Over at Harry’s Place, the hedge-fund-trading, corporate-lawyering, Tory-voting arbiters of acceptably left-wing opinion have come up with a new ruse. Any criticism of their own class of crash-causing bailout beneficiaries must be anti-Semitic, don’t you know? It matters not that most Jews are not in that class, nor are most of its members Jewish.
They have already done this almost subliminally with a piece about Hungary. But now they are doing so flagrantly, in an attack on Quentin Letts of the Daily Mail for his suggestion that Nat Rothschild might not be the sort of person with whom politicians should associate.
He was clearly talking about international money men. The Harry’s Place lot can see that perfectly well. But they are determined to smear this richly deserved attack on them and theirs as an attack on Jews.
As much as anything else, just how Jew-ish are the Rothschilds these days? Just how much brissing, Bar Mitzvah-ing, kosher-keeping or Sabbath-nighting do they do? None, I expect. How many of them even have Jewish mothers, which is, after all, the one thing that really matters?
The fact that the Bullingdon Club ever let in Nat Rothschild strongly suggests that even they – yes, even they – did not know that he had a partly Jewish background. After all, they very nearly kept out George Osborne for being so low-born (the mere heir to a baronetcy) and so minor in his public school (only Saint Paul’s). They probably thought that young Nat was a relative of the Father Rothschild in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies.
But expect this sort of thing to spread, and be ready for it. Be ready to insist on the fact that, no, an attack on the crash-causing, nation-despising, variation-flattening, family-hating, warmongering bailout beneficiaries is not an attack on “the Jews”.
Rather, it is simply an attack on the crash-causing, nation-despising, variation-flattening, family-hating, warmongering bailout beneficiaries.
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It's insulting to those who suffer at the hands of bigots to imply that Quentin Letts is in any way Judeophobic - it's a deliberate twisting of his words.
ReplyDeleteMost Jewish people are wage-workers or small business-people and will be facing hard times like the rest of us because of the greed of the super-rich.
Quite.
ReplyDeleteIt is certainly true that, in a very different world from this, some traditional conservatives used to hate Jews because they were "vulgar, rootless capitalists". But virtually all those people are dead. And even if some people still hold such views, they are greatly outnumbered by those who simply despise what the new elite have done with *our* money and *our* economy, and are barely even aware of, or interested in, the actual background of individual new-elite members.
To suggest that it is all down to anti-Semitism is to discredit by association - without having to dirty one's hands (ha!) with anything as complicated as reasoned argument - any criticism of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. And we all know how many people seek to benefit from that. They must not succeed.
Thinking about this again, I would not rule out the possibility that Letts may have anti-Semitic leanings - his writings do suggest that he has an Old Tory belief in "roots in the land", which always tended to exclude Jews.
ReplyDeleteWhat I object to is the assumption that *anyone* who hates Rothschild et al must be anti-Semitic. I think the Grades damaged Britain through their subservience to the US entertainment industry, but I don't think they were subservient in that way *because* they were Jewish, nor do I belief that the old culture should have been retained untouched - I think the Bernsteins did a great deal of good for Britain through their support for questioning, independent thought (and championing, as Mancunians often have, the less elite-approved parts of US culture, i.e. getting Billie Holiday over to sing "Strange Fruit" rather than getting Neil Sedaka to headline the Palladium show) and I think the greatest sadness of our time has been that the Grades' influence has overpowered that of the Bernsteins.
What does that prove? Only that the historic Jewish wariness of a certain rooted idea of England/Britain (epitomised by the BBC of 1955) has had both positive and negative attributes and influences, just like almost every other view of England/Britain (including the Reithian one). A subtlety that would be lost on the Harry's Placers, I fear.