Another rant about Gerald Warner

A while back I voice my opinions on the reactionary bigot Gerald Warner, who uses his column in the Scotland on Sunday to relentlessly warn against his narrow-minded view of 'cultural marxism'.

I'm going to do it again. Chances are, there'll be another one after this, unless Warner succumbs to a rage-induced heart attack.

Today Warner wrote about the Cuban Missile Crisis, apparently as part of his campaign to have himself seen as some kind of historic revisionist historian ('revisionist' in this case meaning 'everything that's ever happened proves the left-wing are scum').

He covers the event is standard way, working his way through the tense stand-off, noting the role that Kennedy played in stopping it tumbling into a nuclear war. Then, like a hyper-privileged Rod Sterling, Warner uses his closing act to hit us with a stunning twist:

It is fortunate our parents’ generation was willing to risk annihilation to halt Marxism in its tracks. Otherwise, today, we might be living in a society where every candidate at elections stood for the same agenda, where freedom of speech was replaced by Newspeak, where people had to consider whether they would offend the authorities by uttering certain opinions, where they could lose their jobs for being politically incorrect, where messages on social media could lead to arrest and where someone could be sent to jail for an offensive slogan on his T-shirt. When Marxism stops goose-stepping it is not dead: it is coming in by the back door.
 

Boom: it was all a dream! It was earth all along! He was talking about marxism all the time!

Now, I'm a marxist, and I don't think about marxism as much as Gerald Warner does. I didn't get a column is a national newspaper just to piss it away criticizing a political philosophy based on what I wrongly assume its tenets are. Maybe Gerald is like those Southern preachers who react so strongly to homosexuality because they're trying desperately to suppress their own sexuality? Perhaps.

That paragraph is the microcosm of Warner's politics - it basically lists everything he believes marxism stands for, and everything he complains about on a daily basis.

• 'Every candidate at elections stood for the same agenda' - these candidates, who are indeed largely saying the same thing, are doing so out of their own free will, and the free will of their party. The fact that both Labour and the Tories have effectively merged into centrist mess, joined by the soul-selling Lib Dems, has nothing to do with marxism
• 'where freedom of speech was replaced by Newspeak, where people had to consider whether they would offend the authorities by uttering certain opinions, where they could lose their jobs for being politically incorrect' - again, this 'freedom of speech' complaint is a strong theme in Warner's work. He believes, as I pointed out in the last blog, that his right to be racist, misogynist, xenophobic, homophobic etc. overrides the right of people not to be abused in these ways, or to be oppressed by a system designed by people like Warner to benefit people like Warner.
• 'where messages on social media could lead to arrest and where someone could be sent to jail for an offensive slogan on his T-shirt'* - similar to the last point, and, again, I do not see what this has to do with marxism. From what I can gather, he sees marxism as the creation of a godless, pro-communism hegemony, and criticises it as such. This ignores the role that hegemony plays in every political ideology. Marxism does intend, as Gramsci said, to create a working class hegemony, much like how capitalism creates a ruling class hegemony - the latter defended to the death by Warner. The problem is that Warner does not seem to see the creation of a capitalist hegemony. And if he does, he has no problem with it, thus making him a hypocrite.   
• 'When Marxism stops goose-stepping it is not dead: it is coming in by the back door' - a nice outing for the old 'far-left and far-right politics are both at the extreme ends of the spectrum that the spectrum turns into a circle, or something. Whatever, both are the same thing. IT WAS CALLED THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST PARTY FOR A REASON YOU KNOW!' fallacy.

Gerald - just shut up, pal.


*Here, I assume Warner is referencing Barry Thew, who was jailed this week for wearing a shirt reading 'One Less Pig - Perfect Justice' and 'kill a cop 4fun.com ha, haaa?' [sic] the day that two police officers were shot and killed in Manchester. In this case, I am actually inclined to agree with Warner - Thew should not have been jailed. His t-shirt was offensive, but his wearing it on that day was a coinsidence - he was wearing it the day before as well. The 'one less pig' part should testify to this - surely, if he was referencing the shooting, he would have written 'two less pigs' or something similar. The media reporting of the story has also failed to mention an important fact - that Thew's son was killed by the police three years ago. I planned to make this into a longer post, but never had the time or effort required.