Thread by @docrussjackson

#THREAD

‘The man who hated Britain’: the discursive construction of ‘national unity’ in the Daily Mail - an article by Karin Stoegner & Ruth Wodak.

In 2013, the Mail triggered controversy with a story about Ralph Miliband: ‘The man who hated Britain’.

tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108…

In April 2015, a couple of weeks before the general elections in the UK on 7 May, Gulzab-een Afsar, a Tory candidate for Derby, posted on Facebook that she ‘can’t take Mr. Ed Miliband seriously!!’

In response to the comment that she should show ‘some respect for the future PM’, she posted that she would ‘never ever drop that low to support the Al Yahud! Lol'.

Also during the election campaign of 2015, The Sun columnist Katie Hopkins twittered that Justine, Ed Miliband’s wife, was ‘the least popular of party wives’ & suggested that Ed Miliband ‘might stick her head in the oven and turn on the gas’.

Against the background of these explicit antisemitic incidents, Karin Stoegner & Ruth Wodak argue these did not occur ‘out of the blue’. Antisemitic slurs directed against Ed Miliband were already instrumentalised at an earlier stage of the election campaign.

In autumn 2013 the Daily Mail triggered a fierce controversy in the British media & public sphere focused on the topics of antisemitism & patriotism/nationalism. It was sparked by the publication of an article on Ralph Miliband on 27 September 2013: ‘The man who hated Britain’.

The lead refers directly to Ed Miliband, then leader of the British Labour Party: ‘Ed Miliband’s pledge to bring back socialism is homage to his Marxist father. So what did Miliband Snr really believe in? The answer should disturb everyone who loves this country’.

The author of the piece, Geoffrey Levy, delves into Ralph Miliband’s Marxist convictions and recounts Ralph Miliband’s flight from Nazi persecution and his arrival as a Jewish refugee in Britain in 1940.

It is against this background that Levy characterises Ralph Miliband, a well-known and internationally acknowledged critical economist who taught at the LSE after WWII, as a person who – it is alleged in this article – was not reliable in his commitment to Britain.

This accusation rests on a range of presuppositions which refer both to common-sense claims and fallacious arguments such as: a Jewish refugee from Belgium can never become truly British; a Marxist is not reliable;

if the son of such a person still respects his father, then the son is also not reliable; if the father was a Marxist, then the son is probably also a Marxist; and so forth. However, these presuppositions are not stated explicitly and can thus be easily denied;

systematic text and discourse analyses are needed in order to make them apparent. The Daily Mail is renowned for its right-wing conservative stance and opposition to any ‘Left’ politics.

Stoegner & Wodak assume that this article and the claims made therein are neither coincidental nor an exceptional or unique instance.

On the contrary, they further assume that such allegations refer to well-known antisemitic stereotypes, and specifically to traditional beliefs about Jews and Jewish Marxist intellectuals, perceived as ‘dangerous traitors’ in various national contexts, including that of the UK.

Indeed this rhetoric is neither new nor surprising and has already been documented in many in depth studies on the relationship between nationalism/chauvinism and the instrumentalisation of antisemitic prejudice.

The media debates, online & in print, were primarily concerned with the question whether antisemitism could or couldn't be detected in the attack on Ralph; the question of how nationalism/patriotism is actually defined within the article was almost completely neglected.

This is quite surprising, given the headline. Stoegner & Wodak claim that the text attempts to establish a relationship between being a Marxist & Jewish refugee, on the one hand, & the implicit suggestion that such people could not be ‘really British’, ie patriotic, on the other.

Stoegner & Wodak assume – as mentioned above – that the Daily Mail chose to instrumentalise antisemitic rhetoric in order to accuse Ed Miliband of only speaking for working class and unemployed, ‘non-productive’ members of society, and not for the entire British society.

This is achieved via portraying him as being rooted in a personal, thus purportedly insurmountable, Jewish Marxist family tradition represented by his father, hence by an ad hominem argument.

Furthermore, both Miliband Sr and Jr are depicted as remaining outsiders, as not belonging to the centre of the nation, and thus, as being unpatriotic.

Stoegner & Wodak go on to contextualise & undertake a detailed & nuanced discursive analysis, using a Discourse Historic Approach (DHA) which I don't include in this thread, but in doing so they address: the immediate socio-political context – the Labour Party conference 2013;

The demonisation of the ‘Miliband family’; analysis of the figure of the ‘Jewish alien’; exploration of some traditional coded & explicit antisemitic stereotypes, including the ‘anti-national Jew’, anti-intellectualism, & the ‘Jewish Bolshevik’.

The Daily Mail’s intention of discrediting the Left as unpatriotic is expressed by reference not only to Ralph Miliband’s Marxist, cosmopolitan, & republican convictions, but also to his Jewishness.

Ralph Miliband is thereby depicted as a refugee who seemed to have sneaked into Britain and/or as somebody who is ungrateful to such an extent that he fouls his own nest.

Ralph Miliband is constructed in the Mail as a stranger who lacks any feeling of belonging, a ‘knave without fatherland’ – a trope that has been frequently used to discredit socialist internationalists.

The form of patriotism presented in the Daily Mail is obviously nationalistic, and by excluding Ralph Miliband as a foreigner and Jew, it also bears significant traces of ethnic nationalism.

In the Mail, opposing nationalism as an exclusionary ideology is regarded as unpatriotic, even as hatred against the nation (& its people). The Mail also blames Miliband for benefiting from what he criticised, an ad hominem argument that renders any further discussion impossible.

The Daily Mail characterises Ralph Miliband explicitly as a disloyal defeatist who represents socialist internationalist, and by implication Jewish, interests that are diametrically opposed to the supposedly true interests of the nation.

In today’s mainstream media, antisemitism is usually not articulated in an open manner. A taboo has been placed on antisemitism due to the #Holocaust and the history of European antisemitism.

(Although recently, sadly, this is changing).

https://twitter.com/docrussjackson/status/1614575288976809985?s=20&t=NWx5dMmriY0zhcSzUqX_SA

Direct recourse to antisemitic imagery and stereotypy is usually no longer used in mainstream public discourse, except by extreme-right and neo-fascist parties, such as the Greek Golden Dawn and the Hungarian Jobbik and some radical Islamist circles.

Instead, we encounter coded ‘particles of resentment’ that can be linked to different narratives and – intentionally or not – utilised for different political goals.

Wodak labels the use of antisemitic stereotypes when a situation arises where such instrumetalisation might serve political ends as the 'Iudeus ex machina' strategy.

Readers/listeners/viewers may still draw on the old archive of stereotypes and images of the anti-national, hyper-intellectual, subversive, and cosmopolitan Jew, even though those prejudices might not be conscious.

The debate about Ralph and Ed Miliband illustrates this clearly: antisemitic stereotypes are used in order to delegitimise the political Left. In this case, Miliband is produced as the ‘Iudeus ex machina’.

This can only be detected via a systematic in-depth analysis that 12 explicitly refers to the immediate as well as wider socio-political context of the discourse in question and combines sociological, historical, and linguistic approaches.