Racism, Left Book Club

James Heartfield Jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk
Sun Aug 5 01:17:35 PDT 2001


The WEEK ending 5 August 2001

UN World Conference Against Racism

The planned United Nations' conference against racism has been heavily trailed as a contest between former colonial and colonised powers over the demand for compensation. The preparatory committee has clashed over inclusion of slavery in the themes for discussion, and the United States has already blocked inclusion of statements to the effect that 'Zionism is racism'.

The very fact of the conference, though, indicates that the West has successfully whitewashed its own colonial past. In 1919, Britain and America were forced to block a Japanese proposal that the League of Nations' accord as soon as possible to all alien nationals of State members of the League, equal and just treatment in every respect making no distinction, either in law or in fact, on account of their race or nationality'. When black historian WEB Du Bois exposed American racism at the United Nations' General Assembly he was roundly attacked in the press (and parodied in Eddie Cochran's Summertime Blues, where a sulky teenager threatens to 'take my case to the United Nations'). As late as the 1980s Ronald Reagan's administration regularly attacked the UN Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) under Amadou Mahtar M'Bow for its alleged anti-colonial propagandising against the West.

But since the radical nationalist movements in the third world have been contained, the Western powers have succeeded in muddying the waters over colonialism and racism. Today, Western ideological offensives against Slavs and Africans have succeeded in characterising ethnic cleansing and genocide as more characteristic of the third world than of the first. The history of Western colonisation has not been erased, but merely relativised by exaggerating the extent of atrocities committed by African and East European militias.

Even the points of difference that have been opened up by post-colonial states cannot stop the West's campaign to disguise its domination of the less developed world today. The demand for reparations for slavery sounds radical. But in the end it can only succeed in portraying the oppression of African states as a historical problem. Western leaders may want to avoid the costs of litigation, but they are happy to hand out apologies for past behaviour if that takes attention away from their continuing responsibility for the poverty-stricken and violent state of muchof the less developed world in the here and now.

Even the demands to denounce Zionism have their limitations. As long as responsibility for the oppression of the Palestinian people is pinned on Israel, rather than her Western sponsors, a degree of criticism is acceptable to the West.

The UN conference can only further entrench the imperative for military and political intervention into independent states on the grounds of preventing racial discrimination. As long as the interpretation of what is and is not racism is in the hands of the dominant powers, intervention will only ever serve the need of the Western elites to assert their superiority over the rest of the world.

Misunderstanding Louis Farrakhan

It would be hard to find a more gross example of the West's capacity to control the meaning of anti-racism than the British government's condemnation of Louis Farrakhan. Foreign Minister Jack Straw made it plain that he did not accept the court ruling that the Black Muslim leader be allowed entry to Britain. Banned for years on the grounds that he promotes racial hatred, Farrakhan is a perfect bogeyman for the British press, which uniformly denounces him as a bigot. But British newspapermen have tin ears. Farrakhan's anti-Semitic rhetoric mobilises archaic usages which say more about the impotence of his flock than any danger they represent. British immigration officials would never dream ofusing such language, but their incarceration of asylum-seekers causes more misery than Farrakhan could ever dream of.

Left Book Club Reader

Gollancz' republication of the highlights of the Left Book Club of the 1930s has raised eyebrows amongst Britain's literary circles. How old- fashioned, is the general response - to believe that the intelligentsia ever praised Stalin, or wrote anything as absurd as Stephen Spender's Forward From Liberalism! It is a mark of the historical ignorance of British intellectuals that they do not know how much of their own prejudices are owed to the Stalin-like era of British Social Democracy. Today's government regularly denounces liberty in demotic terms that are drawn quite distinctly from the rhetorical armoury of the old Stalinists- along the lines of: 'civil liberty is a luxury for Hampstead intellectuals'.

The Left Book Club's promotion of a state-regulated economy is much closer to contemporary government thinking than the free-market ideology of FA Hayek. Anyone looking for the origins of the government's self- promotion as Cultural Britain need not look much further than the Left Book Club's creepy fantasies about 'Merrie England'. Even Britain's own Stalin-cult owes less to the British Communist Party than it does to the Ministry of Information which launched a pro-Soviet campaign in the middle of the Second World War to head off any radical interpretation of Russia's decisive victories against Nazi Germany, while Britain's own troops languished in North Africa.

-- James Heartfield



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list