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In Holocaust education, we use the phrase Never Forget. While referring specifically to the six million Jews slaughtered by the Nazis, Never Forget has a broader meaning never to allow the abandonment of democratic values, the loss of moral clarity.

The fear has now struck again. Six months ago, it was bomb threats, cemetery desecrations, and verbal assaults. This time, it is an angry mob, fueled by hatred of the other, especially the Jews. The chants, full of vitriolic hate, were of Jews will not replace us and Jew, Jew, Jew.

Watching the footage brought me back to my childhood, when I heard many Holocaust survivors paint unthinkable pictures with their words of atrocities suffered for one, and only one reason they were Jewish. And I was reminded of the soldiers, our parents and grandparents, who fought against the Nazi regime and liberated Europe from Hitlers inhuman chokehold.

Our families, yours and mine, Americans, fought for democratic values, for pluralism, for the right to protest and speak freely. They fought not only to defend the United States, but also to free countries and citizens around the world whose democratic way of life had been stolen.

The neo-Nazis, white supremacists and their hateful brethren who marched in Charlottesville are just the opposite. While they do take advantage of the Constitutional right to protest and speak freely, they are nothing short of un-American. We should never forget that hate groups and their leaders cannot be legitimized. We should never forget the utter lack of moral equivalency between haters and those who oppose them. Whatever they may call themselves, the bigots have one end-gamethe destruction of our democratic value system in the name of white supremacy.

In the South, the Jewish community has been one of its victims. Just to speak of the Atlanta area. More than 100 years ago, Leo Frank was lynched. Fifty years ago, The Temple on Peachtree Street was firebombed. Throughout our history, we have faced the constant attacks, the derogatory remarks, quotas in schools, physical assaults, and forgetful scheduling of events that conflict with our most sacred religious holidays.

Charlottesville made me recall my childhood, when my parents shared their own stories of standing up to the KKK. They told me about Holocaust survivors who confronted hate in the U.S. in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Imagine the post-traumatic stress and the strength it took after the Holocaust to once again stand up to threatening bigots seeking to suck democracy dry. Never forget.

But just as important, never forget or underestimate the uniqueness of American society or the strengths of our pluralistic democracy. We are stronger and more united as a community. We saw in Charlottesville counter-protesters from all faiths, ethnicities, and nationalities. It was a reminder to never forget that we, and the vast majority who oppose the purveyors of hate, are not alone.

Over the years, these trials and tribulations have inspired the American Jewish Committee (AJC) to create the Atlanta Black-Jewish Coalition, the Latino-Jewish Task Force, and the Muslim-Jewish Initiative. These have given us opportunities to create dialogue and build understanding so we can preserve the privilege of living in a democracy.

We invite all of Atlantas multicultural citizenry to gain from AJCs programs founded on the principle that our differences are actually our strength. While the programs are separate and distinct, they often reinforce each other to strengthen our community bonds and ensure that none of us ever forgets that neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and their sympathizers are unequivocally placed outside the pale as immoral, illegitimate, and anti-democratic. Never forget they have no place in our precious, democratic American society.

Dov Wilker is Atlanta regional director, American Jewish Committee.

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Opinion: 'Never forget' remains an apt slogan for democracy - MyAJC

The ghost of Walter Duranty still lives at The New York Times, and it has a perverse sense of timing. Last week, on the anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall, the Times continued its bizarre nostalgia series about communist dictatorships with a piece titled Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism. The author, Kristen Ghodsee, points to a single, post-reunification study to allege that women under the iron fist of East Germany had twice as many orgasms as women in capitalist West Germany.

Highlighting a single bright spot of communist life while mostly ignoring its many dangers, indignities, and rights violations would be bad enough. Ghodsee takes it a step further, however, by speculating that the totalitarianism she euphemistically refers to as a top-down campaign was actually the secret sauce in the communists successful female liberation.

Those comrades insistence on government intervention may seem heavy-handed to our postmodern sensibilities, but sometimes necessary social change which soon comes to be seen as the natural order of things needs an emancipation proclamation from above.

The leftist ideologue is forever being disappointed. Just as Vladimir Lenin was frustrated with the less-than-revolutionary Russian peasantry, the oppressed whom the modern left tries to liberate never seem to quite live up to expectations. Concerned with such frivolities as putting food on the table and spending time with their families, people always fall short of someone elses vision of liberation.

Even today, womens choices about work-life balance and the wage gap those choices create cause many furrowed feminist brows. Actual womenwho in surveys still indicate that their ideal work-family balance is part-time work, despite all the social pressure nowadays against this viewsimply arent as radical as they ought to be when left free to choose their own paths. Ghodsees solution, like the GDRs, is simple: women must be forcibly liberated for their own good.

There is just enough truth in The New York Times article to bolster its radical message. Just as the Roaring Twenties in the United States swept in many changes in womens social roles, so too the 1920s in the Soviet Union brought a period of genuine sexual libertinism and experimentation, encouraged by the vanguard of communist intellectuals that populated Russian cafes. In the early days after the Bolshevik Revolution, peopleespecially those far away from the bloody revolution itselfcould be more easily forgiven for thinking that communism was going to lead to a happier, more prosperous future, given that most of the twentieth-century examples of its barbarism had yet to occur.

But the reality of life in the Warsaw Pact was decidedly different than the picture Ghodsee paints in her column. My father, who grew up in Communist Poland, describes the women he recalls, married in their 20s and 30s, as exhausted, spending most of their time outside of working hours standing in lines and feverishly combing contacts to scrape together the bare necessities for their households.

If American feminists think their second shiftworking full-time and still remaining primarily responsible for domestic dutiesis a burden, they should try to imagine the average womans life in communist paradise, where women went without capitalisms time-saving household appliances and frequently confronted empty grocery shelves.

The laundry list of progressive policies listed in the articlegovernment-paid maternity leave, mandated equality in work, daycare centers to remove parental responsibilities and rear the new generation of homo sovieticusnowhere near made up for being turned away from the toilet paper line.

And as soon as female liberation came up against the needs of the communist state, those benefits were reversed, as happened in Ceausescus Romania. Romania was one of the most sexually liberated countries in the Warsaw Pact, but when its government leaders decided it needed more Romanians, contraception and abortion not only lost state support, but became punishable by law virtually overnight.

Yes, Ms. Ghodsee, in communist societies, men and women were equal: equally poor and afraid of their own government.

In the face of a disheartening future, with little hope of being financially successful, intellectually curious, or artistically exploratory outside of dogma-sanctioned boundaries, young people in communist societies leaned more strongly on their personal relationships for happiness. They found joy where they could, in the excitement of a new romance, or in the right bunch of flowers to bring a smile to a wifes face and a little color to a gray home. Its possible they also found it in more frequent sex, as Ghodsees article claims, although her single data point and two interviews are hardly convincing evidence.

But even these personal joys were infected by the Communist state, as movingly demonstrated in the plot of 2007s Oscar-winning film, The Lives of Others. Trust was broken between husbands and wives, as the secret police found ways to play their fears against one another to control the population. In Ghodsees alleged sexual utopia, the GDR, it is estimated that almost one in six people was an informant for the Stasi. Many were coerced, bullied, and broken into betraying the lovers with whom they were having those all-important orgasms.

There is nothing romantic about life in such a system. It is incompatible with the basic dignity of the human being. Instead of tallying up orgasms, Ghodsee should instead listen to the words of one of Russias greatest female poets, Anna Akhmatova, who had a truer impression of life under communism.

Even if they clamp shut my tormented mouth Through which one hundred million people scream; Thats how I wish them to remember me when I am dead On the eve of my remembrance day. If someone someday in this country Decides to raise a memorial to me, I give my consent to this festivity But only on this condition do not build it By the sea where I was born, I have severed my last ties with the sea; Nor in the Tsars Park by the hallowed stump Where an inconsolable shadow looks for me; Build it here where I stood for three hundred hours And no-one slid open the bolt. Listen, even in blissful death I fear That I will forget the Black Marias*, Forget how hatefully the door slammed and an old woman Howled like a wounded beast.

* Black Marias is a reference to the vans used by the secret police, which made people disappear, whether to interrogation cells or to the gulags.

Inez Feltscher Stepman is an education policy analyst in Washington DC. Her work has been published in Orange County Register, The Resurgent, RedState, Breitbart.com, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter @inezfeltscher.

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Quit Glorifying Communism. There Is Nothing Romantic About Life In A Police State - The Federalist

Take the Czech Republic, for instance.

After World War I, statues from the vanished Hapsburg empire were quickly taken down and replaced by Czechoslovakias new, democratic heroes, like Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, its first president. After World War II, Communists erased Masaryk from public tributes, but he was put back in place after that system collapsed. One statue of Masaryk in the small town of Holesov was taken away and re-erected five times, said Zdenek Lukes, a historian and architect in Prague.

Mr. Lukes opposes the removal of such statues, but he said that in some cases a little historical context must be added. I like the solution they used in the town of Litomysl, Mr. Lukes said. Instead of removing a statue of the Communist minister of culture, they placed a plaque there explaining who he was and what he did.

Slovakia, which broke away after the fall of communism, also reveres Masaryk, but has built its own stable of national heroes, with the biggest disputes over the countrys wartime leader, Jozef Tiso, who was hanged for collaborating with the Nazis. Though monuments to Tiso are still shunned in most of the country, the small village of Cakajovce has erected its own Pantheon of Slovak Historical Figures, with Tiso at the center.

The recent bloody history of Eastern Europe, where occupation by Nazis and then Soviets scrambled political allegiances, has made the region especially susceptible to these waves of political upheaval. But such disputes are not confined to the East.

The spectacular tomb of Spains former fascist ruler, Gen. Francisco Franco, at Valle de los Caidos is still a pilgrimage destination for conservative Spaniards, and has survived several efforts to remove it.

In Italy, the right-wing mayor of Brescia tried in 2013 to restore a monumental statue of a muscular youth from 1932, called Fascist Era but nicknamed Bigio by residents to its perch in the center of town.

The statue, placed in storage after the war, should be seen as a work of art, the mayor argued, bled of its fascist baggage. Many disagreed, vehemently. He lost the next election, and his successor chose to keep Bigio in storage, where he remains.

In Germany, Nazi images and symbols were scrubbed from public spaces immediately after the war, and the display of the swastika and other Nazi symbols is illegal. The site of the bunker where Hitler died has been obscured, to deny neo-fascists a rallying point. The Olympic Stadium, where Hitler presided over the 1936 Games, is still in use, though stripped of all Nazi regalia.

The fall of the Berlin Wall presented fresh challenges. Statues of Lenin were swiftly removed in the early 1990s, but some sites were converted, including a former prison for the Communist security police that was turned into an informational center teaching about the past.

The goal, Culture Minister Monika Grtters of Germany said, is to explain everything, without holding back, without an agenda, without seeking to be in the right.

The extent to which these political symbols from the past still inflame emotions can be seen from a passerbys reaction in Dresden this month to a drunken American tourist giving a Nazi salute a solid punch in the face.

Normally, when jarring political changes happen, the statues of the former leaders and heroes are among the first casualties. Iraqis pulled Saddam Hussein from his perch in Firdos Square in 2003, and there are countless shots of Lenin flat on his face after the collapse of the Soviet empire.

To Ivaylo Dichev, a professor of culture anthropology at Sofia University in Bulgaria, the recent scenes from the United States have a clear resonance. Eastern Europe went through a similar period in the 90s, when a lot of Communist-era monuments were removed, he said.

In many cases, countries chose to move Communist-era statues to tourist-oriented sites, like Gruto Parkas in Lithuania and Memento Park outside Budapest.

But that has not halted controversies over public monuments.

In 2007, the removal from the center of Estonias capital of a statue of a Soviet soldier, head bent to mourn the deaths of comrades killed fighting the Nazis, resulted in riots by ethnic Russians.

In Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban has led the country in a nationalist direction, disputes over public monuments have become a regular feature.

A statue dedicated to Soviet heroes in a park near Parliament was painted red several times by activists. And a monument dedicated to all the victims of the Nazi occupation of Hungary, in the same park, was widely criticized as an attempt by Mr. Orbans government to obscure Hungarys wartime history by ignoring its collaboration with the Nazis in the murder of Hungarys Jews.

In Bulgaria, the authorities decided this year to remove a huge Soviet-era monument that had been left to molder in Sofia since Communisms collapse. But in July, pro-Russian protesters took to the streets, and the demolition was temporarily halted.

This was after activists, in 2011, defaced a huge monument to the Soviet Army in Sofias main park by painting its heroic figures to look like Superman, Santa Claus and Ronald McDonald. The monument has been a regular target of politically minded vandals ever since. In 2013, someone painted all the figures bright pink, spurring an official complaint from the Russian Embassy and an apology from the Bulgarian government.

But not all disputes over public statuary in Europe are fallout from the Nazi and Soviet years. Continuing political turmoil has produced fresh ones.

The breakup of Yugoslavia in the wars of the 1990s caused many of the countries that emerged including Croatia and Macedonia to remove monuments to the former countrys Communist-era leader, Josip Broz Tito.

In Skopje, Macedonias capital, where Titos image was once ubiquitous, he now presides mainly outside a single elementary school named for him. Instead, fresh disputes over public statuary have flared up.

Eager to establish itself as a sovereign nation, Macedonias rulers went on a building spree in Skopje, erecting dozens of statues of contemporary political figures, as well as a giant one known as Warrior, but looking suspiciously like Alexander the Great seen as a rebuke to the neighboring Greek province of Macedonia, which complained that Alexander was theirs to honor.

Now, the nationalist leader who went on the building spree, Nikola Gruevski, has been removed from office and his left-wing successors are trying to decide what to do with all the statues of lawmakers and ministers from a former government.

In this case, we can see how certain symbology can be eruptive and damaging for a democracy when used in political causes, said Aleksandar Petrov, an architect and author in Skopje.

Of course, such problems have bedeviled Europe since the dawn of civilization as new conquerors erased traces of their predecessors, leaving behind a patchwork of stone survivors from ancient Rome to the Holy Roman Empire whose subjects may not have been exemplars of human rights and modern morality.

Nobody would even think of removing statues of Napoleon or Roman emperors, said Mr. Lukes, the Czech historian.

After a certain point, time erases political enmity and the images lose much of their symbolic power. Perhaps, he said, a way forward in America would be to emulate Litomysls example and add context to the monument.

I believe a plaque explaining who he was and what he did would suit General Lee very well, Mr. Lukes said.

Reporting was contributed by Joanna Berendt from Warsaw; Hana de Goeij from Prague; Aleksandar Dimishkovski from Skopje, Macedonia; and Melissa Eddy from Annaberg-Buchholz, Germany.

A version of this article appears in print on August 18, 2017, on Page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Political Rage Over Statues? Old News in the Old World.

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Political Rage Over Statues? Old News in the Old World - New York Times

One cold grey February morning, back in 2001, we turned the key and opened the creaking gate on to a world that could not have been further from the built-up street just strides away. As far as the eye could see, scattered sheds teetered on the edge of a tidal wave of dense bramble. Halfway down the hill, just as the path disappeared into this surge, were plots 20 to 24: our new allotments. Whatever else, this was going to be groundbreaking stuff.

Driven by the vision that more food can and should be grown in London, we set up OrganicLea on a derelict allotment in Chingford, east London. The Lea Valley, which for centuries used the river to transport food down the Thames, from Saxon settlers growing celery in the sixth century to Italians growing cucumbers in glasshouses in the 1950s, was a good place to start.

Over the next year or two we cleared the brambles, made a compost heap, built raised beds, and planted a forest garden with apple trees, worcesterberries and blackcurrant bushes. We created a number of features, including a pond, a willow dome and a compost toilet, built into a honeysuckle bush. All our vegetable planting was done using organic and permaculture principles, working with nature, not against it, to grow food in a sustainable way. We then started to run rudimentary gardening courses from the potting shed, and sell our seasonal produce.

For the past nine years we have managed the 12-acre site as a community market garden. We grow more than eight tonnes of fruit and veg a year, feeding 330 households through our veg box scheme, as well as sending produce to market stalls and eateries across London. We work with the local council to deliver accredited horticulture courses and helped it develop a food policy, which aims to ensure that locally grown, healthy and sustainable food is affordable and accessible to all.

We also run a volunteering programme that welcomes participants from all walks of life to take part, from seed sowing to veg box packing. And we support young people and residents groups to develop their own food growing spaces all over east London.

We do all this as a workers co-operative, employing 15 members. Where normal allotments are rented by individuals, were a community food project, and as a workers co-operative we manage the operation ourselves, without any need for bosses or shareholders.

The community food movement is flowering in the UK and we are proud founder members of Londons community food growers network and the land workers alliance, organisations that are drawing people back to the land and using the land as a way to contribute to local politics.

Allotment gardens have always been more than mere domestic food growing units. From their very beginning in the Victorian period, when land was given to the labouring poor for growing food, theyve provided a space for recreation and an alternative to industrial capitalism.

Allotments offer a way for individuals and the community to come together. They are special places. In 1908, the Small Holdings and Allotments Act placed a duty on local authorities to provide allotments according to demand, and by the end of the first world war land was made available to everyone, primarily as a way of assisting returning service men. By 1925, local authorities were banned from selling or converting allotments without ministerial consent.

This means that, legally speaking, selling from allotment gardens is a murky issue. It is legally permissible for allotment gardens to market the surplus, up to 49% of what allotmenteers produce, and councils are also entitled to put unwanted allotments to commercial use on a year-by-year basis. We believe there is a strong case for promoting limited trading activity: it would enable people to spend more time on their plots, because they can generate some income from it, and would stimulate the local food economy.

By 2009, seven years after signing our first allotment contract, we had built such a reputation that when the council closed down its central plant nursery operation, it entrusted us with the facility. Our site is now located where they originally managed all the local parks and street tree operations.

We are one of many responses to a broken food system, that exploits producers and harms consumers. It contributes significantly to climate change, air and water pollution and is essentially run for the short term profits of food corporations rather than the long term benefit of communities and the environment.

Our purpose is to demonstrate what can happen if groups of committed people with ideas are given space to nurture and grow.

Ru Litherland works at OrganicLea

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Carrots and communism: the allotments plotting a food revolution - The Guardian

In Marxist theory, socialism, also called the socialist mode of production, refers to a specific historical phase of economic development and its corresponding set of social relations that supersede capitalism in the schema of historical materialism. The Marxist definition of socialism is a mode of production where the sole criterion for production is use-value and therefore the law of value no longer directs economic activity. Marxist production for use is coordinated through conscious economic planning, while distribution of economic output is based on the principle of to each according to his contribution. The social relations of socialism are characterized by the working class effectively owning the means of production and the means of their livelihood, either through cooperative enterprises or by public ownership or private artisanal tools and self-management, so that the social surplus accrues to the working class and society as a whole.[1]

This view is consistent with, and helped to inform, early conceptions of socialism where the law of value no longer directs economic activity, and thus monetary relations in the form of exchange-value, profit, interest and wage labor would not operate and apply to Marxist socialism.[2]

The Marxian conception of socialism stands in contrast to other early conceptions of socialism, most notably early forms of market socialism based on classical economics such as mutualism and Ricardian socialism. Unlike the Marxian conception, these conceptions of socialism retained commodity exchange (markets) for labor and the means of production, seeking to perfect the market process.[3] The Marxist idea of socialism was also heavily opposed to utopian socialism.

Although Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote very little on socialism and neglected to provide any details on how it might be organized,[4] numerous social scientists and neoclassical economists have used Marx's theory as a basis for developing their own models of socialist economic systems. The Marxist view of socialism served as a point of reference during the socialist calculation debate.

Socialism is a post-commodity economic system, meaning that production is carried out to directly produce use-value (to directly satisfy human needs, or economic demands) as opposed to being produced with a view to generating a profit. The stage in which the accumulation of capital was viable and effective is rendered insufficient at the socialist stage of social and economic development, leading to a situation where production is carried out independently of capital accumulation in a supposedly planned fashion. Although Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels understood planning to involve the input and decisions of the individuals involved at localized levels of production and consumption, planning has been interpreted to mean centralized planning by Marxist-Leninists during the 20th century. However, there have been other conceptions of economic planning, including decentralized-planning and participatory planning.

In contrast to capitalism, which relies upon the coercive market forces to compel capitalists to produce use-values as a byproduct of the pursuit of profit, socialist production is to be based on the rational planning of use-values and coordinated investment decisions to attain economic goals.[5] As a result, the cyclical fluctuations that occur in a capitalist market economy will not be present in a socialist economy. The value of a good in socialism is its physical utility rather than its embodied labor, cost of production and exchange value as in a capitalist system.

Socialism would make use of incentive-based systems, and inequality would still exist but to a diminishing extent as all members of society would be worker-owners. This eliminates the severity of previous tendencies towards inequality and conflicts arising over ownership of the means of production and property income accruing to a small class of owners.[6] The method of compensation and reward in a socialist society would be based on an authentic meritocracy, along the principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his contribution".[7]

The advanced stage of socialism, referred to as "upper-stage communism" in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, is based on the socialist mode of production but is differentiated from lower-stage socialism in a few fundamental ways. While socialism implies public ownership (by a state apparatus) or cooperative ownership (by a worker cooperative enterprise), communism would be based on common ownership of the means of production. Class distinctions based on ownership of capital cease to exist, along with the need for a state. A superabundance of goods and services are made possible by automated production that allow for goods to be distributed based on need rather than merit.[8]

The period in which capitalism becomes increasingly insufficient as an economic system and immediately after the proletarian conquest of the state, an economic system that features elements of both socialism and capitalism will probably exist until both the productive forces of the economy and the cultural and social attitudes develop to a point where they satisfy the requirements for a full socialist society (one that has lost the need for monetary value, wage labor and capital accumulation). Specifically, market relations will still exist but economic units are either nationalized or re-organized into cooperatives. This transitional phase is sometimes described as "state capitalism" or "market socialism". China is officially in the primary stage of socialism.

The fundamental goal of socialism from the view of Marx and Engels was the realization of human freedom and individual autonomy. Specifically, this refers to freedom from the alienation imposed upon individuals in the form of coercive social relationships as well as material scarcity, whereby the individual is compelled to engage in activities merely to survive (to reproduce his or herself). The aim of socialism is to provide an environment whereby individuals are free to express their genuine interests, creative freedom, and desires unhindered by forms of social control that force individuals to work for a class of owners who expropriate and live off the surplus product.[9]

As a set of social relationships, socialism is defined by the degree to which economic activity in society is planned by the associated producers, so that the surplus product produced by socialized assets is controlled by a majority of the population through democratic processes. The sale of labor power would be abolished so that every individual participates in running their institution as stakeholders or members with no one having coercive power over anyone else in a vertical social division of labor (which is to be distinguished from a non-social, technical division of labor which would still exist in socialism).[10] The incentive structure changes in a socialist society given the change in the social environment, so that an individual laborers' work becomes increasingly autonomous and creative, creating a sense of responsibility for his or her institution as a stakeholder.

In Marxist theory, the state is "the institution of organised violence which is used by the ruling class of a country to maintain the conditions of its rule. Thus, it is only in a society which is divided between hostile social classes that the state exists."[11] The state is thus seen as a mechanism that is dominated by the interests of the ruling class and utilized to subjugate other classes in order to protect and legitimize the existing economic system.

After a workers' revolution, the state would initially become the instrument of the working class. Conquest of the state apparatus by the working class must take place to establish a socialist system. As socialism is built, the role and scope of the state changes as class distinctions (based on ownership of the means of production) gradually deteriorate due to the concentration of means of production in state hands. From the point where all means of production become state property, the nature and primary function of the state would change from one of political rule (via coercion) over men by the creation and enforcement of laws into a scientific administration of things and a direction of processes of production; that is the state would become a coordinating economic entity rather than a mechanism of class or political control, and would no longer be a state in the Marxian sense.[12]

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Socialist mode of production - Wikipedia