LIVINGSTONE, HISTORY AND "MASS KILLINGS"

Ken Livingstone and Adolf Hitler (International Business Times)

The political storm created by the former London Mayor, Labour MP and Leader of the Greater London Council's suggestion that Adolf Hitler was a Zionist shows little sign of abating. This post offers a guarded defence of Mr Livingstone, a long-time controversialist, whose comments have prompted some much needed historical and international discourse in British politics, without, however, supporting his version of history.

Ken Livingstone was suspended from the Labour Party as a result of his clumsy attempt to disentangle Anti-Semitism and Zionism. He was previously expelled from the party by the New Labour government and stood as an independent in the first election for a London Mayor in 2000 in which he won a decisive victory. He was later re-instated by the party and stood as a Labour candidate in 2004. On both occasions, London's ethnic minority communities were a key constituency for Mr Livingstone, along with other groups who felt under-represented in, or let down by, mainstream politics. Perhaps more than any other politician, Ken Livingstone has led the transformation of the UK's capital in to a multi-cultural global city, and compromised his left-wing credentials along the way. It is not without irony that Mr Livingstone - for his detractors one of the founding fathers of modern British political correctness - can be quite politically incorrect himself.

The reason for this, and indeed for Ken Livingstone's political success, is that he is in many ways the quintessential post-war Londoner. The "Life of Ken" is worth reading up on, not least because it has caused much more controversy over a similar time period than Monty Python's "Life of Brian" . Nevertheless, the notion that Mr Livingstone is in some way a Nazi apologist is completely absurd, nor in my view, is he Anti-Semitic.

What Ken Livingstone always has had, along with his onetime arch-enemy Margaret Thatcher, is a highly selective version of events (historical and contemporary), with a possibly even greater tendency to be over-influenced by particular advisers and intellectuals without giving full and proper attention to those with different views. In the present furore, Mr Livingstone has cited the work of the American Jewish Marxist historian Lenni Brenner as evidence of Hitler's early support for Zionism.

However, the wider historical consensus on Nazi policy towards the Jews is very different. For instance, writing in today's Independent on the subject of "Hitler and Zionism" Professor Rainer Schulze points out that:  "Claims that Hitler was a Zionist, or supported Zionism, before his anti-Jewish policies turned into murder and extermination flare up at regular intervals. They usually cite the controversial Haavara Agreement (Transfer Agreement) of August 1933 as the most potent evidence of a wilful cooperation between Hitler and the Zionist movement. When viewed in a certain way, this deal does superficially seem to show that Hitler’s government endorsed Zionism – but just because it was a mechanism to help German Jews relocate to Palestine it does not imply it was “Zionist”. Professor Schulze is General Editor of "The Holocaust in History and Memory" a research project led by the University of Essex and his article originally appeared in "The Conversation".

Returning to Mr Livingstone, his unwary, shorthand view of history has, nevertheless, unwittingly contributed to the Labour Party's new "Big Conversation" on the relationship between the past and present. As my own contribution to this discourse, I would strongly recommend that the former London Mayor, together with Labour's present Leader and his colleagues add to their summer reading - if they have not read it already - a recent book by the historian Timothy Snyder, "Bloodlands"  The subject of this book is "a zone in Europe where the Soviet and Nazi powers overlapped" and where at least 14 million people, mainly civilian or non-combatants, were "killed by purposeful mass murder associated with the above regimes" during the period 1933-45. Snyder purposely uses the term "mass killing" instead of "genocide" to describe the atrocities of the Bloodlands, of which the Jewish Holocaust is the most infamous.

Yet, as Snyder also points out: "During the years that both Stalin and Hitler were in power, more people were killed in Ukraine that anywhere else in the Bloodlands, or in Europe, or in the World". Indeed, Ukrainians have their own expression - the Holodomor - to describe "the greatest artificial famine in the history of the world" that killed between 2.5 and 7.5 million people in the period 1932-3 alone.

The term "Holodomor" is, however, little known outside Ukraine, currently engaged in both a "history war", and a real one, with Russia, and this points to a fundamental problem of modern history itself: that it can sometimes be as selective in its version of events as Ken Livingstone. Much of Timothy Snyder's work is based on "new" archive material that became available to North American and Western European researchers after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc in the early 1990s. However, the partial narrative of mid-century European history also occurred because Russia became a Western ally after 1941, and it suited the allies to emphasize the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany rather than other mass killings that occurred in the Bloodlands between 1933-45. Of Snyder's estimated 14 million victims, "more than half died of starvation", yet as he also admits, the "Great Chinese Famine" of 1958-62 greatly surpassed even this figure.

When Labour's John Mcdonnell presented Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer with a copy of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book last year he was making a serious point: "...We must not pretend to know what we do not know" By this action - which was misunderstood and much derided at the time by Britain's ignorant political classes - Mr Mcdonnell meant that George Osborne , who studied modern history at Oxford University, should seek to understand what the possible implications of an increasingly close economic and financial relationship with the communist People's Republic of China might actually mean for the UK.

I no doubt risk being ridiculed like John McDonnell in conflating the power of contemporary China with the problems of its quite recent past. However, the lessons for both George Osborne and Ken Livingstone, another Sinophile, is the perennial one of needing to understand the past in order to know the present. Unfortunately, we live in an age where the "New Opium of the People"  is  the promise of a digital utopia in which cheap, plentiful and high quality consumer goods continue to be supplied to Western and other consumers by the new Workshops of the World, particularly China. The shallow and materialistic lifestyles to which the post-WII generations - from Baby Boomers to Millennials - aspire has conspired to support an elite dominated by techno-optimist groupthink. It is hardly surprising that in such a millieu histories are often forgotten, spawning an ill-educated social discourse in much of the new and conventional media. So finally, let's thank Ken Livingstone for helping to rectify this, albeit unintentionally.

Postscript: May 2018 - Mr Livingstone has now resigned from the Labour Party.