Letters

Ethnoreligious

Tony Greenstein echoes Zionist mendacity about anti-Semitism when he rubbishes my statement that anti-Semitism is “hatred of people of Jewish origin simply for that ethnic origin” (Letters, September 4). His quibble about the word “ethnic” is a red herring. Many people have multiple strands to their identity. Presumably for Greenstein the British state, in its anti-discrimination laws, is wrong to treat Jews as an ethnoreligious group.

His purpose is to broaden the definition of anti-Semitism so that he can smear critics of his own particular type of identity politics as racist. Race and ethnicity are social constructs, but all types of racism involve hatred of those with a particular origin, whether visible (skin colour) or with less obvious characteristics of origin.

His point about the alleged anti-Semitism of Zionists is irrelevant balderdash. It seems they hate some Jews and are unprincipled enough to welcome their becoming victims of racism as a political convenience. This makes them wretches and traitors, but it does not mean they hate all Jews. This is sophistry to provide a basis to expand the boundaries of alleged racism against Jews from hatred of all Jews to dislike or criticism of, or even treachery against, some Jews by other Jews. If he tried to apply it to other sub-groups of the same group, it would be laughed at.

This broadening the definition of racism against Jews, and indeed having a special term (anti-Semitism) that implies racism, but catches broader criticism of subsets of Jews for their behaviour, is insidious. It is linked to notions of Jewish moral superiority, and the special odiousness of this ‘anti-Semitism’ compared to ‘ordinary’ racism: eg, against Arabs. This is itself racist.

Racism generates more racism, so even from a rational Jewish standpoint this is counterproductive. The term ‘anti-Semitism’ should be abandoned, as it is inaccurate scientifically (Arabs are Semites too), as well as having suffered from this definition-creep. We should oppose anti-Jewish racism as much as anti-black, anti-Irish racism, etc. No more, no less. This means hatred of all Jews, blacks, etc. Anything more is a fraud.

Both Greenstein and John Cable (Letters, September 4) show ignorance of the difference between western society and Israel in terms of the impact of the Nazi genocide. Let me state what should be obvious. In western society, this genocide is rightly regarded as an unprecedented horror and a source of shame. Though the younger generation may be a bit hazy about it, this is still true. In Israel, on the other hand, the Holocaust (with a capital H) is akin to a cult. It is perverted into a morality tale to justify the Jewish state and the dispossession of Palestinians. Israel is one of the most unashamedly racist societies on the planet. Every state institution, including state-funded institutions which commemorate the genocide, has the primary purpose of justifying the racist nature of the state.

In decades past, if anyone challenged known facts about the genocide in western societies, it was usually true that they were expressing sympathy for the racism of Hitler. But in Israel, and even chauvinistic Jewish communities elsewhere, to question the way the holocaust is narrated may be the beginning of challenging Zionist racism. Any crack in that worldview may bring light.

John Cable says that holocaust denial is “generally regarded” as anti-Semitic. Today, immigration is “generally regarded” as bad, but that does not make it so. He implies that no other motive for denying the holocaust, or even expressing doubts about aspects of the current ‘generally accepted’ account (in Israel too?) is possible except anti-Semitism, by which I assume he means my correct definition, not Greenstein’s expanded one.

He shows softness on Israel when he dismisses any comparison with Nazi Germany. Israel has not yet exterminated millions of Arabs, but it has stockpiled hundreds of nukes in a region where it has a complete monopoly. This is a threat of genocide that could be greater than Hitler’s. Israel’s terror against the Palestinians is far worse than the oppression of the Jews in Nazi Germany prior to the beginning of extermination, which began in 1941. The most serious pre-war atrocity against Jews in Nazi Germany was the 1938 Krystallnacht, in which 91 people died. Operation ‘Protective Edge’ alone was over 20 times worse. John Cable should consider Tony Greenstein to be “ignorant at best”, as his blog often rightly compares Israeli behaviour with Nazi Germany.

It is nonsense to suggest that there is a mass wave of Jew-hatred in Europe. Hungary and Greece are economically deprived backwaters on the fringes, not central to European capital. In general, the ‘modern’ far right is pro-Israel, and regards Muslim immigrants in the way Jews once were regarded. In several European countries, they have significant Jewish support on the basis of anti-Muslim hatred - including in France, where the far right has been historically anti-Semitic. No-one in their right mind believes that Jews today constitute any threat to the capitalist order, so the basis for ruling class support for anti-Jewish racism has disappeared.

Cable’s point about Naqba denial by people too young for first-hand experience, as opposed to the holocaust, is weak. The holocaust ended in the 1940s. The Naqba was the beginning of the Palestinian catastrophe. ‘Protective Edge’, ‘Cast Lead’ and others are part of the ongoing Naqba.

Greenstein mixes his criticism of Israel with a communalist agenda, and falsifies quotations to smear people. He cherry-picks sentences from Gilad Atzmon to make it appear he was denying the holocaust, when in fact he was questioning an eminent Israeli historian about an event involving a member of his own family. The sentences in italics below were cut out from the passage in Atzmon’s article which Greenstein cited, obviously to give a false impression:

“If, for instance, the Nazis wanted the Jews out of their Reich (Judenrein - free of Jews), or even dead, as the Zionist narrative insists, how come they marched hundreds of thousands of them back into the Reich at the end of the war? I have been concerned with this simple question for more than a while. I eventually launched into an historical research of the topic and happened to learn from Israeli holocaust historian professor Israel Gutman that Jewish prisoners actually joined the march voluntarily. Here is a testimony taken from Gutman’s book:

“‘One of my friends and relatives in the camp came to me on the night of the evacuation and offered a common hiding place somewhere on the way from the camp to the factory … The intention was to leave the camp with one of the convoys and to escape near the gate, using the darkness, we thought, to go a little far from the camp. The temptation was very strong. And yet, after I considered it all I then decided to join (the march) with all the other inmates and to share their fate’ (Israel Gutman [editor] People and ashes: Book Auschwitz Birkenau, Merhavia 1957).

“I am left puzzled here: if the Nazis ran a death factory in Auschwitz-Birkenau, why would the Jewish prisoners join them at the end of the war? Why didn’t the Jews wait for their red liberators?”

This is a reasonable question to ask in the following context, also omitted from the above:

“It took me years to grasp that my great-grandmother wasn’t made into a ‘soap’ or a ‘lampshade’ ... She probably perished out of exhaustion, typhus or maybe even by mass shooting” (www.gilad.co.uk/writings/truth-history-and-integrity-by-gilad-atzmon.html).

Once widely circulated stories of lampshades and soap being made of murdered Jews in Nazi camps have been shown to be false, according to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. In other words, Atzmon, having discovered he had been lied to about the means used to kill a family member, was raising a reasonable question about an apparent contradiction in the official accounts.

It is malicious to say that the only motive anyone would have for probing such issues is to ‘deny’ that any genocide took place. The underlying assumption is that no embellishment or distortion of the record of the holocaust for reasons of justifying Israeli behaviour could ever be reasonably suspected, and that to raise questions about this makes someone guilty of racism.

This is demented, sectarian hackery. It is also an attack on the Palestinians. Jack Conrad explained why in his book Fantastic reality: “The Israeli state has built the Nazi genocide into a ubiquitous cult. Together, book-nation-land-holocaust forms an ideological quadrinity. Children are indoctrinated into the holocaust cult, relics and heroes are honoured and, in service to the state, it is projected into the realms of metaphysics … The attempted Nazi destruction of European Jewry certainly condones the ‘return’. Dispossessing the Palestinians of their land finds justification in Nazi crimes” (p482).

What Greenstein is doing with this inquisitorial crap is helping the Israeli regime in its tasks of indoctrination, by engaging in vilification of someone questioning their own youthful indoctrination and trying to explore how far it went.

It also appears that the original source of the quote-chopping is Nick Lowdes, the former editor of Seachlight and the leader of Hope Not Hate, an organisation which picketed East London Mosque to stop supposedly ‘extremist’ Palestinians from speaking. So this smear, recycled by Greenstein, comes from a Zionist source.

It is good that Greenstein recommends some excellent books, Abram Leon’s The Jewish question: a Marxist interpretation, and Israel Shahak’s remarkable Jewish history, Jewish religion: the weight of three thousand years. He should take his own advice, and in the case of Shahak in particular, give him credit for originating the use of the term ‘Jewish ideology’ as a broader descriptor of the ideology that drives the Zionist project. Greenstein wrongly credits this to Gilad Atzmon.

He should also give Shahak credit for being among the first to reject the notion that Israel is a colonial project of the imperialist powers, instead addressing the specifically ‘Jewish’ nature of the settler project that created Israel. He was among the first to point out the role of organised diaspora Jews in putting irresistible pressure on these imperialists to adopt slavish pro-Israel policies, even when that contradicts imperialist interests.

Since Tony Greenstein habitually denounces these views as anti-Semitic, I am sure when he has reread the aforementioned work by Shahak he will also be penning a rabid denunciation of this deceased holocaust survivor as a Jew-hater.

Shahak did not, as a non-Marxist, manage to completely explain these questions, which require a materialist analysis. But he did provide a stepping stone for others to do so. I think I have made a reasonable fist of beginning this, submitting a set of theses on The Jews and modern imperialism, to be debated at the September 14 meeting of Left Unity’s Communist Platform. I have also written an extensive critique of the centrist politics of Tony Greenstein, which drives him to wild lies and smear campaigns, as well as unprincipled blocs with Zionists, while maintaining an outspoken posture of support for the Palestinians. Both are available online at http://comunistanueva.wordpress.com.

Finally, with regard to the Socialist Workers Party: unlike these opportunists, I do not capitulate to identity politics, whether it be the kind that makes Greenstein join with Zionists to defame Atzmon, or of the reactionary feminists who the SWP joined in the CIA witch-hunt against Julian Assange. So, no, I don’t regard the SWP’s abandonment of Atzmon as a virtue, but a betrayal: capitulation to imperialism, like their capitulation to the British state over troops in Ireland in 1969.

Ian Donovan
London

Save killer cop?

Comrade Corey Ansel is absolutely correct in his attacks on both Mike Macnair and the Taaffeite Committee for a Workers’ International, “which puts forth the inanity that the cops are ‘workers in blue’” (Letters, September 4). But then he goes and spoils it all by linking “advocating base reformist demands calling for community control of the police, accountability” with the demand to ‘jail killer cops’, which he thinks is so appalling that “groups like the International Bolshevik Tendency” use it.

This may puzzle your readers, who have just witnessed huge riots in Ferguson, Missouri. Their main demand was not, disappointingly, ‘Overthrow the capitalist state and all its institutions and law enforcers’, but justice for the slain teenager, Michael Brown, and jail for that particular killer cop, Darren Wilson, still at large despite clear evidence of the murder he committed. And the group that Corey takes some of his politics from, the International Communist League and its Workers Vanguard, makes roughly the same point in their latest edition.

In attacking the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party they complain: “The RCP writes that … ‘this murderous pig must be charged and taken into custody. Now!’ So the ‘revolutionary’ RCP is fighting for … a good prosecutor to get rid of the bad cop” (September 5).

This is clearly a demand to ‘Save the killer cop’, one I’m sure the Sparts were careful not to voice on the streets of Ferguson. All this madness goes back to a desire to charge the IBT with reformism over the position their supporter, Jack Heyman, put forward in January 2012 over the murder of Oscar Grant in Oakland, California. “Local 10 executive board member Jack Heyman, a central organizer and an emcee of the rally, said, ‘Cops have to go to jail when they commit a crime just like anyone else’.” They were outraged at this and lambasted him for his reformism: “Heyman seizes upon the widespread disgust with the slap-on-the-wrist verdict for Mehserle (the killer cop) to promote the lie that the cops’ capitalist masters will punish their armed thugs if they ‘commit a crime’ … The capitalist rulers are hardly going to punish their own police guard dogs for the crimes they commit in the capitalists’ service. And even if one cop were charged and imprisoned, it wouldn’t stop police terror.”

How absolutely inane can you get? A policeman murders your son or brother and you demand his arrest and jailing and that makes you a reformist! Of course not, this is just indicative of the ever widening gap between the Sparts and the objective reality of how workers live their lives. Trotsky addressed these issues in elaborating his Transitional programme, starting from the present level of consciousness of the working class and leading inexorably to the socialist revolution. But number one: “No justice, no peace” - jail this killer cop, the cops are the capitalist state in uniform. We must get rid of the capitalist state and all its institutions by socialist revolution. You cannot get to the end point without starting at the beginning, as the Sparts would quickly discover if they were brave or foolhardy enough to put their political position into a slogan and demand ‘Save the killer cop’ on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri.

Gerry Downing
London

More critical

I believe your article on Rotherham could have benefited from a more critical approach to Alexis Jay’s report (‘A systemic failure’, September 4). As a UK-based Marxist writer, I have made an analysis of professor Jay’s report into child exploitation at rotherhamabuse.wordpress.com. I show how the story that Asians have carried out abuse on a very large scale in Rotherham is false. The introduction to my article reads:

“On August 26 2014 the report of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham 1997-2013 was published ... The British press declared that the report showed that at least 1,400 children had been sexually exploited in Rotherham, a town of approximately 250,000, over the period in question. The press also stated that the report showed that the majority of those responsible for the exploitation of these 1,400 children were Asian. Professor Jay, however, does not provide evidence that the majority of the abusers in the individual cases she studied were Asian. A close reading shows that her report does not even claim that this is the case.

“In addition, it does not show that 1,400 children were exploited. The report does claim this, but the claim appears to be incorrect due to a confusion between cases where exploitation is suspected by adults and cases where children themselves are reporting exploitation. Whatever the intentions of the author, the report clearly has potential to create serious racial and religious tension, which could harm a large number of British people, old and young, male and female.”

Joseph Ball

Backward

We totally oppose the English Defence League’s vile used of the Rotherham child-sex scandal to attack Muslims. However, that does not mean we ignore the role of a socially conservative religion propagating backward attitudes towards sexual matters - which, seemingly ironically, encourage the treatment of children as sex objects. The Roman Catholic church is a prime example, but all religions have a powerful tendency towards this. And, the more that women are presented as in need of protection, for example, the more there is a tendency towards the ‘pure’ versus ‘slut’ imposed dichotomy, which justifies rape and child sexual abuse.

The Muslim religion has not always been, nor is it today, uniformly censorial. And in practice most Muslims are often far less socially conservative than their ‘community leaders’, whether at mosque or national level. However, the current culture of sections of Muslims is fairly nasty, to say the least. Religion is not the only factor, and neither is ethnic background - for instance, historically the British white working class has had reactionary attitudes to the role if women and children, which are not qualitatively different to those of the Rotherham abusers. In fact, sexual abuse on public transport seems to be increasing, and primarily by white men.

In looking at the failures in Rotherham we need to think about different things - the cuts and ticky-box targets for social workers, the overall nature of children’s services within parameters of seeing children as objects/chattels and ‘a problem’, etc. We also need to find ways to encourage the best people in Muslim and other communities to be able to challenge social conservatism and reactionary ideology and practice.

Alan Theasby
email

Price too high

In the article, ‘Gove, but not forgotten’, Mike Copestake does a good job of analysing Tory and Labour education policies, but I cannot agree with his conclusion (September 4).

He reaches the same conclusion as Jack Conrad did when he first discussed free schools in a podcast - that is, the labour movement should set up free schools; it should ‘make lemonade out of lemons’ rather than return to a ‘dead past’, as suggested by Nick Grant of the SWP. However, while this may sound good, this assertion lacks any development of the real context and strategically makes no sense under present circumstances.

If the labour movement did open free schools, they would be subject to the same centralised controls that all free schools and academies are. They would be subject to league tables and Ofsted inspections. Are Ofsted going to judge the schools fairly if the values they are promoting oppose any government policy? To ask the question is to answer it, as Jack often says. Ofsted are not neutral, but have an agenda to promote government policy. Sure, Ofsted will look the other way if bland moralistic values are promoted, or religious faith values - as long as they coincide with ‘British values’ - but labour movement values of solidarity, collective opposition to injustice? I don’t think so.

Then there is the question of teachers and their conditions of employment. Will labour-movement free schools (LMFS) employ unqualified teachers to teach whole classes? They may be forced to because the funding is likely to be squeezed by future governments. This will mean that LMFS will be forced to have classes larger than the movement has fought for in order to survive or employ unqualified teachers, which they, via the teacher unions, have also fought for. Perhaps voluntary helpers can be brought in to take teachers’ jobs? No. Not a good idea.

Finally, if the free school policy remains, how many LMFS would there be compared to religious free schools? Very few in my opinion. So, let’s imagine LMFS could overcome the difficulties outlined above. How much good would they do, as opposed to the amount of division caused by the likely growth of religious free schools that will be far more numerous? Again to ask the question starts to answer it.

In Waltham Forest we have a new girls’ secondary faith free school. It is being run by the same trust that have banned music in at least one of their other schools. The only students it has are Muslim girls and this is extremely decisive in Waltham Forest. The borough already has two all-girls schools and this means that in some classes in the mixed schools there are less than a quarter girls in each class, making them almost all-boys schools by default. Add to this the number of places lost to other secondary schools and you have big problems: numbers are down, funding is down and redundancies may soon be necessary. This division will increase in Waltham Forest and other areas, as more faith schools or other types of free schools open.

Is this a price worth paying to open LMFS? No, it isn’t. It’s like socialism in one country.

Steve White
email

Sowing the seeds

It was a pity to hear that Danny Hammill did not enjoy my recent talk on Lenin’s Leftwing communism: an infantile disorder (LWC). Or maybe it was that he simply disagreed with it … or that I didn’t make myself understood - his 50-word summary doesn’t make it very clear (‘Debating out differences’, September 4). In either case, I will gladly enter into an exchange on these pages, if comrade Hammill wishes to challenge any arguments that I made or to question their factual basis.

As they are, his brief comments merit three objections:

1. It is inaccurate, or at least a sin of omission, to report that I said that “Lenin sowed the seeds of Stalinism”. I instead referred to Victor Serge’s insight that the Bolsheviks sowed the seeds of many different things in the early days of the Russian Revolution, ranging from new personal freedoms (eg, divorce, homosexuality) to sweeping economic transformation - but also, unmistakably, a ceaseless expansion of arbitrary bureaucratic power. All of these seeds potentially could have grown and flowered, but only some of them ultimately did.

The point of the idea of different seeds being sown is to highlight that, while nationalist-statist degeneration was not inevitably the only possible outcome of October 1917, we really can identify many of its origins in the Lenin period (the Brest-Litovsk treaty, their betrayal of the Turkish communists for the sake of alliance with nationalists, their use of the Comintern as a tool of Russian foreign policy, etc). The seizure of power had the goal of sparking revolutions in other, more important western countries, yet the discourse of the Bolshevik leadership (including Lenin, in LWC) soon replaced this objective, as well as the idea of exemplary social transformations, with a statist project of national reconstruction. Flatly to refuse to recognise the early signs of this strikes me as pig-headed, as well as Trotskyist.

2. Lenin was very much conscious of the exemplary power of what the Bolsheviks were doing. Indeed, some of his writings keenly express this awareness, drawn from his critical reading of the Paris Commune, which issued far-reaching social legislation despite its very brief existence. Yet LWC’s abject defence of cross-class alliances and boundless tactical ‘flexibility’ set a terrible example to future communist parties, and indeed in my talk I described how grateful the popular front-era leaders of Stalin’s Comintern later were to have such a vacuous ‘canonical’ work at hand. This abstract defence of the idea of compromise, mostly directed against straw-man opponents, allows any bureaucrat or opportunist to project onto his schemas whatever intentions of their own they please.

Similarly, I described how Lenin’s consistent refusal to see a connection between means and ends had also had dire consequences when the Bolsheviks destroyed soviet democracy (of ‘All power to the soviets!’ fame) in the months after the Brest-Litovsk treaty, creating a repressive ‘model’ for all 20th century revolutions that discredited the idea of socialism. Not under Stalin, or after 1924 or 1921, but already in 1918-19.

It is tedious to repeat, as Jack Conrad did in his intervention, that Lenin made difficult choices in harsh and unprecedented circumstances. Of course, that is true. But who cares whether the road to the gulag was paved with good intentions? The important thing is to recognise that direct Bolshevik Party control of domestic policy (the soviets no longer able to scrutinise the party) and over the international (the Bolsheviks increasingly dictating terms to the world’s communists, but with no international discussion of ‘Russian’ problems) were utterly disastrous, and that any idea of socialism today must utterly reject the statist and nationalist drift that Lenin’s approach, including in LWC, increasingly expressed.

3. I am not sure that the single International Communist Current comrade present (in comrade Hammill’s words, “even” the sole ICC comrade) did not “enjoy” the meeting, or that he should be treated like some sort of Egon Ronay of whatever’s served up at the left-communist table. In any case, those Weekly Worker readers more interested in the ICC attendee’s political response to my talk, rather than the vexed question of whether he was suitably entertained, can find a report by him at http://bit.ly/1uGb2s7.

David Broder
email

Very silly

“Freak societies” - a Marxist category … or something the CIA might throw about? Or maybe a 12-year-old at the school debating society? Very silly.

Justin O'Hagan
email

England 'yes'

On September 6 a ‘London says yes’ meeting was addressed by former MP and republican socialist Bernadette McAliskey. There were speakers from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and contributions from the Agreement of the People, World to Win, SWP, Socialist Resistance, RS21, Counterfire, Open Democracy, Plaid Cymru, Occupy, Red Pepper, the Green Party and Sons of Malcolm.

The meeting agreed to send a ‘love letter’ to Scotland to be circulated by all possible means. The aim was to make clear that internationalists in England do not support a ‘no’ vote. This is not because of indifference or disinterest in the future of Scotland or because we want to wave goodbye. We hope Scotland votes ‘yes’ because we believe what is better for democracy in Scotland is better for working people in the rest of the UK. A ‘yes’ vote will give the Scottish people the opportunity to decide their own democracy and write their own constitution.

This week a number of significant events occurred. Tory MPs called on the queen to stand up for the ‘no’ camp. The ‘palace’ let it be known she is obviously a committed unionist but can’t openly say so. John Pearson changed sides and came out for a ‘yes’ vote. It is indicative of how the northern working class is moving. Cameron flew the flag of St Andrews over Downing Street. The establishment parties and their leaders, the three stooges, abandoned the Westminster circus and headed north to Scotland.

They are now very afraid that their whole shebang is about to crash. Power will slip out of their control if the Scottish people take the chance on the ‘dangers’ of being able to decide what kind of democracy they want. As the polls narrow, the three stooges are desperately trying to cobble together a devolution offer that will persuade enough voters to fall for it. This ‘hand me down’ scheme designed by civil servants in Whitehall is not fit for the Scottish people.

The unionist case changed from defending the status quo to devo-max. Is it too little, too late? ‘No’ campaigners like George Galloway, Sandy McBurney, Sarah McDonald and the CPGB ‘no’ faction are now ‘D-maxers’. They are probably oblivious to the fact the ground is shifting under their feet. Meanwhile, the CPGB and Left Unity remain sitting on the fence. It is so close that the Weekly Worker line may be decisive.

Many people in England are appalled at the disgraceful bullying by George Osborne and the rest of them, threatening to steal the currency and exclude Scotland from the European Union. If Scotland is a new country then so is the rest of the UK. All should be in or all out. What about the outrageous threats to jobs in Scotland made by the Tories? Nothing new there then.

The 1707 Act of Union does not keep us together. On the contrary its continuation will drive us apart, not least because of the Tory and Labour bullying tactics. We are together because of geography, language, common history, trade, marriages, friendships, trade union organisation and the free movement of people between our countries. None of this will change if Scotland votes ‘yes’.

Today in the 21st century the 1707 Act of Union is a barrier to the people of Scotland becoming a full and sovereign democracy. Break it down, burn it down, vote it down. If Scotland takes this major step forward, then we in England will have to follow. Greater democracy, if it comes from the people, will improve all our lives.

As free peoples we will become even closer in our hearts and minds. Internationalism is not defending Queen Anne’s bloody Act of Union, but mobilising workers in England to support the democratic movement in Scotland and protest against the bully-boy tactics of the British ruling class.

Steve Freeman
LU Scottish Republic Yes tendency