Considering patriotism in the context of anti-establishment politics

Two things happened to me this week that made me consider what it means to be patriotic.

First, I got hold of a copy of the new Titus Andronicus album Local Business. Titus Andronicus, especially on their last two albums, have a strong sense of patriotism and love (sometime begrudging) towards America.

A photo from the lyrics booklet of Local Business

Second, a few days after that, I attended a Yes Scotland meeting/debate in Falkirk, which aimed to continue the spread of grassroots activism which many people say will be the key to Scottish independence.

Throughout my life I have been uncomfortable with the concept of patriotism and, especially, nationalism. Not just uncomfortable, in that I felt these terms could never apply to me, but also struck with a sense that to pride yourself on what imagined community (to use Benedict Anderson’s phrase) you were randomly born in was absurd.

Similarly, although until recently my politics were ill-defined I’ve always desired to be ‘anti-establishment’ in some way. I’ve long idolised punk music and the protests of May ’68. I was enthralled by the anti-globalisation protests in Scotland against the G8 when I was younger, even though I had no real idea what they meant. Patriotism/nationalism – essentially, allegiance to ‘the state’ and its historical, usually conservative context – was against what I scratchily believed in.

Back to Titus Andronicus – one of the reasons I love them is that they are a proper punk-rock band, in ethic more so than aesthetic. They, like all punk should, eschew the mainstream, corporate music industry. And yet they, as I pointed out above, have a strong current of patriotism that runs through their music. Is this compatible? An excellent Stereogum article by Liz Pelly asks this question, framing the attempts of Titus Andronicus to bridge the void between punk and patriotism (a quest made explicit on several occasions by several members of the band, as Pelly notes) in a wider sense of where Americans, of their generation, also belong in this context. Pelly, like TA, believe it is possible to be both and patriotic. In fact, to be both can even be radical - the virtues of the Founding Fathers are so different from the current American values, yet actually similar to the values of punk. Therefore, embracing true' Americanism, and at the same time punk ethics, are a rebellion against contemporary neo-liberal, Christian right America. 

This I find very interesting, mainly because listening to Titus actually makes me feel faintly patriotic for the US (to put this in context, I never been to America and, as befits my radical politics I talked about earlier, have long considered them 'the enemy'). I feel as if I can believe in the early disciplines of America, which were based on liberty and equality. Current America has twisted the 'American Dream' to mean that the only way to be truly free is economically, and this, to some extend, makes me sad. America could - should - be a great country. It is not. It may never be.

So how does this fit into Scottish patriotism? I could not consider myself an American patriot, as I am not American. Can I consider myself a Scottish patriot?

I do not love Scotland - at least, I do not love it unconditionally. There are things I love about Scotland, certainly. The country has a fantastic scientific and cultural legacy for it's size. Two of the greatest novels I've ever read, Alisdair Grey's Lanark and James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner are both particularly Scottish novels, in that they would lose their impact of separated from their national context. Both novels aim to say something about Scottish national identity - Lanark through politics, Confessions... through religious mortality (I'm aware this is a hugely simplistic explanation).

I love that in certain parts of Scotland (Glasgow, and the general Western Scotland area) it's acceptable to use the otherwise offensive word 'cunt' as a term of affection (e.g. "See that cunt over there?" "You're an alright cunt!"). I even love Scottish football, grudgingly. 

On the other hand, combined with a dislike for kilts and bagpipes, I still cannot feel comfortable with patriotism. Therefore, I could never love Scotland in the way that many of the people at the Yes Scotland meeting certainly did.   

In that case, why am I so devoted to the cause of Scottish independence? Other than a hatred for Britain as an entity and identity, I love what Scotland could be. I've written before about the strain of working class pride that is deeply ingrained in parts of Scotland, and that these would come to the forefront of Scottish politics were independence to be achieved. The Scottish Labour party, traditionally the main Scottish party (although heavily defeated by the SNP at the last general election here) are inexcusably tied to the reactionary British Labour party, which is still shrouded by New Labour and ashamed of it's working class, trade union roots. It is hopeless, and the Scottish Labour party is tainted by association*. People on Scotland (including myself, until recently) overwhelmingly voted for Labour as a way to combat the legions of Tories from across the border. We would no longer need to do that in an independent Scotland. At the Yes Scotland meeting, local author Alan Bisset laid out his vision for the future of Scottish politics. It goes:

• Under independence, the centrist SNP would become the party of the establishment
• The current largely pro-union, right of centre Labour party would disintegrate, being reborn as a smaller but left-wing Labour party, comprised of those MSPs who were pro-independence
• The Tories, entirely pro-union, would also wither away to even greater political insignificance than they already have**. The Lib Dems have already done so.
• The Green party, currently with two MSPs and numerous councillors around the country, would be resurgent, as would the SSP (or, even better, a Left Front-type group of the various small 'People's Front of Judea' parties of the Scottish left)
• Therefore, the shape of the Scottish parliament would be overwhelmingly left-leaning to openly left-wing.

This all brings me back to what we can justifiably be proud of - what we are working to. In this context, patriotism could be seen as something to earn. We must build a country to be proud of, not just settle with mild pride for what we have. Independence is just a facet of this. The problems in Scotland will not disappear overnight come a Yes vote in 2014. Years of hard work will follow. What differs from the rest of Britain (I could be a British patriot, but I am vehemently not) is that in Scotland this remains a faint possibility. The nature of Britain, with it's power structure concentrated in the hands of the rich and the privileged, a power solidified through time.

As Alisdair Grey said in my linked article above, "Work as if you live in the earlier days of a better nation". A nation that one day we could concievably be proud of. 


*A month or so ago two incidents concerning these two Labour parties almost motivated me to write a mocking obituary of the party. The first being Ed Miliband admitting in an interview with the Telegraph that he admired Thatcher. The second being Johann Lamont attempting to remove Scottish Labour's dedication to the welfare state. I never wrote it, but I meant it - the Labour party can no longer be seen as the party of social progress.

** I follow the situation of the Scottish Conservative party with some interest, and, given my hatred for all things Tory, a good deal of laughing. They exist in a strange nether-zone - big enough to have a good presence in the Scottish parliament, but not quite big enough to actually have any real impact on the goings-on. The Greens only have two MSPs, but they a fringe party, and so shouldn't be expected to have a huge number. The Tories also have such a toxic reputation in Scotland that no one dare work with them - there are certainly smaller parties with less supporters, but perhaps no major party endures the hatred that the Tories have in here. It's so bad that one of the contenders for the party leadership wanted to disband the entire party and re-brand it as something non-Tory, as to avoid the bad rep.


http://500revolutions.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/album-review-titus-andronicus-local.html

“Writing Matters. Writing always matters”: considering the recent Robert Florence controversy

Although I have no real knowledge of contemporary video games, I’ve been reading with interest about the scandal which has affected Scottish comedian Robert Florence over the past few days, and his reaction to it. Florence writes a column for Eurogamer, and his most recent one looked at a picture of another, fully professional,* games journalist Geoff Keighley sitting beside a table of Mountain Dew and Doritos, and in front of a promo poster for Halo 4. Here is a writer indulging in shameless promotion for the same product he should be critiquing, as well as stuffing his face with garish manufactured foods, as well as the profits of these foods. 

 

Later Florence brings up an example of professional games journalists happily entering a Twitter competition to win a PS3, a competition which involved tweeting about certain games using a certain hashtag. An argument broke out between various writers arguing over whether it was acceptable for people in their profession to enter, and win, these competitions. Two who defended it are named as Lauren Wainwright and Dave Cook (again, I know little about gaming, and I’ve never heard of these two, so I’m quite out of my depth in this way. I only know Robert Florence from his excellent comedy Burniston, which you should definitely watch).

In his article Florence criticises Cook’s response: that a hashtag is not an advert. Which it is, hence why companies pay for sponsored hashtags to trend on Twitter, and companies give away PS3s to people to use their hashtag. Florence also wrote that, after reading Wainwright’s tweets defending this kind of corporate relationship with journalists he was unable to take any sentiments she had about gaming seriously.

This is where everything got out of hand. Enter scandal.

Lauren Wainwright complained the article was libellous, and Eurogamer pulled it. The article, which you can still read in full here, contains nothing libellous, certainly not that I can see. Wainwright is not even Florence’s target, as he takes care to note. His problem is with the system that binds together journalists and corporate PR men. Wainright, Cook and Keighley just happened to enter his field of view at this time. As he says, any other day and it could have been two different journalists. Had it happened even a day later it would not even had made it into his article.

In the first half of the article Florence also tackles the problem of the Games Media Awards, where the PR men of the games industry converge with the writers of the games industry to drink and slap backs. He says:

The GMAs shouldn’t exist. By rights, that room should be full of people who feel uncomfortable in each other’s company. PR people should be looking at games journos and thinking “That person makes my job very challenging.” Why are they all best buddies? What the hell is going on?

On the first read I thought that Florence was making a crass joke about gamers being socially awkward. He’s a better writer than this, obviously, and his greater point, and the point of this article, is that these people shouldn’t be friends, not because of personalities, but because of their jobs. The writers are ‘journalists’. They are intended to be separate from the industry, of which these PR men are very much a part. This fault line should run through all industries. It is expected that politics journalists should stand outside the political world, shining a light into the dimly-light rooms of power and showing the results to the wider world. This should be replicated at all levels of journalism, down to ones which are regarded as the least important, like film and games.

But it’s not the case. As Robert Florence points out in both of the articles I’ve linked to above, journalists and industry men mingle. It benefits both sides, in the short term – journos get rewarded with prizes and exclusives, the PR and marketing men get some help to shift their product, be it a new Michael Bay movie, JLS album, or Call of Duty. In the long term, however, the reputation of the writers are sullied – they are not longer proper journalists, but mouthpieces for companies. They are the new PR men, albeit on likely much lower salaries. The marketing guys, they continue as usual, moving from product to product. It matters not to them.

How does wrong-doing become institutionalised? The police force is institutionally racist not because it is comprised entirely of racists (they’re not, probably). What happens is that the racism of some is overlooked and accepted by those who may be non-racists. A bond is created where racist is accepted. Managers and bosses, who could use their rank to do something in fact do nothing, either because they do not want to risk a mutiny from their troops. New officers join a police force in which racism has been normalised, and the need to conform and fit into a group which may be hostile to newcomers means that they to turn a blind eye. And so it continues, wasting the lives of black and Asian youths with impunity. With the Savile investigation widening by the day, institutionalised child abuse and victim shaming may well be revealed. It will have come about in the same way, with the opinion formers (popular or high ranking police officers in the first example, celebrities and producers in the second) leading the way.

The examples are not on the same scale as writing about games from freebies, but the method is the same - the system adopts a method, the method becomes the system. It becomes so ingrained that to separate the two becomes impossible, and the system, the industry, or the professional, must be torn down and rebuilt, forever noting the lessons of the old.

I made a similar point about football earlier on this blog, and, of course, this is rather drastic. You may ask - is it even worth it for writing reviews of films or games or music? Florence tackles this as well. He said in his reply in the aftermath of the scandal that what he was saying was about writing and journalism on a wider scale, not a positive review of Fifa 13. I touched on this earlier. Writing 'always matters' he says, and it does. It definitely does. Again: journalists are how we mediate the wider world. They channel real life events into news, which is how the vast majority of us consume these events. You may say that writing about music does not matter, but what if every journalist wrote an article about how much of a cock Chris Brown is? Not just the rock/indie critics who hated his music anyway, and have fun with how creative they can get obliterating his album. I people who write about pop music, who's writing is actually read by the fans of Chris Brown.

The fact that Chris Brown attacked his girlfriend and showed no remorse for it would concern no one outside their immediate circle of friends, were Chris Brown and Rihanna not hugely influential and opinion forming for millions of young people. What does it tell pre-teens and teenagers, who are going through a formative stage of their lives, especially where relationships are concerned, that a man can attack his partner, and he will be forgiven, and continue to be successful? The reason Chris Brown continues to be successful is that he receives backing from a music industry with no moral compass, and is not repeatedly slaughtered in the pop press for what he did. Because, ultimately, these pop journalists are part of the same music industry. They continue to support the career of a vile man they could, and should, have ditched ages ago. But Brown turned a profit, something that is increasingly difficult to come by nowadays. Ditch him and you have to find some new singer to mould into a teenage heartthrob.

Of course, the nature of journalism does not always come down to incidents as important as this. At the root of all this is that old saying 'journalistic integrity'. Journalistic integrity is removed as soon as you step within the realm of the industry you claim to critique. As soon as you give something a positive review for a ticket to the Brit Awards. As soon as you prop up the career of a domestic abuser who happens to be a flavour of the month beloved by marketing and PR groups of record labels. As soon as you don't report a politician for wrong-doing because you have drinks together every Friday. As soon as you accept a PS3 for tweeting in support of a company. Without journalistic integrity what are we left with?

Empty words on a page. An industry not dead, but lifeless.      

  

*I use the term ‘fully professional’ here to denote a difference between Florence and Keighley, not as a slight at the former. From my perspective, Florence is a comedian with a sideline in games writing, whereas Keighley earns his wages solely from writing.

Album Review: Titus Andronicus - 'Local Business'

RATING: 8/10

How do you follow an album like The Monitor? It's an album adored by many people (me included), one of the best of the last decade. It sums up the ethos and attitude of Titus Andronicus so competely that it will always be regarded as their calling card.

The first point to make is that Local Business is not The Monitor. Nor is it simply The Monitor: Part Two. To try to top it would be foolish, so Titus Andronicus have shifted their sound to a different plane. The entire album feels less ramshackle. The songs are reined in, the band itself thinned down and refined to a core of five. Singer Patrick Stickles sounds less like he is hauling notes out of his throat from the pit his stomache, and the pace throughout is slower, like an album comprised of the first half of 'Theme From Cheers.' Overall, Titus Andronicus continue to draw from their punk rock background - when I considered this at first, I wanted to draw a comparison to The Clash recording London Calling, embracing a world of different influences as the confines of punk music dawned on them. But, despite adopting a style more suited to classic rock (there's even a hint of country rock at the start of '(I Am The) Electric Man') Titus still stay true to their roots. After all, they expanded a love of punk into a concept album about the American Civil War as a metaphor for a coming of age journey to New Jersey. The boundaries of genre perhaps do not matter here.

Punk or no punk, Stickles' lyrics continue the trend found in both The Monitor and their debut The Airing of Grievances. Albert Camus continues to linger a heavy influence ('Titus Andronicus Vs. The Absurd Universe (3rd Round KO)' being a good example, with it's sole lyric of 'I am going insane'). The opening gambit of Local Business is: 

Okay, I think, by now, we've established that everything is inherantly worthless
And there is nothing in the universe with any kind of objective purpose

Later in the same song:

I heard about my authentic self - what would I say were I ever to meet him?
I guess "Yr guilty of a terrible crime, and I know it was my birth"
I'm doing twenty-six to life now on planet Earth

An obsession with Camus' Absurd prevails, but the most powerful section of the album is when Stickles addresses his eating disorder on the self-explanitory 'My Eating Disorder', (preceded by the ironic 'Food Fight!'). Detailing the 'amorphous monster' that prevents him from consuming food, he moves between the artifical medication of vitamin pills and the self-medication of cigarettes.

Again, like their previous two albums the lyrics are strong, with regular moments of genius.

Your gonna get your chance to be hung
You'll make a great gift to gracious girls
Try to swallow while your still young
That your dick's too short to fuck the world

is an early personal favourite. The only problem is that some the lyrics begin to seem lazy. Both 'Titus Andronicus Vs The Absurd Universe' and 'Food Fight!' are limited to one line each, while the album closer 'Tried To Quit Smoking' has good lines, but makes the mistake of stretching them over ten minutes which begin to drag half way through. The astonishing 'The Battle of Hampton Roads' which closes The Monitor, by comparison, runs for fourteen minutes and flies by, by virtue of cramming in as many ideas as you could find in entire albums by other bands.

And there, the main problem with Local Business raises it's head again - the spectre of The Monitor, in escapable. Simply, Local Business is on no level as good as it's predesessor. We never should have expected it to be. The trouble is not with the album, but with the expectations. As a stand-alone album, Local Business is great - as part of the wider Titus Andronicus canon, not so much.

In an interview to promote The Monitor, Patrick Stickles remarked that the Civil War battleship from which the album took his name from hung over his thoughts, and his experience with New Jersey, that The Monitor, as impressive as it was, began to cloud everything. How right he was. 

Random thoughts on: the American election

Drones

One thing that creeps up in commentaries of the election now and again is that Americans don't really care that much about foreign policy, certainly not much further than advancing American superiority. The last of the three presidential debates, held earlier this week in Florida, focused on foreign policy, and drew the smallest TV audience of them all, the bigger concern of the economy having passed by. I'm not sure whether this has always been the case, but it certainly would explain why so many atrocities carried out by America have gone unpunished by the electorate.

Obama's use of drones in Pakistan, with the aim of tackling al-Qaeda, should be the subject of endless criticism, certainly by his own party. We can expect the Republicans to endorse such measures, but the Democrats have lost any sort of moral highground they may have had. Obama supporter Joe Klein offered a stunningly vile defence of the drone tactics, heavily criticised for the indiscriminate murder of innocent people, killed because they happen to be within half a mile of a suspect (I'd imagine the term 'suspect' in this case is stretching it, slightly). Glenn Greewald offers a brilliant dissection of Klein's comments on the Guardian, but they boil down to the fact that Klein believes, among other things, that the killing of children in the Middle East could be justified if it stopped the killing of American children. Greenwald notes this is the same mentality that many terrorists have - that their killing of American children will, in turn, protect their own. He places the life of an American above that of the life of anyone else, for the sole reason that they are an American.

As I said, coming from a neocon party that also wants to ban abortion and disenfranchise Democrat voters, would be sad, but expected. In the context of the 'liberal' or 'left' side of American politics (if such a thing even exists, it is made even worse. They are the 'good guys' - now, sunk to the level of the classic villains, they have rendered themselves worthless.

Mitt Romney

Obama is lucky to go up against Mitt Romney - Romney, hides Obama's many faults by simply showing off his far greater ones. The man is an idiot, to an astonishing level.  What's even more surprising is that this is somewhat of a trend for America, which is beginning to make a habit of support morons.

With Obama hemorrhaging liberal support, and the economy still suffering, had he gone up against a strong opponent he likely would have lost. Romney is, to use the media term, 'gaffe prone', much in the same way that Larry David is. This, perhaps, is why Obama's put down in the recent debate, where he explained to Mitt that the army doesn't need horses and bayonets anymore, was so popular - people perhaps believed that Romney literally had no idea how the army worked or what it did. It furthered the idea that Obama is more effortlessly comfortable than Romney could ever be. Obama, for all his faults, always has his cool.

Implications worldwide

A recent poll found that 40% of people worldwide would like to vote in the American elections, such is the influence of the country. But would this make a difference? America is not really a democracy - America, the self-regarding superpower functions outwith the poltical sphere of the country. It continues to remove whatever democratically elected governments it feels like. It supports coups, sells weapons to dictators at a profit before claiming they are glad to see them go during the Arab Spring. It launches global campaigns against 'evils' - communism, Islamic fundamentalist terrorism etc., rampaging around the world in pursuit of vaguely defined goals of victory. It will, no matter who is elected, remain run by businesses, and will murder innocent children in pursuit of killing someone who might be a member of al-Qaeda.

The elections surrounding the American machine are nothing more than way to choose the representative of said machine.

The end of the BNP is not the end of racism

Picture taken from politicalscrapbook.net

 

Nick Griffin severed another artery of his already mortally-wounded career earlier, tweeting the private address of a gay couple who had won a ruling against the owners of a B&B who had refused them entry based on their sexuality. The original story emerged a few years ago, if I remember correctly, but the court case only wrapped up today.

 

Griffin's basis for these tweets was apparently that people should be allowed to turn away anyone they want from their house - which is a neat way of disguising your homophobia, I reckon. As is using the phrase 'heterophobia', which has afflicted literally no one in history, except those who think not being about to daub 'fag scum' on a gay neighbour's car is classed as a breach on their human rights, and a breach undertaken solely because they're not gay. To complain about being disadvantaged as a heterosexual - in the same way a person would claim to be disadvantaged because they were a white, western, Christian male - is hugely offensive to those groups who have been genuinely disadvantaged in society, and continue to be at all junctures.

 

So Griffin's career is gone, even more than it was already. His BNP party, which for all intents and purposes he embodies, has limped through a collapse in finances (it couldn't even raise enough money to stand candidates in last Scottish local council elections), in-fighting (Griffin has used party rules to solidify his standing as leader, meaning that disgruntled members leave than attempt reform) a splintering of the far-right in Britain, between both political groups and street-level protest movements, and, as a result of all three, a hemorrhaging of votes at all levels. The surge of support the party experienced as a result of Labour voters leaving their traditional party has subsided as the Tories have regained their 'hatred figures for the working class' throne.

 

The BNP, once the figurehead of the British far-right, have faded from view, and will only keep fading. It didn't even seem that long ago that Griffin was panicking the establishment and provoking swathes of though-pieces with his impending appearance on Question Time. How he sits at home, tweeting angrily into the virtual abyss like the rest of us.

 

I for one, as someone who would proudly call themselves an anti-fascist, am happy to see the BNP go. Thousands, millions of people across the country will cheer their demise, which is becoming clearer even to those with only a casual interest in politics (the initial signs of the death of the BNP came by piecing together the tabloid-style gossip articles of Hope Not Hate). However, I still feel uneasy. 

 

The BNP are not British racism as a whole. As a figurehead they essentially gave a face to the movement - a face to be egged, a face to be despised. But the demise of the BNP does not mean the demise of racism and fascism in this country. Many people who voted for the BNP were disaffected Labour voters looking for a protest vote, and the party were able to fill the void - something that the Lib Dems couldn't do, and the Tories wouldn't even bother trying to do. These people will perhaps not vote for them again, and may go back to Labour, which is fine.

 

But many more voted for the BNP because they genuinely hate and fear immigrants, Muslims, or homosexuals. These people require an outlet. Parties like the English Democrats, the British Freedom Party allow for this, despite their petty squabbles. More worryingly, the EDL, and it's Scottish and Welsh associates (which are, admittedly, less popular) have allowed frustrations with the slow movement of the BNP to develop into a hooligan-based street movement.

 

For example - the BNP promise a break-through at the next election. Months of campaigning follow, but they finished 5th, barely retaining their deposit. Wait another five years, they say, and we'll have another crack at it. For all that the BNP have warned of a current crisis of immigration and Sharia law, they don't seem capable of doing anything quickly.

 

Along come the EDL, which is able to hold flash-mobs just a few hours after they find out that ASDA is selling Muesli, which looks a bit like it says MUSLIM! They have a bad demonstration, they can just try again next weekend, rather than next year, or at some point within the next five. The EDL are a greater threat that the BNP ever were, mainly for this reason - they allow the mobility and physical manifestation of this hatred. We can only bless them for being a disorganised, drunken mess - had they taken on the usual neatness of fascism and all started wearing the same colour shirts the people would have got behind them years ago and the government would have fallen.

 

What has puzzled many people is why significant numbers of the electorate choose Nick Griffin and his BNP as their representatives, and, now, how they can also back the EDL, and their various off-shoots. One answer is the simplest - support for extreme politics always surges in times of economic crisis. It happened, perhaps most notably, in the Weimar Republic, where the vote of the Nazi party directly correlates with the state of the economy. Greece has experienced a rise from both sides, with SYRIZA and Golden Dawn both emerging from electoral obscurity in the past few years.

 

But the real answer is more worrying, and harder to face. The racism which manifests itself directly in the far-right comes from our society as a whole. It comes from the newspapers, like the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, the Sun, the Daily Star, which regularly run negative stories about asylum seekers and Muslims. These institutions would deny that they are racist, and will attack far-right groups (although the Star has, in the past, ran pro-EDL stories) they contribute to the creation of a racist hegemony. They maintain the idea of Britain as a white, Christian, straight country, and their attitude in the stories reflect this. 

 

If the only news you got about Muslims was from The Sun, and the only person you talked to about Muslims got their information from the Daily Star, the allegedly-subconsious pattern of anti-Islam stories would likely forment in your mind - especially if these people are made a scapegoat for your problems*.

 

Celebrating the death of the BNP, and perhaps soon the EDL, is good, and I surely will. But we, as a society, must not only be wary of the other groups that spring up in their place, but of racism as a whole. Racism does not only exist when manifested in a political group. It seeps into every area of society, usually hidden in plain site - on the front page of a national newspaper, for example.

 

*Just thinking aloud here (well, typing aloud, or something) but can there be any correlation between the fact that many people in post-industrialised areas live in deprivation because of the policies of Thatcher, and that the newspapers which run stories claiming that 'immigrants took all our jobs' supported Thatcher?    



 

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.

On Caitlin Moran and feminism

The above (taken from the STFU Moffat tumblr site, which is doing lots of good stuff) created a Twitterstorm (are they still called that) based around Caitlin Moran, who is probably the British figurehead for feminism at the moment.

For a bit of context, Moran stated that she did not care that Dunham's hit TV show Girls contains no ethnic minorities, despite being set in New York, a city with a huge variety of people of different races. I haven't actually seen Girls, as I don't think it's been shown in Britain yet, so I don't know if the 'complete and utter lack of people of colour' refers just to the main characters, or to the cast as a whole. Either way, this seems like a strange case of casting.

The main issue that people took with Moran was that she stated that she didn't care about the race inequality in the show, prompting people to argue with her. Later, in an act of self-aggrandisement that would make Ricky Gervias baulk, proceeded to personally thank everyone that defended her.

The problem with Moran's statement is that she acts as if the role of race in the media doesn't matter. It does. Everything does, in terms of the media. Moran, as a feminist, should be aware that patriarchy is spread - partially, but not totally - through the portrayal of women in the media, the prime example being the prominence of rape culture.

In the case of Girls, which was frequently labelled the successor to Sex In The City, there's a belief that it may become one of those cult shows which people will want to model their life around - there's a consensus that the growth in popularity of coffee-shop socialising in the nineties was due to Friends (Friends wasn't quite a cult show in the strictest sense of the word - it had a devoted fanbase, but the fanbase was massive. It's not cult in the way Arrested Development is.) I'd imagine that Sex In The City prompted groups of women in fours to sit in cocktail bars and talk about their sex lives. Emulating lives lead on screen is a natural extension of escapism.

But Girls (as with all the shows mentioned above, in fact) the lack of a variety of race, though subconscious, will have an effect. All the above groups are populated entirely by white people - usually middle-class white people. What does this say to people - it says that the perfect group of friends you can have are white, middle-class, cis-gendered, straight, etc.

Moran's brand of feminism - I guess you could call it 'liberal feminism' - fails to address the theory of intersectionality - that social inequality is not simply found on one plain, and that gender inequality cannot be separated from the class struggle, the civil rights movement, the fight for homosexual rights - essentially, all fields of identity can, and should be considered.

I've touched on this once before on this blog, during a post about George Galloway's 'in the sex game' comments about Julian Assange. He claims to be a socialist, but, by being a misogynist, he simply cannot be - equality, in class terms, cannot just be for men.

Many people have had objections to Moran's liberal feminism, largely critquing her massively successful book How To Be A Woman. I haven't read it, so my views of it do come from blogs which have written about it. These blogs do quote heavily from the book, and usually give as much context as it is possible to give, so hopefully I am not too far off from what Moran meant, and won't look like too much of a fool.

From what I understand Moran regularly makes jokes about woman, jokes which you'd expect to find being made by someone who reached their twenties before poltical correctness emerged.* Jokes about woman being overly emotional, or scared of spiders, or being unable to drive. Essentially, jokes which force woman into a single hegemonic grouping. Moran's use of these jokes is an extension of the point which I made above - her ignorance of the cultural hegemony which allows patriarchy to survive.

Similarly, and this a point which I don't understand, she asks for over-the-top praise of male feminists. Treating a male feminist in this way, and worshipping his body in such a way, is problematic for a number of reasons. Us men shouldn't be congratulated for being pro-feminists/feminist allies - it should be expected. Certainly, not enough men are pro-feminists, but we should not be treated as superior to female feminists for being so.

Secondly, the sexualised imageary advances the stereotype of men pretending to be feminists so that they can sleep with women. Under no circumstances should this idea be popularised, as it would build a hollow-shell feminism which would crumble as soon as the men found a new way to talk women into bed.

I don't doubt that Moran is actually a feminist, and, like the poster on STFU Moffat, think that she has done of good job of pulling feminism back into the mainsteam (slightly) and helping to remove some of the stigma attached to calling yourself a feminist (although this still has far to go). The problem is that Moran has limited this burst of feminism to a type that ignores the factors surrounding gender equality.

My belief, for what it's worth, is that patriarchy is implicit in capitalism. Capitalism reduces people to the roles exploiters and victims on all levels; the standard bourgeoisie and proletariat system; the system of imperialist nations and colonies; and, in amongst all this, the relations between men and women. Women are tasked with a vast amount of unpaid labour - raising children, looking after the family home. This idea is being erroded, slowly, but it is still commonplace. By taking apart the class system, we can remove the patriarcal aspect of society. The women's rights movement and class struggle are interlinked. I would hate for Britain for transform into a socialist state, only for women to still be subjugated.

So when we embrace feminism, we should not embrace it as a singular, isolated cause. Feminism must be used in tandem with the struggle for equality of all people. 
  

*Or, alternatively, on of those morons who think they're being clever by being willfully politically incorrect. People who think not being able to use the n-word in public is a disgrace to the concept of human rights. They can often be found saying things like 'You can't even say the word blackboard anymore!' I call this Clarkson Syndrome.