Author Archives: Searchlight Team

Anti-fascists roll back most dangerous far-right upsurge in decades

This article appears in the Summer issue of Searchlight

On Monday 29 July, a teenage boy armed with a knife entered a Taylor Swift-themed holiday dance class in Southport and attacked children and adults. Three young girls were killed, others seriously wounded. It was a terrible crime and a dreadful tragedy. A time for grief and mourning.

But some had other ideas. Almost at once far-right agitators and “influencers” went into online overdrive claiming that the attacker was a Muslim and a migrant who had arrived in the country on a boat last year. Some claimed he was Somali, others published an Arabic-sounding name they claimed was his.

All of this was false.

It triggered an outpouring of anti-Muslim hatred and violence that did not abate even when it was revealed that the accused was a 17-year-old, born and bred in Cardiff, whose parents had come to Britain from Rwanda. In other words, he was just as British as Rishi Sunak or Kemi Badenoch. Or Bukayo Saka. And he was far more likely to be Christian than Muslim. That meant nothing to the Islamophobes. The anti-Muslim campaign of hatred that they had dreamed of for years was unleashed and was not to be quelled easily.

*A police van set alight by racist rioters in Southport* *as they attack the local mosque* *(Photo: PA/Alamy)*

The day after the killings, Southport itself was the scene of serious disorder, as racists launched an attack on a local mosque. Police who tried to hold a line defending the building were subjected to a brutal, sustained assault with bricks, masonry, wheelie bins, traffic cones and fireworks from around 1,000 racist thugs. Dozens of officers were injured. From then on, similar outbreaks of violence continued unabated for over a week: in Westminster first, and then the following weekend and subsequent days, in towns and cities across England and Northern Ireland.

So who was behind it?

Fascist groups including Patriotic Alternative (PA) and Britain First, who have done their damnedest to incite such angry racism for years, were secretly whooping with delight at what was taking place. But let’s not make the mistake of believing that they actively organised it.

Some members of these groups were spotted at particular incidents (no one wears a Free Sam Melia T-shirt at random!), but by and large they were just piggybacking events that were perhaps more football-hooligan flash mob in nature.

These parties (and especially their leaders) are very happy to stand back and let events take their course, without suffering any legal repercussions themselves, and without seeing their small memberships depleted by long prison sentences. And all the time, of course, wringing their hands and saying: “We warned you this would happen…”

PA Deputy Leader Laura Towler, for instance, the wife of race-hate jailbird Sam Melia, went online to specifically deny the group had organised anything.

For Britain First’s Paul Golding it was the predictable script: “I don’t condone violence, but can you blame them in Southport for attacking the police…?”

The British Democrats also sought to distance themselves from the violence: “While protesting and demonstrating are within our rights, we must not allow our anger or outside influence to turn the protest into a riot.”

But don’t be misled. This arse-covering blather was purely for public consumption. They may not have been orchestrating things, but privately they were delighted at developments.

And even out on the further reaches of the right, there was – predictably – nothing like unanimity.

Dover fascist Steve Laws, who was arrested at the London thugfest on the Wednesday, was disappointed “to see our own disavow the people willing to do what was necessary” (translation: attacking the Southport Islamic Society Mosque and battering the police).

But Peter Rushton, Deputy Editor of the neo-nazi umbrella outfit Heritage and Destiny, asked: “And just how does a bunch of rioters attacking a mosque (in response to a crime committed by someone with no apparent connection whatever to Islam), or burning a police car, take us any closer to getting our country back? Wasn’t last night a step backwards?”

Alek Yerbury, leader of the emergent National Rebirth Party, denounced the Southport rioters as “feral”, writing the morning after: “By all accounts, there is significant collateral damage to the local population, with gardens destroyed, property smashed and even a shop looted.

“Therefore my recommendation to nationalists in Merseyside is to go to the street in question and offer assistance to the predominantly white British population there in remedying that collateral damage.”

If you want to apportion blame for the rioting, then most of the opprobrium must fall squarely on the sun lounger-surfing Tommy Robinson, his sidekick Danny Tommo and their supposedly more “respectable” enablers such as Laurence Fox, Katie Hopkins and UKIP ersatz leader Nick Tenconi.

Those last three were at “The Fugitive’s” Trafalgar Square rally two days before the Southport killings, giving Robinson’s hate-filled activities their shabby seals of approval. Even before that, they had been lionising him on social media. They bear a heavy responsibility.

When the Southport murders were reported, they lost no time joining in peddling the lie-filled narrative doing the far-right rounds, that the alleged killer was a Muslim and an illegal migrant.

L to R: Katie Hopkins, Laurence Fox, Nick Tenconi

“Hatie” Katie Hopkins: “His name is Ali al Alketi… The police are… covering up for illegals.”

Laurence “Looza” Fox: “Enough of this. We need to remove Islam from Great Britain. Completely and entirely.”

Nick Tenconi alleged that the Southport killer was acting “under orders”.

And then there was Nigel Farage.

On the Wednesday, this irredeemable wretch of a man went on TV to ask if the public was being deceived about the motive for the Southport attack. Like other attacks, he said, the police have said it was “non-terror related”. Why, he asked, were we always told that such attacks were “non-terror related”.

“I just wonder whether the truth is being withheld from us. I don’t know the answer to that, but it is a fair and legitimate question…”

Let’s bounce that back and ask: “Is Nigel Farage a child molester? We don’t know the answer to that, but it is a fair and legitimate question…”

Neither of those is, in fact, even remotely a “fair and legitimate question” because, of course, there is not the faintest shred of evidence to support either proposition. Both are false. It is just an utterly dishonest way of floating a scurrilous suggestion in the hope that it will gain some traction.

Days later, interviewed by Tom Swarbrick on LBC, Farage doubled down, claiming that he was simply echoing questions being raised by prominent people online, and that the identity of the attacker should have been made known immediately, as it was, for instance, in the case of the London Bridge attackers in 2017.

What he omitted to mention was that the London Bridge attackers were all shot dead at the scene and would never face trial. The Southport attacker was in custody and was, in any case, a young person whose anonymity at this stage was protected by law. But then, Farage was never the sort of person to let the facts discourage him from outright deceit. He ploughed on presenting this as concealment by… well, whoever.

And when challenged about the “prominent” people who were the sources for these claims, he came up with just one name: Andrew Tate, the misogynist “influencer” currently facing charges of rape and human trafficking in Romania. It was not until August 5 that Farage issued a statement deploring the violence. And, even then, he seemed more concerned about the fact some people were calling these dreadful events “the Farage riots”.

*A police car burns as officers are deployed in Hartlepool to deal with racist rioters (Photo: PA/Alamy)*

In the background, of course, is the poisonous influence of ‘respectable’ politicians like Suella Braverman, Priti Patel, and other leading conservatives who have relentlessly cranked up fear and hatred towards migrants and asylum seekers for their own malign ends. The widespread acceptance of the message peddled by the likes of Farage, Hopkins and Fox has been reliant on the medium of 14 years of bigoted government.

Although Braverman looks now to be ploughing a different furrow, the noises coming from several of the candidates for the Conservative Party leadership prompt a feeling of weary resignation that we are in for more of the same from the Tories.

But the men who bear more responsibility than most are Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) and his mate and right-hand man, Danny Tommo. Tommo (real name Daniel Thomas) is a criminal lowlife with a conviction for attempted kidnap at knifepoint. He has become, more than ever, Robinson’s UK representative since Robinson fled the country the day before Southport.

Yaxley-Lennon (left) and Danny Tommo (Daniel Thomas)

It was Tommo who broadcast the first call to riot online on the Monday night. It was directed to his 68,000 YouTube followers and thousands more on Twitter, many of them their mates in various hooligan gangs and football firms round the country – the dregs of the now disbanded English Defence League – and was the rallying call to which the racist hooligans and far-right thugs responded.

Just recall what he said, filmed fuming in his car:

“Every city has to go up.

“Get prepared. Be ready. We have to.

“It has to go off in different cities.

“We have to show them we’ve had enough.

“I’m ready to go. I know that a lot of you are. I’m speaking to other people at the moment.

“We’re ready to go. We are, literally, ready to go.

“Just get ready.”

It goes without saying, though, that when it did “go off” in Southport, Tommo was nowhere to be seen.

He it was who also helped launch the call for another demonstration in London on Wednesday night, as did Robinson from afar. This, too, ended in violence and mayhem, but Tommo – predictably – was not among the 100 or so arrested. According to witnesses, at the first sign of trouble he legged it. The following weekend towns and cities in England and Northern Ireland were subjected to sometimes terrifying outbreaks of racist‑inspired violence. Property was destroyed, police officers were battered and injured, and communities, especially minority communities, were left traumatised and terrified.

*Racists attack a hotel housing asylum seekers in Rotherham* *(Photo: PA/Alamy)*

And it wasn’t just mosques that were targeted: in Liverpool, a library and community hub were destroyed. In Sunderland, the offices of the Citizens’ Advice Bureau were burnt out. The true face of fascism was being revealed: racist yes, but also the deadly enemy of ordinary, decent, working people.

A few days later, Tommo’s video was taken down from YouTube (“by the uploader”), but not before Searchlight – and, we imagine, many others – had recorded it for posterity and for possible consideration by a jury. Tommo has tried to say that any suggestion he tried to incite riots is absurd and that he’d urged demonstrators to be calm and peaceful.

The simple question is: Which bit of “Every city must go up” is a plea for calm?

We trust the police will not delay too long before knocking on his door and inviting him to help them with their inquiries.

Robinson also started to panic. Two days before the Southport killings he had headlined an anti-immigration and anti-Muslim rally of some 15,000‑20,000 people in London, the second such rally in two months. He was then due to appear in court in London on the Monday morning to answer a charge of contempt of court for which he faced a likely jail sentence.

On the Sunday, however, in a farcical series of events, he was first arrested at the Eurotunnel in Kent while trying to leave the country and charged with an offence under the Terrorism Act. Then, unaccountably released on unconditional bail, he promptly headed to St Pancras Station and jumped on a Eurostar train to Europe. Tracked down to a luxury holiday complex in Ayia Napa, Cyprus, he proceeded to post a series of increasingly eye-popping and desperate rants online, whining: “They’re coming to get me…They want to lock me up”, and then directly threatening the families of journalists who dared to investigate him.

The man of many aliases – but whose real middle name is “Gutless” – also tried distancing himself from his many incendiary online rants about Muslims and Islam, and from the criminal acts of those who attacked police officers whilst chanting his name. “We will not win our country back by throwing rocks. I fully understand your anger & I stand with the heartbroken & devastated community in Southport…”

A community whose heartbreak he and his vile chums had added to immeasurably.

Then, having been caught off-guard by the speed with which events had unfolded after Southport (and that is not intended as a criticism), the anti-racist movement stirred itself. Local racist rallies mobilised anonymously online were met on the weekend after the Southport attack with decent, if patchy, responses from local anti-racists.

Over the next few days, the movement mustered the most impressive response to racism and fascism that this country has seen since the days of the Anti-Nazi League in the 1970s and 1980s.

*Anti-racists turn out in Sheffield* *(photo: SUTR)*

When an anonymous post appeared that first weekend with a thinly veiled call for an attack on an Islamic centre in Belfast, Searchlight called for anti-fascists to turn out to physically protect the building. When a hit list of solicitors offices and immigration advice agencies was posted a few days later, calling for them to be attacked on August 7, that is exactly what the movement did. Anti-racists in their thousands turned out all over the country to surround and protect those targeted offices, in a massive, inspiring gesture of solidarity and support to the communities – and those helping them – who had come under such sustained attack over the previous ten days.

Huge crowds of decent folk turned out in their home towns and cities, seizing back the racists’ slogan and themselves saying “Enough is Enough”. Even the police were moved to comment that this had a major effect in turning back the racist tide. Special credit must go to Stand Up To Racism for pulling out all the stops and achieving such a magnificent, historic response.

*Stand Up to Racism mobilisation in Dorset* *(photo: SUTR)*

The rapid processing of racist rioters through the justice system also had a salutary effect: sentencing was brought forward for guilty pleas and on several occasions televised live from court. Reports of grown men – oh, so brave a few days earlier, out in a mob throwing bricks or attacking passers-by – crying in the dock as they were sent down for two or three years will hopefully have the deterrent effect that was needed and intended.

For the moment, the tide has been turned. But the pressure against the fascists and their followers must be kept up in the following days, weeks and months. They have been driven back and marginalised, but they have certainly not gone away. And nor will we.

¡No pasaran!

Britain First’s Grift Too Far

MARK SCHOLL investigates Britain First’s campaign to whip up a race hate storm in Stoke, which culminated in a planned mosque being attacked in the recent riots.

“The entire area where the cemetery used to be, where our ancestors are still buried, has been turned into a car park for Mosque goers.” So screams a hysterical, lying, racist and irreligious rant posted by convicted thug, woman beater, multiply-convicted villain and Britain First leader Paul Golding.

After a non-existent General Election campaign, Golding’s troops were probably wise to ask what’s next. Well, a former church in Hanley, Stoke, has become a battleground for bigots as a small group of BF activists protested against the conversion of an old and dilapidated church building into a mosque for a thriving, and growing, local Muslim population.

And only today, former BNP Fuhrer Nick Griffin, chipped in with his own little dose of bile.

“Many Stoke residents and Islam-critics online are upset by the news that Grade II listed St John’s Church, in Hanley, is to be turned into a mosque” he writes, before going to enjoin people to return to “the Russian Orthodox, Latin Mass Catholic and many Calvinist churches (who) are still true to the faith of our forefathers”.

Macabre allegations of Muslims deliberate destroying the few remaining gravestones on the Hanley site have encouraged online agitation which has wound things up.

Of course, Darul Falah, the Muslim group that has acquired the old building, has become the victim of innumerable lies and smears. Some of these have come from Paul Golding himself. Now he is claiming that the Muslim group has instructed solicitors to take action against him.

No surprises there. But never one to look a grifthorse in the mouth, Golding needs an “immediate” £4000 in order to launch an historic defence etc and etc. Muslims, according to Golding, should never be allowed to purchase ground containing historic English graves.

Thing is, there are no graves.

What graves there were, were exhumed, removed, carefully and legally in line with normal procedure in 1985. That’s a fact. And not one that Golding has bothered to research. If he has, he’s remaining oddly quiet about it…

Furthermore, according to Stoke City Council, which has responsibilities for the area and for ensuring that all building work is carried out to acceptable and legal standards, it was local ‘English’ contractors who worked on the site.

True, there are some damaged gravestones at St John’s. They’ve been there for many years. They have been carefully set aside and stacked with wooden boards separating them. The church itself, dating to 1788, is large, and photos taken over the last 30 years show it became something of an eyesore. In 2019, there were efforts to restore the building and turn it into a restaurant. Golding was noticeably quiet at the time…

No laws have been broken. The local council is happy that everything is being done correctly and above board. The building was purchased quite openly for £140,000 at auction, and the new owners have been quite open about the aims and intentions of their community.

Plans for the site include a community centre with craft fairs, festivals and fun days; a women’s-only gym; school tours; a multi-faith library; an ‘educational cinema’; Islamic weddings and burials; an education centre focusing on Islamic education, English language and science; and an arts and history museum. In other words, it will become an attractive and valuable community hub.

One of the group behind the plans told the local paper: “The church houses numerous artefacts that present an excellent opportunity to create a museum section within the church.

“Among its treasures are remarkable stained-glass windows, including those honouring soldier William Henry Hickin, who fell in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, and the brave souls who perished in the First World War”.

For Paul Golding to come along and deliberately lie, mislead people, including his hapless supporters and donors, is yet another shocking example of just how low he’ll go. But, in their terms, the agitation paid off. During the recent post-Southport riots the church was attacked by a racist mob and had to be defended by members of the local Muslim community, and a large number of police officers.

Needless to say, we at Searchlight will be keeping a close eye on Golding’s latest hate filled campaign of lies. We will be liaising with long time anti racist friends and associates in the area to ensure that racist messages of hatred and division gain no further traction.

Fear and grifting on the British far right

As the dust begins to settle on the right-wing riots that plagued the country at the start of the month, so the begging bowls are being brought out for another round of shameless fascist grifting.

First out of the blocks was Britain First leader Paul Golding (above left). In an absurd video posted yesterday and greeted with widespread derision on the right, he claimed that BF has been ‘taking a step back’ and ‘keeping our heads down’ but that “now is the time for relentless action”. So please give generously…etc

Relentless action? Well, that would indeed be a First. Roughly translated it means: Ashlea and I, along with a few mates, have done all the money on extra-strong lager, so please top up the beer fund – even if it’s only an off-license gift voucher.

This has left some sceptics who have tired of putting their hands in their pockets to now refer to this particular shit-show as ’Britain Thirst’.

Not far behind Golding was Patriotic Alternative Deputy Leader Laura Towler (above right) or Laura Melia as she also styles herself. Appalled by the fact that racist online agitators have at last been called to account for their actions, and in some cases received serious jail time, she has launched a welfare fund for the families of ’political prisoners’. It was quickly reposted by the Traditional Britain Group which, not long ago, would have had nothing to do with the uncouth proles of PA.

But, is has to be said, this is something she knows a bit about, already operating one such fund for her banged up hubbie Sam Melia. That one has been particularly lucrative, drawing in around £100k according to some estimates, so the prospect of another has her licking her lips.

This prompted an immediate and withering retort from Katie ‘Sanity’ Fanning (below), partner of National Rebirth Party Fuhrer Alek Yerbury, who for some reason nurses a passionate loathing of PA and its leadership.

She wrote: “If it wasn’t bad enough that certain peoples like to pretend they’re the most persecuted peoples in the world as a means of grift.

“They now want to exploit the fact that other peoples are being persecuted to increase their own grift fund…

“How despicable is that?

“An absolutely disgusting display by fatty Towler once again

“It’s not going to go to what you think it’s going to go towards or the people you think it’s going to help”

Fatty Towler! Ouch!

Fanning and Towler have an especially virulent relationship, which only seems to have worsened during their simultaneous pregnancies. Their giving birth only a few days apart did spark speculation that they had somehow contrived to conceive in tandem – a rumour that prompted most of the people who heard it to rush to Amazon and place a same-day order for scrubbing brushes and boxes of brain-soap.

Across the board, though, varying degrees of panic are setting in now that online inciters are being banged up. Online hate has been the stock-in-trade of these groups – and well-known right-wing influencers – for years, and for the most part they have got away with it completely. The climate has now changed and the message going out from all the established groups is to stay within the law.

The British Democrats are taking the most hardline position, denouncing the rioters as louts who are doing the cause no good. PA say they are against violence but are quite happy adopting rioters as political prisoners. The Homeland Party under Kenny Smith are hovering between the two positions.

Alek Yerbury of NRP is now saying that recent events confirm his earlier view that:

“We must prioritise real world activity, like public meetings, even with people we don’t know, over online discourse…

“When online, especially with anonymity, it permits people to say things that they never would in any public sphere, because of the way it would negatively reflect on them in the environment they are in. This leads to people routinely saying things in online spaces which are so unmoderated and so unpleasant to an outside observer, that it negatively impacts wider society’s perception of the groups and people in those spaces as a whole”.

Despite his absurd Hitler-like persona, Yerbury is gaining a reputation in fascist circles for being the one who regularly talks sense and gets things right before events force the issue. This is seriously upsetting the likes of PA’s Mark Collett, who believes Yerbury is making a play for a section of the PA membership. Getting things right is an activity practised by Collett only after he has exhausted all other possibilities.

So, it’s a pity about the massive security breach that saw Yerbury being caught unaccompanied and photographed by Stand Up To Racism in Leeds at the weekend when he arrived in town for the inaugural meeting of the local NRP branch. Someone will doubtless be cashiered for that little slip up.

On the more disorganised far right, online accounts are being closed down or hidden for fear of legal repercussions. One such case is “Queen Natalie, the Norfolk lion” whose vile posts to over fifty thousand followers have contaminated X for too long. She is now hiding her contributions from general view.

Another very popular fascist account, that of WayneGb88 (’88’ is stock nutcase code for ’Heil Hitler’) has disappeared after the jailing of its author, Wayne O’Rourke (above, right) from Lincoln who was given three years for spreading false information about the Southport killings, and other posts which repeatedly incited violence and disorder. With some 107,000 followers, he was reported to have been earning £1400 a month from his online vituperations. It was his case which particularly freaked out Queen Natalie. ‘There but for the grace of Odin…’

Then the Independent Nationalist Network, run by Midlands-based Richard Lumby, announced yesterday that it is shutting up shop. INN was till recently threatening to become the latest political home for Nick Griffin, with whom it was organising election training seminars. How quickly it went from Griffin Inn to ’Last orders, please’ and Griffin Out.

Lumby is now claiming the shutdown has been planned for months and was held up only by the preparation of a new edition of Griffin’s legal handbook. But no-one is buying it. You don’t have to be in publishing to know you don’t need an organisation to re-edit a book. Like others, Lumby’s running scared.

Goodbye, and good riddance.

Berlin and the red triangle

By Steve Silver

The red triangle was in the news recently when the city of Berlin senate banned its use on activities related to the Middle East after the image was appropriated by Hamas supporters.

There is some confusion as to the origins of the use of the red triangle in this context with some saying it represents the red triangle of the Palestinian flag and others that it comes from the videos produced by Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigade where it is often used to identify the enemy. In addition to being used on social media and demonstrations it has been used as graffiti, including on Jewish people’s homes, as an act of intimidation.

The anti-fascist red triangle

It’s frustrating seeing the red triangle being used in this way because since the end of the Second World it has been an anti-fascist symbol. This is the case most notably in Germany, where former political prisoners in Nazi Germany who were forced to wear it on their concentration camp uniforms, turned it into a badge of anti-fascist pride. The triangle is part of the logo of the Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes – Bund der Antifaschistinnen und Antifaschisten (VVN-BdA) – the Association of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime – Federation of Antifascists – (centre) which was formed in 1947. Originally dominated by communists – for it was they who had been incarcerated – it is the largest and oldest anti-fascist organisation in Germany.

It wasn’t only in Germany that the red triangle was an anti-fascist symbol. It was also an anti-fascist symbol in Britain. Anti-Fascist Action used the symbol in the 1980s with the red triangle piercing a swastika (right). That particular image harked back to early Soviet propaganda. In 1918 Nikolai Kolli produced a sculpture of a red wedge (left) piercing and cracking a white block, the block representing the “Whites”, supporters of the Tsar and other reactionaries who opposed the Bolshevik Revolution. The avant-garde Russian Jewish artist El Lissitsky echoed that sculpture in his famous “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge” poster, some arguing that the slogan was chosen to counter the Russian pogromist slogan “Bej zhidov!” (“Beat the Jews”).

Berlin 1988: the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht

It was in West Berlin in 1988 that I met members of the VVN – as it was then – at an international anti-fascist conference which coincided with the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the mass pogrom initiated by the Nazis. In those days, long before Holocaust Memorial Day was established on January 27th, it was commonplace to mark November 9th to remember the victims of Nazism.

In fact, the German anti-fascists preferred to call it “Pogromnacht” as Kristallnacht was the Nazis own term for the atrocity and downplays what happened as being a “night of broken glass”. In fact, on November 9 and 10, 1938, Jewish homes and shops were ransacked, and synagogues destroyed. Jews were forced to pay for the damages inflicted upon them. People were tortured in the streets and as many as 30,000 sent to concentration camps.

Graeme Atkinson, who was the European Editor of Searchlight at the time and busy building what was to become an important international anti-fascist network, was involved with organising the conference and somehow managed to convince the Union of Jewish Students (UJS) to send me as a delegate. I was still a teenager – nineteen years old – and at the end of a term of serving as their national anti-racism officer. As well as the conference there was a demonstration, and I addressed the rally, giving greetings from the UJS.

It’s kind of hard to get your head round this but West Berlin was a capitalist island in the DDR, East Germany. West Berlin was formally controlled by the Western Allies and surrounded by the Berlin Wall. The unusual status of the city meant that West Germans could avoid being drafted for compulsory national service by going to live there. As a result there was many young left wingers living in squats in Kreuzberg and elsewhere that comprised what was known as the Autonoms – independent anti-capitalist leftists who also had little time for what they saw as the repressive East German regime. To us Brits they resembled anarchists, although they weren’t anarchists in spite of their direct action approach to politics. They often called themselves Antifa and were certainly the forerunners of what is known as Antifa today using the same imagery of black and red flags in the 1980s that Antifa use today.

East Germany

The DDR Conference delegates were welcomed into the DDR for a tour of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. We were taken in by coach and as official guests of the government all the usual visa requirements were wavered. We had a meeting with officials and were then given a tour of the camp. The handful of English language speakers were given our tour by an English-speaking former inmate, Werner Händler. He explained the central role the camp played in the entire camp system. It was the first time I had visited a concentration camp and was a deeply moving experience.

That was November 9 1988, 50 years after one of the most significant events on the path to the Holocaust. There was no indication that exactly one year later, November 9 1989, the Berlin Wall would be torn down with Germans celebrating in the streets as the path to reunification began. Amid the celebrations many forgot why Germany was divided in the first place, but not those who had worn the red triangle.

100 years ago: a grim anniversary Italy’s far right leaders would prefer to forget

By Alfio Bernabei

On 16 August 1924 the body of Italian Socialist MP Giacomo Matteotti was found in woods about 15 miles outside Rome. The five men who had kidnapped and killed him on 10 June, all identified within days and all members of Mussolini’s secret police, had agreed not to disclose the place where the body had been hidden thus fulfilling the psychological component of the crime: keep the country guessing for as long as possible as a warning to all antifascists.

The threat that Matteotti had presented was twofold: through his speeches in the Chamber he had shown his determination to put pressure on the King to urge Mussolini to disband the fascist militia that was in effect a private terrorist army used to strangle democracy (see Matteotti’s speech on 30 May); secondly, he had successfully began to build an antifascist platform abroad to the extent that one could see him gaining more political trust and clout on the international stage than Mussolini himself.

The lapse of time between the killing and the finding of the body was put to good use by Mussolini. A false narrative was developed suggesting that the assassination had been motivated by the need to prevent Matteotti from disclosing documents which he had supposedly acquired proving that some of Mussolini’s associates were involved in accepting bribes from an American Oil Company. Why not follow the trail of a “financial scandal” instead of a political assassination? This “legend” as Matteotti’s widow, Velia, called it, was used by Mussolini to show himself as a man of impeccable morality and high principles, quite capable of acting ruthlessly to uphold justice and good conduct. He staged an eye-catching prolonged reshuffle ditching friends and close collaborators, waited for the Opposition to demonstrate its suicidal weakness and only then took responsibility for the murder in a crude public act of defiance. Soon after, the dictatorship that had already started long before Matteotti’s murder was fully and swiftly implemented landing Italy with a page of squalid history from which it will never fully recover.

Over the past few months a number of antifascist organizations in Italy have marked the centenary of Matteotti’s murder. But they have acted in an uncoordinated fashion. Not enough has been done to create the kind of impact that might have given rise to a focused antifascist campaign or a broad-based antifascist movement attracting international attention.

The president of Italy, Sergio Mattarella, did pay a visit to the street in Rome where Matteotti was kidnapped. Following that example a responsible antifascist secretary of state for Culture might have thought fit and appropriate to encourage all schools in the capital to send their pupils and teachers to the same spot in a massive demonstration of historical significance shown on RAI, the public broadcasting company of Italy. But nothing of the kind took place.

One cannot but suspect that a certain class of politicians in Italy are hoping to bin the entire episode and wait to hear the question: Matteotti who?