On Thu, 26 Feb 2009, Doug Henwood wrote:
>> Second, Churchill *was* antisemitic....
>
> Of course that sort of thing was endemic in the higher circles of English
> society in the early 20th century. E.g., Keynes: "I do not mean that Russian
> Communism alters, or even seeks to alter, human nature, that it makes Jews
> less avaricious or Russians less extravagant than they were before."
This is unquestionably true. Ironically, if it wasn't for British antisemitism, there never would have been a Balfour declaration, and therefore never an Israel. The Brits did it in large part becuase they were convinced it could play a role in bringing the Jews on side, and that they'd bring the Americans with them to enter WWI. Both Chaim Weissman and Louis Brandeis played along with this.
The extent of what upper class Brits were willing to believe is most astonishing in the wake of the Russian revolution. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was treated as an historical document (by Churchill among others) until the Times of London famously proved it a forgery in August 1921 -- which, if you've ever read it, is incredible. And even the Times treated it as worthy of very serious consideration when it first came out.
AFAIK, all of Churchill's most lurid outbursts come from around this moment of the 1920s, and if you look at them closely, virtually all of his lists of boogeymen are simulataneously Jewish and communist. Trotsky is just the endpoint of a list that starts with Marx and is also filled with the bigwigs from the German revolution, which terrified the Brits just as much.
But while the willingness of Mandarins to believe in a world conspiracy might seem amazing, I think we have to remember two things. One, the ability to believe in a communist world conspiracy went way beyond it and endured in respectable circles until... well fuck, many central decision makers still preume that's the basic the story of the cold war. If you identified Jews with communism -- which to be fair, lots of nostalgic progressive Jews still do today; the Jewish museums treats communism and socialism as if there were interesting varieties of reform Judaism -- and you mainly heard about the book rather than actually reading it (I'm sure nobody does that today), it's easier to understand how they said such outrageous things. I'm not saying they're not anti-semites. I'm just saying it only took a little anti-semitism to produce statements that now sound proto-genocidal.
And second, and this is much harder, we always have to realize that before the holocaust and the 60s disqualified all stereotypes as incipient racism -- a very recent and historically unprecedented phenomena, on a par with women's rights and gay rights -- this was the normal way of thought for all of history: every group was thought to have obvious group attributes, and every individual to be a variant of those group attributes, which were always visible even if he/she made more or less successful rebellion. Progressives thought this way just as much as reactionaries. The only modern analog I can think of it the national stereotype thinking that everyone does when they make their first trip to Europe. That used to be the norm, and it used to be taken seriously rather than apologized for, and "race" used to be taken synonmous with "nation," even by progressives. (Just for one example, it's very unsettling to see this usage endemic in Veblin's _Theory of the Leisure Class_, Veblin who was neither a Brit nor an aristo nor (by the standards of his time) a racist nor an anti-semite.)
None of this is to deny that Churchill is a reactionary pig who did horrible cruel racist classist imperialist things, and that today he'd be remembered in the same box with Cecil Rhodes if it weren't for the way in which WWII transvalued most of his vices into virtues. And after which the Brits promptly voted him out.
I'm just saying.
Michael