Dub Mr. Ganesh’s commentaries London Spleen, after Baudelaire‘s posthumously published masterpiece. Mr. Ganesh’s essays are alive with Tory contempt and bile for everyone, who is not a believer in the natural ascendancy of the Tories, and of course the New Labour of Mr. Blair. But on to the business of pillorying and impugning Mr. Corbyn, the favorite sport of The Financial Times and its hirelings: we have come to bury Mr. Corbyn not to praise him!

The conviction of Mr. Corbyn has already taken place, as of the end of April with, at least by my count, 13 ‘news stories’ about Corbyn’s complicity with rampant Antisemitism in the Labour Party. I’ve summed it up in another post but it bears repeating:

The Livingstone and Naz Shah controversies offer a perfect opportunity to not just throw a bit of mud at Mr. Corbyn, but to bring him down as Labour leader.The charges of fostering the growth of Antisemitism within the Party, of associating with known Antisemites and most unforgivable of all just being on the Left.The fact of being on the Left is indicative of moral/political disorder prima facie. After all the FT invented ‘The Rebellion Against The Elites’, and would like to replace Corbyn with a more house-trained  Neo-Liberal, who can wear a proper suit and sing God Save The Queen with gusto. With the proviso that he has the charm and bonhomie of Tony Blair.

At The Financial Times : Antisemitism & Jeremy Corbyn, the manufactured crisis

More political melodrama is afoot, as the days pass we will see a mounting pressure to remove Mr. Corbyn. The machinery of impeachment is alive in the Tory Press and its political wing. There is no longer any real  question of guilt or innocence worth consideration: the avalanche of propaganda is all that it takes to bring down the miscreant and his fellow travelers. The political necromancy of Mr. Ganesh is the necessary intermediate step to political excommunication.

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/67e4e6a8-0e01-11e6-b41f-0beb7e589515.html#axzz47XkPEqyi

For a compelling look at the British Labour Party’s Antisemitism problem see this Intercept essay by Robert Mackey titled

Why a British Fight Over Israel and Anti-Semitism Matters to the Rest of Us

There is much to agree with in Mr. Luce’s essay, much that resonates with many Americans. Mr. Trump manages, in his long winded way, to highlight American discontent with its global role as the singular world power, now being supplanted by the rise of China, India and Iran or even the reinvigorated role of Russia. The Failure of The Elites, the foreign policy and economic policy technocrats, who have brought disaster in their vaunted areas of expertise over time – Mr. Luce issues a resounding rebuke across the stunted American political spectrum. The Failure of that Elite is perhaps the twin of the Financial Times’ political party line of The Rebellion Against the Elites, Trump and Sanders being its two dramatis personae, in the American political context.

Mr. Luce in his polemic misses two salient points of Mr. Trump’s rambling foreign policy chatter: America First and Containment.

America First Committee as described by a Wikipedia entry:

The America First Committee (AFC) was the foremost non-interventionist pressure group against the American entry into World War II. Peaking at 800,000 paid members in 450 chapters, it was one of the largest anti-war organizations in American history.^[1][2] Started on September 4, 1940, it was dissolved on December 10, 1941, three days after the attack on Pearl Harbor had brought the war to America.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_First_Committee

Charles A. Lindbergh  was its spokesman, and it had many prominent supporters, yet its historical reputation is disreputable at best. This dubiousness attaches itself to Trump as a function of the use of the title. Call it historical baggage.

Containment was a theory first articulated by George F. Kennan in the Long Telegram, later published in the ‘July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs with the pseudonym “X”, entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” ‘

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_F._Kennan

The Sources of Soviet Conduct:

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=3&psid=3629

Walter Lippmann criticizes the Containment theory here:

http://www.learner.org/workshops/primarysources/coldwar/docs/lippman.html

Even Kennan repudiated his theory later in his career. So what we as readers are confronted with in Trump’s Foreign Policy address is an exercise in dubious, even unwitting political nostalgia for two failed ideas/practices: America First and Containment, due to willful historical ignorance, nothing new when it comes to Trump. As I recall Trump said to an audience, give me your vote I’ll know what to do.

The failure of those policy technocrats is here amplified with this news from Iraq:

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Hundreds of supporters of Shi’ite Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr stormed into Baghdad’s Green Zone on Saturday and set up tents beside parliament after Sadr denounced politicians’ failure to reform a political quota system blamed for rampant corruption.

The protesters, who had gathered outside the heavily fortified district housing government buildings and many foreign embassies, crossed a bridge over the Tigris River chanting: “The cowards ran away!” in apparent reference to departing lawmakers.

The initial breach was mostly peaceful, but around sunset security forces fired teargas and bullets into the air in an effort to stop more protesters from entering. Around a dozen people were wounded, police sources said.

http://www.businessinsider.com/hundreds-of-demonstrators-stormed-the-heavily-secured-green-zone-in-baghdad-2016-4

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/61b84bb4-0d5f-11e6-ad80-67655613c2d6.html#axzz47LrFIllT

Cut off the head, Corbyn, the posited enabler of Antisemites, so that New Labour’s sycophants, i.e. Blair clones of Thatcherites, can regain control of the Party. Take your cue from Strauss, and his political ally/confederate Carl Schmitt: sow the seeds of political rancor and hate, masquerading as political virtue, bound together by myth making or just plain lies. After all  Isaiah Berlin set the standards for ‘Liberalism’s probity and directness! But be chastened by the singular idea of Schmitt’s, that the world is divided between friends and enemies. In practice Mr.Berlin’s conformist sensibility made him a natural follower of Schmitt.

David Caute and Tariq Ali both provide some useful insights into the exercise of Mr. Berlin’s Liberalism, in situ.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/28/the-dishonesties-of-isaiah-berlin/

Political Observer

At The Financial Times Robert Shrimsley opines on April 28, 2016:

How Jeremy Corbyn turned me into a political Jew. It is simply impossible to vote for a Labour party that does not appear to like us.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/5e642d92-0c57-11e6-9456-444ab5211a2f.html#axzz47LrFIllT

A Financial Times April 28,2016 editorial states:

Jeremy Corbyn’s halfhearted shrug over anti-Semitism.The Labour leader’s failure on this issue is tarnishing his leadership.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/433ec60e-0c60-11e6-9456-444ab5211a2f.html#axzz47LrFIllT

The Financial Times editors even resurrect this February 19, 2016 essay by Simon Schama:

The left’s problem with Jews has a long and miserable history. Anti-Israel demonstrations are in danger of morphing into anti-Semitism, writes Simon Schama

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/d6a75c3c-d6f3-11e5-829b-8564e7528e54.html#axzz47LrFIllT

Also see this picture of the suggested stories that might be of interest to me because of my browsing history, under the Shrimsley essay:

The Livingstone and Naz Shah controversies offer a perfect opportunity to not just throw a bit of mud at Mr. Corbyn, but to bring him down as Labour leader.The charges of fostering the growth of Antisemitism within the Party, of associating with known Antisemites and most unforgivable of all just being on the Left.The fact of being on the Left is indicative of moral/political disorder prima facie. After all the FT invented ‘The Rebellion Against The Elites’, and would like to replace Corbyn with a more house-trained  Neo-Liberal, who can wear a proper suit and sing God Save The Queen with gusto. With the proviso that he has the charm and bonhomie of Tony Blair.

Almost Marx

Its April 30th 2016 and this has been published at Vox Political: titled Livingstone vindicated: There WAS a Nazi-Zionist agreement and Hitler DID support it published April 28, 2016 : http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/04/28/livingstone-vindicated-there-was-a-nazi-zionist-agreement-and-hitler-did-support-it/

‘It turns out all those who clamoured for Ken Livingstone to be suspended from the Labour Party – on the basis that Nazi Germany and Zionist Jews never had an agreement – were completely wrong.
Perhaps John Mann needs to reconsider his actions of earlier today (April 28) – along with all those who accused Livingstone of “rewriting history” when he really was simply quoting it.’

Read the rest of this enlightening essay and wonder why The Economist hasn’t at the least acknowledged the facts of the case?
This isn’t about the cancer of Antisemitism destroying the Labour Party, but about an Economist Witch Hunt against Jeremy Corbyn! The Bagehot column has become one more instrument in the Anti-Corbyn phalanx, as if one more were needed!
Bagehot even spells out the game plan, such as it is, about not just the political danger of Corbyn, but the moral threat of his leadership: never let a manufactured crisis go to waste!

The truth is that Labour is dying, and every MP who thinks she can wash her hands of responsibility for that with the odd disapproving tweet has another thing coming. Today’s fracas will repeat itself, in slightly different forms, again and again, burying any scraps of self-respect (let alone electability in the next decades) the party has left. Perhaps there is a case for not rocking the boat before the European referendum. But then moderates must move to oust Corbyn. If they fail, they should proceed with the Haines solution. I see no good reason why if, say, 100 MPs and a sizeable minority of members quit and set up a Labour Party with integrity, they could not give the Conservatives a run for their money in 2020. This would not be “abandoning” their party. But staying put would be.

One more thing: Zionists are continually re-enacting the conditions of their European oppression upon, not just the Palestinians, but on African Refugees, Jewish and Non-Jewish, and on the Bedouins.

Almost Marx

http://www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/2016/04/labour-disarray

In sum, Jacob Weisberg argues the case for Clinton as her supporters have argued it: Bernie has lost and it is now time for him to step aside gracefully and cede to Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Weisberg extemporizes on the theme here at The Financial Times of The Rebellion Against The Elites, but in a more carefully modified, a less hysterical tone, as if he were trying to reason with a child. Call his tone patronizing, to be charitable!  I’m a voter in California and I have yet to cast my ballot, and when I do it will be for Bernie. I’m heartened to see that Sanders will persist in his Quixotic Crusade, till then, ignoring the Clinton Apologists like Mr. Weisberg, and the rest of the experts and the almost technocrats.

Is it a surprise that Mr. Weisberg uses this platform to advocate ‘Free Trade ‘ as codified in the TPP as some sort of answer to our present economic doldrums? Obama has become its champion, but Clinton has discarded her enthusiasm, Bernie bullied her into it, as Weisberg tells it. At least until after her election? Free Market Utopianism has not just failed, but crashed in a deafening thud! And what do those advocates of that failed utopianism offer now? the mirage of ‘Free Trade’ as its replacement. One Utopianism followed by another? But call the TPP  by its proper name Corporatism.

One can see more than clearly that Mrs. Clinton of not just a Hawk ,but in all but name a Neo-Conservative. With a disturbingly worshipful attitude to Netanyahu, as her speech at AIPAC made clear. If one has the enthusiastic support of both Jeffrey Goldberg and Wm. Kristol, that is proof of her – yet compared to her presumptive rival Trump, she almost appears to be rational and level headed.

Mr. Weisberg closes his essay on an almost elegiac note, that resembles more of the shopworn patronizing tone that pervades the whole of his essay:

Mr Sanders’ most significant effect will be felt over time. As the overwhelming choice of voters under 35, he points the way towards a more progressive future for the Democratic party. Millennial voters strongly prefer his European social democratic model to the centrist one represented by the Clintons. At 74, Mr Sanders will not be the one to lead his young followers into the promised land. Nonetheless, he has brought a more radical political future into view.

StephenKMackSD

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/48197fc4-0df1-11e6-b41f-0beb7e589515.html#axzz47Dvp3LwD

Alan Johnson is the editor of Fathom and a senior fellow at BICOM, Britain Israel Communications & Research Center:

‘BICOM, the Britain Israel Communications & Research Centre, is an independent research centre producing research and analysis about Israel and the Middle East. Our overall aim is to improve understanding of Israel and the many issues facing the countries of the Middle East and the region. We believe in the right of the State of Israel to live in peace and security and the right of the Palestinians to an independent state brought about though a negotiated agreement. We support a close relationship between Britain and Israel, based on shared values and interests.’

Liberal Zionist advocate/apologist Alan Johnson comments on Jeremy Corbyn, as providing a safe space for  Antisemites, while making clear that Mr. Corbyn is not himself one of that loathsome breed. Not very convincing, but first we must wade through Johnson’s lengthy indictment till we reach this:

Anti-Semitism has shape-shifted through history, employing different modes of justification. Its core motif is that the Jews, collectively and in their essence, are not just Other but malign. The content of this perceived malevolence changes with the times and the needs of the anti-Semites. “God-killers,” “aliens,” “cosmopolitans,” “sub-humans” and now “Zionists” have all served as code words to mark the Jew for destruction.

The new anti-Semitism does not criticise Israel—it demonises it. It twists the meaning of “Israel” and “Zionism” until they are so bent out of shape they can serve as receptacles for the tropes, images and ideas of classical anti-Semitism. That which the Jew once was, the Jewish state now is: evil, vampiric, full of blood lust, the all-controlling but hidden hand in global affairs, the obstacle to a better, purer, more spiritual world, uniquely deserving of punishment, and so on. “For World Peace We Must Destroy Israel,” as that new anti-Semitic placard puts it.

Antisemitism has shape-shifted through time to become, in the political present, Anti-Zionism: BDS is the current enemy, and all those who support it as a legitimate answer to Apartheid Israel, and its thuggish leader Netanyahu. There can be no legitimate criticism of Israel: the rhetorical invention of Antisemite/Self-Hating Jew has rendered the very expression of a critique irrational, as argued by apologists like Johnson and others. It never occurred to the advocates/inventors of Zionism, that their politically emancipatory idea and practice, might lead to a critique founded on a rational critique of their politics: one need only look to Arendt’s prediction that Israel would become Sparta.

‘And even if the Jews were to win the war, its end would find the unique possibilities and the unique achievements of Zionism in Palestine destroyed. The land that would come into being would be something quite other than the dream of world Jewry, Zionist and non-Zionist. The ‘victorious’ Jews would live surrounded by an entirely hostile Arab population, secluded into ever-threatened borders, absorbed with physical self-defense to a degree that would submerge all other interests and acitvities. The growth of a Jewish culture would cease to be the concern of the whole people; social experiments would have to be discarded as impractical luxuries; political thought would center around military strategy…. And all this would be the fate of a nation that — no matter how many immigrants it could still absorb and how far it extended its boundaries (the whole of Palestine and Transjordan is the insane Revisionist demand)–would still remain a very small people greatly outnumbered by hostile neighbors.

Under such circumstances… the Palestinian Jews would degenerate into one of those small warrior tribes about whose possibilities and importance history has amply informed us since the days of Sparta. Their relations with world Jewry would become problematical, since their defense interests might clash at any moment with those of other countries where large number of Jews lived. Palestine Jewry would eventually separate itself from the larger body of world Jewry and in its isolation develop into an entirely new people. Thus it becomes plain that at this moment and under present circumstances a Jewish state can only be erected at the price of the Jewish homeland…

– See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2012/01/arendt-born-in-conflict-israel-will-degenerate-into-sparta-and-american-jews-will-need-to-back-away/#sthash.W1ugfYki.dpuf

Political Observer

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/jeremy-corbyn-is-incapable-of-tackling-labours-anti-semitism-problem

Dearest Tina,

Evey time I go to the Daily Beast site two things happen, first I miss your deft editorial hand, expressed in the now long disposed of commentary on the Royals, and then I read the bellicose chatter of New Cold Warrior Michael Weiss with absolute dismay. Now, Mr. Tomasky is in his usual political spot, with his nose buried in Mrs Clinton’s ass. Its familiar territory, but the sagacious Leslie Gelb is missing, who was also fan and former employee of the Clintons, but he brought real world political and foreign policy experience to his essays. Mr. Tomasky was and still is a boring Neo-Liberal propagandist. But the balance between Gelb, Tomasky and your guest commentators, like my favorite Fake French Philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, added a kind of zest, a political yeastiness to your editorship at the Daily Beast.

Mr. Weiss has brought with him a coterie of New Cold War allies, writers who share his political romanticism, his  bellicose and reactionary politics. I’m sad to say that The Beast has lost much of an appeal, vibrancy not to speak of its cutting edge, that your editorship made possible. I hope you are not offended by my honesty!

Warmest regards,

Myra B.

Mr. Quigley doesn’t quite write his essay, but stitches it together not with the aid of Mr. Stephens’ opinion pieces, but lets Mr. Stephens do the actual work. Stephens  and his fellow pundits are following the Financial Times Party Line of The Rebellion Against the Elites, it has been the rallying cry of those respectable Neo-Liberals for sometime. It is endlessly repeated, in its various iterations, as if it were  axiomatically true. That line of argument has become shopworn. Mr. Stephens does not represent a kind of political wisdom!

For an almost alternative view of the Brexiteers see Linda Colley’s essay at the FT:

https://next.ft.com/content/63de3610-07b0-11e6-9b51-0fb5e65703ce

The headline and sub-headline give the game away:

Brexiters are nostalgics in search of a lost empire.

It would be folly for Britain to leave the EU but national pride runs deep, writes Linda Colley

But read the  well written and argued essay as another iteration of that Rebellion posed as a political irrationalism of ‘nostalgia for a lost Empire’ . Ms. Colley is a more adept and fluent writer of Capitalist Apologetics in its Neo-Liberal incarnation. In the political world inhabited by Stephens, Colley, and most assuredly Obama, there can be no credible critique of the EU, a cartel with the thinnest veneer of democracy, or the looming victory of the Corporatism of the TPP and TTIP. Another headline/sub-headline from the FT is exemplary of the Obama position:

Obama gives powerful warning against Brexit

Barack Obama has delivered a stinging rebuke to supporters of a British exit from the EU, saying that if the UK left the 28-member bloc it would go “to the back of the queue” in seeking a trade deal with Washington.

Standing alongside David Cameron in Downing Street, the US president delivered a clear warning that Britain would be less secure, less influential and less prosperous if it votes to leave the EU on June 23.

Challenging Brexit campaigners who had told the US president to stay out of the debate, Mr Obama said: “I’ve not come here to fix a vote, I’m offering my opinion. You should not be afraid to hear an argument being made.”

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/ba4fd8a4-089c-11e6-b6d3-746f8e9cdd33.html#axzz46qhxs3TN

If Mr. Douthat isn’t busy fussing/ fuming about the out of wedlock birth rate or just generally poking his nose into the unsupervised uterus’ of American women- I know! His penchant for patrolling the American female body and it’s morally clueless occupants, they are by Biblical writ lesser beings, in dire need of masculine tutelage, is irrepressible. Kant be dammed!

In today’s outing he focuses on The Reactionary Mind. Now, don’t let it bother you that this is the title of Corey Robin’s scholarly study with the same title. Mr. Douthat is a National Review Ironist which means he’s flatfooted, or just maladroit, you pick your favorite descriptor. The featured player in his essay is the Tenured Radical of 1990, Roger Kimball’s recycling of the political paranoia of Tail-Gunner Joe and Tricky Dick, reanimated by  the political necromancy of Douthat assisted by Conservative scholars Shields& Dunn. The singular idea of the Shields &Dunn duo is the thesis of the  seemingly inexplicable persistence of Left Wing scholars in the American Academy. Douthat essay is highlighted by an idea of Nicolás Gómez Dávila: “reactionary patchwork.” as the plausible answer to Left Intellectual Phalanx, in lieu of a  codified  holistic reactionary response . A riff on Bakhtin’s Canivalization/phantasmagoria? Gómez Dávila is the one with the intellectual breadth to answer that question. Mr. Douthat’s  intellectual reach is, to be charitable, limited. Yet he excels at the demands of the fluent and nearly credible propagandist/apologist: he is the nearly perfect pundit for The New York Times readership. David Brooks is that perfect pundit!

Myra B.