[lbo-talk] Human Smoke

Lenin's Tomb leninstombblog at googlemail.com
Thu Feb 26 07:05:48 PST 2009


On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 2:41 PM, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:


>
> "Baker also includes cameos which suggest, incorrectly, that Churchill was
> antisemitic. For example, he quotes from an essay in Churchill's 1937 book
> Great Contemporaries which identified the malign Trotsky by his race: "'He
> was a Jew,' wrote Churchill with finality. 'He was still a Jew. Nothing
> could get over that.'" But Baker omits the context. Churchill was explaining
> that Trotsky's Jewishness was an obstacle to his becoming autocrat of
> Communist Russia, and he criticised "so narrow-minded a reason"."

Couple of points. First, Nicholson Baker's book was subject to a number of similarly hostile reviews in the UK press, precisely because of its failure to uphold the historiographical mainstream.

Second, Churchill *was* antisemitic. There is a minor cottage industry devoted to defending Churchill from his own antisemitic outbursts (eg: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/11/news/winston.php), mainly because he was pro-Zionist. Martin Gilbert has produced an appalling history, redeeming Churchill's antisemitic remarks about 'the International Jew' and his paranoid ranting about Jews and the Bolsheviks. The apologia is especially astonishing given the alacrity with which timid criticisms of Israel are labelled antisemitic.



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