Labour and the victim card
Posted by admin978 on May 30, 2024 · Leave a Comment
As the UK general election campaign ends its first week, Labour still looks a certain winner. But the party’s first stumble has illustrated the problem of victim culture in today’s woke world.
Veteran left-wing MP Diane Abbott was suspended from Labour more than a year ago, in one of the party’s many disputes over ‘anti-semitism’.
She had written a letter to The Observer (the UK’s oldest newspaper and traditionally linked to the liberal left) in which she tried to argue that only blacks suffer from “racism”.
Abbott (who was the UK’s first black female MP when elected for the North London constituency Hackney North & Stoke Newington in 1987) wrote that while other minorities such as Jews, Irish and “Travellers” (the obligatory woke term for gypsies) experience “prejudice”, which she defined as “similar to racism”, it was not the same as the black experience of racism, which she implied was something much worse.
“It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism.”
As is inevitable in the 21st century, when any controversy over race arises, the question could not be debated in a normal manner and instead had to trigger an internal party “disciplinary procedure”, even after Abbott had apologised for her letter.
Disputes over whether this disciplinary process had concluded, and if so whether Abbott could now stand as a Labour candidate on 4th July, have become such a tangled affair that Abbott’s fate was twice the lead story for the BBC’s Newsnight on Tuesday and Wednesday this week.
Right now it looks as though Labour has tried to allow Abbott to retire with dignity after 37 years at Westminster, having been reinstated to the party, but they are determined not to allow her to stand again as a Labour candidate.
Setting all technicalities aside, what does it tell those of us outside Labour ranks about the state of today’s politics.
It’s interesting that the moment Abbott implied anything potentially anti-semitic (even if her implication was unintentional) she incurred the party leadership’s wrath – whereas her many anti-British and anti-White outbursts over the years were not only tolerated, but even won her promotion.
In 1984, three years before she became an MP, Abbott told a pro-republican journal: “Ireland is our struggle – every defeat of the British state is a victory for all of us.” This was a time when republican terrorists were routinely shooting and bombing civilians as well as soldiers and policemen, across Ulster and the British mainland.
In 1996 Abbott said that her local hospital should not recruit “blonde, blue-eyed Finnish girls” as nurses because they had “never met a black person before”.
These are just two of a whole catalogue of extremist remarks made by Abbott throughout her career.
Turning to her letter to The Observer last April, the truth is that ‘racism’ and ‘anti-semitism’ are political positions which should be argued in a normal manner – but in the 2020s anything venturing onto such ground is treated as an allegation or scandal, requiring months of investigation (if the alleged ‘anti-semite’ is black), or instant defenestration (if the miscreant is White).
Abbott’s real problem is not ‘anti-semitism’ but incoherence. Her mind is so muddled and her self-obsession as a black woman so complete, that she didn’t pause to consider the implications of what she was writing.
The important unwritten and unaddressed question behind Abbott’s letter is whether the orthodox account of ‘Holocaust’ history is correct.
In other words, were millions of Jews murdered in homicidal gas chambers during the Second World War as part of a planned programme of extermination ordered by Adolf Hitler?
If they were, then Abbott’s equation of this experience with school playground abuse suffered by redheads was either monstrously ignorant or deliberately ‘anti-semitic’. If orthodox ‘Holocaust’ history is even broadly accurate, then nothing ever experienced by blacks comes close to what was experienced by Jews. The only times when black people have been the target of planned campaigns of ethnic extermination, have been at the hands of other blacks.
But if the ‘Holocaust’ narrative is fundamentally wrong, then Abbott’s elevation of the black experience as a ‘victim card’ trumping anything experienced by Jews, Irish or other minorities, becomes more understandable and credible from her point of view – whatever we might think from our standpoint as White racial nationalists.
Inevitably, however, in all of the media hype around Diane Abbott, the fundamental question has not been considered. And if she chooses to stand again as an Independent, as her old comrade Jeremy Corbyn is doing, we can again expect that the underlying issues will be ignored.
Instead the media and fellow politicians will obsess over whether Diane Abbott has been shown sufficient ‘respect’ as a black woman. Or conversely whether she has shown enough ‘respect’ to Britain’s Jewish community.
We shouldn’t care a damn about these issues of ‘respect’. We shouldn’t care a damn about the ‘feelings’ of blacks, Jews, or any other minority group.
If politicians wish to play a part in governing the United Kingdom – once the centre of the greatest Empire the world has ever known – they should be capable of addressing issues in a responsible and adult manner, without having tantrums about the status of their particular ethnic group or gender. And the same applies to voters.
