SOMETIMES a particular combination of headline and author catches your eye and you just know where the article is going to go. So I must admit a certain sense of keen anticipation when I spotted the words ‘We were fools to think the fall of the Berlin Wall had killed off the far Left. They’re back – and attacking us from within’ in conjunction with the name ‘Melanie Phillips’.
At first reading, the piece appeared to be a corker, right down to our the stab at summarising Gramsci for a Daily Mail audience. Sure, I know that idea sounds counterintuitive, in a ‘Richard Littlejohn outlines his debt to the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr’ or ‘Seumas Milne ponders the downsides of Serbian nationalism’ kind of way, but to my mind that just made it all the better.
So imagine my disappointment, dear reader, when a quick Google revealed that both the underlying thesis – not to mention chunks of text - are simply rehashed from a 2007 piece authored by Linda Kimball on the US far right fringe website American Thinker. It transpires that Ms Phillips may not have read Prison Notebooks after all, and really should cut Kimball in for at least 50% of the presumably not ungenerous fee she got for the feature.
But in District Line terms, the argument advanced by these two women is totally Dagenham, as psychiatrists dub patients who are clearly three stops beyond Barking. If Kimball and Phillips are to be believed, me and my mates are running the world. Yep, the liberal left has only been pretending to be on the back foot for the last three decades, the better to gull the masses.
Thankfully, our heroines have twigged that we have secretly ditched class struggle at the point of production, only to resume it at the level of ideology. Moreover, the tactic has worked brilliantly, and we have virtually succeeded in installing the dictatorship of the politically correctariat.
Our basic problem is that we are ‘hostile towards western civilisation’ and thus seeking to bring it down. We just can’t help hating freedom, thanks to our ‘totalitarian mindset that replicates the way communist societies clamped down on any other than permitted views’. This is tantamount to reconstituted ‘communist ideology’ that is actually worse than full on Stalinism, being ‘even more deadly’ as an ‘active enemy of western freedom.’
Got that, folks? Forget the Red Terror, forced collectivisation, the Great Purge, Hungary 1956, the Cultural Revolution, the suppression of the Prague Spring, and Cambodia in the Year Zero. Political correctness is ‘even more deadly’.
Now, I have to admit that feminist friends sometimes do tick me off for cracking mildly sexist jokes, and rightly so. But this has not so far resulted in a knock on the door at midnight from a detachment of Beria-inspired bulldykes, come to carry me off to PC re-education camp so that I can learn from the peasantry.
Now for the clever bit; all of this stuff was theorised in the scribbled thoughts of some Italian bloke banged up by Mussolini for his opposition to fascism, and subsequently ‘taken up by Sixties radicals’:
Phillips: This was what might be called 'cultural Marxism'. It was based on the understanding that what holds a society together are the pillars of its culture: the structures and institutions of education, family, law, media and religion. Transform the principles that these embody and you can thus destroy the society they have shaped.
Kimball: The new battleground, reasoned Gramsci, must become the culture, starting with the traditional family and completely engulfing churches, schools, media, entertainment, civic organizations, literature, science, and history. All of these things must be radically transformed and the social and cultural order gradually turned upside-down with the new proletariat placed in power at the top.
Phillips proceeds to list the consequences: ‘the nuclear family has been widely shattered’ … ‘education was wrecked’ … ‘law and order were similarly undermined’ … ‘illegal drugtaking tacitly encouraged’ … ‘turned morality inside out’. Then we get to the real target of the broadside:
Feminism, anti-racism and gay rights thus turned men, white people and Christians into the enemies of decency who were forced to jump through hoops to prove their virtue.
Indisputably, there has been an erosion of social cohesion in Britain since the 1970s. But the primary reason is not the clandestine machinations of closet Gramscians, but the abandonment of social democracy for exactly the kind of inegalitarian society driven by the very market forces that Phillips applauds for ‘carrying the torch of liberty’.
And if feminism, anti-racism and gay rights really are that wicked, with what should they be replaced? Presumably the return of the traditional mother and wife, penalty-free racial discrimination and a retreat to the times of hush-hush homosexuality.
Whatever anyone thinks of society today, it is the creation of Thatcherism and Blairism, which are both essentially variations on a neoliberal theme. Lenin would not – as Phillips crassly concludes – be smiling if he could somehow see it from his mausoleum. But Hayek certainly would be.
In short, Phillips already lives in the kind of country that is the only conceivable outcome of the brand of rightwingery she herself represents; she might at least be that little bit more graceful about it.
[hat tip: email from Will]
Posted at 13:34, 10 November 2009
Comments (22)
this is nothing new - the wingnuts have been banging on about Gramsci and cultural hegemony for yonks
if feminism, anti-racism and gay rights really are that wicked, with what should they be replaced?
Clitorodectomy, gassing and hanging, you big dafty. Now we've got that sorted, it's time for biscuits all round.
Of course, we can't actually read that article, because the cultural commissars with their rainbow coloured knuckle dusters have prevented it from being published, we'll have to wait for the home lithograped copy to be circulated...
oh, wait...
(mind, aren't rainbows scary).
Your headline is quite eye-catching.
(mind, aren't rainbows scary)
Yeah, we could all end up in nudist camps:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7Lag_zq_cs
I like the idea that, somewhere out there, someone's holding a copy of their only link to the outside world and saying, "A don't know much abaaaht cultural marxism, but a knooow what a laaark..."
She wrote this incomprehensible piece about both Antonio Gramsci and Teddy Adorno in 2004...
http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=230
Let's just say that I very much doubt she has been anywhere near a copy of Negative Dialectics.
I'm facinated as to where all this shit comes from though...
Other right wingers are blaming the 'Frankfurt School' for the same thing.
I have seen these pasta web memes (illiterate cut and pasting) circulate around BNP members, Tories, etc etc.
It is clear that none of them have ever read Adorno, Horkheimer or the rest. But they if they can sound knowledgeable about the 'Frankfurt School' they can impress their even more illiterate right wing friends.
I think the 'Frankfurt school is to blame' rightwing meme originates here:
http://www.schillerinstitute.org/fid_91-96/921_frankfurt.html
"Our universities, the cradle of our technological and intellectual future, have become overwhelmed by Comintern-style New Age "Political Correctness.".....
"The single, most important organizational component of this conspiracy was a Communist thinktank called the Institute for Social Research (I.S.R.), but popularly known as the Frankfurt School"....
What follows bears no resemblance to any of the Frankfurt schools analysis. There are just a few cherry picked quotes by some illiterate, woven into a conspiracy theory, reducing all the complex social changes of the 60's into " the Comintern's most successful psychological warfare operation against the capitalist West"!!!
Far, far, far worse than reading 2nd year undergraduate students essays grapple with the Frankfurt School, this really is utter drivel. So I expect Melanie to cut and paste it into her next intellectual excursion in the daily mail!
It's strange that Phillips sees British 'Marxists' as her ideological opponents. She should take ten seconds to check out 'Socialist Unity' where an ultra version of her social philosophy is currently articulated by self styled 'Marxists' - right up to and including an advocacy of creationism in school class rooms; attacks on gay activists and hostility to the Enlighentment.
Of course Newman et al, are coming from a different angle, and ther politics are informed by a different religous constituency. But the final destination look remarkably similar, whether you get their via post modernism or old fashioned conservatism.
It's a funny old world.
Nick Griffin says something similar...
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/lunching-with-the-enemy-749771.html
Although he seems to get the Frankfurt School and Deconstruction a little mixed up.
Also, the "Cultural Marxism" accusation is spookily similar to the accusation of "Kulturbolschewismus" (Cultural Bolshevism)levelled at "Entartete" (degenerate) music and art by Nazi's such as Adolf Ziegler. Such artists were accused of being responsible for promoting an anarchic individualism and for corrupting onservative social mores.
It seems Phillips has come a long way from her social democratic/liberal (even feminist/anti-racist) origins. I have been using Phillips' pieces in The Guardian from 1979 in my current research. Phillips was the the first to publicise the 'virginity testing' incidents by British immigration officers and demonstrated the widespread racism and sexism inherent in the immigration control system. This led to the first major investigation of immigration control by the CRE the following year. Without Phillips' journalism at the time, this may have never occurred. I can't believe it is the same person writing this stuff nowadays!
"an ultra version of her social philosophy is currently articulated by self styled 'Marxists' - right up to and including an advocacy of creationism in school class rooms; attacks on gay activists and hostility to the Enlighentment."
Does Phillips actually advocate the teaching of creationism, attacks on gay activist or hostility to the Enlightenment (leaving aside whether Socialist Unity does)? Or are you making an entirely spurious and disingenuous connection to try and bring your current hobby horse into the discussion here?
Does Phillips actually advocate the teaching of creationism
Mrs Nooman appears to advocate that very thing here.
I blame our totally lax border controls for allowing all these rootless Sardinians into our country in the first place. We are swamped with Sardines. They live seven to a room, pay no taxes and spend all day subverting school children with their vile notebooks. As Melanie once said, "Since homosexuality was legalised, gays are cottaging with impunity". That explains the boom in rural house prices which led directly to the credit crunch.
"Mrs Nooman appears to advocate that very thing here"
No, she defends the right of faith schools to teach it, which is different from advocating that it be taught everywhere. I assume Andy Newman is saying the same thing. Really I don't know why this should get you all so het up - I went to a religious school and was perfectly capable of thinking for myself, and like the vast majority of children took very little interest in anything that was taught. Have you really got nothing better to get into a sweat about?
I find it hard to imagine Measles Mel as an upholder of Christian values. I had the misfortune of sharing a hospital waiting room with her last year, and she's in such a state I toyed with the idea of bursting into a chorus of 'Onward Christian Soldiers' in the hope of inducing a heart attack.
Anyway, quite an amusing piece, but I think you sell yourself short by lining up with bourgeois propaganda in your cheap shots at communism and Serbian nationalism. We know where you live.
What it boils down to is this: what is the requirement for these right-wingers to feel personally safe?
A right-wing government isn't enough.
Ideological hegemony isn't enough.
Only the extermination of every last left-liberal and socialist (of any stripe) will do. Poor Mike Smithson has had to stop reading the comments on his site because most days they include someone (quite possibly drunk) issuing death threats against anyone to the left of Dan Hannan - and he's got better things to do with his life than warn them off twice before banning them.
Now, how can we persuade Mel that the psychiatric profession is full of dangerous Reds and self-hating Jews? It'd be a good game... and then when they come to take her away the whole country could stop to admire the martyrdom of Melanie Phillips, complete with a promise from Sarah Palin that when she becomes POTUS she'll nuke Hampstead and north Oxford...
Phillips trajectory really shouldn't surprise people. She didn't start out as a socialist in the first place and I believe the root of her drift into right wing paranoia, fear and hatred is not unconnected to her Zionist beliefs, after all liberals and lefties criticise Israel don't they and that's the litmus test. Ditto Nick Cohen, although as a socialist at the start he hasn't travelled as far as Phillips (but he's trying his best).
Mel, ironically, now seems to share a great deal of the ideas as those anti-semitic New World Order cranks. Indeed, there seems to be a rizla paper between herself and the likes of David Icke and Alex Jones.
Her latest piece - alluded to above by Dave - wouldn't look out of place on the BNP's website either. And yet she still invited on to Question Time. Oh but so is Nick Griffin too.
"I had the misfortune of sharing a hospital waiting room with her last year..."
you'd better watch out, Jock - Matthew Norman reported that he'd seen Mel & her hubby eating pizza in a restaurant and she sued him for invasion of privacy
those anti-semitic New World Order cranks. Indeed, there seems to be a rizla paper between herself and the likes of David Icke
Icke has denied being any sort of anti-semite:
http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/David_Icke_-_Allegations_of_anti-Semitism/id/1309871
Yes, he's probably denied being a complete barmpot as well.
Hi, Interesting, I`ll quote it on my site later.
Thank you
[url=http://www.noteshamps.com/]DingoDogg[/url]