Leftwing antisemitism is anything but a new phenomenon, says Daniel Hannan. The same could be said of Hannan’s own side of the political divide.
Leftwing antisemitism is anything but a new phenomenon, says Daniel Hannan. The same could be said of Hannan’s own side of the political divide
Dashing through the Reich, killing lots of Kike; that particularly loathsome couplet forms one line in a catchy little number reportedly popular at Oxford University Conservative Association piss-ups a few years ago.
No-one expects undergraduate drinking song lyrics to conform to the highest standards of political correctness, or even the minimum norms of good taste, come to that.
But this one – I’m guessing from the meter that it runs to the jaunty tune of Jingle Bells – is patently as nasty as they get.
Presumably the ditty was not current among the future leadership cadre of Britain’s main party of government when Daniel Hannan was OUCA president in the early 1990s.
I say that because Mr Hannan, currently a Tory MEP, and something of a poster boy for the eurosceptic right, is unwavering in his determination to root out antisemitism wherever he finds this archaic prejudice.
And the main place where he does find it is on the left, as he makes clear in a recent blog post on the Telegraph website.
By stringing together multiple quotes by historical figures ranging from Marx to Hitler – in Hannanland, you see, Hitler was a socialist – he tries to establish that a propensity to this vile prejudice forms part of the our common political inheritance.
Generously, he does concede that progressive opposition to Israel’s brutal onslaught on Gaza should not automatically be equated with a racist attitude towards Jews. However, this is, if nothing else, an easy mistake to make.
‘Supporters of Israel can be too quick to make the elision,’ he tells us. ‘Then again, they have understandable cause.’
Read the piece yourself. Hannan’s tactic is to select sayings from any long-dead arbitrarily-chosen individuals that come to hand, including ideologically eclectic oddballs who could just as easily be pegged as rightists rather than leftists, and then sit back and chalk up QED.
Yet somehow, he is strangely unable to cite a single significant thinker on the contemporary mainstream left who would use such words today.
The most he can hang on us is that a bunch of unknown Occupy activists have been filmed regurgitating Jewish banker conspiracy theory nonsense on homemade placards, while an obscure pro-Chavez Venezuelan publication of which nobody had previously ever heard once ran a dodgy article. Newsflash; neither of these cases is remotely representative, Daniel.
What is more, the same methodology could just as well be applied to Hannan’s own side of the political divide. For most of the previous century, the Conservative Party harboured not just antisemitic individuals at the highest levels, but organised antisemitic currents among its rank and file.
Organised antisemitism in Britain began with the British Brothers League, which from 1902 onwards mobilised the population of East London against Jewish immigrants seeking safety from the pogroms in their home countries.
It’s leaders included two Conservative MPs, Major Sir William Evans-Gordan and Howard Vincent; its actions laid the ground for such mercifully minor successes as the British Union of Fascists, the Union Movement and the National Front were to enjoy in the East End in the decades that followed.
If you want chapter and verse on antisemitism in 1930s Toryism – not to mention its frequent overt enthusiasm for fascism – look no further than Richard Griffiths’ excellent 1980 book Fellow Travellers of the Right.
To take just one example – and there are many, many more – Conservative MP Archibald Maule Ramsay headed an explicitly antisemitic organisation that went by the name of the Right Club. That’s right, Daniel; the Right Club, not the Left Club.
Its aims were to ‘oppose and expose the activities of organised Jewry’, including alleged Jewish control of the Conservative Party.
Conservative prejudice against Jews run up to world war two was not confined to the wingnuts, either. As even sympathetic reviewers point out, biographers of future prime minister Harold Macmillan show up the man’s almost casual antisemitism.
The most notorious example is Macmillan’s putdown of Jewish cabinet colleague Leslie Hore-Belisha as ‘Horeb-Elisha’, a reference to the mountain on which the Ten Commandments were handed down to Moses.
Macmillan and other senior Tories, including Viscount Cranbourne, eventually forced Hore-Belisha out of office in 1940, in the belief that his support for the war was primarily premised on his support for fellow Jews.
In the postwar period, Andrew Fountaine came within a few hundred votes of delivering Chorley to the Conservatives in the 1950 general election, despite giving a speech at party conference only months before, deriding the number of Jews with prominent positions in British public life.
His name may be familiar if you have read any of the literature on British fascism; Fountaine later become part of the central leadership of the National Front.
In more or less the same period, another organisation that wound up as part of the NF – the heavily anti-semitic League of Empire Loyalists – functioned as an unofficial ginger group inside the Conservative Party.
The British Brothers League, the Right Club and the League of Empire Loyalists were never mass forces, of course. The point is that in all cases, their originators found within the Conservative Party a sympathetic milieu in which to grow.
To the best of my knowledge, there are no counter examples of organised antisemitic tendencies of this kind inside the Labour Party, the British labour movement, or even the Marxist left.
Nor is Tory antisemitism entirely ancient history. As late as 1982, the oafish and odious Alan Clark was confiding in his diaries about the sport to be had by indulging in public Jew-baiting during the ennoblement of Sidney Bernstein, who declined to take the Christian oath.
Meanwhile, Supermac was to pop up again in the Thatcher years, famously branding her cabinet ‘more old Estonian than old Etonian’, by way of a less-than-subtle dig at the ancestry of Nigel Lawson, Leon Brittan and Michael Howard.
Much has changed since then, of course. The Colonel Blimp element in local level Conservative Associations is dead and buried, and David Cameron has made genuine efforts to distance the Nasty Party from UKIP-style fruitcake racism.
Yet knowledge that Tory students drunkenly extol the pleasures of ‘killing lots of Kike’ underlines that the brand is some way from detoxification yet.
Admittedly, holding them up as indicative of the mood in the party as a whole is unfair; just about as unfair as Hannan’s attempt to portray a bunch of New York trustafarian stoners as typical lefties, in fact.
To flip his blog post title back at him, rightwing antisemitism is anything but a new phenomenon, either.
David Osler is a London-based journalist and writer
80 Responses to “The antisemitic traditions of the Tory Party”
John
Too often, people simply infer their argument, or use other people’s research to occlude the weakness of their own argument.
This is especcially true in comments made on news, blogs and articles where people do not hold themselves to the standards of academic discourse.
I challenge it where I see it in order to ascertain whether the person commenting has constructed an argument of their own or is merely repeating anothers (often without checking or validating the original argument).
Otherwise the internet becomes nothing more than people saying what others want to hear.
with regards to the article I did read it. I agree with the facts contained therine, but the insinuation the current generation must, in some way, be ashamed of its past Is disingenous in the extreme. Beyond which, if we were to get into a contest of who screwed up the most, the right would definately come out the worse; after all they’ve been in power longer (and thus have more documented mistakes).
So the whole basis of the article is irrelevant.
Cole
The idea that Hitler was left wing is one of the madder notions of the far right, probably imported from the US.
Reco2
leftist Jews largely founded the modern left
Founder of Marxism: Karl Marx-grandson of Jewish rabbi
Founder of Social Democracy: Ferdinand Lassalle: German Jew
Founder of Zionism: Moses Hess-a radical leftist who was a colleague of Karl Marx.
Leader of the communist Spartacus: Rosa Luxemburg (Polish-Jewish-German Marxist theorist
Leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising:
Marek Edelman,
Mordechai Anielewicz
Founder of Israel: David Ben-Gurion: member of the extreme leftwing Mapai party
etc. etc.
Compared to the Right?
The first government that implemented privatization in the 20th century: http://www.ub.edu/graap/bel_It…
Benito Mussolini-Manifesto of Race: Discriminated against Jews
The government that coined the term privatization and implemented it on a vast scale: http://www.ub.edu/graap/nazi.p…
Boycott of Jewish Business, Nuremburg Racial Laws, Holocaust etc. etc.
One
of the first people to urge a return to “active and courageous
entrepreneurship” after the war: Otto Ohlendorf head of the
Einsatzgruppe D
The worst Jews haters have always been rightwing.
quizblorg
“Yet somehow, he is strangely unable to cite a single significant thinker on the contemporary mainstream left who would use such words today.
The most he can hang on us is that a bunch of unknown Occupy activists have been filmed regurgitating Jewish banker conspiracy theory nonsense on homemade placards, while an obscure pro-Chavez Venezuelan publication of which nobody had previously ever heard once ran a dodgy article. Newsflash; neither of these cases is remotely representative, Daniel.”
How about the founder of the Occupy movement (and of Adbusters magazine) writing an article titled “Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish?”
How about Ken Loach saying that antisemitism was “understandable”?
How about Ken Livingstone engaging in classic antisemitic tropes about “wealthy Jews”, and Jewish media influence?
How about Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler openly expressing support for the genocidal antisemites of Hezbollah?
How about MEP Gianni Vattimo saying that Jews control the Federal Reserve, and that he would like to shoot Zionists?
How about Naomi Klein saying that “[some Jews] even think we get one get-away-with-genocide-free-card”?
How about Johan Galtung, founder of peace and conflict studies, engaging in conspiracy theories about Jewish world control, and defending the Protocols?
Dave Roberts
And of the left?