2023: the year the progressive left decided it was, after all, OK to be racist

The progressive and liberal left has decided that it is now OK to be racist just so long as you can find a suitable victim group to provide cover for your racism

On the eve of WWII, James Thurber the great American humorist published ‘Fables for Our Time’, a series of modern takes on the old form of Aesop and de la Fontaine. It was Thurber who first recast Little Red Riding Hood as heroine not victim:

“...for even in a nightcap a wolf does not look any more like your grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looks like Calvin Coolidge. So the little girl took an automatic out of her basket and shot the wolf dead.”

The fables continue in this manner, each with, in traditional form, a little moral lesson at the end. You can see little glimpses of today’s problems echoing down the years. Like the foxes (led by “...a fox from whom God was receiving daily guidance…”):

“...there had once been foxes in the sanctuary but that they had been driven out. He proclaimed that Baltimore Orioles belonged in Baltimore. He said that, furthermore, that the Baltimore Orioles were a continuous menace to the peace of the world.”

Sounds familiar doesn’t it? Thurber’s little cynical fables contain much that is universal, just as did those ancient tales from Aesop or 17th century stories from de la Fontaine. In “The Very Proper Gander”, Thurber picks up on how the political loves misrepresentation as much, maybe more, than it enjoys hyperbole. The tale also picks up the mischievous chinese whispers that create the mob, a process made swifter and grander by social media. The gander - a ‘proper gander’ as one hen described him - had done nothing wrong but a few whispered lies and “...there he is, everyone cried. Hawk-lover! Unbeliever! Flag-hater! Bomb-thrower!. So they set upon him and drove him out of the country.”

Antisemitism has always been a consequence of these trends. What begins as a bad faith - a racist - take on Jews, quickly becomes an accepted truth. The Jews don’t control the media or finance but lots of people believe that they do:

“Roughly one out of three people there said Jews were too influential in political affairs around the world, and more than a quarter of Poles and Hungarians said they had too much influence on the media.

A third of Austrians said Jews have too much influence in finance, while a quarter of French and German respondents said so.

About one in five people in all three countries said Jews had too much influence in media, and a quarter said they had too much influence on wars and conflicts.”

The Arab narrative about Israel and Palestine is the most widely accepted position across the political spectrum and especially among the West’s establishment liberal left. This narrative is false but the framing of Palestinians as the underdog besides a powerful, militarised Israel makes issues of historical accuracy irrelevant. All that should concern us is the wrong that was visited on some Palestinians (and it was a wrong) in 1947/8. Because of this wrong, any action by Israel that doesn’t surrender to its correction merely compounds that wrong. But who are the Baltimore Orioles here?

2023 has been a year when a substantial part of the UK’s liberal left (walking in step with American, European and Antipodean progressives) decided that it was, after all, OK to be racist. Just so long as it conformed to a particularly progressive left-wing position. Thousands - tens of thousands in truth - of these liberal lefties marched alongside one of the world’s most racist ideologies, Islamist extremism, because obviously sticking it to Israel means ignoring the abject racism of those you are marching alongside. Self-proclaimed ‘anti-racists’ appear on the TV, radio, and podcasts proclaiming that it is, of course, entirely OK for a Muslim woman to call a black man a coconut, there is no racism here obviously. And black academics and writers line up to endorse this position because the black person being racially abused is a bad person (usually for not being suitable progressive and left-wing).

Meanwhile bosses in big companies and large public sector organisations actively promote an ‘anti-racism’ that means it is OK to discriminate against white people in employment and career because of entirely racist concepts called ‘white privilege’ and ‘white fragility’ (ironically the brainchild and successful business of a white, middle-class woman). Hardly a day passes without something else being declared racist (the countryside, roads, farming, milk) but this is balanced by a daily diet of excusing overt racism directed at Black conservatives, Jews, Indians and the white working classes. By far the most persistent of these progressive racisms is antisemitism - Jew-hate. This now goes more-or-less unchallenged in almost every part of our society and is fuelled by a steady stream of racism from extreme Islamist groups and their apologists.

“In this episode of the Blood Brothers Podcast, Dilly Hussain spoke with the controversial far-right figure, who was the former leader of the British Nationalist Party (BNP) and a member of the European Parliament for North West England, Nick Griffin.”

You’ll have to find your own link to this podcast but it illustrates the extent to which historical western antisemitism has been brought back to life by Salafist Islam. Anti-Jew tracts from 19th and 20th century Russia and Germany join ancient tropes about money or blood, plus modern lies about the history and actions of Israel to create a deeply racist narrative about Jews and Israel. This narrative, increasingly mainstream within the Muslim world, has joined that progressive left ‘New Racism’ and the pseudo-Marxist analysis of ‘imperialism’ to make a 21st century antisemitism. This new Jew-hate, its advocates say, isn’t really racism but rather a political project about ‘zionism’.

But protesting outside high street shops because they have a historic Jewish connection is not ‘anti-Zionism’. Sharing memes hinting that Hitler was right is not ‘anti-Zionism’. Calling something an occupation when it isn't an occupation isn’t ‘anti-Zionism’. Denying or excusing the killing of 6 million Jews in the holocaust isn’t ‘anti-Zionism’. And claiming that 1% of a population dying (however tragic or wrong that may be) in a land war represents a genocide is not ‘anti-Zionism’. Yet this is the excuse that Britain’s liberal left want us to swallow,

The objection to Israel has never been about land. The objection to Israel has never been about religious choice or freedom. The objection to Israel has never been about refugees or displacement. The objection to Israel has always been because it is a place filled with Jews. It is not anti-Muslim to observe that Islam’s popular culture is explicitly and unapologetically anti-Jew. In much of Europe ‘Mein Kampf’ is banned or restricted but across the Arab world this Jew-hating rant from a mass murderer is widely available. Egyptian TV filmed a popularised reworking of the Russian antisemitic tract, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion ''. And Pakistani social media is littered with memes along the lines of  ‘Hitler was Right’ accompanied by modern variations on the ancient blood libel about Jews sacrificing babies.

Of course none of the cool kids buying a keffiyeh for a march believe these racist tropes as they chant about the elimination of Israel (while hiding behind semantic gymnastics about the meaning of ‘from the river to the sea’ and failing to explain that being anti-Zionist means, by definition, opposing the existence of Israel as a state). And the mums, dads, aunties and uncles of the cool kids stick up for their entitled offspring by echoing the intellectual legerdemain that tells us ‘anti-Zionism’ is not ‘anti-semitism’. The result is that the progressive left world adopts an increasingly explicit antisemitism as a core element of its new racism, sitting alongside the elevation of presumed victimhood and the positioning of slavery as something unique to one period in time, specific to Black Americans and Afro-carribeans. Plus, of course, the view that it is OK to use the grimmest of racist language to describe white people because it is impossible for white people - the world’s oppressors - to experience actual racism.

I expect this to get worse. Whatever the end of the current war in Gaza, the progressive left has decided that it is now OK to be racist just so long as you can find a suitable victim group to provide cover for your racism (although quite how 1.8 billion Muslims, currently the world’s most successful religion, became a victim group is a mystery). Because the Jews - all 16 million of them - are horrid to Muslims (or so the Muslims say while they platform long-standing racist extremists like Nick Griffin) it is understandable, even honourable, for those oppressed Muslims to use hideous racism to promote their cause. And for the cool kids marching alongside those racists to join in.

In the same manner, initiatives around diversity, equality and identity will embrace anti-white racism (as well as antisemitism, obviously) and will double down in attacking non-white ‘conservative’ figures like Kemi Badenoch, Nikki Haley, and Jacinta Price for rejecting the simplistic ‘victimhood’ trope that the New Left racism demands. We can expect that people who challenge this narrative, whether through comedy, politics or their personal choices, will continue to be ostracised by the left liberal culture that dominates the mainstream across the UK, Europe and America. In the UK, the election of a Labour government will shift the new left racists’ emphasis away from attacking non-white conservatives towards targeting the outlets available for those challenging the new racism. Lazy and casual antisemitism will, once again, become commonplace and Muslims will continue to use Israel as a validation for their entirely false sense of victimhood. And the government will indulge this fictional Muslim victimhood by passing laws about ‘islamophobia’.

2023 wasn’t the year racism returned, it has always been with us. Instead 2023 was the year when it became, if you had the right politics - or rather left politics, acceptable again to be racist and to endorse racist campaigns.