[In the Drunk Tank]

Very good article which people should read if they don't understand why Livingston has upset so many people with his comments. What he said is one interpretation of events but in history there is very little that is 'fact'.

So … Ken … A lot of people – predominantly the good people, of course, of the British left – have been tweeting to tell me that Ken just “stated a fact”. Here is the problem with what Livingstone said. Because Ken Livingstone did not state a fact.

The statement “Hitler supported Zionism” is not a fact. It’s an interpretation. An interpretation of a particular historical moment, in the 1930s, when the forced emigration of Jews from Germany was pushed further along by various Nazi economic incentives allowing those who fled to Palestine to get some of their stolen assets back.

That is not Adolf Hitler supporting the idea of a Jewish state (even writing that sentence looks ridiculous). It is the Nazis taking advantage of the terror and despair of fleeing refugees to get more of them to leave the country. It is just the thin edge of the wedge of Nazi horror.

The real problem, in a way, is the tone of Livingstone when giving this interpretation. There’s no sympathy. No compassion – no sense of the tragedy behind this. It’s just complacently presented as a deal that Hitler made with German Zionists, and therefore – and this, of course, is the point, the banal, **** point – a way of confirming that Zionism is bad. Through an association with the top bad thing, Hitler.
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I’ll leave with the words of Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, before he went mad, according to Livingstone. So exactly in that period when he was, as we know, supporting Zionism. I may have as much of a tin ear for meaning as Livingstone has for antisemitism, but I can’t, for the life of me, make this out to be as pro the idea of the creation of a Jewish state as Livingstone insists it is: “While the Zionists try to make the rest of the World believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim. It doesn’t even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organisation for their international world swindler, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks.”

Full article: https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...r-zionism-jews