Though Cowards Flinch

Yesterday, the Financial Times published a truly great article on the poetry and life of Philip Larkin, by the writer Martin Amis, who has selected the poems for a forthcoming Larkin anthology.

As a personal friend of the poet’s whilst he was still alive, Amis is as good as any to recall the type of person Larkin was, as well as detail what may have been the inspiration for his poetry.

In it, however, Amis cuts to the chase, pointing out that:

Larkin died in 1985. And when the Letters [Anthony Thwaite's collection of letters, 1992] and the Life [Andrew Motion's biography, entitled in full A Writer's Life, 1993] appeared, almost a decade later, I wrote a long piece in his defence. I should say that I too was struck by Larkin’s reflexive, stock-response “racism”, and by his peculiarly tightfisted “misogyny”. But I bore in mind the simple truth that writers’ private lives don’t matter; only the work matters. (My emphasis)

This initially made me regret the way in which I studied Larkin as a college student, then made me think about the difference between a writer’s life, and work, in general.

Firstly, while pulling apart my copy of The Whitsun Weddings, I took the care to try and decipher each and every word employed, the part they played, the images they brought up and the sound they made – but took little time in analysing the words as part of a whole. I tore those words up until the stanzas ceased to be part of a wider entity.

Then it was the way in which my class used the myth of Larkin – stories of the unkind, racist, sexist sour puss – to justify our theses and lazy hermeneutics.

The problem with such textual analysis is not that we were wrong, but that we could never tell if we were right. If we read, for example, “A Study of Reading Habits” do we consider the images they relay to us, or do we simply imagine a pieced together image of the bitter Larkin, as characterised by our feminist lecturers?

Consider:

Later, with inch-thick specs,

Evil was just my lark:

Me and my cloak and fangs

Had ripping times in the dark.

The women I clubbed with sex!

I broke them up like meringues.

I think Amis might be right; we should try and disengage with what the private lives of writers are like, lest it interferes with correctly judging a piece of work – were such a thing possible, anyway.

And then this reminded me of another issue; the canonisation of writers linked to the very worst in unpalatable ideas: Nazism.

When it is a great piece of music or philosophy, scholars and commentators of all stripes would prefer you to appreciate the substance, not the individual behind it. When an Israeli orchestra wanted to play a festival in Bayreuth, Southern Germany, dedicated to the music of Wagner, many were insulted and protested. But enough came out saying we must distinguish the person – a known anti-Semite, enjoyed by, among others, Hitler – from the art; and the art should be enjoyed by all regardless.

Indeed Roberto Paternostro, the conductor of the orchestra, was reported as saying: “Wagner’s ideology and anti-Semitism was terrible, but on the other hand he was a great composer”.

Others have pointed out that there was no explicit anti-Semitism in Wagner’s music, so its being listened to ought to be guilt free. Similarly, many in the world of philosophy, according to the Jewish online magazine Tablet, “recognize the difficulty of considering Martin Heidegger’s oeuvre without acknowledging the genocidal machine of which he was a part, but don’t believe that his Nazi sympathies underlie or undermine all of his works.”

The key word here is “underlie”; because no explicit reference to racism is made in Heidegger’s work, so it is not worth us white washing a great thinker (without Heidegger there would be no Arendt, no Foucault, no Rorty, and no Sartre for sure) and leaving that particular gap in the world of knowledge.

But, drawing this back to Larkin – what of writers where unpalatable sentiment is clearly expressed in the work, and which seem to fit with the writer’s own sentiments (here I purposefully conflate sexism and misogyny with anti-Semitism; a trilogy of rancorous motives)? Is it only above board that we read Heidegger and listen to Wagner today because in it there is no trace of their own personal prejudices? If there were, would we have to forgo them through principle?

Let us take another example, this time from popular culture. Michael Richards is most famous for playing Kramer in the popular American sitcom Seinfeld – indeed this is where he produced his best work. In 2006, while doing a stand-up comedy gig, he racially abused two black men who were near the front row of his audience by saying “”fifty years ago you would be hanging from a tree with a pitch-fork up your ass”. Very little is heard of the actor now, and though he denies being racist, and in spite of his great previous work, he has destroyed his career. In this instance, the separation from his acting and his terrible judgement cannot be made.

There is no simple answer for why we choose to keep (in the world of artistic respectability) some over others; possibly it has to do with the form of art produced, perhaps also it’s the amount of time elapsed since that art first emerged in the world. Whatever, keeping at arms length an artist’s personal life is a good principle to keep hold of, because they themselves are rarely the objects of our desire; but we should question as to why it is we forgive for our viewing/reading/listening pleasure.

Early this month, Geoffrey Alderman, for the JC, wrote :

The campaign to persuade the Ramsay MacDonald government to abandon the anti-Zionist policy of its colonial secretary, Sidney Webb, was materially assisted by the deliberate intervention of Zionist groups in the fortuitous Whitechapel by-election of November-December, 1930. (my emphasis).

Sidney Webb (Fabian, founder of the LSE etc), ennobled as Lord Passfield in 1929, issued the Passfield White Paper in 1930, a policy statement for British Palestine. The statement originally set to look at the Arab riots of 1929, and the right for Jews to pray at the Western Wall (Kotel, or wailing wall) in Jerusalem, but ended up concerning a great many Zionists including Chaim Weizmann, the once President of the Zionist organisation, and the first President of the State of Israel – who felt that it represented a U-turn on the commitments set out in the Balfour Declaration.

Ramsay MacDonald was later encouraged to clarify the British Government’s commitments, in a letter addressed to Dr Weizmann explaining that Britain was unquestionably in favour of establishing a national home for Jewish people inside Palestine. In the letter MacDonald notes that the White Paper of October, 1930, had been “the subject of a debate in the House of Commons on Nov. 17, [which also addressed] certain criticisms put forward by the Jewish Agency”.

The criticisms of the Jewish Agency, as well as the Histadrut (General Federation of Labour), concerned policy on Jewish labour in Palestine, which Lord Passfield’s White Paper seemed to level criticism towards. It was the contention of some that in order to bring about peace between Arabs and Jews, who had until 1928 co-existed in relative peace – Jewish immigration be halted. The tone of the White Paper, some have said, demonstrates Lord Passfield buying into this assumption, and that he and his policy statement, were coloured by an anti-Zionism.

However the White Paper did not explicitly state any intention to the contrary of a homeland (Lord Passfield’s main worry was that immigration would exceed whatever may be the economic capacity of the country), in fact quite the opposite – it was in keeping with the consensus at the time that “the development of a Jewish National Home in Palestine is a consideration, which would enjoy continued support”.

That Lord Passfield signed such a statement off should confirm that at the time he and his department were not necessarily anti-Zionist. On September 15, 1929, he also made efforts to reassure a Jewish delegation that the National Home Policy would not be renounced. In a statement from the British Colonial Office, Lord Passfield said “there could be no question of the British government giving up the Palestine Mandate or departing from the policy embodied in the Balfour Declaration of facilitating the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

Speaking to the Mayor of Tel Aviv, he noted the great achievements made between Arabs and Jews, but “felt bound to point out that the development must depend upon the power of absorption of the country”. The outbreak of Arab violence in August 1929 started “when Haj Amin al-Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem, fomented Arab hatred by accusing the Jews of endangering the mosques and other sites holy to Islam. Observers heard Husseini issue the call: Itback al-Yahud “Slaughter the Jews!””

There was to be no halting of Jewish immigration to Palestine, but had there been, it might have been to avert violence towards Jews by aggressors, and not through any notion of anti-Zionist temperament.

Was Webb anti-Semitic?

That hasn’t stopped Sidney Webb being referred to as having “racialist leanings” elsewhere. One journalist has written: “In a treatise entitled Industrial Democracy written by Beatrice and her husband, they refer to the Jews in England as “a constant influence for degradation.”” This claim has been copied by a great many bloggers as proof that English socialism is tainted by anti-Semitism, but on perusal of my copy of Industrial Democracy (900 pages in size, I’m ready to admit that the contentious claim may have passed me by), what I can see is not a berating of Jewish workers, but sympathy for them.

The Webb’s talk at length about the disparity in fortunes made by wholesale clothiers, and the workers of what they call “no notion of a definite “Standard of life”” (workers ranging from Polish Jews to unskilled Englishwomen, who will work simply to keep their heads above water, so to speak) (p.687). Of the Jew worker specifically, they say he will work for low wages so as not to be out of work, and that their indefatigability makes them prime targets for capitalist exploiters (p.698).

Though the racial characterising may be slightly crass for the modern reader, their analysis is not one that immediately signals anti-Jewish prejudice. The real controversy of the book is how they describe black workers: “the African Negro … will work … for indefinitely low wages, but cannot be induced to work at all once their primitive wants are satisfied” (p.698, fn. 1).

Another point to note is found in Jeffrey Kaplan’s book Encyclopedia of white power: a sourcebook on the radical racist right. As he notes, Jews made up the early Fabians, and they were sympathetic towards the Bolsheviks. During Sidney Webb’s 1888 lecture tour in the USA, many far right commentators could not help but repeat the conclusion that Socialism was a Jewish project (of course Webb himself was Jewish, and noticeably so – on meeting him for the first time Beatrice Potter noted in her diary, 14 February, 1890, a “little man with a huge head on a very tiny body [and ] a Jewish nose”). Sidney Webb, if anything, was the subject of anti-Semitic abuse, not the perpetrator of it.

In sum

Aside from the fact that Poale Zion, a Marxist Zionist Jewish workers circle – were key allies for Webb and Arthur Henderson when they drafted the War Aims Memorandum, “recognising the ‘right of return’ of Jews to Palestine”, preceding the Balfour Declaration, I don’t think there is much evidence to show Webb was against a homeland for Jews in Palestine, at least while he was working for the British Colonial Office. What his position was later on, when he bestowed uncritical lust upon the Stalinists – whose notion of the “amalgam” sought to blame Zionism for everything from capitalism and imperialism, to Nazism and anti-Semitism, saddling close to what Bebel called the “socialism of fools” – is for another blog post.

Recently I wrote:

An anti-Semite by the name of Sheikh Ibraheem Zakzaky will be addressing an otherwise very respectable Mosque tonight in my local area of Kilburn.

He is the head of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN), the website of which has an article clearly demonstrating the extent to which he views Jews as plotters. An article on that website details a recent seminar given by a deeply dubious character Sheikh Yusuf Ali who talks about the Zionist plot against Muslims; then clearly details Zakzaky noting “the Jewish plot against Islam is manifested in Iraq as they sent Bush to capture Iraq for them”. There is of course the obligatory reference to the “protocols”.

According to his biography on the official website of the IMN:

The goal of the Islamic movement is to enlighten the Muslims as to their duties as individuals and as a community. The movement owns more than three hundred primary/secondary schools located in different places mainly in the northern part of the country. They are known by the name of Fudiyyah Schools. This is in addition to many Islamic centers and other institutions. The movement also owns the Nigeria’s most widely circulated newspaper, Al Mizan, in the Hausa language.

It also details Zakzaky’s arrests, which the site claims were “for his ideas”.

The Jerusalem Post – one of the few publications with details of Zakzaky’s visit – mentions details of the host of the conference, the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC). They say:

The IHRC is a Hezbollah and Islamic Republic supporting organization. At an anti-Israel rally in Hyde Park during the Second Lebanon War, its chair Massoud Shadjareh wore a Hezbollah flag as did research director Reza Kazim, who was seen chanting phrases like “We are all Hezbollah” and “Bomb, bomb Tel Aviv.” At a pro- Israel rally in London’s Trafalgar Square in 2008, Kazim was ejected by the police for filming within the roped off area.

According to an article written by the Middle East Strategic Information written in 2009:

• Zakzaky’s IMN is growing popular among impoverished Nigerian Muslims
• He believes Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden do not exist, acts of terrorism in the west are organised by western intelligence services, and that Tony Blair was behind the 7/7 bombings
• He claims Nigeria’s secularist leaders perform ritual sacrifices removing unborn babies from their Mother’s wombs by ripping them out
• He believes Jews are “”dastardly infidels” and draws inspiration from Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and the deceased Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin

He has been and gone now, but came almost unnoticed.

I hate to come across all Eustonite or “decent” but if Geert Wilders or Le Pen or someone dreadful like that came to our town, we’d be all over them like a rash, but with figures such as Zakzaky – who is not small beer by the way, he is the head of Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN) – we give it a miss.

Some may say that Zakzaky has never committed terror himself, which is why it is not important, but this does not disprove his threat. Some may say, in his words, he does not cause terror. This is questionable, but I’m careful not to make claims I cannot substantiate. During the conference season, the Quilliam Foundation held an event on how non-violent extremism can be just as dangerous as violent extremism. Whether directly or indirectly, Zakzaky has sounded off to the tune of racial discrimination and religious violence, and this should not be sniffed at.

Some will perhaps accuse me, and have done before, of making straw man of whom to knock down. The point here is that I’m not accusing anyone of supporting Zakzaky – though there obviously are some who do - and I’m certainly not saying that in the absence of an anti-fascist picket of him, that I should therefore deduce the anti-fascists in fact support Islamic fascists. It is not true. But I have difficulty understanding why people like Zakzaky don’t wind them up to the point of protest, whereas smaller targets like David Irving, do.

Now let me quickly qualifiy this before I get myself into trouble. Of course Irving is bad news, and has dangerous ideas, but at least he is an army of one; him and maybe some idiots in the National Front or Combat 18. His words are largely ignored by the vast amount of thinking human beings, and are taken on board by a small group of twits that if they express their counterfactual opinions, land themselves in court. Zakzaky, on the other hand, is the head of a church, has many followers and is fiercely anti-Semitic – context, here, is all.

In my quest to get more airplay on Zakzaky, I wrote to three individuals/organisations that I thought could maybe help; Peter Tatchell, Hope not Hate and Unite Against Fascism.

I requested their help in numbers to picket the arrival of Zakzaky and ask questions of the mosque why they felt it responsible to invite someone with a evident history of anti-Semitism and crime.

I saw something on him at the Jerusalem Post and some bits on Harry’s Place blog here and here, as well as a cross-post on the Spittoon website, but when I read next to nothing about him in the mainstream press I wrote to the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Jewish Chronicle – as well as tweeting Martin Bright and Stephen Pollard – Hampstead and Highgate Express and the Kilburn Times.

The only response I got from any of these places was Peter Tatchell to tell me he was ill and had no campaign funds. Tatchell in his email recommended I contact the Board of Deputies of British Jews and contact local news sources – which I had done. It is a great credit to the man for at least writing back to me and taking my email seriously; there indeed is someone who will not allow sentimentalities affect his principles, and I can’t talk highly of him for doing so.

Tatchell’s first line said it all: “I share your anger about Mosques hosting extremist clerics and preachers. It is no better than having a right wing white racist speaking.”

There is no such thing as a “decent” left. There are leftwingers and rightwingers, with some mixing in the middle, and there are hypocrites and those who allow confused politics affect principles. I do not level this charge at anyone in particular, but in the fight against fascism in all its forms, we can’t just sit on our hands, we should be pulling our fingers out.

In the end I went down to the mosque by myself, and I was ineffective and nervous about getting on the wrong side of anyone. But were I backed up with the same level of energy certain organisations reserve for other far rightwingers, we could have told a number of people what we think about foul ideas infiltrating vulnerable communities.