The theme of Labour anti-Semitism just won’t lie down. And of course it’ll never die, for anti-Semitism is a natural extension of socialism, not, as some try to argue, its perversion.
Yesterday was replete with developments. For one thing, ‘Red Ken’ Livingston set out to prove the chromatic truth of the title above by conducting a little foray into the past.
Hitler, he explained, was a Zionist and, contextually, Zionists are Nazis. That take on history left Corbyn no choice but to suspend his friend from the party.
The reaction to Ken’s political demise was predictable both on the right and on the left. Characteristically, at both ends the Nazi-like animus of Labour is interpreted as a perversion of the party’s socialist DNA, rather than its essential constituent.
This reminded me of the way the political mainstream (with exceptions as notable as they are rare) treats Muslim terrorism. The Left can’t, and the Right won’t, admit that murderous violence is the very essence of Islam, not its aberration.
The parallel is confirmed even by Richard Littlejohn’s otherwise excellent article: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-3564672/The-fascists-poisoned-heart-Labour-RICHARD-LITTLEJOHN-Jew-baiting-lunatic-fringe-charge-Corbyn-s-party.html
He ascribes Nazi-like sentiments to the ‘lunatic fringe’ of the Labour Party, its ‘Far Left’, regretting that their “malignant anti-Semitism has gone mainstream”. I argued yesterday that such unenviable feelings are part and parcel of socialism, whether red, pink or brown.
I shan’t repeat myself and quote Marx again. Suffice it to say now that socialism has scored the greatest and most protracted publicity success in history. The general assumption, shrilly propagated by the lefties and grudgingly accepted even by most conservatives, is that socialism may be right or wrong, but at base it’s a reflection of the good, honourable side of human nature.
That’s like regarding Islam as a fundamentally great religion lamentably besmirched by extremists – and never mind the 300 (!) verses in the Koran explicitly calling for murderous violence. In the case of socialism, commentators also disregard (or, more typically, are ignorant of) its scriptural sources. More important, they don’t delve deep enough into human nature.
Even as Judaeo-Christianity preaches the equality of all before the deity, socialism pursues the equality of all before the state. However, since people are far from equal in any other than the heavenly or perhaps legal sense, they achieve very different results in life.
Hence the only way to equalise them is by coercion. This can take the shape of mass murder and oppression, as in openly totalitarian states, or more subtle expedients, as in the states that oxymoronically call themselves social-democratic but should be branded more appropriately as Totalitarian Lite.
In either case, sustained coercion can never succeed unless it’s broadly supported by the populace. Many of the tens of millions murdered by the international socialists were sent to their death by millions of denunciations from concerned citizens. And the national socialists would never have been able to perpetrate genocide on that scale in the absence of grassroots enthusiasm or at least acquiescence.
The two evil regimes successfully tapped into the subterranean Zeitgeist. They punched a hole in the surface, a tectonic shift occurred, and the rotten part of human nature, now properly agitated and encouraged, splashed out in a murderous eruption.
The same holds true for any type of socialism: it encourages what’s wicked in us all. When socialists, shamelessly stealing the rightful property of Christianity, talk about helping the less fortunate, what they really crave is to rob the more fortunate. They’re driven by envy and hatred, not charitable impulses.
Now, in those countries where Jews weren’t kept down by state diktat, they tended to do well. That encouraged envy and hatred on the part of the ambient population that, by and large, saw itself as comparatively underprivileged. Few blamed themselves for their failings – it’s always easier to blame others, and Jews came in handy.
Hence Marx had an easy task. All he had to do was equate bourgeoisie, his bugbear, with Jewry. The capitalist was a Jew, and the Jew was a capitalist. Getting rid of one meant getting rid of the other – that was simplicity itself, and primitive minds, those possessed by most people, thrive on such simplicity.
Even as the capitalist and the Jew are fused together in socialist mythology, so is anti-Semitism an inalienable part of the socialist ideology. This may or may not be manifest, sometimes it may not be expressed at all. But it’s always there, waiting for an opening to come out.
This isn’t to say that anti-Semitism is the exclusive property of socialists. It’s not. Even Christian conservatives sometimes suffer from this malignant disorder – just think of Chesterton, Belloc, Waugh, Eliot, Céline, Pound, Sobran, Kingsley Amis, Ford, Dostoyevsky et al.
But here one could argue plausibly that, when believers in God who is love, and who twice chose to reveal himself to the Jews, hold such views, they are indeed untrue to their beliefs. Anti-Semitic socialists, however, are faithful to theirs.
I’m sure Richard Littlejohn realises this. That he can’t say it even in our most conservative paper tells you all you wish to know about our times.