Socialism in the United States – Is it making a Come Back?

Focus on Milwaukee and Chicago – Can the United States put the Cold War and McCarthyism behind it?

Bernie Sander’s challenge for the Democratic Party’s nomination in 2016 was unique for a number of reasons, not least for the fact that he was the first mainstream Presidential contender to openly call himself a socialist. The fact that he nearly won the contest was remarkable, especially given that ‘Crooked’ Hilary and her friends openly cheated.

Whereas Europe has had a tradition of strong socialist and communist parties in the United States such parties have always been confronted with a virulent anti-communism. Attacks against labour unions and the right to organise have been particularly vicious in the USA.

Sacco and Vanzetti

Frank Little of the Industrial Workers of the World was lynched in August 1917 by six thugs who pulled him out of his bed and Joe Hill was judicially murdered in Utah in 1915. Twelve years later two Italian born anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti, were again judicially murdered on trumped up charges in Massachussetts.

Nonetheless the United States has had a rich socialist history of class struggle such as in the car factories of Detroit in the 1930’s. In 1912 when Eugene Debbs stood for President he got nearly a million votes and 6% of the vote.  In 1920 he stood again and got nearly a million votes but just 3.4%.

The first Red Scare was in the first World War when Debb’s Socialist Party opposed the draft. A speech in Canton Ohio on June 16 1918 at the end of the war when Debs declared that:

“The working class have never yet had a voice in declaring war. If war is right, let it be declared by the people – you, who have your lives to lose.”

led to a prosecution under the Sedition Act and Debs being sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, of which he served 32 months before being pardoned.

Debs campaigning for President in 1912

In the post-war period McCarthyism and anti-Communist hysteria led to a witch-hunt of supporters of all progressive and radical politics.  This was depicted by Arthur Miller in The Crucible, which was ostensibly about the Salem Witchhunt. People like Pete Seeger and Charlie Chaplin were victims of the determination of the American Right to root out anyone who was seen as an opponent of US imperialism and its war machine.

It was only with the movement against the Vietnam War that radical and socialist organisations began to resurface and grow. Nonetheless the American political environment is very different from that in Britain or Europe.  There is no equivalent to a mass social democratic or Labour Party.  Instead there are two capitalist parties – Republican and Democrat.

The Democrats were originally the party of Dixieland, the KKK and White Supremacy. In the 1950’s and 1960’s it became the party of civil rights and an end to segregation and the Big Society.  This caused a rupture in its southern base with the Democratic Governor of Alabama, George Wallace, running an independent campaign for US President in 1968 having coined the slogan 5 years earlier ‘segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever’. Wallace won 5 states in the Deep South.

Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes

In the Congressional elections last year, Bernie Sanders, the Independent Senator for Vermont was joined in Congress by two members of the Democratic Socialists of America Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and the Palestinian-American Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. It has to be said that the DSA are a social democratic not a Marxist party. Class struggle is not to the fore in their politics.

Nonetheless this has provoked a backlash. In his State of the Union address, Donald Trump railed against the advance of socialism. when he warned that

“Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country. ... Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country”

Not only Congressional Republicans but Nancy Pelosi joined in the applause!

An article in The Hill by Paris Dennard, a CNN political commentator and former Bush official explained:

‘The Democratic Party continues to go further to the extreme left. Their latest clarion call is the idea of "Democratic Socialism." Socialism by any other name is still socialism, and trying to infiltrate it into our modern political process and system of government is dangerous. 

There is no doubt that this new rise of socialism found in the base of the Democratic Party is a flawed economic ideology that must be challenged by all Americans who support free enterprise....

This is, of course, what the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign and the launch of Chuka Ummuna’s now failed TIG was all about.  Making the Labour Party into a safe party of capitalism.

Below are two interesting articles on socialism in Milwaukee and the Democratic stronghold of Chicago, home to the infamous Mayor Daley.

Tony Greenstein

When Socialism Was Tried in America—and Was a Smashing Success

For much of the 20th century, Milwaukee was run by socialists—and Time magazine called it “one of the best-run cities in the U.S.”

April 6, 2019 John Nichols The Nation

Dan Hoan, Milwaukee’s mayor from 1916 to 1940. (Milwaukee Public Library / Historic Portrait Collection), (Milwaukee Public Library / Historic Portrait Collection)

“If I owned all the real estate in the world, I wouldn’t feel so powerful as I do on the streets of this socialist city,” declared former New York City councilman Baruch Vladeck when he arrived in Milwaukee in 1932 for the Socialist Party’s national convention in that city.

Norman Thomas, the famed civil-rights and economic-justice campaigner who became the party’s presidential nominee that year, celebrated the fact that he was chosen for that honor in a city governed by Socialists. The success of Milwaukee under then-Mayor Dan Hoan, Thomas said, was proof that the party’s social-democratic “dreams will someday come true.”

“Someday” was dramatically delayed by the results of the 1932 elections. The Socialist ticket did well, securing almost 900,000 votes nationwide and registering its highest percentage of the total vote in Wisconsin. The winner of that year’s race, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, took notice: He met with Thomas after the election and borrowed liberally from proposals that had long been championed by the Socialists—for a Social Security system, unemployment compensation, strengthened labor unions, and public-works programs. Roosevelt’s New Deal took the wind out of the Socialist Party’s sails in the national arena, but the party remained a force in Milwaukee for decades to come.

Now that Milwaukee has been selected as the host city for another national convention—that of the Democrats in 2020—Republicans have suddenly discovered its history. “No city in America has stronger ties to socialism than Milwaukee,” griped Wisconsin Republican Party director Mark Jefferson. “And with the rise of Bernie Sanders and the embrace of socialism by its newest leaders, the American left has come full circle. It’s only fitting the Democrats would come to Milwaukee.” Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson said the Milwaukee convention would provide a “firsthand look” at “the risk of Democrat socialistic tendencies.”

Apart from the fact that Wisconsin’s top Republicans don’t seem to like the state—or its history—very much, the GOP response is comic. Many Wisconsinites know that their state has a long, rich socialist tradition, and that Milwaukee’s association with it is one of the coolest things about the city. It even earned a mention in the movie Wayne’s World, when rocker Alice Cooper explains, “I think one of the most interesting aspects of Milwaukee is the fact that it’s the only major American city to have ever elected three Socialist mayors.”

The Democratic Party is not a socialist party, but the delegates to its 2020 convention might nominate a democratic socialist, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, for president. And when they convene in Wisconsin’s largest city next summer, they shouldn’t hesitate to take the Republicans up on their call to highlight lessons from Milwaukee’s Socialist past. Doing so will strengthen the hand of the party’s eventual nominee, whether it’s Sanders or another of the contenders, all of whom will surely be labeled “socialist” by Donald Trump and his troll army.

Instead of fearing mention of the S-word, Democrats can and should approach it as smart Republicans have the L-word—“libertarian.” Republicans frequently borrow from the libertarian lexicon and toolbox, and acknowledge as much, without abandoning their essential partisanship. Democrats ought to be similarly limber. It’s great that the party now has a strong democratic-socialist wing, which includes Sanders and members of Congress like New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib. But Democrats who do not identify as socialists can still follow the lead of FDR and the late senator Edward Kennedy, who worked closely with and celebrated the ideas and ideals of democratic socialist Michael Harrington, author of The Other America, a groundbreaking study on poverty. Another 2020 Democratic presidential contender—Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana—gets it right when he says that the old Republican strategy of attaching a “socialist” label to every progressive idea is just that: old. “Today, I think a word like that is the beginning of a debate, not the end of the debate,” explains the most millennial of the Democrats’ presidential prospects.

Buttigieg says that the S-word has “lost its ability to be used as a kill switch on debate,” arguing: “If someone my age or younger is weighing a policy idea, and somebody comes along and says, ‘You can’t do that—it’s socialist,’ I think our answer is going to be, ‘OK, is it a good idea or is it not?’”

Polling tells us that young voters are more comfortable with socialism than capitalism. Older voters may still be susceptible to Republican appeals rooted in Cold War hysteria, but the challenges posed by the existential crisis of climate change and the radical transformation of our economy in an age of AI-driven automation are going to make everyone far more open to radical responses. And many of the best of these—especially those that call for expanding the social-welfare state—will draw from historic and contemporary socialist thinking.

Democrats can get ahead of the curve and disarm Trump and the trolls by embracing the opportunity that Milwaukee offers to talk about socialism as it has existed and succeeded in the United States. For American socialists in the 20th century, Milwaukee was a political mecca, a city that tested and confirmed the validity of their ideas. Vladeck, then the manager of The Jewish Daily Forward (these days known simply as The Forward), called it an example of “the America of tomorrow.”

Socialists were proud to point to Milwaukee, which had a Socialist mayor for most of the period from 1910 to 1960, as a model of sound and equitable governance. And they were not alone: During Hoan’s 24-year tenure, Time magazine reported, “Milwaukee became one of the best-run cities in the U.S.”

Hoan also took on the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, at a time when politicians in both the Democratic and Republican parties were compromising with the violent racists as they extended their reach from the South to northern cities. “The Ku Klux Klan will find Milwaukee a hotter place to exist in than Hades itself,” the mayor declared in 1921.

Hoan’s integrity, along with his managerial skills, would eventually earn him recognition as one of the 10 finest municipal leaders in American history. In The American Mayor, his groundbreaking 1999 assessment of municipal governance in cities across the country, Melvin Holli wrote: 

“Although this self-identified socialist had difficulty pushing progressive legislation through a nonpartisan city council, he experimented with the municipal marketing of food, backed city-built housing, and was a fervent but unsuccessful champion of municipal ownership of the street railways and the electric utility. His pragmatic ‘gas and water socialism’ met with more success in improving public health and in providing public markets, city harbor improvements, and purging graft from Milwaukee politics.” 

Emil Seidel and Frank Zeidler, the mayors who served before and after Hoan, were Socialists as well. And Milwaukee voters elected dozens of Socialists to the city council, county board, school board, state legislature, and Congress. Milwaukee’s Socialists were so fiscally and socially responsible that historians to this day hail them as exemplars of a uniquely American form of democratic socialism. Zeidler once explained to me, 

“Socialism as we attempted to practice it here believes that people working together for the common good can produce a greater benefit both for society and for the individual than can a society in which everyone is shrewdly seeking their own self-interest.” 

That worked well for Milwaukee in the 20th century—so much so that “socialism” ceased to be a scare word for the city’s residents. What frightens Republicans today is that “socialism” is ceasing to be a scare word in our contemporary national discourse.

John Nichols is The Nation’s national-affairs correspondent. He is the author of Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse: A Field Guide to the Most Dangerous People in America, from Nation Books, and co-author, with Robert W. McChesney, of People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy.

America's Socialist Surge is Going Well in Chicago

Tuesday night’s elections saw the largest socialist electoral victory in modern American history

April 3, 2019 Micah Uetricht

The United States is experiencing a socialist surge right now. That surge came to Chicago last night, where democratic socialists won big in the second, final round of municipal elections.

Three Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members won their city council races in runoff elections on Tuesday: Byron Sigcho-Lopez in the 25th ward, Jeanette Taylor in the 20th and Andre Vasquez in the 40th. The fourth candidate, Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez, is locked in a race in the 33rd ward that is too close to call and will await the counting of mail-in ballots, but was up by 64 votes once all precincts’ votes were counted.

They will join two other socialists who handily won the first round of elections outright in February: Carlos Rosa, an incumbent in the 35th ward, and Daniel La Spata, who defeated an incumbent in the first ward.

Add them up and you’ve got at least five, maybe six democratic socialists who will be on the 50-member Chicago city council. Few major American cities have seen even a single socialist councilor in generations; the third-largest city in the US could soon have half a dozen. It’s the largest socialist electoral victory in modern American history.

The socialists won by strong, straightforward campaigning on working-class issues. Rosa, for example, made his race a referendum on affordable housing in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, painting big real estate developers as the enemy and demanding rent control in the city.

Taylor, a longtime neighborhood and education activist on the city’s South Side, demanded the forthcoming Barack Obama presidential library in her ward include a community benefits agreement to fight displacement of working-class residents. In 2015, she participated in a 34-day hunger strike to demand the reopening of Walter H Dyett high school; her website homepage reads: “Send a Dyett hunger strike to city hall.”

And Rodriguez campaigned on a history of activism for affordable housing and immigrant rights in a gentrifying, working-class immigrant neighborhood and against privatization of public services and expansion of police power in the city.

In other words, these democratic socialists ran as unabashed fighters against corporate greed and austerity and for the city’s working class.

Political observers and organizers should take these victories as a lesson: voters found that strong leftwing message appealing – and weren’t scared off by candidates who proudly called themselves “socialists”.

Socialism is spreading throughout the US, as seen in the popularity of the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the huge bump in DSA membership, increasing more than seven times over to 60,000 in the past three years. But what sets Chicago apart from many other cities in America – and played a crucial role in last night’s socialist victories – is that the left wing of the city’s labor movement hasn’t been afraid to partner with democratic socialist candidates.

Since its 2012 strike, the Chicago Teachers Union has served as the anchor of the city’s labor left. The CTU, along with community groups and other progressive unions such as SEIU Healthcare Illinois and Indiana, formed a political organization called United Working Families (UWF) in 2015. Many union leaders, in Chicago and elsewhere, are skittish about backing openly socialist candidates.

UWF appears to be, endorsing most of the DSA’s city council candidates (and in many cases expended significant resources on them). Another progressive electoral group, Reclaim Chicago, was the principal backer of two of the victorious DSA members, Vasquez and La Spata.

That coalition of left unions and community groups will be crucial in the years to come. Last night also saw the election of the Chicago’s first black woman mayor, as well as its first lesbian mayor, Lori Lightfoot, a former prosecutor and corporate lawyer.

Lightfoot claimed to be a progressive, but her record has been scrutinized by criminal justice activists and the CTU (which backed Lightfoot’s opponent, Cook county board president Toni Preckwinkle); she drew a large donation from a murky “dark money” group that uses vague pro-austerity rhetoric as well as support from Emanuel’s personal lawyer. The city’s labor movement and left will probably find themselves joining together to fight Lightfoot in office.

Chicago’s socialist victories last night weren’t a fluke. Throughout the country, people are tired of low wages, soaring housing costs, privatization of public goods, budget cuts and corporate giveaways of public money. They have tried austerity and found it miserable.

If Chicago’s elections are any indication, maybe they’re ready to try socialism.

• Micah Uetricht is the managing editor of Jacobin magazine. He is the author of Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity (Verso, 2014) and a member of the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America

Hannah Arendt – a Jewish Pariah and Daughter of the Diaspora

Arendt was the German-Jewish Refugee whose Universalism Overcame her Zionism

Hannah Arendt was an enigma. She rejected any materialist or class analysis in favour of a philosophical and metaphysical discourse. Originally a Zionist, Arendt escaped the shackles and straitjacket of authoritarian nationalism. Zionism demands obedience to the Jewish volk, above all from its intellectuals, which is one reason why it has produced so few. Nationalism and worship of the state are not conducive to freedom of thought or innovative ideas.

Arendt was the child of left-wing parents. In the 1930’s she became a Zionist as she saw in the rise of Nazism the defeat of universalism and assimilation. Arendt fled from Berlin in 1933 to Paris after having spent 8 days in the custody of the Gestapo. However, as with many other Jewish refugees, the Nazis caught up with her and in 1941 she escaped again from Gurs internment camp and made her way, with her husband Heinrich Blucher, to the United States. For the Zionists, this fact alone ‘only contributed to the dismissal of her work as having no real worth.’

Arendt’s most famous work, the The Origins of Totalitarianism was published in 1951 in McCarthy’s America. It is as its title suggests an analysis of what she called ‘totalitarianism’, the kind of a state that Orwell described in 1984.  She summed it up in the Introduction:

‘Anti-Semitism (not merely hatred of the Jews), imperialism (not merely conquest), totalitarianism (not merely dictatorship) one after another, one more brutally than the other have demonstrated that human dignity needs a new guarantee.’

As a refugee she noted that when a person is driven away from one country, he is expelled from all countries “which means he is actually expelled from humanity”. Refugees are literally outlaws, beyond the protection of the law.

It is ironic that Israel alone of Western states refuses to accept any refugees on the grounds that they would undermine Israel’s (Jewish) national identity. Hostility to refugees in Israel is higher than in any other western state. Despite claiming it is a ‘Jewish’ state the injunction in Leviticus 19:33-34 is ignored:

You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God”

refugees stranded at the Greek border 2016

Arendt is without doubt the greatest Jewish political philosopher of the 20^th century. It is little surprise that despite having being converted to Zionism under the influence of Kurt Blumenfeld of the German Zionist Federation and having worked for Youth Aliya in Paris in 1935 she became a bête noir for the Zionist movement after having published in 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem – The Banality of Evil, about the 1961 Eichmann trial in Israel.

BACKGROUND

Gabriel Piterberg in The Returns of Zionism describes how in 2001 Yad Vashem and Jerusalem’s Hebrew University organised a conference to mark the 40^th anniversary of the Eichmann Trial. The keynote address was by Anita Shapira, the ‘princess of Zionism’ To her all Jewish history began and continued in Israel. The intervening 2,000 years of diaspora Jewry were a void. Shapira evinces what Piterberg calls ‘the hegemonic depth of Zionist ideology.’

Elizabeth Varnhagen

We can see this ideological hegemony and totalitarian thought in the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ onslaught today on Corbyn’s Labour Party whereby any fundamental critique of Israeli ‘democracy’ is deemed anti-Semitic under the IHRA. The IHRA has been adopted by all major British political parties, local authorities and the Police and Judicial College, despite excoriating criticism by legal scholars such as  Geoffrey Robertson QC, Hugh Tomlinson QC and the Jewish former Court of Appeal Judge Sir Stephen Sedley. No amount of reasoned argument or logic can withstand the unanimity of bourgeois support for Zionism.

In contrast the most outrageous anti-Palestinian racism is excused by police state journalists like the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland as a product of ‘Jewish identity’ which is therefore immune to criticism. ‘Jewish identity’ is used as a shield to protect Israel yet anyone who associates Jews with Israel’s crimes is under the IHRA ‘anti-Semitic’. A case of having your Zionist cake and eating it!

Arendt committed what for her Zionist detractors was a cardinal sin. She sought to draw universal lessons from the Holocaust that were neither nationalist nor racist. ‘Shapira charges Arendt with trying to ‘understand’ Nazism and the Judaeocide from a universalist position.’  [Piterberg, 149] That was why, until 1999, Eichmann in Jerusalem was not published in Israel. As Boaz Evron put it

‘this book came to me as a fresh wind of sobriety and sensibility amongst the hysterical storm blown all around by the propaganda agencies of the Ben Gurion regime.’

Arendt was

‘in Shapira’s absurd judgment, incapable of sensing the Jewish experience because she was from ‘there’ as if ‘there’ was not where the Holocaust had occurred.’

Not only did Shapira condemn Arendt’s universalism but her refusal to accept Zionist colonisation and ownership of the Holocaust. A Holocaust which the Jewish Agency had ignored whilst it was happening but which they utilised politically and ideologically.

Arendt’s essay ‘The Jew as a Pariah’ was savaged in a review in the magazine of the American Right, Commentary. Rather than praising Jewish nationalism, Arendt praises Jewish dissidents as she focuses on 4 particular pariahs – Heinrich Heine, Bernard Lazarre, Charlie Chaplin and Franz Kafka – each brilliant in their own way. But as Ron Feldman notes sniffily regarding Chaplin ‘strangely enough, one did not have to be Jewish to be a Jewish pariah.’

Rahel Varnhagen's Literary Salon in Berlin

But of course the quintessential pariah was Arendt herself. As Lyndsey Stonebridge notes in her essay The Shape of Totalitarianism and the Meaning of Exile: Three Lessons from Hannah Arendt Arendt was a self-proclaimed pariah, a term she borrowed from Bernard Lazare. She considered her closest soulmate Rahel Varnhagen, a pariah to parvenu of the late 17^th, early 18^th century who ran a famous literary salon in Berlin. An important figure in Germany’s Romantic movement she converted to Christianity in 1814 in order to escape the social restrictions that were placed on Jews. She was the outsider who sought acceptance which is one reason why Amos Elon [The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews in Germany, 1743-1933] falsely accused her of hating her Jewish background.

Conversion was Varnhagen’s only escape. Arendt said of her that

‘Rahel had remained a Jew and a pariah. Only because she clung to both conditions did she find a place in the history of European humanity.’

For Zionism, what is and was more important was her rejection of racial exclusivism in favour of Jewish assimilation.

In 1938, Arendt completed her biography Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess although it wasn’t published until 1957. As Piterberg notes, it took 20 years to write. For Arendt ‘a decent human existence is possible only on the fringes of society, where one then runs the risks of starving or being stoned to death.’  Arendt cherished Varnhagen as her "closest friend, though she had been dead for some hundred years".

Arendt followed a similar trajectory to Einstein. From Zionist to non-Zionist. She signed a famous letter on 2^nd December 1948 on the occasion of Menachem Begin’s visit to the United States.

Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the "Freedom Party" (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.

In October 1944 Arendt wrote an essay Zionism Reconsidered. Judith Butler observed

‘Paradoxically, and perhaps shrewdly, the terms in which Arendt criticised Fascism came to inform her criticisms of Zionism, though she did not and would not conflate the two.’

Although Zionism is not a fascist ideology (although it has a remarkable number of fascist adherents) it shares a number of common features with fascism such as the premium placed on loyalty to the state and the prioritisation of the needs of the state over those of the individual.

During the Holocaust this was expressed as the need to build the Jewish state taking priority over the saving of the Jews in Europe.  Shabtai Teveth, his official biographer, quotes Ben Gurion as saying that where there was

a conflict of interest between saving individual Jews and the good of the Zionist enterprise, we shall say that the enterprise comes first.

In ‘Zionism Reconsidered’ Arendt noted that the American Zionist conference in 1944 had demanded a Jewish Commonwealth in the whole of Palestine without once mentioning the Palestinians, describing this as a victory for the Revisionist programme. Her conclusion was that this ‘obviously leaves them the choice between voluntary emigration or second class citizenship.’  In fact there was a third choice, which in 1948 came to pass – transfer or ethnic cleansing, which she notes was discussed in a wide variety of Zionist circles.

The critical problem for Arendt was both political and humanitarian:

the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people.

As Butler noted

she calls ‘absurd’ the idea of setting up a Jewish state in a ‘sphere of interest’ of the superpowers. Such a state would suffer under the ‘delusion of nationhood’: ‘Only folly could dictate a policy which trusts a distant imperial power for protection, while alienating the goodwill of neighbours.’

Zionism rested on‘an open acceptance of anti-Semitism as a “fact.” The Zionist labour movement had created, with the chalutz and kibbutz ‘a new type of Jew’ but this didn’t prevent the Zionist Organisation ‘against the natural impulses of the whole Jewish people’ doing business with Hitler in order to ‘trade German goods against the wealth of German Jewry.’

Arendt noted that the ‘socialist’ Zionists ‘failed to level a single critique of Jewish bourgeoisie outside of Palestine, or to attack the role of Jewish finance.’

Arendt had great difficulty in coming to terms with the nation state.  To her the only solution to national conflicts was either complete assimilation or emigration. The possibility of national autonomy, cultural pluralism and multi-culturalism were absent.

Arendt castigated the ‘Zionist doctrine of eternal anti-Semitism’. Quoting Herzl she noted that because Zionism ‘concluded that without anti-Semitism the Jewish people would not have survived’ it was opposed to any attempt to liquidate anti-Semitism.

Astutely Arendt observed that for all their strictures against assimilation the Zionists ‘were the only ones who sincerely wanted assimilation, namely, ‘normalization’ of the (Jewish) people.’ Theirs was a collective assimilation in a Jewish state. The irony is that because of the circumstances of its creation, under the protection of the British Empire, Zionism had created a ‘Jewish’ state which is anything but normal, not least because it is an ethno-nationalist state.

Arendt’s criticism of Zionism’s attitude to the Jewish diaspora are astute. Zionism ‘cuts off Jewish history from European history and even from the rest of mankind’.

Arendt is particularly cutting in her description of leftist Zionists ‘who simply added official Zionism to their socialism’ whilst fighting the employment of Arab labour ‘under the pretense of class-struggle against Arab labour.’

Arendt accused Zionism of being inspired by German nationalism which viewed people biologically not politically. In the process

‘Zionists ended by making the Jewish national emancipation dependent upon the material interests of another nation.’ ‘The erection of a Jewish State within an imperial sphere of interest may look like a very nice solution to some Zionists...’

The ‘relationship between the proposed new State and the Diaspora’ is one which disturbed her. Arendt put her finger on another problem of Zionism. Its claim that Jews form a separate nation, even whilst the majority continue to live outside Israel in other countries. Inevitably this posed ‘the old question of double loyalty’ which is precisely what has happened.  [see Hannah Arendt would agree with Ilhan Omar] In her essay ‘To Save the Jewish Homeland’ Arendt foresaw the time when Israel’s relations with world Jewry

would become problematical, since their defense interests might clash at any moment with those of other countries where large number of Jews lived.

Dual loyalty is inherent in Zionism.

Arendt argues that Herzl’s Zionism was ‘inspired from German sources – as opposed to the French variety.’ In other words a German nationalism which was exclusive and volkish, based on blood relations and kith and kin whereas French nationalism had been inclusive, based on all those residing within France.

Arendt noted the Zionist and Herzl view that the Jewish people were surrounded by a ‘world of enemies’ remarking that ‘if’ the whole world is ultimately against us, we are lost.’ She finishes her essay by warning of the parallels with Sabbatai Zevi, the false messiah of the 17^th century.

Arendt’s attitude to the onset of anti-Semitism was that

If one is attacked as a Jew one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man.

Eichmann in Jerusalem – The Banality of Evil

What aroused the ire of the Zionist movement to white fury was Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem. She famously coined the slogan ‘the banality of evil’ which Zionist historians like David Cesarani have written books about without once understanding what it meant! She portrayed Eichmann as a desk bound bureaucrat and some took this to mean that he was simply doing a job that he had no strong feelings about either way. Cesarani went out of his way to prove what none of us doubted – that Eichmann was an anti-Semite.

However his anti-Semitism was political not personal. He was not some political Lord Voldemort, breathing fire. Rather he was someone who could only talk in clichés, lacking all original thought. In fact a most unremarkable man who nonetheless had perpetrated monstrous crimes.

Lyndsey Stonebridge observed it wasn’t Eichmann who she got wrong, but a young black woman named Elizabeth Eckford who was depicted amidst screaming white women in a famous 1957 photograph from Little Rock, Arkansas as she entered an all-White schools.

Arendt argued that Eckford should not be carrying such a political burden at her age and that education was a social and largely private matter. Ralph Ellison replied that all black children in the south carried a political burden from the day they were born whether they or their parents liked it or not. Arendt shut up.

The Judgment of the Eichmann trial dovetailed with Zionism’s political requirements when it found that ‘it has not been proved before us that the accused knew that the Gypsies were being transported to destruction’. Thus no genocide charge except that against the Jews was upheld. Hannah Arendt remarked that

‘This was difficult to understand, for, apart from the fact that the extermination of Gypsies was common knowledge, Eichmann had admitted during the police examination that he knew of it.’ It had been an order from Himmler.

The trial verdict did not see the extermination of millions of people as a crime against humanity. Rather it was a crime against the Jewish people. The Holocaust was not seen as ‘a Fascist attack on human diversity’ but a specific and exclusive attack on the Jewish people.

Arendt pointed to the hypocrisy of the Prosecutor Gideon Hausner:

‘Israeli citizens, religious and non-religious seem agreed upon the desirability of having a law which prohibits intermarriage… there certainly was something breathtaking in the naiveté with which the prosecution denounced the infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which had prohibited intermarriage and sexual intercourse between Jews and Germans.’

Kasztner was the leader of Hungarian Zionism during the war. He was accused after the war by Hungarian survivors of the deportations to Auschwitz of having collaborated with Eichmann in return for a train carrying 1,684 of the Jewish and Zionist elite out of Hungary. The verdict of the trial judge Benjamin Halevi was that Kasztner had sold his soul to the devil. Although the decision was overturned on legal and political technicalities by the Supreme Court the damage had been done.

The Eichmann trial was staged primarily to undo the damage caused by the Kasztner Affair. In the words of Israeli historian Tom Segev [The 7^th Million, p.328, see Noah Lucas, The Modern History of Israel, p. 414] it was meant to ‘expunge the historical guilt that had been attached to the Mapai leadership since the Kasztner trial.’  The Kasztner trial dominated the Israel of 1954-58 and caused the fall of the 1955 Sharrett government.

Witnesses who were likely to raise the issues that had surrounded the Kasztner trial were carefully excluded from giving evidence e.g. Kasztner’s friend Andre Biss.

What Arendt did was to write a book which threatened to undo this careful stage management. Her first sin was to attack the Jewish leadership in Nazi occupied Europe. She wrote:

‘Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and half and six million people.’

As Lucien Sternberg observed, ‘Arendt’s argument caused an outcry among Zionist holocaust historians but it could not be refuted.’ [Not as a Lamb - Jews Against Hitler, Gordon & Cremones, University Press, Glasgow p.109]

Arendt was accused of being incapable of understanding the complexity of the situation. Despite the participation of the Judenrat in rounding up Jews for deportation, Israel Gutman of Yad Vashem and Rozett opined that ‘‘The Judenrat reinforced the Jews’ power of endurance in their struggle for survival,’

Hausner was foremost among those who defended the Judenrat. He attacked Raul Hilberg, the preeminent Holocaust historian because Hannah Arendt ‘in her vicious and compassionless attitude to the Judenrat’ drew upon his work.’

The problem was that one could not explain how the Nazis had achieved their objectives so efficiently without taking the behaviour of the victims, including the Jewish Councils into account.

When Israeli Professor Jacob Talman criticised Hannah Arendt, for mentioning Zionist collaboration with the Nazis, Rudolph Vrba,  the Jewish escapee from Auschwitz, then residing in London asked:

‘Did the Judenrat (or the Judenverrat) in Hungary tell their Jews what was awaiting them? No, they remained silent and for this silence some of their leaders – for example Dr R Kasztner – bartered their own lives and the lives of 1684 other ‘prominent’ Jews directly from Eichmann.’

The Zionist movement exploded with fury when Arendt wrote ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem – The Banality of Evil.’ It threatened to undo all that had been achieved by the Eichmann Bill. Arendt’s crime was to highlight what the Eichmann Trial had been designed to avoid.  Their attacks bear a familiar ring:  Arendt wrote:

… the campaign, conducted with all the well-known means of image-making and opinion-manipulation, got much more attention than the controversy…. (it was) as though the pieces written against the book (and more frequently against its author) came “out of a mimeographing machine” (Mary McCarthy)… the clamor centered on the “image” of a book which was never written, and touched upon subjects that often had not only not been mentioned by me but had never occurred to me before.”

Rabbi Joachim Prinz, a German Zionist who had welcomed the rise of Hitler as vindicating Zionism, accused Arendt of having described Eichmann as a ‘sweet and misguided man.’ One French weekly went so far as to ask whether Arendt was a Nazi.

Amos Elon wrote, in an Introduction to her book, that

No book within living memory had elicited similar passions. A kind of excommunication seemed to have been imposed on the author by the Jewish establishment in America.

Arendt was stunned by the uproar. She spoke of the ‘smear campaign’ being conducted ‘on the lowest level’ based on the claim that she had said ‘the exact opposite of what I did in fact write.’ What Arendt had to say about the way her book was viciously caricatured has a familiar ring to those claims of ‘anti-Semitism’ in the Labour Party. In a letter to her friend, Mary McCarthy, Arendt complained ‘what a risky business to tell the truth on a factual level without theoretical and scholarly embroidery.’ Shooting the messenger rather than responding to the message has always remained the quintessential Zionist modus operandi.  Apparently Arendt had claimed that ‘the Jews had murdered themselves’ and why had she told ‘such a monstrously implausible lie? Out of “self-hatred” of course.’

The Eichmann Trial was a political show trial. It focused solely on the Jewish dead and failed to place the Holocaust in any kind of historical context. Its purpose was not to understand but to rewrite history. People have concentrated on the Appeal Court’s decision to find Eichmann guilty and the imposition of the death sentence whilst ignoring its decision that ‘the Appellant had received no ‘superior orders’ at all. He was his own superior.’ Israel’s Supreme Court had exculpated Himmler and even Hitler.

A movie The Specialist was made. It reflected Arendt’s thesis on the banality of evil. Eichmann, whose enthusiasm for the annihilation of the Jews was never doubted, had nonetheless been a bureaucratic cog in the wheel.

‘The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely to think from the standpoint of somebody else.’

Raul Hilberg reached the same conclusion.

‘The bureaucracy had taken over. It is the bureaucratic destruction process that in its step-by-step manner finally led to the annihilation of five million victims.’

Eichmann was an ardent Zionist. Baron von Mildenstein, the first head of the SS’s Jewish Department, had required Eichmann to read Herzl’s Der Judenstaat ‘which converted. Eichmann promptly and forever to Zionism... as late as 1939 he seems to have protested against desecrators of Herzl’s grave in Vienna.’

At the Eichmann trial, the most glaring omission from the picture painted was any witness to the co-operation between the Nazis and the Jewish authorities and the Zionists. This prevented the question being asked ‘Why did you cooperate in the destruction of your own people’. When Pinhas Freudiger, the Chief Rabbi of Hungary testified, this caused the only significant interruption as Hungarian survivors called him a collaborator and ‘accused him of abandoning his position as a leader of the Orthodox Community.’

Perhaps the best example of the ideological confrontation between Zionism, with its belief in the negation of the disapora and the voice of the Jewish diaspora, is the correspondence between Arendt and Gershom Scholem, the Professor of Mysticism. 

On June 23^rd 1963 Scholem wrote to Arendt, having read Eichmann in Jerusalem.

In the Jewish tradition there is a concept Ahabath Israel: ‘Love of the Jewish people…”  In you, dear Hannah, as in so many intellectuals who came from the German Left, I find little trace of this….’

Arendt’s reply demonstrated that Scholem was at heart a Jewish chauvinist. 

‘I am not one of the “intellectuals who come from the German Left.’… It is a fact of which I am in no way particularly proud and which I am somewhat reluctant to emphasize – especially since the McCarthy era in this country.  I came late to an understanding of Marx’s importance… let me begin… with what you call “love of the Jewish people.”… (Incidentally, I would be very grateful if you could tell me since when this concept has played a role in Judaism)… You are quite right – I am not moved by any “love” of this sort, and for two reasons.  I have never in my life “loved” any people or collective… I indeed love “only” my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons.  Secondly, this “love of the Jews” would appear to me, since I am myself Jewish, as something rather suspect…. I do not “love” the Jews, nor do I “believe” in them; I merely belong to them as a matter of course, beyond dispute or argument…. But I can admit to you something beyond that, namely, that wrong done by my own people naturally grieves me more than wrong done by other peoples.’

It was in truth a devastating reply.

See      Hannah Arendt would agree with Ilhan Omar, Philip Weiss

Why Hannah Arendt is the Philosopher for Now, Lyndsey Stonebridge

Hannah Arendt: Human, Citizen, Jew

Tony Greenstein