Everyone knows the story: Corbyn was an antisemite. There was that mural, wasn’t there, and some business about a wreath? And didn’t Ken Livingstone say something about Hitler?
The echoes and ripples of this story are confused now, like old memories. Was it Ken Livingstone who said the thing about Hitler or Chris Williamson? Did Corbyn say it was Jews or Zionists who don’t get irony? And didn’t someone say Jews controlled the slave trade or something?
The details barely matter anymore, though of course every one of these claims has been robustly and comprehensively exposed as a crude fraud.
But that doesn’t matter either: the words ‘Corbyn’ and ‘antisemitism’ now come out together automatically, one prompting the other. This will always be so. No matter how discredited the claims are, they will live on, zombie ‘facts’ that can never die.
What makes this all the more bizarre is that anyone can check these facts for themselves, easily, in minutes. The frauds are right there on the surface, and the information is public and always has been.
It’s impossible to gauge how widely this fraud is known, because our official media simply cannot and will not talk about it. Some of us have been aware from the outset, others have become aware gradually.
If you happen to be on social media and happen to stumble onto the debate, you will become aware too. But for most, that’s never going to happen.
For most, the words ‘Corbyn’ - which can be interchanged at will with the word ‘socialism’ - and ‘antisemitism’ will exist as a linguistic coupling, like steak-and-ale. It has entered the language. It bypasses thought entirely and operates on the deeper level of learned response.
I’m not aware that voters generally thought antisemitism was an important issue prior to 2016, I mean in terms of electoral salience. Had voters been asked how important the issue of antisemitism was to them, I doubt it would have been above a few percentage points.
The outcry against Corbyn, then, looks odd: why would we, as a nation, as an electorate, suddenly put antisemitism at the top of our salience list? Why would we suddenly start caring about it as an electoral issue?
We didn’t, of course, because it was never about antisemitism.
We didn’t, of course, because it was never about antisemitism.
The left were rising up, they had to be defeated. Left policies were hugely popular, there was a mass movement building around Corbyn, something had to be done.
After a few abortive attempts at other accusations (Russian stooge/Czech spy), antisemitism started to work, to cut through. The words were placed together, brute repetition did the rest.
Voters were given a ready-made reason to hate the left, they were given a narrative that was stark and clear and simple, and they were given it so many times it became ‘common knowledge’.
They didn’t have to ‘care about antisemitism’, they could just say what everyone else was saying. No thought required, details unimportant.
It’s instructive to have seen all this unfold in real time.
If we didn’t know before, now we do: we know what we’re up against.
ENDS
If we didn’t know before, now we do: we know what we’re up against.
ENDS
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