A poignant article, by Benjamin Jefferies, reprinted by Front Page Magazine from the Times of Israel, about the slow descent into madness by the British Left. Like the writer I’ve also seen how the British Left has gone from supporting the rights of all people to live in freedom, including the Jews of the State of Israel, to vicious friends and enablers of anti-Semites, especially Islamic anti-Semites.
Mr Jefferies said:
“I was brought up in a secular, democratic socialist family and the values of freedom, equality and solidarity were engrained into me from an early age.
My parents, British Labour Party stalwarts, looked to Israel in the 1960s as exemplar of the democratic and socialist ideals they maintained. Both were on the centre left of the Labour Party, and as a result, they and their many friends were deeply committed supporters of Israel and the Zionist cause. The commitment of those British socialists of half a century ago to the cause of the national self-determination of the Jewish people was exemplary and widely shared on the British left, Jewish and Gentile alike.
Things are very different now. The left of centre is, at least in Britain, the domain of the new antisemites of the anti-Zionist movement. BDS stalks the land, not the Spectre of Communism. The left is delivered to a lethal compromise that gets into bed with clerical fascists who demand women and gays and Jews be thrown off mountains.
This modern red-brown Strasserite left spits on the socialists of yore that actually believed in such values as freedom, equality and solidarity — and does it in the name of a fictional “anti-imperialism” that is nothing but the cheer-leading of the evil and murderous. “
I agree with Mr Jefferies and the sources that he quoted that this is not the working class Left of old, this is a middle class Left, unconcerned with either the broader questions of freedom and justice or for the British working classes (whom they often despise). Instead they bother themselves with thinks like self-imposed guilt, sexual kinks and power grabbing.
I look at the middle class Left and especially the middle class Left in the Labour party, and I don’t see the party of Keir Hardie or Will Thorn or Clement Atlee or even Harold Wilson, but instead I see a group of people who have an unshakable belief in their own twisted version of Leftism and who have hollowed out the British Labour party. Where once we saw Labour MP’s backing the London Dockers in order to get them a living wage, now we see Labour MP’s like Andy Slaughter and Stephen Timms pandering to Islamic groups and often pushing the false narrative of the ‘Palestinian’ Nakba or catastrophe (To the ‘Palestinians’ it’s not a catastrophe, you started a war and lost, get over it, the after affects of this war are you and your leaders fault). Can you imagine one of the greats of Labour history sharing a platform with Islamic fascists? Of course you wouldn’t, but this current generation of Leftist activists see no problem with cosy-ing up to the violent Jew hating thugs of the Islamic world.
The British Left has in the main ignored some of the great human rights scandals of our times in favour of bashing Israel. They have ignored the concentration camps in North Korea, the genocide in Sudan and any repression worldwide provided it was done by either brown people or whichever group ticks the ‘victim’ box this month.
This quote by Mr Jefferies from Julie Burchill sums up where the British Left has come from and where it has sunk to.
“It’s easy for me to sentimentalise those days when the trade unions held sway, chiming as they did with the calf country of my communism, but whatever their beery and sandwichy limits, they were far better than what replaced them; the politics of diversity. While working-class left-wing political activism was always about fighting the powerful, treating people how you would wish to be treated and believing that we’re all basically the same, modern, non-working-class left-wing politics is about… other stuff. Class guilt, sexual kinks, personal prejudice and repressed lust for power. “
The Times of Israel article continued:
“Sometimes I think the entire British left has dropped acid. There can be surely no other explanation for its addiction to insane, inverted political visions of a surreal quality that might suggest the left was readier for the madhouse than any sort of political power. Really though, it is not funny ha-ha. There is nothing amusing about the treachery of the modern British left, its abandonment of the values of freedom, equality and solidarity. Julie Burchill rightly rages against the modern British left’s obsessions with the hang-ups of the chattering classes; but if ever there was a collective criminal act by which the British left has betrayed its own foundational values, it is its iniquitous and venomous loathing of Israel and its denial of the Jewish people’s inalienable right to national self-determination in that land. “
The chattering-class Left who have steadily took over not only for crazy far Left but also the British Labour party have committed treason. They have committed treason to the citizens of Great Britain by their policy of multiculturalism, which has created and exacerbated not reduced division, treason against all the socialist Zionists who built the modern nation of Israel, nestled among the barbarism of neighbouring Arab countries and treason against all those who dragged themselves up by their bootstraps and built the British Labour Movement.
The British Labour movement and much of the Left as a whole has become an enemy of all that it once held true and it has frighteningly become both an enemy of the British working classes and their former allies in the Zionist movement.
The Left have gone collectively mad and I for one am sad to see this state of affairs. Nobody but nobody who considers themselves working class should vote for the Labour party or support any of the far left groupuscules, because if they throw the Jews and the Gays under the bus today, they will be chucking you and your family under the bus tomorrow. The BDS movement is but a small sample of the sickness afflicting too much of the Left.
Link
Front Page Magazine where I first saw this story
I’m not sure that the Left has ever really believed in ‘Freedom and Equality’ as Mr Jeffries claims; it’s always had a nasty side – from it’s support of Eugenics and praise for the Soviet Union up to its modern antisemitism and general hatred of Western Civilisation.
Agreed that it has always had that side but was that because of the working class Left or the Middle class Left? Much of the Left these days has very little in common with the great fighters for justice for the working classes of old.
True, but the majority of people who’ve shaped the left have been middle or upper-middle class so there’s always been a tension, just a difference in priorities.
There has always been these two strands the outward solidarity inclined communal working class left on the one side and the control freaks of the middle class left. In my opinion this tension kept both sides in check but the convulsions in the 1960’s ushered in the 1968 generation of academic middle class Leftist who had no connection with the other sort and completely despised the ordinary working class person sometimes because his or her views were completely at odds with those of academia and the middle class Left.
I guess fundamentally it’s the difference between the nationalist and internationalist left: the British working class tending to be more patriotic than the middle class, with the latter being dominant at the present.
I think both the nationalist and internationalist left can coexist side by side to a certain extent but what has happened is that too many of the chattering class left have sold their souls for the chimera of ‘anti-imperialism’. Both working class and middle class can be patriotic but the middle class Left is quite wedded to the idea of ‘anti-imperialism’ even though such a policy so often ends up backing far right Islamists and oppressing the very people that the old Left would have stood up for. Nick Cohen’s ‘What’s Left?’ is a fabulous read to see how the Left went berserk.