Deep Left
type: channel
description: a blog about politics and culture
date: 2025-08-01T07:13:40Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
generator agent: https://wordpress.org/
items: Israel has relativised the Holocaust
items: Tariffs and imperial decline
items: Liberal remigration
items: Jewface
items: Gig report: Pussy Riot
items: In The Air
items: Who should define antisemitism?
items: Defining antisemitism
items: Where to draw the line?
items: Thinking about the Labour Party and antisemitism

Israel has relativised the Holocaust
type: item
creator: Mark Alexander
date: 2025-07-31T15:34:37Z
subject: Opinion
subject: Belsen
subject: Gaza
subject: Holocaust
subject: IHRA
subject: IHRA definition of antisemitism
subject: Israel
subject: Omri Boehm
description: The Israeli state claims ownership of the memory of the Holocaust, but by inflicting famine on the people of Gaza it has itself compromised the memory of that experience.
encoded: When the Allies came across the Nazi death camps in 1945, it had a massive emotional impact. In my own country of origin (the UK) in particular, the reporting by the BBC from the newly-liberated Bergen-Belsen camp horrified the British public. [A personal connection: a friend of my father was one of the Liverpool University medical students sent to help care for the survivors. A microscope from the medical block at Belsen was in our family for some time; it’s now in the RAMC museum in Aldershot.] The Holocaust remains a reference point for evil and depravity, and a dark presence in the Western imagination. The industrialisation of murder on a vast scale, perpetrated by a nation renowned for its contribution to science and culture, has undermined everything that we believed about civilisation. In the decades since then however, there have been attempts, coming mainly from the far right, to “relativise” the Holocaust, setting Hitler’s six million Jewish victims against Stalin’s supposed twenty million victims. On the other hand there has grown the idea that the Nazi genocide of European Jews is unique and sui generis, incomparable to any other genocide. This is alongside the growing association between the Holocaust and the Jewish state as the guardian of its memory (I’m uncomfortable with the term Holocaust, familiar with its original Ancient Greek meaning as a burnt offering, but it’s what we have). Such is the Israeli government’s influence over Holocaust memorialisation that the Israeli scholar Omri Boehm‘s invitation to speak at the commemoration of the liberation of Buchenwald this year was cancelled, at the insistence of the Israeli embassy, because of his belief that the slogan “Never Again” shouldn’t only apply to genocide against Jews (link to haaretz.com, registration required). This is a significant step in the nationalist appropriation of the Holocaust, in a country (Germany) where it is seen as a moral debt from one nation to another, rather than a warni…

Tariffs and imperial decline
type: item
creator: Mark Alexander
date: 2025-07-18T16:07:44Z
subject: Opinion
subject: British empire
subject: Donald Trump
subject: Joseph Chamberlain
subject: tariffs
description: Trump's tariff wars have strong echoes of a similar moment in British imperial decline.
encoded: Donald Trump is finding out that trade wars are not easy to win after all. He was elected at least in part because of his promise to bring down inflation from the levels it reached under Joe Biden, but his long-held beliefs in tariffs will lead if implemented to rising prices. Moreover, what are his goals with his tariff wars? Is it to raise revenue? Or to force America’s trading partners to lower their own tariff barriers (“reciprocity”)? Or is it to protect American industries? He claims that these tariffs will bring back the industrial jobs that have been lost over the last forty years, to China and elsewhere. At different times he has claimed all of these are possible; however, the reality is that he can’t achieve all three goals at the same time. He has evoked the memory of President McKinley’s tariff policy, but McKinley’s tariffs were carefully targetted to protect specific American industries as they were developing. The only consistent theme is his sense of resentment of the countries that are running a trade surplus with the U.S. His tariff plans announced on 2nd April 2025 targetted those countries in direct proportion to the size of their trade surplus. This all has strong echoes of a period in British history when tariffs also played a key rôle. In 1903 Joseph Chamberlain launched a campaign for tariff reform, specifically a system of “imperial preference” that would place a tariff barrier around the British empire. This was at a crucial time in the global economy; Britain had dominated world trade in the 19th century, promoting free trade and even fighting a war with China to force it to open up to opium imports from India. At the turn of the 20th century that dominance had started to slip, and Britain faced both economic and political competition, particularly from Germany. Just like Trump, Chamberlain really never clarified what the goals of his tariffs were, but his campaign argued that if food became more expensive as a consequence, then this was n…

Liberal remigration
type: item
creator: Mark Alexander
date: 2024-12-15T16:44:32Z
subject: Opinion
subject: AfD
subject: Germany
subject: Never Again Is Now resolution
subject: remigration
description: In the name of the fight against antisemitism, the German centre parties are buying into the concept of remigration.
encoded: On the 10th January this year, details emerged of a conference where members of the European extreme right met with several leading members of the German Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party. The key event was the discussion of a plan for mass deportations of immigrants, so-called “remigration”. This would sweep up both asylum-seekers and any German citizen who was considered to be “unassimilated” to Western society and values. This isn’t a new idea; the concept of “remigration” has been heavily promoted over the last ten years by the European far right; it’s closely linked to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, the belief that there is a plan to replace the white peoples of Europe and America with immigrants; the Great Replacement is the danger, and remigration is the solution. The word has started to seep into the mainstream: recently Donald Trump has used the term. The news of the conference and the AfD‘s involvement was met with a wave of street protests, and widespread condemnation, and there were calls for the party to be banned. Under pressure the AfD itself tried to distance itself from the meeting, and sacked the parliamentary assistant who had attended. By the time a Syrian asylum seeker killed three people in a knife attack in the city of Solingen on the 23rd August the mood had changed. The attack was terrible timing for the German coalition government, a week before regional elections in which the AfD was close to a breakthrough. Predictably, the AfD used the incident to go on the offensive against immigration, but what is more worrying is how the mainstream parties responded: they echoed the AfD‘s arguments. What was needed was apparently less immigration and more deportations of failed asylum-seekers and criminals. A deportation operation took place a few days later to send convicted Afghans back to Afghanistan. Shifting to the right in this way didn’t stop the coalition parties suffering big losses in the regional elections; the AfD scored hi…

Jewface
type: item
creator: Mark Alexander
date: 2023-08-27T15:50:01Z
subject: Opinion
subject: David Baddiel
subject: Jewface
subject: racism
subject: Sarah Silverman
description: In the controversy about 'Jewface' a crucial point about racism has been missed.
encoded: Bradley Cooper’s portrayal of Leonard Bernstein (and specifically his prosthetic nose) has reignited the controversy around “Jewface”: should non-Jewish actors be playing Jewish roles? Sarah Silverman kicked this off a while back by criticising the casting of Kathryn Hahn as the Jewish comedian Joan Rivers. After that Maureen Lipman attacked the decision to cast Helen Mirren as Golda Meir; then David Baddiel pitched in, objecting to the casting of a non-Jew as the voice of a Jewish character in an animated movie. He felt that the sensitivities of every minority were being taken into account, except when it came to Jews. Those who refer to non-Jews playing Jews as “Jewface” are clearly trying to draw a parallel with the old vaudeville “minstrel shows”, when white artists wore “blackface” makeup and performed song and dance routines as black people; the implication is that it is just as offensive. I don’t think this comparison holds up. First of all you have to realise just how racially derogatory those minstrel shows were: the makeup gave the actors comical fat red lips, and the routines portrayed black people as stupid, lazy and easily frightened. Minstrel shows were hugely popular during the heyday of industrialised slavery in the mid-19th century in the U.S., and they were part of the racist culture that normalised slavery. In itself non-Jews playing Jews doesn’t come anywhere close to that kind of offensiveness. Given Sarah Silverman’s and David Baddiel’s own history of playing in blackface (half-apologised for), it’s not clear to me that they really get this. Moreover there’s a broader point here that’s being missed, which is about the content of anti-black racism. It’s certainly true that it’s no longer OK for white actors to play black people (Laurence Olivier playing Othello comes to mind), and the history of minstrel shows is part of why, but such casting also carried the implication that black people were too stupid or uncultured to portray themselves. What…

Gig report: Pussy Riot
type: item
creator: Mark Alexander
date: 2022-07-10T08:10:05Z
subject: Reviews
subject: Hagar The Womb
subject: Maria Alyokhina
subject: punk
subject: Pussy Riot
subject: rock
subject: Russia
subject: Ukraine
description: A review of the Pussy Riot concert (with Hagar The Womb) at Het Depot, Leuven, Belgium on 20th May 2022.
encoded: The concert was this year’s edition of the annual Breaking Barriers festival at Het Depot. The support band was Hagar The Womb from London – very much old school punk. The repartee between numbers was brilliant, and Ruth was lovely to talk to when I caught up with her after their set. <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-208" src="https://www.deepleft.blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/IMG_7761-online-tagged-300x225.jpg" alt="Lorna and Ruth from Hagar the Womb" width="300" height="225" srcset="https://www.deepleft.blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/IMG_7761-online-tagged-300x225.jpg 300w, https://www.deepleft.blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/IMG_7761-online-tagged-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https://www.deepleft.blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/IMG_7761-online-tagged-768x576.jpg 768w, https://www.deepleft.blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/IMG_7761-online-tagged-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://www.deepleft.blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/IMG_7761-online-tagged-1200x900.jpg 1200w, https://www.deepleft.blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/IMG_7761-online-tagged.jpg 1672w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 85vw, 300px" /> Lorna and Ruth from Hagar the Womb Pussy Riot’s performance was not a conventional rock and roll set, more like radical rock theatre, with the band declaiming their poetry to throbbing music and a political back projection with surtitles in English. They told the story of their conflict with the Russian regime, the gig in the cathedral that got three of them arrested, the subsequent trail and the imprisonment of Maria (Masha) Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova. Masha had just escaped from Russia to avoid being imprisoned again for her opposition to the invasion of Ukraine; according to reports she had slipped out of her home disguised as a food courier. It can’t have lasted for more than about an hour but it was intense, and emotionally hard-hitting; I thought that the music was excellent and the poetry remarkable. It was the kind of thing that makes…

In The Air
type: item
creator: Mark Alexander
date: 2022-06-18T15:16:02Z
subject: Reviews
subject: air pollution
subject: Wellcome Collection
description: A short review of the In The Air exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London
encoded: I only had a few minutes to look around the In The Air exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London, but I was impressed by how political it was. It was willing to look at air pollution in a political context; it included examples of the Hazards Bulletin published by the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science in the 1980s, and the BSSRS’ critical journal Science for People. There was even a pamphlet about the technology of political control that I remember owning. What blew me away however was the video produced by Forensic Architecture, that shows in detail how air pollution, produced by reckless and criminal despoiling of our forests and clean air, creates health threats across whole regions that transcend national borders. The shocking news about the murder of environmental activist Bruno Pereira and journalist Dom Phillips reminds us just how sharp and important the conflict around the earth’s resources is. In The Air is on until the 16th October 2022.

Who should define antisemitism?
type: item
creator: Mark Alexander
date: 2021-12-09T09:40:31Z
subject: Opinion
subject: antisemitism
subject: IHRA definition of antisemitism
subject: intersectionality
subject: Labour Party
subject: Macpherson Report
subject: standpoint theory
description: Some proponents of the IHRA definition insist that only the mainstream Jewish organisations have the right to decide what constitutes antisemitism, and refer to the Macpherson report for justification.
encoded: With such a complex and contentious issue as antisemitism, the issue of who defines it becomes a sensitive one. Since there is wide disagreement about where to draw the line, how do we reconcile the competing standpoints? Who has the authority to say what it is? This became a key issue during the controversy over antisemitism in the UK Labour Party. In the summer of 2018, under pressure on the issue, the party developed its own definition of antisemitism, which modified the IHRA definition in several ways, in particular in relation to Israel. Jewish bodies such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Labour-affiliated Jewish Labour Movement rejected this and insisted that the party adopt the original definition with all its examples without modification. In fact Mike Katz, the chair of the Jewish Labour Movement, claimed that only Jews had the right to define antisemitism. This was a right accorded by the Labour Party to all other ethnic minorities, so Jews were being prejudiced against when Labour modified the IHRA definition of antisemitism, a definition widely supported by the official British Jewish bodies. In justification he cited the “Macpherson principle”, referring to the report of the Stephen Lawrence enquiry led by Sir William Macpherson. In doing so he was following the lead of the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism who stated that in the light of the Macpherson Report “it is the Jewish community itself that is best qualified to determine what does and does not constitute antisemitism” (in their 2006 Report Into Antisemitism, page 1). So what did the Macpherson Report actually say? Most of the report relates to the details of the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the subsequent investigation, but Chapter 45 takes a wider view of how racist incidents are treated by the police. The then definition of a “racial incident” was too vague and left too much discretion to the police. The report recommended that the definition of a racist inc…

Defining antisemitism
type: item
creator: Mark Alexander
date: 2021-05-18T11:12:06Z
subject: Opinion
subject: antisemitism
subject: IHRA definition of antisemitism
subject: Israel
subject: Labour Party
subject: Nakba
subject: Palestinians
description: The IHRA definition of antisemitism demands recognition of Israel's legitimacy as a Jewish ethnic state. That shuts down legitimate argument about Israel's past, present and future.
encoded: I started this series by stating my own understanding of what antisemitism is. In fact, the very question of how to define antisemitism has become a highly contested one. The controversy centres around the Working Definition of Antisemitism, a “non-legally binding” definition promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), and adopted in different forms by a number of countries, including the UK, and also by the British Labour Party. The IHRA‘s definition of antisemitism itself is rather vague: Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. This definition is so lacking in content that it becomes critically dependent on the included list of examples of what it considers antisemitic attitudes, and this is where the controversy begins. It’s striking that some classic antisemitic tropes, such as that Jews are tight-fisted or dishonest, are missing from the list. What’s even more striking is that seven of the eleven examples refer to Israel in some way; here’s Example 7: Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor. This statement begs a lot of questions. First of all it assumes that Jews globally make up one people, with its own right of self-determination, rather than an ethnic category within a number of different nations, with its own rights within those nations. This whole question has huge implications, and has been highly controversial in the past. In fact, up until the Second World War many Jewish organisations rejected Zionism on the grounds that it might compromise the rights of Jews within their nation of birth or residence. Moreover, Example 7 claims the general right of “the Jewish people” to self-determination, but the concrete example that it gives implies that self-determination means statehood, when as Peter Beinart has argued that is only one possible form that self-determination can take. Wher…

Where to draw the line?
type: item
creator: Mark Alexander
date: 2020-12-21T15:56:29Z
subject: Opinion
subject: antisemitism
subject: EHRC
subject: IHRA definition of antisemitism
subject: Ken Livingstone
subject: Labour Party
subject: Naz Shah
description: The failings of the Corbyn leadership over antisemitism have handed a victory to Israel's defenders.
encoded: Although I supported the Corbyn leadership, I felt frustrated at its handling of the antisemitism controversy: too often it appeared to be chasing events rather than leading them, and opportunities to take the initiative such as the Chakrabarti Inquiry report were squandered. Jeremy Corbyn’s own conduct in the past was open to criticism, and the drip-drip of revelation undermined him. Of course Corbyn’s enemies inside the party and out have exploited the issue to damage him, but that’s because there was a weakness there to be exploited. The publication of the report into antisemitism in the Labour Party by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is the latest turn in this conflict, and one that could have far-reaching consequences. Most of the political attention has been taken by Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension and ongoing denial of the whip, but I want to take a closer look at the report itself. The EHRC has found that the Labour Party breached the 2010 Equality Act in several ways. First of all, elected officials of the party (“agents” in the terminology of the Equality Act) have harassed the Party’s Jewish members with antisemitic conduct. The report gives prominence to the case of Ken Livingstone and the statements he made after the suspension of Naz Shah, the MP for Bradford West at the end of April 2016 (Livingstone was a member of Labour’s National Executive Committee at the time and so is classed as an agent of the Labour Party). What’s striking about the report is that it fails to mention the worst things that he said, such as that Hitler “was supporting Zionism – before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews” (so before the Holocaust began Hitler’s policy towards the Jews was benign?) or “a real antisemite doesn’t just hate the Jews in Israel, they hate their Jewish neighbours in Golders Green or Stoke Newington” (so hating the Jews in Israel is OK?). The Labour MP John Mann attacked him later that day as a “Nazi apologist”, which is certain…

Thinking about the Labour Party and antisemitism
type: item
creator: Mark Alexander
date: 2020-10-16T11:00:09Z
subject: Opinion
subject: antisemitism
subject: George Soros
subject: Israel
subject: Jews
subject: Labour Party
subject: Palestinians
subject: racism
subject: tropes
description: You can't make sense of the conflict over antisemitism in the Labour Party without delving into the deeper issues.
encoded: It’s taken me a while to get round to writing about antisemitism and the Labour Party. Initially I bristled with suspicion about the motives of those who attacked the Corbyn leadership for being antisemitic: the antisemitism conflict has divided the party fairly clearly between right and left (unlike Brexit), and the issues of principle seemed to be getting lost in the factional struggle. Moreover, the issue has become (inextricably?) entangled with the question of Israel and the Palestinians, a subject that is highly emotionally charged, deeply polarised and very complex. What if I made a mistake? What if I lost my temper and wrote something that I would regret? Since then I’ve been reading and thinking, and I realise that the subject raises deep and important questions about a host of issues that are well worth the risk of exploring. Even the definition of antisemitism is contested, so it seems best to begin with what I understand antisemitism to be at this point. I see it from a social-psychological point of view: as in all forms of racism I think that there’s a underlying antisemitic fantasy (sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit). This fantasy sees the Jews as a single powerful global force, a massive conspiracy, that uses its money and hidden channels of influence to manipulate the world to its advantage. In this worldview the Jews are cunning and arrogant and enjoy special privileges. This fantasy is charged with a sense of inferiority and resentment as well as hate; this is what gives antisemitism its emotional power. Antisemitic beliefs can find expression in the form of cliches or “tropes”. For example, when U.S. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar tweeted that support for Israel in Congress was due to spending by pro-Israel lobbyists (“It’s all about the Benjamins baby” – a line from a Puff Daddy song referring to the picture of Benjamin Franklin on the $100 note) I think she was evoking the antisemitic trope that Jews use their money to corrupt politicians (Omar d…