Yeah, Roger Waters’s antisemitism is in the news again. And yeah, I’m gonna diary about it.
No, Roger Waters isn’t an antisemite for wearing the Nazoid crossed-hammers costume. Waters is opposed to right-wing neofash and is parodying them, not emulating them.
No, Roger Waters isn’t an antisemite for “supporting the Palestinians.” There are plenty of ways to do that that don’t involve spreading antisemitism.
But yes, Roger Waters is an antisemite. Even David Gilmour agrees.
Left-wing antisemitism is different than right-wing antisemitism, with its own discourse and its own blind spots. Most of this diary is about the main historical reason why.
The Medieval Tune
If you are a member of a minority, you know the tune others sing about you. You can’t help but know it because it’s thrown in your face. So let’s talk about a tune.
For literally a thousand years, the church laid down a tune, a way of thinking about the Jews. Jews, the tune said, are enemies — literally enemies of all that is holy and good, and enemies of God. They are the allies of Satan, working relentlessly as the devil’s hands for what we’d now call a secret global conspiracy to destroy civilization and enslave mankind. Jews have access to supernatural powers when it suits Satan to give them a hand. It’s never a bad time to throw a Jew down the well, and it’s never the wrong Jew being thrown down the well, because to be a Jew means to collude in the grand plan against humanity.
Is the world confusing and hard to understand? No, say the antisemites, it’s really simple: the devil has a script, and the Jews have a big role in implementing it. Did something bad happen? It’s because it’s in the devil’s script, and the Jews helped. But the script is a secret. And the Jews are the hidden hand that turns the wheels.
For a thousand years, if you thought of the Jews, you thought of them in these terms, humming the tune the church taught you.
And when you spend a millennium building a groove, that groove stays solid.
Same Tune, New Key
Well, along comes the 20th century. As society secularizes, old scare stories about Satanic powers lose their power to frighten. So shortly after the turn of the century, reactionary Tsarists in Russia come up with a modernized version. They keep the Jews as the hidden hand, the engine behind a centrally coordinated, secret global plot to destroy civilization and enslave mankind.
There are really only two changes. One is that the Jews’ supernatural power is no longer from Satan but from supernatural wealth and a supernatural degree of global coordination. It’s not some Jews with some money, it’s The Jews with The Money. Anything worth owning they own, they have a controlling interest in anything worth controlling, they have greased every greaseable palm, and they are the hidden movers of history. The second difference is that the script is no longer Satan’s, but from the Jews themselves, being worked out in a secret meeting of a dozen Jewish “elders” in a Prague cemetery at midnight. The Jews use The Money to serve The Plan.
The book, of course, was Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, and it was literally one of the half-dozen best-selling books of the 20th century. Why? Because it let you be as antisemitic as you want to be, but in an ostensibly logical way because you’re not falling back on all old irrational stuff about Satan. Instead you have the Jews’ own confession (as the book pretends to be). No, Protocols is a thoroughly modern and rational approach to understanding the Jews that just happens to be at its essentials nearly identical with the old groove about how evil they are.
It’s the same medieval tune in a new key.
And then history happens
Then two things happen, halfway through the 20th century.
One is, Adolf Hitler gives antisemitism a bad name.
Two is, Israel.
The USSR is delighted that Israel has happened, giving it diplomatic recognition only two days after Israel’s Declaration of Independence — the first nation to do so — because they’re sure it will be aligned with the Eastern bloc.
But then … Israel allies itself with the west. And the Soviets turn on Israel with all the fury of a love-spurned sociopath. And they say: if only there were some sort of long-established, well-known propaganda-friendly tune with Israel-related ethnic overtones we could exploit relentlessly to make people not merely disagree with Israel but hate hate hate Israel on a visceral level. If only there were some tune for that.
Another New Key
The Soviet rules on this are simple.
- Be as antisemitic as you want to be. Use hook-nosed caricatures that would make Goebbels blush. Assert international conspiracy of “Protocols” scale, reaching everywhere. Blood libel? Go for it. There is no bottom. Nothing is too awful, too obviously antisemitic.
- Add the disclaimer: oh but of course we’re talking about Zionists, not Jews, so this isn’t actually antisemitism, just purely legitimate and angelic political discourse over which neither the Jews nor the Zionists have any right to complain, those bastards.
The hidden hand, supernatural levels of coordination, supernatural levels of wealth, no greaseable palm left ungreased, controlling interest in everything worth controlling, on and on and on. But it’s about The Zionists *wink wink* and therefore can’t be antisemitic *wink wink*. Just say “but of course I’m talking about Zionists, not Jews,” and the Magic Unicorn of Righteousness will fly by and shit moral exoneration glitter all over your argument, no matter what antisemitic bog you’ve drawn it from.
Who did the work of turning Protocols-like antisemitism into antisemitic anti-Zionism? Here’s an excerpt from a new paper, “The Soviet Origins of Contemporary Anti-Zionist Discourse” by Izabella Tabarovksy, a research fellow at the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism. (The link is to a publication by the Labour Party’s group Labour Friends of Israel. A more comprehensive account from Taborovsky is the article “Soviet Anti-Zionism and Contemporary Left Antisemitism” available here.)
Until 1967, Soviet antizionism remained largely a domestic matter. But Israel’s unexpected victory in the Six Day War changed that. Convinced that the Jewish state could not have overcome Soviet-trained and Soviet-equipped Arab armies on its own, Moscow went searching for hidden factors to explain their defeat. Connecting Israel’s victory with the budding pro-emigration movement among Soviet Jews, and the campaign among western Jews in their support, the Soviet security apparatus concluded that a massive conspiracy operated against Soviet interests globally. Leading this conspiracy were the dark forces of “international Zionism” and Israel in cahoots with American imperialism.
[...] The body of work produced by Soviet antizionist propaganda in the wake of the Six Day War redefined Zionism, painting it as a sinister global conspiracist network that drew on Jewish/Zionist capital to control the media and politicians in key countries. It claimed that Zionism served the interests of monopolistic capital and its imperialist and colonialist aspirations. It described Zionism as racist and fascist, a Nazi collaborator, and an enemy of socialism, anti-colonial movements and all progressive forces in the world.
The striking correspondence between these ideas and those presented in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion [...] was not accidental. The group of Soviet authors who produced these ideas were members of a loose far-right, antisemitic, Russian nationalist movement that emerged in the USSR in the 1950s. Known as “Zionologists”, and working under close supervision from a senior official in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, their singular achievement was to rewrite the antisemitic conspiracy theory of the Protocols as a Marxist-Leninist critique of Zionism fit for consumption by Soviet Communist elites and the global left.
The parallels between the two are striking. The Protocols talked about “international Jewry” seeking to dominate the world; the Zionologists’ output claimed “International Zionism” did so too. The Protocols accused Jews of seeking to control the media; the Zionologists argued Zionists did likewise. And, even more important than specific tropes, the Zionologists’ writings and the Protocols both rested on a fundamental belief that Jews/Zionists were involved in a sinister, inhumane conspiracy to undermine all that’s good in the world, which justified the concomitant anti-Jewish/anti-Zionist demonisation. In this update of the classic antisemitic conspiracy theory, the all-powerful Israel and Zionists manipulated American politicians and ran American financial and media institutions; Israel and Zionists stood behind every Soviet foreign policy failure; and Israel and Zionists sought to undermine the Soviet image by deliberately and falsely accusing the USSR of antisemitism.
The measure of a conspiracy theory
One of the ways you can quickly characterize a conspiracy theory is by agency: who is granted agency to act, and who is denied agency and reduced to the role of mere puppet?
To be UK-centric, a recent version of the Soviet-style antisemitic anti-Zionism would say: voters of the UK didn’t choose a Tory government in the 2019 election, because they don’t actually have any power to choose; The Zionists snapped their fingers and unilaterally imposed it, stealing the election. Jeremy Corbyn didn’t resign as Labour party leader because he’d led Labour to its worst defeat since 1935; The Zionists merely snapped their fingers and he was gone. The members of the Labour Party didn’t choose Sir Keir Starmer as their leader; The Zionists unilaterally imposed him. Sir Keir Starmer doesn’t actually make any decisions; he is completely controlled by The Zionists, as if they’re playing Legend of Zelda and Starmer is Link (press A to jump, press X to swoosh sword).
Which brings us back to Roger Waters
Well, now, let’s have a look at how Roger Waters sees things. My transcription from a YouTube video I’m not going to link to.
Talk about foreign powers interfering in elections, the Israeli government took the general election f-from-from Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, later that year, in November, later that year, and gave the country to the Tories … gone! And also kicked Corbyn out and installed Keir Starmer as the leader of the Labour Party, who um is complete controlled by the Israeli lobby, everything that he says show's you that's true.
Who has agency in this version? Only one group. Everyone else is puppets and crash test dummies. Only one ruler rules in the Waters version, only one group can act, while the rest are reduced to supporting cast.
That’s the old tune.
I’ve posted this quote in a previous diary. And some people tried to talk it down — saying, in effect, “well, if you dial what Waters says down from level 11 to level 2, and listen to it at 2, maybe it’s not so antisemitic.” Well, no, the problem is, he didn’t say it at 2, he said it at 11. His quote is indefensible in its own terms, and trying to recast it in more pleasant terms is to run interference for antisemitism.
Does Waters even know he’s an antisemite?
No, I don’t think so. Like Corbyn, I think he believes he used the right incantations and therefore the Magic Unicorn of Righteousness has shit exoneration glitter all over him.
Wandering into this terrain once or twice a decade out of ignorance isn’t antisemitism, but to camp out there the way Waters does, and Corbyn enabled an entire movement to do, can’t be put down to ignorance.
“BUT YOU’RE JUST TRYING TO SHUT DOWN CRITICISM OF...”
Nope. Israel needs us to be able to criticize it fairly, especially in its current Netanyahu-induced constitutional crisis. Throwing antisemitic memes around, even in the name of the Palestinian cause, doesn’t help anyone, especially not the Palestinians. Actually, take that back. It helps antisemites.