The unique source of all bad things

In today's Guardian Lindsey German, convenor of the Stop the War Coalition, has this to say:

Those who argue that Muslim groups such as the MAB are fascist, or that al-Qaradawi's views on gays are worse than the BNP's, are dangerously wide of the mark.

The BNP's heroes in Nazi Germany scapegoated gays, trade unionists, Gypsies, socialists and, above all, Jews because they wanted to destroy democratic and working-class organisations in the interests of a German imperialist super-state. British Muslims, however much we might disagree with some of the views that some hold, are struggling to uphold their rights and culture in an environment of pervasive racism - a racism used to uphold the policies of the new imperialism. The comparison with Nazism is abhorrent.

I'm interested in the paragraph that follows German's 'dangerously wide of the mark' claim. The content of the MAB's views is to be established by listening to what its spokespeople and supporters say, reading what they write and distribute, and so forth. But this paragraph of German's urges upon us a different criterion of judgement: namely, the putative relationship of the MAB and the BNP to something else. Follow the threads.

We are told that the BNP's heroes, the Nazis, 'scapegoated' the groups listed, this in the interests of German imperialism and in order to destroy democratic and working class organization. The list contains one item which so obviously undermines a 'scapegoat' model of explanation for the given case that you might think it would have given Lindsey German pause. You don't mobilize tens of thousands of functionaries across the better part of a continent and in order to destroy an entire people, developing a specialized technology to do that, just so you'll have a scapegoat for something else you want to do - here, destroying working class and other democratic organizations. And if scapegoating were indeed what you were about in this genocidal assault, you wouldn't try to keep it secret, hidden from the very public before whom the would-be scapegoats are to be... scapegoats. It isn't how scapegoating works. If ever there was a case of a political 'project' not explicable reductively as being really about something else, it was the Hitlerian ambition to annihilate the Jews of Europe. This is true whatever the merits of a class-based account of Hitler's rise to power, such as that put forward by Leon Trotsky at the time (and its merits, in my own view, were considerable).

To put the same thing differently: even though imperialism is responsible for some terrible things, not all terrible things are explicable as being due to imperialism. Or to put it differently again: there are other sources of badness in the world than imperialism. Such are the lethal hatreds that lead to genocide, hatreds generated at least in part by ideological and other belief systems that demean, reject or dehumanize whole groups of people on account simply of their identity, on account of who they are.

Look, now, at the latter part of Lindsey German's paragraph. Apart from its other strains - 'some of the views that some hold' - note that those who might be thought to be condemned by holding these said views are enfolded in a protecting contextual blanket: struggling within 'an environment of pervasive racism' which is designed to 'uphold the policies of the new imperialism'. When all is said and done, they're on the right side of the relevant Manichean divide between good and evil: anti-imperialist rather than imperialist, oppressed rather than oppressor; the specific weight, therefore, of their actual - anti-democratic - views reduced.

For some forty years, there has been a strenuous intellectual effort within the left to overcome reductionist modes of thinking. The tropes and the advocacy of wide sections of the so-called peace movement since 9/11 demonstrate by just how much that effort has fallen short.

Update at 9.00 PM: Harry details the several other problems with Lindsey German's article.