Corbyn isn’t the Problem, he’s a Symptom of It Melanie Phillips see note
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/article4562807.ece
It’s a myth that the left is opposed to fascism – it has always been drawn to power and violence
It reads like satire. Jeremy Corbyn has appointed a convicted arsonist to his team. Lord Watson of Invergowrie was jailed in 2005 by a Scottish court for drunkenly setting hotel curtains alight. The sheriff said Watson presented a “significant risk” of reoffending. Corbyn has now made him spokesman for, of all things, education.
Should one laugh or cry? As a metaphor for the grotesque and incendiary Corbyn ascendancy, this could hardly be bettered. Such is the alarm in security circles about Corbyn that the intelligence services reportedly will censor the information they provide to this opposition leader and putative privy council member. An anonymous serving general has warned that the army “would not allow a prime minister to jeopardise the security of this country”.
At the weekend, Corbyn stepped down as chairman of the Islamist-linked Stop the War Coalition, which also has ties to the Socialist Workers party. The coalition’s website attacks the Queen as someone who “profits from the arms trade” and “lubricates Britain’s wars”.
Like Corbyn’s recent bewildering series of U-turns (he’ll now apparently kneel to the Queen/keep Trident/vote to stay in the EU) that panicky resignation means nothing. He still supports an organisation that backs the West’s enemies while opposing any defence measures against them. Corbyn is not, however, the problem. He is but a symptom of the problem.
The “moderate” left are howling as if they have been taken over by an alien. How can the Labour movement possibly have elected as leader, they wail, a man who supports Hamas and Hezbollah, wouldn’t sing the national anthem and has appointed as shadow chancellor someone who consults Das Kapital for economic guidance? The answer is simple. The “moderate” left themselves made this happen.
For decades, they have taken an ideological axe to the bedrock beliefs in faith, flag and family that underpin British and western society. They promoted mass immigration and multiculturalism. They vilified anyone who stood up for the traditional married family. They discriminated against Christians. They bashed bankers and sentimentalised the anti-capitalist Occupy movement.
They draped themselves in victim culture, told us that western society was racist, sexist, xenophobic and Islamophobic, and made patriotism a dirty word. They demonised America, opposed every anti-terrorist measure and pretended that British and American human rights abuses in the Muslim world were greater than anything the Muslim world had done to the West (or to itself).
They displayed axiomatic prejudice against Israel, while airbrushing from the picture the Palestinians’ antisemitism. They wore their hearts on their sleeves for Irish republicanism, while bashing Ulster Protestants and the British army in Northern Ireland.
Why, then, are they so astonished that Labour now has a leadership that honours terrorists, would destroy western defences and wants to bring down capitalism?
The “moderate” left cannot acknowledge their role in this because, just like comrade Corbyn, their belief in the unchallengeable virtue of their world-view produces a mind-bending syllogism: all that is not left-wing is right-wing; all that is right-wing is bad; and all that is bad is right-wing.
As a result, some “moderate” lefties are claiming that Corbyn’s real outrage is to ally himself with “right-wing” leaders and excesses such as Islamism, oppression of women or antisemitism. But the oppressive Venezuelan regime lauded by Corbyn is a Marxist dystopia; and Hamas or Hezbollah don’t represent any political wing because they are religious fanatics.
Such intellectual contortions tell us that the “moderate” left still don’t get it. The notion that the left are intrinsically opposed to fascism is a myth. Both have the same roots in counter-Enlightenment thinking, particularly 19th-century German Romanticism, which led through mysticism, paganism and environmentalism to Marxism, Stalinism and Nazism.
Like fascists, the left have always been drawn to power and violence. Hence the tyrannies of Stalin and Mao. And as for antisemitism, it was the deracinated Jew Karl Marx himself who believed that society’s “new man” would be created only by repudiating Judaism altogether.
In Labour’s early years, its Methodist roots obscured these unsavoury characteristics. But that tradition of ethical socialism has died out. Now the left have reverted to type. Even if the party removes Corbyn from office, his successor will face the same existential crisis. That’s because the fury being expressed by the “moderate” left over Corbyn is nothing other than Caliban raging at his own reflection.
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