege that all Jews across the world support the genocide in Gaza. We see huge protests by Jews against the genocide. 

Remembering and commemorating the Holocaust does not show any implicit support for the Israeli State. Writing for a popular tabloid daily is different from writing for a left-wing audience. It’s the right-wing and local political class who read it, including church leaders. So, with a public Holocaust memorial service on the morning of the publication of this article, it’s essential to begin by saying we remember and condemn, unconditionally and forcefully, the Holocaust. We condemn antisemitism!

And then, how to condemn the genocide in Gaza without condemning all Jews and Judaism. It must be done by noting the implicit comparisons of dehumanisation and barbarity, and most importantly to identify the Islamophobia now being driven by the fast-growing far-right racist and fascist movement, as the latest mechanism to produce the same outcomes. 

Next, Don’t Bomb Iran!

One column of 600 words a week is not enough. Read Socialist Worker for a more comprehensive coverage of this world in crisis, chaos and turmoil: https://socialistworker.co.uk

But most importantly, take to the streets on Saturday 31st January for Gaza, and challenge and fight back against fascism wherever it rears its head!

The unedited version below – expand the picture of the article to read the edited version.

Every year, socialists commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day, 27th January. All year round, socialists challenge and oppose antisemitism. It has never been more important than now to remember the Holocaust – the detestable systematic murder of more than 6 million Jews by fascists across Europe – one of the greatest outrages across humanity’s long history. 

We demand “Never Again!” knowing full-well it can happen again. The potential for the dehumanisation of an ethnic group is always with us.

Hitler’s Nazi fascist party and his allies in Axis States across Europe and beyond joined together to identify, round-up, incarcerate, torture, kill and dispose of the bodies of at least 6 million Jewish women, men and children inside four years of the Second World War, 1941-5.

Nazis had a worked-out plan in 1920-21 to exterminate all of Europe’s Jews. It didn’t happen overnight. It took advanced planning and decades of racist propaganda. The fascist military elites who rose to power across Europe used the idea of racial purity to scapegoat ethnic groups and project the threat of “The Other” and “The Enemy Within” into the minds and communities across the continent. 

These were state-driven mass killings with an ideological purpose of winning white supremacy, militarised caste-systems, and Apartheid States as the basis of future society. Fascism’s core idea, that those born to a specified ethnic community all share the same characteristics, behaviours and beliefs, is racist. There is no social homogeneity implicit in an ethnicity.

Racism is a tool of power and control. In the conditions of economic crisis and war, the defence of the Capitalist order required the destruction of all opposition. Most jews were poor, and many jews in the working classes supported socialism, at that time primarily organised by communist parties in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. 

The Holocaust was proclaimed by the Nazis as an “ideological war of extermination” against the “Judeo-Bolshevik” enemy, many business people joining the Nazi Party in defence of Capitalism against the mass socialist movements of the time. The fascist party’s name adopted the term “socialist” alongside “nationalist” in order to confuse and supplant the Left.

Millions were forcibly taken from their homes and off the streets by armed state militia. Mass killings took place in Nazi extermination camps designed to murder millions. 2.7 million Jews of Nazi-occupied Poland murdered at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau along with tens of thousands of Roma and Sinti people. Jewish families were herded into filthy cattle trucks, daily transporting train-loads to the gas-chambers.  But millions were killed by other methods too. 

Nazi Germany launched its invasion of the Soviet Union in the second half of 1941. Einsatzgruppe C, aided by a local Ukrainian militia, shot 33,000 Jews over two days – over 1,000-an-hour. This “Holocaust by bullets” was responsible for 1.5 million Jewish deaths between late 1941 and the spring of 1942, the largest single massacre 54,000 people, mostly Ukrainian Jews, at Bogdanovka.

In addition, Hitler’s Protection Squadron, the dreaded SS selected some to go to slave labour “subcamps” to be rapidly worked to death, whilst another half a million Jews died from starvation and disease in the guarded ghettos – open air prisons without facilities – the Nazis created initially in occupied Poland and the western Soviet Union. By late 1944 the Nazis evacuated the camps forcing the 750,000 or so surviving Jewish inmates onto “death marches” with 250,000 victims shot by SS guards when they could no longer walk.  

The Nazis drew on historic antisemitism, now portraying the Jew as responsible for all current economic and social ills, and as the greatest threat to the white-skinned Aryan “race”. The fascists’ war was promoted as the life-or-death struggle for survival of the “pure Whites”, promoting nationalist aspirations to create “ethnically homogenous nation-states”, subjugating “inferior races”.

The Nazis falsely presented themselves as revolutionaries who would eradicate the unhealthy “parasitic”Finance Capital linked to international markets. 

“Aryanising” Jewish assets would leave healthy “productive” national capital in place and able to thrive, they shouted. Without evidence or fact they projected Jews as “The Rich”, running Capitalism for themselves – the forerunner of the ludicrous “Great Replacement Theory” being spouted by fascists today.

The Nazis promised national regeneration, the end to national humiliation at the hands of foreign powers and the elimination of “the enemy within” – the Jew. In fact, it was organised labour that was suppressed by the Nazis, trade unions and workers rights broken, not capitalism. Socialists and trade unionists were killed in the death camps too. 

Fascism was, and is, a counter-revolutionary mass movement from below, using the power of racism to divide us and to rule us with an iron fist.  They continue to represent a brutal militarised world overseen by their own oppressing and exploiting super-rich ruling class.

Today we see the white-supremacist fascist parties of Europe rising again, this time pretending to stand alongside Jews, waving Israel’s national flag whilst calling for the forced removal of Muslims. The fascists’ latest enemy within, their latest scapegoat, their racist target, is Islam. Their manipulation should not be tolerated. We should have no truck with their lies and fear-mongering. Fascism is the real threat, not Jews and Muslims. Say No to antisemitism and Islamophobia!

Defend Workers Rights and Defeat Fascism

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (9.9.25) challenging the media censorship of the words “fascism” and identification of active fascists in the UK. In the course of a broadcast BBC interview with me, editors clumsily cut my sentences to ensure the word fascist” wasn’t included. That is a sophisticated editorial decision, and probably institutionally dictated. This was published before the violent protest by the fascist Tommy Robinson supporters on Saturday 13th September 2025, an historic turning point with upwards of 250,000 supporters racist Islamaphobe surrounded and kettled 15,000 anti-racists, boot-boys looking to assault us all. We were kettled for over three hours, the Police having allowed the mobs to encircle us in Whitehall, the seat of UK Governance. The Nazi-saluting Elon Musk addressed the huge gathering, having donated towards the costs of coaches from across the countries and thousands of nationalist flags, to state that the current British government must be dissolved, and the gathering should prepare to fight to defend themselves. My article had not anticipated the grotesque scale of the rise of organised racism in Britain, but the point is made in print, in time. We need to call out fascism, everywhere, all the time.

The unedited version below:

There are fascists in Britain. Organised fascists. And they are organising. But we don’t talk about them.
Across Europe there have been fascists ever since Mussolini first adopted the political concept of a mass movement for authoritarian rule. Political descendants of Hitler’s National Socialist “Nazis” in Germany and Franco’s authoritarian Falange militarist party in Spain still hold positions of power and privilege today, their street supporters numbering millions locally identified and opposed.
In the United States various fascist organisations parade with their guns demanding male white supremacy, allied with or spawned from the Ku Klux Klan and their vigilante lynch mobs.
In Britain, with the historical echo of us fighting and beating the fascists in the Second World War, tolerance of fascist speech and fascist organisation has been understandably very low by comparison. Low until now. British fascists are on the streets once again, funded by those in Europe and the USA.
Post-war Britain saw working class mobilisations destroying the fascist organisation of Moseley’s Blackshirts – his street thugs finally routed in the Battle of Cable Street. In the 1970’s we organised a mass movement against the fascist National Front through the Anti-Nazi League, in the ‘80’s and 90’s we beat-back the BNP through Unite Against Fascism. This century we mobilised against the English Defence League organised amongst the violence-obsessed ultra-nationalists on the football terraces.
But now we have a new breed who have studied and analysed their previous defeats and built a militarised cadre of organisers across Britain. Some fascist groups are proscribed, but new forces imported from the USA are permeating local housing estates and community organisations.
The largest fascist group, the Homeland Party has emerged from the neo-nazi “Patriotic Alternative” as a front-runner here, preaching white-supremacism and “white nationalism”. The “National Rebirth Party” and the previously defunct UKIP group led by the fascist Nic Tenconi are also competing for leadership. With links to American groups they’re helping fund the “Fly the Flag” ultra-nationalist protests across the UK, in competition with the “Britain First” fascist group, their leaders identified at the “Flag” demonstrations in Plymouth last week. They brandish Nazi salutes of Seig Heil and lead the chants of “let them drown”, whipping-up racist division.
Fascists are peddlers of myths and superstitions, lies and conspiracies. Fascists feed on fear and guilt and powerlessness. Fascists use individual force and violence to remove all opposition, weaponising individual traits to victimise entire minorities, creating division inside the working class. They currently lead the “anti-woke” brigades, opposing multiculturalism, gay and trans-rights, action on the climate emergency, and women’s rights. Fascists are misogynists and antisemites to the core.
Today, as in the past, the fascist organisations are funded by the super-rich and billionaires internationally, tolerated if not fed by mainstream politicians. Why? Because democracy can get in the way of unregulated profiteering and exploitation. Fascists may propagandise against “The Establishment” but theirs’ is no anti-capitalist revolution – on the contrary it is a promotion of dog-eat-dog exploitation and a reaction against any call for equality and human rights.
Today, Capitalism is in crisis and the billionaires are taking control. We are heading for war and climate collapse.
The definition of Fascism is the melding together of the big business corporations and the State. Trump is militarising American cities, placing corporate executives in charge of the military, and encouraging racist scapegoating of migrants. Elon Musk is funding the UK far-Right. Italy’s Meloni is drowning refugees. The fascist Le Pen is set to be France’s next President, fascist street gangs are killing migrants in Spain, and the fascist AfD now controls half of the German republic.
The Centre will not hold. Democracy is in peril.
The international working class is beleaguered and demanding change. The fascists are seizing the opportunity. Trade unions oppose racism and fascism for obvious reasons. The aim of fascism is the atomisation of the working class and liquidation of the Left as a progressive social force. The Capitalist ruling class have let the fascists off the leash for their own self-defence. It’s our job to defend workers rights and defeat fascism once again.
Trade unions will be mobilising for the national counter-protest against the fascist “Tommy Robinson” demonstration in London next Saturday. Standuptoracism.org.uk

Fascists are the threat, not Migrants!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (20.5.25), warning of the fascist group coming to Plymouth on Saturday 24th May, under the banner “Great British Strike”, emulating the National Socialism of the Nazis, and conning the working class. Please join the counter-demo at the Sundial, Armada Way Plymouth City Centre, 11am.

The full article:

The fascists are coming! On Saturday, Nazi-sympathisers are returning to Plymouth to parade in the city centre that their forebears flattened with blanket bombing 84 years ago. They’re not welcome here!
We say Never Again! Never will we allow Hitlerites to foment violence, scapegoating sections of the working class or minorities identified by our skin colour or gender. Never again will we be conned by talk of white power and male supremacy preached and funded by super-rich multi-millionaires and their billionaire masters.
Fascism took-over in Germany and across Europe one hundred years ago resulting in social terror and genocide and world war in which more than 70 million people died. We should be historically informed and ideologically clear enough by now to recognise and oppose fascism when it speaks.
Fascism allows no free-speech or opposition, especially not organisation of the working classes such as trade unions. All individual interests must be subordinated to the good of the nation’s rulers, defined by those with wealth and power.
Fascism promotes extreme nationalism and militarism breeding contempt for electoral democracy and cultural diversity. Fascism is a political belief in there being a natural social hierarchy, white men at the top, and the rule of an elite as an autocracy with absolute power. Fascism is favoured by sections of the Capitalist ruling class when rumblings of discontent sound loud amongst workers.
Fascist ultra-nationalism was first fomented across Europe by isolating and demonising Jewish people, dividing the working class and ending with at least 6 million murdered in industrial death camps. Today it is Muslims similarly scapegoated across Europe, and now targeted in Britain as encompassing all Black and Brown-skinned “migrants” wherever born.
Racial hatred is being whipped-up again to divide us and rule us. Onto this stage comes Keir Starmer, echoing the nonsense that migrants are a threat to Britain’s economy, culture and identity. He claims that migration is making us a “country of strangers” when it is the extreme class divisions between rich and poor which segregate and alienate.
We’ve heard it all before. In the 1960’s Enoch Powell said white people were “strangers in their own country”, Nigel Farage marched with the British National Party in the 1980’s and praised Powell as his political hero, now Starmer echoed Powell with his “island of strangers” immigration speech. The fact is, this country’s working class has never tolerated a fascist party and isn’t about to now.
Migration isn’t a threat to the security and wellbeing of the working class. Migrants are not responsible for the housing crisis – rent hikes by landlords, interest rate hikes by banks, construction material price-hikes by monopoly corporations have together caused a crisis totally out of any power or influence of Black migrants.
Migrants are not responsible for the crisis of our Health Services – in fact migrants keep it going amidst decades of underinvestment. Without so-called “foreign-labour” the NHS and care homes for the elderly would not exist. You are far more likely to be helped by a migrant worker in a hospital than be in the queue alongside them.
Migrants are not responsible for the high prices of electricity and gas – they suffer the same charges whilst watching the record profits of Corporations like Shell and BP enrich the shareholding class.
We, the working class, are being fleeced by the super-rich, and fleeced by the same people telling us to blame the poorest and most powerless of the world on the basis of the colour of their skin. We’re not that stupid!
When we see Muslims being butchered in Palestine we protest – 600,000 on the streets of London last weekend. Britain’s multiculturalism is a hallmark of our post-colonial culture and identity.
Last weekend, leading fascist organisers in Britain called on Nazis to join Reform UK. They want to fast-track racism and male-supremacy, on a roll after the Prime Minister’s inflamatory speech.
Starmer is fuelling far-Right scapegoating out of fear of the rising tide of protest against his Austerity Mark 2 programme of social welfare cuts across the UK. We want to see real change for He could raise taxes on the Rich, but he’s on their side. He could restore the Winter Fuel Allowance and gain the support of the majority of of our cash-strapped elderly. He could u-turn on the £5billion cuts to welfare for people with disabilities. He could ensure a living wage for care workers and invest in the NHS and schools rather than military rearmament.
But Starmer is not on the side of the working class. History is littered with failed politicians who sought to appease fascists rather than expose their lies. Starmer is courting the same fate. Trade unionists must stand together and demand redistribution of wealth from the super-rich to the working class.