Gerry Downing and SF Have Yet to Admit that Labour Against the Witchhunt was right in 2018 to Exclude Them
As Jesus remarked:
there is more joy in heaven over one lost sinner who repents and returns to God than over ninety-nine others who are righteous and haven’t strayed away!
We should welcome the fact that Gerry Downing [GD] has repented of his association with Ian Donovan [ID] and his anti-Semitic theories. However repentance, at least for socialists, is not enough. GD needs to come to terms with why he maintained an alliance with ID for at least 5 years.
In last
week’s Weekly Worker, GD announced the
expulsion of ID and the Trotskyist Faction [TF] from Socialist
Fight [SF]. In this week’s paper ID denies that he has been
expelled since it is his comrades who are in the majority. The expulsion is therefore
‘dead in the water’.
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| Gilad Atzmon |
Where the
truth lies is irrelevant since, with or without ID, SF is politically dead. GD’s
letter says that for the past 5 years SF has harboured within it a key
individual, ID, who is ‘in lockstep’ with
Gilad Atzmon [GA] whom he describes as a ‘left
Mussolini-Strasserite fascist.’ What kind of Trotskyist or Marxist
organisation is it which has harboured within it a neo-Nazi and one whom, until
very recently, GD himself gave uncritical support to?
ID’s defence,
if that is the right word, is that GD has become a Zionist because he doesn’t
support expelling all Zionists from the Labour Party. Neither do I. I am in
favour of disaffiliating or proscribing Zionist organisations such as Labour
Friends of Israel and Jewish Labour Movement not individuals per se, although
clearly Zionist apparatchiks and propagandists should be shown the door.
ID’s letter
also constitutes an appalling apologia for GA’s anti-Semitism, including his
comments questioning the Holocaust.
What is
important however are the political issues that this falling out between ID and
GD involves and not who expelled whom.
When Labour
Against the Witchhunt [LAW] was formed at the end of 2017, it faced an
immediate problem. Set up to fight the Zionists’ fake anti-Semitism smear
campaign and the ensuing suspensions and expulsions, it faced a problem. Two of
those present at the inaugural meetings, ID and GD were espousing anti-Semitic
politics.
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| The Israel Lobby at Work |
Unsurprisingly
LAW’s officers decided that they had no alternative but to exclude supporters
of SF. We were called witchhunters and accused of hypocrisy since we were set
up to protest the expulsion of Labour Party members for ‘anti-Semitism’ and yet
here were we expelling SF for anti-Semitism!
The
difference of course was that the target of the ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations in
the Labour Party were innocent. Their real ‘crime’ was being anti-Zionists. SF was
guilty. The bourgeois and Zionist press however weren’t interested in such
nuances.
The Independent’s
‘Group set up to protest against Labour's
expulsion of members accused of antisemitism expels members for alleged
antisemitism’ reported that ‘Gerry
Downing, who was excluded from Labour Against the Witchhunt (LAW), has accused
the group of conducting its own witch hunt against him.’
In the lead
up to the LAW meeting on January 6th 2018 SF appealed to its
supporters to come to the all-members meeting where the question of their
exclusion would be decided. They wrote:
No one can point to a single act or political stance
that is in any way racist or anti-Semitic except in the minds of those who want
to appease the Labour party bureaucracy of Ian McNicol.
Our actions were compared to a ‘throwback to the Great Purges in the USSR in the 1930s and 1940s’.
Gerry went even further arguing
that
‘Today, he [TG] and his bed mate Jack Conrad are in
a bloc with the same Iain McNichol who is framing him up for anti-Semitism.
This is class treachery at its most pathetic.’
Two months later I was expelled by my bedmate! You
can imagine my surprise when GD’s letter appeared in last week’s
Weekly Worker informing us that ‘Socialist
Fight has expelled Ian Donovan and his ‘Trotskyist Faction’ by a unanimous
vote.’
This is to be welcomed but clearly it is not enough. You cannot wipe away
the past 5 years through bureaucratic means. It is incumbent on Gerry to
admit that we were right to exclude SF from LAW and to accept that we were not
‘witchhunters’ but anti-racists.
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| Gilad Atzmon - blowing his own trumpet |
Gerry
informs us that ID and the TF were expelled for ‘anti-Semitism and
support for the racist, anti-Semitic and left Mussolini-Strasserite fascist,
Gilad Atzmon.’
GD quotes from GA’s 2006 essay ‘On
Anti-Semitism’: “... we must begin to
take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very
seriously’. GA goes on to say that whether the infamous Czarist forgery,
the Protocols of the elder of Zion, are genuine or a forgery is irrelevant
since “American Jews do try to control
the world, by proxy.” Hitler’s take
on the Protocols in Mein Kampf was that they must be genuine because they were
true!
Quoting from GA’s most recent book Being
in Time that ‘“Fascism, I believe,
more than any other ideology, deserves our attention, as it was an attempt to
integrate left and right.’ GD concludes that GA is a fascist. Furthermore,
since ID has ‘developed a full-blown
ideological outlook in lockstep with Atzmon’, citing Donovan’s defence of GA’s
admiration for ex-KKK neo-Nazi David Duke, he alleges that ID too is now a
fascist.
GD also cites ID’s defence of Atzmon
groupie Devon Nola that ‘“Bolshevism was
a Jewish-led form of government.’
It is to be welcomed that Gerry now
repudiates use of the term, ‘the world ‘Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie’’ and the
whole notion of a Jewish-Zionist imperialist vanguard as anti-Semitic tropes.’
The idea that there is a Jewish sub-set of the ruling class, still less a pan
national Jewish bourgeoisie is deeply anti-Semitic and reminiscent of Nazi world Jewish conspiracy theories. They have
no place in a socialist let alone Marxist group.
However GD also has to explain why he
ever went along with this nonsense. At the very least it must show some serious
deficiency in his own understanding of capitalism and imperialism and leave
open the question, ‘what is Socialist Fight for’?
It is equally welcome that GD now
believes it is inappropriate to refer to Jews such as Kissinger and Milton
Friedman as examples of Jews being
“overrepresented among the most strident
spokespeople for capitalist reaction” without openly recognising that they are
doing so primarily as representatives of the interests of imperialist
capitalism, as in the Pinochet coup in Chile against Allende in 1973, and not
as any separate Jewish influence or conspiracy.
However if this rejection of ID’s pretentiously
titled ‘Draft
Theses on the Jews and Modern Imperialism is
sincere then he must explain why SF up till now didn’t realise that they had an
anti-Semitic cuckoo in their nest.
ID’s
Theses argued that what is distinctive about Israel is that unlike other
settler colonial states ‘Israel has no ‘mother country’ because it was
populated by part of the Jewish population from several countries.’ This is one
of GA’s key argument as to why Israel’s character owes nothing to its being a settler
colonial state but to the fact that it is a Jewish state. And it is the Jewishness
that most interests GA.
It
is of course a bogus argument. South Africa’s Boers had no mother country
either. Nor did the American colonists once they had rebelled. Palestine had British imperialism as
its sponsor. What distinguishes settler
colonialism is not who sponsors it but what the settlers do. It is the political economy of settler
colonialism which matters. Do the
settlers depend on exploitation of the indigenous labour or do they want to
exclude it?
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| The next best thing to the tablets of stone that Moses carried down Mount Sinai |
ID
explains support for Israel by the West as being on account of ‘Jewish overrepresentation in the US and
other ruling classes.’ In other words Jews form an ethnic lobby. Although ID
doesn’t realise it, this is what the Zionists themselves say! When arguing in
support of Israel the Zionists claim to represent the whole Jewish community
(apart from a few Jews of the ‘wrong sort’). No. 8 of the Board of Deputies 10 Commandments, which Labour
leadership candidates were expected to endorse proclaims that
‘labour must engage with the
Jewish community via its main representative groups, and not through fringe organisations
and individuals.’ #
It
is Zionist advocates who argue that only Jews have the right to define what is
anti-Semitic. In the words of Jonathan Freedland
black people are usually allowed to define what’s
racism; women can define sexism; Muslims are trusted to define Islamophobia.
But when Jews call out something as antisemitic, leftist non-Jews feel
curiously entitled to tell Jews they’re wrong,
Freedland
was talking nonsense. There is no homogenous women’s view as to what sexism is nor
is there a Black monopoly on the definition of racism whereas the Zionist
movement insists that everybody accept a definition of anti-Semitism whose sole
purpose is defence of Israel. And further they also insist that they, and only
they, represent British Jews.
In order to understand the background to GD’s letter
it is instructive to have a look at what SF said at the time we were ‘witchhunting’
them. ID’s Third-Camp Stalinoids bring Witchhunt into ‘Labour
Against the Witchhunt’ spoke about ‘the role of Jewish bourgeois in
the diaspora.’ This ‘Jewish component
within the ruling classes of Western countries that exceeds by many times over
the proportion of Jews in the general population’ turns a ‘normal relationship’ between states ‘into a servile relationship where states
like the USA give barely critical support to Israeli atrocities against
Palestinians.’
Socialist
Fight accused
the CPGB of having engaged in the ‘indulgence
of Jewish sensibilities” as if all Jews have the same sensibilities. It is a
statement which could have been taken from an overtly anti-Semitic publication.
SF also defended GA’s belief that the Bolshevik Revolution was Jewish dominated
describing his views as ‘confused and paranoid’ rather than calling their
fascist lineage out.
ID defended
GA and attacked the campaign that Jewish anti-Zionists waged against him and the
SWP’s toleration of him. Ours was
‘a reactionary campaign, contrary to working class
democracy, and in reality constituted an anti-left witch-hunt which the SWP
unfortunately capitulated to.’
Not only
that but
Atzmon manages to poke holes in
key aspects of Zionist ideology, and expose some of the capitulations to
Zionism and Jewish communalism of some of those on the left who claim to oppose
Zionism. He is a savage critic, albeit from an idealist standpoint, of Jewish
identity politics, which... is the identity politics of an oppressor people,
and thereby Atzmon’s critique, along with those of others such as Shlomo Sand,
is essential for Marxists to engage with.
In Defend
Marxism and Labour Movement democracy against capitulators to Zionism
Donovan wrote that Jews are a ‘people,
who, insofar as they act in a collective manner under a quasi-nationalist
leadership today, act as oppressors of another people, namely Arabs’.
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| The Jewish Question was confined to the feudal era and the transition to capitalism, not modern day capitalism |
Yet during
the debate on whether or not LAW should exclude SF ID denied that they had
described the Jews as an ‘oppressor
people’ which suggests that his ‘materialist’ analysis of what he calls
‘the Jewish Question’ is indefensible.
Atzmon’s
‘critique’ of Zionism includes drawing a straight line between the ‘Judaic god’
of Moses and Israel’s behaviour today. In ‘The Wandering Who’ (p.120) Atzmon writes
that:
The Judaic God, as portrayed by Moses... is an evil deity,
who leads his people to plunder, robbery and theft. ... Israel, the Jewish State, has been following
Moses’ call. The ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people in 1948, and the
constant and total abuse of the Palestinian people since then, makes Deuteronomy
6:10–12 look like a prophecy fulfilled.
Atzmon’s statement
in his essay Truth, History and Integrity
questioning Auschwitz has nothing in common with Arab or third world Holocaust
denial. Yes because Zionism uses the Holocaust as a weapon many Arabs therefore
query the weapon itself rather than the use made of it. But Atzmon comes from
the oppressor people. His ideas are from European neo-Nazis. When GA wrote
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? I think that 65 years
after the liberation of Auschwitz, we must be entitled to start to ask the
necessary questions. We should ask for some conclusive historical evidence and
arguments rather than follow a religious narrative that is sustained by
political pressure and laws. (my emphasis)
ID merely says that
‘His sometimes-sceptical remarks about the Holocaust have an Israeli
origin, and are a confused reaction to the abuse of the Holocaust to justify
hideous Israeli crimes.’
The first two sentences of the above quotation are omitted from the
chapter ‘Truth, History and Integrity’
in his book. Clearly GA recognised that they were problematic even if ID
didn’t!
GA also went on to justify the persecution of Jews under the Nazis by
conflating the Jews of Europe with Israeli Jews today. In essence he was justifying
the anti-Semitism that led to Auschwitz.
65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz we should be able
to ask – why? Why were the Jews hated? Why did European people stand up
against their neighbours? Why are the Jews hated in the Middle East (pp.
175-176 The Wandering Who)
For anyone interested in a Report of the meeting of January 6th
2018, including a comprehensive analysis of how SF adopted the politics of
anti-Semitism, as a means of explaining Zionism, you can go here.
GD has written a mea culpa
of sorts, explaining that when he formed an alliance with ID ‘I did not examine too closely the politics
of Ian’s Draft Theses on the Jews
and Modern Imperialism’. This is, to say the least, hard to take.
In an interview with GA Gerry wrote that ‘I do not agree
he is either racist or anti-Semitic.’
Gerry’s explanation for his alliance with ID was that he had just lost two
comrades and that
‘I desperate
needed someone who understood the history of the Marxism-Leninism-Trotskyism,
at least to a certain level and so made that alliance with Ian, which I now
recognise as opportunist.’
Opportunism is probably the least of it! The anti-Semitism inherent
in what ID wrote was staring GD in the face. Even if GD didn’t have a great
grasp of the history of Zionism he must have been acquainted with the nuts and
bolts of Marxism and a class analysis.
In Why Marxists must address the Jewish Question
concretely today ID wrote that ‘Zionism
is a Jewish nationalist-communalist project’ which is not true. It became
an ethno-nationalist movement in Palestine/Israel but originally it was a
separatist reaction to anti-Semitism. After all Poalei Zion in Russia joined
the Bolsheviks. ID describes the outcome of WWII as having led to
‘an emerging understanding that the Jewish
bourgeoisie was an important reserve for the survival of capitalism itself,
particularly in its ability to see beyond narrow national horizons and look out
for the interests of the bourgeois class on a broader basis.
In other words the ‘Jewish bourgeoisie’
were the guardians of the rest of the capitalist class! ID went on to state
‘If Socialist Fight is right
on Zionism’s special relationship to global finance capital what programmatic
implications does this have?’
and asked
‘Does it mean that we
specifically target Jewish capital?’ Answer: Not all Jewish capital. But we do
want to expose that a specific part of Jewish capital has an ethnocentric
interest in the dispossession of Palestinians.
Targeting Jewish capitalists was the
anti-capitalism of the Brownshirts. It was what the Nazis and anti-Semitic
movements in Europe did. I find it difficult to understand how Gerry could
seriously accept this garbage.
ID
has responded
to his expulsion by saying that they have ‘taken
on the mantle’ of Socialist Fight.’ Gerry Downing needs to ask some serious
questions such as what is the purpose of a group that went down this road. Does
it serve any purpose?
GD
describes GA as a
‘left Mussolini-Strasserite fascist’ and by implication ID too since he has ‘developed
a full-blown ideological outlook in lockstep with Atzmon’.
I disagree. Fascism is a specific
political movement aimed at not only destroying working class organisations and
the left but all democratic rights. It is the last resort of capitalism against
the workers’ movement. GA certainly flirts with fascists and anti-Semites,
neo-Nazis included but he has also
flirted with the Left, including the SWP. He is, if anything, politically
promiscuous. He reminds me of Christopher Hitchens, a contrarian who would
argue positions for the outrage they would cause.
I’m sure that GA, an accomplished
jazz player, is well aware that jazz was considered Jewish inspired ‘nigger music’ in Nazi Germany. Listening
to jazz was considered an act of rebellion by rebellious youth chafing at the boring
monotone culture of the Nazis. GA also works happily with Jews, converses with
them and has no personal antagonism to Jews as Jews. In other words whilst his
ideas are without doubt anti-Semitic, on a personal level he is not an
anti-Semite. Nor is there any reason to believe that he has given his support
to, still less become a member of, a fascist organisation.
Likewise ID, engaged in the hopeless
task of proving that Marx and Trotsky would have approved of his batty notions
that Jewish capital is responsible for the direction of US foreign policy
today. Despite his many sins Ian looks to the left not the right. It would be
wrong to categorise him as a fascist, if only through guilt by association.
Tony
Greenstein
