Dog doesn’t bark

Submitted by Anon on 16 July, 2006 - 10:23

This is an editorial from Solidarity’s forerunner, Socialist Organiser (27 September 1984)


SOME readers last year thought Socialist Organiser was wasting time and valuable space when we published an article on the naked anti-semitism of an editorial which appeared in Newsline, the daily paper put out by the Workers Revolutionary Party (with, it is widely assumed, financial help from their friend Col. Gaddafi, Libya's eccentric dictator).

The editorial, entitled “The Zionist Connection”, had a smaller headline above it: “From Socialist Organiser to Thatcher and Reagan”. It began: “A powerful Zionist connection runs from the so-called left of the Labour Party right into the centre of Thatcher’s government..

“Top of the list, we have the most recent appointment of Mr Stuart Young, a director of the Jewish Chronicle, as youngest-ever chairman of the BBC... He is the brother of Mr David Young, another Thatcher appointee who is chairman of the Manpower Services Commission...”

The MSC, said Newsline, “is the key organisation which the Tories are transforming into a ‘corporatist front’ behind which they hope to mobilise jobless youth from 14 years upwards into a slave labour body...” But: “The Tories know they can rely totally upon Zionist imperialism to produce the most hated reactionaries...”

It raved on about “Thatcher's hand-picked Zionists” etc. Denouncing Socialist Organiser, it finished: “The Zionist connection between these so-called lefts in the Labour Party right through to Thatcher and Reagan’s White House is there for all to see in its unprincipled nakedness”.

It was crazy stuff, echoing fascist propaganda about the “international Jewish conspiracy”, but giving it a ‘left’ and ‘anti-imperialist’ twist.

One would have expected the recent appointment of Mr David Young as minister without portfolio in Mrs Thatcher’s cabinet — rather spectacular promotion, which provoked comment in the bourgeois press —to have sent Newsline into a new frenzy of paranoia.

They already describe the Tory government as a “Bonapartist dictatorship”, and might have been expected to see Young’s appointment as highly sinister, a new step in the development of Thatcher’s “Bonapartist dictatorship” in collusion with the international “Zionist” conspiracy which is — so Newsline has asserted — at the heart of world politics.

Not a bit of it. They reported Young’s appointment blandly, with less comment than the bourgeois press.

So challenging and branding their crazy anti-semitism seems to have had some effect on them. It is unlikely to affect the way they see the world and think about it, but at least this time it has convinced them of the wisdom of keeping their dirty mouths shut.

That’s progress, of sorts.

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