Fascism: April 2007 Archives

This is a hard book to read. It is not that the words are too big or the sentences too long. Caroline Elkins writes well, and her message is very clear. The trouble is that many readers are going to find the subject too gruesome to make it to the end. It is a fairly big book, 475 pages of which 375 need to be read, another 100 of which are notes, a bibliography, and an index. Being very interested in East Africa and its history, I finished Imperial Reckoning by reading 30 or 40 pages a day. A sense of duty kept me going.

Caroline Elkins meant to write a dissertation on the savagery of the Mau Mau insurrection in 1950s Kenya, but as she researched her topic she found the British colonial reaction to the murders the more compelling story. Most of the administrative records were destroyed by the British authorities as they left Kenya, but the cover-up was incomplete.

Full story: Imperial Reckoning : The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins

Editor's note: The subject of political repression of free speech is a complex subject that we cannot discuss here. We would like, however, to point out the similarity between the new European Union laws on "racial incitement" and Article 59-7 of the 1934 Criminal Code of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic: "Propaganda or agitation, directed toward arousing national or religious enmity or discord, or likewise the dissemination or preparation and storage of literature of the same character, shall be punishable by - deprivation of freedom for a term up to two years." The Stalinization of the Western mind continues.

European interior ministers have agreed to make incitement to racism an EU-wide crime, but have stopped short of a blanket ban on Holocaust denial.

The agreement makes it an offence to condone or grossly trivialise crimes of genocide - but only if the effect is incitement to violence or hatred.

The deal follows six years of talks, and will disappoint Germany, which pushed hard for a Holocaust-denial law.

Berlin has also had to drop a proposal for an EU-wide ban on Nazi symbols.

The European Network Against Racism said most European countries already had laws against incitement to racism, and the "weak text" would leave many national legal codes unchanged.

Full story: EU agrees to new racial hatred law

Roger Boyes in Berlin Fears that the German police force contains neo-Nazi sympathisers have been sparked after disdainful cadets delivered an extraordinary rebuff to a Holocaust survivor. Students at the Berlin police academy refused to listen to the harrowing testimony of Isaak Behar, 83, who had been invited to lecture them on his experiences as a Jew in the Third Reich. Mr Behar lost his parents and his two sisters in the Auschwitz concentration camp. The cadets shouted that they did not want to hear about the Holocaust any more, and said that the Jewish community was emotionally blackmailing Germany, according to German press reports. Dieter Glietsch, Berlin’s police commissioner, has opened an investigation. Full story: German neo-Nazi fear over police cadets