The Anti-Imperialism Of Idiots

One of the points I have raised repeatedly since I started this blog in January 2017 is my dislike of the current binary thinking in politics. In my very first post I wrote…

“There are three main reasons for starting a blog at this time. The first is my concern about the general coarsening of debate in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Too many people are too convinced that they know all the answers. Too many issues are black-and-white, good-versus-evil. If you don’t agree with me you are not just wrong or mistaken, you are evil and you deserve to be punished for your errors. Opponents are ‘phobes’ and suffer from ‘isms’ or, if you prefer, they are ‘snowflakes’ or ‘traitors.’ This blog will be firmly in the grey. Like Manuel, I know nothing. Or was that Socrates?”

Nothing in the last two-and-a-half years has persuaded me that I am wrong. If anything, this tendency is getting worse.

It seems some of the pseudo-left are subscribing to the ‘two camps’ philosophy of the Zhdanov Doctrine.

Andrei Zhdanov was a senior member of Stalin’s Politburo in the 1930s and 1940s; in fact, after the Second World War he was seen as Stalin’s heir apparent, although his early death, aged only 52, prevented his succession. In 1946, he was responsible for the Zhdanov Doctrine which divided the world into ‘imperialists’ (the USA, Britain et al) and ‘democrats’ (the Soviet Union and its allies). Like modern-day ‘anti-Zionism,’ this binary view had more than a whiff of anti-Semitism in its attacks on ‘rootless cosmopolitanism.’

The far left in the West was morally compromised by its support for the Soviet Union. Numerous left-leaning intellectuals, among them Sidney and Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw, were duped into supporting Stalin’s totalitarian despotism because it was ‘socialist.’ George Orwell wrote about the appalling behaviour of the NKVD (Narodnyy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) – the Russian secret police – during the Spanish Civil War. They were, according to Orwell, more interested in pursuing Trotskyists and other anti-Stalinists than in fighting Franco’s fascists. Many British Communists initially opposed the war against Hitler because Nazi Germany was officially allied to the Soviet Union between August 1939 and June 1941. Opposition to the ‘imperialist’ West was more important than opposition to the Nazis for some far leftists.

I came across the phrase ‘the anti-imperialism of idiots’ whilst reading a report by Alan Johnson called Institutionally Anti-Semitic: Contemporary Left Anti-Semitism and the Crisis in the British Labour Party. The phrase is based on August Babel’s description of anti-Semitism as “the socialism of fools” which I wrote about in Quote of the Day #60. The nightmare cult of identity politics has divided the world into a binary of ‘oppressors’ and ‘oppressed’ and, as I wrote in The Bigotry of the ‘Anti-Racists’ it is the misfortune of Jewish people to have been placed in the ‘oppressor’ camp despite the historic injustices they have suffered.

The obsession with Israel amongst the ‘woke’ (nauseating word) and ‘progressive’ is a mystery to me. As John Harris, one of the few sane voices left at the Guardian, wrote here there are some who support “a supposed anti-imperialism that doesn’t only criticise US foreign policy and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, but sees those things as unsurpassable evils.” Harris goes on to encapsulate exactly what is wrong with the binary worldview of the apostles of identity politics…

“All too often, its adherents seem to apply entirely different standards to events depending on who is held to be responsible (witness responses to foreign intervention by Russia and the US), and keep the company of very rum people.”

Israelis are somehow possessed of something called ‘white privilege’ – which is odd because more than half of the Israeli population is descended from people of North African and Middle Eastern background who were expelled from their ancestral homelands after 1948. Utter nonsense of course. And if Israel is a ‘settler-colonialist’ State, doesn’t the same label apply to the Arab countries of North Africa and to Turkey? Some animals are more equal than others. As for apartheid, people in glass houses…

Many on the far left have compromised themselves in their paranoid fixation on Israel to the exclusion of all other territorial disputes and their embrace of the hardest of the Islamist hard right – “very rum people” indeed. If Trump is a racist then so is Jeremy Corbyn , along with his fellow ‘anti-Zionist’ fanatics.

I’d like to end with a final thought about the reaction of some ‘progressives’ to the anti-Semitism crisis engulfing Corbyn’s Labour and the way, in John Harris’ words, some folks “seem to apply entirely different moral standards to events depending on who is held to be responsible.” When Black Lives Matter took off after 2013, some of its supporters claimed that opponents insisting ‘all lives matter’ were racist. During the anti-Semitism scandal, a common response have been to try to divert attention to ‘Islamophobia’ amongst Conservatives. Applying the same standard, doesn’t this make them anti-Semites?