Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Per Namib - ecco uno studioso ritardato

Lenin's legacy - why Jews have been betrayed by the radical Left
Historian Robert Wistrich says the left-wing is pitiful, incoherent
and deeply antisemitc
 
By Winston Pickett,
 
There are a few biographical details about Professor Robert Wistrich
that people tend to overlook when evaluating the work of someone who
is arguably the world’s foremost authority on antisemitism.
 
They offer a key to explaining why — just two years after writing his
1,000-page magnum opus, A Lethal Obsession: Antisemitism from
Antiquity to the Global Jihad — Wistrich has now produced a 623-page
tome with the auspicious title, From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The
Left, the Jews and Israel.
 
The first salient fact is that the 67-year-old historian was born in
Kazakhstan at the height of Stalin’s power after his family fled
Krakow during the Second World War. Add to that the cultural/political
milieu in which he was raised — Wistrich’s father, despite having been
a member of the illegal Polish Communist party, was rewarded for his
fidelity with imprisonment by the NKVD (the secret police). His
family, Wistrich has reflected, consequently had “no allusions about
Soviet mendacity after the war and the cruelty of a totalitarian
system that ruthlessly crushed all individuality”.
 
And yet, as a young intellectual, there was still the allure of
leftist thought. Growing up in Britain in the 1950s Wistrich recalls
becoming “radicalised at grammar school”, and later spending “two
years of study and radical protest” at Stanford University in
California as well as being present at the Paris student riots of 1968
opposing “capitalist alienation and the racism and militarism of the
West”.
 
During that same period, however, after grappling with classic Marxist
theory and its ambivalence towards the Jews as a student at Cambridge
and researching his doctorate on “Socialism and the Jewish Question”
at University College London, Wistrich found himself debating against
pro-Palestinian leftists on British campuses, where he detected an
inescapable “sharp edge to anti-Israel sentiment which went beyond
theory”.
Why, he wanted to know, had “so many on the new Left turned against
the Jewish State with such vehemence?”
 
Forty years later Wistrich has returned to this question — only this
time, his pursuit of an answer is aided by four decades of research
and exhaustive scholarship.
 
Reading his book is not an easy journey — unless the reader is already
familiar with the original arguments of leftist luminaries the likes
of Karl Marx, Fredrich Engels, Rosa Luxembourg, Bernard Lazare, Karl
Kautsky and Leon Trotsky. Some of Wistrich’s conclusions are familiar,
the product of eight years as director of research at the Wiener
Library before ultimately becoming head in 2002 of the Vidal Sassoon
International Centre for the Study of Antisemitism at Hebrew
University, where he he holds the Neuberger chair of history.
 
But this is the first time his analysis has been synthesised into one
volume. And then there is the title — From Ambiguity to Betrayal. Do
his personal details explain why he chose such an emotive term? Is the
“betrayal of the Left” in any way personal?
 
“No”, he says flatly. “I stopped regarding myself as a man of the Left
over 40 years ago.”
Instead, as he sees it, the “betrayal” is a matter of first
principles. “Much of the contemporary Left has abandoned its own
Enlightenment legacy as well as its broad-based humanist social
project,” he says.
 
“Instead, it has become disproportionally and irrationally obsessed
with the ‘sins’ of Israel, which it holds responsible for virtually
all the problems in the Middle East and even beyond.”
The second layer of betrayal comes from what he calls “the anti-
Zionist Left”, who have “reneged on the universality of the principal
of national self-determination” — a principle that seems to exist for
everyone else except the Jews — and at the same time embraced radical
Islam.
 
The final layer finds its home in the radical Left and parts of the
liberal mainstream, for whom, Wistrich says, antisemitism does not
exist unless it can be laid at the doorstep of the extreme Right.
 
Yet what baffles Wistrich more than anything about the contemporary
Left and its antisemitic impulses is its incoherent nature. “Today’s
ideology of the Left is a boutique of fragments — what I call the
‘debris of dead Marxist galaxies’.” But all the fragments are linked
by a baseline animosity to Jews and Israel. It is what unites such
disparate worldviews as those of Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
 
One of Wistrich’s most startling discoveries was what he thought was a
Soviet antisemitic trope turns out to have originated from the British
Labour movement at the turn of the last century.
 
“What struck me quite forcefully when researching this book was how
much Great Britain is responsible for its own, indigenous – and
contemporary – antisemitic traditions.” Among them are the widespread
theories of Jewish world conspiracy manipulated by the British Left
during the Boer War of 1899-1902.
 
Wistrich argues that that war — as contentious and polarising as any
in the modern period — saw the emergence of a radical anti-war
movement which coined conspiracy terminology such as “Imperialist
Judaism” to describe how prominent Jewish financiers in South Africa
allegedly plunged the British Empire into a disastrous conflict. These
ideas would resurface with the emergence of Oswald Mosley and his
British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, who accused Jews of dragging
Britain into a war with Germany, and again with the radical anti-Iraq
War movement and its accusations of “Jewish cabals”, neo-conservative
conspiracies and claims of “Zionist imperialism”.
 
Worse still, says Wistrich, was his discovery that the virulent notion
that Zionism is a form of Nazism had emerged within the British
Foreign Office as it sought to restrict survivors from Hitler’s Europe
from entering the country. In the 1950s that notion would enter
mainstream public opinion via the renowned historian Arnold J Toynbee
whose Study in History indicts the Zionists as “disciples of the
Nazis” – an allegation that became a mantra of the British Left, and
was behind the notorious Zionism Equals Racism United Nations
resolution of 1975.
 
If all of this paints a bleak picture, Wistrich nevertheless holds out
a ray of hope in his view that the British Left “is ideologically
impoverished and the level of its argumentation truly pitiful”.
He adds: “If my book helps to restore some sanity to the increasingly
toxic discourse surrounding these issues today, I’ll know I’ve made a
dent.”
 
From Ambivalence to Betrayal is published by the University of
Nebraska Press at £38
 
 
http://www.thejc.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-features/69409/lenins-legacy-why-jews-have-been-betrayed-radical-left
 

 By Winston Pickett,
 
ovviamente l'eredità di Lenin è un'invenzione del ritardato, il libro
si intitola
"From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews, and Israel"
Se c'è un commie di cui tutto si può dire fuorchè che fosse
antisemita, è proprio Lenin
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/mar/x10.htm
 (discorso
radiofonico, giusto per puntualizzare che certe cose non le pensava
privatamente, ma voleva che fossero d'insegnamento a tutti i popoli
della futura URSS)

 ovviamente l'eredità di Lenin è
 
ampiamente trattata nel libro di Wistrich. Ma tu ti fermi alla
recensione. Tu guarda che strano.
Peraltro Wistrich la conosce bene l'eredita' di Lenin, avendo (come il
sottoscritto) militato a sinistra ed essendosene poi andato una volta
che ha scoperto che anche da quelle parti non ci si fa scrupolo ad
appoggiare argomenti antisemiti. E dopo la scoperta si e' messo a
indagarne le ragioni, ovvero a pubblicare libri ed adesso e' la
massima autorita' vivente in fatto di antisemitismo. Per Namib,
chissa', forse un "ritardato". E tu manco capisci quando si parla dei
suoi libri.
Fate una bella coppia, tu e Namib.
 
 

 appoggiare argomenti antisemiti.
 
lo faceva Lenin? No, e allora NON è la sua eredità, con buona pace tua