Dorian Lynskey's Blog, page 4

Another kind of patriotism: why the Mail is wrong about Britain

It might seem that there’s not much more to be said about the Daily Mail’s week of horror after the embarrassing flailing of its staff and supporters in various media outlets and Mehdi Hasan’s bravura monologue on Question Time. But one thread that’s worth pursuing is the Mail’s persistent defence of its smear on the grounds that if you are a socialist you must de facto hate Britain.

I am not convinced that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, but I am sure that claiming patriotism for a single political ideology is. The Mail insists that because Ralph Miliband criticised such institutions as public schools and the House of Lords he hated Britain, whereas showing contempt for another set of British institutions (the BBC, the welfare state, trade unions) and values (tolerance, generosity) is the noblest form of national pride. The absurdity should be obvious but I’m not sure the people at the heart of the Mail realise that their hardline Manichean view is profoundly out of step with the public it claims to represent.

Polls suggest that around 20% of the electorate is instinctively very conservative. These voters support Ukip or the Tory right-wing represented by the likes of Daniel Hannan. They are not concerned with political theory so much as with being left bloody well alone: pub garden libertarians. They resent red tape, taxes, political correctness, do-gooders, vegetarians, feminists, environmentalists, foreigners and speed limits. A friend suggested to me that most Ukip supporters are essentially more bothered about parking restrictions than they are about immigration or Europe.

Within that cohort is a much smaller percentage, spiritually aligned with Joseph McCarthy, the John Birch Society and the dark corners of the Establishment that considered mounting a military coup against Labour in the 1970s (I recommend Andy Beckett’s brilliant Pinochet in Piccadilly for more on that weird episode). They include Paul Dacre, Melanie Phillips and the tormented souls who haunt the Telegraph comment section. They are prey to paranoid, apocalyptic visions of a communist takeover, obsessed with the Cold War and the 70s (when many of them were great admirers of General Pinochet), terrified about reds under the bed and the imminent collapse of western civilisation. But what keeps them up at night is comically irrelevant to most Britons: most Mail readers come for the gossip and voyeurism, not the Cold Warrior hysteria. Dacre believes he represents the heart of Middle England, when in fact he represents a single artery, clogged with rage and fear.

Most voters hold a mixed bag of beliefs. On immigration, crime and welfare they swing to the right, so much so that the majority view bears little relation to the facts. On taxes, the minimum wage, trade unions and privatisation, as the New Statesman’s George Eaton illustrates, they favour the left. Naturally, the Mail and its allies venerate the great British public when it toes the line but as soon as it swings the other way it is a “mob”, seduced by crude “populism”. Hence Quentin Letts’ fantastical Question Time vision of the Mail as a gang of anti-establishment guerrilla idealists, defending the underdog against the powers that be. I’d like to think he was just improvising wildly, but I’m scared that he truly believes it.

The Miliband story will fade as the news cycle moves on. I can’t quite believe Gavin Haynes’ eloquent argument that it will bring down Dacre, although my fingers are crossed. What’s important, after this week, is to insist on two things: that the Mail’s core values, laid bare this week, are alien to all but a small, embittered corner of Britain; and that progressive patriotism not only exists but has broad support.

A nation is a marvellously plastic thing, constantly changing, forever fought over, shifting this way and that, accommodating all kinds of contradictions while remaining fundamentally true to itself. At heart I love Britain but I want to change aspects of it for the better, just like Ralph Miliband or Paul Dacre or just about anyone else who lives here. The Mail tried to insist this week that only one vision was valid and it was a lie defended by more lies. In Alastair Campbell’s pungent phrase, it is “the worst of Britain posing as the best,” and that has never been clearer.

 

 

The Daily Mail’s Ralph Miliband editorial: annotated version

For those who don’t want to visit the Daily Mail website but want to know what all the fuss about, here is a helpfully annotated version.

Red Ed’s in a strop with the Mail. Doubtless, he’s miffed that his conference was overshadowed by the revelations of his former friend, the spin doctor Damian McBride, serialised in this paper, which exposed the poisonous heart of the Labour Party.

Ed Miliband is annoyed by something else.

or did he see the funny side when we ridiculed the yucky, lovey-dovey photographs of him and his wife, behaving like a pair of hormonal teenagers in need of a private room.

And something else.

But what has made him vent his spleen — indeed, he has stamped his feet and demanded a right of reply — is a Mail article by Geoffrey Levy on Saturday about the Labour leader’s late father, Ralph, under the arresting headline ‘The Man Who Hated Britain’.

Well OK, he’s mainly annoyed that we accused his late father of hating Britain. Weird.

Of course, it was not the Mail that first drew the prominent Marxist sociologist Professor Ralph Miliband — a man who was not averse to publicity — into the public arena. This was the decision of his son who, for two years running, has told Labour conferences how his refugee father fled Nazi persecution to Britain.

But he asked for it really, banging on about his Jewish father fleeing the Nazi invasion of Belgium.

More pertinent still, McBride argues that Miliband Jnr is obsessed with maintaining Ralph’s legacy.

Winning the leadership, he writes, was Ed’s ‘ultimate tribute’ to his father — an attempt to ‘achieve his father’s vision’.

Although we recently described McBride as “destroyed by his own malign tactics” and “spreading a series of mendacious allegations about prominent Tories”, he is clearly a man of integrity whose insights should be taken as fact.

With this testimony before us, from a former Labour spin doctor who knew Mr Miliband inside out, the Mail felt a duty to lay before our readers the father’s vision that is said to have inspired our would-be next Prime Minister.

“Duty”

How can Ralph Miliband’s vision be declared out of bounds for public discussion — particularly since he spent his entire life attempting to convert the impressionable young to his poisonous creed?

Today, we stand by every word we published on Saturday, from the headline to our assertion that the beliefs of Miliband Snr ‘should disturb everyone who loves this country’.

In his tetchy and menacing response, which we publish in full on these pages, the Labour leader expresses just pride in his father’s war record as a volunteer in the Royal Navy.

We granted him the right to reply but fuck his right to reply, basically.

But he cites this, and his father’s affection for his shipmates (which, as shown on these pages, was riven by class hatred), as if it were conclusive proof that he loved this country.

So how is it that shortly after his arrival in Britain, the 17-year-old Miliband senior had confided to his diary: ‘The Englishman is a rabid nationalist. They are perhaps the most nationalist people in the world . . . you sometimes want them almost to lose [the war] to show them how things are’?

Isn’t it permissible to surmise that a man who had expressed such views joined the Royal Navy not so much to fight for Britain as to fight, like the Soviet Union, against the Nazis?

Despite having just arrived in Britain, Miliband Snr did not love his adopted country as much as he hated the people who would have rounded up him and his family and sent them to concentration camps. There is no chance that his feelings about Britain may have changed one iota during his three years in the Royal Navy, therefore it is fine to discredit his military service. Tragically, all this bloodshed could have been avoided if the British government had heeded the wise words of the Mail’s former proprietor, the 1st Viscount Rothermere, who wrote to Hitler in 1938, congratulating him on his annexation of the Sudetenland: “Frederick the Great was a great popular figure in England. May not Adolf the Great become an equally popular figure? I salute Your Excellency’s star which rises higher and higher.” And to Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, on July 7 1939: “Our two great Nordic countries should pursue resolutely a policy of appeasement for, whatever anyone may say, our two great countries should be the leaders of the world.” Here he is doing his bit for Britain.

Yes, as his son argues, Mr Miliband Snr may have felt gratitude for the security, freedom and comfort he enjoyed in Britain. But what is blindingly clear from everything he wrote throughout his life is that he had nothing but hatred for the values, traditions and institutions — including our great schools, the Church, the Army and even the Sunday papers — that made Britain the safe and free nation in which he and his family flourished.

Loving these institutions is synonymous with loving Britain. Please don’t think it’s different. It’s not. It’s exactly the same.

The constitutional monarchy, the bicameral legislature, property rights, common law . . . even ‘respectability’ and ‘good taste’ — all were anathema to this lifelong, unreconstructed Marxist who craved a workers’ revolution.

To repeat, you cannot be left-wing and love Britain. It’s not possible. That’s just scientific fact.

Significantly, when he defended students for silencing a visiting speaker with whom they disagreed, he wrote: ‘Freedom of speech is not always the overriding criterion.’

Unfortunately we can’t explain the context because this is the only citation of this phrase on the entire internet.

As for the Falklands war, our defence of British sovereignty so appalled him that it moved him to four-letter words of disgust.

He was the only person in Britain to oppose the Falklands War. Why didn’t he just hand the keys to Number 10 to General Galtieri and have done with it? As for the foul language, we believe our editor has made his position perfectly clear.

At the London School of Economics, he was taught and heavily influenced by the extremist Left-winger Harold Laski, who said the use of violence was legitimate in British elections. One of his closest friends was Eric Hobsbawm

He was friends with another left-winger – one whom the Mail trashed as a “traitor” the day after he died. Normally the Mail believes that “bilious hatred and lack of respect for the dead is a disturbing new low in British life” but come on, he was a Marxist. That’s different.

(though, as we reported, at least Miliband wouldn’t join his fellow Marxist in refusing to condemn Stalinism’s mass murders or the brutal Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956).

Miliband Snr didn’t defend Stalin. In fact, his biographer Michael Newman writes: “you see signs of his shift away from [seeing] the Soviet Union as a kind of beacon early, in the 1940s. A long time before Hungary, in other words. He was someone who never had uncritical enthusiasms.” But let’s just throw it in there to make it seem like he almost did.

It is all too easy today to forget that Marxism supplied the philosophical underpinning to a monstrously evil regime.

Under Stalin’s Communism, countless millions were murdered, tortured, starved to death, executed or sent to endure a sub-human existence in the gulags.

Religion, the family and the very spirit of the individual were brutally crushed. The arts, newspapers — justice itself — were ruthlessly controlled by the commissars.

Freedom of expression was purged. Even as late as the Seventies, dissidents were locked in mental asylums, while the Press was controlled by the State for another two decades.

Not to be confused with the regime of General Pinochet, of whom the Daily Mail columnist Paul Johnson said: “I regard the demonisation of General Pinochet as the most successful, mendacious propaganda exercise ever carried out in the 20th century.” Nor indeed with that of Mr Hitler in 1939, to whom the 1st Viscount Rothermere wrote: “My Dear Führer, I have watched with understanding and interest the progress of your great and superhuman work in regenerating your country.”

Truly, Ralph Miliband and Hobsbawm were, in the withering phrase often attributed to Lenin, the ‘useful idiots’ who validated this most pernicious doctrine, which has spread poverty and misery wherever it has triumphed.

That’s why the Mail — which is not Pravda

Just clearing that up

— said that readers who love this country would be truly disturbed if they understood about Miliband’s father’s views.

To be absolutely clear, you cannot love your country if you’re a Marxist, only if you’re a fascist.

We do not maintain, like the jealous God of Deuteronomy, that the iniquity of the fathers should be visited on the sons.

On no account are we to be confused with the jealous God of Deuteronomy. Not even sure why we brought that up to be honest.

But when a son with prime ministerial ambitions swallows his father’s teachings, as the younger Miliband appears to have done, the case is different.

True, Ed Miliband has said: “My father’s strongly Left-wing views are well known, as is the fact that I have pursued a different path and I have a different vision.” But he’s probably lying.

Indeed, his son’s own Marxist values can be seen all too clearly in his plans for state seizures of private land held by builders and for fixing energy prices by government diktat.

Fixing energy prices today, building gulags tomorrow.

More chillingly, the father’s disdain for freedom of expression can be seen in his son’s determination to place the British Press under statutory control.

Getting to the gist here.

Next week the Privy Council, itself an arm of the state, will meet to discuss plans — following a stitch-up with Hacked Off over late-night pizzas in Mr Miliband’s office

Filthy Italian grub. Someone who loved his country would have served roast beef with all the trimmings.

— for what will ultimately be a politically controlled body to oversee what papers are allowed to publish.

Put to one side that Mr Miliband’s close involvement with degenerates such as Damian McBride gives him scant right to claim the moral high ground on anything.

[Is this the same “degenerate” whose word we took as bond when he was sticking it to Ed Miliband earlier on? Subs to check.]

If he crushes the freedom of the Press, no doubt his father will be proud of him from beyond the grave, where he lies 12 yards from the remains of Karl Marx.

Spooky

But he will have driven a hammer and sickle through the heart of the nation so many of us genuinely love.

You can’t drive a hammer through a heart but come on, that’s good stuff.

The L***-W*** Word

 

On Radio 4’s Today programme this morning Justin Webb was interviewing Ed Miliband about his party conference speech. “When you see the headlines saying Red Ed is back, back to the 70s, etcetera, you don’t mind that do you? You don’t mind people saying it’s left-wing. It is,” goaded Webb.

“I don’t see it that way, I see it as a truly One Nation approach,” stammered Miliband, running a mile from the l***-w*** word.

It’s testament to Margaret Thatcher’s legacy, subsequently absorbed and entrenched by New Labour, that “left-wing”, not even the more loaded “socialist”, has the power of a slur as opposed to an obvious truth about a party that originated in the labour movement. Stigmatising an entire wing of political thought is quite an achievement: There Is No Alternative indeed.

You expect this kind of Red Ed guff from the Mail or Telegraph but it’s much more depressing coming from the BBC. People who accuse the corporation of left-wing or right-wing bias are both right and wrong. The BBC’s real bias, shared by most of the mainstream media, is towards certain key assumptions that take on the status of incontrovertible fact. In some cases, for example gay rights and climate change, the assumptions favour the left. In economics, however, they are generally conservative.

One example is that austerity is presented as painful but sensible and necessary while Keynesian economics is eccentric and even dangerous. What makes Keynesianism both brilliant and hard to sell is that is counter-intuitive to people who mistake national budgets for household budgets writ large. To families sat around the proverbial kitchen table the solution to debt is to spend less and the idea of borrowing your way out of a recession with stimulus spending can seem reckless. It’s instinctive but it’s also wrong and the media shouldn’t settle for accepting and reiterating the kitchen-table “commonsense” view.

Another assumption is that wealth matters more than equality, so rising house prices in the South East are instinctively celebrated despite the social damage they cause, intensifying the north-south imbalance and driving workers on modest incomes, let alone benefit claimants, out of the capital. And multinational corporations are depicted as a delicate flowers who might be driven out of the country every time a policy makes the tiniest dent in their profit margins. Some of the very rich have even convinced themselves that they are victims and the actual victims of the finance industry’s malfeasance are brutal bullies. AIG chief executive Bob Benmosche this week compared anger over bankers’ bonuses to racist lynching in the Deep South decades ago.

Yet another conservative assumption is the idea that the economic traumas of the 1970s (a period of unparalleled equality in Britain by the way) were caused by an excess of socialism instead of a number of different factors including oil shocks. This inaccurate bogeyman is revived unquestiongly any time Labour dares to suggest an even mildly left-wing policy. Justin Webb described Labour’s criticism of big businesses as “a throwback”, as if that side of the argument were as redundant as a Bay City Rollers scarf but much more scary. No matter how many businesses are fined by regulators for outrageous misbehaviour, criticism can only mean the dreaded 70s.

The truth is that most governments in most western countries in most decades have overwhelmingly sided with the interests of the rich. Taxes are relatively low, avoidance is rife and employers are courted more assiduously than workers. “Class war” is only ever invoked to describe the attitude of the have-nots, these resentful ingrates who criticise our beloved wealth creators, even though it has been waged consistently from the top down and every important worker’s right has been fought for, not willingly granted by employers. But of course that side of the war has been normalised; only the other side is deemed unreasonable.

These assumptions shape public opinion and therefore policy, which is why Miliband was too nervous to challenge Webb’s hostile use of “left-wing”. The longer they go unchallenged, the more they become absorbed into the bloodstream so that it becomes almost extremist to suggest otherwise: witness how even “liberal” has become a dirty word in US politics. If the Labour party cannot even admit that, however close to the centre it may be, it is left-wing then it is nothing.

 

UPDATE: I love this George Eaton blog for the New Statesman which uses survey stats to show that on many issues the public is at least as “socialist” as Miliband and sometimes moreso. Two days later, I think I underrated Miliband’s courage this week by focussing too much on the language he used. If his new policies continue to enrage so many conservative commentators then he must be doing something right.

The L***-W*** Word: why Labour is scared of itself

 

On Radio 4’s Today programme this morning Justin Webb was interviewing Ed Miliband about his party conference speech. “When you see the headlines saying Red Ed is back, back to the 70s, etcetera, you don’t mind that do you? You don’t mind people saying it’s left-wing. It is,” goaded Webb.

“I don’t see it that way, I see it as a truly One Nation approach,” stammered Miliband, running a mile from the l***-w*** word.

It’s testament to Margaret Thatcher’s legacy, subsequently absorbed and entrenched by New Labour, that “left-wing”, not even the more loaded “socialist”, has the power of a slur as opposed to an obvious truth about a party that originated in the labour movement. Stigmatising an entire wing of political thought is quite an achievement: There Is No Alternative indeed.

You expect this kind of Red Ed guff from the Mail or Telegraph but it’s much more depressing coming from the BBC. People who accuse the corporation of left-wing or right-wing bias are both right and wrong. The BBC’s real bias, shared by most of the mainstream media, is towards certain key assumptions that take on the status of incontrovertible fact. In some cases, for example gay rights and climate change, the assumptions favour the left. In economics, however, they are generally conservative.

One example is that austerity is presented as painful but sensible and necessary while Keynesian economics is eccentric and even dangerous. What makes Keynesianism both brilliant and hard to sell is that is counter-intuitive to people who mistake national budgets for household budgets writ large. To families sat around the proverbial kitchen table the solution to debt is to spend less and the idea of borrowing your way out of a recession with stimulus spending can seem reckless. It’s instinctive but it’s also wrong and the media shouldn’t settle for accepting and reiterating the kitchen-table “commonsense” view.

Another assumption is that wealth matters more than equality, so rising house prices in the South East are instinctively celebrated despite the social damage they cause, intensifying the north-south imbalance and driving workers on modest incomes, let alone benefit claimants, out of the capital. And multinational corporations are depicted as a delicate flowers who might be driven out of the country every time a policy makes the tiniest dent in their profit margins. Some of the very rich have even convinced themselves that they are victims and the actual victims of the finance industry’s malfeasance are brutal bullies. AIG chief executive Bob Benmosche this week compared anger over bankers’ bonuses to racist lynching in the Deep South decades ago.

Yet another conservative assumption is the idea that the economic traumas of the 1970s (a period of unparalleled equality in Britain by the way) were caused by an excess of socialism instead of a number of different factors including oil shocks. This inaccurate bogeyman is revived unquestiongly any time Labour dares to suggest an even mildly left-wing policy. Justin Webb described Labour’s criticism of big businesses as “a throwback”, as if that side of the argument were as redundant as a Bay City Rollers scarf but much more scary. No matter how many businesses are fined by regulators for outrageous misbehaviour, criticism can only mean the dreaded 70s.

The truth is that most governments in most western countries in most decades have overwhelmingly sided with the interests of the rich. Taxes are relatively low, avoidance is rife and employers are courted more assiduously than workers. “Class war” is only ever invoked to describe the attitude of the have-nots, these resentful ingrates who criticise our beloved wealth creators, even though it has been waged consistently from the top down and every important worker’s right has been fought for, not willingly granted by employers. But of course that side of the war has been normalised; only the other side is deemed unreasonable.

These assumptions shape public opinion and therefore policy, which is why Miliband was too nervous to challenge Webb’s hostile use of “left-wing”. The longer they go unchallenged, the more they become absorbed into the bloodstream so that it becomes almost extremist to suggest otherwise: witness how even “liberal” has become a dirty word in US politics. If the Labour party cannot even admit that, however close to the centre it may be, it is left-wing then it is nothing.

 

Remembering the other 9/11: Chile, 1973

President Salvador Allende’s final speech during the coup led by General Pinochet, future friend of Margaret Thatcher and pioneer of the free market shock doctrine:

My friends,

Surely this will be the last opportunity for me to address you. The Air Force has bombed the towers of Radio Portales and Radio Corporación.

My words do not have bitterness but disappointment. May they be a moral punishment for those who have betrayed their oath: soldiers of Chile, titular commanders in chief, Admiral Merino, who has designated himself Commander of the Navy, and Mr. Mendoza, the despicable general who only yesterday pledged his fidelity and loyalty to the Government, and who also has appointed himself Chief of the Carabineros [national police].

Given these facts, the only thing left for me is to say to workers: I am not going to resign! 

Placed in a historic transition, I will pay for loyalty to the people with my life. And I say to them that I am certain that the seed which we have planted in the good conscience of thousands and thousands of Chileans will not be shriveled forever.

They have strength and will be able to dominate us, but social processes can be arrested neither by crime nor force. History is ours, and people make history.

Workers of my country: I want to thank you for the loyalty that you always had, the confidence that you deposited in a man who was only an interpreter of great yearnings for justice, who gave his word that he would respect the Constitution and the law and did just that. At this definitive moment, the last moment when I can address you, I wish you to take advantage of the lesson: foreign capital, imperialism, together with the reaction, created the climate in which the Armed Forces broke their tradition, the tradition taught by General Schneider and reaffirmed by Commander Araya, victims of the same social sector which will today be in their homes hoping, with foreign assistance, to retake power to continue defending their profits and their privileges.

I address, above all, the modest woman of our land, the campesina who believed in us, the worker who labored more, the mother who knew our concern for children. I address professionals of Chile, patriotic professionals, those who days ago continued working against the sedition sponsored by professional associations, class-based associations that also defended the advantages which a capitalist society grants to a few.  

I address the youth, those who sang and gave us their joy and their spirit of struggle. I address the man of Chile, the worker, the farmer, the intellectual, those who will be persecuted, because in our country fascism has been already present for many hours — in terrorist attacks, blowing up the bridges, cutting the railroad tracks, destroying the oil and gas pipelines, in the face of the silence of those who had the obligation to protect them.  They were committed. History will judge them.

Surely Radio Magallanes will be silenced, and the calm metal instrument of my voice will no longer reach you. It does not matter. You will continue hearing it. I will always be next to you. At least my memory will be that of a man of dignity who was loyal to [inaudible] the workers.

The people must defend themselves, but they must not sacrifice themselves. The people must not let themselves be destroyed or riddled with bullets, but they cannot be humiliated either.

Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Go forward knowing that, sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again where free men will walk to build a better society.

Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers!

These are my last words, and I am certain that my sacrifice will not be in vain, I am certain that, at the very least, it will be a moral lesson that will punish felony, cowardice, and treason.

Santiago de Chile, 11 September 1973

After Pussy Riot, let’s talk about Weld El 15

Remember Pussy Riot? Of course you do. They’re the world’s most famous dissident musicians and their visit to Yoko Ono’s Meltdown last week inspired a fresh wave of well-deserved coverage, including this excellent piece by Laurie Penny. While they remain in the news so do other injustices in Russia such as the Bolotnaya Square case.

So why haven’t we heard much about Tunisian rapper Weld El 15, who has been jailed not for an act of physical protest but for a mere song? I only came across the case today, 11 days after his sentencing, thanks to the Care2 petition site and when I searched for his name I found surprisingly little coverage beyond the BBC and Human Rights Watch. In the Guardian, the original in-absentia sentence received just a fleeting mention in this April column by Mona Eltahawy. To my knowledge, no high-profile musician has yet spoken out in his defence.

Weld El 15 (also spelled Oueld El 15), aka Ala Yaakoubi, was jailed for two years for “insulting the police” in his song Boulicia Kleb (Cops Are Dogs) and its music video, which depicts police brutality — the maximum sentence, under Article 128 of the penal code, for defaming public officials. Initially sentenced in March while on the run, he was retried and imprisoned after turning himself in to the police in the hope of a more lenient sentence. This came only a day after a four-month sentence for members of the feminist group Femen, which was also harsher than expected. A journalist and two rappers are currently awaiting trial for allegedly assaulting and abusing police in clashes after Weld El 15′s re-trial

Tunisia appeared to be the Arab Spring’s only success story after the removal of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali two years ago, but under the new regime there has been a protracted crackdown on freedom of speech, driven both by the old institutions and a new wave of ultra-conservative Islamists. Minister of Culture Mehdi Mabrouk’s expression of support for Weld El 15 suggests that there is a battle over freedom of speech within the government itself, but the censors have scored a number of victories. From the Human Rights Watch story:

Since early 2012, there have been numerous cases against journalists, bloggers, artists, and intellectuals for peaceful expression. In September, for example, a public prosecutor brought charges against two sculptors for artworks deemed harmful to public order and good morals. On March 28, the First Instance Criminal Tribunal of Mahdia sentenced two bloggers to prison terms of seven-and-a-half years, confirmed on appeal, for publishing writings perceived as offensive to Islam. On May 3, the First Instance Criminal Tribunal of Tunis fined Nabil Karoui, the owner of the television station Nessma TV, 2,300 dinars (US$1,490) for broadcasting the animated film “Persepolis,” denounced as blasphemous by some Islamists.

Before his re-trial, Weld El 15 said: “In the song, I used the same terms that the police used to speak about the youth. The police have to respect citizens if they want to be respected.” It reminded me of Cop Killer by Ice-T’s rock band Body Count. In 1992 opposition from police and politicians led to the song being deleted from the album and brought to a close hip hop’s most politically outspoken era. But nobody went to jail over Cop Killer, while a very similar song has landed Weld El 15 in prison.

You could argue that Pussy Riot’s international celebrity has done nothing to sway the Russian government and courts, but at least their plight, and that of fellow protesters in Russia, continues to be widely reported. Weld El 15′s case is even more outrageous and disturbing yet has inspired little outcry outside Tunisia. If we care about one group of musicians disproportionately punished for criticising a regime then we should extend that concern to all of them. Signing Care2′s petition to free Weld El 15 would be a start.

Man in the Mirror: the politics of Yeezus

Among the many outlandish claims made by Kanye West in his recent New York Times interview, the most implausible is the one that seems to have passed without comment. “I am in the lineage of Gil Scott-Heron, great activist-type artists,” he said. After hearing Yeezus, I’m more inclined to believe that he’s the black Steve Jobs or Henry Ford than to accept that he’s heir to Scott-Heron.

The second half of that quote — “But I’m also in the lineage of a Miles Davis — you know, that liked nice things also” — is relevant but it’s not news. Kanye has always been conflicted about his desire, as a black man, to acquire the trappings of wealth, albeit not to the point where he considers acquiring less of them. Go back to All Falls Down on 2004’s The College Dropout: “We shine because they hate us, floss cause they degrade us/We trying to buy back our 40 acres/And for that paper, look how low we stoop.”

Diamonds from Sierra Leone, in its remixed version, considered the human cost of luxury (“How could somethin’ so wrong make me feel so right?”) and I even like Good Morning’s “I’m like the fly Malcolm X/Buy any jeans necessary,” because it’s so palpably absurd. I read it as a generational cringe, a wry acknowledgement that African-American stars’ financial and cultural capital is a real achievement but one that pales next to the radical goals of the civil rights movement. In these songs, Kanye is both victim and perpetator: “I ain’t even gon’ act holier than thou/Cause fuck it, I went to Jacob with 25 thou” (All Falls Down). By being implicated in what he criticises he was more challenging and provocative than sanctimonious scolds such as Immortal Technique.

Ironically, back when he was addressing political themes in such a sharp, refreshing way he didn’t make a big deal out of them but the sloppier and more self-obsessed his lyrics, the more he wants to be seen as an important activist-star. “I was able to slip past everything with a pink polo, but I am Dead Prez,” he told the New York Times.

OK, but if you want to pose as a rebel provocateur you need to work a little harder. Hone your thoughts. Read a book or two. Apply some perspective. Don’t treat that lineage as a prop to be manhandled and discarded. The extended Gil Scott-Heron sample which served as a cold blast of reality at the end of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’s claustrophobic narcissism felt like cheap imported gravitas, as if Kanye had to delegate the big-picture thinking rather than attempt it himself.

On Watch the Throne, it’s true, he and Jay-Z briefly acknowledged the world beyond hotel suites and gallery openings on Murder to Excellence, which made some unusually precise observations about black-on-black violence: “314 soldiers died in Iraq/509 died in Chicago.” But they segued uncomfortably into celebrations of their own ascendance to greater things. “In moments like these, Watch the Throne suffers from a perverse sense of perspective, entire histories invoked to justify two men’s fortunes,” wrote Hua Hsu in his terrific Grantland review. “‘This is something like the Holocaust/Millions of our people lost,’” Kanye announces on Who Gon’ Stop Me, offering himself as a reason to remain hopeful: ‘Bow our head and pray to the lord/’Til I die I’ma fucking ball.’”

I’d like to agree with the fair-minded assessment recently offered by stic.man of Dead Prez: “He looks at contradiction as the way things really are. He doesn’t want to fit in any one sided box. I think for him he has found his lane which blends a lot of points of view that are often polarized but with ye’s art it becomes one.” But you can only push a contradiction so far until it snaps in two. As Al Shipley writes in his City Pages review of Yeezus, the best I’ve read, “Increasingly, Kanye West’s lyrics feel like the result of a gross misunderstanding of the phrase ‘the personal is political.’”

Exhibit A is I’m In It, a porn-addled sexual fantasy which cites Martin Luther King (his lover’s braless breasts are “free at last”) and the Black Power salute: “Put my fist in her like a civil rights sign.” You could charitably read these lines as deliberately heretical tilts at black history’s sacred cows but to what end? They just sound like cheap jokes to me, especially in a week when the Supreme Court is poised to overturn Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

But it’s just a warm-up for the breathtaking crassness of Blood on the Leaves, which hijacks Nina Simone’s recording of Strange Fruit to bemoan the outrageous injustice of… alimony. Yes, he really does act as if celebrity divorce is a tribulation to be equated with lynching: he even keeps the line “black bodies swinging”, the original song’s dark, shocking heart. It’s lucky for Kanye that the formidable Simone is dead, because I can’t imagine she’d be overjoyed at being made to serenade a string of petulant misogynist stereotypes. To cap it off, he describes being forced to seat his wife and mistress on opposite sides of a basketball court and says, “I call that apartheid.” Do you, Kanye? Do you really?

At least nothing else on the album displays such colossally moronic tunnel vision. There are, blessedly, no attempts to compare the stress of an uptown limo ride in heavy traffic to the Middle Passage. Instead there are rough drafts of what one day might be fashioned into coherent thoughts. Haunted by the language of race, Black Skinhead sounds like a rebel yell until you crack open its shell and find that its real concern isn’t racism but Kanyewestism. His ability to slam prejudice against interracial relationships (“They see a black man with a white woman/At the top floor they gon’ come to kill King Kong”) only to offer a puerile racial stereotype of his own (“Eatin’ Asian pussy, all I need was sweet-and-sour sauce” — I’m In It) calls into question his alleged self-awareness.

More successfully, New Slaves addresses black stars’ addiction to white-owned luxury brands and the lucrative racism of the prison-industrial complex but doesn’t bother to join the dots between the two, let alone his mother’s childhood in “the era when clean water was only served to the fairer skin”. Whether Kanye thinks a poor black man railroaded into prison for a minor narcotics offence more or less of a “new slave” than a rich one talked into buying a Maybach is unclear. His playful tone on earlier albums made space for such problematic ambiguities about his beliefs and desires but New Slaves’ relentless raw-throated rage — the very thing that makes the track so sonically exciting — cannot accommodate it.

I’ve read enough glowing Yeezus reviews to wonder if I’m being priggish about all this. I’ve liked hip hop long enough not to finger-wag or expect every MC to toe the liberal line, and there are moments on Yeezus as bold and exhilirating as any music I’ve heard this year. I’m bored by rote misogyny but no longer shocked by it. I don’t want Kanye to turn into Talib Kweli. I just wonder when his free pass from critics will expire. Long after the likes of Ice Cube, Eminem and Tyler, the Creator were taken to task for careless or bigoted lyrics despite their prodigious skills, Kanye gets off lightly thanks to the conventional wisdom that he is “messy”, “contradictory” and therefore “fascinating”. But contradiction isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card: it’s a reason to ask tougher questions.

Complaining that Kanye is self-obsessed is like wailing that Sir Mix-A-Lot likes big butts — that’s the schtick — but when that self-obsession thwarts or travesties the language of protest it’s a problem, not an achievement. One absurd review goes so far as to call Yeezus a “confounding, uncompromising protest record” and compare Kanye to Curtis Mayfield, an artist whose almost saintly humility and generosity could not be more different. Even some of my favourite critics are bending over backwards to excuse Kanye’s lyrical weaknesses. “If West’s notions are half-baked, it may be because there’s no percentage in letting them get overcooked into earnestness (viz., three-quarters of ‘conscious’ rap),” writes Slate’s Carl Wilson, as if Kanye could easily develop his themes but fears that he might bore us because, God, coherent ideas, what a snooze.

The real issue, I suspect, is that critics don’t want to seem boring or pompous by subjecting Kanye’s political lyrics to close scrutiny. But go back and read Jon Savage’s review of the second Clash album or Robert Christgau’s complex critique of Ice Cube and you’ll find critics who believe that kind of scrutiny is their job — that if an artist purports to be saying politically important things then their songs should be measured against those claims. Lil Wayne’s boneheaded line about murdered civil rights activist Emmett Till may be worse than anything on Yeezus but at least Wayne never claimed to be a deep thinker. Reviewers who have expressed disquiet over I’m In It and Blood on the Leaves dismiss them as regrettable missteps rather than insights into Kanye’s colossal loss of perspective.

Since My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy appeared to mark Kanye’s coronation as the reigning musical genius of our times, too many critics have seemed willing to assume that he knows exactly what he’s doing and us mortals just can’t decipher his cunning mixed messages. You think a particular line is dumb or repellent? That’s the point, apparently. And those sloppy half-thoughts, nonsequiturs and lame jokes, so different from the beautifully crafted ambivalence of songs like All Falls Down, are meant to be the price we pay for his uncensored honesty.

I don’t buy it. I think Kanye’s narcissism renders his political provocations at best toothless and at worst insulting. Compare the personal pronouns on The College Dropout or Late Registration to those on Yeezus and you can see a dramatic journey from “we” to “me” as his interest in the lives of others shrivels to zero. Kanye flattens the troubled history of black America into a vast mirror so that, when he considers the experiences of millions, all he can see is own face staring back at him. And he wonders why he’s not happy.

Ding Dong ding dong

I wrote a piece about the Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead campaign for the Guardian on Thursday. By the afternoon I was arguing the toss with Tory peer Baroness Buscombe on Radio 4′s PM, by Friday morning the record was front page news and by Friday afternoon the BBC had found the kind of half-assed compromise that satisfies nobody but outrages nobody either, and can therefore be considered making the best of a bad job.

I maintain that the principle was clear. The Radio 1 chart show is fundamentally a news show with a duty to report the record-buying choices of the British public during the preceding week and to play all high-charting new entries. The choice facing the BBC was not whether to endorse the protest or not; it was whether to do its job or to bow to political pressure for censorship. But this clear principle was effectively rendered irrelevant by the media hysteria which forced the BBC to buckle. It feels absurd now. It will seem utterly, stomach-clenchingly ridiculous in retrospect. I haven’t bought the song or encouraged anyone else to but, like a lot of people, I was swayed by the bullying backlash from finding it crass and childish to wanting it to succeed. I’m heartily sick of the Daily Mail’s power to bludgeon organisations into succumbing to its screeching demands, and of the hypocrisy underpinning the backlash. It’s laughable that the right should want a public-service broadcaster to censor the result of free speech, democracy and the free market — that’s how the Top 40 works — and to say that playing the record once on a show that surely none of Thatcher’s friends or family members listen to would be offensive while splashing the same record on the front page of newspapers that those same people read, ensuring that the offence was magnified. Critics of the campaign say that it shows the left at its most vindictive and crass. I would argue that the backlash shows the right in an even worse light. Ironically, I feel sure that Thatcher herself, who faced much fiercer criticism while in Number 10, would have found the whole affair rather comical and shrugged it off. It’s all been a very British farce.

Stand down Margaret

 

 

So much to say about Thatcher and so much has already been said. This morning’s Today programme was the political equivalent of the Here and Now tour, stuffed with 80s veterans rolling out the hits. My small contribution was a blog for the Guardian about her impact on music:

Protest songs thrive on combat. Complicated policy details may cause the songwriter’s pen to freeze but larger-than-life politicians who polarise opinion enable the ink to flow. It is striking that, despite all the frustration and ferment of the punk era, nobody wrote a memorable song about Jim Callaghan. But to musicians on the left Margaret Thatcher was an irresistible super-villain who threw all the conflicts of the time into sharp relief. Penny Rimbaud of anarcho-punk radicals Crass once told me: “I think Thatcher was an absolute fairy godmother. Christ, you’re an anarchist band trying to complain about the workings of capitalist society and you get someone like Thatcher. What a joy!” More…

If I’d been smarter I would have written it well in advance instead of in a rush and I wouldn’t have forgotten one of my favourite, and most overlooked, condemnations of Thatcherism. If Ghost Town, A Town Called Malice and Shipbuilding defined pop’s response to her rocky first term, then King’s Cross did something similarly potent during the period when it became clear that she had won many of the key battles and reshaped Britain forever. The nauseous sadness of songs like this feels more powerful than more direct assaults on the woman herself. It was certainly the anti-Thatcher song that, given my age, first resonated with me and ran counter to the values of the true blue London suburb that I grew up in.

 

Rather than bombard you with links, I’ll just quote this response from Morrissey, which sums up the feelings of so many who opposed her during the 80s. It’s the best thing he’s written in ages.

 

Every move she made was charged by negativity; she destroyed the British manufacturing industry, she hated the miners, she hated the arts, she hated the Irish Freedom Fighters and allowed them to die, she hated the English poor and did nothing at all to help them, she hated Greenpeace and environmental protectionists, she was the only European political leader who opposed a ban on the ivory trade, she had no wit and no warmth and even her own cabinet booted her out. She gave the order to blow up The Belgrano even though it was outside of the Malvinas Exclusion Zone—and was sailing AWAY from the islands! When the young Argentinean boys aboard The Belgrano had suffered a most appalling and unjust death, Thatcher gave the thumbs-up sign for the British press.  

Iron? No. Barbaric? Yes. She hated feminists even though it was largely due to the progression of the women’s movement that the British people allowed themselves to accept that a prime minister could actually be female. But because of Thatcher, there will never again be another woman in power in British politics, and rather than opening that particular door for other women, she closed it.

Thatcher will only be fondly remembered by sentimentalists who did not suffer under her leadership, but the majority of British working people have forgotten her already, and the people of Argentina will be celebrating her death. As a matter of recorded fact, Thatcher was a terror without an atom of humanity.

MORRISSEY.

UPDATE: Morrissey fans pointed out that his “statement” was in fact a shoddy mash-up of comments he had made to Loaded months earlier. He subsequently released an official statement which makes many of the same points, notwithstanding its idiotic final sentence.

Margaret Thatcher

The difficulty with giving a comment on Margaret Thatcher’s death to the British tabloids is that, no matter how calmly and measuredly you speak, the comment must be reported as an “outburst” or an “explosive attack” if your view is not pro-establishment. If you reference “the Malvinas”, it will be switched to “the Falklands”, and your “Thatcher” will be softened to a “Maggie.” This is generally how things are structured in a non-democratic society. Thatcher’s name must be protected not because of all the wrong that she had done, but because the people around her allowed her to do it, and therefore any criticism of Thatcher throws a dangerously absurd light on the entire machinery of British politics. Thatcher was not a strong or formidable leader. She simply did not give a shit about people, and this coarseness has been neatly transformed into bravery by the British press who are attempting to re-write history in order to protect patriotism. As a result, any opposing view is stifled or ridiculed, whereas we must all endure the obligatory praise for Thatcher from David Cameron without any suggestion from the BBC that his praise just might be an outburst of pro-Thatcher extremism from someone whose praise might possibly protect his own current interests. The fact that Thatcher ignited the British public into street-riots, violent demonstrations and a social disorder previously unseen in British history is completely ignored by David Cameron in 2013. In truth, of course, no British politician has ever been more despised by the British people than Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher’s funeral on Wednesday will be heavily policed for fear that the British tax-payer will want to finally express their view of Thatcher. They are certain to be tear-gassed out of sight by the police.

United Kingdom? Syria? China? What’s the difference?

Morrissey

9 April 2013

Assessing Hugo Chávez 1954-2013

 

If you’re finding it tricky to assess the late Hugo Chávez’s 14-year stewardship of Venezuela, then the work of expert journalists who met the man and visited his country won’t necessarily help. Jon Lee Anderson’s blog for the New Yorker was a masterpiece of ambivalence. The New Statesman recently ran the case for the defence (by Richard Gott) alongside the case for the prosecution (by Rory Carroll, still less hostile than most of the current coverage in the US media). At the risk of sounding like The Fast Show’s Indecisive Dave, you could come away believing that both portraits were true yet incomplete.

Chávez’s presidency cries out for both/and rather than either/or analysis. In the life of this passionate, flamboyant, provocative character, success and failure don’t meet in the middle but create a balance of extremes. He reduced poverty (the number living in extreme poverty went from 23.4% to 8.5%; unemployment halved) and poured oil money into education and healthcare but he left Caracas a failed city with crumbling infrastructure and one of the highest murder rates in the world. Working with other populist leaders on the continent, he made Latin America stronger and more self-confident but he was a loyal friend to tyrants and continued to offer unwavering support to Gaddafi and Assad even as they murdered protesters. He introduced a progressive constitution and survived a US-endorsed right-wing coup without resorting to the extreme measures that blighted Latin America in the 70s and beyond, but also centralised power, eroded human rights and intimidated opponents (although not on the scale that his critics would have us believe). And so on.

Such titanic complexity is great if you want to write a Shakespearean tragedy but not so useful if you want to make a political case. For commentators (rather than reporters) on the left and right, there is a lot riding on Chávez’s legacy and nuance is the first casualty. You will read countless times that Chávez was a champion of the underdog and a vital counterbalance to the US-led neoliberal consensus. You will also read that he was an autocratic buffoon whose ambitions far outstripped his competence.

His critics have a hard time accepting that he genuinely won four elections, either questioning the integrity of the results or the intellect of the voters, unable to accept poor Venezuelans’ sincere love for a leader who actually cared about them. They also show considerably more concern for Chávez’s human rights abuses than they ever did for those of the regimes that did far worse things across Latin America, Venezuela included, with the west’s blessing during the Cold War. If only Pinochet had attracted half the opprobrium, but of course he wasn’t a socialist. Overcorrecting this bias, supporters on the left are prone to handwave his human rights record, support for dictators and various economic failures. Give an inch in this argument and your opponents will take a mile.

But the validity of left-wing populism doesn’t stand or fall with Chávez. As Jon Lee Anderson writes, “Brazil’s last leader, Lula, who was also a left-wing populist, also made ‘the people’ and poverty alleviation a priority of his Administration, and, with a better management team and without all the polarizing confrontation with the imperio, he succeeded to an impressive degree. In Venezuela, by contrast, Chávez’s revolution suffered from mediocre administrators, ineptitude, and a lack of follow-through.”

And there is no need for the left to make excuses for Chávez’s sins. Noam Chomsky was a friend and supporter of the president but nonetheless pointed out where his autocratic excesses fell short of his Bolivarian ideals, telling the Observer in 2011: “Concentration of executive power, unless it’s very temporary and for specific circumstances, such as fighting world war two, is an assault on democracy. You can debate whether [Venezuela's] circumstances require it: internal circumstances and the external threat of attack, that’s a legitimate debate. But my own judgment in that debate is that it does not.”

Unlike the mass of colourless and compromised world leaders, Chávez was a genuinely important, gamechanging character whose presidency resists simplistic labels. Rather than fighting to persuade people that he was either one thing or the other, his critics could learn something from his tremendous strengths and his defenders could draw lessons from his considerable flaws. That would be a legacy worth shouting about.