NEVER AGAIN – COLUMN BY TIM EVANS

Never Again

I am writing this after the killing of 11 Jewish worshippers and the wounding of 6 at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, USA. This was a vile, indiscriminate murder of elderly Jews. The killer was an antisemitic white supremacist who reportedly screamed “All Jews must die!” before he opened fire. So, why did he believe that? And what do I mean by ‘antisemitic white supremacist’ anyway?

For ‘white supremacist’ let’s use the Wikipedia definition. “White supremacy or white supremacism is a racist supremacist belief which maintains that white people are superior in many ways to people of other races, and that therefore, white people should be dominant over other races…Like most similar movements such as neo-Nazism, white supremacists oppose members of other races as well as Jews”. So that’s fairly straightforward. These are far-right, often fascist white racists who believe the ‘white race’, whatever that means, is superior to, and should rule over, all other races.

There are so many problems with this that I don’t know where to start, so let’s start with the fact that, as far as most modern scientific research goes, ‘race’ does not exist. Even as far back as the 1970s, it had become clear to scientists and anthropologists that most human differences were cultural, and that race as the previous generation had known it – as largely discrete, geographically distinct, gene pools – does not exist. The old anti-racist slogan “No race but the human race” turns out not just to be ethically and politically, but scientifically correct, too.

Now let’s turn our attention to the second expression, ‘antisemitic’. The root word Semite gives the impression that antisemitism is directed against all Semitic people, including Arabs. But this isn’t so. The word was invented in 1879 by the German racist Wilhelm Marr as a scientific-sounding term for the word Judenhass, meaning ‘Jew-hatred’ and this has been its common use ever since. So an antisemite is a person who hates Jews – all Jews – for no other reason than that they are Jews. Although anti-Jewish prejudice can be traced back to mediaeval times and beyond, its most notorious expression was in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, where 6 million European Jews were rounded up into extermination camps.

The most infamous was Auschwitz, a network of extermination camps in German-occupied Poland, where Jewish men, women, children and elders were gassed, shot or worked to death. The sheer scale of the slaughter was appalling. As a teenager, I bought a book ‘A Pictorial History Of Nazi Germany’, which contained the first photographs I had ever seen of the death camps. I still have the book, as a reminder that such horrors should never happen again. I was so moved I even wrote about it, one of my poems – ‘The Old Jew’ – winning the Nehru Gold Medal in Shankar’s International Poetry Competition. By the way, to call Jeremy Corbyn an antisemite is a complete distortion of the meaning of the word, and I only hope that people who have done so will, after these killings, now have the good grace to apologise.

The killer, then, was a violent, Jew-hating racist who believed that only the ‘white race’ is worth preserving. If this was an isolated act by an unhinged individual it would be bad enough. But it isn’t. The election of Donald Trump has empowered the far right everywhere. In my first column for the Chronicle I argued the present is similar to the 1930s, with the rise of fascist movements across the globe. In Brazil the ex-paratrooper Jair Bolsonaro has just been elected president. He claims he is not a fascist, but if you read his latest threats, you could be forgiven for disbelieving him.

In Britain, mobilisations around the far-right violent racist Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon (otherwise known as ‘Tommy Robinson’) pose a threat to black people, gays, trade unionists, Muslims and Jews everywhere. What can be done? On November 17 there is a National Unity Demonstration Against Fascism and Racism in London. Stand Up To Racism is sending coaches from Haverfordwest, Swansea and Cardiff. You can contact them on Facebook, or contact me through the West Wales Chronicle. No to fascism. Never again.