ANTHONY JULIUS AND DEBORAH LIPSTADT RESPOND TO KEN LIVINGSTONE’S ANTI-SEMITISM
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In yesterday’s London Sunday Times, Anthony Julius and Deborah Lipstadt on the latest Livingstone imbroglio:
“Ken Livingstone, who has been suspended from holding office in the Labour Party following his claims that Adolf Hitler supported Zionism, is a provocateur. That is to say: he doesn’t care about the truth.
To respond to him is already to elevate him; to debate him is a waste of time. Self-pitying, self-admiring, he believes himself to be a truth-telling, special-interest-defying, independent-minded maverick. He cannot be persuaded out of these delusions.
The implication is that anti-semitism is best engaged with at the level of reason, or ignored, following a diagnosis of imbecility. The problem with that approach is that it overlooks the fundamentally malicious nature of anti-semitism. Anti-semites have not reached their conclusions by some faulty line of reasoning that can be corrected. As if Livingstone, when presented with the historical record would say: Oh I see! Gosh, I got it wrong!
Livingstone and people like him conform to a familiar pre-1933 – that is to say pre-Holocaust – type of anti-semite. This kind of anti-semite lived among journalists, politicians and others with access to newspapers, radio stations and other public forums. They could be relied upon to see the Jews behind every scandal, to give a “Jewish twist” to any issue of public concern.
When criticised, they dismissed their critics as in the pay of the special interests that they had exposed. Of course their enemies attacked them: didn’t that prove they were on the right track?
They mostly appealed to constituencies liable to resentment at others’ perceived success. They tended to cast themselves as oppositionists, progressives. Their constituents were down, when they should be up. The Jews were up, when they should be down. Why was this so? A ready answer was always provided.
This explains much in Livingstone’s own career. He found his pleasure in anti-semitic asides mostly in the long years of his own political opposition.
The Times, 7 April 2017 There are three questions that have been raised by the sorry affair. The first question is: does anything that Livingstone has said raise any interesting historiographical issues? The answer is no.
The second question is: why is the Labour Party unable to address the shame that his continued membership brings upon it? The answer to that is that his tastes are shared by too large a fraction of the party — or too large a fraction, at least, of its governing bodies.
And the third question: why are we unable to recognise Livingstone for what he is? The answer lies in the history of anti-semitism. If anti-semitism blinds people to the world, then the recent history of anti-semitism has blinded people to its earlier history. Specifically, the Holocaust has blinded us to the pre-Holocaust diversity of anti-semites. There any many species in the anti-semitic bestiary.
Anti-semitism has right-wing versions, but also leftist ones
There are religious versions – principally, Christian versions, and at least one Muslim version; political versions – principally, right-wing versions, but also liberal and leftist ones. And yet Hitler’s programme of genocide has come to define anti-semitism. It is as if the horror of Hitler’s mass murder of Jews has erased the assaults and exclusions, the slurs and defamations that conditioned their existence before Nazism. The pre-Nazi history of anti-semitism has been lost; non-Nazi contemporary anti-semitisms are inadequately acknowledged, when not altogether defined out of existence.
Imagine these various kinds of anti-semites as denizens of an ugly zoo. And imagine that they flourish there, attended by zoo keepers – let them stand as a sympathetic or neutral “state”. At different times, some beasts will flourish more than others. Some will draw the attention of visitors more than others. But they co-exist – the social anti-semites, the progressives, the Christian and Muslim and secular anti-semites, the reactionaries.
Then suppose that one night, while the management of the zoo sleeps, the ugliest and most dangerous of them all, the exterminationist anti-semite, breaks out of his cage and goes on a rampage in the town. After bloody battles, he is destroyed. The zoo itself is wrecked; many of the other beasts die or go into hiding. One or two, appalled by what has happened, abandon their home.
In due course, the townspeople forget about the zoo’s history; they remember only the moment of the rampage. In their minds, where once there was a variety of anti-semites, different in menace and in intensity of conviction, now there is just one type – and he is dead.
Quietly, patiently, with the assistance of the returning zoo keepers, the other beasts begin their work of reconstruction, inviting in other beasts from other zoos. The townspeople stop going to the zoo. And then one day, they wake up to find that it is flourishing once again.”
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