Ken’s love for Hitler might lead to his fall
We never loved each other, Ken Livingstone and I. We first clashed in public more than a decade ago, and have enjoyed castigating each other ever since. But now that he has been suspended from the Labour party for a second year in a row, I come not to bury him but to praise him. For there is something valorous, even glorious, about his downfall.
It was the MP for Bradford West who triggered his demise. In April last year Naz Shah was exposed for sharing anti–Semitic content on social media. Though such views are hardly a problem (can even be a boon) for a Bradford MP these days, any ambitious young politician may still find them a hurdle. Sure enough, Ms Shah performed all the textbook PR moves. She laundered her reputation through meetings with Jewish “communal leaders”. In an apology to the House of Commons, she said she realised how “ignorant” she had been about all matters Jewish. And her career continued.
One reason for her survival was the monumental act of martyrdom, or deflection, that Ken Livingstone accomplished for her on live radio. While insisting that Ms Shah was not an anti-Semite, Mr Livingstone got into a discussion in which he insisted that Adolf Hitler was in fact a Zionist. Mr Livingstone’s inability to appear on radio, television, or any street corner without mentioning the late German dictator became a source of niche fascination. Not least for the former mayor’s bizarre little appendices, such as his insistence that Hitler’s period “supporting Zionism” was “before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews”.
For his doggedness alone, Mr Livingstone has been admirable. There is something refreshing about a politician who refuses to play the game in this way. For a year, interviewers have asked Mr Livingstone why he will not say what everyone wants him to say. Yet he will not. He carries on arguing over aspects of deals he claims took place between “the Zionists” and Hitler eight decades ago.
During this time it has become clear that Mr Livingstone main, perhaps sole, source on Hitler and Zionism is a book by Lenni Brenner called Zionism in the Age of the Dictators. In the 34 years since its publication, this work has rarely been cited — and never in any serious work of history.
As the historian Paul Bogdanor showed in a scholarly article last year, Mr Brenner imbibed his ideas from the well of Soviet propaganda. As opposed to far-right Holocaust fabrications (which either claim that it did not happen, or downplay the numbers), Soviet-inspired anti–Semites tend towards claims that the Jews were themselves involved. Mr Brenner, who was involved in the 1980s with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), clearly helped dig this well, from which Mr Livingstone drank deeply.
On international affairs, Mr Livingstone’s views are a hodge-podge of learning from quacks. But all good quacks lean on nuggets of truth. In the case of Jews in the 1930s, it is true that a small number of Labour Zionists had meetings with Nazi officials in 1933 about helping German Jews emigrate to what was then Palestine. But these were not “clandestine” meetings, as Mr Brenner and Mr Livingstone claim. Their take is classic crackpot history. And like Mr Livingstone’s frequent citings of Mosaddegh and the CIA in discussing the wider Middle East, it isn’t that what he’s saying didn’t in any way happen. It’s just that what happened doesn’t remotely support the conclusions he comes to.
It looks as if Mr Livingstone will keep arguing his case, talking Hitler into every microphone he sees. But he’s not such a bad person to watch. He has shown an ambition to get the past right. He has refused to buckle even when the world has told him to. He is a man seeking truth while swimming in error. It says something about our age of half-truths and swiftly swapped opinions that, in a certain light, Livingstone can look almost noble.