SUMMER OF HATE

I relish a summer garden party as much as the next man –golden fields baking in the heat, the smell of simmering sausages and sun cream, the young in one another’s arms, with luck a tombola tent or a wellie-throwing competition, a tractor parade and perhaps a local farmer playing old English airs on his fiddle. Love, hope, promise. Sumer is icumen in…. What’s not to like?

The garden parties I don’t want to attend are those where vast crowds sway and sing-along in thrall to the same music, swept up in the frenzy of that like-minded togetherness Freud called ‘oceanic’. I can’t go to a football match for the same reason. A goal is scored or a penalty is missed and one half of the crowd rises as though impelled by a force beyond its control and becomes a single, unindividuated mass. Cricket doesn’t lose its mirth in this way. ‘Barmy Army,’ cry the more vociferous of English fans, thereby making fun of fandom even while expressing it. Oh, for a Barmy Army at Glastonbury. But that would shatter the trance. The anthems that would agglomerate diverse thousands into a single mass can no more abide an ambiguity than their audiences can get a joke.

It's the agglomeration that ought to concern us more than whether the BBC should have pulled the plug or the police should now take action. How do you take action against the however many thousands complicit in the blood-lust - not by silence (the usual accusation against those who don’t call for death to Zionists) but by their enthusiastic embrace of Bob Vylan’s murder chants. Is there any violence they wouldn’t accede to once the festival madness is upon them?

In their submission to the authority of the performer on the stage, in their arm waving and obedient chanting, are they not reminiscent of the crowds that filled marching squares and beer halls not that many years ago? I say no more than ‘reminiscent’. I don’t claim that Glastonbury is Munich. And I don’t even say that what crowds will sing about euphorically one day, they will put into murderous effect the next. But music and crowds are a lethal mix, carrying us away, taking us out of our shivering individual selves into the warm arms of comrades who feel and believe as we do. Sacha Baron Cohen’s endearingly racist Borat famously persuaded a group of drinkers in an Arizona bar to join him in singing ‘Throw the Jews down the well.’ For all the bemused discomfort some of the drinkers clearly felt, they were unable to resist Borat’s appeal. Who wants to be a party pooper? History teaches that the impulse toward individuation was a long time coming; it further teaches that it takes no time at all for that impulse to go into reverse.

Whether or not Borat’s singalong resulted in any immediate harm to Jews in Arizona I have no idea. But then that was twenty years ago. Words like Israel, Zionist, Jew were not quite so lethal then. I have already heard it argued that no harm will come to any Israeli soldiers on account of Bob Vylan’s chant. They operate too far from Glastonbury Tor. But this fails to acknowledge how lies are spread and hate augmented. It is said that a music festival should give voice to controversy, but in the sense of expressing new thoughts or asking us to see familiar things differently, there was nothing remotely controversial about Bob Vylan’s words. You can hear them every weekend in marches across London and every day on university campuses throughout the Western world. Hence, you might say, the uncomplaining assent they were given by the Glastonbury crowd. It already knew the script. This version of uneducated, unthinking, received unwisdom, has been normalized to the point of being commonplace. Who doesn’t wish ill on Israel now? And so it starts. Not to join in is to put a damper on the day.

An entertainingly lightweight weekend presenter on LBC to whom I sometime listen before bed, though not on the subject of the Middle East if I can help it, offered the view that the furore over Bob Vylan and Kneecap was a sort of snobbish denial to the populace of the artistic licence unquestioningly granted to literature or the stage. Such remarks as ‘Death, death to the IDF’ he suggested, would pass unnoticed in a West End play. Really? Which, I wonder.

Somewhere along the way our presenter has confused the freedom to speak hate with the freedom to make art. I cannot think of a play where it would be acceptable, legally or aesthetically, for a character to walk to the front of the stage mid-action and ask the audience to join him in calling for ‘Death, death’ to anyone. In fact, there is a marvellous play on in London at present – Giant, in which the Jew-obsessed children’s writer Roald Dahl is given enough rope to hang himself ten times over and manages it even more than that without trying. He delivers far more bitter diatribes against Israel than Bob Vylan and Kneecap manage because he has more words. What makes Giant art as opposed to propaganda is the trembling balance of its dramatic form, questioning, testing, playing this off against that, weighing all that’s said in the light of the speakers’ psychic compulsion to say it. When Dahl’s self-destruction reaches its apotheosis in a riff of violent Jew mania that makes the Glastonbury lot sound like kindergarten name-callers, the audience audibly gasps. Gasps.

I take great comfort from that gasp. Somewhere what is shocking still shocks. Somewhere the individual heart still refuses the blandishments of the mob. Unfortunately, terrifyingly, that somewhere isn’t Glastonbury.

END

First published by UnHerd on July 1