I.
Introduction: Left anti-Semitism?
Recently, the scandal – or pseudo-scandal – of ‘left-wing
anti-Semitism’ in Britain has been making headlines around the world. I find
the subject somewhat baffling: I am unable to determine whether these
left-wingers – who are invariably white British, or Muslim, or Jewish – in the
Corbyn Labour Party are real anti-Semites or not. My confusion stems from the
fact that I perhaps stand too close to the subject: I have been a fully-fledged
anti-Semite (according to the IHRA’s definition) for nearly twenty years, and
as a result, I tend to evaluate the newfound anti-Semitism of the British Left
(from what I’ve seen so far) as being rather weak and watered-down. But, I am
told – by outraged conservatives, and certain sections of the British Left
itself – that this new wave of left-wing anti-Semitism is really strong stuff.
It is my observation that what calls itself the ‘Jewish
community’ habitually exaggerates anti-Semitism and attempts to make it out as
worse than it is, and as a consequence, the IHRA (International Holocaust
Remembrance Alliance) definition of anti-Semitism goes too far, as it makes
virtually any discussion of Jews and Israel by non-Jews ‘anti-Semitic’, and thereby
cuts off any criticism of Jews and Israel at the knees before it has left the
starting gate. Quite possibly, any rules and regulations against anti-Semitism
as defined by the IHRA cannot be complied with: given the definition’s
broadness, its scope, one always – whenever one touches upon the subject of
Jews, Israel, the Holocaust – runs the risk of falling of falling foul of
strictures against anti-Semitism. One thereby has to ask if this effect was
intended: did the framers of the definition want any intellectual who talks
about the Jewish people to stand in danger of thinking of himself as an
anti-Semite and thereby feel an accompanying sense of shame? Some religions
strive to induce a false sense of guilt as a means of social control. Is
anti-anti-Semitism a religion?
Most of the polemics and the back and forth on the subject
of British left-wing anti-Semitism have appeared in the
Weekly Worker, which is
a left-wing tabloid (run by the Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional
Central Committee)) whose letters pages serve as the closest thing to a free-for-all
discussion forum for the British Left – a kind of communist 4Chan: the editors
will cheerfully print letters from just about anyone of a Marxist Left
orientation, no matter how crack-brained or politically incorrect they are. In this
the Weekly Worker shows a tolerance and restraint which is unusual for the
Left, which cannot, to save its life, run a left-wing equivalent of Stormfront
or 4Chan, because, being traditionally obsessed with control of discourse, it does
not like discussion which threatens to wander off the reservation. We find
plenty of free and frank talk on Jewish subjects in the Weekly Worker. But, in
all the writings there and elsewhere by the British participants in the left-wing
anti-Semitism scandal (men such as Tony Greenstein, Moishe Machover, Gerry
Downing) and sympathetic onlookers (Jewish intellectuals such as Norman
Finkelstein and Gilad Atzmon), I find little to no Holocaust denial: I see that
they subscribe to the notion that, during WWII, Germany gassed six million Jews
in giant gas chambers. One has to ask why this is so. These men have already travelled
a great distance towards anti-Zionism, but will not make the final leap into
Holocaust Revisionism. And it is only Revisionism which can defeat Zionism,
because, as I will attempt to show in a moment, the Holocaust serves as the
metaphysical foundation of the State of Israel, Zionism and Judaism itself.
I am here going to make the assumption that many on the Left
stay away from Revisionism because they find it too hard: that is to say, it
requires – because of the often poor presentation of its chief arguments on
Internet forums – too much effort and time to comprehend, and on the surface of
it, never seems to get down to core principles. From the outset, most
Revisionists will bombard their readers with facts and figures, and references
to documents, eyewitness testimonies and demographic studies which are usually
obscure to the non-initiated. Worse, Revisionism seems to revolve around
chemistry and engineering: it is not possible to cremate x amount of corpses of
y amount of time, or the gas chambers at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor and
other camps could not have functioned, were they real, in the way they are described
in Holocaust literature. All this tends to overwhelm the casual reader. The
average Marxist-Leninist will spend a great deal of time and energy on reading
up on, for instance, the intricacies of the October 1917 Revolution in Russia –
look at the libraries of commentaries the Revolution has produced – but he will not waste precious time on
Revisionism, a subject which does not lie within his traditional sphere of
interest. So here I will try, for the benefit of my reader, to prune
Revisionism to its essentials: no degrees in chemistry or engineering are
required.
II.
The Cabbage Fields of Death
To begin with, we must establish what the Holocaust is. It
consists of three connected historical theses, none of which can be denied
without calling the entire official Holocaust narrative into question. The
first is that Hitler and the NSDAP leadership ordered the extermination of
Europe’s Jews, as outlined in documents such as the Wannsee Protocol of 1942;
the second is that this extermination, which did take place, was accomplished
primarily through gas chambers disguised as showers, and (on the Eastern Front)
mobile gas chamber vans (there was shooting there as well – this is what is
called the ‘Holocaust of bullets’); the third is that six million Jews (or one
third of world Jewry) were killed, five million in Europe (nearly 3.1 million
of them Polish) and one million in occupied Soviet territory. (As to what
happened to the corpses: in Europe, most of these were disposed of in
crematoria, and in the USSR, on bonfires).
Now, at this point, alarm bells should start ringing in my reader’s
head: your first thought may be, ‘Is that what the Holocaust is? What he says
above doesn’t sound right’. In fact, the above sounds a little… implausible, and
I may be accused of twisting the story in order to give it that slant. But I
can assure the reader that I have given a factual account. The problem of ‘ringing
alarm bells’ comes from the fact that the Holocaust story in itself sets up a
cognitive dissonance. The lay person who believes in it thinks, ‘Yes, I give
this gas chamber story credence because every single book, newspaper, movie, TV
show in the world says that it happened; besides which, there are plenty of
witnesses who have been there, saw it happen, met Doctor Mengele, and have a
tattoo on their forearms’. But on the fringes of their conscious awareness
lurks another thought: ‘From my basic knowledge, most mass murders in the 20th
were carried out through starvation, disease and overwork, and to a lesser
extent, through shooting and decapitation. I can’t understand why the Germans
went about it in such a laborious and inefficient manner, why they used exotic
weapons such as the gas chamber, and why they went to so much trouble to
dispose of millions of corpses – wasn’t there a war on?’. This can lead to a
real conflict in the mind of every person who thinks over the Holocaust for
himself.
That conflict is compounded when you learn that the
Holocaust story we hear today is a cleaned-up version of the original. Take
this news article from the Ohio newspaper, the Youngstown Vindicator, from February
2, 1945 – a few days after the liberation of Auschwitz: ‘Reds liberate
thousands in torture plant – Report says Soviets find “Nazi death factory” in south
Poland’. Pravda correspondent Boris Polevoy tells us
Dissatisfied with early methods of execution by which
victims were machine-gunned in trenches which they themselves had dug, the Germans
‘increased production by mechanizing the murder plant', Polevoy said.
Perhaps the most elaborate apparatus was an electric conveyor
belt on which hundreds of persons could be electrocuted simultaneously, then
moved on the belt directly into furnaces.
‘They were burned almost instantly, producing fertilizer for
near-by cabbage fields’, Polevoy said.
The above sounds like something taken out of a pulp novel,
comic book or adventure movie. And it comes from an impeccable source: a Soviet
journalist attached to Pravda (which is, incidentally, a Russian word meaning ‘truth’)
who was there when the Russians liberated the camp. Peculiarly enough, most of
the best evidence we have for the Holocaust -
the wartime reports of Polish exile and Jewish
groups, and the evidence heard at the Nuremberg trials - abounds with tales of
mass killings carried out by the Germans using cartoonish murder methods. (In
the Nuremberg trial transcripts of June 1946, we read that the prosecutor
Robert H. Jackson accuses the Germans of killing 20,000 Jews at Auschwitz with
an atomic bomb).
Holocaust narratives from this period tend to deconstruct
themselves, and the Youngstown Vindicator is a case in point. It starts off
well enough, with descriptions which tally with the contemporary accounts we
have all heard of the liberation of the camps and the discovery of the atrocities
there; it speaks of ‘several thousand tortured, emaciated inmates’, who were ‘ghost-like
apparitions blown to the ground by the slightest breeze, ageless and sexless’,
of trains arriving in 1941, 1942, 1943 filled with ‘Russians, Poles, Jews,
Czechs, French and Yugoslavs’ who were ‘jammed in sealed cars’. So far so good,
as this accords with the footage we have all seen of the liberation of Dachau
and Bergen-Belsen. But then we read something which sounds a little dubious: ‘Dozens
of square miles are saturated with human blood and literally blanketed with
human ashes’. Then: ‘The main department was the “smelting furnace” where,
after elaborate torture, victims were burned’. Finally we come to the electrified
conveyor belt which, after killing ‘hundreds’ of victims, drops them off into a
furnace which then turns them into fertiliser for the Auschwitz cabbage
gardens. All this could have happened, but seems highly unlikely.
It raises the question as to what the men who put these
stories together were thinking: did they really believe that newspaper-reading
public was that stupid? They must have, and furthermore, they were correct in
their assumption: Europeans and Americans at that time accepted whatever
appeared in a newspaper or book as gospel. But one cannot argue with success:
mixing in absurdities with facts worked for the Allied and Russian
propagandists of the time. In this sceptical age, they would have been howled
down.
III.
The Sand Book
In most essays on the Holocaust, the Holocaust Revisionist
will attempt to refute it by reference to forensics, documents and demographics.
Here I will not take this route: that is, I will not attempt to ‘refute’ the
Holocaust, and as stated before, I will not be discussing autopsies of concentration
camp cadavers or the chemical composition of samples taken from Auschwitz
chamber walls. I will instead talk about how the Holocaust relates to the
Jewish religion.
The most remarkable thing about the Holocaust story is that it
matches – to an extraordinary degree – prophecies made in the Babylonian Talmud
which were written some 1500 years ago. According to the Talmud, at some time
in the future, Gentiles will murder a vast number of Jews by throwing them into
ovens and burning them to death. But dead does not mean dead in this case, as the
murdered Jews will magically return to life, and God, seeing their sacrifice,
will allow them to reclaim the lost Kingdom of Israel. And as to the number of
murdered Jews, it is – as you may have guessed – six million. The name given to
this event, it is, of course, the Holocaust. (The word Holocaust means ‘burnt
offering’ or ‘holy sacrifice’ or ‘burnt offering to God’, and it comes from the
Greek word kauston, which means ‘to
burn’).
The below 4Chan post sums it up:
Elie Wiesel in his autobiographical novel Night (1960)
records that the Germans tried to kill him four times at Auschwitz, once by throwing
him into a giant fire pit in the ground (which he miraculously survived). Wiesel’s
use of this image – a Jewish man being thrown into a pit of fire, from which he
emerges unscathed – is no accident, as Wiesel
studied the Torah as a youth and evidently incorporated imagery from the Talmud
into his account. (Jewish folk literature influenced the writings of Wiesel and
other survivors as well: Jewish folk tales often depict extraordinary
persecution of Jews by Gentiles and are coloured by an absurdist and surreal
tinge. We could call the strange quality of these stories ‘Kafkaesque’, but that would
be putting the cart before the horse, as according to the arguments of some literary
scholars, much of Franz Kafka’s work stems from motifs drawn from Jewish
folklore).
A number of points arise from all this.
1.
These Talmudic passages explain why the number
of Jewish fatalities always stands at six million. If you compare the death
toll from, say, the Great Leap Forward in China, or the famine in Ukraine in
the early thirties, you see all sorts of figures bandied about. As a science,
demography does not always gives us the precision we would like, and it would
stand to reason, then, that the Holocaust death toll would fluctuate. But no:
it always stays the same. And it must stay the same, because otherwise it would
not conform to the prophecy of the Talmud.
2.
We also have the same explanation as to why the
official Holocaust narrative insists that the majority of corpses were disposed
of in ‘ovens’ and by burning. (Now, crematoria differ from ovens, but the
Talmud – if the Holocaust narrative is true – gets it mostly right). The six
million needed to be ‘burned’ for the ‘burnt offering’, the ‘burnt sacrifice’,
to take place.
3.
If the Germans in WWII did not murder six
million Jews, and did not throw the corpses into giant ovens, then reality did
not conform to the prophecy, and Zionist Jews – that is, the Jews who wanted to
create the lost Kingdom of Israel – have pulled a fast one on God. If I were
God, I would be displeased by this, and if I were today’s Jews, I would fear
their God’s wrath – as their God, to judge by what is written about Him in the
Old Testament, sounds like a vengeful fellow. The Holocaust is sustained by the
active belief of Jews and non-Jews, which is why the ‘Jewish community’ seeks
to outlaw disbelief in it.
4.
The death and resurrection narrative of the
Talmud prophecy explains why so many Jews have ‘survived’ the Holocaust. Given
that over one million people died in Auschwitz, survivors of the camp should be
as rare as hen’s teeth, and yet, they are legion, and they all have the same
story to tell (they all dodged the gas chambers by a whisker, they all met and
spoke to Dr Mengele, etc.). To take an analogy from WWII: we know that, according
to the official historical record, only a few thousand German soldiers survived
the encirclement and destruction of the 200,000 men in the German Sixth Army at
Stalingrad in the winter of ’42 – ’43, but let us suppose that soldier after
soldier from the Sixth Army had turned up alive straight after that
catastrophic defeat: I would begin to doubt either the official record or at
least those soldiers’ claims that they had served in the Sixth Army. And yet,
when it comes to Holocaust survivors (and Auschwitz survivors in particular),
we are not allowed to express any such doubt. The most puzzling thing is that starvation,
exposure and overwork in any death camp (with or without gas chambers) would destroy
one’s body and lower one’s life expectancy severely, and yet, many of the
Auschwitz survivors have lived to a ripe old age some seventy years after the
event. But all this can be explained by the religious aspect of the tale. The
facts have changed to conform with the religion, because according to the
Talmud, millions of Jews must survive the immolation so as to reclaim Israel.
And so we must overlook the self-contradictoriness of this miracle.
5.
You cannot believe in the Holocaust without
believing at the same time, in Judaism. Suppose that someone tells you that
they are not Christian, that they do not subscribe to Christian religious
beliefs, but at the same time declares that they believe single word in the
Book of Revelations, and that the apocalypse foretold in there is just around
the corner – then they would be guilty of a self-contradiction. People who
believe in the Holocaust – which is mostly everyone – find themselves in the
same boat as that Christian. If they believe that one part of the Talmud is
true, then they must believe in the rest – all 22 volumes of it. They are,
rightly understood, Gentile followers of Judaism, and they must accede to the
creation of the State of Israel in 1948 as it was, after all, God’s will.
We understand, now, why the IHRA and other Jewish groups see
Holocaust denial as an attack on Jewish identity. The Holocaust can be
identified with not only Zionism, but Judaism itself – it can be said
constitute the very essence of both. If you deny the Holocaust, you deny
Judaism and Israel’s right to exist.
The consequence of this is that, if the
Holocaust was disproved and the story was no longer believed in, Israel would
be forced to give back the West Bank to the Palestinians, and may even cease to
exist altogether - a happy outcome for the Left, which for the most part seems
to regard Israel as the most racist and evil state in the world.
IV.
The Bourgeois Influence
But even if, as in the above scenario, Israel were to
vanish, and the Palestinians were to be liberated – and have their homeland
returned to them – leftists would be aggrieved, as the worldwide spread of
Holocaust Revisionism would give a great impetus to the German nationalist
(that is, Neo-Nazi) cause and strike a blow against anti-Nazism and
anti-fascism. In the past forty years, the opponents of German National
Socialism – which is just about everybody of any political persuasion – have,
in their efforts to prosecute German National Socialism and propagandise as to
why it is a bad thing, invested nearly all of their resources in the Holocaust
story. Anti-Nazism has come to pivot on the Holocaust, whereas, during the war,
it did not. A survey of all the books, articles, plays, movies, novels, museum
exhibitions on the Holocaust will reveal that it only attained its prominence
in the decades following the war: as the 4Chan post indicates, while plenty of
references to the Holocaust of the Jews and the six million Jewish dead-to-be proliferate
in the media dating all the way back to the 19
th century, the
Holocaust did not by and large enter the public consciousness until around the
1970s, when it became the central exhibit in the prosecution case against
German National Socialism and the main reason for opposing German fascism and
for supporting the State of Israel. And because almost everything anti-Hitler
is tied up in the Holocaust story, once the buttress which is the Holocaust is
removed, the case against National Socialism collapses, and National
Socialism’s opponents will need to cast around for other reasons to damn it.
The left-wing reader will interject at this point and note that
the Left long opposed German fascism before the Holocaust was said to have
occurred, and this is true enough, but the Left in 2019 in its current polemics
against fascism has largely forgotten the antifascist writings of the Stalin-Trotsky
era; it has come to rely overly much on wartime and post-war atrocity
propaganda. The problem with that strategy is that once one experiences doubt
regarding the Holocaust, one begins to doubt the associated atrocity stories as
well. Take, for example, the case of the unfortunate SS man Oswald Pohl who was
convicted at Nuremberg – and then hung – for, among other things, steaming to
death inmates of Treblinka in ten steam chambers and making doormats out of
their hair. (The steam chambers also appeared in the acclaimed work The Black
Book: The Nazi Crime against the Jewish People (1946), in which the Germans
were accused of parboiling, frying, electrocuting, and gassing Jews, and also
suffocating them to death in vacuum chambers). It is possible that, even if the
gas chambers never existed, the steam chambers may have, but that seems
unlikely given the lack of hard forensic evidence for both. Could it be, then, that
the prosecutors at Pohl’s trial were making it up? And the Jewish groups who
authored The Black Book? And what of the wider claims such as the one made by
the Poles, who insist (even to this day) that, during the war, the Germans
gassed three million Poles as well as over three million Jews? As the Holocaust
story unravels, the circumference of doubt widens.
How does all this relate to the Left? The Left has bought
the entire Holocaust narrative for what seems to me to be two reasons.
The first is that the Left (and here I run the risk of
alienating the left-wing reader) may pride itself upon being free-thinking,
rational, and ‘red-pilled’, with the ability to see through the lies
perpetuated by the bourgeois and capitalist political and economic system, but
the truth of the matter is that it is not as free-thinking and
independent-minded as it believes itself to be. It has been more influenced by
the Western ‘bourgeoisie’ than it acknowledges. To explain. After the Russian
liberation of the camps in Eastern Poland, the Soviet Union helped get the death
camp propaganda ball rolling with breathless reports of German atrocities: Red
Army war correspondent Vasily Grossman reports that large numbers of Jews were
murdered in a basement in Treblinka, in an Edgar Allen Poe-esque ‘chamber of
moving knives’ that cut the Jews into pieces; the bodies were cut up, burned
and piled into heaps of ashes ‘twenty to twenty-five metres high’. (He also
describes ‘In one place Jews had been chased into a pond full of acid… Their
screams were so terrible that local peasants abandoned their homes’). But, even
though the Soviets turned camps such as Auschwitz into exhibits of fascist
crimes, communists in Eastern and Central Europe after the Nuremberg trials
seemed largely uninterested in pushing the death camp narrative further: they
did not convert it into the Holocaust narrative we are familiar with today. No:
it was the Western half of Europe, and America, and the ‘bourgeoisie’ there,
that founded the Holocaust story and perpetuated it through an endless campaign
of Holocaust ‘education’ (really, indoctrination) which seemed to have reached
a peak in the 1990s. The Left in Western countries received the full brunt of
this along with everyone else, and it would have been a miracle had the Left
not been sucked in by the Holocaust story (I myself remember being profoundly
moved watching Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) in the cinema). This highly sophisticated campaign was carried out with a political intent. It goes
without saying that the Jewish groups that sponsored the films, exhibits,
museums, plays, etc., were all fervently pro-Israel. After all, the underlying message of
Holocaust ‘education’ is that the Palestinians will simply have to put up with
the theft of their country and their dispossession in the West Bank - because
Nazis, because gas chambers, because the six million, because God gave the Jews
the land. But times have changed. Now, thanks to the Internet, growing numbers
of people (especially insouciant young people) are showing more and more
scepticism towards the Holocaust narrative, and this is despite all the
mandatory Holocaust ‘education’ classes and trips to the local Holocaust
museum. But the Left remains stuck in the 1990s – in the pre-Internet era.
The second reason why the Holocaust narrative holds such
sway amongst the Left lies in the Left’s antipathy to German National Socialism
(that is a given) but also to Germany. Anti-imperialism forms one of the
center-pieces of Marxist doctrine, and Germany, as well as being one of the
founders of Western civilisation, was one of the biggest imperialist powers,
which makes it one of the world’s worst offenders. (In Leninist speak,
‘imperialism’ refers to the white Western countries which partitioned the world
– the coloured world – between them by around 1900; after the onset of the Cold
War, it refers to one country only: America; after the end of the Cold War, it
refers to – take your pick: America? China? Russia?). The Holocaust narrative
fits in neatly with the Marxist narrative: an imperialist and capitalist power
descends into madness and turns on an innocent and helpless minority, and
carries out a cold-blooded extermination of it using the most modern and
advanced industrial methods (insert thought-clichés regarding capitalism,
modernity, etc., here). The Holocaust is what happens when you don’t have
socialism! (Marxist socialism, that is, not the socialism of the ‘national’
kind). It was too easy, too tempting a target. And the fact that the Holocaust
had been carried out by the German National Socialists, among the worst (and
most effective) enemies of Marxism, made the story doubly appealing.
One can understand, then, why the Left normally stays away
from Holocaust Revisionism. But in my view they should embrace it, for the
simple reason that, as it stands, the Holocaust story is an affront to the most
basic standards of reason, evidence, proof.
Suppose that, 75 years ago, a gang of desperadoes rob a
bank which is quickly surrounded by police, and, as what was intended to be a quick
robbery turns into a siege, the gang takes twelve people at hostage, one of whom
dies of a heart attack. The police storm the bank, free the hostages and arrest
the gang and put them on trial – not only for armed robbery, but for
first-degree murder of the person who died from the heart attack (in what
should have been at the most an involuntary manslaughter charge). In addition, the gang are also
charged with the premeditated murder of the eleven other hostages, even though all eleven survived. As evidence
for this mass murder (which never happened), the prosecutors use photographs of
the heart attack victim’s corpse, documents supposedly found at the gang’s
hideout, and a confession coerced out of one of the gang’s members by torture
or threats to his family. The final piece of evidence, which onlookers regard as
the most compelling, is the eyewitness testimony of the eleven murdered people
themselves, who all put in an appearance at the trial. At the conclusion of the trial, the gang members are either sentenced to death or life imprisonment. No-one spoke
up for them – after all, they were admittedly bad characters, had made many
enemies, and should have been in jail for other crimes – and decades later, they are still regarded as guilty, because, among other reasons, the survivors of the siege and their descendants will tell anyone who will listen
how the gang took a dozen people hostage and murdered them in cold blood.
The reader can deduce that the above is an allegory for what
happened to the Germans after the end of the war: the gang of robbers are the
Germans, the police are the Allies and Russians, and the hostages are the Jews
(and perhaps the Poles). I think the story can be used to understand why
precisely it is that the Holocaust story is so objectionable. Standards of
justice and law come into it, and ethics as well – is it right or wrong to use
unjust and unlawful methods to take down a criminal gang? But more important
than that, in my view, is that normal standards of reason, evidence and proof
were breached. We are told that Polevoy’s, Grossman’s, Wiesel’s and Jackson’s
obvious lies are in fact true, and axiomatically true, and anyone who professes
disbelief in them is either insane or a cynical political operator who is
twisting the truth, with malice aforethought, for Adolf Hitler (‘Telling lies
for Hitler’, to quote the title of Richard C. Evans’ book on David
Irving). This brings about a confusion for which ‘cognitive dissonance’ is too
mild a word: a more apt term for it would be a mental rupture which causes a
splitting of the mind. (And there is a word for that: schizophrenia).
But this is
no accident, as theology tells us that confrontation with absurdities and
unreason can assist one in making a leap into religious faith – in the case of the
Holocaust, the Jewish religious faith.
V.
Reactionary and Theocratic
In his now-forgotten book Strategies
of Revolution (1974), Régis Debray surveys some of the insurgencies of WWII
and the post-war period: the anti-Nazi resistance in Europe, Costas-Grivas’
EOKA in Cyprus, the FLN nationalists in Algeria, the 26th July
Movement in Cuba, and the Irgun in Palestine. He writes, ‘The techniques of
underground resistance are one thing, the various ideologies underlying them
quite another’, and characterises the ideology of Irgun as a ‘Reactionary and
theocratic Zionism’.
He sums it up correctly, but his choice of words would, were
he a British Labour Party member today, lead to his expulsion and blacklisting.
The Left in the seventies and eighties could afford to be much more cavalier –
and outspoken – regarding Israel and Zionism than it is now; for one, Holocaust
indoctrination had not quite sunk in and sensitivities to anti-Semitism – real
or imagined – had not been raised to a fever pitch. But now the British Labour
Party has been given over to the ideology of Irgun, and any Labour Party leftist
who disputes that ideology’s ‘Reactionary and theocratic Zionism’ shall be
punished. This state of affairs was brought about, not by Labour’s acceptance
of the IHRA’s definition of anti-Semitism, but by the Left’s acceptance some
forty years ago of the six million, the ovens, the sacrifice to God: the rot
had set in long before Jeremy Corbyn, Momentum, Labour Against the Witchhunt,
Jon Lansman...
What, then, is the answer? It certainly is not left-wing
anti-Zionism, which has been going on for a long time. Take, for example, this
essay from over thirty-five years ago, by the American group Line of March:
The root of the problem is that the progressive, anti-imperialist
movement in the US has consistently conciliated Zionism (liberal, ‘progressive’
Zionism of course!) and has refused to break with it as a thoroughly
reactionary and chauvinistic movement that, in order to accomplish its dubious
political goals, has become the handmaiden of imperialism in the Middle East.
Contrary to the biblical nonsense about what God has promised his ‘chosen
people’, Israel has, since its establishment in 1948, constituted, in the main,
a European settler state and an advanced outpost of imperialist interests in
the region. All the fanfare about Zionist ‘socialism’ and kibbutzim (which has
conspicuously faded over the past decade) does not alter this fundamental fact
one iota. [‘The Palestinian Revolution and the Struggle Against Zionism’, Line
of March: A Marxist-Leninist Journal of Rectification #13/14, March-April
1983]
This sounds like something straight out of the Weekly Worker,
and no doubt would be deemed ‘anti-Semitic’ (especially with its reference to ‘biblical
nonsense’) by the IHRA.
In one remarkable passage, we learn that accusations of ‘left-wing
anti-Semitism’ are nothing new:
As Marxist-Leninists we must base our analysis and line on a
concrete class and political assessment of the Jewish community and its
politics. In doing so we can not allow ourselves to be cowed by demagogic
charges of anti-Semitism. Indeed, one of the chief of functions of the Jewish
identity movement so far has been the attempt to hold the left hostage to the
accusation of anti-Semitism. The mythology promoted by such groups as the New
Jewish Agenda is that, at best, the Left has become ‘insensitive’ to anti-Semitism,
that it has abandoned the struggle against it, and that it frequently permits
its opposition to Zionism to spill over into anti-Semitism.
Of course, when warnings on anti-Semitism are raised from
within the Left, they do not take the explicitly reactionary form of the Perlmutters’
arguments. Indeed, they rarely take a concrete form at all. Rather they are
generally raised as a ‘concern’ with the implicit intention of fostering an
ideological conciliation of left wing Zionism. Although unspoken, this, we
believe, is the real ‘concern’ of those who raise the specter of ‘anti-Semitism
on the Left’. And to the extent that the US communist movement lacks a clear
and thoroughgoing line and analysis of the Palestinian revolution and the struggle
against Zionism, we will continue to remain vulnerable to such demagogic
blackmail. [Ibid]
Here we find the theses of left-wing anti-Zionism expressed
with admirable clarity and vigour. And the results, nearly forty years later,
we can all see: Israel is still standing and left-wing Palestinian sympathisers
are still being denounced for anti-Semitism, real or imagined. We can safely
say that for the past forty years the Left has scarcely landed a blow against
the Jewish State and Zionism. Why is this, one may ask? The answer is that they
have not availed themselves of the deadliest weapon against ‘Reactionary and
theocratic Zionism’, and that is Holocaust Revisionism.
