Keeping the faith

It's at this time of year that I ask this sort of question.

Where would you go if you wanted to hear at a public event someone who believes the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is an accurate depiction of the state of modern America? ("American Jewry makes any debate on whether the 'Protocols of the elder of Zion' are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant. American Jews (in fact Zionists) do control the world. So far they are doing pretty well for themselves at least.") That, where Holocaust 'revisionists' (i.e. deniers) such as David Irving are concerned, there just aren't enough of them? ("If history shapes the future, we need to liberate our perspective of the past, rather than arresting revisionists [i.e. Holocaust deniers], we simply need many more of them.") That Holocaust deniers, instead of being frauds and charlatans, "engage themselves in detailed archive work as well as forensic scrutiny"?

If you guessed the Ku Klux Klan or David Duke's National Association for the Advancement of White People, you would be venturing a shrewd but mistaken judgement. If you guessed the British National Party, you would be closer - very close indeed, in fact - but still wrong. The correct answer is the annual Marxism jamboree, this year to be held from 6-10 July, of the Socialist Workers' Party. For the third year running, "acclaimed jazz musician Gilad Atzmon" will be entertaining the proceedings with his very own - in reality, highly traditional - brand of crank racism.

I referred just before the municipal elections this month to the ideological identity of the Respect 'Coalition', which is the electoral front for the Socialist Workers' Party, and the BNP. Atzmon is not an aberrant eccentric within this political culture. There was a time when the SWP, in the form of its predecessor organisation, held a view of Middle East politics that was other-worldly but not racist (something like the views of the early Noam Chomsky in his 1973 book Peace in the Middle East). But the current SWP has no difficulty in commending Atzmon's bigotry as "fearless tirades against Zionism". Respect/SWP and the BNP are not merely comparably repellent organisations: they stand for the same thing.