Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain

Pearce, Andy

doi:10.4324/9780203484210

Cited by 35 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…However, the main focus of the CPGB's appeal here was on the 'breach of faith' being committed by the Western Allies against their peoples whose wartime sacrifice was being betrayed, and the spectre of another war against a remilitarised Germany. 29 CPGB references to the camps which did not mention victims' Jewishness were in line with broader British memory and discourse at this point. Patriotism aligned the CPGB with what it saw as the British people's faith in the legacy of the Second World War.…”

Section: Labour In Powersupporting

confidence: 55%

“…28 Copsey made a case for a new 'antifascist minimum' (the minimum characteristics that define an organisation or individual as antifascist), echoing the concern with delineating generic fascism that so dominates fascist studies. 29 He anticipated and defended his work against charges of conceptual stretching by carefully distinguishing between activism and 'the state of being in opposition' so that antifascism can be both active and passive (or 'liberal'). Liberal antifascism, he argued, can manifest in literature, public meetings, petitions, lobbying and education.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…He could 27 Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain,p.85;Renton,Fascism, Nigel Copsey, 'Preface: Towards a New Anti-Fascist Minimum' in Nigel Copsey and Andrzej Olechnowicz (eds), Varieties of Anti-Fascism: Britain in the Inter-War Period (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p.xiv. 29 See Roger Griffin's concept of the definitional minimum of fascism in Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Pinter Publishers, 1991), p.13. 30 Copsey, 'Preface: Towards a New Anti-Fascist Minimum', p.xv.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As late as 1961, Colin Cross observed that there was, 'a great deal of latent anti-Semitism in Union Movement but it is never expressed publicly'. 29 Anti-black racism gave the UM renewed motivation, although the results of this new focus were mixed. While the UM had performed poorly at the 1952 LCC elections, its racist campaign revived its fortunes to an extent: in the 1955 local council elections in Shoreditch's Moorfields ward, the UM candidate won 48 per cent of the vote after campaigning against 'the Negro invasion'.…”

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confidence: 99%

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British Antifascism and the Holocaust, 1945–79

Cohen¹

2022

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British Antifascism and the Holocaust, 1945-67 Joshua Cohen This thesis explores the extent to which the Holocaust shaped British antifascism in the period 1945-1967. It makes an original contribution in setting out the first dedicated analysis of the relationship between consciousness of the Nazi genocide and motivations for confronting fascism in Britain. The study has interrogated institutional archival records to assess the presence of the Holocaust in the private discourses, propaganda and campaign strategies of a wide variety of antifascist organisations. Personal motivations for antifascist activism have been engaged with through analysis of memoirs, autobiographies and oral histories. The thesis will demonstrate that the Holocaust was often absent from antifascist rhetoric, and so should be decentred from understandings that assume constant affinity between Holocaust remembrance and British antifascism. Instead, antifascism in this period was often conceptualised in a patriotic framework, as coda to the Second World War, or viewed through left-wing analyses of class struggle which obscured fascism's 'racial' victims. However, the central importance of this study lies in its revealing that a Holocaust-inspired resistance to fascism was emerging in this period and beginning to co-exist with patriotic and other forms of antifascism. The 'lessons' of the Holocaust for antifascists were the subject of agonised internal disputes and became a point of open conflict between militant and establishment Anglo-Jewish organisations. The genocide was also politicised in a number of antifascist campaigns, including on the Left and in the name of civil liberties. The thesis therefore argues for 1945-67 as a vital transitional period when use of the Holocaust as a weapon against fascism was developing, albeit sometimes on the fringes of antifascist discourse. In this way, the period presaged the more confident later invocations of the genocide, including in activism against the National Front in the 1970s.

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Section: Labour In Powersupporting

confidence: 55%

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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British Antifascism and the Holocaust, 1945–79

Cohen¹

2022

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“…and in different decades (1960s, 1980s, 2000). And, since no trial is a blank page, (Bloxham, 2001, pvii), each case had been framed and shaped by a range of national and international developments impacting on an evolution of consciousness of 'the Holocaust' since 1945 (Yablonka, 2004;Weitz, 2009;Bialystok, 2000;Erwin, 2016;Pearce, 2008;Cesarani, 2010).…”

Section: History and The Law: A Methodology Of 'Good History'?mentioning

confidence: 99%