The British Election of 2019 and a Tribute to Noel Ignatiev

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You’re listening to Back in the USSR on CFRU 93.3 FM, I am Siegfried.  Last Thursday the United Kingdom went to the polls in one of the most pivotal national elections in a generation.  The British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, a long-time progressive and anti-imperialist, with a history of solidarity with the Palestinian people in particular, faced off against incumbent Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservatives, who have presided over one of the most brutal austerity regimes in the world – cutting back on every kind of social spending and consigning millions upon millions of people to poverty and homelessness while giving every subsidy and tax break one can think of to the one percent.  Unfortunately that hyper-capitalist regime of austerity was given a major boost last Thursday, with the Conservatives winning an absolute majority in the UK parliament.  A moment of truth and a moment of shame, and a moment that will cost the lives of many people, too many people, over the course of the next five years as the Tories move forward with, amongst other things, their now exposed plan to privatize the UK’s public healthcare system, the NHS, thereby handing fat profits to US multi-national pharma and health insurance companies that profit off of the pain and suffering of sick people.

Jeremy Corbyn, with his explicit rejection of capitalist austerity and calls for a government that would put the needs of people first, represented a genuine hope for many people.  Myself included.  Even though he’s no Marxist, his policies would have provided relief to so many suffering people and saved a lot of lives.  His condemnation of Saudi Arabia’s war on the people of Yemen, and his vow to cut off UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia, would have likewise saved countless lives.  While his support for Palestine, Venezuela and Bolivia in the face of brutal US sanctions and Israeli Apartheid might have done something to alter international politics for the better.  And that’s why so many rightwing forces were lining up to silence him and those who supported him, because to them he represented a threat that had to be destroyed.

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Noam Chomsky, himself Jewish, was right to point out how ironic it was that perhaps the strongest anti-racist in the British House of Commons should be presented as a rabid anti-semite by the mainstream media in a country where the far-right has been running rampant for years now.  Yet, as the journalist Asa Winstanley pointed out in a recent article for the Electronic Intifada, the right-wing media campaign to smear Jeremy Corbyn as anti-semitic, which has basically been ongoing since he won the leadership of the Labour Party in 2015, was a major factor in his defeat in the December 12 election.  There was never any credible evidence behind the smears, but a lie endlessly repeated can still be effective, especially when it’s repeated by the mainstream capitalist media for years at a time.  As the independent journalist Max Blumenthal pointed out in a recent article in The Grayzone, one of the main problems that the rightwing has with Corbyn is that he supports Palestinian rights and opposes Israeli Apartheid, and, just as the state of Israel has been trying to do to supporters to Palestinian rights all over the world, he was smeared as an “anti-semite” on that basis. 

Now here it’s worth pointing out that those who support an independent Palestine and self-determination for the colonized Palestinian people, are not the ones shooting up synagogues in Pittsburgh or smashing and defacing Jewish graves in France.  Far-right white supremacists are the ones doing those things.  But neither the Apartheid state of Israel, even though it claims to speak on behalf of the Jewish people, nor any of the capitalist states of Europe or North America care about that.  They’re not interested in stopping the real racists, the real anti-semites, or the real Nazis.  They’re interested in shutting down support for Palestine because that support conflicts with their own geo-political goals, especially when that support comes from the leader of a major political party in a major Western country who has a serious shot at becoming Prime Minister.  This is why there’s been a concerted effort in recent years, both in Europe and North America, to equate criticism of Israeli government policy with anti-semitism and racism toward the Jewish people and religion.  Trump is pushing legislation to this effect in the US, both France and Germany (and now the UK) have passed laws this year which effectively criminalize solidarity with the Palestinians.  And this is music to the far-right’s ears because it effectively gives them a pass.  Most far-right political parties in Europe and America have zero problem with Israel.  In fact they’d like all Jews to move there, which is the effectively same thing that the Apartheid government in Tel Aviv wants in order to shift the demographic balance against the Palestinian majority.  The Israeli government has no problem with far-right racist governments in places like Hungary or Italy, and it has no problem giving guns to Neo-Nazi militia units in Ukraine as I’ve pointed out on a previous episode of the show.  And so the meaning of anti-semitism has been trivialized to the point where it has become nothing more than a political weapon to be used against pro-Palestinian activists and progressive challengers to the status quo, which is exactly what the far-right wants.  I mean instead of hunting Nazis like it used to, the Simon Wiesenthal Center now targets Palestinian activists on behalf of Apartheid Israel.  And Jeremy Corbyn was one of those people targeted for his non-existent anti-semitism, while all over Europe fascist forces are growing stronger and becoming more and more brazen in their violence.  Max Blumenthal, a progressive American Jew, was right to complain about Israel trying to “weaponize” him and other progressive Jews against those it views as political opponents, while giving the real far-right anti-semites a free pass – just as it gives a free pass to a racist conservative British Government that routinely demonizes Muslims, Roma, and migrants of all kinds.

Britain and Europe are really at a crossroads now.  This right-wing victory in the British elections will embolden fascism and rapacious capitalist elites alike.  Resistance is going to be the only choice for millions of people whose lives and livelihoods will be on the line as a new round of austerity begins and the cuts start coming hard and fast.  And that resistance is there and growing.  Particularly at the periphery of the UK.  In the colonized north of Ireland, in one of the few bright spots in the election, the people voted in more pro-Irish nationalist MPs than pro-British unionist MPs for the first time since the partition of Ireland in the 1920s.  Ridings that had remained staunchly loyalist for more than one hundred years changed sides, their inhabitants fed up with poverty, joblessness and cutbacks.  As the issue of Brexit continues to polarize the country, and as a hard and militarized border between the Republic of Ireland and the occupied north looks increasingly likely, both Scotland and the north of Ireland are increasingly looking to break away from the UK and forge their own path.  As a Marxist-Leninist of Irish descent who has long supported Irish independence and opposed colonialism all around the world, I believe that will be a great day for humanity.  Because it will mean the final end of the British Empire and the sun will finally set on centuries of imperial bloodshed and colonial dominion.  And I know many in the Irish Communist Party and the James Connolly Youth Movement who sense that the day of liberation, foretold by Bobby Sands and so many others who gave their lives for a free Ireland, is finally coming after eight hundred years.  Resistance always begins with the colonized.  They are always in the vanguard.  And that’s the way it is in the so-called British Isles right now.  And from the periphery that resistance will spread to the core.  I very much doubt that Boris Johnson will be getting much sleep at any time in the next five years.

And just for those who would accuse me of treason for saying such things; people who would attack me for welcoming Irish independence and the breakup of the UK when many of my own ancestors were English and even fought for the British Empire in its wars.  Some of them might even acknowledge that my Irish ancestors were deliberately starved to death in a genocidal campaign by the British in the 1840s and forced to flee their ancestral land, but still accuse me of hypocrisy because of my family ties to England.  To them I would say this: my granddad grew up in a coal mining town on the Scottish border with no electricity or running water, had his first language taken from him as a kid by a school system meant to turn out obedient workers, saw his fellow miners die around him of tuberculosis and black lung when he was still only a teenager, and yet the British Government still expected him to be willing to die in World War II so that the Empire could hold onto its colony in Burma.  They demanded that my great-uncle do the same thing in Malaysia, and he spent most of the war in a Japanese POW camp as a result.  Like so many other working class kids, they were expected to lay down their young lives for a colonial empire that had used and abused them since they were born.  The only reprieve they got came after the war when the British welfare state and the NHS were constructed, which made life livable for so many English proletarians,
and that was only because the British elite were literally afraid of a socialist revolution breaking out if they didn’t do something for the people .  It’s true that neither of them survived to see this recent election, but they lived long enough to see the onset of austerity and what a hyper-capitalist British Government did to the rights of pensioners.  Now, just like in their days in the coal mines, people like them were expected to die in the name of “efficiency”, unable to access the services that they needed in old age.  So pardon me for saying that neither myself, nor anybody else in my family, owes the British Empire a goddamn thing.  These old soldiers ain’t marching anymore, and their grandchildren are only going to march in picket lines and in the protests and demonstrations that will finally bring this inhuman system to its knees.  My English and Irish ancestors alike will be there on that day.  On that day, both the living and the dead shall celebrate.

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So that’s my take on the British election.  The rest of tonight’s show is going to be a little different.  I had the opportunity recently to re-unite with an old comrade of mine and a valued contributor to the show, Brendan Campisi, who some of you might remember from the various times he’s joined me here to talk about different subjects.  I had the privilege of talking to him again earlier today and we discussed the life and legacy of a man that many of you might never have heard of, even though his contribution to a more radical understanding of history is significant indeed.  Noel Ignatiev was an American author and historian, who is best known for his work on race and social class and for his call to abolish “whiteness”.  He was the co-founder of the New Abolitionist Society and co-editor of the journal Race Traitor, which argued that “treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity”.  Particularly known for the controversial work “How the Irish Became White”.  Born on December 27, 1940 in Philadelphia, Ignatiev was a life-long radical.  At different times he was a member of the Communist Party USA, Students for a Democratic Society, as well as the union movement where he took part in numerous strikes and labor actions.  For twenty years he worked in a Chicago steel mill before being accepted into the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1985, where he earned his doctorate in 1995.  His PhD dissertation, which later became the book “How the Irish Became White” discussed the integration of Irish immigrants into white supremacist America in the 19^th Century, arguing that race is a social construct, not a scientific reality, that groups of people are arbitrarily included in or excluded from by those with political power in society.  Famous for his call to abolish the white race, Ignatiev said this on his website “Race Traitor”:

“We do not hate you or anyone else for the color of her skin. What we hate is a system that confers privileges (and burdens) on people because of their color. It is not fair skin that makes people white; it is fair skin in a certain kind of society, one that attaches social importance to skin color. When we say we want to abolish the white race, we do not mean we want to exterminate people with fair skin. We mean that we want to do away with the social meaning of skin color, thereby abolishing the white race as a social category. Consider this parallel: To be against royalty does not mean wanting to kill the king. It means wanting to do away with crowns, thrones, titles, and the privileges attached to them. In our view, whiteness has a lot in common with royalty: they are both social formations that carry unearned advantages.”

Noel Ignatiev, a Jewish-American who also campaigned hard for Palestinian rights, died on November 9 2019 at the age of 78.  This is the full interview that I did with Brendan Campisi about this remarkable man.

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