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.

A rant about Gerald Warner

Sunday is Funday, especially if you are Gerald Warner, professional misery-guts and right-wing writer. He is Richard Littlejohn, if Littlejohn were a Will Self-level thesaurus botherer, and wrote a column for the Scotland on Sunday.

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.

 - from 'Statue of George at the BBC would be truly Orwellian'

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.