That stuff was endemic to _European_ (and North American) society of the era. In fact, it's in Marx )On the Jewish Question, of course). Some of this "Churchill was a monster!" idea seems to me to be OUTRAGE!!!! because Churchill, an early 20th-century European, shared the values of early 20th-century Europe. Ho-hum. Might as well get mad at Montezuma for endorsing human sacrifice. "In my daring new book, I show that the Aztecs, rather than being enlightened secularists and innocent victims of savage Spaniards, actually SACRIFICED HUMAN BEINGS TO THE GODS! I even have quotes from the Aztec priesthood endorsing this practice!" Duh.
--- On Thu, 2/26/09, Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:
> From: Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Human Smoke
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Thursday, February 26, 2009, 5:01 PM
> 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 as an historical document (by Churchill among others) until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
>
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