Attempts are being made across the UK to ban and censor the rather innocuous, talking heads, documentary film Oh, Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie made by experienced labour film-makers Platform Films.
The film was banned from the official programme at this year’s Glastonbury Festival… although thanks to Shaun Dey of Reel News the film was actually screened three times on the main festival site in defiance of the ban and to full houses.
And we at the Tolpuddle Radical Film Festival have withdrawn from this year’s Tolpuddle Martyr’s Festival because we were ordered not to show the film… and we too are still hoping to defy the ban by showing the film at/during Tolpuddle, despite the fact that the venue has cancelled our booking…
In any event, what on earth is going on? Why are Starmer’s Labour Party and their supporters in the Labour Movement, so determined to make such a huge issue out of this little, lefty film? After all, their attempts to ban the film have led to many, many more screenings of the film than would have otherwise taken place and to many, many more people being aware of the film and the issues surrounding it?
The film is an essay on the collective efforts of the PLP and Labour Party bureaucracy to collaborate with the corporate media and other third part interest groups to bring down Jeremy Corbyn. The film is professionally made, well-researched and temperate in tone and the assertions made in the film are based on verifiable evidence. And while the film does deal with the ‘antisemitism crisis’, which was so important in bringing Corbyn down, it is not the main focus of the film.
The reasons given for banning the film are often confused and vague but generally accuse the film of being ‘antisemitic’. The accusers never attempt to explain the specifics of the film which make it antisemetic, rather they assert things like the film “is dripping” with unfounded antisemitic tropes about a ‘global Jewish conspiracy”.
The first thing to say about that accusation is that a very large proportion of those in the film sharing their personal experience of the collective campaign to destroy Corbyn, are in fact Jewish and they do not regard themselves or what they say as being antisemitic.
Interestingly, we are also reliably informed that before banning the film Glastonbury Festival hired a firm of lawyers to assess whether the film was in fact antisemitic and the lawyers report said that the film was NOT antisemitic… Yet the ban went ahead.
Having seen the film several times I can agree with Glastonbury’s lawyers that the film is not antisemitic.
And the film does NOT repeat unfounded Jewish conspiracy tropes. Rather what the film does do is make specific allegations against specific people and institutions, some of whom are Jewish, allegations which are verifiable with evidence.
Anyone who has seen the Al Jazeera documentaries The Lobby or The Labour Files has seen much of this evidence presented clearly and convincingly on camera before. For example many of us have seen the footage of an employee of the Israeli government offering millions of pounds to fund attacks on a chosen list of left/pro-Palestinian MP’s. This isn’t an unfounded ‘conspiracy theory’ or antisemitic ‘trope’, this is something that a specific individual did and was filmed doing it.
[FYI: Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, from Jewish Voice for Labour has written an important line-by-line defence of the film which you can find here.]
So if the film isn’t in fact antisemitic what could be going on? Well, whether there was a conspiracy or not what the accusations of antisemitism have done is to successfully delegitimise Corbyn, his followers and the ideas that inspired us, in the eyes of significant numbers of the British public.
In mainstream discourse these accusations have contributed significantly to placing Corbyn and his supporters ‘outside the pale’, outside of the ‘overton window’, outside of the range of what is regarded as acceptable in the public discourse. These accusations associate the attempt to challenge the neoliberal hegemony we live under, with the vilest of racist ideologies and has been and still is, a very effective way of delegitimising those who promote left wing alternatives to globalised, free-market, financial capitalism.
During the Cold War mainstream discourse sought to associate ‘the left’ with the horrors of Stalinism. But ironically those attacking ’the left’ often used many of the strategies and tactics of Stalinism to achieve their aim of defending the world from Stalinism.
Under Stalinism an accusation established guilt and to deny your guilt was to prove your crime. But to admit your guilt was not enough either, you also had to ‘name names’, but even then there was no escape because you had after all admitted your guilt. Under Stalin simply being accused inevitably meant unemployment, imprisonment, torture, a show trial, expulsion, exile or execution.
Today the equivalent of Cold War McCarthyism is the attempt to brand the entire left with the mark of antisemitism, which in light of 2000 years of persecution and of the holocaust, is undoubtedly the vilest of vile hate crimes.
And the tragedy for all of us anti-racists being accused of racism by racists, is that the antisemitism thing has stuck in the mainstream and this perhaps explains why for Mandelson and the Stalinist team advising Starmer, the banning of this little film is a win-win for them?
Because when they attack the film we defend it. When they ban the film we screen it anyway. And every time we defend or screen the film, we can be portrayed as publicly demonstrating our antisemitism yet again and they can portray themselves as the righteous defenders of a persecuted minority.
For example the ban at Glastonbury enabled them to claim a victory; To claim that the righteous had prevented awful antisemites spreading their evil ideology to innocent young people. And to claim that the attempts to screen the film in defiance of the ban merely shows how determined and dangerous the evil antisemites are.
I see no way out of this Catch 22. We have to defend the screening of the film and we have to resist the attempt to demonise Corbyn and the ideas he represented. All we can do really is recognise that our political enemies are cunningly ruthless and that there is almost always a method behind their apparent madness.
Chris Jury
Co-Founder Tolpuddle Radical Film Festival
tolpuddleradicalfilm.org.uk 