‘We've dug ourselves a really deep hole’ – David Neiwert on the rise of the far right // One in 20 Britons does not believe Holocaust took place, poll finds

David Neiwert has lived in his Seattle neighbourhood for decades. But it, like the US, has changed beyond recognition around him. Once upon a time, the journalist and author of the book Alt-America explains, “most of the houses were older, but they were cheap. They were places where working-class people who work on these fishing boats out here” – he gestures towards the docks at Salmon Bay – “could live, right? You know, 500 bucks a month. It all got torn down during the gentrification phase and replaced with multistorey condos that cost $1,500 or $2,000 a month.”

Amazon, whose headquarters are in Seattle, “changed the city”, he says. “All the folks who work on those fishing boats are still in the neighbourhood, but they’ve got no place to live. They’re all living on the street.” He offers a characteristic wry grin. “We’ve got a lot of motor homes around the neighbourhood now.”

Neiwert has spent his career studying far-right movements. Alt America analyses their growth over the past several decades, and looks at how authoritarianism and conspiracy thinking have come to hold sway over US politics. Neiwert believes that the far right’s surge, the election of Donald Trump and mass homelessness in Seattle all spring from a common root: the deliberate assault on democracy by the US right and the Republican party. 

For several decades following the Great Depression, when capitalism and liberal democracy teetered on the brink, Republicans and Democrats “agreed to defend democracy, and defend the values of democracy because it benefited them all by following basically FDR’s program. Now, we’ve lost that because conservatives have decided they are no longer willing to submit to any kind of government run by liberals,” Neiwert says. “The current conservative movement has decided it no longer wishes to be part of a liberal democracy.”

The principal reason, he thinks, is greed. “By the time they got to the 1980s when Ronald Reagan was president, all they cared about was: ‘Well, fuck you, you can’t take my money away. You can’t tax me!’ Politics has become so focused on economics that we’ve lost sight of humanity.”read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/27/american-exceptionalism-has-to-die-david-neiwert-on-the-rise-of-the-far-right

One in 20 Britons does not believe Holocaust took place, poll finds
One in 20 British adults do not believe the Holocaust happened, and 8% say that the scale of the genocide has been exaggerated, according to a poll marking Holocaust Memorial Day. Almost half of those questioned said they did not know how many Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, and one in five grossly underestimated the number, saying that fewer than two million were killed. At least six million Jews died.

The poll, commissioned by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, a charity established and funded by the UK government to promote and support the international day of remembrance, echoes the findings of a survey carried out in seven European countries in November. That poll found that one in three people knew little or nothing about the Holocaust, and an average of 5% said they had never heard of it. In France, 20% of those aged 18-34 said they had never heard of the Holocaust; in Austria, the figure was 12%. A survey in the US last year found that 9% of millennials said they had not heard, or did not think they had heard, of the Holocaust.

The scale of ignorance about the Holocaust has shocked experts. Olivia Marks-Woldman, of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, said: “I must stress that I don’t think [the poll respondents] are active Holocaust deniers – people who deliberately propagate and disseminate vile distortions. But their ignorance means they are susceptible to myths and distortions.” The Holocaust is taught in schools as part of the history curriculum, but “that might only be one lesson”, she added. “And people who are middle-aged or over may never have been taught about it.”

Steven Frank, who was one of only 93 children to survive the Theresienstadt camp, said: “I find these figures terribly worrying. In my experience, people don’t have a solid understanding of what happened during the Holocaust and that’s one reason I’m so committed to sharing what happened to me... read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/27/one-in-20-britons-does-not-believe-holocaust-happened