With the row over its cartoon, the newspaper that helped oust Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour Party has briefly found that what you sow, you can reap, writes Jonathan Cook.
By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net
The Guardian found itself last weekend at the centre of an anti-semitism controversy. Its cartoonist Martin Rowson was accused of using anti-Jewish “tropes” as he depicted a Conservative government mired in corruption, including in its ties to the outgoing BBC chairman, Richard Sharp.
There was a certain Schadenfreude in watching The Guardian squirm as it was accused of anti-Semitism by a wide range of Jewish establishment bodies and its media rivals. After all, it was The Guardian that was the most eager and effective media organisation in cheerleading evidence-free claims — promoted by those same Jewish groups — that the Labour Party was “plagued” by anti-Semitism under its previous leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
As a paper supposedly representing the left, the corporate Guardian’s attacks on Corbyn injected unwarranted credibility into smears from the wider, billionaire-owned media that might otherwise have appeared too transparently to have been the establishment’s handiwork. Corbyn was reviled because he was the first politician in living memory to challenge the neoliberal consensus at home, one that keeps a tiny elite enriched, and to reject the West’s endless resource wars against the Global South.
It was the sustained campaign against him – one that largely hinged on conflating anti-Semitism with trenchant criticism of Israel — that ultimately led to Cobyn’s suspension from the parliamentary Labour Party. He has been replaced by the all-too establishment-friendly Sir Keir Starmer.
The redefinition of “anti-Semitism ” has proved to be the gift that keeps on giving: Corbyn is now banned from running as a Labour candidate in the seat he has represented for 40 years, despite the warm ties he has forged with large segments of the Jewish community there.
"We write as Jewish members of the Islington North Labour Party to express the enduring distress we have experienced watching the continual accusations of anti-Semitism made against our MP, Jeremy Corbyn, with our own experiences completely ignored." https://t.co/a7uMNFhZAz
— JewishVoiceForLabour (@JVoiceLabour) February 7, 2023
With the row over its cartoon, The Guardian has briefly found that what you sow, you can reap. It had to hurriedly take down the image, while Rowson issued a profuse apology.
According to the same Jewish organisations that hounded Corbyn, the paper’s depiction of Sharp — who few knew was Jewish, even among Guardian staff apparently — plays on long-standing anti-Semitic tropes.
Sharp’s face is said to be too caricatured, and his grimace too sinister, even though he is made to look far, far less grotesque than (the non-Jewish) former Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
How many tropes can the @guardian get into one cartoon?https://t.co/BhwilR5dRa
— Jewish News (@JewishNewsUK) April 29, 2023
Sharp carries a “carboard box of unemployment” marked with the name Goldman Sachs, the large investment bank where he accumulated so much money he was able to donate more than £400,000 of it to the Tory party.
Johnson repaid the favour by appointing him BBC chairman, even though Sharp had no qualifications for the job. He was finally brought down by further revelations that he had concealed sleazy personal ties to Johnson.
Jewish organisations, however, believe any reference to Sharp’s connection to Goldman Sachs is anti-Semitic because the bank’s name sounds a little too obviously Jewish. Presumably, in their eyes, there should be no visual association between Sharp and money either — despite his enormous riches and that fact’s pertinence to the issue of corruption in public life — because of the historic association made by anti-Semites of Jews with greed and wealth.
Curving building in center is Goldman Sachs’ global headquarters in New York’s lower Manhattan in 2010. (Dismas, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Rishi Sunak, Johnson’s successor — and again, more unpleasantly caricatured than Sharp — is in the cardboard box, because he worked for the outgoing BBC chairman at Goldman Sachs. One might assume that the cartoonist intended this to suggest that the wheel of corruption has come full circle.
But Jewish organisations read it differently, as a signifier that Sunak is Sharp’s puppet — another anti-Semitic trope — even though Johnson sits above them both, high up on a mountain of faeces grasping bags of money while turning everything in British public life to shit.
Topping off Rowson’s offence is a toy squid in the cardboard box, a jokey reference to a well-known description of Goldman Sachs by the U.S. leftwing writer Matt Taibbi.
Thirteen years ago, he called the bank “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
It seems that description now needs reassessing as anti-Semitic too.
Useful Bludgeon
But, of course, though The Guardian has had its feathers ruffled by the incident, it is not going to face any real consequences for its transgression — and certainly none of the kind its columnists insisted Corbyn suffer.
No one, least of all Jewish organisations that police modern public discourse so assiduously, is calling The Guardian “institutionally anti-Semitic” as a result. Nor will its senior editors, such as Editor-in-Chief Katharine Viner, be forced out of their jobs, as Corbyn was from his. Ofcom will not investigate The Guardian and issue a denunciatory report, as the Equalities and Human Rights Commission did into Labour under Corbyn — the commission’s first and only investigation of a mainstream political party.
The Guardian is not like Corbyn. Since Viner took over the helm, it is enthusiastically on board with Britain’s neoliberal establishment, and barely bothers to hide the fact that it is under the security services’ thumb. Its chief function is to rally support on the left for Starmer as the leader of a politically neutered Labour Party, one that now reliably backs Israel as it oppresses the Palestinians and cheerleads NATO’s expansionist wars to surround Russia and China.
The Guardian won’t be targeted. The same figures who demonised Corbyn very much kept the gloves on as they berated the paper over the cartoon.
Dave Rich, head of policy at the Community Security Trust, wrote a commentary in The Guardian (of course) castigating the paper for running the cartoon. However, he was quick to discount any possibility that the paper or Rowson had committed the crime of intentional anti-Semitism. Their sin was more one of carelessness and thoughtlessness.
The aim was not to weaponise anti-Semitism to damage The Guardian, as happened to Corbyn, but to reinforce the limits of public discourse. It was a reminder that there is a price to pay — potentially a catastrophic one — for straying too far into topics the establishment wishes to remain off-limits.
Keir Starmer, at left, in December 2019 with Jeremy Corbyn, then party leader. (Jeremy Corbyn, Flickr)
It was a reminder that the charge of anti-Semitism is still a powerful bludgeon, one that can be deployed to intimidate the left when its critiques of key establishment interests gain too much traction. How can we be so sure? Because that same bludgeon is kept safely in the drawer whenever it comes to the right, however overtly anti-Semitic their politics.
The Guardian was quick to offer reassurances it would not repeat its error. While noting that none of his staff knew Sharp was Jewish, opinion page editor Hugh Muir promised readers “there will need to be learning” from the incident.
Viner drove the point home: “The publication of this cartoon highlights failures in our editorial processes, which we are determined to address. We are working on what those changes might be so that we can be sure that something like this won’t happen again.”
What readers can be sure of is that those changes will further enfeeble The Guardian’s already tepid efforts to hold power to account. It is important to understand why.
Imagery Hijacked
What The Guardian cartoon incident reveals is the degree to which official discourse about anti-Semitism has now squarely placed the cart before the horse.
In his Guardian article, Rich gives a clue as to how this works in practice. He starts by making an incisive point:
“It is unlikely that anybody would complain if a Guardian cartoonist drew Boris Johnson as a gorilla. All’s fair in political satire, cartoonists are expected to be scurrilous, and the former prime minister is fair game. But if that same cartoonist drew a black politician in simian form, it would be obviously racist. This is the principle to hold in mind when decoding Martin Rowson’s cartoon of outgoing BBC chair Richard Sharp, who is Jewish.”
Rich observes that the context of racism is critically important, or as he puts it: “Centuries of anti-Jewish caricaturists (and to be clear, I do not accuse Rowson or the Guardian of falling into this category) have generated an extensive library of visual tropes to convey their hatred of, and disgust for, Jews.”
True, but Rich’s analogy is not quite as straightforward as he makes it sound.
We understand that a cartoon depicting a black politician as a monkey is racist, not just because of historical context, but because, by definition, the cartoonist’s visual comparison is entirely gratuitious. There is no reason to link a black politician with a monkey except to suggest that the politician is primitive or subhuman. The cartoonist’s racist meaning and intention are transparent.
But things get more complicated when it comes to the “library of visual tropes” about Jews. And that is because long ago the far-right appropriated the left’s visual lexicon, a lexicon developed by satirists and caricaturists to critique power. The racist right hijacked this imagery to attack Jews —and for obvious reasons.
Two Birds, One Stone
The aim of leftwing cartoonists is to focus popular attention on the corrupt establishment that rules our societies, leaders that leech off public funds and privatise what should be the common wealth, as well as peddling endless wars to steal weaker countries’ resources, while being given cover by a corporate media that acts as the public relations arm of crony capitalism.
Necessarily, the left’s visual lexicon is intensely negative. Its cartoons associate the ruling class with the blood of unnecessary wars, with the foul stink of faeces and putrefaction, and with parasitical and predatory creatures. In fact, all the themes deployed in Rowson’s cartoon.
That has not gone unnoticed by the far-right. The Nazi publication Der Sturmer associated Jews with rats, spiders, vampires and octopuses with their tentacles wrapped around the globe because it wished to suggest the ills of German society, or the world, should be pinned, not on the German establishment, but on identifiable and vulnerable minorities.
Citizens publicly reading pages of Der Stürmer in Worms, Germany, 1935. The billboard heading reads: “With the Stürmer against Judah.” The subheading reads: “The Jews are our misfortune.” (Bundesarchiv, CC-BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
That tradition carries on today in the Western mainstream, though almost never in relation to Jews. Dehumanising Muslims and Arabs is the acceptable face of modern official racism, expressed by overt British establishment mouthpieces like the Daily Mail. In 2015 it depicted Muslims as rats. Such demonisation rarely gets called out. In fact, good liberals regularly defend the right of cartoonists to be racist in relation to Muslims, such as the staple implication that they are terrorists.
Daily Mail cartoon showing hooked-nosed refugees & rats crossing into Europe has chilling echoes of Nazi propaganda pic.twitter.com/jAQb9SkcKW
— Stefan Simanowitz (@StefSimanowitz) November 17, 2015
The far-right found it could kill two birds with one stone. By appropriating the language of the left, it deflected public animosity away from the proper target — a depraved, parasitic ruling class — and turned it instead towards scapegoat groups: Jews, Roma, Communists. It stripped out the left’s structural, economic critique of power and replaced it with facile finger-pointing at “subversive elements.” Instead of hitting up, the far-right punched down.
The deflection was particularly successful against Jews because some — unlike most Roma or Communists — were visibly successful within the capitalist system.
This is a major reason why an establishment in deep trouble, and its media, are so ready to tolerate far-right street thugs offering simple-minded slogans that blame minorities for society’s ills. It will tolerate a Nigel Farage long before it does a Jeremy Corbyn.
That lesson was all to evident, of course, in Germany as the Weimar Republic collapsed in the immediate period before Hitler seized power. The German aristocracy and business elite colluded with the Nazis precisely because they viewed Hitler to be much less of a threat to their interests than local communist and socialist parties.
Language Police
There is another reason why the establishment’s discourse enthusiastically embraces political confusion about anti-Semitism. The far-right has polluted the well from which the left once drank. It has imbued the imagery and language relied on by the left to mobilise popular sentiment against ruling elites with the taint of anti-Semitism .
Now meaningful critiques of power can be easily and retroactively diagnosed as symptoms of anti-Semitism — because the left’s tools have been stolen from them. The left has been stripped of the populist lexicon with which to attack the ruling class.
This has been particularly obvious in relation to criticism of Israel, now defined as the “New Anti-Semitism.” Cartoonists using visual “tropes” to ascribe malign motivation to foreign powers, whether Official Enemies such as Syria and Russia or Good Guys such as Western states, find themselves certain to come a cropper if they try to do the same with Israel.
Here are examples of two famous cartoonists who immediately found themselves falling foul of the language police when they targeted Israel:
I just warned on my blog about the growing mystification of anti-semitism. Now the Guardian's Steve Bell has had this cartoon pulled amid accusations of anti-semitism. What cartoonist is not going to reach the conclusion that it's safer to avoid all cartoons critical of Israel pic.twitter.com/yEAIgqqGPm
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) June 7, 2018
In the case of the leftwing Steve Bell, his repeated efforts to portray Israel in a harshly critical light eventually led to The Guardian quietly ousting him.
The Labour Party under Starmer has only intensified this erosion of the left’s room to critique Israel. Now the use of terms like “Zionism,” the racist political ideology that seeks to justify Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, or “Israeli apartheid,” the outcome of decades of Zionist policy in Israel and Palestine, are cited as evidence of anti-Semitism.
But the rot has spread much further afield. Nowadays, simply using expressions like “the ruling class,” “bankers,” the “establishment” or “a global elite” is likely to get one denounced as an anti-Semite, as though anyone referencing these predatory groups representing global capital must also believe that Jews are a cabal controlling the world.
Been hesitating to tweet this bevause I keep thinking it can't be, surely it can't be.
But the more I think about It, the more it seems it really is.
This is 'nudge, nudge, you know who I'm talking about don't you?'
And yes I do. It's appalling https://t.co/XzgpnLwlTU— Stephen Pollard (@stephenpollard) September 15, 2018
Critique of Power
A good illustration of this problem is the now-infamous London mural that is so regularly trotted out as evidence of Corbyn’s anti-Semitism. Rich himself refers to it, distinguishing The Guardian’s publication of Rowson’s cartoon from Corbyn’s opposition to the erasure of a piece of street art. The former is treated as unfortunate; the latter as definitive proof of the Labour leader’s supposed covert racism, a racism that apparently justified the U.K.’s three leading Jewish papers claiming that he posed an “existential threat” to Britain’s thriving Jewish community.
One can argue over how successful the mural is, or what the intention behind it was. Those are separate debates worth having. But there are no obvious clues — at least to any casual observer — that the mural is anti-Semitic, except for the fact that the far-right has associated the ideas of greedy bankers with Jews.
The image itself deploys a once-familiar, populist left visual lexicon critiquing capitalism, exploitation and elite power. Workers on their hands and knees support a Monopoly-style board overseen by six real-life banking figures, two of whom were Jewish (Rich falsely implies all six were).
Above them is the “Eye of Providence” — an all-seeing, divine eye within a pyramid — a symbol familiar from the one-dollar bill and one that can be found on churches and Masonic buildings.
The New World Order is the Enemy of Humanity — Painted with permission, but later removed by a London council because of complaints of anti-Semitism in its depiction of the banking elite. (duncan cumming, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)
Again, one can argue over what the artist meant, but there is reason enough for those viewing the mural, most especially on the left, to interpret it according to familiar leftwing critiques of power. It suggests that there is a class war in which workers are simply pawns in a capital accumulation game being played by an elite that worships Mammon, while claiming its incomparable wealth is divinely ordained.
It is anti-Semitic only if we imagine, like Rich, that Jews comprise most of the greedy bankers.
Pulling Punches
Where does this leave the left? Well, as Rowson just found out, it means it is all but impossible to use the left’s traditional — and most vivid and resonant — imagery to critique the power elite when someone who is Jewish, such as Richard Sharp, is implicated in its crimes.
Punches must be pulled, gloves must be kept on, the caricatures kept to a minimum, implications of greed, predatory behaviour and power removed, even if the targets of the cartoon are greedy, powerful and predatory.
Remember: The Guardian just censored a cartoon that showed a thieving Boris Johnson turning everything he touches to shit, that incriminated Rishi Sunak in this world of sleaze, and reviled a ruling class feeding at the trough like pigs. And the paper did so only because one of the actors in this real-life conspiracy happens, so it turns out, to be Jewish.
Any cartoonist watching what just happened to Rowson will have absorbed the main lesson. It is extremely risky to use the traditional lexicon, visual or otherwise, of the left.
Should Sharp be portrayed differently from other powerful actors just because he is Jewish? And if, as The Guardiansays, its opinion-page staff did not know Sharp was Jewish, is the lesson for cartoonists and columnists that it would be wiser to assume anyone in power might be Jewish and avoid language or imagery that that could later cause their outlet harm?
Even more significantly, might the lesson for newspaper editors be that they should impose just such a rule — to tone down political language and imagery criticising the ruling class — whatever the wishes of cartoonists and columnists to avoid “causing offence?” And how resistant to such pressures might an editor like Viner really be when her paper’s job is to serve as the faux-left, Starmerite-wing of the establishment?
Not very, seems the only plausible response.
Which will prove another triumph for the establishment as the gradual evolution of anti-Semitism as a weapon with which to crush the left continues apace.
The already-narrow space to critique a West hurtling towards self-destruction, risking nuclear Armageddon and environmental collapse, just got a little bit narrower. And we will all be the poorer for it.
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the U.K. in 2021.He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008).
If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support.
This article is from his blog, Jonathan Cook.net
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
This is perhaps the best article I’ve read from Jonathan Cook. Excellent exposition and explanation.
Thanks CN.
Compare this with the clear lack of reaction to the decision to honour Nancy Astor who was the second woman elected to the UK House of Commons but the first to take her seat.
A statue was unveiled in 2019 and Labour and Conservative MPs were gushing in their praise of her. But no mention of her virulent anti-Semitism or pro-Hitler sympathies.
“Centuries of anti-Jewish caricaturists (and to be clear, I do not accuse Rowson or the Guardian of falling into this category) have generated an extensive library of visual tropes to convey their hatred of, and disgust for, Jews.”
Would he accuse Star Trek: The Next Generation of falling into that category? The Ferengi are clearly based on several Jewish tropes but they only come under mild criticism, which is quickly brushed off. The warlike Klingons are Africans, The emotionless Vulcans are inscrutable Orientals and the Cardassians are Germans because everybody knows that all Germans are Nazis. No excuses suffice since defining races (or species) by a single characteristic is the very basis of racism. Star Trek racism: a place for everyone and everyone in their place.
And then there is the Borg, the dystopic future of Marxism, assimilating everyone into the Collective. Free trade rules even though they have no money. The Federation brings peace everywhere and they have the battle scare to prove it. All neoliberal propaganda and nobody calls them out on it.
Oh, and sex with extraterrestrials is bestiality.
Thanks to Jonathan Cook for this piece–and shame on Rowson for knuckling under. Especially when he knew the Graun had dumped his long-term colleague and fellow-warrior Steve Bell on similar and equally bogus grounds.
“Antisemitism is a trick we always use.”
– Shulamit Aloni, Jewish Israeli, former Israeli Minister of Education, longtime member of the Israeli parliament.
It seems that Jews are never able to be the subject of criticism, even in cartoons which have the job of showing faults among the “important people” and even if the cartoonist does not know the characters are Jewish. Who else is allowed to stop any implied criticism wherever it is?
Russia’s president Putin now is treated as evil in every possible way, can be vilified with complete impunity, is tarred with characteristics which ignore any vestige of truth and although many millions of people all over the globe find this offensive in the extreme, their opinions and sensitivities are discarded by nearly all Western media and pundits.
Very good point rosemerry.
A great article! If anything, it is not critical enough of the broad campaign by well-funded organizations to silence unwelcome dissent as bigotry, leaving us only with vacuous, faux-liberal half-truths.
as a jew critical of israel’s blatant policies of racism, apartheid and genocide, i certainly can relate to the feelings expressed in this article. if i had a dollar for every time someone on-line, (typically a zionist), called me a traitor, or self-hating jew, or some other such nonsense, i could retire!
I find the Guardian rather biased when it come to reporting the Russia/Ukraine conflict. It should report about both sides of this tragic coin instead of always bashing Russia. And as a news outlet it should stay out of politics and just report facts instead of so much hate mongering propaganda. It is quite obvious, at least to me, who dictates the shots…
DoubleThink is a symptom that reveals that a person (or society) has been subjected to powerful Mind Control.
If you realize that someone is controlling your mind, well, at least to me personally, it makes sense to make them stop. I guess I like my Mind, and am not submissive enough to cede it to outside control. Interestingly, much of the modern Mind Control is quite voluntary on the part of the recipient, and thus can easily be turned off …. except the Mind Control also says not to push that OFF button.
A good course is to convince people to turn them off.
I also find it quite amazing how often that having personally turned them off and banned these corporate manipulators from my life, I find some ‘alternative’ writer making damn sure that I get every message that these manipulators could not put into my brain directly once I had turned them off. We need to learn both not to repeat their manipulative messages for them, and also how not to promote them as some oracle of truth by constantly reacting to what they say.
If you turn them off, it has two effects.
1) They lose the power to manipulate you.
2) They lose money, as they depend on selling your eyeballs,ears or mental attention to their advertisers, and the advertisers won’t pay for low ratings or low circulation or low website hits.
Turn them off.
In this society ruled by ‘scandal’, anyone can be attacked at any time. And that is the modern ‘west’. A feature of our ‘democracy’ (where most people say we are consistently heading in the wrong direction) is that candidates are frequently eliminated via ‘scandal’. If you have lots and lots of money, you can always gin up a scandal against an opponent. That’s easy. And of course, another piece of this oligarch tactic is the ‘media’ that is willing to run with the scandal.
The same ‘media’ is of course vulnerable to the same tactic … since all it take is oligarchs with money and competing ‘media’ who are happy to run the latest ‘scandal’ to gin up such a scandal.
A free and tolerant society would be less able to be manipulated by scandal, and also less able to be manipulated by blackmail behind the scenes which is of course powered by the threat of such a scandal. But with the modern, incredibly uptight society which is dominated by various forms of the Politics of Hate, ‘scandal’ is the normal way of attacking people who would otherwise be popular.
Think of a tea kettle. It has a release valve that whistles when you heat it. The whistling lets you know that the kettle is boiling, so you turn down the heat. If there is no release valve, and you seal the kettle, and then heat it, it will at some point explode. The flying pieces of the kettle are dangerous to everyone.
The irony is that the more this Zionist revisionism continues, the more they enforce the stereotype of Jews as a shadowy, corrupt, behind-the-scenes puppet masters.
It was a sad spectacle to see; Alan Rusbridger being frog-marched down to the Guardian basement to destroy the hard-drives; then to goose-step back up the stairs, with the un-named spooks whispering in his ear. It is highly unlikely that the Guardian will ever recover its intergrity.
Various modes of social control and narrative control are intensifying as the West sees its influence in the world decline. In regards to Israel, it is astounding how equating criticism of Israeli policy has come to be considered anti-semitic. ……… One can not overestimate the power of the Israel Lobby. …………… In the US, four members of the African Peoples Socialist Party were arrested for “sowing discord” and “advancing Russian propaganda” for writing critically of US/Ukraine matters. …….One can almost smell the desperation in these attempts by the West to shut down dissent and keep the people in line.
……Is it any wonder the rest of the world is turning more to China for diplomatic/economic leadership??
The left needs to learn to ignore the corporate owned “news”. If you respond to their critiques as though they have meaning and weight, then you have bought into their BS fantasy world. You need to turn the tables on the media mouthpieces and show how hypocritical and disingenuous their claims are. Don’t defend your actions, attack their methods and their affiliations with corporations and the wealthy. Appropriate their terminology and turn it against them, make capitalism a dirty word.
It is an uphill battle because the wealthy own all the corporate news outlets, and the left has virtually nothing but the internet. That is where the battle will be waged.
In my view the Zionist empire can brook no commentary that might crack open the door to a discussion of their political and social power. Hence the smallest hint of such a direction is met by an onslaught of “anti-Semitism” accusations. That is the warning that you are putting your entire career at risk.
And this works despite the clear fact that anti-Zionism is not equal to anti-Semitism, both logically and factually. Jewish Zionists are a sub-set of Jews, and some Jews are anti-Zionists.
Which raises a question. How do these people have the power to cover up such a vast quantity of thoroughly documented crimes as Israels? And what are the mechanics by which that power works? If we can’t talk about this obliquely then we’ll have to talk about it directly.
Read Whitney Webb’s One Nation Under Blackmail and you’ll understand how Zionists have the power to cover up immense crimes.
Excellent suggestion!
Well i laughed all the way through this excellent piece by Mr. Cook. This portion however stood out for me:
“Remember: The Guardian just censored a cartoon that showed a thieving Boris Johnson turning everything he touches to shit, that incriminated Rishi Sunak in this world of sleaze, and reviled a ruling class feeding at the trough like pigs. And the paper did so only because one of the actors in this real-life conspiracy happens, so it turns out, to be Jewish.”
I missed that cartoon.
“has briefly found that what you sow, you can reap”
Facilitated by the illusions that – we are the Praetorian Guardians, we are exceptional not like the “little people”, and in contexts where alienation is marketed as individual freedom, coercion as competition, within virtual democracies correctly designated as “representative democracies” although many still don’t understand the joke.