ANTIFA and The Battle of Cable Street

 CABLE STREET

I found this celebration of the riots of Cable street and wanted to post this . . . . . . . . . 

I object to the term 'Antifa' apart from being lazy language and a portmanteau at its worse, it allows for redefinition, disambiguation and misleading re-interpretations. The world wars were the common man's success against the Fascists of Germany, Italy and elsewhere, the Nazis in the Second World War of course and current usage allows for right wing pressure groups like Trump and his cretinous followers for Antifa to be mislabeled as urban terrorists. Amongst many ani-facist movements we celebrate the common man overcoming the fascists of Mosley's British Union of Fascists and Cable Street. What Anitfa is not is an organisation, a movement or website it is merely the people standing up to the rise of Fascism

Uncredited Photographer     Anti-fascist Community Members and Street Barricade Set Up to Block A Fascist March, Cable Street, East London     Oct. 4, 1936

Today is the 83rd anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street.  The Battle of Cable Street took place in the Whitechapel district of East London.  That community was heavily populated by working class Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and their British-born children, as well as Irish immigrants who mainly worked on the local docks.  In Oct of 1936, Oswald Mosley, mini-fuhrer of the British Union of Fascists announced that he and his blackshirts would hold a march through this community, calling for it to be “cleansed” of Jews.  Members of the Jewish community, union members, the largely Irish dockworkers and members of anarchist, socialist and communist groups vowed to stop the fascists.  Between 2- and 3,000 fascists marched, protected by 7,000 cops.  They were met by somewhere between 50- and 100,000 anti-fascist demonstrators.  Needless to say, the police, protecting the fascists, rioted, attempting to tear down the barricades the community had erected so as to allow the fascists to continue their march.  Police used their truncheons to beat anti-fascists demonstrators.  The community responded by pelting the police and fascists with rubbish, dumping chamber pots on them from windows, and fighting back with their fists.  Eventually, the police and the fascists withdrew.  The Battle of Cable Street was won by the anti-fascists, and it is today commemorated as a great victory by unions and leftists in the UK.

Umberto Eco on Nazism

 

[…] While [Umberto] Eco is firm in claiming “There was only one Nazism,” he says, “the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.” Eco reduces the qualities of what he calls “Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism” down to 14 “typical” features. 

“These features,” writes the novelist and semiotician, “cannot be organised into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”

1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
7. The obsession with a plot. “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.”
8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning