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The intelligent worker will realise one thing stands out crystal clear throughout the centuries. Where there has been peace, prosperity and progress, the Jews have been able to live unmolested. Only where there has been a breakdown in society through war or economic collapse have we begun to hear of the “Jewish Danger”.
Though many similar stories may be told of the fate of other minorities, no minority has suffered so much and for so long as the Jewish minority.
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As socialists we do not represent an inalienable moral code, we see ourselves as part of the forward motion of history. We build on the foundations laid by great men and women, long gone, and we plan meticulously for the prosperity of some future day, which we ourselves may never see.
One of the great crimes committed repeatedly against ordinary people is the theft of their history. The class that profits most in the present day populates the past with foreboding shadows and triumphant images of themselves, such that they may lay claims of ownership upon the future, uncontested.
When confusion and disorientation run amok, we can and should look to the body of experience laid down by those that came before. Presented below are excerpts from a publication from 1944 on anti-semitism; by wartime MP and Communist, William Gallacher. What strikes me is how fresh and true these words ring today, reminding us that we must never loose sight of these principles.
This pamphlet is not some boring proclamation of dogma – it is a concise, gripping address to the ordinary man and woman. To be a socialist it is not enough to simply wrestle with the finer points of Marxist doctrine. The purpose of being a socialist is to engage in a continuous and ongoing dialogue with the world around you. It is with respect to this tradition that I’m paraphrasing William Gallacher’s words on anti-semtism here for you to read, and to disprove the lie that the totality of socialist thought is nothing but scripture enforced by propaganda and coercion.
He begins by highlighting the outrageous contradiction which is the hallmark of anti-semitism.
“But the Jews are all Communists!” Ah, I wish it were so. Only a small minority have so far made their way into the Communist Party. We would like more of them, all we can get, as of Scots, Welsh, English and all the rest.
No sooner has this wild yelling died down than it starts up again, this time on an entirely different tune. “All Jews are capitalists!”. So they get it both ways. Such childish nonsense wouldn’t be listened to in relation to any other people. The natural outcome of class relationships affect Jew and Gentile alike.
“But look at the money they spend, their blatant extravagance!” and then again “See how mean and miserly they are!”. Always the anti-semites have it both ways and upside down.
Gallacher goes on to dissect these arguments in greater detail, with reference to the prevailing issues of the day – particularly around war profiteering, black markets and representation in the armed forces. He reminds us that instead of looking for an imagined cabal of Jews hiding behind the curtains of power, you might be better off considering how fantastically over represented Jews have always been within the forces of anti-fascism. Of the 2500 men that went to fight fascism in Spain, roughly 300 were Jewish, and a staggering 12% of Britain’s Jewish population took up arms to fight Hitler.
THE CLASS ANALYSIS
Jews, like all people, are subject to the forces of class. But just it would be laughable to hold the existence of a corrupt Scottish banker against the Scots, so it is madness to see the position of one Jewish person or another as emblematic of anything other than the general organisation of society. He reminds us that when Jews are conspicuous by their difference it is always, repeat always, because of the methods of survival they have had to adopt against exclusion and persecution.
“But the Jews control finance, and through the control of finance do this, that and the other!”. If every Jew disappeared from this country tomorrow, it wouldn’t make one difference to the relationship between financiers, industrialists and the great masses of the workers.
Many who would fight gladly against the attacks of big business fall for anti-semitism, and thereby open the gates to their enemies. Anti-semitism is the trick by which people are persuaded to tie the rope around their own necks, to willingly sell themselves into slavery.
It is not a coincidence that Hitler and his ilk used the persecution of Jews as a smokescreen for a much wider attack on the organised working class. While the spectacle of jew-hatred was blinding the eyes of Europe, into the camps he swept Communists, the entire leadership of the Social Democratic Party and many thousands of rank and file Trade Union organisers and shop stewards – leaving the rest of Germany’s workforce vulnerable to open slavery by the Nazi Party and the industrialists who supported them.
Gallacher then proposes that the antidote to anti-semitism is education. Not education in how to “check your privilege” – as the dreary liberals of today so love to foist on you – but education in the principles of economics, from which lessons in unity can be drawn.
Many people cannot understand the mysterious workings of our economic system. Those people who are not socialists find their explanation not in the evils of capitalism, but in the imaginary evils of the Jews. Our world is indeed a difficult world to understand.
On the one hand, mankind has very largely solved the problem of producing food and commodities in sufficient abundance for everybody; and yet, on the other hand, our world is one in which both the working class and the middle class experience more insecurity than mankind has experienced for centuries. There seems to be something mysteriously wrong.
Why have we got poverty and hunger, crime and immorality? To all these questions the fascists have one simple answer – the Jews. It isn’t the private ownership of land. The Jews become the scapegoats of the capitalist system.
We can easily see that this is applicable to all kinds of anti-minority prejudice. Gallacher also often references the parallels between Jew-hatred and the persecution directed at Scots and Irish Catholics in Britain in his era. We too can also use our understanding of anti-semitism to spot other forms of bigotry. However, just as Gallacher doesn’t directly conflate the two examples, and discusses in great detail the specific characteristics of anti-semitism, we too should be careful not to conflate various forms of hatred, and make special effort to give them each their own unique appraisal.
STAMP IT OUT!
Gallacher finishes with an appeal to us all to play our part in stamping out anti-semitism as we find it. Just because the horror of total war is long behind us, there’s no reason not to remind ourselves that this duty remains bestowed upon us to this very day. I’ll leave you with his words:
Every worker must make it his serious individual responsibility to see to it that no anti-Jewish statement is allowed to pass without challenge, and when such a statement is made in innocence, a careful explanation is given of the danger it carries.
By seeing that this foul disease of anti-semitism is stamped out, we can clear a way for the advance of a new chapter in the forward march of Jews and Gentiles to a higher and better life.
heavyleather 