Maple Leaf Gardens yesterday, the gay village tomorrow

Francine Collavecchio

Move over Maple Leaf Gardens, Sheldon has made his next move.

Not content with owning the historical arena only, Sheldon signed a deal with the City of Toronto to purchase the entire gay village.

“Ryerson will finally be the gayest school in Canada” said an elated Levy to a press conference held at Zelda’s today.

“We’re very proud of our school and it was this pride that lead us to procure the village.”

Ryerson’s purchase has secured Church Street from College Street to Isabella Street. Work is ongoing to finish the details for Ryerson to purchase the final, less gay blocks. The details of cost were kept confidential, but a rumour over heard in a bathroom stall during the press conference leads The DeVryersonian to believe that the costs are somewhere close to $200 million.

Belinda Grayson, the university’s vice-president of women’s issues, said “Sheldon is an amazing visionary. He imagines what’s possible and goes out and buys it. He’s a capitalist’s dream and the gay town’s saviour.”

Sheldon outlined the cancerous university’s plan to develop the village with a very nice PowerPoint presentation. He indicated that Ryerson will be moving the School of Engineering to new booths that will line the street. As the Faculty that already has the most frontage on Church Street, moving Engineering there made sense to Levy and his people.

“We plan to replace all the rainbow flags with the colour of our Engineering Faculty. Purple flags will be much less gay,” said Levy.

Skip Judsen, president of the Ryerson Engineering Student Society (RESS) was cautiously optimistic of his faculty’s move to the village. “I’m afraid that engineers wont realize that we moved the faculty and will still show up to the engineering building for class,” he said.

“However, the stigma that comes with the village–partying, drinking and awesome parties–is an image we encourage and promote with in the Faculty. Once we figure out how to reduce the traffic at the village coffee shops, this new location will be perfect,” added Judsen.

Councilor Kyle Rae was kind of pissed that Ryerson bought the street.

“Why would he buy the entire street?” said Rae. “That’s insane.”

Toby Whitfield was seen grinning about the purchase at the back of the room at the media conference.

“OMG,” said Whitfield, “now that we’ve closed Gould Street, our campaign naturally extends to closing other streets. The Close Church Street campaign is going to be bigger than the Gould Street campaign ever was.”

Chris Drew, self acclaimed lover of street closures in and around Ryerson and former RSU vice president could not be reached at the Liberal party’s secret headquarters for comment.

The Ryerson purchase was the first case in Canada of a university actually purchasing a street from a city.  When the University of Toronto heard that Ryerson won this honour, a statement was issued by president David Naylor.

“The University of Toronto plans to buy Spadina and become the first university in Canada to purchase a street. Ryerson is not a university,” read the statement.

Vampire Weekend Vampire Weekend Vampire Weekend

Somehow reviewers just can’t get enough Vampire Weekend. To satiate your appetite, we’ve pulled together three separate reviews of the most amazing band ever.

Vampire Weekend

Reviewed by Jimmy Streak (a hopeful for an Exclaim! internship)

In the wake of post-modernism, post-post-modernism, pre-post-modernism, post-globalization and the post-digital era, Vampire Weekend - whose pre-Vampire Weekend demo is still their best work, in our opinion - holds a special place in our hearts. Unlike the myriad bands we’ve screwed over by giving their debut a stellar rating and then unmercifully shredding their next album, we decided to stick by Vampire Weekend. Why, you ask? Because Vampire Weekend is the kind of band that’s perched perfectly between the snobby music world of critics and the music audience that disdains that kind of cultural elitism. By attaching ourselves to the band’s music, we can stay in touch with the general public, further establish ourselves as populists and grow ever more monolithic. [Why do you think we gave Justin Timberlake such a good review?] Furthermore, because we helped break Vampire Weekend to the world, we can now pretend that we like them more than other publications based on the fact that we heard them first. Then, when we very suddenly decide we no longer like them, we can appear ahead of the curve beside publications who like Vampire Weekend for their music and not just their cultural sway! See? It’s perfect - Wait, what? My word count is up? But I’ve only had enough space to demonstrate my superior intelligence and cultural hubris! I haven’t even begun to make a critical judgement based solely on the band’s mu -

Rating: 10.0

Vampire Weekend

Reviewed by Sarah Jane Osborne (a hopeful for Rolling Stone magazine internship)

We love Vampire Weekend, modern music, and the “indie” scene. You know “indie”? It’s this new kind of music that the kids like, and we here at Rolling Stone are really digging it - people still say they “dig” things, right? In fact, we liked the band’s debut so much that we named it the fifty-sixth best album of the decade, meaning that it’s better than U2’s How to Dismantle an Atom Bomb (68) but not as good as All That You Can’t Leave Behind (13) or No Line on the Horizon (36). Vampire Weekend’s Contra doesn’t sound much like U2, or like any album from before 1980, so we don’t really have any points of reference here. I guess Contra is a pretty good album, with simple, clean guitar and upbeat rhythms. It’s definitely not bad, but I don’t want to say it’s amazing, either. Rolling Stone can’t make bold judgments like that…

Have other publications written reviews of Contra yet? ‘Cause that would really give me a clue as to how to rate this album. Ah, well - I’ll just give it three stars out of five for now and then Rolling Stone can change the rating in a half a decade when the album starts being considered a classic. Hell, we did it for Kid A.

Rating: ***

Vampire Weekend
Reviewed by first-year RTA student Kimmy Rodgers

Who the hell is Vampire Weekend?

I mean, I know music inside and out, but for the life of me, this just isn’t ringing a bell. Aren’t there any celebrities in this band? Then I could at least just talk about how good-looking they are. If I had to give this music a genre classification, it would definitely be “weirdo-rock,” music for people who don’t like good music like the Black Eyed Peas and Lady Gaga. God, I knew we shouldn’t have started doing album reviews!

Rating: ?

Toby caught vacationing

Shandon Cunningham

Toby Whitfield has been seen on a ski hill in Quebec, says a report from the student newspaper from McGill University. While there has been no word on whether or not his work is related to the Ryerson Students’ Union or the Canadian Federation of Students, he suspiciously covered his face with a balaclava and ski goggles, and purposely took a double-black-diamond run to escape a photographer.

“This is inexcusable,” said Jesse Troutman, a former Ryerson student, a former employee of the RSU and the guy who holds the most public beef with Whitfield. “Toby was elected to work at RSU, not be in Quebec. Plain and simple.”

When contacted for comment, Whitfield said that he was using two vacation days and met his family in Quebec for a ski getaway. “Sometimes I need a break, you know. I thought reading week was a good time for me to see my family.”

Whitfield is entitled to two weeks of vacation as an executive member of the RSU.

But vacation is not an excuse for Troutman. “He is paid barely enough to meet minimum wage to take shit from people every day. How dare he vacate his post. Where will people go now if they’re looking to launch an attack on someone at RSU? Definitely not Liana, that would just look bad,” he said.

Jessica Henry, a first year RTA student agreed with what we told her Troutman said. “Liana is a hard person to attack in the newspaper, it’s true. Toby’s the easiest for students to take our aggression out on and because of that he should be in his office all the time, waiting for students to come and yell at him.”

At the same time, Whitfield was also spotted running for a student union position at the St. Mary’s Student Union in Halifax. Troutman argued that this is gross incompetence and Whitfield has no right to seek executive offices elsewhere in Canada. “This is another example of the control the CFS has in trying to infiltrate student unions,” he said.

When confronted about this, Whitfield said that he has a twin brother who lives there. That answer was not good enough for some of Whitfield’s critics.

“Seriously, a twin? That’s basically impossible,” said an anonymous Internet commenter.

Whitfield has been the target of many scandals this past year. While he’s managed to reduce the cost of students’ health and dental benefits, reduced the lines at the Member Services Office, produce a budget that balances, provides regular financial reports, secured a promise to close Gould Street and somehow was elected to be president of RSU next year, he has been dangerously negligent in his duties, say some students.

We finally get to say ‘blowjob’ in a headline

Balloonda Mithchel

With the closure of the Carlton Cinemas, Ryerson has signed an agreement with another local theatre to address its classroom space crunch.

Starting fall 2010, students in large liberal arts classes will have their classes at the Loft 18-plus Cinemas on Yonge Street.

“People talking about stuff that isn’t sex is not too common at our pleasure theatre,” said Boss Singleton. “I think these lectures are going to help raise the level of discourse around here.”

On the first day of class there, students were mostly content with the new theatres for classes, but some were unhappy that they were expected to pay 25 cents to get into the theatre.

“The 18-plus theatres is a nice place to kill time between classes,” said Henry Langford, a second-year student in business management.

“I never in my wildest dreams thought that I’d find myself here learning about geography. In fact, on Thursdays I don’t even leave here until its time to go home,” he said.

The Ryerson Faculty Association launched a complaint claiming that the 18-plus Loft Theatre is not a safe working environment for professors. They lodged a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

When asked about whether or not he thought it was appropriate to hold classes in a pornography theatre, Sheldon dismissed all criticisms.

“First of all, students love pornography. That’s a fact,” said Sheldon. He added that students have emailed him many times saying that they thought the new classroom space was great.

“We finally have our spot on Yonge Street which is historic. Nowhere else in Canada can students take class in a pornography theatre, except maybe at Concordia,” he said.

The president of the Ryerson Faculty Association thinks that the space is inappropriate to hold classes. John Matjke told The DeVryersonian that he hopes their challenge to the Human Rights Commission will be successful.

“How are students supposed to pay attention to lectures when there’s someone getting a blowjob on the screen behind me? There’s like only two profs at Ryerson who can compete with that action.”

Some students agreed with the Faculty Association, and thought that holding classes at the 18-plus Lofts was inappropriate.

“Ryerson cannot expect students to be okay with having classes in such an oppressive environment,” said Liana Salvador the vice-president of education for the Ryerson Students’ Union.

“How does Ryerson expect us to be respected once we become Ryerson grads when people know that some of our degrees were earned in a porn theatre? We’ll be protesting this decision by covering the screens with the massive banner we had Sheldon sign that promised to ban bottled water at Ryerson. That way, students wont have to watch women being oppressed and objectified and they’ll stop using bottled water.”

When asked about the move, Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities John Milloy said that he approved of the decision made by Ryerson.

“We applaud Ryerson’s visionary leader and personal hero of mine Sheldon Levy for coming up with such a clever way to save us money. We refuse to properly fund this system and this decision will rely on creative work arounds such as this one.”

Milloy was given a tour of the theatre by Levy in a private meeting the week before the announcement was made.

“I tested those seats and they were very nice. Students here are very lucky, and my ministry will be suggesting to other schools to make similar partnerships with pornography theaters in their areas,” Milloy said.

“I have a feeling that this partnership will be best exported to the University of Windsor,” he concluded.

Canada to have tallest tower once again

Jimmy Jo-Jo Junior Shabadu

A treaty signed today by Prime Minister Stephen Harper has traded Canada’s Aboriginal population for the largest tower in Dubai.  In anticipation of deep hostility toward this move, Harper made the announcement quietly while on vacation.

“We respect Canada’s treaty obligations that have recently been signed with the president of Dubai’s development organization, Ali Muh…[in audible],” Harper told reporters yesterday, while bathing in a tar pond.

“Canada’s great Aboriginal population is our donation toward the great kindom’s workforce shortage. We wish these men and women well in their voyage to their new homeland.

The 1.5 million people who identified as Aboriginal in the 2006 Census will receive their one-way tickets to Dubai by barge in the mail. Local band councils will be forced into ensuring that every single Aboriginal person they’re aware of are on the boat.

Chuck Strahl, minister of Indian and Northern Affairs, was elated with the announcement.

“We solved Dubai’s labour deficit and Canada’s Aboriginal unemployment problem with the stroke of a pen. This is the greatest trade since Wayne Gretzky went from the Edmonton Oilers to the Los Angeles Kings,” said Strahl.

Harper and Strahl were both quiet about where the tall tower would be located. Strahl was overheard the night of the announcement while very drunk saying, “there’s no fuckin’ way that the tower will end up in Toronto.”

The move has been highly criticized by Aboriginal groups and construction companies.

“We have a damn labour shortage in this country, and we’d be happy to underpay Aboriginal people the way we underpay temporary foreign workers,” said Hamish McDonnald the president of the federation of home construction corporations. “A stupid tall building isn’t going to do any work. Give us more tax breaks and we can afford to hire these people.”

The National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations was so angry that he released only a statement to the press.

“We’ve always known that Haper and Strahl were racist and heartless but this decision is a low that we haven’t encountered in a century,” said Shawn Atleo. “We weren’t even consulted on this decision.”

Harper’s press secretary and only other person allowed to comment on the trade other than Strahl, thought the decision was an innovative way to improve the lives of Aboriginal people.

“I’ve heard excellent things about Dubai. They will have an amazing opportunity to make themselves new lives. Plus the desert is going to be a hundred times better than our awful winters,” said Dmitri Soudas.

Michael Ignatieff was highly critical of the decision, calling Harper’s “flip-flopping” negligent, abhorrent and disgusting.

“Stephen Harper apologized only a while ago to Canada’s first peoples for their treatment, then he cut funding to programs like the National Healing Fund, then he said he’d never deport Aboriginal people, and now he’s shipping them off to Dubai. This flip-flopping is not a leadership quality like my qualities,” said Ignatieff.

Haper’s phallic desire to have the tallest tower has been clear to his inner circle for years. Skip Hardeman, Harper’s former spiritual advisor when he was the leader of a fringe, right-wing melitia of wieners, said that he was actually obsessed with having the tallest tower in the world.

“Steve’s only fond memory of living in Toronto is his love of the CN Tower,” said Hardeman.”

“When he was approached to make this sale, he couldn’t give up his boyhood love of the CN Tower, and so he creatively used his hatred of Aboriginal people to craft a deal that is win-win.”

Hardeman added that Harper confessed that he is sure that God’s will is flowing through his hands.

“This truly is God’s will. God bless these troubled people, and God bless the charity that the good, albeit godless, people of Dubai have displayed.”

First Nations people are planning massive protests that may shut down Canada’s economic activities entirely through protest activities. These actions will coincide with the Victoria long weekend.

Holocaust survivor speaks out

Suzanne Weiss

Students in more than sixty cities took part this year in educational meetings on conditions in Palestine as part of Israeli Apartheid Week, held from March 1 to 7. It’s a controversial event for some, and not popular in Canadian government circles. Some criticize it for supposedly dishonouring the victims of Hitler’s Holocaust.

I am a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust, the Nazis’ mass murder of Europe’s Jews. The tragic experience of my family and community under Hitler makes me alert to the suffering of other peoples denied their human rights today – including the Palestinians.

True, Hitler’s Holocaust was unique. The Palestinians are victims of ethnic cleansing and apartheid. Hitler started with that, but went on to extermination. In my family’s city in Poland, Piotrkow, 99 per cent of the Jews perished.

Yet for me, the Israeli government’s actions toward the Palestinians awaken horrific memories of my family’s experiences under Hitlerism: the inhuman walls, the check points, the daily humiliations, the systematic deprivation, diseases and killings. There’s no escaping the fact that Israel has occupied the entire country of Palestine, and taken most of the land, while the Palestinians have been expelled, walled off, and deprived of civil and human rights.

Many levels of the Canadian government have recently been attacking the movement against Israeli apartheid, saying that it is anti-Jewish in character. This is bizarre. When Nelson Mandela opposed South African apartheid, was this anti-White? No, Mandela proposed that all South Africans, Whites included, join on a basis of democracy and equality in freeing the country from racial oppression. And that is precisely the proposal that the movement against Israeli apartheid makes to all inhabitants of Israel/Palestine.

We are told that Israeli Jews will never accept such a democratic solution. Why? Is there something wrong with their genes or their culture? The very notion is absurd – in fact, its logic is anti-Jewish. Opposition to Israeli apartheid is based on hope – a hope founded on the common humanity of the region’s Jewish and Palestinian inhabitants.

Hope from Holocaust resistance

My family and their community in Piotrkow, Poland, suffered a hard fate under Hitler. The Nazis forced the city’s 25,000 Jews into the first ghetto in occupied Poland. The resistance movement in the ghetto was unable to link up with resistance outside. Only a couple of hundred Piotrkow Jews escaped death.

But my mother and father then lived in Paris. They were active in the ‘Union des Juifs,’ a Jewish resistance organization closely linked to socialist parties and other anti-Nazi groups. When the Nazis started rounding up Jews in France, the Union des Juifs hid thousands of Jewish children among anti-Nazis across the country. My parents were killed. But a brave peasant family in Auvergne, at great risk, took me in and hid me. And that is why I am here today.

The Nazis were defeated, and the resistance dealt blows to racism that are felt in France even to this day.

There is a lesson here for us today. Hitler seemed all-powerful at the time. But he could not crush the resistance, a broad people’s alliance embracing many religions and many political viewpoints.

We need that kind of alliance in resisting oppression today – including the oppression of the Palestinians.

What makes Israel An apartheid state?

The United Nations has defined apartheid as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.”

The apartheid concept was instituted in North America when indigenous peoples were restricted to reservations in remote corners of the lands stolen from them. The South African Dutch settlers and Israeli government further developed the concept.

Eliminating Israeli apartheid involves three simple measures: 1) The right of exiled Palestinians to return to their country; 2) An end to Israeli occupation of Palestinian land; 3) The right of Palestinians within Israel to full equality.

On July 9, 2005, 170 Palestinian civil society organizations called for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against the institutions of Israeli apartheid. The BDS movement helped to end the crime of South African apartheid. Since 2005, the BDS movement against Israeli apartheid movement has won wide support around the world.

Nelson Mandela, the great leader of BDS against South African Apartheid, said, that justice for the Palestinians is “the greatest moral issue of the age.”

Support from Jewish community

I recently discovered that my name is included in a website list of “7,000 self-hating Jews.” They need to add a couple of zeros to that total. In my experience, support of Palestine is stronger in the Jewish population than in society as a whole. And Jewish people work alongside their Palestinian brothers and sisters as a strong component of the Palestine solidarity movement.

Why do they call us “self-hating?” Because they define Judaism as support for the present policies of the Israeli government. They see Judaism as nothing more than a rationale for oppressing Palestinians. What an insult to Jewish religion and culture!

We, as Jewish supporters of the Palestinian resistance, stand on the finest traditions of Judaism, and its great contributions to human religion, philosophy, science, and solidarity through the ages. For us, Judaism is universal. The rights we expect for the Jewish people, we demand for all humanity – above all, for the Palestinians that the Israeli government oppresses in our name.

Suzanne Weiss is a Holocaust survivor and member of Not In Our Name: Jewish Voices Against Zionism (www.nion.org) and of the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid (www.caiaweb.org).

Murder by assembly line

How the capitalist crisis in Germany unleashed the forces that produced the Holocaust

Henry Maitles

The last century was the bloodiest in history. The Holocaust, the Nazis’ attempted annihilation of Jews and other “sub-humans,” claimed over 12 million victims and was its most brutal act. It was not the only genocide. There was the attempt by the fledgling Turkish state to wipe out the Armenians from within its borders in the second decade of the twentieth century. In the last decade there was the slaughter in Rwanda.

There were other atrocities too – the use of atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, imperialist wars such as in Vietnam, and appalling conflicts such as in the Congo.

Yet the Holocaust rightly evokes for most people the ultimate in inhumanity. Hence the outrage and revulsion when Ernst Zündel, David Irving and other Holocaust deniers claim that it was “a detail in history.” However, it was not just the scale and savagery of the slaughter, but the thoroughly capitalist nature of the Holocaust – both in its planning and implementation – that makes it unique.

In a BBC documentary on Auschwitz a few years ago, one Nazi officer described it as “murder by assembly line,” as the most advanced industrial methods were turned to killing.

In essence, it was an attempt to strip humans of their humanity, to justify the idea that they are subhuman as a prelude to their extermination.

As Primo Levi, the Italian Auschwitz survivor put it: “Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself.

“He will be a man whose life and death can be lightly decided with no sense of human affinity, in the most fortunate of cases, on the basis of a pure judgment of utility. It is in this way that one can understand the double sense of the term ‘extermination camp,’ and it is now clear what we seek to express by the phrase ‘to lie on the bottom.’”

The capitalist nature of the Holocaust ran through from the conference that planned the slaughter at Wannsee in January 1942 through to the role of industrialists and the civil servants. Jews were not only exterminated immediately, but could, particularly in times of labour shortage, be worked to death as slave labour.

Yet unlike previous barbarities, such as the slave trade, there was no overriding economic logic to the death camps and the mass murder.

It often appeared irrational – industrial managers using slave labour complained of how wasteful it was to constantly have to train up new workers as the SS ensured that Jewish slave labour did not live too long. On occasion, the transport of Jews ran counter to the war effort. On D-Day itself, in June 1944, the main worry of the German High Command, faced with the Allied invasion of Europe, was the transport of a few hundred Greek Jews to Auschwitz.

Yet as the German army was thrown back on the Eastern and Western Fronts, the Nazis’ commitment to wiping out the Jews of Europe remained. The one thing holding the Nazi cadre together was the belief that as they went down they would take millions of Jews and other “subhumans” with them. This has encouraged some to argue that the Holocaust was some inexplicable outburst of “evil” with no connection to the capitalist system.

The connection is there. Germany’s leading engineering firms competed for the contract to build the most efficient crematoria. However, the link is not primarily through the complicity of firms such as IG Farben or IBM in the execution of the Holocaust, but in the way the Nazis came to power and maintained their rule in alliance with big business.

Historian Ian Kershaw, who was adviser to the BBC series on Auschwitz, has described how Germany’s elites hoisted the Nazis into power in January 1933.

Hitler did not win a majority of seats in the German parliament. For all the Nazis’ rhetoric of standing up for the “little man” on the street, Hitler required the support of the representatives of the capitalist class to seize power.

They saw in him a force that could destroy working-class resistance. His program of military expansion, particularly into Eastern Europe, chimed with the historic aims of German imperialism.

The Nazis were the barbaric product of the crisis of capitalism in Germany between the wars, and the Holocaust was a product of their twisted world outlook which had at its heart the notion that the Jews were a sub-human enemy. The Holocaust became central to the Nazis, while the Nazis and the successful outcome of the war were central to the interests of German capital.

The German invasion of the USSR in 1941 unleashed murder on a vast scale. The Nazis found they now controlled areas with many millions of Jews – there were less than half a million within the borders of Germany itself. Forced Jewish emigration from the lands the Nazis controlled was no longer an issue. The “solution to the Jewish problem” was to murder them.

In the first week of the invasion, more Jews were killed by the Einsatzgruppen (the SS killing squads) than in the previous eight years of Nazi rule in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and half of Poland.

Indeed, until mid-1941, there were more communists and socialists in Nazi concentration camps than Jews.

The Einsatzgruppen moved in behind the German army. One historian summed up what happened in the city of Bialystok, which had some 50,000 Jews, when the Nazis entered on 27 June 1941: “Dante-esque scenes took place in these streets. Jews were taken out of the houses, put against the walls and shot… At least 800 Jews had been locked in the Great Synagogue before it had been set on fire… the soldiers were throwing hand grenades into the houses.”

The Einsatzgruppen also attempted to involve indigenous populations in doing their killing. Often they were successful and many of those accused of war crimes were Latvian, Lithuanian or Ukranian.

In other places, though, the Nazis couldn’t make the locals into murderers. For example, a report prepared in October 1941 complained that Einsatzgruppen A operating in Estonia could not “provoke spontaneous anti-Jewish demonstrations with ensuing pogroms” because the population in their area lacked “sufficient enlightenment” to murder the Jews.

The need to kill Jews more efficiently and quickly, and the effects of face-to-face slaughter on the German soldiers, persuaded the Nazi leadership that a more impersonal method of slaughter was preferable.

The Nazis went to great lengths to keep the extermination camps secret from both the Jews and the German population. The Allies did get to know about the death camps. But Allied leaders told delegations asking them to bomb the railway into Auschwitz and the crematoria blocks that they had no proof of mass murder. Saving the Jews of Europe was not an Allied war aim.

We should remember all this as we commemorate the Holocaust. Keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive will not by itself stop the rise of fascism in the twenty-first century. But it does make the Nazis’ job harder, which is why today’s neo-fascists and their ilk go to such lengths to deny it. The Holocaust also stands as a terrible warning of the barbaric forces capitalism can unleash when it goes into a deep crisis and its existence is at stake.

Henry Maitles has written extensively on the Holocaust, which claimed the lives of members of his family in Lithuania and Poland. This article originally appeared in Socialist Worker (UK), issue 1936, January 29, 2005: http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=5685.

Marek Edelman: The Ghetto Fighter

John Rose

“

Now the SS men were ready to attack. In closed formations, stepping haughtily and loudly, they marched into the seemingly dead streets of the Central Ghetto. Their triumph appeared to be complete.

“It looked as if this superbly equipped modern army had scared off the handful of bravado-drunk men, as if those few immature boys had at last realized that there was no point in attempting the unfeasible.

“But no, they did not scare us and we were not taken by surprise. We were only waiting an opportune moment.

“Battle groups barricaded at the four corners of the street opened concentric fire on them.

“Strange projectiles began exploding everywhere, the hand grenades of our own make, the lone machine pistol sent shots through the air now and then – ammunition had to be conserved carefully.

“They attempted a retreat but their path was cut. Their dead soon littered the street.”

Thus Marek Edelman describes the first major battle for the Warsaw Jewish Ghetto in his stunning memoir The Ghetto Fights.

Edelman, who died at the age of 90 on October 2, 2009 in his native Poland, was the last survivor of the five-person command group which led the Ghetto uprising. The above passage describes the beginning of the 1943 uprising against the Nazi Holocaust in Poland.

By the time of the uprising, two thirds of the 400,000 Jewish men, women and children sealed in the ghetto had already been deported to the death camps. The uprising was triggered by the Jewish Fighting Organization – in Polish, Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or “Zob.” It was formed from three political parties – the Anti-Zionist Jewish Socialist Bund, the Socialist Zionists and the Communists.

Two days fighting resulted in “something unprecedented”, he continues. “Three officers with lowered machine pistols appeared. They wore white rosettes in their buttonholes: emissaries.

“They desired to negotiate with the Area Command. They proposed a fifteen minute truce to remove the dead and wounded.

“Firing was our answer. Every house remained a hostile fortress. From every storey, from every window, bullets sought hated German helmets, hated German hearts.”

The end came only when the Nazis set the Ghetto ablaze. Edelman was one of the lucky few to escape by crawling through underground sewers. The fire was the only way the Nazis could “save their military honour.” Heinrich Himmler, Nazi chief military thug, had panicked. He ordered the total destruction of the Ghetto.

“Otherwise,” he said, “we shall never pacify Warsaw, which continues to be a dangerous centre of disintegration and diversion.”

Himmler was right about that. A year later, the Polish Underground, inspired by the Jewish ghetto fighters despite their defeat, led the city-wide uprising against the Nazi occupation.

Remarkably, Edelman took part in that uprising too.

Edelman’s remarks about “hand grenades of our own make” and the “lone machine pistol” firing only occasionally to conserve ammunition – comments echoed in other memoirs – have been seized upon by some historians. Don’t they prove the deep-rooted, endemic anti-Semitism, the anti-Jewish hatred, of wider Polish society? Why, even the anti-Nazi Polish Underground was unable or unwilling to arm the Ghetto properly.

Marek Edelman always dismissed these accusations. In 1989, I visited him at his home in Lodz, Poland, to seek his agreement to produce a first British edition of The Ghetto Fights.

He told me then that nearly 50 years of reflection had not changed his mind about the basic decency of the Polish people. His humanist Judaism and trenchant political beliefs forged in the struggles of his teenage years as a cadre of the Bund had instilled in him an unshakeable belief that racism could be overcome, and in the potential enormous power of solidarity.

Yes, there was a weakness of solidarity from the Polish Underground in 1943, but it reflected their own weakness, lack of arms and terrible sense of their own political isolation.

The Red Army might have helped deliver the knock-out blow against Hitler in the end, but the 1944 Polish uprising was defeated because Stalin ordered them to halt outside Warsaw. Some Israeli ideologues and politicians have bitterly resented Edelman’s decision to live in Poland, and to ignore or criticize Israel.

Some have even criticized his positive attitude to Polish solidarity. But “Antek” Zukerman agreed with Edelman. Antek was Zob’s liaison with the Polish Underground, Edelman’s comrade in the Zob leadership – and a staunch Zionist who ended his days on the Ghetto Fighters Kibbutz in Israel.

Antek watched the Ghetto burn from the outside. In his own astonishing memoir, A Surplus of Memory, he writes, “With my own eyes I saw Poles crying, just standing and crying.

“One day the ghetto was shrouded in smoke and I saw masses of Poles, without a trace of spiteful malice.”

Antek even called it a “sin” to condemn the Polish people. He also knew all about Polish solidarity. Here he is describing rank-and-file Polish Communists: “Until they were corrupted by authority and even more so by Stalin, those people demonstrated exceptional personal and movement integrity.”

The basic conviction of the Ghetto fighters was that the struggle of fellow Poles suffering at the hands of the Nazis was the same struggle as their own. This led to the publication, as the Ghetto was on the brink of collapse, of a “Manifesto to the Poles,” which must rank as one of the last century’s greatest appeals to liberty, equality and fraternity.

“Poles, citizens, soldiers of Freedom!” it begins. “Through the din of German cannon, destroying the homes of our mothers, wives and children; through the noise of their machine guns, seized by us in the fight against the cowardly German police and SS men… Through the smoke of the Ghetto that was set on fire, and the blood of its mercilessly killed defenders, we, the slaves of the Ghetto, convey heartfelt greetings to you.

“We are well aware that you have been witnessing breathlessly, with broken hearts, with tears of compassion, with horror and enthusiasm, the war that we have been waging against every brutal occupier these past few days.

“Every doorstep in the Ghetto has become a stronghold and shall remain a fortress until the end! All of us will probably perish in the fight, but we shall never surrender!

“We, as well as you, are burning with the desire to punish the enemy for his crimes.

“It is a fight for our freedom as well as yours! We shall avenge the gory deeds at Oswiecim, Treblinka, Belzec and Majdanek!

“Long live freedom! Death to the hangmen and the killer! We must continue our mutual struggle against the occupier until the very end!

“Signed, the Jewish Armed Resistance Organization.”

Marek’s fight for freedom did not end in the Warsaw Ghetto. After the war ended, Edelman became a heart surgeon in his native Poland – continuing the task of saving lives, as he saw it. And he remained politically active all his life, supporting the independent Solidarity trade union movement that would remove the Stalinist regime in Poland in the 1980s.

At Solidarity’s congress in 1981, in the shipbuilding city of Gdansk, where the union was founded, a veteran of the Polish Underground that led the 1944 uprising against the Nazis, one year after the Ghetto uprising, halted the applause for himself. He pointed to a hero “of considerably greater stature” in the hall – Dr. Marek Edelman.

The Communist authorities, fearful that Edelman would emerge as an iconic figure for Solidarity, offered him belated Polish military honours, which he refused.

In the summer of 2002, Edelman, still going strong, intervened in Israel’s show trial of the now jailed Palestinian resistance leader, Marwan Barghouti. He wrote a letter of solidarity to the Palestinian movement, and, though he criticized the suicide bombers, its tone infuriated the Israeli government and its press.

Edelman had always resented Israel’s claim on the Warsaw Ghetto uprising as a symbol of Jewish liberation. Now he said this belonged to the Palestinians. He addressed his letter to the Palestinian “Zob:” the “commanders of the Palestinian military, paramilitary and partisan operations” and “all the soldiers of the Palestinian fighting organizations”.

The old Jewish anti-Nazi Ghetto fighter had placed his immense moral authority at the disposal of the only side he deemed worthy of it.

This article originally appeared in Socialist Worker (UK), issue 2173, October 17, 2009: http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=19233.

John Rose is a British Marxist of Jewish descent who teaches sociology at Southwark College and London Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom. He is the author of The Myths of Zionism.

What is fascism?

James Clark, Features and Opinions Editor

I

t’s impossible to talk about fascism without looking at the economic and social struggles that were underway in the first half of the twentieth century.

The outbreak of World War I ushered in a period of war and revolution on a global scale. Ordinary people rose up all over Europe—trying to end not only the war, but also the conditions that gave rise to it. Revolutions including millions of workers took place in Russia, Germany, Italy and elsewhere in Europe, while general strikes and uprisings spread across the globe—including the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919.

Most of the revolutions were unsuccessful, except in Russia where workers briefly established the first genuine workers’ state in world history.

Elsewhere in Europe, although capitalism had been restored to power, the contradictions in the world economy that contributed to the outbreak of World War I remained, and contributed to the economic and social struggles that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s.

In 1929, the US stock market collapsed, creating a global economic meltdown. In places like Germany, already suffering from the terms of settlement of the Versailles Treaty and paying massive reparations to the victors of World War I, economic crisis affected the whole country. The world was in an economic depression with no obvious way out.

In response, two movements emerged that attempted to solve the crisis.

The first was the Communist movement. Inspired by the initial success of the Russian Revolution, millions of people around the world turned to communism as an alternative to the capitalist economic system that had created so much inequality and that had led to World War I. Despite the defeats of revolution immediately after the war, Communist Parties around the world continued to grow and wield more influence, playing a decisive role in the struggles of the 1920s and 1930s.

Related to the Communist movement and influenced by Marxist ideas, social democracy—what is called “reformism” today—was another response to the economic crisis, but one whose objective was to work within the existing system (not to replace it) and to follow constitutional laws.

The second movement was fascism, a movement based on the petit bourgeoisie—what today is called the middle classes (small business owners, shop-keepers, non-unionized professionals, bureaucrats, etc.)—that sought to restore capitalism’s health by physically defeating the working-class movement. Fascism came to power in Italy in the early 1920s under Benito Mussolini, and in Germany a decade later under Adolph Hitler.

Today, fascism is a term that many people use casually to describe racists, anti-Semites, authoritarians or even just the right-wing. Some people describe the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as “fascist.” The US-based “Tea Party” movement uses the terms “fascist,” “communist,” and “socialist” interchangeably, although there are dramatic differences among these terms.

By contrast, historians and political scientists attempt to define fascism scientifically – usually in class terms, and in the context of a critique of the capitalist system. Leon Trotsky – a leader of the Russian Revolution who had been exiled from the Soviet Union by Joseph Stalin in 1929 – wrote extensively about the nature of fascism and the threat it posed to human civilization. He also wrote extensively about the best way to resist the rise of fascism, harshly criticizing the response of the Communist Parties that failed to stop it.

Despite the fact that Trotsky wrote in exile—observing events in Europe through news reports and letters—anti-fascist activists and scholars continue to draw on his works today. Trotsky describes fascism as follows:

“The historic function of fascism is to smash the working class, destroy its organizations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery.”

Describing the rise of Nazism in Europe, Trotsky says:

“German fascism… raised itself to power on the backs of the petit bourgeoisie, which it turned into a battering ram against the organizations of the working class and the institutions of democracy.”

During periods of prolonged economic crisis, the struggle between the working class (anyone who has to work to make a living) and the ruling class (those who own or control what society produces and how it gets distributed) intensifies, often bringing the two groups into sharp conflict with one another.

The struggle between those two groups has become more obvious today, following the collapse of global financial markets. Workers all over the world have been under pressure to accept lower wages, give up their pensions or face lay-offs. Unemployment has reached its highest levels in years. While workers make concessions, the corporations and the banks seek government hand-outs to increase profit margins.

Sometimes this struggle intensifies to the point that massive social upheaval is the result. This was the case in the early decades of the twentieth century when millions of people around the world were attracted to the ideas of communism and socialism as a means to end war and economic crisis. Communists helped organize mass strikes that allowed workers to express their collective potential strength, shutting down their workplaces—even if only temporarily—and stopping capitalist production and the creation of profit.

But the working class and the ruling class are not the only groups affected by global economic crisis. Within that framework, there are other classes that exist in between.

Trotsky uses the term “petit bourgeoisie” to describe what some identify as the middle classes today: small business owners, shop-keepers, non-unionized professionals, bureaucrats, etc. This group of people—while often connected to the working class, and sometimes rising from it—does not have the same collective power as workers do because they cannot be organized along the same lines. They are atomized and isolated from one another.

Trotsky argues that this class can become the vehicle for fascism. He says that fascism elevates “those classes that are immediately above the working class and that are ever in dread of being forced down into its ranks; it organizes and militarizes them… and it directs them to the extirpation of proletarian organizations, from the most revolutionary to the most conservative.”

This contradictory position means that the middle class can be pulled in one of two directions, depending on the strength of class forces. When the working class is strong and winning victories, the middle class is pulled in their direction—in a supportive way. But in periods of economic crisis, the middle class can come to see the working class as a threat to their own prosperity and the health of the economic system. As a result, it can be drawn to fascist parties that aim to defeat the working class.

But because the middle class doesn’t have the same potential collective strength of the working class, fascists need the political and economic backing of big business and the corporations – often called the ruling class—in order to mobilize middle class support as an effective force against workers and their organizations.

This is what happened in Italy and Germany in the early twentieth century. The terrible economic crisis that swept the world in the wake of the Wall Street crash in 1929 threatened the livelihood and position of Europe’s middle classes, especially in Germany where people lost all their savings, inflation went through the roof and millions became unemployed. The corporations and the banks could no longer produce profit competitively. The survival of the capitalist system was in doubt.

Big business in Germany was more frightened of the threat of Communism and the influence of the Russian Revolution than it was of fascism. As a result, fascism became the saviour of capitalism, by defeating the working class and all forms of mass organization that could mount any effective resistance.

The Nazis built fascism on two fronts: in parliament where they contested elections, and in the streets where fascist thugs inflicted physical violence and intimidation on workers, socialists, communists, Jews and other oppressed groups. The strategies worked hand-in-hand to consolidate the Nazis’ power.

Fascism relies on racist ideology, including anti-Semitism, to bind its supporters together, and to find a scapegoat for the growing anger over the effects of an economic crisis. In the case of German fascism, the Nazis exploited anger about the global depression, mass unemployment, hyper-inflation, Germany’s defeat in World War I, the reparations the German government was forced to pay, and the impoverishment of Germany’s middle class—and made Jews the scapegoat.

But the principal objective of fascism is not necessarily to exterminate a particular racial, ethnic or religious group from society – although this was certainly a means to an end for the Nazis. German fascism was mainly concerned with the restoration of German capitalism as the most powerful force in Europe (and eventually the world), and later believed that the “Final Solution”—the organized and state-led genocide of Jews—would help them achieve their goal.

This is why communists, socialists and trade unionists were among the first groups targeted, arrested and sent to concentration camps immediately after the Nazis seized power. Germany’s mass working-class organizations had the potential to stop the Nazis – both in the streets and in parliament—and Hitler knew it.

Once the leadership of the largest opposition forces to fascism had been eliminated, the Nazis were able to consolidate their power, and expand their terror against all those who opposed their agenda. The defeat of the German working class paved the way for the Holocaust, removing the last line of defence of German workers against the horrors of Nazi tyranny.

Remembering the Holocaust

Nora Loreto, Editor-in-Chief

This year marks the sixty-fifth anniversary of the end of World War II, a global conflict that claimed the lives of nearly 60 million people over six years of total war. It also marks the 65th anniversary of the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp, where over a million people were systematically murdered, 90 per cent of them Jews.

The systematic persecution and attempted extermination of Europe’s Jewish population over the years of the Third Reich in Germany are known today as the Holocaust, what many historians call the “greatest crime of the twentieth century.” The Holocaust refers to the six million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators from the rise of fascism in Germany in the 1930s to the end of World War II in 1945.

The Nazis also systematically targeted and murdered millions of other people during the Third Reich: Romani, Poles, Soviets, communists and socialists, trade unionists, political and religious dissidents, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gays, people with disabilities and prisoners of war. The total number of people killed in Nazi concentration camps – whether by gassing, firing squads, slave labour, disease or malnutrition – ranges from 10 to 17 million.

Scholars continue to debate whether the term Holocaust should include non-Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, although most acknowledge the disproportionate suffering of Jewish victims, in terms of the large percentage of Europe’s Jewish population that was killed. In 1933, European Jews numbered over nine million. Almost two thirds of them were killed in the Holocaust, a fact that compels most historians to describe the event as a genocide.

The Holocaust is unique in that it marks the first time in history that the full machinery of the modern industrial state was comprehensively and systematically organized to achieve the extermination of a particular group of people, based on their religion. At every level – economic, political, legal and social – the Nazi state attempted to target, isolate and murder Jewish people, cultivating anti-Semitism to achieve its ends. Nazi tactics ranged from the slow and gradual exclusion of Jews from public life, and their isolation in disease-ridden ghettos, to their mass transfer to death camps all over Europe where they were killed in gas chambers or by slave labour.

The term “Holocaust” comes from the Greek for “sacrifice by fire” and is called the “Shoah” in Hebrew. Today the Holocaust is commemorated all over the world, and is marked by numerous days of remembrance and mourning. January 27 is now marked as the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the date in 1945 when Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, just months before the German surrender that ended the war in Europe. In 2005, the United Nations designated January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, although it is also observed on other dates around the world by Jews and non-Jews alike.

In Canada, many Jewish Canadians refer to Holocaust Remembrance Day as Yom HaShoah, held annually on the twenty-seventh day of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar, which usually falls sometime between March and April. The full name is Yom HaShoah Ve-Hagevurah, which means “Day of (remembrance of) the Holocaust and Heroism.” This year Yom HaShoah is on April 11. Although there is no federal legislation recognizing a Holocaust Memorial Day in Canada, it is widely observed by Jewish Canadians. Manitoba is the only province that officially recognizes a Holocaust Memorial Day, following legislation passed in 2000.

In Israel, Yom HaShoah is an official state holiday, and will also be marked on April 11. Memorial services are generally held the day before, as the official holiday begins at sunset.

The Ryerson Free Press will mark Yom HaShoah this year by publishing a special feature about the Holocaust, one that retells both the traumatic experience of Jewish suffering during the rise of fascism in Europe, and the heroic and inspiring resistance of European Jews and their allies who fought back against Nazi persecution. We hope that it will serve as a valuable resource for our readers who share our commitment to anti-oppression and anti-racism, and as a reminder that, in the darkest moments of our history, there will always be resistance to injustice.

That resistance, more than anything else, should be the lesson we draw from the experience of the Holocaust, a lesson that affirms our common humanity and the real potential for human liberation.

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