Warner's work can be boiled down to two main strands - he hates socialism, and he hates political correctness. He also sees them as being intertwined somehow, so essentially his work follows that one strand.
His column this week, "The whole myth of the Spanish civil war is sustained by lies" starts by accessing the BBC's obituary of Spanish communist leader Santiago Carrillo. He fought to defend Madrid from fascist forces during the civil war, and, after years of exile, helped Spain in it's transition to democracy. Sounds like a decent person, but several historians, and Warner, have tied him to the massacre of civilians and fascist soldiers, something which was carried out by both sides during the war.
What Warner objected to most was the overly-positive tone that the BBC took when reeling through Carrillo's life - to Warner, he is a murderer, and worse: a communist.
Criticising Carrillo for his earlier war crimes in Madrid (which he always denied) is fair enough - using it as a reason to ignore his role in the transitional period (when Carrillo moved towards social democracy) is stretching it. But Warner uses the example of Carrillo to springboard into strange critique of the Republican forces of the civil war, and their historical representation. Why this is a big deal I have no idea, by Warner perseveres playing down the bombing of Guernica, without any hint of a reference. He points to faked war photos, ignoring the fact that, in all likelihood, the majority of famous war photos are probably faked to some extent. The famous picture of American troops hoisting a flag pole on Iwo Jima is faked, and it may be the most recognisable war photograph ever.
With such a strong-headed assault on the Republican forces, Warner almost seems to come out on the side of the fascists - for all the faults he lists on one side, Franco's army - which committed massacres and disseminated propaganda just as much, if not more than, the democratically elected government they were overthrowing. Not to mention - I doubt there is a single army in history that has fought a war without using propaganda and massacres as a weapon.
To further the point of him defending the fascist forces - he never actually uses the word 'fascist' to describe Franco's troops. Using that would remove any audience sympathy which he is trying to garner. Imagine the opening scene of a film where a character is being badly beaten in an alleyway. As his assailants runs off, he is revealed to have a swastika armband - would this not drastically change the audience perception of him immediately? Maybe you wouldn't feel the beating was justified (it depends on the extent to which you believe 'an eye for an eye', I suppose) but it would certainly remove a great deal of empathy which you had felt originally.
Interestingly, he does, once, use the word 'falangists', a more obscure term than fascists, but one which is associated mainly with Franco's strain of politics. It's like using the term autonomism to refer to marxism. Both are more niche terms, and much less emotive.
This tight control of words, the shying away from openly calling what he is partically defending 'fascism', jarrs with one of his recurring themes - the cultural control he believes marxism is gaining in British society.
As a writer, Orwell’s stock in trade was words. He therefore recognised earlier than most people the bastardisation of language that was a principal instrument of leftist subversion of objective reality. Marxists have always been obsessed with linguistics, for a very good reason: if the means of communication can be manipulated, if words can be made to take on a new meaning supportive of the programme of those in power, it will become impossible to articulate views hostile to the regime.He is obsessed with what he terms 'Frankfurt Marxism', persumeable a reference to the Frankfurt School, which pioneered marxist cultural studies and revisionism in the early twentieth century.
You see, Warner is one of those anti-PC people who believe their right to say racist terms trumps the right of people not to be abused. He sees political correctness as a form of 'Newspeak', rather than as an attempt to sideline offensive language in our culture. In the above article on George Orwell, he has a final paragraph meltdown, listing the various 'invented' words which, to him, signify nothing but an attempt at mind control - 'sexist' 'homophobic' and 'multicultural'.
And, in case you hadn't worked it out, a week before his 'daring'/factually-inaccurate critique he revealled himself to be homophobic by not only standing against gay marriage, but declaring the arrival of totalitarianism if same-sex marriage were to become legal. He backs this up, apparently, by saying that it represents as attack on religious freedoms (specifically Judaeo-Christian, obviously). The logic in this falls apart in seconds - no one is being stopped from practising their religion by this new law. If anything, it will bring gay men and women back into the faith - the number might not be very big after the way the church has attacked them, but I assume there will be some same-sex couples who want to get married in a church. And denying people the right to marriage because of their lifestyle - is that not itself totalitarian?
Warner is vainly expanding on the argument I pointed out above - that his right to say whatever he wants, to whoever he wants (it would be something offensive, as I have no doubt that Gerry is very much a bigot, a word I would use to describe him mainly because he hates it so much) trumps the right of people not to be abused because of their race, gender, sex or otherwise. He claims to rebel against cultural totalitarianism, but he himself practises it, in his desperate attempts to promote WASP values at the expense of genuine freedom.
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