So you think waving paper-RAF planes on the anniversary of the Dresden bombing will combat the influence of Fascism? You are crazy infants with no strategy. Worse you are dangerous fools. You will reinforce the influence of the German neo-Nazis over the ordinary people and marginalise yourselves. To oppose the Neo-Nazis you must stand as the champions of the working class in Germany and everywhere else.

But then you are NOT Antifa - you are the 'AntiDeutsch' morons! You just appear to like the cheap thrill of the extremist pose.

When we oppose the BNP here in Britain do we call ourselves the 'anti-British'? No, because we are not some silly students intoxicated on theory and guilt! We are Anti-Fascists!

For other British readers some info - in Germany there are some dangerous fools called the 'AntiDeutsch'. They are a mirror image of nationalists. To oppose the Neo-Nazis they think they have to support the war crimes of the British state against the working classes in Germany.

This is the same British state they are praising that deported Jewish people back to Nazi germany and ignored the reality of of Auswitch; the British state that refused to bomb the railway lines to the death camps - but bombed the working class instead; The same British state that sent its troops first to defend its empire in Asia, as a priority over the fight in Europe; The British state that rules over us and is the enemy of the British working class. If I want to oppose the British state should I support the Nazi criminals in Germany? No - I should oppose all states, all capitalists, all racists!

The AntiDeutsch also think that to oppose the anti-Semitism that lead to the holocaust you have to support the Israeli state. So they don't wave the red and black flags of antifa - they wave the flag of Israel, and proclaim solidarity with the occupation!

They support the oppression of the Palestinians because they feel guilty about what their ancestors did to the Jewish people. Thus they think two wrongs make a right! Thus the obscenities of history are compounded and continue today.

We should be against all forms of racism - both the anti-Semitism of Europeans that lead to the holocaust and that still exists today - and also the racism of the Israeli state that oppresses the Palestinians. (Of course, as bad as the treatment of the Palestinians is now, nothing is equivalent to the horrors of Nazi holocaust. Israel has not built death camps YET - only walled ghetto's and ethnic cleansing so far).

Down with Fascism! Down with Anti-Semitism! Down with all Nationalism! Down with Zionism! Down with all Racism! Down with Imperialism! Forward to International Working Class Solidarity!

Fuck the AntiDeutsch! Get out of our movement you dangerous idiots!

@ Barry Kade:
you are right, anti-Germans have turned their back to any form of emancipatory politics. But please note that, while the Dresden events still attract some anti-German nutters, the protests are mainly carried out by anarchists, anti-fascists and 'autonome'.

Anti-Germans (by definition) don't oppose neo-Nazis!!! They want to criticise the racism of the 'ordinary German' instead.

@ skunk:
this is exactly what the NPD (neo-Nazi party) argues. Or, in fact, the BNP. More particularly it is one of the main points of Holocaust denier David Irving, how appeared with Griffin at the Oxford Debating Union the other month.

I don't understand why such a comment is not delete. This is clearly Nazi spam!

shocking is that Barry Kade finds the fault for a growing neo-Nazi movement plus sympathisers in Germany with the Antifa.

And, skunk, so are you arguing that we should revise the 'official' numbers of Jews that died in the Holocaust? Can I point you towards stormfront...

Hirz'lande wirds nu' Jejammer' datt man layda nett di Fanichtung leugne' dirrfe un' datt Ih' alle dumme Anti-Deutschen waere'!

Herrlich!

Dis's Projek issn'e Hose jegange'

Here is Bomber Harris, the icon of the pro-zionist (nazi collaborating), middle-class guilt movement AntiDeutsch

The venue: Berlin's Olympic Stadium; the date: 14 May 1938. As the English players lined up alongside their German counterparts for pre-match ceremonies captain Eddie Hapgood and his men issued a Nazi salute to the crowd.

The gesture provoked outrage in the British press, and was seen as all the more galling since Hitler was not even present at the time.

But England's presence in Germany on that day was less about sport than politics.

The policy of appeasement towards the Nazis pursued by Neville Chamberlain's government at the time had been intentionally transposed to the football pitch.

It was a Foreign Office order that the England team, which included the legendary Stanley Matthews, perform the salute.

The underlying message was calculated to be that Germany, which two months earlier had annexed Austria, was not a pariah state.

The friendly game effectively helped clear the way for Chamberlain's "Peace in our Time" deal with Hitler, which, in turn, led to Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia.

If you think those comments were bad, have a look here to see what has been on public display for days:

 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/02/391195.html

Pretty much normal round here these days.

I think it is wrong to take a position on the bombing of Dresden except as an example of the age old failings of states being played out with new killing machines. I think it is inaccurate to assume that the US and British Imperial military were antifascist forces simply because they were fighting the Nazis. If our states were truly antifascist they wouldn't have flirted and traded with fascists, and would have both opposed Franco in Spain both both the war and after. Put it this way, more innocents died at Dresden than at Guernica. I don't even think many Jewish people will be impressed by British bomber command strategy at a time they were leaving the death camps alone. There were slave labourers incinerated, Jews and Polish and Ukranian peasants who I'd guess would rather have tried to survive the war. Most of the victims were female, many were infants, elderly and infirm. To tell everyone in Dresden 'you deserved it' is to apply total culpability for the German state onto each individual within that state. By that measure, you would have to support every bomb attack in the UK that is carried out due to the Iraqi genocide, including your own family. You'd have to tell all the survivors of the 7/7 attack that they deserved it too.

I realise there were some military or economic reasons to attack Dresden, but that is an excuse not a reason. Those individual targets that were legitimate under existing international law - factories, garrisons, etc - could have been wiped out by so many bombers trying to concentrate their payloads. That was not the intent of the raid though. It was designed to start a firestorm that would incinerate the city. Bombing runs were laid in so bombs were dropped not to hit anything in particular, but in a grid designed to suck all the oxygen out of the city and vapourise all combustable materials. In that regard it was a great success. The second wave of bombers was timed to arrive just when the ambulance and firemen would be on the streets. When foriegn car-bombers employ that tactic on a smaller scale, that is commonly called evil. We did that to a city and tell them that they deserved it ? Was Fallujah in your name too ?

My impression is that it was a punishment attack, revenge for London and Coventry. It was also a military experiment, an atrocity and it was definitely a war crime - the indiscriminate bombing of civilians was been banned before the last century. No Luftwaffe officer could be prosecuted at Nuremberg after because they would have to have charged Bomber Harris too. A deliberate firestorm of that size had never been designed before, it is comparable to a nuclear blast. The effects justified the Times having coined the term 'weapons of mass destruction' back in the thirties to describe bomber aircraft. Are you going to tell the people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that they deserved it too ?

If the NeoNazis are trying to coopt this as a war-crime, then I think it is wrong to oppose them on that because to most german observers it certainly seems to be one. I think if the NeoNazis are adopting a populist 'germans were victims too' pose then it is a mistake to say 'You all deserved it'. Or if you do, maybe also turn up at Coventry cathedral and tell them that they deserved it too for being part of the biggest, most brutal empire the world had ever seen.

Never concede a truth to the nazis, truthes are what they are lacking most. Whether anyone who wasn't there thinks they deserved it or not, it broke existing international law. It was a war crime by two states against another state that was itself committing mass war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Kurt Vonnegut is a recently deceased american humanist, sort of sci-fi author who was held as a prisoner of war in Dresden on the night it was incinerated. His book Slaughterhouse Five is about that, it is a classic anti-war novel but far from his best work - that came when he was opposing the Neo-cons before his death.

"I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center." - KV

Well, they only way I can resolve this conundrum is:

1.) Most left-wing Germans do not see that playing the victim is a serious position. There is no great debate about Allied war crimes. It is known they happened and people have moved on. Fair enough.

2.) The German NeoNAzis are trying to capitalise atrocities such as these as and assert them as being comparable to the crimes of the Holocaust. They have misappropriated the vocabulary. And many people naturally want to oppose this. Fair enough.

Now it seems that some people have taken this to another logical (?) step.

But it is hard to decide without some sort of explicit statement whether their symbolsim is supposed to be:

A.) A simple knee-jerk contrary: we'll do the opposite of whatever the Nazis do.
B.) Try to symbolise that it was teh Nazis fault the bombers came
C.) Say everyone deserved it.

C. would be just completely fucking unaccptable on so many levels and stupid beyond belief.
B. & A. would be understandable but badly realised

But bear in mind the overwhelming number of people in Dresden protesting were there to denounce the Nazis, NeoNAzis and to protect the local Synagogue from ritual attack.

If this gets hidden I will look for a better text and translate it.

Although in europe 'antifa' is often a loose term used to describe antifascist activists rather than an organisation, this is not the case in the UK.

To attribute the article to anyone involved with Antifa Britain is totally false.

We did not post this, it has nothing to do with us or our ideas.

please visit:

antifa.org.uk

and check.

So I did write :

>> I think it is worth pointing out that historical revisionism is allowed when it is a matter of downgrading the number of victims of the Dresden firebombing carried out by the RAF by a factor of 10...

But critically examining any aspect of the so-called jewish holocaust or shoah and reaching conclusions not matching the "official" figures and narrative has become a crime severely punished in many european countries... <<

What is wrong with saying that ?

In which way is it clearly nazi spam ?

What is certain is that it has become a crime in many european countries (and in the US as well I think) to do historical research on certain aspects of WWII and reach other conclusions than a certain official narrative.

What is annoying for me to the point I post about it online is that I cannot understand why certain historians are outlawed, some of them in jail since several years apparently, instead of having their books and research proven wrong point by point by other historians.

Anyway you are only going to fuel neo-nazi radicalism and extremism by adopting such policies, maybe even drive people to them.

Antifa, how do you know that this article wasn't posted by someone in the antifa group. Do you personally police what members of antifa post?

It's very similar to an article from the middle features section of the German Indymedia:

 http://de.indymedia.org/index.shtml

 http://de.indymedia.org/2008/02/207878.shtml

Posted as also under the AntiFa category...

There are a couple of critical posts, but most seem to not see this as denying Nazis a monument to rally around.

To make it easier for people who read this later it is worth pointing out tht there were two threads running simultaneously. I think the other thread and this thread are so closely related that they deserve a link.