Corbyn’s election and re-election to the leader of the Labour party has led to a revolution in opposition politics that has been felt across Britain. But a crackdown is now in full swing. The sudden, shocking ascendancy of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party was an awakening for the UK. In 2015, a society decades deep in the slumber of austerity rubbed its bleary eyes and gazed in horror at the vast misery engineered by cruel public spending cuts enforced under the banner of the Thatcherite neoliberal mantra “There Is No Alternative.” The response from the newly roused was to take a perennial backbencher and veteran anti-imperialist and push him to the front of the party.
Corbyn immediately instigated a collective public questioning of the national commitment to war and capitalism that was nearly unthinkable during previous decades dominated by Blair’s New Labour, a power bloc that shackled the soul and substance of the UK workers movement to the terms and conditions of Thatcherism.
Because Corbyn’s message has been so powerful in dissolving the neoliberal narrative of the Westminster status quo, his leadership has heralded a new era of progressive politics. This new era threatens to smash the tight consensus grafted together by elites, so they have responded by enforcing a global mass propaganda program by stealth to defame Corbyn, Corbynomics and its supporters. The aim of this program is to distract people from the truth of the struggle Corbyn represents and the choices he makes plain, that in one direction lies a future promoting prosperity “for the many not the few” and in the other lies the continued dominance of politics, the economy, society and the narratives that bind it together by an unaccountable complex of elites and transnational corporate lobbies estranged from the working population.
It is balefully poor journalism, and testament to their collective lack of imagination that today the media rehashes scares over “populism” in terms that make it always a pejorative, much like in decades past when the term “bourgeoisie” had come to lose all semantic meaning for leftists beyond simply “that which I don’t like”.
Similarly, the semantic meaning of “populist” has been obscured and is now bourgeoisie code for “grassroots”. It doesn’t take a genius to see that media clubs (remember, boardrooms are unelected, members-only associations through which op-ed policy is politicized) are confreres of powerful politicians and thus have a vested interest in maligning grassroots movements because they energize seismic campaigns that advance “unapproved” agendas that undermine the maintenance of elite power.
Corbynites are activists and left populists who advocate the use of mass power as a way to protect democratic, environmental and worker rights from their wholesale retrenchment at the hands of not only a longstanding austerity regime, but also the threat of a neoliberal and austerity-oriented Brexit. Yet the media today don’t stop for a moment while denouncing populism to reflect on whether there is value in the masses’ convictions, or to ask themselves if there is a reason why leftist, communitarian ideas have become popular. Because doing so would entail dangerous cognitive dissonance that would threaten their allegiance to status quo narratives that just so happen to justify the world they know and love.
This propaganda program is insidious, leaders like Corbyn who make any headway in challenging the status quo are smeared with a coordinated campaign of aspersions in an attempt to make them unacceptable to the public. Corbyn, who is not only arguably responsible for the renaissance of original Labour values but has been a leading voice in the radical antiwar left for decades, has been vilified for years by both domestic and international media outlets . So now he has become the target of covert intelligence operations, directed in part by the dying centrist lobby that’s in cahoots with powerful intelligence firms. Together, they have mounted a bitter political attack by using the media to paint Corbyn as a pro-terrorist leader of an anti-Semitic cult.
Let’s get clear on anti-Semitism. Anybody who denies that there is a large deal of offensive ignorance about Jewish culture and history in politics today, ignorance that also exists in the Labour movement, is wrong. Undeniably, bigotry about the Jewish diaspora manifests in anti-Semitic myths that still circulate, even after the unspeakable tragedy of the Holocaust. It’s our duty as human beings to make sure we are critical and think about the ways we may be instrumental in maintaining this kind of racism.
The truth, though, is that Labour is not in denial about the abhorrent nature of anti-Semitism, having sought to establish inquiries and suspensions, whereas the Tory party, whose youth factions at Oxford routinely dress up as Jews for Halloween, has never attempted any self-accountability. Meanwhile, the Tories are the ones opportunistically standing to gain with the myopic focus on Corbyn. To sum up this thought: anti-Semitism in Labour exists in isolated fashion, while to the right of Labour it is endemic and far more sinister—but we are told by the media that it’s the other way around.
From another angle, anybody who denies that there is an agenda to repress voices of dissent against the policies of Benjamin Netanhayu, and who denies that he suppresses reporting about his governments’ crimes, a suppression which operates by conflating dissidence with anti-Semitism, is also wrong. Labour members who are a part of this dissent are not an anti-Semitic cult. They represent a people’s agenda for societal and political change that extends solidarity to struggles around the world, including those faced by Palestinians.
The UK is a clown car driven by Tories to dystopia. This reality has simply not been recognized within national political and media circles. It has been sidelined by distraction, diversion and misinformation unprecedented in its depth, complexity and scale. The media, which, when used earnestly, can be a great tool for emancipation and liberation through collective enlightenment, has, through forty years of machinations of neoliberal New Public Management doctrine, been transformed into the biggest, most dangerous totalitarian cult ever seen. The media cult is a threat to British politics and global peace. It is the media that has been instrumental in manufacturing the myth of Labour’s anti-Semitism crisis.
This metamorphosis of the media and journalistic culture into an elite cult that attacks real progressive causes has come about mostly silently because those who know about it are insiders with no incentive to speak about it. They are blinded by vested interests in maintaining the interconnected geopolitical and media status quo. Left to its own trajectory, in a few years the global media will be the canteen of postmodern totalitarianism, indivisible from U.S. power and the world order. We may, in fact, be there already.
The neoliberal totalitarian MSM is a useless parasite on the world, engorged on its profits in societies merging with a hell of poverty, austerity and destitution. The media-politico complex, not Corbynism, is the true cult imperiling British politics and global peace.
