“despite offering what I thought to be quite concrete answers (that stateless people should have been able to find and settle in any state they so chose”

I understand that you are a librarian? or at least slightly connected with books?

can I suggest that you look up the fate of Jewish refugees returning to Poland and Eastern Europe after WW2?

you will find that they were killed, they were murdered for doing exactly what you stated.

after that there was an increased impetus amongst Jewish refugees to move to countries where they wouldn’t be killed for merely existing, but please don’t take my word for it, look it up.

well, I am going to have to admit that despite offering what I thought to be quite concrete answers (that stateless people should have been able to find and settle in any state they so chose without discrimination or detriment – i.e. that all states should have been capable of becoming “their” state – a not unreasonable nor impossible temporary solution), I might not be understanding your question.

my questions were political questions, and despite the obvious conclusions, instead you replied with political dogma and abstracts

you can’t really see the issue, can you?

it is that smug invertedness which is so politically debilitating and morally vacuous

and the reason it is morally vacuous and worthless is because it does not provide any real answers to real questions, real human difficulties, there is just some vague future pie in the sky

people have real problems and these need to be addressed in real ways not by meaningless political abstractions, trotted out in the same way that any cultist from the Mormons to the Moonies would do, parroting lines without understanding what would have happened had such a course of action been taken (the extinction of Jews)

and because you can’t follow this line of thinking, and seemingly no little of the history of the period it is worthless to discuss these points with you, as you have nothing to contribute, other than political dogma

shame, really.

well, you’re question is itself fairly abstract – you’re giving a concrete historical situation and saying What do you [i.e. me] think could have happened other than did happen?” To answer that I would, necessarilly, have to change the conditions surrounding that circumstance, otherwise the same outcome, necessarilly, would occur.

Even “Starting from here”, it was possible through solidarity to find a different course.

Short story: a comrade was in prison as a CO (IIRC), the prison used to hand out shaving mugs – one day, they stopped just handing them out when they broke. So people instantly started stealing to replace broken (and stolen mugs).

If someone steals from me, I am not entitled to commit theft myself. If everyone is stealing from everyone else, the concrete, rational course is to put a stop to the material conditions of theft, not to carry out more of the same.

““how exactly is a stateless and powerless refugee who is held behind barbed wire in a concentration camp in Cyprus able to seek redress?””

another Monty Python type argument

I am talking about the material conditions that real people found themselves in and yet you can’t be troubled to engage with that

it’s like the old Irish joke:

“which is the quickest way to Kerry? “straight down the road, on the left, but I wouldn’t be starting from here, if I were you”

you wrote:

“My point is entirely that a great crime was committed by refusing the refugees before and after the war, but that crime is not redress by perpeutuating the system that caused it, and recreating the obnoxious restrictions of freedom of movement by establishing a state with passport and imigration controls – a crime against humanity.”

your point is an irrelevance, it is as germane to the plight of Jewish refugees in British concentration camps in Cyprus as “yogic flying”

your points have conspicuously avoided dealing with the material circumstances which people found themselves in, your arguments do not relate to people, they are mere abstracts and as such they are worthless

but as I said there is something peculiarly contradictory and hypocritical, for smug westerners to lecture stateless refugees that they shouldn’t have a State

“how exactly is a stateless and powerless refugee who is held behind barbed wire in a concentration camp in Cyprus able to seek redress?”

Preferably by not being a stateless powerless refugee in the first place – i.e. Britain should not have been committing that crime.

“and what if they didn’t want to go to Britain? what would you have done? forced them at the point of a bayonet?”

Not at all, they should have been free to go anywhere on Earth that they chose, their inability to do that is a crime against humanity, and remains one today.

A great many British died in the war perhaps if they’d had a British state, oh, no, hang on, they had a state, it didn’t protect them.

My point is entirely that a great crime was committed by refusing the refugees before and after the war, but that crime is not redress by perpeutuating the system that caused it, and recreating the obnoxious restrictions of freedom of movement by establishing a state with passport and imigration controls – a crime against humanity.

It is the job of the workers’ movement to redress this situation, and put a stop to the crime.

I have always been struck by the analogy with people of otherwise sound progressive views who continue to try and explain away the behaviour of Israel despite all the evidence about the nature of the Israel/Palestine conflict. The similarities are uncanny.