The 1936 rout of Sir Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirted Fascist thugs, who, 5,000 strong, intended to march through Whitechapel, a poor, largely Jewish and Irish part of London’s East End, was commemorated by thousands of people of numerous ethnic origins London on Sunday 9th October.
Behind Trade Union, Labour Party, Communist and other Left Wing Banners, and those of Jewish Groups, and London Football Supporters’ Groups they marched from Altab Ali Park (named after a Bangladeshi worker, set upon and murdered by racists in 1978) through Cable Street to St George’s Gardens to rededicate themselves in opposition to bigotry, racism and xenophobia. Many of those who in 1936 defended Whitechapel from Fascists supported the International Brigade, or served in it to resist General Franco’s murderous mutineers.
Max Levitas, who took part in the 1936 Battle of Cable served in Street, was one of the speakers, and still retains his old radicalism and his Dublin accent. Sharing the platform with him was Dubliner Manus O’Riordan of the International Brigade Memorial Trust, son of Michael O’Riordan who fought in the Brigade and founded the Communist Party of Ireland. There were many fine banners, none finer than a newly created one of the Connolly Association celebrating the Centenary of Easter Week.
One of the Jewish speakers observed that wealthy and influential Jews generally despised their poor co-religionists in the East End and disapproved of their refusal to allow the Fascists to strut by their homes and through their neighbourhood. I’ve read that the Board of Deputies of British Jews took that attitude.
What was clear to me was that sight of the refusal of poor people who had escaped pogroms in Europe to suffer them in their own neighbourhood was indeed local, and might be derided by those in better circumstances as “parochial”.
Many people in comfortable and secure circumstances, like those in the Dublin media, clearly despise those in the North of Ireland who have experienced repeated pogroms, and strutting thugs banging drums where they are not wanted. It is easy to sleep on another man’s wound.
One Desmond O’Toole, in a letter to the IRISH TIMES (a paper that editorially rejoiced at Hitler’s accession to power) quotes Dr Sigmund Freud, in an attempt at a put-down of the “parochial” BLOGMEISTER , Jude.
Poor Freud, if he had had the protection which the Jews in Whitechapel and their friends organised for themselves, could have survived in Vienna and need not have fled to Hampstead.
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