Plus ca change

[Rhyd6]

I have been reading "Our Hidden Lives" a book based on diaries kept by ordinary people based on information gathered from the "Mass Observation Project" which ran both during and after the war. I am reading diaries from 1945 to 1947 and the thing that has really shocked me is the casual anti semitism. One chap remarked "I can't agree with a lot Mosely advocates but I do agree with his attitude towards the Jews", if only we could get rid of them England would be a much better place". The chap who wrote that was an antiques dealer, well read, loved visiting London to go to the theatre and the ballet, another from a woman, she was born in South Africa and married a Brit. She remarked that "If only England hadn'r rushed into the war it would have given Mr. Hitler time to get rid of even more Jews". All of them refer to "Jew Boys" as the cause of most of the problems post war. It's horrified me that even after seeing and reading about the horrors of the concentration camps British people could be so callous and unfeeling.
Some things never change do they.

R6

[didds]

In the early 80s i was travelling to nuniversity in Aberystwith by nationaql express coach. The coach was late into cardfiff, and missd the connection so i was told by Cardiff bus station manager to jump on the nnext "normal" bus to Swansea bus station and meet the coach there.

I dutifully got on the next Swansea bus and got chatting to an OAP woman next to me onour jouney.

She asked where I was from with my "london" accent and i explained i was from noth Kent. She then told me that as young woman shed been in service, in London.

"Nice family" she said. "Jewish, but nice all the same".

It struck me as an odd thing to say - aside from being an ingrained attitude probably for her generation.


didds

PS the journey became a saga... at Swansea the Aberystwyth coach had already left - a driver that had just finished his shift driving from Aberdeen (!) volunteered via the Swansea bus station management to drive me in his own vehicle (!) to chase the coach. We caught up with it in Carmarthen bus station, and he halted the coach as it was just starting to leave by driving across its bows and stopping! The coach's passengers were mainly also Aber students who cheered and jeered loudly as I got on the coach as many of them knew me! Wouldn't happen today...

[kiloran]

She asked where I was from with my "london" accent and i explained i was from noth Kent. She then told me that as young woman shed been in service, in London.

"Nice family" she said. "Jewish, but nice all the same".

It struck me as an odd thing to say - aside from being an ingrained attitude probably for her generation.

didds

This brought to mind a Beyond The Fringe sketch from the '60s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUd1OxPbKk4 (see 1h 8m 45s)

--kiloran (hoping it's not too offensive )

[UncleEbenezer]

It's horrified me that even after seeing and reading about the horrors of the concentration camps

What's the chronology there? How much was actually known at the time, and (before the era of telly) by the demographics being widely quoted? Bear in mind that people had grown up and formed many ideas pre-war. And zionism was an active terrorist movement: how much was that in the news?

Even today, quite a few people will make comments like that about gypsies - who suffered similarly to jews under Hitler. Us-and-them tribalism. And of course Christian culture has a complex and confused relationship with biblical-era hebrews, including the guilt of the crucifixion.

But there may be another consideration: what did the idea of "jews" represent to people back then? I can't actually speak for that period, but going back earlier, a lot of antisemitism looked like anti-globalism today, because the popular image of jews then looked a lot like globalism today. A nineteenth century antisemite might look a lot like the "occupy" movement in our times. Not to mention the association of jews with banking, having its historic roots when christianity forbade usury, so christians then - like moslems today - couldn't be bankers.

[stewamax]

In 1190, the entire Jewish population of York was expunged - either murdered or took their own lives in expectation of being so.
A hundred years later, Edward 1st forced the expulsion of most Jews from England by banning their money-lending and making them wear a 'Jew' badge.
Nearly four hundred years elapsed before Cromwell invited them back, but he was also busy murdering Roman Catholics, especially the Irish ones.

Plus ca change indeed.

[scotia]

In 1190, the entire Jewish population of York was expunged - either murdered or took their own lives in expectation of being so.
A hundred years later, Edward 1st forced the expulsion of most Jews from England by banning their money-lending and making them wear a 'Jew' badge.
Nearly four hundred years elapsed before Cromwell invited them back, but he was also busy murdering Roman Catholics, especially the Irish ones.

Plus ca change indeed.

Regrettably you don't need to go that far back. I was born in Midlothian at a time when my Member of Parliament, Captain Archibald Maule Ramsay, was lodged in prison under defence regulation 18B (from May 1940 to September 1944). He was a virulent antisemite, and founder of the Right Club. At a meeting with the Nordic League (a far right organisation) he was reported to have pronounced that they needed to end Jewish control "and if we don't do it constitutionally, we'll do it with steel"

[Lootman]

what did the idea of "jews" represent to people back then?

The traditional rationalisation of anti-semitism, which you can see in the characterisation of Shylock and no doubt earlier than that. It is the resentment by a class of people who fail to achieve success over another class of people for whom success comes naturally.

Why else would it be left-wingers who, despite their self-proclaimed detestation of racism, find themselves in the cross hairs when it comes to allegations of racism against Jews? Mostly seen crucially with Corbyn's struggles which look like leading to his ostracism from the Labour party (along with a good few others including Livingstone and Williamson).

And don't forget that the KKK in America hated Jews at least as much as they hated blacks, which led to Jews being predominant in the development of civil rights during the 1960s.

I give you credit for having the vocabulary to nuance the characterisation of racism yourself. But you tread very close to the line, and reasonable Lemons might question your apparent rationalisation of anti-semitism here and elsewhee.

[dionaeamuscipula]

what did the idea of "jews" represent to people back then?

The traditional rationalisation of anti-semitism, which you can see in the characterisation of Shylock and no doubt earlier than that. It is the resentment by a class of people who fail to achieve success over another class of people for whom success comes naturally.

Why else would it be left-wingers who, despite their self-proclaimed detestation of racism, find themselves in the cross hairs when it comes to allegations of racism against Jews? Mostly seen crucially with Corbyn's struggles which look like leading to his ostracism from the Labour party (along with a good few others including Livingstone and Williamson)..

According to the left wing of the Labour Party, they found themselves in the cross hairs because anti-Zionism was deliberately misinterpreted by the right wing press and others as anti-semitism.

Certainly (for all his failings), while Corbyn is most definitely pro-Palestine and anti-Israel, it is difficult to reconcile him being racist with his life long campaigning against racism.

Starmer's view is that this is a boil that needs to be lanced, and to hang with the rights or wrongs.

DM

(Please, anyone, do not take this as an excuse to argue that being anti-israel means you are anti-semitic, because that is not an argument worth having here)

[servodude]

Some things never change do they.

Not the big things no.

The source of the refugees or "the incommers" might
- and "the Jews" have for most of history been a displaced people "othered" the places they found themselves
- but the nonsense they face? that's eternal

But what do you expect when "elected leaders" spout sentiments suchs as:
"I would love to be having a front page of The Telegraph with a plane taking off to Rwanda. That’s my dream. That’s my obsession"
- classy!

-sd

[todthedog]

Golf in the 80's visiting an old established course just west of London that had a prominent sign 'Jews not accepted for membership'. Horrible even back then

[Lootman]

The traditional rationalisation of anti-semitism, which you can see in the characterisation of Shylock and no doubt earlier than that. It is the resentment by a class of people who fail to achieve success over another class of people for whom success comes naturally.

Why else would it be left-wingers who, despite their self-proclaimed detestation of racism, find themselves in the cross hairs when it comes to allegations of racism against Jews? Mostly seen crucially with Corbyn's struggles which look like leading to his ostracism from the Labour party (along with a good few others including Livingstone and Williamson)..

According to the left wing of the Labour Party, they found themselves in the cross hairs because anti-Zionism was deliberately misinterpreted by the right wing press and others as anti-semitism.

Certainly (for all his failings), while Corbyn is most definitely pro-Palestine and anti-Israel, it is difficult to reconcile him being racist with his life long campaigning against racism.

On the contrary it is quite easy to reconcile the two. Corbyn has for his entire career divided countries into simplistic "good" and "bad" nations. So he dislikes the US but likes Russia. He dislikes Israel but likes its Arab neighbours. And so on. He turns a blind eye to things like Russian aggression or Arab terrorism because at a higher level he has a very rigid and one-dimensional view of the world. It is ideological blindness and that can very easily lead to the kind of bigotry and prejudice that he simultaneously claims to abhor.

Starmer's view is that this is a boil that needs to be lanced, and to hang with the rights or wrongs.

(Please, anyone, do not take this as an excuse to argue that being anti-israel means you are anti-semitic, because that is not an argument worth having here)

Then you are effectively trying to stifle any dissenting view by attempting to dismiss the evident correlation between dislike of Jews and dislike of a Jewish state. You surely would not expect readers to let you get away with such an arbitrary restriction. The reality is that people who are anti-semitic are far more likely to find fault with Israel. The "No, I was only criticising Zionism and not Jews" can often be a tactic designed to deflect scrutiny of their deeper underlying motives.

[Howyoudoin]

I have been reading "Our Hidden Lives" a book based on diaries kept by ordinary people based on information gathered from the "Mass Observation Project" which ran both during and after the war. I am reading diaries from 1945 to 1947 and the thing that has really shocked me is the casual anti semitism. One chap remarked "I can't agree with a lot Mosely advocates but I do agree with his attitude towards the Jews", if only we could get rid of them England would be a much better place". The chap who wrote that was an antiques dealer, well read, loved visiting London to go to the theatre and the ballet, another from a woman, she was born in South Africa and married a Brit. She remarked that "If only England hadn'r rushed into the war it would have given Mr. Hitler time to get rid of even more Jews". All of them refer to "Jew Boys" as the cause of most of the problems post war. It's horrified me that even after seeing and reading about the horrors of the concentration camps British people could be so callous and unfeeling.
Some things never change do they.

R6

Interesting.

I recently moved house and although there are plenty of pubs about a mile from my house, the two nearest ‘bars’ are the British Legion club and the RAF club, so I joined both of them.

I enjoy the company of ‘older’ people immensely but there’s no doubt some of them hang onto racist views they would make their grandchildren (and me) wince.

I thought I was right wing but I have nothing on some of these!

HYD

[XFool]

Then you are effectively trying to stifle any dissenting view by attempting to dismiss the evident correlation between dislike of Jews and dislike of a Jewish state. You surely would not expect readers to let you get away with such an arbitrary restriction. The reality is that people who are anti-semitic are far more likely to find fault with Israel. The "No, I was only criticising Zionism and not Jews" can often be a tactic designed to deflect scrutiny of their deeper underlying motives.

Yes. But then the correlation is not necessarily symmetric, is it? An analogy can be made with Brexit.

I don't believe all Brexit supporters are racist; but show me a racist and I'll show you a Brexit supporter.

[UncleEbenezer]

Then you are effectively trying to stifle any dissenting view by attempting to dismiss the evident correlation between dislike of Jews and dislike of a Jewish state.

Would you also posit an "evident correlation" between dislike of christians and dislike of the Christian State? Protestants around the world might take issue with that!

Would you also posit an "evident correlation" between dislike of moslems and dislike of the Islamic State?

How can it not be racist to co-opt decent and honest people to the interests of a terrorist state merely by virtue of their jewishness, as you do when you argue such an alleged correlation as evidence of antisemitism?

[Clitheroekid]

Then you are effectively trying to stifle any dissenting view by attempting to dismiss the evident correlation between dislike of Jews and dislike of a Jewish state. You surely would not expect readers to let you get away with such an arbitrary restriction. The reality is that people who are anti-semitic are far more likely to find fault with Israel. The "No, I was only criticising Zionism and not Jews" can often be a tactic designed to deflect scrutiny of their deeper underlying motives.

Yes. But then the correlation is not necessarily symmetric, is it? An analogy can be made with Brexit.

I don't believe all Brexit supporters are racist; but show me a racist and I'll show you a Brexit supporter.

Have you ever wondered why there might be a correlation between support for Brexit and racism?

My own view - and I accept it's unlikely to be a popular one - is that some racist attitudes are actually a fairly rational and understandable response to the effects of mass immigration over the past few decades.

The first point I’d make is that most of the prosperous middle classes - which term probably applies to 90% of Fools - have not been unduly affected by mass immigration at all.

The vast majority of first-generation immigrants ended up in the poorer areas of the country. Most of them are still there, but those (or more likely their children) who have managed to gain a good education and career have long since moved out, and have also largely assimilated into middle-class England. So your new Asian or black neighbour is probably just another prosperous, professional person like you, with similar values and preferences.

But it's been a totally different experience for the working class / poor people that lived in those areas where most of the immigrants arrived. I speak from my own knowledge of the Lancashire mill towns, where very large numbers of South Asian immigrants started arriving in the 1960s and 70s, but the same applies to similar towns in Yorkshire, the Midlands and some parts of London.

These immigrants were from a completely different culture to that which they found on their arrival, and their cultural values were often almost directly opposite to the host community. To give just one example, the life of the white, working class community often revolved around the local pub, and drinking - often heavy drinking - was a way of life. The new arrivals were, of course, mostly Muslims who didn't drink at all, so were effectively excluded from a central part of the host culture.

Moreover, many of these immigrants were unable to speak English with any fluency, and the women were – and in many cases shamefully still are - effectively kept entirely away from the host community.

The net effect was that many members of the host community were often extremely unhappy about the arrival of these `alien' people. They derived little or no benefit at all from their presence – the immigrants had basically been brought over to supply labour for the wealthy local business owners - and resented seeing familiar surroundings changing to accommodate them.

Over the years, as the numbers of immigrants continued to grow, this differentiation became more pronounced. Churches closed or were turned into mosques. Schools had to concentrate more of their efforts on teaching English to children that didn’t speak it as a first language, often causing resentment amongst the white parents. The phenomenon of `white flight' meant that the more affluent members of the white community moved to other areas, thereby increasing even further the concentration of Asian people.

In general terms there has been - even now - remarkably little assimilation of the Asian community into the white one. Many Asians still speak to each other in their own language, and dress in traditional clothing. The two communities co-exist side by side, generally without much overt hostility, but also with very little integration. It's a very long way from the multi-cultural dream fostered by the good old `metropolitan elite'.

Of course, from my privileged position I can very easily see that the immigrants have done nothing objectively wrong. Even if they had been minded to adopt the host community’s culture it would have been very difficult, due to the hostility they would have faced, so it’s hardly surprising that they have chosen to continue their own culture. In any case, the host culture was hardly what might be termed aspirational!

But for people who don’t have that benefit of objectivity I really don't think it's remotely surprising that they are `racist'. They have seen their communities where they and their families had grown up for generations fall apart and become semi-ghettos. They have often seen the value of their houses fall, so that they are denied the option of selling up and moving to a more traditional (i.e. white) community. Many of their friends have left, the local pubs are now all closed, and they are often left feeling very isolated - strangers in their own country.

This may all sound rather melodramatic, but I can assure you that it isn't. I have lived among and dealt with very many people like this, and the situation is just as much a problem now as it was 50 or 60 years ago.

Furthermore, that racism is present not just in the people that are unable to move away; it's also prevalent amongst those who feel that they were `forced' to move away from an area where they were happy and had their roots.

And the phenomenon is by no means limited to the towns where there has been large scale South Asian immigration. Similar attitudes will be found – though rarely now voiced in public - in virtually all communities which have been subject to large scale immigration by people of a different culture. It helps to explain why so many people in the Eastern counties voted Brexit as a protest about the large number of East Europeans that had arrived. Once again, they’d been brought in solely for the financial benefit of the people who owned the local farms – many of whom probably lived in the Thames Valley! - but it was the local people who had to deal with the disruption that such uncontrolled immigration had brought to their communities.

It's very easy to preach the benefits of multi-culturalism when you can afford to pick and choose where you live. But to criticise those who don't have that privilege for not joining in that enthusiasm shows a fundamental lack of understanding of human nature.

[SimonS]

There is an interesting fact that emerged from the various campaigns against nuclear energy. The AEA felt that they had to be able to respond to these arguments and , as scientists, felt they ought to start off with evidence.

So they started off with the "cancer clusters", the claim by the antis that round every nuclear power station there were abnormal levels of cancer in surrounding communities. This was where things got difficult, because cancer clusters showed up, but knowing the levels of radiation being emitted it did seem likely that nuclear emissions were the cause.

The investigation (country wide) showed that similar clusters occurred in odd parts of the country, often a considerable distance from any nuclear source. Historically these clusters often pre-dated nuclear developments by decades and sometimes centuries. There did appear to be a correlation between a static population and an influx of "strangers", and many of the clusters correlated to the presence of US military bases in WW2, being built away from urban conurbations, in countryside where people could point to their family generations in the local graveyards. It would appear that cancers of this sort are to a degree the result of contagion.

There was, for example, a fading cluster identified from church records in the vicinity of Dartmoor, possibly attributable not to the inherent radiation of the granite tors but to the influx of Napoleonic prisoners of war to the prison and its environs.

So given how widespread the general feeling of distrust of incoming strangers seems to be globally, it may well be a hangover from more distant days when strangers in significant numbers represented an unseen and existential threat to the community, not as a result of warlike tendencies but simply from the mixing of bloodlines. Instinct is a powerful force and the instinct of distrust seems widely distributed.

[Lootman]

Then you are effectively trying to stifle any dissenting view by attempting to dismiss the evident correlation between dislike of Jews and dislike of a Jewish state.

Would you also posit an "evident correlation" between dislike of christians and dislike of the Christian State? Protestants around the world might take issue with that!

What is this Christian State that you speak of? Most western democracies, which typically have evolved from predominantly christian societies, are secular these days. There are anomalies, such as the fudging of church and state in the UK, and issues around abortion in catholic nations (and the US of course). But I cannot think of a nation that one would normally call a Christian state in the same sense that Israel is often called a Jewish state.

And where do you find this dislike of christians?

Would you also posit an "evident correlation" between dislike of moslems and dislike of the Islamic State?

Insofar as there is distaste for Arabs and Moslems, it is founded upon their intolerance of women, gays and disbelievers, and their propensity for terrorist acts and war, rather than any inherent racism. Other than based on behaviour, there is no more reason for someone in Europe to hate Moslens than to hate buddhists or hindus, and I have noticed neither of those. Hindus, buddhists and jews don't go around planting bombs in European railway stations.

Corbyn's love affair with Arab states is not something noble like with Lawrence of Arabia. Rather it is a based on the cynical assessment that the enemy of your enemy is your friend. If you hate Israel and America, then Corbyn will love you regardless of whether you bomb and maim innocent people.

How can it not be racist to co-opt decent and honest people to the interests of a terrorist state merely by virtue of their jewishness, as you do when you argue such an alleged correlation as evidence of antisemitism?

By characterising Israel as a terrorist state you undermine your own credibility and claim of balance, and effectively concede that you have a biased view of the situation in Israel. Not that that means you dislike Jews of course. But at the margin that distinction becomes fuzzy unless you are a lot more careful about your choice of words. If you focus your venom on Israel whilst ignoring far worse actors like Russia, Iran and North Korea, then you cannot reasonably complain when people accuse you of a biased perspective.

Israel is forced into some less than ideal policies as a matter of survival - something that many are committed to destroy. You quite simply cannot judge Israel's policies by the standards that apply in, say, a safe and sleepy village in West Devon. When a nation has been under constant existential threat for 75 years, then some slack should be cut when seeking to judge them.

[redsturgeon]

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Discussion on this topic has now moved on from the congenial nature of the Snug so the thread is now closed.