The smearing of Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn is the face of our new toxic politics
JVL Introduction
This article by Jonathan Cook is over a year old.
But it couldn’t be more topical, following Ken Loach’s “auto-exclusion” from the Labour Party last week.
Even the title serves unaltered.
This article was about pressure on a charity not to have Ken Loach as a judge in a school anti-racism competition because of his alleged antisemitism.
The case against Loach was dismantled by Antony Lerman in his article Flimsy and vindictive: the ‘case’ against Ken Loach.
What the latest developments show is that if they want to get you, toxicity and malevolence can overwhelm truth.
And the Labour Party under Keir Starmer really, really wants to get Ken…
This article was originally published by jonathan-cook.net on Wed 8 Apr 2020. Read the original here.
The smearing of Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn is the face of our new toxic politics
The film-maker’s crime – like Corbyn’s – wasn’t antisemitism but recalling a time when class solidarity inspired the struggle for a better world
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Jonathan finishes by saying that ‘Should this perversion of our democratic discourse be allowed to continue, our societies will be doomed to become even uglier, more divisive and divided places’. Well, they HAVE continued, and now Ken has been expelled from the party, and Jeremy as good as expelled from the party, and LAW and three other groups proscribed by Starmer and CO. And I mean no disrespect to Jonathan, who I have nothing but the highest regard for, but there is absolutely nothing we can do to stop the continuation of the ‘perversion of our democratic discourse’ as he describes it.
In his article Jonathan says that ‘More than 200 prominent figures in sport, academia and the arts came to Loach’s defence’, and links to an article in which it names some of them – ie Miriam Margolyes OBE, Eric Cantona, Sir Alex Ferguson, Peter Gabriel, Juliet Stevenson, Michael Mansfield and Dame Marina Warner. Well I just did a quick search, and as far as I can ascertain the MSM completely blanked the letter, unlike the letter from 24 celebrities – including Joanna Lumley – just prior to the 2019 general election, which the WHOLE of the MSM covered.
So when almost ten times as many prominent figures write a letter in support of someone who has been demonised, the MSM suppress the fact, but when just 24 write a letter saying they can’t vote for Labour blah, blah, blah (even though it’s HIGHLY unlikely that any of them ever HAVE!), it’s front-page news!
And THAT tells you ALL you need to know – ie when you own and/or control the MSM, you control the narrative.
Superb article.
PS What we need is not 200 hundred prominent figures speaking out against the anti-democratic dark fascist forces at work, but TWENTY THOUSAND! I mean could the MSM really ignore THAT! Well, yes, they could potentially, but if they DID, could they refuse to take full-page ‘ads’ taken out by 20,000 prominent figures.
There are thousands of well known musicians from over the decades, and artists and movie stars and authors and sports men and women etc, etc, etc, and THEY really are our only hope of exposing the fascist forces and putting an end to their evil.
First they came for Jeremy Corbyn…..
Several days ago JVL re-posted an article by Steve Topple entitled ‘Labour’s expulsion of Ken Loach has been decades in the making’ in which Steve looks back at the demonisation and character assassination of the left and prominent left-wingers during the past fifty years or more by the rabid right and their propaganda machine. Anyway, I just wanted to mention a book that’s well worth reading that covers many of these black op campaigns against the left etc in the eighties. It’s by Mark Hollingsworth and entitled: ‘The Press and Political Dissent: A Question of Censorship’, and chapters include ‘Tony Benn – the Socialist Threat’ and ‘Ken Livingstone and the GLC’ and ‘The Miners’ Strike – a Question of Censorship’ and ‘Peace Women at the Wire – the Greenham Factor’, the latter relating to how the Greenham Common Women were set up, and is definitely a MUST read.
I don’t know if JVL will allow me to link to the amazon page, but they can delete this bit and the link if they don’t:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Press-Political-Dissent-Question-Censorship/dp/0745301398/ref=sr_1_7
Why all the consternation at what the Labour Party bureaucracy, the majority, right-wing, careerist MP’s in the PLP and their friends in high places do to maintain their hold on power? To those of us who fought as far back as 60 years ago against their scheming, lying treachery within the Party and trades unions the recent actions of this Tory 5th Column within the Labour movement is no surprise. What is surprising is the naivety of some of those on the Left for whom the penny just seems to have dropped that the idea of a “broad church” with these traitors is no longer tenable!
What consternation is that Nigel? And I must say that I’m surprised you’re surprised at something that is non-existent! Or did this ‘some’ on the left that you refer to somehow miss all the smearing and vilification and demonisation of the left that’s been going on for most of the past six years? Er, no, I don’t think so.
As for the ‘broad church’, well I think most people who aren’t out to smear the left as ‘naive’ realise that THAT was obviously aimed at the general public who, for the most part, didn’t have the first clue about what was REALLY happening during the course of Jeremy’ tenure as leader, just as they don’t know that Starmer saying he wants to unite the party is a Big Lie and a Blind.
But then again, more than a few prominent Jeremy Corbyn supporting figures on the left DID call out the Blairites for their machinations and smears and falsehoods when Jeremy was leader, including Ken Livingstone and Len McCluskey:
‘Labour anti-Semitism: Unite leader Len McCluskey lashes out at Blairites and ‘hostile’ Jewish leaders’
https://news.sky.com/story/labour-anti-semitism-unite-leader-len-mccluskey-lashes-out-at-blairites-and-hostile-jewish-leaders-11474266
When the last dissenting voice on this planet is snuffed out, then we shall have peace in our time and discord no more.