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The Ethical Record ISSN 0014-1690 The Ethical Record Vol. 100 No. 2 £1 February 1 995 EDITORIAL E.P. THOMPSON: HEROIC PESSIMIST When the heroic Red Army reached Auschwitz 50 Peter Cadogan 3 years ago, only a few thousand prisoners remained to be liberated. The majority had been forced by their Nazi guards to march westwards, where most of MANAGING THE PUBLIC them perished (viz, the account in Night by eye- SECTOR - THE ART OF witness Elie Wiesel). For many years after the war, THE IMPOSSIBLE? most survivors did not talk about their experiences in Gerald Vinten 11 the camps; their friends were too reticent to ask, and some were incapable of expressing their horrific memories. Crucial documentary evidence of the BLATCHFORD, construction and purpose of Auschwitz, taken to THE CLARION, GOD Moscow in 1945 and kept secret by the communists, AND MY NEIGHBOUR has only recently become available to historians. We Peter Broks 15 and posterity require the terrible facts of the holo- caust to be a matter of public record. VIEWPOINTS 20 Prof Robert Schwarz has argued (in A Sociopathic Colin Mills; Frank Holmes View of Nazism, Ethical Record, Sept 93) that even when all the facts are in we may still lack insight into the psychological factors at work in the society which FUTURE EVENTS 24 conceived the Final Solution. Although Nazism itself is almost beyond the reach of rational argument, that cannot be said for the antisemitic tendencies, manifested in the very recent past, of some major forms of Marxism and Christianity. Here, one may demand that their doctrines be modified in the lurid light of the holocaust. It was communist doctrine that Jews could have no authentic national aspiration; they were called 'hucksters' by Karl Marx and 'rootless cosmopolitans' by Stalin, and were destined to disappear in a future communist state. Zionism (a state for Jews) was loudly demonised along with capitalism and imperialism. An outcome of this policy was the UN's infamous (but since rescinded) proclamation that 'Zionism is racism'. The communists were always reluctant to acknowledge that Jews had been singled out by the Nazis for total destruction; they were discomfited when Yevtushenko bravely declaimed his poem Babi Yar (a place near Kiev where thousands of Jews were murdered). Secularists, going back to Voltaire, have occasionally blundered in regard to Jews. Were they to be classified simply as religious, or were they an ethnic minority with rights to self-expression? Now Judaism as a religion must, along with all other religions and ideologies, be open to critical comment. However, if Jews were more accurately regarded as a large extended family with some religious/cultural features in common, living in a somewhat hostile society (eg parts of Europe in the last hundred years), then it is not incumbent on secularists to add to the hue and cry against them. Questions involving multiculturalism are difficult and defy generalisation. One therefore has to treat each issue on its merits and each person as a unique individual rather than a stereotype. continued on page 2 SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY Conway Hall Humanist Centre 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL. Telephone: 071-831 7723 Appointed Lecturers Harold Blackham, T.F. Evans, Peter Fleales, Richard Scorer, Barbara Smoker, Harry Stopes-Roe, Nicolas Walter. Officers Honorary Representative: Nicolas Walter. General Committee Chairman: Barbara Smoker. General Committee Vice-Chairman: Govind Deodhekar. Treasurer: Don Liversedge. Editor, The Ethical Record: Norman Bacrac. Librarian: Edwina Palmer. Registrar: Marion Granville. Secretary to the Society: Nina Khare. Tel: 071-831 7723 Fax: 071-430 1271 (The Secretary's office is on the 2nd Floor, Bradlaugh House, 47 Theobald's Road) Hall Staff Manager: Stephen Norley. Tel: 071-2428032for Hall bookings.Head Caretaker David Wright. New Members Dr Bimal Prodhon, Donald Rooum, Mrs A. Walford. Editorial continued from page I Undoubtedly the major source of the stereotyping of Jews has been Christianity, for this first introduced into its doctrines the concept of a malignant people. It did so not least 143ithe very terminology of the New Testament. This refers to 'the Jews' in a way that makes it natural to transfer the responsibility for questioning Jesus's mission from particular persons (Jews or 'Pharisees' — itself an early example of group character assassination) to contemporary Jews. At Easter, Jewish children have been confronted with the accusation, "You killed Our Lord". Pope Pius XII prayed for the conversion of the 'perfidious' Jews even as some were being rounded up for transportation within earshot of the Vatican. (After the war, John XXIII amended that prayer). During the war, numerous Christians acted on their own initiative and risked their lives to save Jews, but there was no lead from the top. Nor was any German soldier, with Gott mit Uns on his buckle, ever given reason to doubt the propriety of waging a total war, in which anything goes, against that Bolshevism which his church had so vilified. Mussolini, Hitler and Franco are just the most notorious of the Fascist leaders who found that however they treated the clergy, the hierarchy would never cease its servility, arising from its antipathy to the left. One may hope that appropriate lessons will be learnt by the faithful; freethinkers will reflect on the harm that can be wrought by religion. The text of the Holyoake Commemorative Lecture Seeking a Full and Worthwile Life: Aspects of Humanist Education. Professor Sir Hermann Bondi KCB FRS, President of the British Humanist Association available from the Secretary, S.P.E.S. at £2 The views expressed in this journal are not necessarily those of the Society 2 Ethical Record, February, 1995 E.P. THOMPSON: HEROIC PESSIMIST Peter Cadogan General Secretary of the South Place Ethical Society from 1967-1980 Lecture to the Ethical Society, 15 January 1995 Talking about Thompson is like talking about England since 1945. Yet although he was too-English-to-be-true he also managed to be a great internationalist. The two things arc not incompatible. By nature of our very origins we are as a people European, imperial and Atlanticist; Edward was all those. His mother was American, the family background was inseparable from India and he pioneered the idea of a people's Europe as catalyst in the dissolution of the Cold War. If I tend to speak of Edward Palmer Thompson (E.P.T.) in the first person it is because I first met him back in 1948 when he was 24 and I was 27. It was the year that he and Dorothy married. Our last communication was 45 years later when he wrote to me just before he died in August 1993. We met and wrote intermittently but I never got to know him personally — it was a matter of meetings, conferences, demonstrations and in the corridors of the movement. I abandoned Marxism and party politics in 1960 in favour of direct democracy and militant non-violence. He made no such switch. In practice we came to much the same conclusions by very different routes. There was a meeting of deeds but not of minds. The Red Thread There was a red thread (a good but quite accidental pun) in the whole of Edward's adult life: what was he to make of Marxism and what were Marxists to make of him? He joined the Communist Party in 1942, aged 18, and when he died aged 69 he had never formally renounced the faith. But from 1979 he just moved on, in his empirical fashion, and left it behind. He had, of course, quit the Party back in 1956. This is not a potted biography but the background to E.P.T.'s life was so extraordinary that a little personal detail is called for. There is already one biography in print: E.P.T: Objections and Oppositions by Bryan D. Palmer, a Canadian historian and one of Edward's friends. It is an entirely delightful book full of interesting detail and excellent documentation, but sans any critical assessment.' The Family Background His father, Edward John Thompson read Classics and joined the Methodist ministry, going out to India in 1910 at the age of 24 as a teaching missionary. He was soon a Headmaster and an Assistant Principal of a University College. His mother Theodosia Jessup was from a vintage and distinguished New England family, who also went out to India as a Methodist missionary. She married Edward John in 1920. Of the six children, the first, Frank, was born in 1921. E.J.T. became deeply involved in Indian culture, mastered Bengali and was the friend of Tagore and Nehru. He knew Gandhi too, but more at arms length, since not until 1939 was he committed to the Indian nationalist cause. His interest was the Anglo-Indian interface about which he had two important messages. He wrote a famous book on the Indian mutiny of 1867 and the horrific revenge taken by the British Army, with between 10,000/20,000 hanged and others blown apart at the canon's mouth. For this there had first to be atonement. He was no less hard on the Indian side, over communal differences, the caste system, male chauvinism (he produced a book on suttee)and endemic violence. Ethical Record, February, 1995 3 But he loved India and its culture took over from his Methodism. The family returned to England in 1923. E.J.T. resigned from the Methodist ministry and began an entirely new profession as a Research Fellow in Oxford — his subject was, of course, India. Besides being a scholar and a teacher he was a poet, a playwright and a novelist.
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