Lord Glasman's Labor blues

Lord Maurice Glasman writes in the New Statesman

As a political position Blue Labour, of which I am a co-founder, draws upon a rich heritage of socialist and religious thought and practice. We try to reconcile the revolutionary and Leveller John Lilburne with his contemporary Archbishop Laud in our defence of liberty and resistance to enclosures.

Why do anything so foolish? How many working class people have heard of Lilburne or Laud? The former has some salience for American Constitutional Law. The latter has been wholly irrelevant for 300 years.

Blue Labour was supposed to revitalize working class organizations and community based initiatives. How can it do so by talking of Lilburne and Laud?

We draw upon Catholic social thought and Machiavelli’s discourses in our understanding of civic democracy, social organisation and resistance to commodification.

No wonder we stopped hearing about Blue Labor. It is a farrago of contradictory nonsense. Glasman, himself, was described as Ed Milliband's Guru. Predictably, that Arjuna has been rejected by the battlefield.

What about Glasman? Does anybody bother with him anymore? More to the point, does anyone let him bother them? It appears so. The long suffering people of Iraq have had to put up with this windbag.

Last October, I went on the pilgrimage of the Arbaeen as a guest of the Shia community of Iraq to honour the sacrifice of Imam Huseyn in 680 CE and their more recent sacrifice in defeating Islamic State (IS).

Oddly, the Shias weren't exactly shouting from the rooftops about their guest. He got less publicity than the Neteuri Karta do on their visits to Iran.

We also take great inspiration from the Jewish trade union called the Bund, which operated in eastern Europe in the early 20th century and linked exploitation and oppression in the development of its socialism, as well as the self-organised communal forms of exilic Judaism that characterises eastern European Jewry before its destruction.

The Bund opposed Zionism and, in Russia, threw in its lot with the Bolsheviks. It was on the wrong side of history. Subsequent events made it clear that emigration was not 'escapism'. It was the only alternative to either being killed or being part of a murderous crew who'd scapegoat and slaughter you when it found it convenient.

We respect religious traditions and their defence of the integrity of the person when confronted by the inhumane utilitarianism of both the market and the state.

There is only one reason to respect a religious tradition. It is because you belong to that religion and believe you are obeying God by following that tradition to the best of your ability.

Religions which are difficult to convert to- like Judaism- may be grateful for 'respect' but proselytizing Religion demand more than respect. They need you to convert.

A Brahman may like it if his traditions are respected, however, as a Vaishnavite or Shaivite or whatever, he wants you to give up eating meat and drinking wine and come join his Sect so as to obey God and gain His Grace.

Blue Labour takes as its starting point the defeat of fascism at home and abroad and the faithfulness of the British working class to Labour.

That 'faithfulness' disappeared long ago. Why? Maggie Thatcher saw to it that we could own our own homes and even buy shares in leading British enterprises. She also defeated a genuine Fascist- General Galtieri- and liberated English speaking people in the Falkland Islands from an alien yoke. Michael Foot, Labor's leader at the time, was initially quite jingoistic but Labor as a whole appeared to prefer the path of appeasement. What stuck in peoples' minds was Tam Dalyell banging on about the sinking of the Belgrano- which the rest of us considered a victory for our country.

For us, the survival of the Jewish community in Britain is a source of pride and wonder.

This is foolish. The Jews have contributed so much to our sense of 'pride and wonder' at what Britain has achieved that we are concerned that they should thrive as much as possible, not merely survive.

We recognize that 'virtue signalling' on Israel represents 'wasteful competition'. It is a public nuisance which must be curbed. The proper way to do it has been suggested by a highly responsible British organization- viz. the Jewish Board of Deputies. Barristers and Constitutional lawyers may be able to suggest improvements. This should be a bi-partisan matter because it is in the National interest.

Blue Labour begins its reflection on what Marx called the “Jewish question” by recognising

that Marx was a shithead? No? then don't bother.

the tragedy of the Jews who remain in the diaspora as a much-diminished minority in a growing world,

There are plenty of diasporic communities. If, like the Armenians, they start backing terrorist outfits, it is in their own interest for them to forced to desist by the operation of the Law. Terrorists soon turn into extortionists and get involved with international criminal syndicates and foreign intelligence agencies.

The Jews are in a different position because the State of Israel can more than hold its own. That is why there is no Jewish terrorism. The Palestinians are still paying a price for their desperate gamble with terrorism. Pakistan too is paying a terrible price. It has fallen behind Bangladesh economically. Just recently, Pakistani terrorists enabled Narendra Modi to gain a landslide victory. There is no 'Hindu terrorism' in India because the State is willing to flex its muscles.

just as we recognise the tragedy of the Palestinians and support them in resisting the dispossession that Israel enacts.

So Blue Labor spends a lot of time recognizing all sorts of things in distant parts of the globe where Britain has no influence. Why not spend some of that time recognizing shite that's going down in our own streets? We have a situation in London, on Lord Glasman's doorstep, where Mums are sending their sons back to Somalia because they are safer there than in Stoke Newington or Stamford Hill.

The Jewish question pervades these several debates in different ways.

No it doesn't. It is wholly irrelevant.

In the Brexit debate, the Jews are considered by many to be archetypal Remain supporters, “citizens of nowhere” and “rootless cosmopolitans” who prosper from the weakening of borders and democracy and benefit from the free movement of people, money, services and goods.

The opinion of many shitheads is still shit.

This leads us on to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership: the two issues that have united opposition to it have been his stance on Brexit and anti-Semitism, which are connected in his politics with the assertion of democratic sovereignty and opposition to colonialism, and, therefore, Israel.

Corbyn came to power because Miliband listened to Glasman and fucked up monumentally. But Corbyn is a deeply silly man. We put him in so as to scare the smart people straight. They need to stop virtue signalling and talking hi ghfalutin nonsense and roll up their sleeves and do something useful for a change.

Within Labour, it is widely asserted that the accusation of anti-Semitism has been “weaponised”, ie used dishonestly by opponents of Corbyn to undermine him and his radicalism, which is expressed in support for the Palestinians and a condemnation of Israel.

Corbyn isn't anti-semitic. The problem is that there is 'wasteful competition' in virtue signalling on this issue. I believe this trend was started by Holier than Thou Jews but, precisely because Jews are genuinely smart, everybody else felt obliged to jump on the bandwagon. Similarly, Hindu intellectuals got off on condemning Modi and, because they were Professors at highly regarded Ivy League Universities, everybody else jumped on the bandwagon. However, Indians aren't considered to be anywhere near as smart as Jews. So there were diminishing returns to this sort of stupidity. Once people saw that Indian people in the U.K or the U.S were batting for Modi, they backed off. Still, the Labor Shadow Foreign Secretary got into hot-water for tweeting the sort of routine congratulatory message that his counterpart in Government had sent Modi.

The Jewish community is seen as part of the “Israel lobby”.

Nothing wrong with that. Most British people prefer Israel to other countries in the region.

That in turn opens up the issue of colonial politics and Britain’s refusal to recognise the pervasive imperial influence in its foreign policy, one manifestation of which is its support for Israel.

This is sheer nonsense. After the Suez crisis, Britain has been a poodle. Obama may blame Cameron for the Libyan fiasco, but back then it was not blindingly obvious that the man was a cretin.

The argument and iconography of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903), an infamous fake purporting to document a Jewish conspiracy for global control, has taken a left-wing form in modern Labour politics. Corbyn’s 2012 Facebook comment in support of a mural in London’s East End depicting hook-nosed bankers plundering the poor of the world – which he later expressed regret for – is an example of this.

But we all already knew Corbyn was a cretin. His function is to scare the pointy heads straight- i.e. get them to stop virtue signalling to each other and roll up their sleeves and do something useful for a change.

The tragedy is that the contribution to socialism and communism is one of the major Jewish stories of the 19th and 20th centuries, up there with American immigration, the Holocaust, the foundation of the state of Israel and the disappearance of the ancient Jewish communities of the Arab lands.

Communism was a bad idea. Jews did make a contribution to Italian Fascism and the Young Turks and so on but couldn't, through no fault of their own, make a contribution to Nazism. However, they have made a very significant contribution to Monetarism, Free Market Economics, Neo-Con ideology, not to mention Ayn Rand's 'Objectivism'.

It is not just that Jewish theorists and leaders such as Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky and Leon Trotsky played a constitutive role in the formation of communism, and that Eduard Bernstein, Harold Laski and Max Adler also formed the fundamental opposition between social democracy and revisionism. There is also the fact that millions of Jews supported and considered the left to be their natural political home.

Till they smartened up or were killed.

Forty-five per cent of members of the German Social Democratic Party were Jews in 1920.

And that turned out swell.

The majority of Russian Menshevik activists, as well as Bolshevik leaders, were Jews with a loathing of tsarism and a strong commitment to communism as an ideal of equality and justice.

And that turned out just as swell.

The ultimate victory of Stalin following the Russian Revolution should not obscure this. He rose in alliance with two Jews, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, who he then murdered when his dominance was assured.

So the lesson here is...what?

In Britain, there was a strong Jewish representation of MPs and party members in Labour, as well as a virtual domination of the Communist Party. Some of them were members of my family; poor working-class Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe – tailors, fenning hands, seamstresses and pressers – who saw in the left a strong anti-fascist force that cared for the poor. My Mum, who was born in Hackney, learned to read from the Daily Worker, brought round daily, unread, by her Uncle Dave.

Yup. But Glasman's family also started businesses or learned remunerative trades or joined well paid professions. They rose up by their own bootstraps. True, the contribution they made was out of all proportion to their numerical size. But that is true of almost every Jewish community across the Globe. India had a tiny Jewish community. That didn't stop them making a huge contribution to the Arts.

This story did not turn out well. The Soviet Union became increasingly hostile to Jews with the extermination of the Bund and the massacre of Jewish intellectuals in the 1930s. After the Second World War, there was the so-called Doctors’ Plot of 1953, in which a group of Jewish doctors were accused of trying to poison Stalin, and the Slánsky trial of 1952 in Czechoslovakia, in which leading Jewish communists were accused of supporting the Yugoslav leader Tito and secretly working with “Zionist-imperialists”. Rudolf Slánsky, the deputy leader of the party, was publicly hanged in Prague. This period of anti-Semitism climaxed in the Soviet Union with the revival of a tsarist policy of limiting Jewish participation in public institutions.

So, Glasman is saying Jews, like other people, can back the wrong political party. Still, they learned from their mistakes- those that didn't being repeatedly decimated- and now have a thriving state of their own.

Incidentally, quite a few Indians- like Saklatvala or Palme Dutt (who was half Indian)- did turn to Communism. Some, like Chatto- Sarojini Naidu's brother- were killed by Stalin. Others, like M.N Roy fled in time to join mainstream politics in India.

Looking back, Indians can see Communism was shite. So was Socialism. As for 'Secularism'- don't get me started. Public intellectuals are a public nuisance. As for Professors of Political Science, the Chinese have said it best- 'Science Students look down on Arts students. Arts students look down on Politics students. Politics students look down on their teachers.'

The tragedy of the Jewish left has been a long time in the making.

The tragedy of the Left, or the Right, or the Center may or may not be a long time in the making. However what triggers it is an act of cretinism. Glasman, who thought Labor should be talking to the English Defense League and campaigning for an end to all immigration in defiance of EU law, made Cameron look like a cuddly teddy bear to those who believed Glasman was Miliband's guru. But Cameron was a cretin. He triggered the tragedy- farce though it may presently appear- which all of us in this country will have to suffer through.

We think often of the victims of Nazism, but the persecution of the Jews in the Soviet Union initiated by Stalin also caused a huge loss of life and hope for eastern European Jews.

As nobody does not know. People my age grew up reading about Jewish 'refuseniks' and tolerated detente because at least some Jews were managing to get out of the Soviet Union. Needless to say, the countries which received them profited greatly. Israel is now a thriving knowledge economy. That's why its neighbors now trust it. It doesn't have to expand geographically to become economically viable. On the contrary, it gets a big peace dividend once young Palestinians (who do very well academically when given a chance) can be recruited to these new industries.

This could be seen as a form of progressive suicide in that, unlike Nazism, many Jews believed in communism, and made sacrifices and devoted their lives to it.

They didn't have a lot of options. Emigration was not 'escapism' precisely because if you move once, your ability to move again increases. Your choice menu expands. Geographical mobility unlocks occupational and social mobility. Vote with your feet if you are unable to vote for what you want. Oppression and rent extraction can only occur if there is inelasticity. Good mechanism design attains subsidiarity when it increases elasticity of response and decreases reliance on top down remedies.

There was a strong belief that a secular society built upon equality and justice would eliminate poverty, exploitation and oppression, and allow Jews to participate fully in a world that had persecuted and excluded them for centuries.

There was also a strong belief that a place were Jews ran things would be a safe place for Jews. This belief was proved true only because Jews were prepared to fight to safeguard such a place and enforce the rule of Law. This is all that matters. A society can be as secular as you like and spend all its time bleating about equality and justice. It is still not a safe place to settle if it can't defend itself or enforce its own laws.

More than that, it was also the liberation of Jews from their religion through a scientific belief in progress and a general hostility to faith as the ultimate form of “false consciousness”. They even had a word for this process, “auto-emancipation”, and early Zionism was also part of that story, of the emancipation of Jews from Judaism and all peoples from God. They were the original progressives and believed in the liberation of mankind from superstition and dogma.

How is it 'progressive' to believe nonsense? Pious Beliefs & ringing Declarations are useless. There are exceptions to this rule. In 1968 my own Baghdad declaration called for the liberation of mankind from naughtiness and evilry. I reiterated this manifesto in my Nairobi declaration of 1972 as well as my New Delhi declaration of 1974. My London Declaration of 1982 however called for the libra-fucking-ration of man-fucking-kind from like... you know OMG this babycham really packs a punch! and, what was I saying... fuck, I'm gonna hurl'.

Nazism is often cited as a reason for the state of Israel, but its appeal also lay in the experience of Jews in the Soviet Union.

This is silly. Zionism was firmly established before Hitler or Stalin rose to power. Balfour, who introduced the first British restriction on immigration- a measure aimed at East European Jews- also signed the Balfour declaration a dozen years later. The irony is, as my esteemed colleague Prof. V.D Choothopadhyay has discovered, Balfour was actually Balfive! In the light of this revelation, Prof. Glasman's screed appears quite sensible.

Since the Second World War, and growing in volume and intensity in our time, there has been a resurgence of anti-Semitism on the left that equates Jews with capitalism, imperialism and racism in the form of its two largest communities, those of the United States and Israel.

So, tell the Left to go fuck itself. Hindus in the Nineties found themselves being shat on by the Left- more particularly by Hindu academics. We told them to go fuck themselves. Thanks to regular beatings by Mamta's goons, former Leftists in West Bengal are now voting for Modi.

Why seek a homeland in an abstract ideological space populated only by cretins? Why not beat or otherwise ridicule and deride ideologues who try to shit on your head?

The loss of a political home on the left and the latter’s transformation into a hostile force is a form of double exile for Jews such as me who are still faithful to the idea of the leadership of the poor, of a democratic resistance to the domination of capital, and of a belief in a common good in which Jews are obliged to participate.
It is another dispossession.

If you say so, my Lord. Most reprehensible, I'm sure.

So how did it happen? How could it be that the most persecuted and socialist of people, the Jews of eastern Europe, should become, in the mind of their political descendants, the architects and puppet masters of systematic imperialism, colonialism and slavery?

The most persecuted and socialist Jews were killed. The one's who weren't killed were less persecuted and socialist. They had kids who did well because they were not being persecuted and weren't living in socialist shitholes. Many did well for themselves which made stupider people jealous. That's it. That's the whole story.

How could it be that what August Bebel, one of the founders of the German Social Democrats, called “the socialism of fools” became the dominant creed of much of the progressive intelligentsia?

 Where is anti-semitism the dominant creed? Syria? Those guys have fucked themselves over. Iran? They may yet get nuked. Fuck is a 'progressive intelligentsia'? Only retards use such terms. We expect smart people to invent cool stuff not talk stoopid shite.

How did it come to be that the only country in the Middle East with free and democratic trade unions, with a welfare state, with very high rates of literacy and low rates of child mortality, with women’s equality and gay rights, is seen by so many on the left as on a par with Islamic State?

The simplest explanation is best. The thing is not alethic. It is hypocritical virtue signalling caught in a vicious cycle of 'wasteful competition'. It is a public nuisance and should be curbed by law.

It’s a question that we have to understand because the coalition between post-colonial politics, Islamism and progressive thought is the dominant one of our time.

Hilarious! Where in the world can you find any one stupid enough to subscribe to 'Post Colonial theory'? No doubt, there are cretins who have to take the shittiest of non-STEM subjects so as to get a Credential and who are therefre obliged to pretend to take that cretinism seriously. But everybody knows they are cretins. You may get naches for saying 'my daughter is doing a Doctorate at Princeton'. But if it is in Subaltern shite, the girl will still have to bus tables to pay off her Student Loans.

As for 'progressive thought' fuck is it doing in bed with Islamism? Pretending its butt-hole is a vagina?

How did the left end up translating and promoting The Elders of the Protocols of Zion for a digital age?

Such translations were ubiquitous by the Twenties of the last Century. Why would the Left need to translate it? Nasser was promoting it and the Ba'athists considered it canonical. A Saudi King recommended it to Kissinger. I once knew a crazy guy named Gobind Menon, whose 'Syndic Oil Agencies' represented OPEC, whose sideline was crazy anti-semitic theories tailored to appeal to South Indian idiots like me. Captain Vadakayil may be one of his intellectual heirs. Incidentally, Ambassador Damodaran quizzed me about Menon. He took the reasonable view that the guy was a nutter who had managed to tap into a little Saudi money.

People like Glasman thought that, when they got a Graduate student from Pakistan or Yemen or whatever, that they were being presented with a tabula rasa. The reverse was the case. The cretinism of political philosophy was hospitable to anti-semitic cretinism. The solution is to get rid of worthless University departments.

Part of the answer is that the central assumptions of the left have all turned against the Jews.

And the Hindus and Men and Heterosexuals and cis-gender White People and people wot talk fancy like my cousins in Hampstead.

There used to be a serious socialist commitment to a different kind of economy, based on rational principles and co-operation rather than the frenzy of waste and competition.

But stupid shitheads like you crowded out the guys who were doing useful work. So they went to the private sector where they didn't have to listen to your cretinous, holier than thou, whining.

The left position was based upon class and exploitation rather than identity.

It was based on stupid lies- like how White people came to India and stole everything while the Brown folk were sleeping.

This element has fallen away and is no longer the central feature of progressive ideology.

Coz you can't tell people who are as poor as shit that they are being stolen from. They know they never had anything to steal. So you have to pretend it is the State or the Commons which are being plundered. The trouble is the last bunch of guys who looted the country said the same thing. After a couple of iterations, this shit won't fly.

It is hard to imagine a time when socialism was seen as productively superior to capitalism.

It could be in certain sectors and over a limited time frame. Economists figured all this out long ago. Glasman and me studied this at A level or the first year of College.

But, although there are some murmurings about international forms of regulation and economic democracy, today’s socialist programmes are not based upon capitalism’s lack of productive efficiency and scientific management.

Capitalism has productive efficiency and scientific management. So does any successful Public Sector enterprise. Inefficiency and unscientific management rapidly destroys an organization's ability to function. So the thing ceases to exist. Ask the Venezuelans.

Tax and regulation are the order of the day.

When have there not been taxes and regulations? They are the the price of Civilization since the time of ancient Sumer.

The price system is believed more resilient than central planning.

Central planning works if the Government controls the economy directly. Gorbachev crashed Communism by giving up Party control of the economy. This, predictably, led to a 'scissors' crisis.

Extensive price systems are fragile unless their supporting institutions are anti-fragile. Because of Knightian Uncertainty, most markets fail almost immediately.

There are those like me who argue that a different economy is reasonable, plausible and desirable, based upon labour value, economic democracy and respect for work, but we are a declining tribe, a bit like those Hasidic groups who follow a dead rabbi.

More like a brain-dead group following a dead preceptor. The fact is Kantorovich showed the equivalence (absent Knightian uncertainty) between 'shadow prices' and Arrow Debreu prices. He also said he'd solved the Marxian problem of value. Obviously, by the Spilrazn extension theorem and Brouwer's fixed point theorem, there must be a Labor numeraire. The problem is it is not effectively computable and, because of Knightian uncertainty, useless in any case.

Does Glasman know how much steel we should produce and how it should be produced? What about how much butter should be supplied to his local Supermarket on any given day? If not, why does he hold such an absurd belief?  Is he not merely talking for the sake of talking?

In place of a political economy, or a scientific socialism, as it used to be known, has emerged a post-colonial politics that organises itself around an opposition to and a reckoning with imperialism.

It emerged in the Fifties and then disappeared because Colonialism disappeared. That's also the reason the Suffragette movement ended after women got the vote.

A few stupid academics- or Shashi Tharoor giving a bombastic speech to the Oxford Union- do not constitute any sort of politics. Tharoor got re-elected- and helped Rahul get re-elected from his native Kerala- by stealing votes from the Communists by opposing the entry of women into the Sabarimala temple. That's genuine politics. Saying 'boo to Imperialism!' is silly.

Instead of a constructive alternative in terms of democratic organisation of the firm or state control of capital, there is a denunciation of the “1 per cent” who control the world’s resources.

State control of capital means the Government can take your money and piss it against the wall. Welcome to Venezuela.

That is the deep story of the left, the idea that the economy excludes most people through the concentration of ownership by finance capital and that the world is run for the benefit of this elite.

This deep story was kicked in the goolies by Thatcher who created a home owning, share owning, democracy. Sadly, Blair and Brown didn't take equally active measures to redistribute wealth. Instead they put their faith in University education- not realizing that shitheads like Glasman can hand out worthless credentials for ignorant nonsense.

The socialism of fools has always seen those people as being Jews, the puppet masters of the sham theatre of competition when all is collusion, who thus reveal the truth behind the mirage of the invisible hand of the market.

So what? Why bother with it? The fact is, back then, the 'blood libel' too had currency. Why does this guy- who went up to University a year after me- have his head stuck so firmly in the butt of a bygone age?

Left anti-Semitism may partly be a result of socialism’s failure to constrain capitalism, but that does not make it any less real. In fact, from within left ideology, anti-Semitism has a role in making socialism’s failure to constrain capitalism more plausible.
From this perspective, Israel is not an example of Jewish self-determination, nor a response to sustained forms of oppression, but a manifestation of colonialism and imperialism.

This was the usual view in India from the Thirties to the mid Seventies. The Israeli Labor party shat the bed by its patronizing attitude to 'Oriental' Jews- i.e. from non European countries. But the Israeli Left, like the Indian Left, has been almost wholly erased.

Nobody believes this shit any more. They may pretend to coz they are stupid academics or because they are talking to stupid academics, but everybody has wised up to the reality. Israel is a thriving knowledge economy. It has made reliable friends in the region. Its most ferocious enemies have, one by one, bitten the dust- or are likely to unless they mend their ways. Why? They have been less successful in turning into Knowledge Economies. Partly, this is the familiar 'resource curse' driving a Thucydidean trap. In other words, military strength based on high oil prices causes other players to act in concert to neutralize the threat. Israel escaped this because it did endogenous, knowledge based, growth and engaged in pretty nimble diplomatic footwork. Still, it could be caught with its pants down. Fortunately, it was able to find new allies among the American Christian Right and, under Likud, became a proxy that could be used in internecine Arab conflicts- e.g. containing Syria in Lebanon so Saudi and Gulf clients could hang in there.

A friend of mine- the son of a Pakistani General- related to half that country's Defense and Diplomatic elite- sums up the change in how Israel was viewed. 'Yaara,' he says, 'the Palestinians were supplying surface to air missiles to the Bhutto brothers to shoot down Zia's plane at the same time as the Israelis were in Peshawar training the Mujahhidin.' His point was that you can rely on Israelis to act sensibly. Arabs be kray kray. Why on earth did Gulf countries supply the money for the SAMs? What prompted the Palestinians to take the money? The whole thing had to do with some thymotic tribal conception of generosity or manly bravado.

Israel is a pragmatic country which is turning Knowledge into higher living standards. Its military pays for itself by having become a technology incubator.

Glasman, who teaches a subject fit only for retards thinks people in 2019 still believe that it is 1957 and Israel is on the point of grabbing the Suez Canal in alliance with the Brits and the French.

It is considered a European project sustained by the support of the United States. The US is in turn seen as essentially subordinate to the “Jewish lobby”, or more commonly the “Israel lobby”, which is sustained by finance and the soft power of American corporate entertainments and media interests, which are, on the whole, assumed to be owned and run by Jews.
This, allied to the wealth of the American Jewish community, is then presented as the real truth. The conspiracy says: you may think you like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, you may even be amused by Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm, you may occasionally enjoy watching The Wire or reading Phillip Roth but, in reality, you are perpetuating the domination of culture by a form of control that excludes criticism of Israel and reproduces capitalist hegemony, sexism, racism, colonialism and imperialism.

And the Spanish Inquisition. Everybody forgets the Spanish Inquisition. That is the secret of its success.

As George Orwell wrote in his essay on Dickens, “all art is propaganda”.

Coz Orwell knew shit from shit and wasn't an Old Etonian shithead who thought POUMists were just swell. After Franco died, who voted for POUM? 0.22% of the population. Why? Everybody knew it had always been shit.

Harvey Weinstein was the cherry on the cake in offering supposed proof for this theory.

Because Weinstein was too busy recolonizing India and enslaving Africans and manipulating Wall Street to sexually harass anybody.

The Jews and Israel are simply “on the wrong side of history”.

Like cisgender Men.

Israel is dubbed an “apartheid state”, based on the systematic dispossession and expulsion of the Palestinian population.

South Africa would still be an apartheid state if Whites were in the majority. It may become a country White people and farsighted non White people run the fuck away from.

Israel can be as apartheid as it likes so long as Jews are the majority. What matters is if it can defeat any internal or external enemy.

The two faces of Jewish threat in the 1920s were Trotsky and the Rothschilds.

Trotsky was a threat. Wall street bankers- more particularly Jewish bankers who supported Japan against Tzarist Russia- were portrayed as a threat. The Rothschilds weren't. They were thoroughly assimilated into British and French Society and helped finance the Tzarist war effort.. Rufus Isaacs was seen as a bit of an upstart and came in for abuse from Cecil Chesterton. Montague committed political suicide by tearing into Brigadier Dyer. But the Rothschilds weren't a target till somewhat later.

Today it is George Soros and Binyamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu's most fervent haters are Israelis or well to do American Jews. Soros is an obsession only for Orban.

Trotsky really was trying to fuck everybody up. But Stalin settled his hash long ago. Jews are simply too small in number to worry anyone now.

Jews are still seen as two-faced. They want a state for themselves but globalisation for everyone else.

So does everybody else. It is perfectly rational to want everybody else, except oneself, to play by the rules.

The “socialism of fools” conflates the critique of capitalism with the power of Jews.

But the critique of capitalism was itself foolish. This is a case of ex falso quodlibet. From nonsense any other nonsense follows. Stuff like this-

That is its fatal conceit. George Soros is not to be understood as the cause or the controller of capitalist globalisation, but he is a strong and super-rich advocate of that system who seeks to subordinate democracy to the free movement of capital and labour and I believe it is right to oppose him.

Why oppose Soros when there are younger, smarter, richer guys who advocate the same thing? Why put yourself on the side of Orban? Fuck is wrong with you?

It is wrong, however, to view him as representing the “Jewish interest”, or as the mystery of capitalism revealed.

It is wrong to get exercised about Jews as if they weren't rational, self-interested creatures like everybody else, and it is also wrong to talk stupid shite about Capitalism.

In the secular left analysis, which rejects religion as a motivating force in people’s lives, Islamic State and Hamas are anti-colonial movements resisting the domination of Western interests and culture.

Which is why everybody thinks the secular left is as stupid as shit.

Indeed, it is rare on the left to hear any analysis of Islam as a form of imperialism that includes slavery in its political economy. It seems that colonialism and imperialism were exclusively born in the 18th century and any instances before then don’t really count. The exception to this mindset is the politics developed by the Kurds in Turkey and Syria, in which this point about these aspects of Islam’s past is well made.

Which is why Kurdish controlled portions of Iraq have so many mosques going up.

There was a strain of silliness among Turkish Kurds, and another  strain of silliness in Syria, but silliness is all it was. Only a Glasman level narcissist would imagine it amounted to anything. Why not start gassing on about the MeK? They are just as crazy and useless.

I am vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Kurdistan and I visit Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish regional government in Iraq, at least once a year.

And a very useful idiot you are too. I'm kidding. You are not useful at all. Still, it explains why the Shias invited you to Kerbela. After all, them Kurdish Sunnis should not be allowed to monopolize narcissistic idiocy of Glasmanic proportions because everybody should have an equal share in such delectable mishegos. 

I was there when the Peshmerga, the Kurdish fighters, had just defeated IS in the northern Iraqi province of Nineveh, where Yazidis and Christians used to live. I followed a day after battle and I saw muddy holes full of dead women’s bodies, killed because they were too old to be sold into slavery. I saw crucified bodies nailed on to walls and fences; decapitated corpses on the street.
What was remarkable about this was that I could not get anybody interested in it when I returned to London, not in the Labour Party and not really in the Church either.

This is because they think you a tosser who might, any moment, start a dialogue with the EDL or the Neo-Nazis or whatever. Also, Youtube is way more effective than some sad fuck Professor who helped Miliband fuck up.

The gist of what I heard was that Tony Blair had a lot to answer for in the Middle East. In that same week, a Palestinian was killed at an Israeli checkpoint. That generated powerful anger – and I felt it.

In whom did it generate 'powerful anger'? A bunch of shitheads. The ordinary British voter was entirely unaffected.

That's the problem with teaching a shitty subject to retards. You have to interact with stupid shitheads. Do what everyone else in the House of Lords does and get a couple of Directorships so you can move in slightly less shitty circles.

The explanation that I came to accept for this is that IS’s activities are seen as an unfortunate result of failed policy, Western colonialism and oppression. Israel’s actions, however, are believed to be the direct consequence of imperialism. Reason requires an understanding of cause and effect, and Zionism is believed to have led to the rise of Salafist Islam: in that way, Israel and the United States are considered responsible for Islamic State.

Considered by whom? Only ignorant shitheads. Why swim in their sewer? Ask Nick Clegg to get you a job with Facebook.

I know that the founders of Zionism understood nothing about Islam. As progressives they considered themselves to be a benefit to the local population by increasing literacy rates and cutting child mortality. They were Fabian in their approach. My experience of working within many different traditions with the Muslim community in Britain is that the dispossession of the Palestinians is considered a great wrong that should be corrected as a matter of justice. This is not a view held only by Wahhabists but also by the mainstream of Islamic thought and within the Muslim community.

So what? Saudi Arabia is Wahhabi. It gets on well with Netanyahu's Israel.  Glasman's experience of 'working within many different traditions with the Muslim community in Britain' is worthless. People think him a fool. He is welcome to go work with Tommy Robinson.

Muslim immigration to Britain means that the political narrative held by many Muslims does matter greatly in our politics.

Nonsense! If they were sensible enough to come here, they are sensible enough to see that what is good for Britain is good for them. 70% voted Remain though Muslims are more likely than non-Muslims to be displaced in the job market by European workers.

Muslims, on the whole, vote Labour.

Unless 'Blue Labor' gets its feet under the table.

Solidarity with the Palestinians is based upon religious and communal solidarity rather than simply a political preference. We can see this in the developing narrative that Labour is anti-Semitic and the Conservatives are Islamophobic. Communal strife is becoming part of our national politics.

There are more Islamophobes than Muslims. The Tories are also actively trying to recruit Hindus and Sikhs on this basis. But, 'communal strife' is not on the cards. Racial strife, however, is a danger. At any rate, that is why Blue Labor was shunned like the Black Death.

Because Jews feel snubbed and reviled in their inherited home on the left, while the right is also turning ugly, it is not difficult to understand why there is genuine anxiety in the Jewish community.

Jews, like Muslims, are sensible people. There is anxiety because this country was unexpectedly launched upon a highly uncertain trajectory under the most incompetent Prime Minister we have ever had.

More than this, the unity of progressive forces do not view the Jews as a small and traumatised people; they do not view Jews as having a two-thousand-year history of defencelessness.

Progressive forces, properly so called, make progress. They don't talk stupid shite. Jews are just people like anybody else. If banging on about being Jewish makes them better comedians, then and only then does everybody benefit. But it doesn't help in STEM subjects or entrepreneurship or any utile profession.

Jewish life was extirpated in western Europe, eastern Europe and throughout the Muslim world, where Jews had lived for many millennia.

Etruscan life was extirpated as was that of almost all the non-Indo European speaking peoples on the continent. Jewish life has not been extirpated in Europe any more than Romani life has been extirpated.

And Jews are what they have always been, a small people (14.5 million, 0.2 per cent of the global population) with genuine reasons to be fearful for their existence on the face of the Earth. In Salafist Islam they confront an implacable and violent foe.

But Ba'athist Syria or Iraq was worse. Saudi Arabia grants visas to Jewish workers. If they transition to a sophisticated service based economy, we can expect to see plenty of Jews thriving there. Qatar, also a Wahhabi state, may move more quickly in this direction. Dubai has had a synagogue since 2008. This community of perhaps 2000 people is now officially recognized.

Still, sensible Jews won't want to live in a Muslim country. In any case, simply so as to improve their kids' chances of finding marriage partners, Israel represents the best alternative.

Even if such extremists constitute a small minority, the Muslim community worldwide is far larger (at 1.8 billion), and growing.

These extremists pose a threat to their own countries thus creating a market for anti-terrorist technology which Israel is well placed to profit from.  Israel now provides a better standard of living and far superior life-chances, so making Aliyah is no longer the terrible sacrifice it once was.

I was recently in Baghdad, where Jews have lived since the Babylonian exile, and there was not one Jew left.

Nor are there many Christians.

I found myself listening to Boney M in a more meaningful way. Where had they gone? In finding an answer to that question the tragedy of the Jewish left took its Arab form. Before the Second World War the Jews of Iraq participated fully in a generous and inclusive vision of Iraqi identity.

There was no such vision in Iraq then or now. The place has always been tribal.  Still, it is true that older Baghdadis retained fond memories of their erstwhile neighbors.

As with the Social Democrats in Germany, as with the Mensheviks in Russia, half the members of the Iraqi Communist Party were Jews.

Does this man think the Iraqi Communist Party represented anything except its own fatuity? The fact is Grand Mufti Husseini was wildly popular in Iraq and the first pogroms began in '41. Anyway, Stalin ordered the Arab Communist parties to support the creation of Israel, so Communism never had a chance. Still, Ba'athist Socialism could be just as bloody- though less economically repressive.

I do feel sympathy for Iraqi Jews, some of whom blamed Mossad for carrying out terrorist strikes to get them to emigrate. However, the truth is, getting out of Iraq was a good thing.

Left-wing newspapers and journals proliferated in Baghdad.

To no good effect whatsoever.

In that city there was a three-thousand-year presence of a self-organised Jewish community that produced the great masterpiece of Jewish exilic life, the Babylonian Talmud. That community also built schools, hospitals, banks and houses. In old Baghdad, the mark of this history is everywhere, but there are no people of that heritage living there.

Because they kept getting killed. I recall asking the servant to switch on the TV so I could watch my cartoons- Baghdad TV transmitted American and Soviet cartoons on alternative days, I was hoping for an American cartoon- instead some bleak Polish shite came on. I asked the servant to turn off the set but he was entranced by what he saw- Jews being hanged. This was in '68. An Israeli academic who wrote a book about Saddam tells the story of a Jewish engineer who had been brought in for interrogation. Apparently the mukhabarat wanted him to confess to poisoning the water supply before hanging him. Then Saddam steps up. He recognizes the engineer as someone he used to sell cigarettes to. He orders him released. The fellow managed to get across the border and escape to Israel.

Soon many other 'minorities'- even if they were actually the majority- were in the same boat. Glasman thinks this is the fault of 'Nationalist modernity'. People who grew up in Iraq may be forgiven for having a different view.

Nationalist modernity had no place for them. The Jews experienced an unprecedented and extremely nasty pogrom in June 1941 in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the pro-Nazi government in Baghdad. Hundreds were killed and homes smashed as the Jews were targeted as agents of the British. (The Nazis were also anti-colonial.) Alongside this, many Baghdadis were killed defending the Jews, in an event that had no real precedent over the three millennia of Jewish life in Mesopotamia.

There were plenty of precedents. Baghdad hadn't seen a big pogrom for some time because the Jewish population only began to climb after, first the Ottomans, and then the Brits found Jews from Kurdistan to be smart and useful and worthy of protection.

A few years later, the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948 led to mass firings of Jewish people from Iraqi state jobs,

That began after independence in 1934.

the denial of civil rights and a spate of mysterious bombings in synagogues and Jewish community centres. There was also the public hanging of Shifaq Ades in Basra in October 1948. He was a prominent businessman and anti-Zionist who was charged with selling weapons to both Israel and the Communist Party. In 1951-52, El-Al planes arrived from Israel and there was a mass evacuation of the Jewish community.

Arab regimes played a cat and mouse game with their captive Jews. Still, the fact is, there were some left wing Jews in Baghdad for the Ba'athists to kill when they finally secured a vice like grip on power.

The tragedy of the Jewish left, then, is that there is no recognition, by the left, of Jews as a dispossessed, oppressed people.

The tragedy of the Jewish left is that it got hanged or shot or sent off to a Gulag or torture chamber. The comedy of the Jewish left is that it weeps tears of blood over getting no recognition, from the left, for the fact that the left kept fucking it over in a most heinous manner. This is funny because everybody knows the left fucks over everybody without distinction of color or creed.

Jews are not defined by the very thing that exiled them – imperial colonial domination.

Hilarious! England was once a Roman colony. How come this does not define England as a post colonial society struggling to overcome a historic trauma?

Jews are now considered alongside the Greeks, the Babylonians, the Romans. As a consequence, Jews are dispossessed of their history, and of the left as their home and hope in exile.

Greeks are dispossessed of their history? Really? Since when? What about Romans? Last time I visited, they were talking a language of Latin provenance. Babylonians are Baghdadis. They are still around. So are the Jews. So are the Indians and the Chinese and the Ethiopians and so on.

I suppose you could make your home on the Left but Glasman's Left is the empty air which goes whooshing past you as you step off the cliff edge of common sense.

The choice before them is brutal. Jews either affirm equality, justice and liberation and renounce Israel, or they accept Israel and become part of Babylon.

The choice before us is brutal. We either affirm equality, justice and liberation- which means handing over your house and your wife to any psychopath who barges in after liberating himself from the prison van- or we become part of 'de babylon'  by calling the police or performing a citizen's arrest while kicking the fucker's head in.

That is the tragedy of the Jewish left, who are baited and despised in the home they built in exile.

But they are baited and despised most by other Jews. Nobody else greatly cares, though getting a rise out of a noble Lord is always funny.

The fraternisation of opposites and the morbid symptoms are taking centre stage.

Very true. The neighborhood cats have taken to raping dogs. The times are out of joint. Morbid symptoms are taking center stage. Especially now Game of Thrones is over. Whatever are we to do?