Few doubt that Salvador Dali was an artistic genius, creative and profound in some ways but as Orwell said:
"One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. "
So it's perfectly possible to be a genius at the arts and be a rather nasty thinker in other areas.
The anitsemites Richard Wagner, Ezra Pound and TS Elliott come to mind in that regard, not forgetting the American artist Kalen Ockerman (AKA Mearone) either.
Ockerman's work gained approval from odd quarters, even Jeremy Corbyn defended his antisemitic mural in East London, until it was removed. It is not a new issue and was highlighted in 2015.
However, it is unlikely that Jeremy Corbyn realised how Kalen Ockerman was a fan of David Icke.
In all fairness, Jeremy Corbyn could counter with ignorance of the topic, and frankly in his case it is a profoundly strong defence! Nevertheless, Corbyn might do well to recall that not every antisemitic idea emanates from Charles Lindbergh or Henry Ford type figure.
I have to say as a socialist and a long-term trade unionist I am exceedingly disappointed with parts of the Labour Party.
There is nothing more than I really want to see than the end of Tory governments. Every one of them.
Memory
I remember Thatcherism all too well.
I recall a post-war society which was struggling towards decent provisions for the working classes to be swept away by decades of greed, avarice and an overarching narcissistic attitude.
I remember with great sadness how the Miners were defeated.
I recall the lies and promises of privatisation pushed through by the Thatcher and Major governments.
I remember numerous Tories and Virginia Bottomley saying how the NHS “had far too many beds” and needed cuts.
I recall a time when sleeping on the street was an aberration and not a daily sight.
I remember a time when overt racism was rampant in Britain and successive Labour governments changed society with the Race Relations Acts.
But moreover, I remember a time when the ideas of the Hard, Far and Extreme Right were largely confined to the grubbiest meeting rooms over the nastiest of Pubs.
I recall when absurd conspiracy beliefs were confined to National Fronters, the Monday Club and the neo-Nazi fringe.
I remember a time when the Left and, in particular, Labour Party people knew about the intrinsic link between conspiracy theories and racism.
I recall a time when the Left and Labour members physically opposed the ideas of the Far and Extreme Right, with post-war memories still lingering in the air.
I remember when the Left and Labour people were very careful, how they knew to avoid the friends, the promoters and allies of incorrigible racists.
I recall all that without the aid of Google. But with a Google search it means we can look up anyone in the world.
We could, for example, study the arch conspiracy crank Alex Jones and we would notice his proximity to racism, his awful lies about the Sandy Hook massacre, his support for Donald Trump and influence on the political Right.
Then we could ask why someone who promoted Alex Jones in Britain is, apparently, going to be speaking on a Labour platform shortly.
Let that sink in for a moment.
From being at the forefront of antiracism Labour and the Left is now hosting someone who openly promoted the nasty Alex Jones.
I am deeply saddened that Owen Jones and Dr Rosena Allin-Khan will be sharing a platform with one of Alex Jones' would-be friends.
"Honest gov'nor, how was I to know Alex Jones was a racist when I invited him into my taxi and promoted him? "
"It's not like I could have looked him up on Google, is it?"
A duty to tackle racism
Again, Labour and the Left, if they are serious about antiracism must not collude with conspiracy oddballs or their advocates.
Racism thrives in the dark reaches of conspiracy theories and allows extreme racist views to enter the mainstream. It is the duty of the Left and decent Labour people to vigorously opposed these vile ideas by their actions, not just words, as happened in the past.
Dr. Dave Rich discusses conspiracy theories and the centrality of antisemitism to them:
"Conspiracy theories play a central role in extremist politics of all type, and antisemitism has a very strong traditional role within conspiracy theories, and this is why repeatedly we see antisemitism cropping up in the language, in the discourse, of extremist movements of all types - whether they are far-right, far-left, radical Islamist movements, and even New Age movements, we often find antisemitic conspiracy theories.
There is a British think-tank called demos, which has done a lot of research on conspiracy theories, they looked at the the literature and the arguments of a full range of extremist movements, and they found antisemitic conspiracy theories cropping up in all their literature.
The idea of ZOG - the Zionist Occupation Government, that there are Zionists or Jewish hidden powers behind our governments, was the most common one they found in the literature of all different extremist movements, and there's reasons for this.
Antisemitism was the dominant type of conspiracy theory in that conspiracy world, pretty much
from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century, so any conspiracy theory that came out of that period, or that harks back to that period from today, will inevitably bring antisemitism into it, and this has been facilitated to a large extent by the growth of social media on the Internet.
If you wanted to come across these antisemitic ideas 20 years ago you would have to go and actually find an extremist movement, persuade them to let you into their meetings, and these are not trusting people, get to read their magazines, which would not really look like professional magazines or send off to their book lists, and then you'd start to see these ideas.
Ten years ago you could find them on the Internet on extremist message boards, like Storm front and other far-right groups, but again it was people talking to like-minded people, it was far-right people gathering together making networks and connections, but not really reaching out of those boundaries.
Nowadays with social media these extremist ideas, these conspiracy theories, this antisemitism is on all of our phones in all of our pockets in our children's bedrooms and it looks as professional and as believable as something from the BBC or from CNN, all you need is a Facebook page or a Twitter account or an Instagram account and there it is.
So these ideas spread and what we're hearing from teachers in schools is that increasingly their students are bringing in material that they found on the Internet, that they do not have the critical powers to assess and to challenge and to debunk, and increasingly teachers are having to argue against conspiracy theories in the classroom.
So this is a new problem, we hear a lot about fake news nowadays, people talk about fake news and post-truth politics all the time. Of course antisemitism is the original fake news.
Antisemitism has always relied on lies and libels and myths about Jews, that unscrupulous political and religious leaders have used to mobilize their own supporters or to whip up a mob.
George Orwell, one of the great British political writers, wrote a famous essay on antisemitism in 1945, where he wrote words to the effect of one of the striking things about antisemitism is that you have to be able to believe things that could not possibly be true.
So conspiracy theories, antisemitism, what is now being called fake news, they all live together in a world and it's given a new lease of life to some quite nasty antisemitic ideas.
Holocaust denial for example has really failed as a political project, it's something that neo-Nazis tried 20-25 years ago to use to revive National Socialism, no one bought it, but in the conspiracy world where you're not supposed to believe any official story about anything, you shouldn't believe anything that any establishment authority tells you, Holocaust denial has a home, and it has a home alongside conspiracy theories about 9/11 or about the 7th of July tube bombings here in Britain or about the moon landings or about, you know Princess Diana's death, and all these things just fit into this mix together, and the old barriers between what is far-left and what is far-right, what is fascist and what is anti-fascist, get completely blurred and broken down, because you get the same conspiracy theories in all different parts of the political spectrum, and as ever, as I said, when conspiracy theories are the main way of understanding politics and of viewing the world, antisemitism will always have, not just a place, but a central place."
