Googling the phrase "socialism of fools" brought up this NYT link - an article from Seymour Martin Lipsett. The date? January 1971:
Twenty-five years after the end of World War II and the collapse of the most anti-Semitic regime in history, anti‐Semitism appears to be on the rise around the world. But unlike the situation before 1945, when anti‐Jewish politics was largely identified with rightist elements, the current wave is linked to governments, parties, and groups which are conventionally described as leftist. Various New Left activists in different countries, American black militant groups, Arab “socialist” spokesmen, and East European Communist governments have moved on from anti‐Zionist to anti‐Jewish and fully anti‐Semitic statements and acts. And though the extreme right remains relatively weak in Western countries, its news‐papers have become much more open about referring to “Jewish conspiracies.”
To say that increasing numbers of New Leftists, black militants and advocates of the Palestinian cause are not only anti‐Israeli and anti Zionist, but, more, are moving toward—or have already achieved— full‐fledged anti‐Semitism is clearly to use fighting words. Some distinctions are in order. One may oppose Israeli policy, resist Zionism or criticize worldwide Jewish support of Israel without being anti‐Semitic. But when one draws on the age‐old hostility to Jews to strengthen a political position, when one gives credence to the charge of a worldwide Jewish plot to rule, when one attacks those with whom one has political and economic differences as Jews, when one implies that Jews are guilty of some primal evil, then one is guilty of anti-Semitism, and one is engaged in the same racism that all decent men insist on eliminating. [...]
The most important expression of anti‐Jewish sentiments in the West takes the form of attacks on “Zionists” and the state of Israel by every section of the left, except the Democratic Socialists. As the war in Vietnam peters out, the various in carnations of the extreme left new and old, anarchists, Maoists, Trotskyists, Black Panthers and Communists — have reoriented their international emotional priorities to identify the heroes as the Arab terrorists and freedom fighters, and the villains as Israel and its American ally. In Germany, New Left students, in a sickening replay of the behavior of their Nazi predecessors of 1928‐33 (university students were the first stratum in Germany to back the Nazis, giving them majorities in student council elections as early as 1931), chant as they parade: “Mach die Nahe Osten rot; schlag die Zionisten tot” (“Make the Near East Red; smash the Zionists dead”). Dieter Kunzelmann, who played a major role in the demonstrations at the Free University of Berlin during the late nineteen‐sixties, and who is now in the Middle East with the fedayeen, being instructed, according to his published letters, “in the use of explosives ... [and] the manufacture of time bombs,”; has written from Amman that the German left must break down the pro‐Semitism that emerged out of German guilt at the holocaust, that Germany must get over “der Judenknax” (the “thing” about the Jews) (Encounter, Nov., 1970).
French New Left spokesmen have openly defended the need to speak in anti‐Semitic terms when supporting the Arab cause. Jean Bauberot, former leader of the French Student Christian Association and currently editor of Herytem, a New Left journal, wrote in the May‐July, 1969, issue that to “demonstrate the intricacies of the Palestine problem” leftists must “use expressions which, taken by themselves, appear to resemble certain lines from ‘Mein Kampf.'” The French New Left also has expressed its pro‐Arab feeling by violent action. Members of the Mouvement Contre le Racisme Anti Arabe, formed by people active in the revolutionary movement of May, 1968, were responsible for attacks in October, 1968, on the Rothschild Bank in Paris. [...]
Given the clear‐cut anti-Semitic character of much pro‐Arab propaganda, given the extent to which criticisms of Zionism by various left and black militant groups have become anti‐Semitic, the question arises as to why so many on the left, including many Jews, have accepted such policies as their own, or more commonly, have abstained from criticizing groups such as the Black Panthers, no matter how explicit their bigotry. The answer to this question is obviously not simple. [...]
It may be, however, that these explanations are too rational, or that they serve to explain only the specific content of the current revival of anti‐Jewish feelings. What may be more abnormal, more peculiar, than the presence of anti-Semitism has been its seeming absence for a quarter of a century within Western civilization. Reactions to the holocaust repressed overt expressions of the normal vein of anti-Semitism which has existed in Christendom for close to 2,000 years. To attack Jews became an unspeakable act following the revelations of the mass murders committed by the Nazis. But it is not very likely that one of the most stubborn cultural conventions of Western civilization could disappear that quickly. The French Revolution did not succeed in obliterating the cultural continuum of anti‐semitism, but only invested it with new secular forms. The Russian Revolution failed even more dramatically. Not even the creation of culturally and ethnically pluralistic societies in the New World could eliminate it.
The generationally transmitted reservoir of cultural anti‐Semitism is best conceived of as a kind of collective consciousness built almost ineradicably into our literature, into our language, into our most general cultural myths. The memory and significance of the holocaust inhibited the willingness to use anti‐Semitism, even to express it, but it still persisted. And, over a quarter of a century, the events of 1939‐45 have retreated into history, have become increasingly “irrelevant,” particularly to those who came of age after 1945. For new generations what happened just before they reached political consciousness has almost as little direct impact as events which occurred a century ago, or even longer. Hence, as time goes on, the chances increase that the persistence of cultural anti-Semitism, of folk anti‐Semitism, will be picked up and used for political purposes.
The fact that this time the predominant weight of the anti‐Semitic thrust is on the left rather than the right will surprise only those who are unaware of the considerable literature on anti‐Semitism it the socialist and other leftist movements. The identification of the Jews with international finance, with capitalism, with the status of businessman, with Shylock has long replaced the image of the Jew as Antichrist for many on the left and right. Karl Marx him self accepted the stereotype which linked Jews with capitalism. Thus, in his essay on “The Jewish Question,” he wrote: “What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Bargaining. What is his worldly God? Money. . . .”
That was written forty-eight years ago. When people like Corbyn were just cutting their political teeth.
Plus ça change...
Interesting read.
Posted by: Recruiting Animal | March 11, 2019 at 08:30 PM