Here’s a snippet of U.K. news you might have missed. Jeremy Corbyn, who was happy to participate in a state visit to Britain by China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is now boycotting President Trump’s visit. He is prepared to overlook China’s detention of a million Muslims in Xinjiang’s concentration camps, but apparently not Trump’s largely token attempts to reduce Muslim immigration.
In a statement following the announcement that the president would visit Britain as a guest of the queen at the beginning of next month, the Labor leader declared: “Theresa May should not be rolling out the red carpet for a state visit to honor a president who rips up vital international treaties, backs climate change denial, and uses racist and misogynist rhetoric.”
In Corbyn’s worldview, refusing to sign up to the Paris Agreement on climate change is worse than being the world’s foremost polluter. China overtook the U.S. as a producer of greenhouse gasses in 2005, and its carbon emissions are rising while America’s are falling. But for the Labor leader, Americans are always the bad guys.
When I wrote in this column a few months back that Britain’s opposition leader regretted the outcome of the Cold War, some Examiner readers were skeptical. Surely I was exaggerating, they said. Corbyn was never literally on the side of the USSR, was he?
Well, sorry to say it, but yes, he was — at least in the sense that he regarded the Kremlin as preferable to NATO. He never wavered in his belief that the Cold War was caused by American aggression, which was in turn driven by big business. As late as 2011, he wrote the following: “Since World War Two, the biggest imperial force has been the United States on behalf of global capitalism and the biggest, mostly U.S.-based, corporations.”
He went on to argue that Warsaw Pact states had more freedom of action than Western democracies: “The Soviet influence was always different and its allies often acted independently. Cuba developed a quite independent foreign policy and enormous respect and stature among the poorest people.”
Got that? The U.S. was a more domineering ally than the Soviet Union. “The hard power of weaponry, the malign influence of the CIA and its creation of pliant and friendly governments actively suppressed and subjugated peoples in the poorest counties [sic] of the world.”
Corbyn’s unquestioning anti-colonialism and anti-Americanism explain something else that people outside the far Left often find puzzling: An unremitting hostility to Israel that often spills over into anti-Semitism.
Those earlier quotations come from Corbyn’s enthusiastic introduction to a 2011 reprint of “Imperialism” by J.A. Hobson, first published in 1902. That book, the central theme of which was taken up by Lenin, set out what was to become the anti-colonialist argument for the next century. Hobson argued that “great businesses — banking, booking, bill discounting, loan floating, company promoting — form the central ganglion of international capitalism.”
Who ran these great businesses? Why, they were “controlled, so far as Europe is concerned, by men of a single and peculiar race, who have behind them many centuries of financial experience.”
Hobson’s argument was that imperialism is caused by capitalism and is run in the interests of Jews. Which, in essence, is the thesis that has reemerged on the British Left today, born out of an odd mixture of hostility toward banks and sympathy with anti-Western Islamists.
Corbyn explicitly endorsed Hobson’s thesis. “What is brilliant, and very controversial at the time, is his analysis of the pressures that were hard at work in pushing for a vast national effort, in grabbing new outposts of Empire on distant islands and shores.”
Here, in other words, was the Labor leader, who not long ago was in trouble for endorsing a mural that showed Jewish bankers getting rich off the backs of workers, lavishing praise on a book which asked: “Does anyone seriously suppose that a great war could be undertaken by any European state, or a great state loan subscribed, if the house of Rothschild and its connections set their face against it?”
In ordinary times, this would be enough to finish Corbyn. He would be deemed unfit to be a member of Parliament, let alone prime minister. But, in the culture war that has overtaken Britain since 2016, many voters are so anti-Tory and anti-Brexit that they are prepared overlook almost anything else.
This situation is utterly without precedent. The United Kingdom, like most European countries, has had its anti-Semites down the years. But, unlike most European countries, it has never before allowed them to infiltrate a major party. Will Brits ignore it? Will they vote primarily on other issues? Because things have reached the point where to overlook what is happening is, itself, a decision.
