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Dogma on Monday, history on Tuesday.

I thought Guardian columnist Marina Hyde was brave to bring up the siege of Waco.

Her recent piece on the similarities in mawkish sentiment between supporters of far-right activist Tommy Robinson and the followers of Jeremy Corbyn was provocative enough. But to allude to the Branch Davidians and David Koresh was, I felt, probably asking for a little trouble online.

When federal agents surrounded Mount Carmel back in 1993, it led to a bloodbath in which dozens of people died. The crackpot sect had amassed a frightening arsenal of automatic and semi-automatic weapons and fought with fanaticism.

Even if we see the Corbyn movement as being cultlike in its behaviour and worship of its leader, I think we can rule out a Texan-style denouement. Jez, after all, is a man of peace, as we are repeatedly reminded by his supporters.

But there is a serious question about how all this craziness will end.

The Twitterstorm this week - running with the hashtag #WeAreCorbyn - provoked a frenzy of sycophantic drivel that sits well outside the norms of British political life.

'Has a politician ever received such an outpouring of love?' asked Bevan Boy, who presumably was discounting the affection previously shown to luminaries of the left such as Kim Jong Un and Joseph Stalin.

You don't need to be a sociologist, shrink or theologian to see the religious overtones in many of the obsequious eulogies. Bevan Boy proclaimed that Corbyn had 'walked in our shoes' and 'knows our struggles'. Reassuringly, he reminds us that he is, however, 'a human being'.

A guy called Joe, meanwhile, took up a common refrain. We are against Jez because we are afraid and have been brainwashed. Replying directly to columnist Dan Hodges, he said: 'You sound scared. You have for a long time. Change can be daunting for the heavily indoctrinated. Don't worry, Dan. We're here to help lead you to a better place.'

One would like to believe there was a sense of irony behind Joe's comment, but with the Jezuits, you can never be entirely sure. (There was one tweet circulating today in which a supporter of Corbyn speculated that former BNP leader Nick Griffin might be advocating #JC4PM because he'd been converted by the leftist guru's policies on the NHS. Are we looking at a tragic lack of understanding here or some kind of poorly-judged comedy routine?)

Some of the Biblical allusions from the Corbynistas are quite overt.

'The only thing that would appease the haters would be Corbyn's head on a platter,' wrote a lady called Chelley. To her, Jez seems to be John the Baptist - the voice crying out in the wilderness, although the parallel leaves me in fear that we await another socialist messiah. Believe me, one has been quite enough, thanks.

Religions are built around certainties and mantras. When those are challenged by external events and objective reality, the dissonance can often be overwhelming.

If there was one thing that seemed certain beyond doubt to Corbynistas, it was that the anti-semitism crisis in Labour was manufactured by the 'MSM', the 'Israeli lobby' and Blairite MPs planning another 'chicken coup'. For that reason, the stock response has been to defend the leader against obvious attempts to destabilise him.

But then came a shock.

Labour's Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell recorded a video in which he seemed to recognise the concerns of the Jewish community as being real. The anti-semitism issue, he revealed, had shaken the party 'to its core'.

We can imagine the smoke billowing from the ears of the faithful. To them, McDonnell's contribution was akin to a Cardinal in the Catholic Church questioning the Eucharist.

And then we had Momentum.

The official Jez fan club, and vanguard for the Leader's hard-left agenda, decided to withdraw its support for Pete Willsman, the veteran hardliner who had ranted about rabbis at a meeting of Labour's ruling National Executive Committee.

Suddenly the #JC9 slate had become the #JC8.

All hell broke loose on social media and we started to see the emergence of different camps.

Pragmatists (mainly younger and less obsessive about Israel as an issue) understand that anti-semitism tends not to be a good look. They want the issue closed down. But the old guard doubles down, cries betrayal and threatens to quit Momentum in disgust. A classic hard-left split.

But it's still relatively early days. At this point, many activists probably don't fall into either camp. They are, however, disconcerted and uneasy. Dogma which seemed so central to the movement has now been relaxed and they have been blindsided.

These middle-ground folk are the footsoldiers in any political organisation who tend to rehearse the prevailing line and repeat it. They are followers rather than shapers of policy and have been telling people that anti-semitism isn't a problem, because that's what they believed they were supposed to do.

But now, it's very messy.

Willsman didn't seem to say anything which lay outside the dogmatic schema of the movement. He had simply asked for evidence of anti-semitism and implied that the allegations were all part of a plot to undermine Jez by right-wingers.

And that's exactly what Momentum members had been told that they believed. Until the moment it became apparent that they shouldn't believe it any more.

We're unlikely to see a formal schism just yet, but the internal tensions are there for all to see.

The short-term solution will be to rally behind the one thing that unites everyone: devotion to the leader. In the longer-term, things don't look too rosy for Corbyn's followers. Because if there's one issue that can cause an even more disruptive fissure than anti-semitism, it's Brexit. And that clock is ticking very fast.






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