Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: ancora per Namib - ecco un altro studioso ritardato

http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/4363/full
 
 
How the Left Turned Against the Jews
NICK COHEN
 
 
In Weimar Germany, riddled with resentment after defeat in World War I
and the national catastrophe of the Treaty of Versailles, demagogues
knew that they could win the attention of the mob by palming the race
card from the bottom of the deck.
 
"You cry out against Jewish capital, gentlemen?" cried one. "You are
against Jewish capital and want to eliminate the stock manipulators.
Rightly so. Trample the Jewish capitalists under foot, hang them from
the street lamps, stamp them out."
 
Ruth Fischer sounded like a Nazi. She used the same hate-filled
language. She wanted to murder Jews. But Hitler would never have
accepted her. Fischer was a leader of the German Communist Party. She
made her small differences of opinion with the Nazis clear when she
went on to say that her audience should not just trample Jewish
capitalists to death, but all capitalists.
 
Unconcerned by the contradiction, Hitler said the Jews were at once a
"Judaeo-Bolshevik" conspiracy and a capitalist conspiracy. In
Fischer's case, he was half right. The rabble-rouser who wanted to
hang Jewish capitalists was a Jewish Communist, the sister of Hanns
Eisler, who wrote music for some of Brecht's early plays. Eisler and
Brecht fled the Nazis in 1933. A sense of self-preservation triumphed
over ideology, and they found permanent sanctuary in America rather
than in Stalin's Soviet Union. Hanns could not have been surprised
when the House Committee on Un-American Activities demanded his
deportation. He was a prominent Communist composer who worked for
Hollywood, which the American Right considered a nest of reds. Eisler
was perhaps more surprised to discover that his own sister Ruth was a
witness for the prosecution when the McCarthyites arraigned him in
1947. Supporters of Stalin had denounced her as a "Left oppositionist"
Trotskyist. She responded by not only going over to the "capitalist
camp" but by providing evidence against Hanns, and against a second
brother, Gerhart, who was a leading agent in the Comintern.
 
Political and personal betrayals filled her life. But as Colin
Shindler shows in his Israel and the European Left (Continuum,
£17.99), her embrace of anti-Semitism would have struck her fellow
Communists as no betrayal at all.
 
Before I go further, I should say that Shindler's book is superb: a
well-written and meticulously researched history of the horrors and
ironies of the last 100 years. He shows how screaming stereotypes and
anti-Semitic conspiracy theories developed by Marxists — not by
fascists or Islamists or Catholic and Orthodox nationalists, but by
the Left — have survived while all around has changed.
 
Given the cramped nature of British debate, I doubt if it will be
widely reviewed. The right-wing press won't like it because it is not
a conventional denunciation of the Left. Shindler is a properly
impartial historian, but when his beliefs show through he reveals
himself to be a social democrat rather than an Israel-firster or man
of the Right. The left-wing press won't like it for the same reason
Caliban did not like the sight of his face in the mirror. Beyond the
ideological divide lies the almost taboo nature of Shindler's subject.
Conventional wisdom does not regard Communism with the same abhorrence
as fascism, even though if you want to be an accountant about it and
add up the skulls of the dead, you will find that the Communists
murdered many more people than the fascists did, began murdering
before fascists came to power and carried on murdering after the
fascists had gone. Yet few can bring themselves to see fascism and
Communism as moral equivalents. Even Robert Conquest, who mapped the
crimes of Stalin, and had been mocked by the know-nothing Left of his
day as a Cold War fantasist, said he thought the Nazis were worse than
the Communists. He couldn't explain why, they just felt worse.
 
A part of the explanation for the double standard is that the allies
overthrew the Nazis in 1945 and opened their archives. The democratic
world could read what they had done. China's archives on Mao, the
greatest criminal of the 20th century, remain closed. Perhaps
historians will never read them in full. More important than the
scarcity of source material is the woozy feeling that Communism's aims
— equality, universal fraternity — were noble, whereas not even
Germans and Italians can now find reasons to applaud racist theories
of German or Italian domination.
 
Shindler's story of the racism of the anti-racists, of how the far
Left turned on Europe's most persecuted minority, does not fit into
the preconceived notion that, say what you like about it, Communism
was an emancipatory creed. Because his book is disconcerting, I doubt
if centrist broadcasters, for whom conventional wisdom is the only
wisdom, will review Shindler either. All the more reason, of course,
for you to read him. If he has not produced a           secret
history, then it is a history of a secret in plain view; an account of
facts that are available but not discussed. After I interviewed him at
Jewish Book Week, members of the audience said they had never before
heard anyone examine the racist strain in left-wing  thinking, even
though it was there from the beginning.
 
The movements for Jewish self-determination and Russian Communism were
twins separated at birth. The First Zionist conference met on August
27, 1897, to discuss the escape from anti-Semitic Europe to Palestine.
The General Jewish Labour Bund held its first conference in Vilnius on
October 7, 1897, to organise the Russian Empire's Jews in a united
socialist party. The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, from
which the Bolsheviks split, held its first conference in March 1898.
Naturally, the Bund sent delegates. For liberal and left-wing
Europeans of the late 19th century, no regime was more repellent than
Tsarist autocracy, and nothing better symbolised its reactionary
nature than its anti-Semitic pogroms. Jews responded to the terror by
keeping their Jewish identity and joining Jewish socialist movements,
such as the Bund, or by becoming entirely assimilated Communists, as
Trotsky and many others did.
 
The coincidences of history do not end there. On November 2, 1917,
Arthur Balfour sent his declaration to Baron Rothschild that the
British Empire would allow the Jewish people to find a home in
Palestine "it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done
which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-
Jewish communities". On November 7, 1917, the Bolsheviks stormed the
Winter Palace.
 
The Jews and the Left were entwined. Many who went to Palestine were
socialists determined that the New Jerusalem should be in Jerusalem.
Others saw a New Jerusalem rising in Moscow. They could never get on
for theoretical and practical reasons. The theory sounded plausible;
indeed, for all the crimes the Left has committed, I still half
believe it myself. To revolutionaries, Jewish self-determination was a
distraction from universal liberation. Anti-Semitism was purely a
result of "medieval" prejudices that would wither away as humanity
progressed, Lenin said. The Enlightenment had given the Jews political
freedom and an "undeniable progressive assimilation with the
surrounding population". Come Communism, Judaism like all national,
class and religious differences would vanish.
 
As so often the theory was one thing and the practice another. The
belief that Communism was better than Nazism stops us seeing that the
Bolshevik Revolution was an insane idea from its inception. A
"vanguard" party, composed of a tiny band of professional
revolutionaries, could hold on to power only by terrorising the
subject population. The Bolsheviks had to crush independent Jewish
organisations, as they had to crush all other independent
organisations. Yet even before the Bolsheviks produced a left-wing
variant of the Nazi conspiracy theory, the Jews were a special case in
the old Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks recognised other minorities as
minorities with homelands. They never said that there should be a
Jewish homeland in their empire. Socialist Zionism was a particular
threat to the new regime. If Jews succeeded in building a socialist
state in Israel, it would be a rival. Lenin set a loyalty test. Before
he came to power, he purged the Communist movement of supporters of
the Bund. The only Jews he permitted to remain were Jews who were so
thoroughly assimilated that they were barely Jews at all.
 
Unlike Lenin, Stalin was an anti-Semite and understood the uses of
irrational hatred. His crimes took the forms of the sins of omission
and commission. The omission was not to see Nazism for what it was,
and ally with it in the Hitler-Stalin pact of August 1939. It remains
one of the most hypocritical and stupid acts in the annals of
diplomacy, where examples of hypocrisy and stupidity are not hard to
find. Throughout the 1930s Communist writers, poets and propagandists
had denounced fascism and urged a popular front against the Hitlerian
menace. Then in August 1939 Stalin stood on his head and announced a
Soviet reconciliation with Nazi Germany so they might partition Poland
between them. Stalin believed in Hitler. Solzhenitsyn speculated in
The First Circle that Hitler was the only man he ever really trusted.
The complete surprise Hitler achieved when he invaded an unprepared
Soviet Union in 1941 suggests that Solzhenitsyn was right. By signing
the pact, the Soviet Union agreed to hand over the Jews of western
Poland to the Nazis. Although conventional historians lazily say that
the pact shocked a generation of leftists, Shindler points out that
membership of the British Communist Party actually rose after the
tyrants had cut a deal, and hardly anyone worried about the fate of
Polish Jewry. Those who had shouted loudest about the dangers of
fascism from 1933 to 1938 were as willing as Chamberlain and Halifax
to appease it in 1939.
 
Leftists of the 1968 generation tried to recover something from the
disgrace of Marxism-Leninism by arguing that if only Trotsky had
succeeded Lenin then all would have been well. Trotsky, however,
argued from exile that the war between Nazi Germany and Britain and
France was an imperialist conflict. Marxists should not take sides,
but wait for the revolutionary opportunities that would follow the
exhaustion of the warring powers. Shindler illustrates the mood far
beyond the Communist Party by digging up the writings of Tony Cliff,
the cultish founder of the Socialist Workers Party, the most malign
force in British left-wing politics. "Tony Cliff" was the suitably
proletarian nom de guerre of Ygael Gluckstein, who was born in
Palestine. In our day, the SWP accuses virtually everyone of being a
fascist, most notably Israelis and their friends abroad. Yet when he
confronted actual fascists in the form of Nazi armies, Gluckstein
would not fight them. If Rommel had broken through the British lines
at El Alamein, the Nazis would have killed every Jew in Palestine,
including Gluckstein. Instead of defending them and himself, he issued
appeals to Jewish students not to fight Hitler that were so insistent
the British authorities interned him alongside members of the Stern
gang in Acre prison. The Trotskyist thought he could secure a
revolution and throw out the British imperialists by letting the Nazis
win. Stern and his associates thought they could create a Jewish state
by attacking the British and trying to negotiate with the Nazis. It is
hard to say who was the greater fool.
 
The establishment of Israel in 1948 and its defeat of the first Arab
attacks unleashed the sins of commission. The idea that Soviet Jews
wanted to flee their glorious socialist motherland to Israel persuaded
Stalin to ape the tactics of Hitler. The secret police began rounding
up Jewish writers on charges of Zionism just four years after the
overthrow of the Nazis. Stalin turned on Jewish Communist leaders
across the new Soviet empire. In 1953, in his last days, he imagined a
plot by Jewish doctors to poison him and the Soviet leadership.
Historians dispute what would have happened if Stalin had lived, but
it is possible that he would have deported the remaining Jews of
European Russia to central Asia. Even after his death, the Polish
Communist Party distracted attention from student protests by
launching Europe's last pogrom in 1968.
 
Three features of the old Left's racism feel contemporary. Naturally,
Communists could not say that Jews were members of a "Judaeo-
Bolshevik" cabal. They had to recast the conspiracy as a right-wing
plot and substitute "Zionist" for "Jew". When Stalin put Rudolf
Slansky and other Czech Communists on trial in 1952 the authorities
announced: "The whole worldwide Zionist movement was in fact led and
ruled by the imperialists, in particular the US imperialists, by means
of US Zionists. For US Zionists, who are financially most powerful and
politically the most influential Zionists, form part of the ruling
imperialist circles of the USA."
 
Rudé Právo, the organ of the Czech Communist Party, said that Slansky
and his co-defendants were "Jewish cosmopolitans, people without a
shred of honour, without character, without country, people who desire
one thing — career, business and money". Communists and their
supporters imagined a vast Zionist conspiracy reaching from the US
Supreme Court to Tito's anti-Stalinist supporters in Yugoslavia. For
all that, they maintained that they were not anti-Semites but enemies
of Zionism. They might have been modern "leftists" talking about the
"Israel Lobby" conspiring to organise the Iraq War of 2003, while all
the time insisting that there was nothing remotely racist about their
conspiracy theories.
 
The dog days of Stalin also saw a new loyalty test for left-wing Jews,
many of whom did not consider themselves remotely Jewish. My
grandfather, whose parents had fled to Britain from the pogroms in
Lithuania, abandoned his religion and all connections to Jewish
culture and became a Communist, as Lenin would have wanted.
Objectively, there was nothing Jewish about him. But men like him, who
had gladly broken free from their old religious and cultural
identities and spent their life serving the party, saw the party use
their ancestry to damn them. In Czechoslovakia, any Jew was a suspect.
When the secret police imprisoned Artur London, deputy Foreign
Minister in the Slansky government, the guard told him that Hitler was
right about the Jews and "we will finish what he started".
 
London was as much astonished as frightened: "This was the first time
in my adult life that I was insulted because I was a Jew and was held
to be a criminal because of my race — and that by a man from State
Security of a socialist country, a member of the Communist Party. Was
it possible that the mentality of the SS had risen in our ranks?"
 
Western Communists of Jewish origin rushed to prove their loyalty by
supporting the pogrom; not out of fear of physical violence, for no
one could threaten them in the West, but out of fear of the ostracism
that would follow a falling out with the Left. Maxime Rodinson, a
French Communist who defended the purges, later said that he could not
face "the most obvious facts" about the fascistic nature of the
Communists because of his "visceral need not to renounce a commitment
that has illuminated one's life, given it meaning, and for which many
sacrifices have often been made".
 
Ever since there have been loyalty tests and demands for left-wing
Jews to speak "as a Jew" as Howard Jacobson puts it, and announce
their shame of and contempt for Israel. The campaign to boycott
Israeli universities, to quote the most sinister example, says that
Israeli academics must prove that they are not anti-Palestinian before
it will allow them to work with the Europeans — in the same manner as
McCarthyites insisted that Hanns Eisler prove that he was not anti-
American before they would allow him to work in the US.
 
Finally, who can deny that anti-Semitism was popular in Eastern Europe
and Russia then, and is popular in the Middle East and parts of Europe
now? Particularly if the more obviously "medieval" features of the
prejudice are dropped and anti-Semitism is recast as anti-Zionism.
 
Leftist attitudes have been extraordinarily consistent. Communism gave
way to anti-colonialism. Israel remained a target for special rage,
even though Zionism was both a settler movement and an anti-colonial
movement that attacked the forces of the British empire. Anti-
colonialism gave way to the 1968 rebellions. In Germany, the left-wing
terrorists around the Baader Meinhof gang claimed to be against the
Nazism of their parents. They proved they were just like their parents
when they planted a bomb at a meeting to commemorate the anniversary
of Kristallnacht. Today the bulk of the Left has forgotten its old
appeals to universal values. Conservatives and liberals are more
likely to emphasise the need to assimilate, while the Left
"celebrates" diversity and difference — for everyone, that is, except
Jews.
 
I could go on but must anticipate an objection. Sensible and well-
meaning people might say, "If hatred of Israel from the Left has been
remarkably consistent, that's the fault of Israel and those Jews who
support it." They have a small point.
 
Israel is unique among nations. It is the only sovereign country whose
right to exist is questioned as a matter of routine. No other country
— not China, Zimbabwe, Sudan or Iran — suffers comparable abuse. Left-
wing viewers of the atrocities in Syria must be baffled. Who knew that
the Assad family was capable of such crimes? Who told them that anyone
in the Middle East outside Palestine had good cause to revolt?
 
But those who say that the bias of much leftish protest is a reason to
exonerate Israel miss the point that injustice in Palestine is still
injustice, and people are entitled to protest against it. Anti-
Semitism plays a part in Israel-hating, so does the unhappy status of
Jerusalem as a sacred city for fanatics from three warring creeds. But
many who defend the rights of Palestinians are not fanatics. They may
devote disproportionate energy to their cause. They may or may not be
blind to the suffering of others. But that is no reason to damn them.
They oppose Israeli policy because contrary to the Balfour Declaration
it impinges on the civil rights of non-Jewish communities.
 
Sceptical readers of Shindler's book might go further and wonder what
his history of left-wing anti-Semitism has to do with them. By "the
Left" he means the far Left. In Stalin and Mao's day it was one of the
most horrifying forces humanity has witnessed. Now it is nothing. The
Soviet Union is gone. China is a state capitalist power. Who cares
about Communism? It is as dead as the Albigensian heresy or the Stuart
claim to the English throne. Even Marxists don't believe in Marxist-
Leninism any more.
 
But in a strange manner few discuss, the death of Communism has freed
far-Left ideas from the cage of the Cold War. When the far Left was a
global force, the mainstream liberal Left had to draw dividing lines
and defend itself from its attacks. Now that the far Left threatens no
one, the borders have gone. The media would hound from public life any
conservative who shared platforms with members of a neo-Nazi group.
But respectable leftists can now associate with those who would once
have been regarded as poisonous extremists — and no one notices. What
applies to personal alliances applies equally to ideology. Foul ideas
flood past the unmanned border posts, with disastrous consequences for
Jews and Arabs.
 
The influence of far-Left ideas on attitudes towards the Israeli/
Palestinian conflict is too obvious to spend much time on. You will
have noticed how rarely discussion of a workable solution appears.
Most Israelis and most Palestinians favour a compromise, which
includes a fair distribution of land, an end to violence, and security
— essentially dividing the country on 1967 lines. Compromise is as
much an anathema to the far Left and the Islamists as it is to the
Israeli and American Right. Increasingly, it is anathema to the
mainstream liberal Left as well. The notion that Israel is an
illegitimate state has gone from the fringe to the mainstream of left-
wing discourse.
 
For Arabs, the European Left is proving a disastrous influence. The
spirit of the Hitler-Stalin pact lives on in the coalition between
white leftists and the Islamist religious Right. Such alliances are
scandalous. They can bring no good to Arabs in general and Arab women
in particular. They expose the insincerity of the anti-sexist and anti-
racist principles that leftists claim to hold. Yet they are tolerated
almost without comment. Islamists are against the West in general and
Israel in particular, and the Left can ignore the sufferings that
theocrats impose from Iran to Gaza. This tendency to forget about the
very people you say you are championing is the final legacy of a dark
past.
 
 Ralph Miliband, the father of Ed and David, dissected it well. He was
a Marxist who retained the capacity for independent thought, and got
into a furious argument with Marcel Liebman, a fellow Marxist Jew, at
the time of the Six Day War of 1967. Miliband pointed out an essential
truth: that the corrupt regimes of the Middle East needed Israel and
anti-Semitic conspiracy theories to distract the attention of their
peoples. "If Israel did not exist, they would have to invent it," he
said.
 
 He despaired of the willingness of leftists to go along with
Nasserite Egypt. His friend, like so many others, indulged Colonel
Nasser even though he had used former Gestapo officers to turn Egypt
into a repressive military dictatorship that, despite the Arab Spring,
survives to this day. All Nasser had to do was shout about
"socialism", "imperialism" and "revolution", said Miliband, and they
would come running. "The sad thing is that this sterling Left is
incapable of distinguishing anything from anything, and reacts with a
truly Pavlovian predictability to the slogans used to make it drool on
cue."
 
Now as then, nothing makes the sterling Left's spittle flow more
freely than mention of the state of Israel. They may not know it, for
they know very little, but the origins of their Pavlovian response lie
deep in the terrible history of the 20th-century Left.

 Israeli and American Right.
 
qui sta dicendo che Bibi è di coccio come i commie Anche qui, il rav
non ha letto...:D

 rimanere sotto i tacchi delle truppe d'occupazione imperiali.
 
anche agli ebrei, vero?
 
Grazie del tuo peculiare contributo, Bombacci. Ora puoi farti da
parte.
Naturalmente non hai capito che l'oggetto del post e' il libro di
Colin Shindler (uno storico di sinistra che studia l'antisemitismo di
sinistra: in altre parole, secondo Namib, un "ritardato") e non la
recensione di Nick Cohen. Il quale e' comunque una gran brava persona
e chissa', magari secondo Namib e' un "ritardato" anche lui. "What's
Left?" e' in effetti un libro interessante.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Cohen
 

 anche agli ebrei, vero?
 
ovvio. Senza 1917, non ci sarebbe stato il 1948. Adesso rosica pure