January, 24, 2010, Germany — Neo-Nazis across Europe are planning to march on Dresden on February 13th. A broad coalition of over 200 groups — left, ecology, labor, student, youth, human rights and anti-fascist — has called for counter-protest, for broad-scale civil disobedience to prevent the Nazi march. “We are colorful and we are placing our selves in the way of the brown mob. From our side, there will be no escalation.”
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Workers’ Liberty condemned and opposed Israel’s invasion of Gaza, and we condemn and oppose its occupation of the Palestinian territories. We believe solidarity with the Palestinians should be the left’s starting point on the question of Israel/Palestine. But we believe that the proposal to boycott Israel is reactionary, counter-productive and will hinder efforts to build an effective movement of solidarity with the Palestinians.
In this briefing, we set out our arguments against the boycott, and for a different kind of solidarity with the Palestinians and the Israeli left.
Read here…
Hat tip: Engage.
Event in London, UK, on Sunday 24 January, connecting the struggles of refugees and asylum-seekers in the UK, Israel, Palestine and elsewhere. Details here.
Over the years, there have been a series of scandals and controversies over the relationship between the French “ultra-left” and what is in France known as “negationism”. The “ultra-gauche” in France, defined by Wikipedia as “a branch of left communism descending from people such as Amadeo Bordiga, Otto Rühle, Anton Pannekoek, Herman Gorter, and Paul Mattick, and continuing to present day writers such as Jacques Camatte and Gilles Dauvé (also known as Jean Barrot)”, is a heterogeneous and contentious movement.
Some of its grouplets, such as La Vielle Taupe (The Old Mole, led by Pierre Guillaume) and La Guerre Sociale (led by Dominique Blanc), were closely involved in Holocaust revisionism or negationism in the 1970s and 1980s. Their activities included the publication of some of the works of now notorious Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. (Noam Chomsky’s involvement in this affair, documented here and here, has been another source of controversy, but that’s another story…)
This scandal has recently flaired up again in one of the corners of the libertarian communist and anarchist web, with the publication of an English translation of a 2001 article by Didier Daeninckx amplifying some of the allegations, specifically against Gilles Dauvé. AGT has details of this, and a large amount of background material for those interested in the intersection between the ultra-left and negationism.
AGT also notes some problematic texts written by Dauvé (including under the pseudonym Jean Barrot), such as “Fascism/Anti-Fascism” and “The perplexities of the Middle Eastern conflict” (the latter just added to the Libcom archive), as well as Amadeo Bordiga’s “Auschwitz ou le grand alibi” (“Auschwitz or the great alibi”, 1960), published by French ultra-leftists. These texts cannot be described, in Deborah Lipstadt’s terms, as “hardcore” Holocaust revisionism. However, they arguably do constitute a form of “softcore” denialism. Crucially, the “critique” of anti-fascism developed by Dauvé and Bordiga has been taken up by a number of small far right groups who fish in the murky waters of anti-authoritarian “anti-Zionism”, such as those around Pacifica Forum and Palestine Think Tank.
