Setting Bad Examples

Oliver Finegold: Mr Livingstone, "Evening Standard." How did tonight go?
Ken Livingstone: How awful for you. Have you thought of having treatment?
Finegold: How did tonight go?
Livingstone: Have you thought of having treatment?
Finegold: Was it a good party? What does it mean for you?
Livingstone: What did you do before? Were you a German war criminal?
Finegold: No, I'm Jewish, I wasn't a German war criminal and I'm actually quite offended by that. So, how did tonight go?
Mr Livingstone: Arr right, well you might be, but actually you are just like a concentration camp guard, you are just doing it because you are paid to, aren't you?
Finegold: Great, I have you on record for that. So, how was tonight?
Mr Livingstone: It's nothing to do with you because your paper is a load of scumbags and reactionary bigots.
Finegold: I'm a journalist and I'm doing my job. I'm only asking for a comment.
Mr Livingstone: Well, work for a paper that doesn't have a record of supporting fascism

In a previous blog, and on his site, I asked Stuart Syvret to make an apology for his anti-Semitic remark. See:

http://tonymusings.blogspot.com/2008/08/apologies-please-stuart.html

Now this is Stuart's response to my call for an apology.

My e-mail exchange with Freddy Cohen, in which I had accused him of gross hypocrisy for his betrayal of an unambiguous election promise to support exempting medical services and supplies from the Goods & Services Tax. He responded by, essentially, arguing that he resiled from his election promise because he was "a team-player". [The "team" being the Council of Ministers] To which I responded that the "need to be a team-player" may well have been used as an excuse by Nazis on trial at Nuremburg. He responded by saying he had never been so insulted in his life - and would never speak to me again (great). What - of course - one won't read in The Rag is the rest of the correspondence. I replied by saying that my remarks were intended to be insulting; as I knew exactly what such things meant. This because my mother's maiden name was Gould, and she was borne in a Nazi internment camp following my grandmother's deportation by the occupying Nazis. So, unsurprisingly, this latter part of the correspondence has still not appeared in The Rag. And people think I'm paranoid about that wretched journal? So, Tony - you want me to apologise to Freddy Cohen?

Yes, how you act gives the lead to others. Behaviour has consequences, and other people may not have what you see as a very nuanced approach to these matters. Look at one effect of Ken Livingstone's comment.

A concerned primary school teacher who, after telling off one of her pupils for who calling a Jewish child "a Nazi", was given the excuse that "The Mayor said it was OK, so why can't I do it

Also part of the exchange with Cohen is now fairly public, and sounds as presented like a general anti-Semitic remark, which must cause offense to members of the Jewish congregation in Jersey. They have good cause to feel touchy about such matters. Neo-Nazi movements are still around, and a recent Channel 4 Dispatches showed London newspaper vendors selling "Mein Kampf" - in Arabic. It doesn't take much to set the ball rolling, and when a culture exists in which remarks like that are taken as acceptable, we have gone a long way back towards the kind of culture which was a fertile soil for anti-Semitism.

Why use an anti-Semitic insult, when Philip Zimbardo, in "The Lucifer Effect" shows how situations shape the way people respond, which is what may well have happened in Cohen's case? A better case - might be to argue that as an outsider, being Jewish, he may have been desperate for acceptance, to the extent of betraying manifesto promises for existential gain, that of being part of the "inner ring".

C.S. Lewis comments on this kind of desire

I believe that in all men's lives at certain periods, and in many men's lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside. This desire, in one of its forms, has indeed had ample justice done to it in literature. I mean, in the form of snobbery. Victorian fiction is full of characters who are hag-ridden by the desire to get inside that particular Ring which is, or was, called Society. But it must be clearly understood that "Society," in that sense of the word, is merely one of a hundred Rings and snobbery therefore only one form of the longing to be inside.

This is a slippery slope, and notice how well it fits as a motivation for betraying manifesto promises. It is not to do with illegality but with a moral decay, with the gradual erosion of those ideals for which people enter politics. I think the following passage fits very well the phenomena which we have all observed, of a high minded individual going into politics, with the best of motives, and then - a year or more later - we wonder where those ideals have all gone, and why.

Over a drink or a cup of coffee, disguised as a triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still... the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which is not quite in accordance with the technical rules of fair play: something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which "we"-and at the word "we" you try not to blush for mere pleasure-something "we always do." And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man's face-that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face-turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude: it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.

In his reply to my comments, Stuart commented:

Firstly, as explained elsewhere, I have Jewish ancestry myself - and my maternal family suffered internment by the Nazis. So "anti-Semitic"? Sorry - it just won't wash.

That is a nonsense. Some Jews have even set up an anti-Semitic cartoon contest (http://drawn.ca/2006/02/14/israeli-anti-semitic-cartoon-contest/): "Amitai Sandy, the publisher of Tel-Aviv, Israel-based Dimona Comix, and founder of the contest jokes, "We'll show the world we can do the best, sharpest, most offensive Jew hating cartoons ever published! No Iranian will beat us on our home turf!" So, I'm sorry, your argument won't wash either!

More seriously, consider also the case of the Irène Némirovsky controversy - a Jewish writer, who tried to dissociate herself from other Jews in her life as well as being extremely unpleasant about Jews in her work, at least in the early novels she wrote and which secured her fame. The idea that somebody Jewish cannot be alienated from their roots to the point where they made anti-Semitic remarks about other Jews is quite possible. It has happened before. Look up "internalised oppression", for a good start on Google!

Secondly, "giving offence"? Just what & why should that be any big deal in societal discourse - at least if one comes at things from a post-enlightenment perspective? Sometimes offensive things need to be said - as part of debate - as part just getting at the truth. Indeed one of the banes of Jersey politics is that people attach so much importance to "politeness" - rather than the truth.

If by "post-enlightenment perspective", Stuart means "an excuse to be insulting when I feel like it", then I am sure he can do this very well. Postmodernism - which is what I assume he means by post-enlightenment - is really often little more than rhetorical posturing which avoids argument. In fact, a good deal of debate is conducted today at a shallow and trivial level... We are all used to, and tired of, the heated exchanges which consist simply of name-calling. If one wants an Occupation analogy, debate is avoided because the combatants merely want to dig into worn out positions and lob shells at "the other side" from the safety of their own bunker. I'm not saying that everything Stuart says is like that, but when he descends into insults, it is a case of out with the hand-grenades and mortars, and fire them off in the hope of provoking some response. To paraphrase him, I think he often writes a lot of sense, but it is obscured, because one of the banes of Stuart Syvret's politics is that he attaches so much importance to "insults" rather than the truth. He should consider how Leavis attacked C.P. Snow with a vicious ad hominem attack, and how the dignified way in which Snow responded left Leavis looking almost pathological in his insult.

Thinking about it - how could any sensible person look to politicians as a specie for "moral guidance"? Isn't "morality" and "politicians" an oxymoronic concept?

A good joke, but don't always paint the picture too black. Look at those politicians who have actually made changes which have benefited ordinary people's lives. At random, in no particular order, Nye Bevan, William Wilberforce, Lord Shaftesbury, Phillip Le Feuvre, Norman Le Brocq, Abraham Lincoln - to name a few.

Now let me give you a joke. I've yet to find a local politician apologise - even Stuart resolutely refuses to do so - "Isn't "apology" and "politician" an oxymoronic concept?

Links:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4746016.stm

London's mayor has been suspended from office on full pay for four weeks for comparing a Jewish journalist to a concentration camp guard.
The Adjudication Panel for England ruled Ken Livingstone had brought his office into disrepute when he acted in an "unnecessarily insensitive" manner.
The hearing followed a complaint from the Jewish Board of Deputies, which had not called for the mayor to be suspended over the comment he made to the Evening Standard's Oliver Finegold outside a public-funded party. The chairman of the panel, David Laverick, said it had decided on a ban because Mr Livingstone had failed to realise the seriousness of his outburst. He said: "The case tribunal accepts that this is not a situation when it would be appropriate to disqualify the mayor. "The case tribunal is, however, concerned that the mayor does seem to have failed, from the outset of this case, to have appreciated that his conduct was unacceptable, was a breach of the code (the GLA code of conduct) and did damage to the reputation of his office." Mr Laverick went on to say that the complaint should never have reached the board but did so because of Mr Livingstone's failure to apologise. In a statement, the Board of Deputies of British Jews said it regretted the guilty result, but said Mr Livingstone had been "the architect of his own misfortune" by failing to recognise the upset caused. It added it had never sought anything more than an apology and an acknowledgement that his words were inappropriate for the "elected representative of Londoners of all faiths and beliefs".

The Inner Ring, C.S. Lewis
http://www.geocities.com/bigcslewisfan/

Article on Irène Némirovsky
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/feb/22/secondworldwar.religion

Books:
The Lucifer Effect, Philip Zimbardo
The Two Cultures, C.P. Snow