Lead story

Refugee crisis: don’t stand by

by Daphne Liddle

THE THEME of this year’s Holocaust Memorial events has been: “Don’t stand by” — a phrase with particular significance in the light of the current refugee crisis unfolding throughout Europe.

On Monday 25th January a demonstration for migrants’ rights drew parallels between Holocaust victims and refugees stranded in Calais.

A group of demonstrators — calling themselves Never Again Ever! — gathered outside the Home Office to commemorate the end of the Nazi Holocaust and to demand more rights for migrants.

Holocaust survivor Ruth Barnett questioned what had changed since she arrived via Kindertransport. The 77-yearold said: “Refugees would not have come to Europe if we had opened our eyes, minds and hearts to help them preserve their homes and culture many years ago when violence began.

“They had to come because we failed them then. Now they are here, we must not fail them again. They deserve to have their immediate needs met with compassion and kindness while we process their applications for asylum until their homes are safe to return to.

“If we treat them with respect and they wish to stay they will contribute riches to our culture as waves of refugees have done previously. If we treat them with hostility and contempt — we will have problems instead of the riches they might give us.”

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Refugee crisis: don’t stand by

Average pay for 90 per cent in Britain is under £13,000

THE WAY that official statistics on income levels in Britain are published has been hiding a shocking increase in the number of people living in or very close to poverty, according to a report by Graham Vanbergen of Global Research, published last week by the True Publica website.

If the earnings of the top 10 per cent are discounted then the average pay for the rest of us is just £12,969 per year.

The Equality Trust and High Pay Centre has calculated the average pay for workers in Britain as £26,500. But this is misleading because it is distorted by the very high pay of the richest one per cent.

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Average pay for 90 per cent in Britain is under £13,000

Editorial

Never Again, Ever!

ON 27TH JANUARY 1945 the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, the largest Nazi death camp in the Third Reich and last Wednesday we remembered the millions of victims of Nazi genocide in solemn ceremonies in London and across the country. Holocaust Memorial Day takes place on 27th January each year to remember the six million Jews and the millions of other innocent civilians who were murdered in Nazi death camps during the Second World War.

The genocidal policies of Nazi Germany and their Japanese allies during their brief period of ascendancy show what the future would have been had they won and there can be no doubt that a world run by Adolf Hitler and Emperor Hirohito would have set back civilisation hundreds of years.

As these events pass from living memory some fascists claim that the holocaust never happened. They dismiss survivors’ statements as lies and juggle statistics to “prove” that the gas chambers didn’t exist. What they can’t explain is why none of the Nazi war-criminals claimed this as a defence at Nuremberg or by Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief architects of the holocaust, at his own trial in Tel Aviv in 1961.

Most bourgeois academics, on the other hand, tend to portray Nazism as an aberration of capitalism rather than the instrument of the industrialists, bankers and landowners within the German ruling class who wanted another global conflict and were prepared to commit any crime in order to win it.

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Never Again, Ever!