Let's be frank with ourselves: some of our friends on the Left, present company excepted, are idiots. Anyone who thinks that anti-semitism is something 'got up' recently (including by a significant number of concerned community leaders, current and former Labour MPs and others) in order to spite or frustrate Labour generally or Jeremy Corbyn in particular has no sense of history - and may not even have heard the well-known expression "anti-semitism is the socialism of fools" (sometimes "the anti-imperialism of fools") often attributed to August Bebel but in fact in common circulation amidst German Social Democrats - then the world's largest and most powerful workers'movement - as early as the 1890s.Sunday, 1 December 2019
the socialism of fools
Let's be frank with ourselves: some of our friends on the Left, present company excepted, are idiots. Anyone who thinks that anti-semitism is something 'got up' recently (including by a significant number of concerned community leaders, current and former Labour MPs and others) in order to spite or frustrate Labour generally or Jeremy Corbyn in particular has no sense of history - and may not even have heard the well-known expression "anti-semitism is the socialism of fools" (sometimes "the anti-imperialism of fools") often attributed to August Bebel but in fact in common circulation amidst German Social Democrats - then the world's largest and most powerful workers'movement - as early as the 1890s.