Seeing the world from Corbyn’s point of view
DID YOU by any chance watch the rest of Jeremy Corbyn’s speech? What he said after talking about our lacking a sense of history and English irony? It was actually really interesting. The truth is that I go back and forward about Mr Corbyn. Sometimes I wonder if he has much intellectual grip. I watched his hapless performance explaining his behaviour with the wreath-laying, and he didn’t really seem to understand his own side’s latest contorted excuse. He kept changing his position.
I am always reluctant to question the intelligence of someone who has reached the position of party leader. I mean, it’s so much further than I ever got. But he seemed, on that occasion, so obtuse that it was hard not to, you know, wonder.
But another explanation is that he knew exactly what he’d done with the wreath and why he’d done it and is switched on enough to know that telling the full story might be impolitic. But also honest enough to mangle the cover story.
Watching him, in the irony speech, talk about imperialism lent weight to this alternative view. For this was a cogent explanation of his challenge to Western orthodoxy.
In a nutshell, and using my own words rather than his, Mr Corbyn argues that nothing could be more mistaken than the Western view that we are the good guys of history. He suggested that many of the world’s wars and, in particular, its ethnic conflicts, originate with Western imperialism and the lines drawn on maps by conquering powers.
I didn’t fully concur with this but I thought it contained much that was right and even more that prompted reflection. But I did notice something that had vaguely bothered me before about Mr Corbyn’s historical surveys. There wasn’t much of a place in it for the Holocaust. I am not arguing or even hinting that Mr Corbyn denies the Holocaust. I’m making a somewhat different point. There isn’t much of a place for it in his framework of analysis. History for him is driven by the imperialism of great economic powers seeking new markets. And by colonial powers using developing nations as a way of solving their own problems or satisfying their lust for power. The sharp contrast that most see between Britain and its opponents in the Second
World War, Mr Corbyn does not see, at least not in quite the same way.
Now, of course, if the Labour leader was pressed on the difference For Jews, Israel is a project of rescue. For Jeremy Corbyn, it is a project of colonial oppression between Churchill and Hitler, I’m not saying he wouldn’t see one. Or that he is “soft” on the Nazis. I’m simply saying that he sees Churchill not only as a defender of British democracy but also as an imperialist. And he argues that the really big struggle of the last century has been the struggle for self-determination against European colonialism.
In this struggle, the Holocaust doesn’t have the centrality it has for Jews or for those with a more Eurocentric view of history.
Here opens up a major gulf between a Jewish view of recent history and what is now increasingly the mainstream view of the left (if one accepts that Mr Corbyn now represents the mainstream) . For Jews, Zionism is a project of rescue. The creation of a safe haven for the oppressed Jews of Europe and elsewhere, especially after the Holocaust. For Mr Corbyn it is a project of colonial oppression. The internal problems of the imperialist nations of Europe are being dumped on countries under Europe’s yoke.
See the world like that and it doesn’t seem all that “off” to be scrawling slogans about Gaza on the wall of the Warsaw ghetto.
Recently, there has been a fuss about Mr Corbyn using staff who haven’t been given security clearance to work in Parliament. The suggestion that admitting these people to the Palace of Westminster may not be in the security interests of the country, misses the point. Mr Corbyn doesn’t agree with the conventional view of what the security interests of the country actually are.
This is the big reason why we aren’t getting anywhere with Mr Corbyn. His frame of reference is entirely different to all that has come before. And in it, Jews don’t find a place as oppressed people. Which is ironic. I think.
Daniel Finkelstein is Associate Editor of The Times