Video and text of speeches made at our 2024 Holocaust Memorial Day event

On Sunday 28th January, Community Solidarity Stroud District held a series of events to mark Holocaust Memorial Day. On this page you can find videos and text of speeches made at the different events. These are listed in chronological order. You can watch all videos in succession via a YouTube playlist at this link.

audience of 120 people in the Lansdown Hall, watching the Stroud Red Band perform

Clips from the introduction, prayers, and music

The video below features only some clips of the introduction and prayers made by Steve Saville (Curate, Stroud Parish Churches), Baron Mendes da Costa (3 Counties Liberal Jewish Community, Imam Hassan MG (Masjid-E-Noor Mosque), and performances of the songs Dona Dona by The Grove Singers, and Einheitsfrontlied by the Stroud Red Band.

Speech by Jeremy Green, Community Solidarity Stroud District

My name is Jeremy Green, and I want to welcome you to this event on behalf of Community Solidarity Stroud District. CSSD was formed for Holocaust Memorial Day 2022, and exists to oppose the hatred of minorities and oppressed people arising from false and harmful information.

Holocaust Memorial Day is held annually in many countries on 27th January, because that’s the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army in 1945. It commemorates not only the Nazi slaughter of Europe’s Jews, but also other genocides. Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur are specifically referenced, but it’s understood that other genocides are also commemorated. The Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews is foregrounded, in part because – unlike other mass slaughters motivated by racism – this was the first time that the full force of a modern industrial state – its administrative and bureaucratic capabilities, its industries, its science and technology – were deployed with the purpose of destroying an entire people.

We mark this day in the hope that memory and understanding will help to prevent such slaughter in the future, and to give courage to those who resist.

There is always a tension between wanting to make the commemoration more inclusive – to recognise the similarities between different episodes of mass murder, and wanting to learn from the specific history that gave rise to each of them. There’s a risk that a shopping list approach to genocides works against understanding.

So it’s with a great deal of trepidation that I, as a Jewish person, raise the subject of Gaza at this event.

This year’s Holocaust Memorial Day presents even more challenges than most. We see a rise in antisemitism and Islamophobia around the world. We are living in the fallout from the Hamas attack into Israel on October 7th last year – involving the largest killing of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust itself – 685 civilians, including 36 children. 132 Israeli citizens are still held hostage. 25 have died in captivity.

We are also living in the fallout from the retaliation ordered by Netanyahu’s Israeli government, which has killed tens of thousands – including thousands of children.

Other Holocaust Memorial Day events around the country have deliberately avoided raising this, understandably concerned that it would cause hurt to Jewish Holocaust survivors and descendants of victims.

The creation of the state of Israel was intimately connected to the Holocaust. Many people, movements and states that had previously been hostile to Zionism and to Jewish immigration to Palestine changed their minds as the full horror of what happened to the Jews of Europe became known. Israel was created with tragic consequences for the Arabs of Palestine. But for many – perhaps most – Jewish people it held out a kind of promise that the trauma would not be repeated. No more helpless, stateless Jews desperately seeking exit routes and refuge in a world where they had no place.

Two generations on, Israel is accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice in the Hague.  For me this is heartbreaking. I don’t much care whether what is happening meets some formal, technical or legal definition of genocide or not. Around a third of buildings across Gaza have been destroyed, around 85% of the population has been displaced. More than 200 schools and the Islamic University of Gaza, the first higher education institution established in the Strip, have been destroyed. Gaza’s oldest mosque, originally a fifth century Byzantine church, has been destroyed. The oldest church in Gaza, St Porphyrius church, believed to be the third oldest church in the world has been damaged. The entire population faces malnutrition if not starvation, diseases such as diarrhoea are rampant.

I’m heartened, though, by those in Israel – including families of those taken hostage – who have taken a stand against what the government and state is doing. Today I’d particularly like to call attention to a declaration by a group of Holocaust scholars at universities in Israel and elsewhere, who have written an open letter to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Center. Their letter asks Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan to voice an “unambiguous moral call condemning” incitements to genocide made by Israeli officials and personalities, and a “public discourse calling for extermination and the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.”

The statement includes the following:

“We, the undersigned, know from Jewish and human history, especially from studying the Holocaust and its memory, that incitement to extermination and to commission of grave crimes, using language that creates dehumanization and an incrimination of all members of a rival group within a conflict, are in many cases a first step in committing crimes that can reach the stage of genocide,

“This is a key lesson learned by humankind from the Holocaust. It has been included in international conventions, some of which were signed by Israel. This is also part of the call ‘Never Again,’ in the spirit of which commemoration organizations, led by like Yad Vashem, conduct their education.”

This call must be a guiding light, especially in the wake of the detestable crimes committed by Hamas on October 7.”

The call that goes out from each Holocaust Commemoration event is “Never Again”. Let’s pledge that this means never again for anyone. The Jewish experience of racism and our liberatory traditions impel us always to fight against oppression and act in solidarity with the oppressd.

Speech by family carer, Jacky Martel

Hello my name is Jacky and I am mum to 3 young men. My eldest, Tomas is autistic and has a profound learning disability and the reason I am here today to remember the hundreds of thousands of disabled people exterminated by the Nazi’s who are so little talked about.

The exterminations started with children well before the war building on a social Darwinism movement not just in Germany and not just the far right – it was secretive but legally sanctioned – parents were told they were lucky – their children were being accepted into hospitals to help and perhaps cure them. Doctors and nurses were paid for each child they registered as feebleminded or defective. Parents were then told their child had been moved to another more specialist hospital – they couldn’t visit. The children were usually killed the day they arrived but a “condolence” letter would not be sent for some months. They were told they had died of perhaps pneumonia or influenza and they had needed to cremate the body for infection control. They could have an urn with their ashes delivered for free but some parents found girls hairclips in their boys ashes. The letters always reiterated that the parents should find consolation in that their child was relieved from the suffering of its defective life.

The children were being experimented on – how to kill them most effectively – what gas at what dose, inhalation chambers became fake shower blocks, children’s brains were injected with different drugs to see what would keep them calm, brains that were then sold for research – one collection in Germany only finally laid to rest in 1990 (it reminded me of Alder Hey when I read that).

The law authorised the Destruction of life unworthy of life – which proposed the killing of people with congenital mental or physical malformation – I think most people will assume due entirely to meet the obsession with a pure Aryan blood line but this wasn’t the whole reason. It was stated that “such creatures required costly long term care, aroused horror in other people and represented the lowest animal level”

Have we come far enough away from these views? I don’t think so. Most parents of disabled children will tell you the hardest part is fighting for the support and resources your child needs to live an ordinary life. We still see lives valued in terms of contribution – disabled people are othered, especially if they aren’t a paraolympian or climbing mountains – but that isn’t most disabled peoples reality. It showed its ugliest head during Covid when thousands of “Do Not Resuscitate” notices were put on disabled people’s records for no good clinical reason and unknown to the person or their family – hospital resources were scarce – why bother with them?

2-3,000 people who are autistic and have learning disabilities or mental health issues are currently locked up in this country – some fed through hatches and sent from hospital to hospital hundreds of miles from family as the hospitals don’t want the families seeing them. The hospitals put gagging orders of parents to stop them going to the press.

Bristol City Council is as we speak trying to get a policy through which would make disabled people who are costing more than the average move out of their own homes into care homes where they have little choice, control, freedom or rights.

Denise [Needleman, from Community Solidarity Stroud District] told me about a conference she went to in Europe 10 years ago or so and the chilling moment when the Germany attendees said they didn’t have any data for over 65 yr old disabled people as there were none………………. None. I don’t even know how to describe that gap – its more than a generation lost – it’s a community, a vital part of our soul and its how I feel about the statistic that over 90% of babies found to have Down’s Syndrome in the womb are aborted – we are the poorer for that loss.

My friend was asked 15 times if she wanted her pregnancy terminated because her baby had a deformity – I am not anti-abortion but that is not choice it is pressure –  a consultant offered a termination 2 days before the birth. We have got to start valuing all life equally – we must remember the ¾ million disabled people’s lives extinguished by the Nazis because they were deemed to be lives unworthy of life.

Speech by Andy Woolley, Stroud & District Trades Council

My name is Andy Woolley and I am a delegate to the newly formed Stroud & District Trades Council from the National Education Union. I spoke at this event last year on behalf of the Gloucester Trades Council which then covered this area.

My Union, the NEU, was formed in 2017 from a merger and one of its predecessors the NUT (National Union of Teachers) and the new Union have produced a large amount of age appropriate material in conjunction with the Holocaust Educational Trust, which is available on both organisations’ websites as well as materials suggesting how teachers can deal appropriately and sensitively with issues about Israel and Palestine and I commend them to anyone working with young people of any age.

I wish to approach my contribution today by concentrating, as last year, on the impact on trade unionists and socialists and on the current move towards extremism and intolerance in our society. Yesterday I attended a large march in Cheltenham to protest against attempts to restrict trade union rights and to remember the people who were dismissed for being trade union members at GCHQ.

Many, if not most of you will be or have been members of trade unions and I recognise a number of active members here today. We take this for granted but in 1933 onwards people found themselves imprisoned for this sort of thing. I remind you that Dachau concentration camp, whilst not an extermination camp as such, was built mainly to imprison political prisoners and trade unionists and some 200,000 were imprisoned there from 1933 until the camp was liberated by the Americans in 1945 when only 67,000 remained. Of those remaining 43,000 were trade unionists and political prisoners and 22,000 of these were Jewish. It should be remembered that the various groups who suffered at the hands of the Nazis were not mutually exclusive, some trade unionists were Jews, some socialists were gay and so on. The people represented here today were like a big Venn diagram overlapping with each other – you can tell I was a maths teacher, can’t you!

Throughout my life the call has been that this should never again come to pass just as the call after the First World War was that it was ”the war to end all wars”. Sadly, as Jezza has referred to, there have been many other instances of genocide since 1945 and there are still wars going on today.

In the specific area I represent today, Colombia is the most dangerous place in the World to be a trade unionist with many killed purely for doing what many of us do in our working lives and despite this the British Government has supplied arms to
successive Colombian governments whilst, despite a recent left wing government being elected, right wing death squads continue to kill trade unionists and leftists and to disrupt civil society.

You may feel that this is just South America where coups and right wing governments have been more common but, sadly, Europe is seeing an increasing growth in right wing ideology scapegoating minorities, immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers just as the Nazis demonised and scapegoated Jews. This is happening in Hungary, Turkey, the Netherlands, Finland, supposedly liberal Sweden, sadly once again in Germany with the so called Alternative für Deutschland and, along with othersto many to mention, our own country of Britain.

The Jewish poet and former Children’s Laureate Michael Rosen has written:


I sometimes fear that people think fascism arrives in fancy dress
worn by grotesques and monsters
as played out in endless re-runs of the Nazis

Fascism arrives as your friend.
it will restore your honour,
make you feel proud,
protect your house
give you a job
clean up your neighbourhood,
remind you of how great you once were,
clear out the venal and the corrupt,
remove anything you feel is unlike you …
It doesn’t walk in saying,
“Our programme means militias, mass imprisonments,
transportations, war and persecution.”

and indeed here in Britain today we have prominent politicians demonising refugees fleeing from conflct, wishing to deport them to a country from which we ourselves are accepting asylum seekers despite their rights to seek asylum here and keeping them constrained without freedom of movement. They claim Britain is “full’ and talk about economic migrants with scorn, even though many of those who try to divide us like this are the descendants of economic migrants, and they talk of restoring Britain to Great Britain even though Great in this context is a geographical term. They talk of the threat to our culture, but what is our culture, we are Welsh, Scots, Northerners or Southerners and from the many communities that have lived here over the years. Are we all to be demonised too in the name of returning Britain to its supposed glory when we colonised the World and supressed people’s rights in other countries?

When they take away the right to protest peacefully, constrain the right to strike, plan to criminalise rough sleeping instead of eliminating it, pack our legislature with their unelected friends in return for favours and demonise the media as “woke”, how far along the road are we to more extreme persecution.

As Michael Rosen says,
Fascism doesn’t walk in saying,
“Our programme means militias, mass imprisonments,
transportation, war and persection.”

So let us be vigilant, let us oppose a move to the far right here, in Europe and in every country in the World, however dear it is to our hearts, and let us do all we can to end conflict, the deaths of innocent men, women and children and let us work for peace so people can co-habit in harmony and mutual respect.

I suggest that only if we call for peace, tolerance and an end to the loss of innocent lives can we truly honour the memory of those who died and suffered so cruelly, needlessly and wastefully in the Holocaust.

Resources for teachers and young people as mentioned in Andy Wooley’s speech:

Speech by Caroline Beattie, Stroud District Together With Refugees

The policy by one people to exterminate another people is at one hideous end of a spectrum. The loss of a single life due to the action of someone else is also a tragedy, unbearably painful to family, friends, community. Each is a crime. We always yearn for the truth of the crime to be recognised.

Which its why its so important to keep being here each year. To keep telling the truth of what happened and is happening, from our own experience, and from listening to others who know it from their own experience and their own history. And those who are struggling to comes to terms with inherited trauma, of victims or perpetrators.

Yesterday, I was with a small group of people seeking sanctuary in the UK, from 9 different countries. An extraordinary day when with the help and inspiration of Sam – who himself knows the experience of fleeing again and again for his survival within Uganda, our friends were making clay models of people to put in a boat – to symbolise something of their terrifying journeys to find safety. Mostly their experience was in images, but some were also then able to speak about their journeys. No-one could doubt the truth of their stories.

It isn’t so easy for this voice to be heard. Government narrative, in its own interest,  spreads continous lies about people seeking asylum, and maintains that UK population do not want refugees here – is irresponsible and incredibly dangerous. We see the way such rhetoric  feeds division, fear of other people, hate crime and far right activity. For example locally, on the strength of one allegation which was acutally found to be false and withdrawn, our MP ensured that the one hotel for asylum seekers in our District was closed. Leading to evictons and huge disruption for individuals. A hotel which had been an amazing success story in terms of warm, lasting, relationship built with the local communites around Dursley. Nothing like direct contact to create an impact. 

This is the good news – much less often heard. Opinion polls repeatedly show that UK population amongst the most positive towards refugees, internationally. Locally from the point of view of those of us campaigning and advocating for refugee rights, this is also our experience. We saw a huge response to Homes for Ukraine locally and work still goes on two years later to support Ukrainian refugees in the area.  Now Gloucestershire County Council with particular input from Stroud District Council are far-sightedly extending the scheme to those who have been evicted at short notice from hotels on receiving full refugee status, so that people can start their lives inside a welcoming community. I say far-sighted because, we need the welcome and need the resources to support it. A point made very clear in a report from a German protestor against the far right AFD on the Today programme this week. In Germany there has been a big welcome to refugees but not enough resources put into local communities to realistically support that welcome. 

What does this day invite us to do here in Stroud? Three possible things

1. To do whatever we can to keep talking, keep listening, keep stretching our imagination to hear, to understand and take in other people’s stories. As we are doing here in today’s memorial gathering.  Keep telling the truth as we know it and hear it about the experience of being marginalised for any reason, disbelieved, discriminated against. Not to let historical conflicts and experiences divide us here and now in Stroud.

2. To help and properly support the current generation of all those who are fleeing  to the UK to escape violence (in which UK has so often been historically and shamefully implicated) or in the future fleeing unliveable consequences of climate change.

3. And to keep enabling the voice of lived experience to be heard, despite the effort of those with power and money to suffocate it. As we are today, we must go on using our own voice, and supporting each other to use theirs, to maintain and celebrate a tolerant, inclusive, fully diverse, including neurodiverse, and anti-racist community.

Speech by Midge Purcell, Stroud Against Racism

Thank you for inviting SAR to participate in this remembrance of The Holocaust; a monstrous crime that is still beyond comprehension.

A crime that involved the full mobilisation of the industrial, political and military capacity of a world superpower directed towards the annihilation of six million Jewish people, for no other reason than the fact that they were Jews.

While antisemitism was at the core of the Nazis’ ideology of hate, others were caught in the spiral of persecution and death, Roma, Gays, trade unionists, people with disabilities… and including 24,000 Black Germans – many from German colonies in Africa. All denied the most basic human rights, often sterilised, tortured, experimented upon before being murdered in camps.

It’s not a surprise that the Nazis borrowed heavily from American anti-black, anti-native policies and narratives about racial superiority, apartheid segregation and eugenics.

Despite the vows to never allow such crimes against humanity to occur again, since the Holocaust, other genocides have occurred and are occurring. Today we remember not just the victims of the Third Reich, but all victims of genocide.

In 2024, have we learnt the lessons? Are we doing all we can to prevent genocide and fascism from happening again?

Before the killing there was a long process of dehumanisation.To unleash atrocities on such a massive scale, you have to render a people less than human; animals.

While we shouldn’t exaggerate the comparisons to the horrors of the 1930s we shouldn’t ignore similarities either. Once again we see racist lies, stereotypes, and dog-whistle propaganda fuelling far-right parties and policies.

Views that we hoped had become peripheral, unacceptable, have come back again into mainstream political discourse.

We have national media that describes refugees as cockroaches who should be met with gunboats. Asylum seekers face deportation to a country of a recent genocide, Rwanda.

The person who may retake the US Presidency talks about immigrants polluting the bloodline and calling them criminals with low intelligence, to the cheers of neo-Nazis and white supremacists. This sounds like eugenics and the language of the 1930s.

The result is a rise in racism, Anti-semitism, and Islamophobia here, in the US and across Europe. We’ve seen attacks on synogogues, mosques, temples and, in the US, Black churches. Attempts to rewrite history and turn back the clock on gains in civil and human rights.

If we are to heed the lessons of history, of The Holocaust we must keep memory alive.

I am mindful that I am just one generation away from those who perished in The Holocaust. As a young activist one of my mentors, Sadie Doroshkin, who became like a surrogate grandmother to me, was a holocaust survivor. An early partner and still dear friend’s mother was sent to the gas chamber at Auschwitz and only survived because of a malfunction on the day.

It falls to us to carry their testimony to future generations.

One of the things that I learned from Sadie was her unwavering belief in internationalism as a response to oppression and fascism. It was a decisive force against fascism then and it must be a force against oppression now.

Anti-racism and anti-facism is the last line of defence to protect human rights and the dignity of all. We must be ready to take action against discrimination persecution, and genocide wherever it happens.

It also means addressing the roots causes that make people susceptible to populism, demagogery, and hatred for the other, – the anger, deprivation, poverty and inequality.

It means ensuring that the Holocaust Memorial Day pledge of “Never Again”  becomes a reality for every man, woman and child, everywhere.

Stroud Red Band and Karen Coldrick perform Zog Nit Keyn Nol (“Never Say”)

Closing our ceremony, Stroud Red Band performed Zog Nit Keyn Mol – sung by Karen Coldrick. The lyrics of the song were written in 1943 by Hirsh Glick, a young Jewish inmate of the Vilna Ghetto. Sometimes known as the “Partizaner lid” (Partisan Song), Zog Nit Keyn Mol is a Yiddish song written for the Vilna Jewish United Partisan Organization (FPO), and considered one of the chief anthems of Holocaust survivors. Karen Coldrick sang in both Yiddish and English, thanks to StroudTimes for filming this.

Speech by James Beecher, introducing Primo Levi’s “The Drowned and The Saved”

This speech was given as an introduction to the Stroud Radical Reading Group discussion held after the ceremony. This was not filmed.

Stroud Radical Reading Group meets monthly to discuss a ‘radical’ text. By radical we mean things that either help us to go back to the roots of problems, or which propose drastic/urgent changes to society. As well as books, essays and academic journal articles, we’ve also looked at graphic novels, Chartist poems, and political Haiku. We don’t expect people to attend every session or to read the book for a session in full – we encourage people to come along and listen to the discussion even if they have not read the book.

Today, we are discussing “The Drowned and The Saved”, marking Holocaust Memorial Day as we have done in previous years. Last year we read “We Fight Fascists: The 43 Group and Their Forgotten Battle for Post-War Britain”, which tells the story of the Jewish ex-servicemen who fought against Oswald Mosley after World War II. The year before we read a chapter in Alain Brossat and Sylvia Klingberg’s Revolutionary Yiddishland, which addresses “the image of the Jew in the face of Nazism that history has retained”, one “not that of the Resistance fighter but that of the victim”. Before that, we read Primo Levi’s answers to the most common questions he was asked about “Survival in Auschwitz”, the US Title for his first book about his experiences in Auschwitz known in the UK as “If This is a Man”. On another occasion, we also looked at an essay by Jurgen Habermas on how “postwar Germany [has] attempted to come to terms with its ‘unmasterable past’”.

I’ll give a biography of Levi, provide a sentence long summary of each chapter, and end with a few quotes.

Primo Levi was born in 1919 in Turin, Italy, into a liberal Jewish family – the same year Benito Mussolini established himself as Il Duce of Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (an ultranationalist paramilitary organisation that became the National Fascist Party), just over three years before the coup which saw Mussolini installed as Prime Minister, and around five years before Mussolini’s government became a dictatorship.

Levi’s parents were well educated, and he excelled academically. At the equivalent of secondary school, he was the youngest, the shortest and the cleverest, as well as being the only Jew. Only two boys there bullied him for being Jewish, but their animosity was traumatic for him. In 1933, as was expected of all young Italian schoolboys, he joined the Avanguardisti movement for young Fascists. In 1937, he was summoned before the War Ministry and accused of ignoring a draft notice from the Italian Royal Navy. His father was able to keep him out of the Navy by enrolling him in the Fascist militia (Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale). He remained a member through his first year of university, until the passage of the Italian Racial Laws of 1938 forced his expulsion. Italian Jews lost their basic civil rights, positions in public offices, and their assets. Their books were prohibited.

In 1943, after Mussolini was deposed and the new government prepared to cooperate with the Allied countries, the Nazis occupied northern and central Italy, liberated Mussolini from imprisonment and appointed him as head of the Italian Social Republic, a puppet state in German-occupied northern Italy. The situation for Jewish people had dramatically worsened, and Levi’s family fled to an area known for partisan resistance activity against the Nazis.

Levi and some comrades took to the foothills of the Alps, and in October 1943 formed a partisan group. Untrained for such a venture, he and his companions were arrested by a Fascist militia in December 1943. When told he would be shot as an Italian partisan, Levi confessed to being Jewish, and was taken to an internment camp under the control of the Italian Social Republic.

The camp was then taken over by the Nazis, who started arranging the deportations of the Jews to eastern concentration and death camps. On the second of these transports, in February 1944, Levi and other inmates were transported in twelve cramped cattle trucks to Monowitz, one of the three main camps in the Auschwitz concentration camp complex. Levi spent eleven months there (aged 24 and 25) before the camp was liberated by the Red Army on 27 January 1945. Before their arrival, people were sorted according to whether they could work or not. An acquaintance said that it would make no difference, in the end, and declared he was unable to work and was killed immediately. The average life expectancy of a new entrant at the camp was three to four months. Of the 650 Italian Jews in his transport, Levi was one of twenty who left the camps alive.

Although liberated on 27 January 1945, Levi did not reach Turin until 19 October 1945. After spending some time in a Soviet camp for former concentration camp inmates, he embarked on an arduous journey home in the company of former Italian prisoners of war. His long railway journey home to Turin took him on a circuitous route from Poland, through Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Austria, and Germany.

In 1946, while staying in a factory dormitory during the week due to a limited train service, Levi wrote what became If This is a Man, recounting his experiences in Auschwitz. Initially rejected by publishers, 2,000 copies were published in 1947. It was translated to English in 1958 and published in the UK in 1959 – and in the same year translated into German – which Levi discusses in the book we will discuss today. Together with ‘The Truce’, it has become one of the most widely read accounts of the Nazi slave labour and death camps.

Levi had a successful writing career, including fiction and a book related to his career as a chemist, The Periodic Table, widely regarded as one of the best science books.

The Drowned and the Saved is his last work, written in 1986. Though referring to his autobiographic work on the Nazi Genocide, it takes a more analytic approach [numbers following quotations are page numbers from the edition sold by the Yellow Lighted Bookshop].

After a preface exploring the ways in which “testimony” can form “an act of war against fascism” (10), and raising the questions “How much of the concentration camp world is dead… How much is back or coming back”, Levi look then looks at Memory – exploring self-deception and drift, and describing the history of the Third Reich as a ‘war against memory’. In “The Grey Zone” he looks at various forms of collaboration and explores in detail why ‘it is imprudent to hasten to issue a moral judgement’ (40). He then looks at ‘the shame which the just man experiences when confronted by a crime committed by another’ (75), how ‘the hour of liberation was neither joyful nor lighthearted [as] for most it occurred against a tragic background of destruction, slaughter and suffering’ (73) and the numbers of suicides among survivors, contrasting this against the rareness of suicide during imprisonment.

These remarks have an added significance, as Levi died in 1987, a year after publication of the book, from injuries sustained in a fall from a third-story apartment landing. His death was officially ruled a suicide, but some have suggested that the fall was accidental because he left no suicide note, there were no witnesses, and he was on medication that could have affected his blood pressure and caused him to fall accidentally.

In the next chapter, Communicating, Levi argues that ‘To say that it is impossible to communicate is false; one always can” (95), and discusses the degradation of the German language to a distinct language of the Third Reich, and the even harsher language of the Lagers or camps: “where violence is inflicted on man, it is also inflicted on language” (106)

In Chapter 5 he explores the Nazi regime’s particular focus on what he calls ‘useless violence’: “an end in itself, with the sole purpose of creating pain, occasionally having a purpose, yet always redundant, always disproportionate to the purpose itself” (116).

He then looks at the distinct experiences of “The Intellectual in Auschwitz”. He writes that “Reason, art, and poetry are no help in deciphering a place from which they are banned” (160). Nonetheless, he also feels “The Lager was a University; it taught us to look around and to measure men” (159). He notes his “habit of never remaining indifferent to the individuals that chance brings before me. They are human beings, but also ‘samples’… food for my curiosity… that certainly contributed to keeping a part of me alive and which subsequently supplied me with the material for thinking and making books” (158).

In Stereotypes, he details the extensive repression and power of totalitarianism in providing answers to three questions “formulated with ever increasing persistence, and with an ever less hidden accent of accusation… Why did you not escape? Why did you not rebel? Why did you not avoid capture ‘beforehand’?” Examples of each type of response are also provided (170).

In Letters from Germans he discusses the process of having his book translated into German, and quotes from some of about forty letters he received from Germans between 1961 and 1964 – all but one of which from young people, which attempt to answer his question of “whether it is possible to understand the Germans”. He writes that he “had written the book in Italian, for Italians, for my children, for those who did not know, for those who did not want to know, for those who were not yet born, those who, willing or not, had assented to the offence; but its true recipients, those against whom the book was aimed like a gun were they, the Germans. Now the gun was loaded.” (190-191)

Finally, Levi offers conclusions, most starkly that the Nazi torturers “were made of our same cloth, they were average human beings, averagely intelligent, averagely wicked: save for exceptions, they were not monsters”.

I’ve spoken for some time, but I’d like to draw attention to two final quotes before we move onto discussion.

Firstly, by way of explaining why I continue to allocate one of our monthly readings each year to Holocaust Memorial Day. In short, this is because I feel we should be acutely aware of the horrors humans are capable of, in particular because of the justifications people are able to create for themselves that allow them to continue to think of themselves as good, or in pursuit of a grand vision, even as they behave in monstrous ways.

As someone much younger than the generation of survivors or even children of survivors – and with no family connection to the Holocaust myself (though my mum is Jewish), I feel it is important to close what Levi calls “the gap that exists and grows wider every year between things as they were down there and things as they are represented by the current imagination fed by approximate books, films and myths. It slides fatally toward simplification and stereotype… it is part of our difficulty or inability to perceive the experience of others… we are prone to assimilate them to those ‘related’ ones, as though hunger in Auschwitz were the same as that of someone who has skipped a meal” (178)

Secondly, the theme of this year’s events as set by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust is the ‘Fragility of Freedom’. So I want to close with something optimistic that Levi says, in a book that is otherwise profoundly troubling in many ways. He says this to explain the prevalence of the questions he addresses in the chapter on Stereotypes:

“In countries in which the elementary needs are satisfied, today’s young people experience freedom as a good that one must in no case renounce: one cannot do without it, it is a natural and obvious right, and furthermore, it is gratuitous, like health and the air one breathes. The times and places where this congenital right is denied are perceived as distant foreign and strange. Therefore, for them, the idea of imprisonment is firmly attached to the idea of flight or revolt” (170-1).

Speech by Adam Horovitz, ahead of screening of the film “Denial”

The full text of this speech is below, the video misses the start of the speech

Good evening and welcome to the opening event of Stroud Film Festival, a special presentation for Holocaust Memorial Day of the film Denial, based on Deborah Lipstadt’s book History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier. My name’s Adam Horovitz, and I have been asked by Community Solidarity Stroud District, who organised the events marking Holocaust Memorial Day in this hall today, to introduce the film.

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We live in an age of denial, twenty four years into a century of refutation, in which a growing number of people, overwhelmed by the internet and its maelstrom of ever-increasing amounts of information, disinformation, distortion, clarification, truths and lies are all too often turning away from what we as a species collectively know to be fact.

Increased communication has made the world seem at once much smaller and terrifyingly large, thanks to the multitude of voices on social media shouting and shouting at one another, without any human face to give context to what thoughts, if any, lie behind the screams.

More and more often, frightened, overwhelmed and confused people are allowing themselves to be swayed by carefully curated corruptions of basic truths, seeded amongst straightforward lies and facts freighted with the deep-seated, emotionally manipulative language of propaganda.

More often than not they are listening to tales told by demagogues and populists, or by invisible seeders of falsehoods, dressed in what seems at first like common sense, who make it seem as if the little nuggets of information they dole out are entirely the discovery of the reader, rather than a carefully laid trail of breadcrumbs with designs on the exhausted readers’ emotions, hopes and fears.

In this way, the long-debunked Protocols of the Elders of Zion have found their way back into common parlance. Reintroduced by David Icke 30 years ago, they are now spreading relentlessly, used once again as a rod to beat Jews with, in much the same manner as the Nazis used them. In certain circles, the Holocaust continues to be denied – though these days such denial is more often than not dressed up as ‘having an opinion’ – watching this film, you will understand why that position has shifted a little.

Denial is an important film to watch now because the act of denial has spread beyond the Holocaust; though that atrocity remains the great tentpole of deniers, there is now quite a smorgasbord of things that people are being encouraged to deny. For example, some people will tell you, with an alarming earnestness that brooks no facts, no evidence to the contrary, that climate change CANNOT be real, because it’s ‘so cold here right now’. They will bring up dubious proofs that have little or no back-up in the scientific community, as has happened with MMR vaccination and more. Others will attempt to deny the call to acknowledge that Black Lives Matter because they believe that they have no power or say themselves.

In America, the presidency could be won once again by arch-denier of all that does not serve him, Donald Trump, despite the exposure of much that lead to the January 6th insurrection he incited and the slew of criminal charges against him and his inner circle. His followers – faithful, afraid, and in a frenzy of denial – believe that the more the state pushes against him, the more he must be telling the truth. They are even denying, now, that Trump et al were involved in any insurrection – all the blame for that is being laid at the door of anti-fa. We swirl in circles upon circles of denial.

There are too many other examples of this all-too-human ability (driven by fear of change, of death, of things that are different, of simply being left behind) to batten down the hatches of the mind and assume that someone else out there is to blame for all your ills. That the people who are different from you can’t be suffering as much as they say they are because they’re getting all the attention. That if you ‘do your own research’, whatever you find must be right.

What the film you are about to watch proves beyond doubt is that if people work together to assiduously research a subject, and they calmly and carefully interrogate the poison of propaganda that is being spread as if it were snake oil medicine, the facts, difficult though they may sometimes be to hear, tell a better, truer story than the ones told by propagandists and bigots.

In a century of refutation, of propaganda, of war, terror and climate change, it is time to stop screaming on the internet and stop denying others a voice. The world is too crowded now to be able to run on tribalism, instinct and fear. It is time to look and listen hard and carefully to people and things and ideas, as the lawyers in this film do – even to those people and things and ideas we loathe – before anything too monumental and unchangeable is decided upon, or anyone or anything is decried, denied or disappeared again.

Watch a trailer for “Denial”

See resources about the David Irving v. Penguin Books Ltd. and Deborah Lipstadt trial

Letter to the Stroud News and Journal on the protest before Katie Hopkins recent local performance

We sent the following letter to the Stroud News and Journal on Monday 22nd January. Below is a photograph of the letter as it appeared in print in the Wednesday 31st January edition. Beneath this is a photograph of the letter we responded to.

“Your anonymous correspondent’s recollections of Nazi Germany are important. But as our community prepares to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, their suggestion that the breaking of a single window at the back of a pub is somehow “Kristallnacht in well-heeled Whiteshill” is both dangerously wrong and highly offensive. 

On 9th November 1938 Jewish homes, hospitals and schools were ransacked as attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers. Rioters destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland. Over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. At least 91 Jews were murdered. Painting those who attended Katie Hopkins’ “comedy show” as somehow victims of Nazism is grotesque and disrespectful to the memory of the actual victims of Nazism.

Many readers may be unfamiliar with Hopkins and the reasons for the demonstration before her performance. It is important to emphasise that she is not merely a celebrity whom some people don’t like. In 2015, her comments referring to people migrating as “cockroaches” in an article saying she would “use gunships to stop migrants” prompted condemnation from the UN high commissioner for human rights. The commissioner emphasised that the term was similarly used by both the Nazis and those behind the genocide in Rwanda which occurred 30 years ago this year. In 2018, Hopkins spoke alongside a Holocaust denier at the conference of a far-right political party, and was banned from South Africa for ‘spreading racial hatred’. We could fill an entire letter with further examples.

Those of us who attended the 200-strong protest against Katie Hopkins in Whiteshill were surprised and saddened to learn that a window had been broken, not least because it could overshadow the effectiveness of an entirely peaceful demonstration against the platforming of hate speech locally. 

To imply that the same people who organised the protest and took such effort to ensure a calm and positive atmosphere, would then arrange for someone to return 90 minutes after the demonstration had dispersed to break a window of the pub where Hopkins was speaking, is beyond ridiculous. The people of Whiteshill expressed a peaceful message of tolerance and hope, reminiscent of those in the past who stood up in opposition to Nazism. Let us recognise this, and thank them for it. 

Denise Needleman

James Beecher

Jacqui Stearn

Jeremy Green

Rosie Wingate”

The letter as it appeared in the Stroud News and Journal on Wednesday January 31st 2024

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The letter we responded to, from an anonymous author:

HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2024 – Stroud Ceremony – 28th January

Please join us in reflection and remembrance on Sunday 28th January from 2-3pm at the Lansdown Hall (GL5 1BB) for our Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony. Later the same day there will be a discussion of a book by Primo Levi (3.30-5.30pm) and a screening of the film Denial (7.30-10pm) – full details below.

The theme for this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is Fragility of Freedom.

The event will include speakers from our local Jewish, Muslim and Christian communities. We will also hear about Hitler’s forgotten victims – disabled people.

Baron Mendes da Costa from the Three Counties Liberal Jewish Community will read the Kaddish.

There will be short speeches from Community Solidarity Stroud District, Stroud Trades Council, Stroud District Together With Refugees and Stroud Against Racism.

Music will be provided by the Stroud Red Band and Grove Singers.

Steve Saville (Curate, Stroud Parish Churches) will welcome attendees and introduce the event and our speakers:
Baron Mendes da Costa from 3 Counties Liberal Jewish Community, Hassan MG from Masjid-E-Noor Mosque, Jezza Green from Community Solidarity Stroud District, family carer Jacky Martel, Andy Wooley from Stroud Trades Council, Caroline Beattie from Stroud District Together With Refugees, and Midge Purcell from Stroud Against Racism.

Access

The main access to the Lansdown Hall is via a staircase with handrails.

Step free access to the Hall is at the back of the building in Bank Gardens. This can be accessed via the path from the bottom of the High Street.

There are accessible toilets in the Hall next to the bar.

A hearing loop is in place on their PA system.

If you have particular access requirements and you are attending an event in the Hall please contact them in advance and they will make every effort to assist and accommodate you.

Later in the day at the same venue:

* 3.30-5.30pm: discussion of Primo Levi’s book, The Drowned and The Saved, hosted by Stroud Radical Reading Group. Copies of the book are available from the Yellow Lighted Bookshop.

* 7.30pm: screening of the film Denial as part of Stroud Film Festival. Denial is based on the acclaimed book “History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier,” and adapted for the screen by David Hare. It tells the story of historian Deborah Lipstadt’s legal battle for historical truth against David Irving, who accused her of libel when she called him a Holocaust denier. With the the burden of proof on the accused in defamation cases, it was up to Lipstadt and her legal team to prove that the Holocaust occurred. This will be a ticketed event – with tickets priced at £8/6/4. Check the Festival website for other films stroudfilmfestival.org.

Buy a Ticket to see Denial

For more information, go to: hmd.org.uk

Share and invite friends to the event on Facebook

Whiteshill and Ruscombe Community Solidarity’s demonstration promoting inclusivity, anti-racism, and tolerance

Last night, 11th January 2024, the Whiteshill and Ruscombe Community Solidarity group successfully organised a calm and peaceful demonstration to promote village values of inclusivity, anti-racism and tolerance. Here’s a short video featuring Whiteshill residents Helen Price and Adrian Lukes talking about why they organised the demonstration, and below it some photos from the event and links to social media posts you might like to share.

The call to action posted is below, which you can read in full in our previous post.

Help residents keep Whiteshill tolerant, loving, anti racist, and inclusive

We are sharing the post below from residents of Whiteshill. We offer our full support and encourage supporters of Community Solidarity Stroud District to read and share the message below (share it on Facebook via this link).

“📢 CALL TO ACTION >> CALL TO ACTION >>
Help us keep Whiteshill tolerant, loving, anti racist, and inclusive.

On Thursday 11th January Katie Hopkins will perform at The Star Inn, Whiteshill.

JOIN Whiteshill community in a show of solidarity against hate-speech. Please bring friends, family, neighbours, and anyone who shares our values of tolerance and inclusivity.

WHEN: Thursday 11th January, 19.00 – 20.30 (7pm to 8.30pm) on Whiteshill Main Road, assembling at junction with Field Road (there’ll be loads of us there!)

PLEASE BRING:

➡️ Torches/head torches and lanterns to help illuminate signs/banners
➡️ Food/hot drinks in flasks to share if you can
➡️ Waterproofs/brollies if needed.
➡️ Banners and placards with positive messaging, like:

✅ Hope not Hate
✅ Refugees Welcome
✅ Whiteshill Welcomes Inclusivity / Tolerance / Kindness etc.
✅ Whiteshill is anti-racist / inclusive / anti-hate

Please keep it non-personal. We do not wish to mention her name any more than necessary.

BANNER & SIGN-MAKING WORKSHOP
Tuesday 9th January, 5pm – 9pm
St Pauls C of E Church, The Plain, GL6 6AB (big church in Whiteshill)

Come and make your banners with us. We have lots of materials but bring your own if you can. Dress warmly and bring snacks/hot drinks.

Please join us!”

Video from our “Racism isn’t funny” rally when Katie Hopkins came to perform in Stroud in September 2023

Read previous pieces on Katie Hopkins:

Take care what you share about the Israeli assault on Gaza

It was perhaps inevitable that the Israeli assault on Gaza would lead to a swathe of new conspiracy theories. Israel positions itself as the state of the Jewish people, and Jews are often the locus and subject of conspiracy theories. Israel, its enemies, and other actors with interests in the region are involved in a sharp information war.

So there are lots of unsubstantiated and sometimes implausible claims circulating about the “real truth” behind what is going on in Gaza, and about what “really” happened on 7th October. Some of these play into classic anti-Jewish stereotypes and narratives.

There are memes with made-up quotes that don’t reflect what anyone has really said. There are faked photographs of atrocities, even though there are plenty of real photographs available. These may be intended as part of a plan to discredit real reports of atrocities. They don’t help the cause of the Palestinian people.

Please don’t share this kind of material. Even reliable news sources can be overwhelmed with disinformation, but if you rely on organisations that you have known and trusted for a long time, and which are actively involved with providing support in the region, you’ll go wrong less often.

We read ‘The Light’ so you don’t have to: Issue 39

We plan to produce summaries looking at each issue of The Light. Below we look at Issue 39 from November 2023, which continues to promote false claims on climate – as we have we have written about previously.

This month, that includes the following articles:

Page 14-15: ‘What they Really Mean by ‘Net Zero’’ (no named author)

Falsely asserts that “Carbon dioxide has zero effect on temperatures” (we’ve pointed to some of the ample scientific evidence showing otherwise previously). The piece argues that all efforts to tackle climate change are simply a corrupt elite controlling our lives and freedoms. The article appears to frame attempts to reduce car use and increasing train use, or to increase energy efficiency and reduce reliance on fossil fuels, as bad things.

Page 13 ‘Ultimate Goal is Dependency’ (Gary D. Barnett, a retired financial advisor who also writes for extreme right ‘Lew Rockwell’)  and ‘Future of Freedom Foundation’.)

An ‘Opinion’ piece on how we are apparently experiencing slavery on a mass level. Describes ‘the farcical fraud called man-made climate change’ – according to him measures to tackle the climate emergency are a communist takeover plot and extreme weather events either didn’t happen at all or were initiated by the New World Order. Also suggests food shortages are a myth.

As well as articles, there are also adverts pushing denial that human activity leads to climate change – for the Lois Carborn Insistute, Free Citizen UK, and creativesociety.com. The latter is a prolific pro-Putin, climate change denial and disinformation group that operates under the pretext of working for the global good. It runs a network of more than 200 accounts across social media platforms. The melting of glaciers are linked to ‘cosmic pulses of galactic interactions’. On Facebook, it has paid to promote videos describing renewable energies as a “scam”.

These continued false claims on climate undermine the social movements that are protesting and demanding action from governments and corporations, and divide our communities as we try to reduce our contributions to global warming, and try to build resilience to the crises to come – as we’ve written previously.

But it’s not only the information on climate change that’s dodgy. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the other content in this issue.

Page 1: ’WHO’ rules the world (no named author)

Most of the content is lifted from a right wing ‘Christian Broadcasting Network’ (CBN) interview with Trumpist politician Michelle Bachmann (who supports increasing drilling for oil and refuses to rule out a nuclear strike on Iran among other strongly conservative positions). While there’s plenty to scrutinise in the WHO proposals relating to pandemic preparedness, ‘The Light’s usual cherry picking, oversimplification, fearmongering bias is here in full force. (why is the word pandemic in inverted commas?). The CBN was founded by Pat Robertson – notorious for vile anti-LGBTQ+ commentary and for writing the book on ‘New World Order’ conspiracies in which the Illuminati, the New Age movement and – of course – Jewish bankers – were being guided by Satan to bring about the ‘end times’.

Human Rights organisation Liberty has some balanced and informative content on International and national positions on mandatory vaccines and passports, without the right wing bias.

Page 2: ‘Medical crisis declaration’ (Darren Smith – editor of The Light)

States that ‘More than 400 doctors, scientists and professionals’ have signed the declaration. In reality, anyone can sign the declaration without verification of credentials. Includes an unverified ‘graph’ made by ‘ethicalskeptic’, who also climate change denial ‘graphs’. 

Page 3: More ‘Great Reset’/ global elite / WEF agenda plot to erode capitalism and our freedoms stuff, present in every issue

Page 5: ‘Democracy a failed experiment’ (Lance Peatling)

Libertarian ‘Sovereign Citizen’ stuff, claims democracy is tyranny and “true power rests, after all, in each of us individually, and in our ability to persuade.” The piece is copied from the authors blog, where he also writes of the many hedge funds he was worked at.

Page 9 ‘How to Avoid Digital Slavery’ 

Advert for a book published by the ‘White Rose’. A  group with links to white supremacist groups whose content is chock full of antisemitic tropes. The group’s name misappropriates the name the anti-Nazi White Rose group. And here in this title it misappropriates the term slavery.

Page 10 Shane Fudge interview with Richard Vobes. Shane Fudge also regularly writes for the right wing pseudoscience website ‘The Daily Skeptic’ and far-right ‘The Conservative Woman’, and interviewed David Kurten from ‘Heritage Party’ a couple of issues back. Vobes has recently been heavily pushing “15 minute city” paranoia.

Page 11 ‘Battle of the Naomis’ – An abysmally written ‘review’ of Naomi Klein’s book, Doppelgänger by Andrew Barr.

Massive amount of cherry picking that dishonestly skews the tone of the book and the points it makes. Suggests Klein would do better by following Wolf’s ‘path of enlightenment’ (becoming a gun-toting ‘patriot’ and appearing on alt-right platforms alongside Trump’s advisor Steve Bannon?). Barr is another regular contributor to The Daily Skeptic, created by Toby Young – associate editor of the right wing Spectator – known as a controversialist and for promoting eugenics.

Page 12 ‘Psychology’ section: NLP: Focusing on the Positives (Richard House)

Glorified advert for David Molden’s Neurolinguistic Programming books, along with advice from Molden, who is apparently a ‘certified NLP trainer’ alongside being a ‘freedom musician and anti-5G campaigner’. it’s unclear what his actual qualifications are but the practice of NLP has been heavily criticised and discredited by professional psychologists.

Page 16 ‘Shocking History of Hamas’ (Rodney Atkinson) and 17 ‘Exploring Motives for Slaughter’ (David Wilson)

A muddled but not entirely objectionable account of the background to the current round of fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza by Rowan Atkinson’s less funny arch-Brexiteer brother Rodney, who somehow manages to use Hamas’s victory in the 2006 Palestinian Authority elections as an opportunity to bash European institutions. Facing it on P17 is a longer piece which recycles unsubstantiated and implausible conspiracy theories that the Israelis knew the 7th October attack by Hamas was coming but allowed it to go ahead so that they would have an “excuse” for their assault on Gaza. 

Page 18: ‘Failed referendum cost $450m’ (Malcolm Turnbull, former prime minister of Australia). This article is lifted from the website of Australia’s extreme right wing ‘One Nation’ Party.

Ex Prime Minister’s of Australia’s critique of the current administration’s direction and fiscal choices. States the Indigenous Voice Referendum and net zero initiatives have been a virtue signalling waste of time and money. ‘Man of the people’ Turnbull (now worth over 200million, he was once Australia’s richest parliamentarian) ends by saying the only solution for Australians during the cost of living crisis is to vote for the nationalist, populist ‘One Nation’ party. 

Page 19: another anti-5G article, ‘How to Stop the 5G Rollout’. 

Page 20: another anti-medicine article, ‘Medicines can Destroy Health’.

Page 22: ‘Do They Want to be our Gods?’ (Ben Hunt via the far right American site ‘Red Pill Revolution’)

Sort of stream of consciousness article on power and the human soul. Who are the ‘they’ and the ‘mass culture’ ‘controllers’ who are ‘harvesting our souls’ he is referring to, I wonder?! Much talk of men: ‘men’s search for meaning’ ‘the race of pious men’ that is gone.

Page 23 (letters page) letter from Malcolm Taylor: “the strength of Zionist capitalism and political influence in the West is deep and widespread” – back to the antisemitic tropes from ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ again.

Read our previous summaries:

Things “The Light” Wants You to Dislike (Issue 32)

We read it so you don’t have to: Issue 34 of “The Light”

Don’t let conspiracy influencers pull you into their hateful rabbit hole

The following text is from a leaflet we started handing out on 11th November 2023, the day an event was held in Stroud featuring Sandi Adams (returning for her 3rd public speaking event here) and James Delingpole (returning for a 2nd time)

As well as opposing the harmful content in The ‘Light’ paper, Community Solidarity Stroud District has raised concerns about some of the people who have been invited to speak in Stroud by groups pushing conspiracy theories locally.

For example, before her appearance at a rally in November 2020, we challenged organisers regarding antisemitic content on Sandi Adams’ website. Despite this, she has since been invited on two further occasions.

In July 2020 Adams published an article titled The Truth is anti-Semitic which repeated vile claims that have been and are still used to persecute the Jewish community and are extremely harmful. Adams also hosted a notorious, 12-hour long highly antisemitic pro-Nazi Holocaust denial documentary. 

Adams has blamed this content on her then website manager, deleting some items she claims were published without her knowledge or permission.

However, she continues to host on her website a ‘documentary’ called The Jewish Crucifixion of Russia, which concludes “Although it is believed the Soviets lost power years ago, the Jewish hand behind [Communism] is very much alive today.” Adams describes this ‘vital’ and adds a grossly antisemitic cartoon featuring a Jewish ‘puppetmaster’. There also remains a post on her website (featured on her home page) about The New World Order which contains quotes from notorious Jew-hater Douglas Reed, references the infamous antisemitic forgery the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, and praises ‘brave’ holocaust deniers Kevin Barret and Nicholas Kollerstrom – among other antisemitic content.

It isn’t only her promotion of antisemitic content that makes Adams a concerning public speaker. Her main obsession is with ‘Agenda 21’, which she describes as “indicative of a longer plan of human population control and world domination”. Since 2021 has been and gone without Adams’ fantasies coming true, she and other conspiracy theorists have copy-pasted their theories into reheated scaremongering about ‘Agenda 30’.

In fact, Agenda 21 was a non-binding planning paper, adopted by the UN Conference on Environment and Development in 1992. It is not a treaty. It has no force of law, no penalties, and no significant funding. It sought to encourage communities around the world to come up with their own solutions to environmental problems rather than to impose them. In the decades since, right-wing groups in the US like the John Birch Society, have claimed that this document is a blueprint for a totalitarian world government – but people who care about our environment shouldn’t be fooled.

Environmentalists should also be concerned about a repeat invitation to James Delingpole, who has a long history not only of denying the science around climate change, but of attacking climate scientists and activists, to the point of repeatedly inciting violence. Since the pandemic, Delingpole has been embracing increasingly extreme conspiracy theories and their politically extreme proponents including Colin Robertson, a white nationalist who has enthused about “torpedo[ing] boats carrying refugees”.

Read more about Sandi Adams on our website.

Read our open letter opposing an appearance by James Delingpole.

Sign our statement against distribution of ‘The Light’ paper locally, and join our mailing list.
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Ceasefire NOW!

We are encouraging our supporters to sign the Stroud Ceasefire Now Coalition declaration: sign the open letter, and to join the weekly candlelit vigil for Gaza and Israel every Friday 6-6.15pm outside local MP Siobhan Baillie’s office, 3 King St, GL5 3BS. The declaration and weekly vigils are supported by us at CSSD, Stroud Against Racism, Stroud District Together With Refugees and Palestine Solidarity Campaign – Five Valleys Branch.

The declaration reads:

“The Stroud Ceasefire Now coalition is calling on ALL political parties and politicians locally to support the worldwide calls for a ceasefire. A ceasefire on all sides, will avoid the humanitarian crisis in Gaza from deepening and save lives on both sides of the conflict.

The Stroud Ceasefire Now Coalition Declaration supports demands for:

  • An immediate ceasefire on all sides.
  • For all captives to be released.
  • An end to the blockade preventing civilians in Gaza from accessing food, fuel and water.
  • A process for real and lasting peace for Palestinian and Israeli people

We encourage you to support this declaration.”

Join the call for a ceasefire NOW!

Sign the local open letter calling on local politicians to back a ceasefire
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Speeches from our Public Meeting on 4th October 2023

On 4th October 2023, we held a public meeting titled ‘Conspiracy Theories, the Far Right, and The Light’. Here we present:

Before those, biographies of our three speakers:

  • Emma Calcutt is originally from the West Midlands, Emma studied Development Studies, Politics & Arabic at SOAS, spent 5 years in Syria and 2 years in Indonesia.
    She has had a life long interest in anti-racism, and as well as Community Solidarity Stroud District, also works with Stroud Against Racism.
  • James Beecher has lived in Stroud for almost his entire life. In 2011-12 he was the Chair of Stroud Against the Cuts when it ran a successful campaign to keep health clinics and district hospitals like Stroud’s across Gloucestershire from being moved out of the NHS. He works at a local community bike workshop, has been involved in a variety of direct action anti-war, environmental and social justice movements, and is a founder member of Community Solidarity Stroud District.

The speech by CSSD representatives, James Beecher and Emma Calcutt

We’re going to talk about four things

  1. What we mean by “conspiracy theories
  2. What we mean by “the far right”
  3. How “The Light” paper promotes both of these things, and
  4. Why we think these issues cannot be ignored, and some ideas we have about how to tackle them. We don’t think we have all the answers and we’d like to hear your ideas too.

Before we get started – a warning. While some of you will be familiar with the terrible content of The Light, and it can be uncomfortable to quote it out loud, we feel it’s necessary to the arguments we are making to provide quotations.

Life is hard, and hugely unequal. It is entirely unsurprising that people are distrustful of government, authorities and institutions.

But that doesn’t mean any claim about government or other institutions is true. When we talk about “conspiracy theories” what we mean is perhaps better described as “conspiracy beliefs”. This is where there is limited or no evidence for the theory. Indeed, the absence of evidence or the existence of evidence that contradicts the theory is treated as evidence that the theory is correct – that the conspiracy is suppressing evidence.

The example we’ve written about at length is the claim that global warming and climate change are hoaxes or scams as part of a conspiracy to decimate the human population and control what remains of it. This conspiracy involves not only ignoring but seeing as part of the conspiracy the enormous volumes of evidence that human societies since the era of colonialism and industrialisation – and in particular the burning of fossil fuels – have contributed to global warming, and that this is leading to changes in the climate, and to suffering and death.

Example headlines in The Light paper include “global warming lies, deceit and hypocrisy”, “challenge climate emergency theories”, and – on a recent frontpage accompanied by two charts easily shown to be grossly misleading, “No climate crisis”.

We need to take this seriously: when publications like “The Light” attempt to sow doubt about climate change, they undermine the social movements that are protesting, demanding action and making change. They divide our communities as we try to reduce our contributions to global warming, and build our capacity to respond to the crises to come as the climate breaks down. One of the risks of those crises is that the far-right will seek to build from them.

When we express concern about the far right, we aren’t only concerned about The Light newspaper.

In 2010 – long before our group existed – the British National Party – the most electorally successful far right party in England of recent decades – sought to site its communications office at Salmon Springs in Stroud. Then BNP leader Nick Griffin had visited a pub in Painswick the year before, at the peak of the BNP’s popularity – it received nearly 1 million votes in the 2009 elections for MEPs. An 18 year old poured a pint of Guinness over Griffin, and BNP goons beat him up in response. The BNP dropped their plans for a media office here after community opposition including a public meeting of 120 people – not dissimilar to tonight’s meeting.

There’s a popular idea that Griffin and the BNP fell apart after his support for Holocaust denial aired on an episode of BBC Question Time, but in my opinion the way in which Griffin was granted this platform has only aided a drift to far right ideas and policies in English politics – even if the BNP did not benefit themselves.

We’ve seen the Conservative Government introduce the horrendous “hostile environment” that insists on identity checks of people racialised as other than British, and have led to the denial of healthcare treatment to hundreds of people – including those who have lived here for decades and members of the Windrush generation.

The current Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, has recently been referring to undocumented migrants as an “existential challenge” to Europe and the US – echoing racist conspiracy theories of “White Genocide”, and the “Great Replacement Theory”. In Christmas 2021 these ideas were promoted in leaflets distributed locally by supporters of what was – as least until a recent split – Britain’s most active fascist organisation – Patriotic Alternative.

As today is the anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, it’s also worth mentioning that Oswald Mosley visited Stroud in the 1930s – there is a picture of him outside what was most recently the Electric Bike Shop on John St, apparently after staying in Cainscross House, the home of the leader of the West of England branch of Moseley’s British Union of Fascists.

In short – while it may unsettle ideas about Stroud’s current political culture, we shouldn’t be complacent about the possibility of the far-right organising here.

But we should also celebrate the antifascist opposition locally – not just to Nick Griffin and the BNP in 2009/10.

In 1962 a far right camp in Guiting Wood in the Cotswolds hosted a visit by the leader of the American Nazi Party. He was deported from the country after the camp ‘was stormed by 100 Cotswold villagers’ and a swastika flag ‘hauled down’’. The Daily Mirror reported that Mrs Ada Green from Cheltenham who was nearly eighty and a former district nurse at Guiting Power “Angrily… stamped around the camp site, waving her first at the grey-uniformed, jackbooted Nazis, shouting “Clear off, clear off!”

What about The Light, and our opposition to it?

The paper describes itself as a “truthpaper”, offering “the uncensored truth” as it casts itself as an “alternative” to the “mainstream media” and “tyranny”. 37 monthly issues have been published since September 2020. Its editor has claimed a monthly print run of 200,000 – distributed both directly to subscribers, and via stalls such as the one in Stroud High St. 

The latest issue credits 13 people involved in the production and distribution of the paper – though we don’t know how many of those roles are paid. We do know that the editor, Darren Nesbitt, is a Christian who describes his politics as “constitutionalist” – about “preserving what our ancestors have built up”. He’s also a proud flat-earther.

The Light isn’t a simple far right publication – it’s not the case that every article is from or promoting the far right. And we’re not saying that all the people who hand out the paper whether locally or elsewhere are far right.

We might describe it as a paper of the “cosmic right” – mixing ideas from a range of perspectives on the right including the far right with those from “hippy” and “alternative” communities. Others have referred to a phenomenon of “Conspirituality” where conspiratorial ideas about how the world works are blended with those from New Age or other forms of spirituality (including forms of Christianity) or “wellness influencers” with a particular approach to alternative health.

What we have written about extensively is how The Light provides space for, points to, and includes adverts from far right individuals or organisations. In our view, the paper effectively functions as public relations for the far right – mixing content from the far right with other content, or concealing its nature, so that audiences that might normally reject the far right instead come to see these individuals and organisations as valued members of their movement.

The paper has published several articles by Anne Marie Waters – leader of the ‘For Britain’ political party, described by former UKIP leader Nigel Farage as “Nazis and racists”. One of AMW’s articles in The Light is all about promoting Tommy Robinson – one of the most well known far right activists in Britain, a member of BNP before founding the violent street movement the ‘English Defence League’.

In Issue 31, The Light defended a protest which turned into a riot against asylum seekers being housed in a hotel in Liverpool. The article opens by suggesting that the term ‘far right’ is nothing but a ‘trope’ which has been ‘rendered utterly meaningless’. Yet, the violent protest the article defends was promoted by far right organisations including Patriotic Alternative, who had visited the hotel in the weeks before the riot, and delivered leaflets in the area.

The government’s dehumanising rhetoric about migrants or policies that restrict access to public services or involve invasive personal data collection or sharing as part of border controls aren’t criticised. Instead the paper attacks those seeking refuge, listing the term “asylum seeker” as an example of “newspeak” in the style of Orwell’s 1984. The “Oldspeak Definition” offered by The Light is “government enabled economic migrant”. It is revealing that a paper that presents itself as opposing tyranny shows no solidarity with people forced to flee their home countries.

The attacks on oppressed and marginalised people don’t end there.

In Issue 36, from August this year, Robert C Smith – manager of a boutique investment bank – begins an article “Men are conquerors, if this were not true, America would never have been discovered”. He says that men have a “conqueror gene” and tells a story about how if he sees water he has to go in and tell the ocean “you are our bitch and we are not afraid of you” and goes on to say “I don’t expect you ladies to understand”. This is in an article primarily about denying global warming.

These attitudes are consistent with the paper’s approach to women and feminism. In an issue from November last year, readers are told that “Patriarchy” is nothing but a “sexist insult”, rather than a way of examining the continued evidence and experience of women having less wealth and experiencing more violence, both at home and abroad. An article on films complains of “strong, miserable female leads with no personalities”, brought to us by sinister forces who want to “destroy society, confuse and blur gender roles, eradicate traditionalism…”

Hungarian PM Victor Orban is praised as a champion of “traditional family values” – as he rules a government that has ended legal recognition of transgender people, censored any “LGBT+ positive content” in movies, books or public advertisements and severely restrict sex education in school in the style of Section 28 – and passed legislation enabling him to impose states of emergency where he can rule by decree at will. So much for freedom.

A cartoon from the July 2022 issue features a parent asking their primary-school age child “how was school?”, and the child projectile vomiting a rainbow in response. This represents a grim disgust with LGBTQ+ people, and a bizarre conspiratorial fantasy that the content of primary school education is in some way overwhelmingly made up of content about LGBTQ people. In case the meaning of the cartoon isn’t clear, Page 7 of the same issue describes Pride month (in which it was issued) as “a rainbow-festooned festival of the Globohomo cult” – with the author of the piece writing “the question must surely be asked just how much longer can society stomach being force-fed this most degenerate form of diversity”. The cartoon was produced by Bob Moran who is described as “our best political cartoonist”. Moran was sacked by The Telegraph after he tweeted that palliative care doctor and pro-NHS campaigner Rachel Clarke “deserves to be verbally abused in public for the rest of her worthless existence. They all do.” 

What prompted our group – initially made up predominantly of Jewish people – to form was a piece in The Light paper’s November 2021 issue regarding an online radio host, Graham Hart, who was jailed for 32 months for even worse language. Hart pled guilty to eight counts of making a “programme in service with intent or likely to stir up racial hatred”. Hart broadcast that Jews were “like rats”, “filth” and needed to be “wiped out”. He asked listeners to send him a gun. He said “that although baby rats look cute, they grow to be adult rats and that in a similar way, young Jews should also be killed.” These are only a few examples of his disgusting comments.

The article in The Light mentioned none of this. Nor did it report the perspective of a single Jewish person. Instead it misled readers to present Hart as a sympathetic character, “entitled to” his opinions and asked “How does it harm anybody else for him to have a different view of history?”

This complacency and evasiveness have been replicated in many of the responses we’ve had to raising these issues – with our extensive evidence dismissed as “smears”, “nitpicking” or “based on one article”. In a piece that the most prominent local distributor of The Light wrote for the paper as a “riposte” to the BBC coverage of The Light’s promotion of the far right, he complained of “the assumptions that anything that can be labelled as “far right” is necessarily bad”. Isn’t that revealing?

Some responses been directly antisemitic, and this isn’t a surprise given antisemitism is a common feature for speakers invited to Stroud by either “Stroud Freedom Group” or related organising around the former shopfront space “The Beacon”. 

Our origins as a group lie in a letter written asking the Stroud Freedom Group to withdraw an invitation to Sandi Adams to speak at a rally in November 2020 – before CSSD existed, but written by several current members. We were concerned about antisemitic content on her website. Though she has deleted some of the posts we highlighted, she still hosts a page titled “The Crucifixion of Russia” – a documentary film for which the full title is “The Jewish Crucifixion of Russia”. The video concludes “Communism was always a Jewish tool, used to purge Christianity and freedom. Although it is believed the Soviets lost power years ago, the Jewish hand behind it is very much alive today”.

Rather than taking our concerns on board, and certainly making no apology, ‘Stroud Freedom Group’ instead chose to invite Sandi Adams to speak again in this town at a public meeting held at The Old Convent in December last year.

We do not want to overstate the risk locally, but neither do we want to be complacent.

Malakai Wheeler, an 18 year old who lived in Swindon but was studying at Marling school – was recently convicted of terrorism offences. He was arrested in May 2021, when just 16. He was caught doing a Nazi salute and owned a ‘Terrorist’s Handbook’. He was described as a ‘prolific contributor’ to an extreme right wing chat group, posting regular racist and antisemitic content and propaganda, using a swastika as his profile image and telling the court he had “an interest and sympathy with some of” National Socialism.

We believe that by talking about these issues, and coming together as a community to discuss them – using our freedom of speech – we can tackle them.

We’d be really grateful if you would share our online articles on social media or through email with your friends and other networks.

We have leaflets that you can help us distribute, and regularly hold street stalls where you can join us.

We encourage you to talk about these issues in face to face conversations – including objecting when you hear people repeat conspiratorial or far right ideas.

We have a website, Facebook page, email list and a whatsapp announcements group you can engage with for updates, and will be organising further in person events including for Holocaust Memorial Day in January, and film screenings in the coming months.

If you’d like to get more involved, please talk to us.

Thanks again for listening.

The speech by David Renton

For 30 years, I’ve spoken at events in the UK and abroad about the threat posed by the far right. When I started, what motivated my listeners was fear of fascist parties. In France and Britain and Italy, there were parties set up former fascists, nostalgic for the 1930s.

So, in France, you could tell Jean-Marie Le Pen was a fascist, because he insisted on talking about the second world war. FN [Front National – Jean-Marie Le Pen’s party] candidates said that Marshal Petain, Hitler’s ally in France, had been misunderstood. Le Pen claimed the Holocaust had been exaggerated. Six times, he was convicted of Holocaust denial. He was fined, he was threatened with jail, but always he came back to that argument. It was more important to him to keep fascist, voters on side than it was appealing to middle-of-the-road centre-right voters.

Here in Britain we had the National Front, and the British National Party, which was founded by a former leader of the Front. When anti-fascists wanted to expose the BNP, the easiest way of doing it was by showing old pictures of their leader John Tyndall in a Nazi uniform.

In Italy, the main fascist party was called MSI, or M-SI meaning “Mussolini, Yes.” The party’s first three leaders had all served under Mussolini. For years, the leaders would give speeches saying, “Let everyone know, if they search for fascism, fascism is here.”

By around 1990, all those parties had worked out that it was in their interests to deny that they were still fascists. The first was the MSI in Italy. They elected a new leader, Ginafranco Fini, who said he was a “post-fascist”.

Every time I addressed an anti-fascist meeting, the audience would agree about certain things:

  1. We all thought fascism was bad
  2. Although the success of the parties was worrying, we weren’t absolutely terrified. We reckoned there was a limit as to how far the fascists could grow. It wasn’t exact. But iot seemed like no more than about 20 percent of people would vote for a fascist party.
  3. What that meant was – so long as the left did our job properly, so long as we were organised and challenged them, the growth of the fascists would be limited.

This is how the left understood the world: and by the “left” I mean socialists, liberals, Communists, trade unionists, environmentalists, peace protesters, feminists.

Let me skip the intervening 30 years of history, and come to the present.

Politics now is very different. For one thing, the far right has undoubtedly grown. And yet, if anything the number of people willing to call themselves fascists has shrunk.

It is almost as if the most effective leaders of the far right had grown up in the same world as the rest of us, and drawn similar conclusions.

Their most important realisation was this – that people really did hate fascism. Therefore if the far right was to grow beyond its limits, what needed to happen was this. New leaders needed to emerge who weren’t interested in fascism, did their best to ignore it, and found new ways of doing politics seemingly a long way from fascism

The far-right had to decide between diluting fascism or trying something new. There were times when you could see these strategies in competition with one another. So, in the 2000s, you had the BNP standing in elections, you had UKIP standing in elections. For a long time, each party did about as well as the other. But by the end of the 2000s it became obvious that UKIP (a never fascist party) was going to do better than the BNP which had been fascist and now didn’t know what it was. Voters, donors, abandoned the BNP. They found a home in UKIP instead.

That’s why if you take the successful leaders of today’s far-right, Trump, Orban, Bolsonaro, they aren’t fascists nor have they ever been. They feel like – and are – something new.

Another problem is that small numbers of former leftists have joined them. With every “culture wars” waged by right-wing press, groups of people detach themselves from the left and go over to the right. So, when UKIP became the Brexit party, among its candidates was Claire Fox – a former Revolutionary Communist. She was happy to give cover to Nigel Farage.

Under Covid, in America and all over Europe, you saw people siding with the right from New Age communities. For someone of my generation, you say the words “New Age” and I think of people travelling in their thousands to Glastonbury, being denounced by government ministers, being attacked by the police. It felt like there was an automatic link between those communities and the left. But in 30 years those links have broken.

At this point, I need to explain two definitions. The first is “fascism”. When I talk about fascism, I mean something specific. It is a way of doing politics with a definite history. What Mussolini and Hitler stood for was radical inequality: they wanted bosses to have more power over workers, the richer countries to have more power over their colonies, men to have more power over women. They pledged to fight a war to the death against socialism.

Fascism was also a mass movement. It was enthralled by the latest technology, airplanes, cinema, radio. By uniforms. By leaders. It tried to mobilise millions of people on the streets.

Between fascism’s goals and its style of organising there was always a tension. If something else could emerge, a mass movement with millions of supporters, fascism would be pushed back. That’s where anti-fascism comes in. That was the effect of such demonstrations as the Battles of Lewisham or Cable Streeet, whose 87th anniversary is today, when 2,000 fascists tried to march through east London, but were blocked by a crowd of 150,000 people.

Lots of people have tried to define fascism over the years, and their definitions say more or less the same thing. Everyone knows what fascists stand for. You can make a list of their beliefs. But there is no similar list of core “far right” beliefs. Their content changes rapidly.

By the far right, all we mean is a kind of politics which is on the right, and more aggressive than most other right-wing politics at the time. It’s not a fixed set of ideas, but something changing. One of the reasons the far-right changes is because the centre-right changes as well. Think about the Conservatives when they came into office, how their one slogan was austerity. But that’s now what the Conservatives were under Boris Johnson, he was a spender not a cutter. So the centre-right changes, and the far-right changes in reaction to it.

That said. It is always the case that when you have a far right that is large and growing, the fascist element never disappears. Fascism solves certain problems facing the far right. The far-right goes through a cycle, in one moment disavowing fascism, in the next copying parts of it

One part of fascism which the non-fascist far right constantly recreates is fascism’s dependence conspiracy theories. No political movement in history has relied on conspiracy theories as deeply as fascism did. Hitler and Mussolini wanted to pose as radicals. They also wanted to run society very much along the lines it was already organised, with the same rulers. How they could combine these two ambitions was by pretend that there were, everywhere, secret conspiracies of the truly powerful which only the fascists could defeat.

They said Western society was run by cultural producers, artists, film-makers, musicians, working as opinion formers. They called this Kulturbolshewismus, “Cultural Marxism”.

They claimed that the banks and supermarkets were run by rich Jews, “Globalists”. And the trade unions run by poor Jews. These were lies. This was paranoid thinking. It was a spur to violence. Thousands of socialists had their meeting-halls burned or were shot, even before Hitler or Mussolini took power. Fantasies of Jewish power led to the Holocaust.

What about The Light?

The first thing to say about the newspaper is that it is right-wing. It never has a kind word for the poor or a harsh word for the rich. Think of the things which make people in Britain’s lives a misery. High gas and electricity bills – the Light isn’t interested. Why aren’t wages keeping up with bills. In 38 issues, the paper hasn’t once tried to explain where they come from.

Tens of thousands of tenants are going to be evicted in Britain this year. Read The Light, and you’d never know it. The paper isn’t interested in workers or the poor.

Much of what the paper does tell you is the same as any right-wing papers. The poor are a cost on society. The poor want houses, they want jobs. And the rich mustn’t help them.

The Light is against taxes on the rich. The Light think making the rich pay their fair share is “100 per cent immoral and 100 per cent corrupt.” Like every other right-wing paper, the Light hates refugees. In Issue 27, the Light warned of refugees coming into Britain. Let them in, the paper said, and it will be taxpayers “footing the bill”

Remember – a year ago – we had the most useless government in British history. Headed by Liz Truss, it announced more tax cuts for the rich in a shorter period of time than any government we’ve ever had. She cut so much, there wasn’t going to be any money left. There was a run on the pound, and Truss fled from office after 45 days.

The Light responded in March this year. They reprinted an article from the Daily Telegraph, praising Liz Truss, quoting her account of what had happened, and wishing for the return of a proper “Conservative government to implement Conservative Party policies”.

There is a reason why The Light can borrow content from the Daily Telegraph, without that article standing out in any from the material around it – and it’s this. The basic ideas of The Light are the most familiar clichés that we see every day in the right-wing press.

Of course The Light was only a right-wing paper, then many people in this room would dislike it. We’d ignore it. But The Light isn’t just right-wing, it is a far-right paper.

The first issue of The Light was published six months after the start of the Covid lockdown. The first reaction of the Prime Minister Boris Johnson to Covid was to insist that Britain would see no lockdown. You remember what he said. He  was going to be like the Mayor in Jaws, keeping the beaches open no matter what.

Within days, though, Johnson had changed course. The government introduced a lockdown. It did so because every night on our TV screens, pictures were being shown of people dying in hospitals. No-one knew how many people would join them. Ordinary people in our millions demanded that the government take action to save lives.

From the start, the lockdown was criticised by the right-wing press. There were Conservatives who wanted business keep on as usual. They hated the idea of spending billions on healthcare. The Light saw that argument, and repeated arguments spread by Johnson’s Conservative critics.

The problem wasn’t criticising the lockdown, it was the way they criticised it. There is all the difference in the world between criticising the lockdown from the left or criticising it from the right. A “left anarchist” paper could have said – we are giving the state power, which after the lockdown ends will be used against protesters. But the Light didn’t say that. It said all the real protesters (Pride marches, Black Lives Matter, XR) were part of some fantastic imagined conspiracy. They think we only took to the streets because George Soros put us there.

A “left libertarian” paper could have said the impact of the lockdown fell too hard on workers. But The Light never did say that. It wasn’t interested in workers.

Instead of taking either of those approaches, it tried to join up people’s anger to far-right talking points. When The Light criticised the Covid rules, the paper never attacked the actual people making the decision: Boris Johnson or the Conservatives. Instead, the paper blamed a series of imaginary enemies. It started talking about the 9/11 attacks, saying they had been a “false flag”. It claimed that fluoride was being added to the water to “reduce an individual’s power to resist domination by slowly narcotising a certain area of the brain”.

When people start using conspiracy theories, that always helps the right. They stop talking about the real, obvious, visible beneficiaries from our society, “the rich”, specific politicians. They start invoking some other secret, invisible, imaginary enemy.

The Light has published 43 articles attacking “the globalists”. It’s a language with an old history. When interwar fascists spoke of “globalists”, they meant the Jews. They had in their kind the weird fantasy that Jews didn’t have roots, that they wandered the world. Unlike the good, honest, British or German or Italian rich who were tied to one place. Blaming people on the basis of myths about ethnicity: that way of thinking led to the gas chambers.

And The Light, in its inching, dishonest, way – not wanting to state anything openly, only at the start of the journey – is staring down the same path.

As I speak, The Light has on its website, an advert for the latest David Icke book. David Icke believes there is a secret conspiracy that runs the world, “the Death Cult.” It’s a conspiracy of secret lizard people. And behind them, the Jews. He blames Jews for the Russian Revolution. He blames them for 9/11. He insists that the greatest forgery in world history – the Protocols of the Elders of Zion “are happening”.

Let me end by addressing the question of how to respond to publications like The Light.

I have always encouraged movements to distinguish between fascists and their allies closer to the political mainstream. Faced with groups like the National Front or the British National Party, the left has always spoken of “no platforming” fascists. The idea was of taking away any means by which the fascists might reach their audience. If a fascists hand out a paper, take if off them, throw it in the bin. If a fascist tries to hold a stall, close it down. If a fascist wants to hold a public meeting, occupy the venue, we should make sure it couldn’t proceed.

The reason for that approach is that fascism is a dynamic style of politics, capable of growing every fast, and with serious ambitions to take state power.

If that’s the model of no platform, then The Light aren’t fascists. They don’t organise physical attacks on anyone. They support the likes of Meloni in Italy or Orban in Hungary – but they never dare say straight out that Britain would be better if we got rid of democracy. The Light is, in the end, a far-right propaganda sheet. If you were going to draw up a line of political ideologies, from left to right, then you’d say. Not actual fascists, but the next along.

So my position would be that that people should allow The Light to speak. But when they speak, we will speak too. We will argue with them. We will say it over and over again until even the people handing out that paper grasp what we are telling them. If they have a meeting, we will stand in front of it. We shouldn’t make it impossible for them to organise, but we should argue with every person in their audience where The Light’s ideas lead.

The Light is wrong. It lies about what’s happening. People who read it, and believe what it is saying, misunderstand the world. There is no secret world government of anything. Tommy Robinson does not care about the victims of child sex abuse. Global warming is not a conspiracy to usher in 15-minute cities or whatever other nonsense talking-point the magazine decides to print. The far right are not your friends.

100 years ago, a socialist writer August Bebel responded to the rising antisemitism of his day, and he called it “the Socialism of fools”. He wasn’t dealing with the murderous antisemitism of the 1930s but something earlier than that, fuzzier, less well-formed. What he meant was that if you look at the world, imagining you’ll find some secret conspiracy to explain everything – you make it harder to identify the real culprits in our society.

If you think about all the problems in Britain, it’s remarkable how many boil down to the same basic issue. The rich do not pay enough in taxes. The politicians cosy up to them. Therefore there isn’t the money we need to pay for proper services – NHS, council homes.

The rich are not a conspiracy. The papers don’t hide their wealth, they boast about it in Rich Lists. You don’t need to imagine there’s a secret caste of reptile overloads ruling us. You just need a system which properly taxes the rich.

The Light doesn’t help us to see what needs doing. Allowing the paper to go without challenge makes it harder to bring about the world we need.

So the paper can share its lies, but every time they speak, we will speak too.

Footage from the event