Mick Hartley

With roots in the contaminated soil of Marxist totalitarianism

Nick Cohen joins in:

Challenging prejudices on the left wing is going to be all the more difficult because, incredibly, the British left in the second decade of the 21st century is led by men steeped in the worst traditions of the 20th. When historians had to explain last week that if Montgomery had not defeated Rommel at El Alamein in Egypt then the German armies would have killed every Jew they could find in Palestine, they were dealing with the conspiracy theory that Hitler was a Zionist, developed by a half-educated American Trotskyist called Lenni Brenner in the 1980s.

When Jeremy Corbyn defended the Islamist likes of Raed Salah, who say that Jews dine on the blood of Christian children, he was continuing a tradition of communist accommodation with antisemitism that goes back to Stalin’s purges of Soviet Jews in the late 1940s.

It is astonishing that you have to, but you must learn the worst of leftwing history now. For Labour is not just led by dirty men but by dirty old men, with roots in the contaminated soil of Marxist totalitarianism. If it is to change, its leaders will either have to change their minds or be thrown out of office.

Faces of Aleppo

After airstrikes in the rebel held area of Old Aleppo, Syria, on April 28:

[Photos: Abdalrhman Ismail / Reuters]

The idea of Nazi-Zionist collusion

David Aaronovitch in the Times (£) traces the roots of Ken Livingstone's anti-Zionism/anti-Semitism:

Though Britain was not immune to anti-Jewish racism, the ordinary Labour party members were broadly sympathetic to Jews. They saw the children of the camps in Israel seemingly making a new land in Labour’s own image — egalitarian and collective. Significant figures on the Labour left such as Ian Mikardo championed the cause of Israel. With fraternal links to the Israeli Labour party and the Israeli Trade Union, left-wing Zionism became Labour’s default position.

Not everyone on the left agreed. By the early 1950s, Stalin was convinced that “cosmopolitan” Jews in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe were hijacking communism. In the show-trials that disfigured the Iron Curtain countries, “Zionism” became one of the charges that could result in a noose or a bullet in the nape of the neck. Often the accusations linked Zionists not only to western intelligence but also to the defeated Nazis.

There was one significant taker for this proposition after Stalin’s demise: a Trotskyist fringe group expelled from Labour that became the Socialist Labour League and later the Workers’ Revolutionary party (the cult to which Vanessa Redgrave belonged). The WRP sought finances for its activities from radical Arab regimes, including that of Muammar Gaddafi. In return it championed the most anti-Israel stance. For the WRP the issue was not some illusory peace in the Middle East but the requirement for Israel to be destroyed altogether.

A particular strand of argument that the party began to use was that Zionism was, paradoxically, associated with Nazism. They were to be understood as complementary in that one wanted the Jew out and the other was the Jew who wanted to be out. And both were therefore equally illegitimate. This idea of Nazi-Zionist collusion was the message of the infamous — and unperformed — 1987 playPerdition by the former Socialist Labour League (SLL) member Jim Allen (to be directed by Ken Loach). It was also the substance of what Ken Livingstone said this week. In the late Seventies, Mr Livingstone’s Labour soul-mate was “Red” Ted Knight, who had been a member of the SLL and was still in touch with his old comrades. Together they produced and edited the Labour Herald, a far-left publication published at a loss by the WRP’s printing press.

At the same time as that paper was damning Zionism in most editions, the WRP was getting hundreds of thousands of pounds from Arab regimes. In 1983 Mr Livingstone wrote an article in the WRP’s Newsline paper to attack an edition of the BBC’s Money Programme that had revealed some ugly truths about the WRP’s print business.

Mr Livingstone wrote: “It is obvious that those who inspired theMoney Programme want to silence you. There is certainly a case for suspecting the hand of the forces opposed to the Palestinians. The fact that smears about me are being fed to the Jewish Chronicle on a fairly regular basis suggests that agents of the Begin [Israeli] government are active in the British labour movement and press at present.”...

Labour’s position, like that of the British Communist party, was that the solution was a Palestinian state alongside Israel. But on Labour’s far left that was not the view. A veteran anti-Zionist, Tony Greenstein, recalled this month in a Trotskyist publication that he “first met Jeremy Corbyn over 30 years ago when I chaired the Labour Movement Campaign on Palestine. The policy of the campaign, which Jeremy Corbyn sponsored, was to support a democratic, secular state in the whole of Palestine. We did not support the ‘right to exist’ of the apartheid state of Israel.”

Now Corbyn's in charge of the Labour Party, that position - that Israel has no right to exist - is effectively what many top Labour figures believe. Seumas Milne, Corbyn's director of strategy and communications, is on record as stating that the foundation of the state of Israel was "a crime":

In the footage, uncovered by the Guido Fawkes website [link added - MH], Mr Milne can be seen speaking at a rally in 2009. He says: “Hamas [the Palestinian militant group] is not broken and will not be broken because of the spirit of resistance of the Palestinian people. We have a responsibility more than anyone to show solidarity in a practical way because it was in this country that this crime began 90 years ago when Palestine was promised by the British government who had no right to offer it to another people.”

Corbyn, of course, can't openly admit to this now. But these are the circles he moves in, and from which he's emerged. Livingstone has no such scruples. He's fighting back:

Ken Livingstone has said he will use a 1983 book by an American Marxist to defend himself against accusations of antisemitism and bringing the Labour party into disrepute....

Speaking to the Guardian on Friday, Livingstone praised Lenni Brenner, the author of Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, and said the book was full of details that he would cite in his defence.

“All the detail is in there. The striking thing that does confirm there was an ongoing dialogue between the Zionists and Nazi government is, in 1935 Hitler passed a law banning any flag being displayed except the swastika and the blue and white Zionist flag, which is pretty amazing.”...

Thomas Weber, a professor of history and international affairs and an expert on the Hitler era, Jewish relations and German history, said he was not immediately familiar with Brenner’s book.

However, he added: “Brenner’s book lies well outside academic mainstream. It is mostly celebrated either by the extreme left and by the neo-Nazi right.”

Brenner’s book is cited by, among others, the Institute for Historical Review, which is widely regarded as antisemitic and is listed by the US Southern Poverty Law Center as a group that has engaged in Holocaust denial....

A 1983 review by CC Aronsfeld, a respected scholar of the Holocaust, in the journal International Affairs was critical of Brenner’s book.

“Brenner has produced a party political tract that unhinges the balance of history by ignoring too many difficulties, especially psychological. For once Stalinists will be pleased with the work of a Trotskyist,” he concluded.

For more on Brenner, see Paul Bogdanor at Harry's Place.

Using Hitler to demonize Israel

David Horovitz in the Times of Israel:

The content and fallout from Livingstone’s attempt to rewrite history dominated British media throughout Thursday, led the front pages of many of Britain’s newspapers Friday, and continues to resonate, drip-dripping the fallacy into tens of millions of minds. Amid all the chaos and by-the-minute reporting of his utterances, the outrage they caused, his suspension from the party, and the calls to expel him permanently, Livingstone’s cynical lie, his foul and ridiculous depiction of Hitler as a Zionist (succinctly debunked by British historian Roger Moorhouse here), was not energetically challenged in much of the coverage.

Livingstone must be quite delighted.

In planting and nurturing the notion that Hitler and the Zionists were in league, that Hitler was by extension a factor in the establishment of Israel, Livingstone serves and advances his long-term efforts at demonizing Israel, the better to isolate and weaken it.

What Livingstone would have Britons believe is that an equation can be drawn between the Nazis, the very epitome of evil, and the Zionists whom he so reviles. All those who rightly abhor the Nazis — Livingstone would hope to convince those tens of millions of viewers, listeners and readers — must likewise abhor and oppose Zionists and Israel.

Labour’s recently elected leader Jeremy Corbyn, who succeeded the inept Ed Miliband after last year’s general election failure, was demonstrably unhappy to have to suspend Shah on Wednesday, and reluctant to suspend his ally Livingstone on Thursday. Corbyn, after all, is also a relentless critic of Israel who has described representatives of Hamas and Hezbollah — terrorist organizations that kill civilians, use their own hostage populations as human shields and avowedly seek the destruction of Israel — as his “friends.”...

The English Liberal rabbi, Danny Rich, quickly recognized on Thursday what Livingstone is up to. “Claiming Hitler was a Zionist is not only a huge historical perversion, but it directly equates Nazism and Zionism,” wrote Rich. “It suggests they share objectives and values; it is guilt by association. It is hard to think of a more offensive linkage.”

But it is a linkage most deliberately perpetrated by Livingstone, a linkage that he continues smugly to assert, in the cause of an Israel-demonizing agenda that is shared by his party leader.

Update: this piece from Gaby Hinsliff at the Guardian is surprisingly good. Though no comments allowed, I see.

Finnish Wood

Forest in Länsi-Aure, Finland:

[Photo: Jekaterina L., National Geographic Your Shot]

The Livingstone Formulation

Or, how raising the issue of antisemitism puts you outside the community of the progressive. Originally set out in 2010, David Hirsh provides an update:

In February 2005, Ken Livingstone, then the mayor of London, became involved in an apparently trivial late night argument with a reporter after a party at City Hall.  Oliver Finegold asked him how the party had been.  Livingstone was angry because he felt Finegold was intruding.  There was a little banter to and fro, in which the reporter said that he was only trying to do his job. Livingstone fixed on that phrase and retorted by asking him whether he had previously been a ‘German war criminal’.  Finegold replied that he hadn’t, and that he was Jewish, and that he was offended by the suggestion.  Livingstone went on to insist that Finegold was behaving just like a ‘German war criminal’, that his newspaper, The Standard, ‘was a load of scumbags and reactionary bigots’ and that it had a record of supporting Fascism (Transcript 2006).

Instead of apologizing for his comments in the sober light of day Livingstone treated the publication of this exchange as a political opportunity rather than a gaffe.  He wrote an article criticizing Ariel Sharon, then the Prime Minister of Israel.  In that article he responded to charges of antisemitism which had been made in relation to the Finegold affair with the following words:

For far too long the accusation of antisemitism has been used against anyone who is critical of the policies of the Israeli government, as I have been (Livingstone 2006).

This is the Livingstone Formulation.  It is a response to a charge of antisemitism.  It is a rhetorical device which enables the user to refuse to engage with the charge made.  It is a mirror which bounces back onto an accuser of antisemitism a counter-charge of dishonest Jewish (or ‘Zionist’) conspiracy.

The Livingstone Formulation conflates everything, criticism of Israel but also other things which do not seem to be so legitimate, such as repeatedly insulting a Jewish reporter by comparing him to a Nazi, into the category of legitimate criticism of Israel.  The Livingstone Formulation does not simply accuse people who raise the issue of antisemitism of being wrong, it accuses them of being wrong on purpose: ‘the accusation of antisemitism has been used against anyone who is critical…’ [my italics].  Not an honest mistake, but a secret, common plan to try to de-legitimize criticism by means of the instrumental use of a charge of antisemitism; crying wolf; playing the antisemitism card. This is an allegation of malicious intent made against the (unspecified) people who raise concerns about antisemitism.  It is not possible to ‘use’ ‘the accusation of antisemitism’ in order to delegitimize criticism of Israel, without dishonest intent; the accusation is an accusation of bad faith.

But read it all.

Sam Stone

John Prine's eponymous first album, released in 1971, was an extraordinarily powerful debut. Here was a singer straight from the heart of Country music, yet - breaking all that right-wing Country tradition from the likes of Merle Haggard - he was undoubtedly a man of the left. And no more so than in his Vietnam-era song, Sam Stone. It was very much a song of its time, but it's good enough to stand up now, still, some 45 years on:

It's an extraordinarily assured performance, given how nervous the man clearly is. This was one of the major markers, I think, in Country's long rapprochement with the mainstream:

Prine is widely regarded as one of the most influential songwriters of his generation. In 2009, Bob Dylan told The Huffington Post that Prine was one of his favorite writers, stating "Prine's stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mindtrips to the nth degree. And he writes beautiful songs. I remember when Kris Kristofferson first brought him on the scene. ‘Sam Stone’ featuring the wonderfully evocative line: ‘There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes, and Jesus Christ died for nothing I suppose.’ All that stuff about "Sam Stone," the soldier junkie daddy, and "Donald and Lydia," where people make love from ten miles away. Nobody but Prine could write like that."

Not sure about that "Proustian existentialism", but we take the point.

The brief spoken intro kind of developed over Prine's career. See him here, a grizzled performer now in 2005, for a classic wry introduction to "The Other Side of Town". No one does it better. 

He's dueted with some of the top female Country singers - notably on the "In Spite of Ourselves" album. Here he is on the title track, with Iris Dement. With Nanci Griffith. And with Emmylou Harris, on Guy Clark's "Magnolia Wind". 

Anna's Hummingbird

From a gallery of the 2016 Audubon Photography Awards:

[Photo: Sarah Blodgett / Audubon Photography Awards]

Aleppo Hospital Bombing

The latest from Syria's second largest city:

At least 14 patients and three doctors have been killed in an air strike on a hospital in the Syrian city of Aleppo, the charity Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) says.

Among those killed in the MSF-supported al-Quds hospital was one of the city's last paediatricians, MSF said.

Local sources blamed Syrian or Russian war planes. The Syrian military has denied targeting the hospital.

Monitors say attacks by both sides left 34 dead and dozens wounded on Thursday.

A news release from the Red Cross - Aleppo on the brink of humanitarian disaster:

The intense battles raging in Aleppo, which have seen a key hospital destroyed with significant loss of life, are putting millions at grave risk, the International Committee of the Red Cross has warned.

"Wherever you are, you hear explosions of mortars, shelling and planes flying over," said Valter Gros, who heads the ICRC's office there. "There is no neighbourhood of the city that hasn't been hit. People are living on the edge. Everyone here fears for their lives and nobody knows what is coming next."

Amid the escalating fighting over the past week, the Al Quds hospital in eastern Aleppo city was completely destroyed overnight, killing several people and depriving many more of lifesaving medical care.

"The recent attack on the ICRC-supported Quds hospital is unacceptable and sadly this is not the first time the lifesaving medical services have been hit," said Marianne Gasser, head of the ICRC mission in Syria. "We urge all the parties to spare the civilians. Don't attack hospitals, don't use weapons that cause widespread damage. Otherwise, Aleppo will be pushed further to the brink of humanitarian disaster."

"Unacceptable" seems a little mild. And Assad's forces - if they are indeed responsible for this - have been bombing civilian targets for years now, and no one seems particularly concerned. Well, not concerned enough to actually do anything.

Looking at food

Winning images from this year’s Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year, now on show at the Mall Galleries:

"Salmon Tail Still Life" by Susan Bell (UK). © Susan Bell/Courtesy of Pink Lady.

"The Beauty of Fruit" by Emma Franklin (UK). © Emma Franklin /Courtesy of Pink Lady.

 
"Unstill Life" by Polina Plotnikova (UK). © Polina Plotnikova/Courtesy of Pink Lady.