It was sort of inevitable that the Labour Leadership and the NEC would capitulate over the IHRA example, though not as inevitable as that, having capitulated, the Zionists and the Labour Right would simply utilise it to immediately press their attacks on Corbyn further, and to immediately confirm all of those suspicions that it would be used to close down effective criticism of the Israeli state, despite all of the assurances to the contrary given prior to the vote. No sooner had the vote gone through than Carwen Jones was giving a statement to the media saying that any statement to the effect that the Israeli state is racist, would be in contravention of the guidelines. It will be used to demand that anyone making a statement that might in any way be construed as breaching that guideline be hauled up on charges, and so the whole farrago will be perpetuated ad infinitum. Yet its hard to see how a state that constitutionally gives preferential treatment for one ethno-religious group, and systematically deprives other groups of such rights can be described in any other way!
This is not just a matter of the policies of this or that political party or government, but of the constitution of the Israeli state itself, as much as Apartheid was a part of the South African State. To change it requires not just a change of government, but a change in the Israeli constitution, and the very basis upon which the state itself was founded, and that is something that is different in relation to Israel, than with other states. The only comparable situations, besides apartheid South Africa, would be situations such as the Northern Ireland Statelet in the 1960's, which provided institutionalised privileges for Protestants, and systematically discriminated against Catholics, or similarly, the privileged position given to the Catholic Church in the constitution of the Irish Republic when it was founded.
Yet, today, if anyone were to say that Northern Ireland is a Protestant State, and that Protestants from anywhere in the world had a right to move there, a right over and above the rights of Northern Ireland Catholics, or any other ethno-religious group, or if anyone were to say that the Irish Republic is a Catholic State, and that Catholics from anywhere in the world have a right to move there, and would be privileged as against non-Catholics, few would have difficulty in recognising that such institutionalised privilege amounts to systematic discrimination. If someone were to say that Britain is a white Anglo-Saxon, Christian State, established for white, Anglo-Saxon Christians, few would have difficulty in recognising that such a conception would make it a racist endeavour. So how on Earth can anyone even suggest that to define Israel as being a Jewish state, and which enshrines in its its constitution a privileged position for Jews as against non-Jews, and which systematically discriminates against Palestinians, is not a racist endeavour?
That Jeremy Corbyn attempted to retain a semblance of rationality and principle by putting forward his additional statement is to his credit, though the fact that he failed to push it to a vote, apparently for fear that he would not have had the support of Lansman, shows the fundamentally weak position that the leadership rests upon. That weak position, however, is one of their own making as they have continually failed to stand up to the Right over the last three years, and each time they have caved, the Right have simply pushed further and harder.
But, again, it's hard to see how anyone could rationally disagree with the sentiment of Corbyn's statement. The state of Israel was created by a violent terrorist campaign waged both against Britain, and against the resident Palestinian population. The terrorists of the Lehi Group saw Britain as a bigger enemy than the Nazis or Fascist Italy, and attempted to form an alliance with them, against Britain.
If someone can explain how establishing a state by force, whose basis is the theft of land from the existing population, and the expulsion of tens of thousands of those residents, and the creation of a constitution which enshrines a privileged position of a specific ethno-religious group, is not racist, I would be glad to hear it.
Making the argument over whether the creation of the Israeli state is a racist endeavour, however, is to miss the point, because the reality is that every state in history that has been created, has been a racist endeavour! Britain was created by systematically beating down different nationalities, such as the Cornish, Welsh, Scots and Irish. There were 200 nationalities within modern France, before they were all beaten down by the dominant group of Franks. The United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand were all states that were established as a racist endeavour by committing genocide against the aboriginal peoples living in those countries. The only difference with the racist endeavour that led to the establishment of Israel, is that it is more recent. What constitutes left anti-Semitism is not stating the fairly obvious and non-contentious historical fact that the state of Israel was established as a racist endeavour; it is treating this particular racist endeavour as different to the racist endeavour that is the basis of the creation of every other state on the planet!
What constitutes left anti-Semitism is not the fact of stating this obvious truth about the history of the way the state of Israel was created, or that the underlying ideology of Zionism, as a reactionary, nationalistic and expansionist ideology lies behind the institutionalised racism against non-Jews, and also behind the continued actions of the Israeli state in attempting to take possession of additional Arab lands, as with its expansion on the West Bank; it is rather the demand that the Israeli state be destroyed, and thereby treated differently to every other state, equally established as a racist endeavour, and in many cases, equally attempting to act in an expansionist manner, as with British colonialism.
But, instead of dealing with these truths, they are denied, because admitting them might cause offence, not to mention lead to discussion about the history of the creation of other states, of colonialism and so on. And, that is the sorry state we have arrived at, as the result of a process that has unfolded over several decades, whereby liberals, socialists and democrats, rather than stand up and defend liberty and free speech, and engage in a political battle with the forces of reaction and bigotry, instead prefer to close down free speech on the basis that someone might take offence, and thereby replace liberty and free speech with bureaucratic diktat and censorship. In place of open debate, and political contest, we have instead the creation of safe spaces, and bunkers, and witch hunts and heresy trials.
We saw it quite clearly back in 2007 in relation to the publication of the Danish cartoons depicting Mohammed. The stance of liberals, in the media, was appalling, in failing to stand up in defence of basic principles of free speech, faced with attacks on them by religious zealots. But, in large part, that liberal media had already self-censored itself, because the idea that free speech should not cause offence had already been absorbed into its blood stream. Some sections of the left were even worse. They had attached themselves to sections of those reactionary Islamist forces, as a natural extension of their ideology of idiot anti-imperialism, whereby they lined up with all sorts of reactionary forces, purely on the basis of their supposed “anti-imperialism”. Those who first fought for and won the right to free speech would have been rightly appalled at the craven attitude of the liberals, in accepting such limitations, because they knew and deeply understood that the right to free speech is only meaningful if it does provide the right to cause offence!
In the early 1960's, liberals, socialists and democrats fought a long battle to establish that principle that the right to free speech means the right to cause offence, in the face of the attempts by religious zealots, moral crusaders and the establishment to censor and confine it. Even the liberals of that time, that put themselves on the line, appear as giants compared to the craven apologists of today. The struggle to defend individual liberty, and collective workers rights and liberties is one that must be fought continually against attempts to constrain it, or turn it back. A free speech that is merely a right to propound banalities is the inevitable consequence of the collapse into effectively a one party regime that was created by the establishment of the Tweedle Dee-Tweedle Dum politics of indistinguishable Blair-right Labour and Cameroon Tories in Britain, or Clintonite Democrats and Bush Dynasty Republicans in the US, and similar mediocrity across Europe.
Blair and Cable's appeals to establish a new party of such mediocrity is simply the siren call of yesterday's failed politicians, who cannot reconcile themselves to the fact that that mediocrity and banality is precisely what led them into the wilderness. It is only those self-obsessed and self-serving politicians locked inside the Westminster bubble, and their media entourage who believe that there is a large reservoir of the population aching for the re-establishment of such mediocrity and vacuity.
The consequence of the failure to stand up to the Islamofascists over the Danish cartoons was to embolden the Islamofascists to undertake further attacks such as those against Charlie Hebdo. And, we see the same thing today with the failure to defend the principle of free speech in relation to criticism of the racist nature of the Israeli state. The measure of the depths to which things have sunk is given by the claim, that is left more or less unchallenged, that those who suffer racism should be the only ones able to define what constitutes racism! Absolute nonsense, but it is a direct consequence of the failure to challenge that idea in relation to the Danish cartoons. If that principle is accepted, it means that Muslims can define free speech that is critical of the reactionary nature of Islam, as racist! It would mean that, Muslims could define, as racist, criticism of systematic oppression of women, and criticism of discrimination against women, as an integral aspect of that religion. It would mean that those from cultures that undertake female genital mutilation, could define any criticism of such practices as racist! That is where pandering to the idea that free speech should be limited so as not to cause offence leads you!
As Marxists we do not believe that workers, for example, are best placed to define what constitutes the basis of their oppression, or the best means of overcoming it. As Marx and Engels describe in The Communist Manifesto, workers initially saw machinery, and thought that it was the cause of their problems, and saw smashing the machines as the means of remedying those problems, or they saw foreign wares as the source of their problems.
“The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own ends, made in times of universal excitement, when feudal society was being overthrown, necessarily failed, owing to the then undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the absence of the economic conditions for its emancipation, conditions that had yet to be produced, and could be produced by the impending bourgeois epoch alone. The revolutionary literature that accompanied these first movements of the proletariat had necessarily a reactionary character. It inculcated universal asceticism and social levelling in its crudest form.”
“The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the operative of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.”
And, not just in those times were the workers led by the condition of their oppression to look for salvation in reactionary solutions that placed the blame on foreigners etc. It is the job of socialists to tell the truth to workers, and to confront such reactionary ideas, even if to do so might cause offence. We cannot allow the idea that only those who suffer oppression or discrimination are able to define that discrimination and oppression, because throughout history that has simply meant that instead of locating the true nature of that discrimination and oppression, and so locating the real basis of ending it, the oppressed have misinterpreted the true nature of that oppression, and in the understandable urge to “do something”, do the wrong thing, often seeking easy or quick answers that fail to resolve their problems, often make them worse, and frequently result in others facing oppression and discrimination as a consequence. It was understandable that Zionists would be energised to create a Zionist state, as a result of the Holocaust – but Zionism long predates the Holocaust, and Zionists proposed a number of locations for such a state, across the globe, thereby illustrating the fallacious arguments about the need to establish such a state in Palestine – but the creation of a Zionist state in Palestine necessarily meant, inflicting oppression and discrimination on Palestinians, whilst creating all of the problems that both Palestinians and Israeli Jews have faced in the last 70 years, and which thereby has not even resolved the problems it was intended to resolve.
It is what happens when you make the simplistic assumption that those who suffer from oppression and discrimination cannot themselves be guilty of oppression and discrimination, and so should be free from criticism for any such action. The same is true of those, who today adopt the opposite stance, and who look at the oppression faced by Palestinians, and see the solution being to destroy the Israeli state, so as to create a Palestinian state! But, its of course, nonsense. Just because workers suffer oppression and discrimination it does not mean that male workers are not oppressive and discriminatory towards women, or towards foreign workers, or towards people on the basis of their sexuality and so on. Just because Jews faced oppression and the Holocaust does not mean the Israeli state cannot be oppressive and discriminatory towards Palestinians, and just because Palestinians today face oppression and discrimination does not mean that a Palestinian state would not act in an oppressive and discriminatory way towards others.
But, worse than that, who is to determine who amongst those suffering discrimination determines what is racist? It would be to assume that all of those suffering such discrimination are some homogeneous bloc. The obvious problem with that is shown with the IHRA definition debate. It is quite clearly not all Jews who believe that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are the same thing. We know that is true in relation to radical socialist Jews from Jewish Voice for Labour, or Jewdas. And from the growing number of Jewish groups internationally that have come to the defence of Jeremy Corbyn. The Tory media, keen to help the Labour Right in utilising the anti-Semitism debate against Corbyn would have you believe that the IHRA definition is universally accepted, whereas only six countries have accepted it in full, the House of Commons Select Committee raised concerns over it, almost identical to those raised by Labour, and so on. But even some orthodox Jewish groups back Corbyn over the issue, and vehemently oppose the idea that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are the same thing.
In the case of the Danish cartoons, sections of the left, like the SWP, adopted an atrocious position, because to have adopted a principled position in defence of free speech, and criticism of Islam would have undermined their strategy in relation to Respect, and so on. The same was true in relation to their failure to speak out against grooming of young girls. Now, the Labour Right are utilising the row over anti-Semitism for their own narrow political ends, whilst Zionists are using it as a means of themselves undermining Corbyn, and the potential that a Corbyn Labour government might actually act on the basis of support for a Two State solution, and act to support Palestinians when they are facing murderous attacks by the Israeli state. The Tory media are happy to add fuel to that fire, whilst Liberals, as they did in relation to the Danish cartoons are showing a distinct lack of backbone in standing up for the principle of free speech.
The Danish cartoons were an early illustration of the abandonment of the defence of basic liberties, and the current failures are the logical extension of that, but the roots of this collapse go back further. The roots go back to the 1960's, and 1970's and the rise of the National Front. Rather than tackle the cancerous ideology of racism that spread during that time, and was given nourishment as unemployment and economic stagnation took hold in the late 1970's, and 1980's, both Labour and Tory politicians, with some notable exceptions adapted to it. Rather than tackle the noxious ideology of racism, successive governments introduced immigration controls, and blamed foreigners. At the same time, rather than confront the ideology of racism in open debate, they attempted to simply sweep it under the carpet, to make it illegal, by bureaucratic diktat and the creation of quangos for Race Relations and Racial Equality.
When mass unemployment rose in the 1980's, and the National Front increased its vote, Maggie Thatcher simply stole their clothes. She did not defeat the National Front, she mostly became them, just as the Tories became UKIP, more recently. When Thatcher adopted the clothes of the NF, she thereby legitimised them, just as more recently they have legitimised the racist ideas of UKIP. And, having adopted those policies, the NF simply moved back into the Tory Party, just as now UKIP and the BNP have moved back into the Tory Party. In the 1980's, Searchlight regularly exposed all of the NF'ers who were then standing, and in some cases had been elected as Tory Councillors, and so on.
Similarly, in the early 2000's, when the BNP and UKIP began to gain support, the conservative social democratic Home Secretaries such as Straw, Reed, Clarke, and Blunkett simply directed their fire at asylum seekers and refugees. The policy has always proceeded on this two-pronged approach of legislative measures against immigrants or asylum seekers, alongside bureaucratic measures to try to outlaw racist ideas, to hide them from view, rather than to confront them. It does so, because of a failure to be prepared to wage a political fight based upon a defence of free speech, and a willingness to cause offence as part of that fight. In turn it flows from the fact that the creation of a politics of mediocrity, in which there is essentially no difference between the Labour, Liberal and Tory politicians, and where politics is reduced simply to spin, to the soundbite, and presentation above content, means that these politicians simply lack the ability to engage in serious political debate at any level of substance. They simply lack the tools to engage in a political struggle based upon principles and ideology, because they long since abandoned any such principles or ideology for fear that espousing it might offend some potential voter.
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