A Study of the Ideology Behind 1960s French Revolutionary Radicalism

Richard Gombin, The Origins of Modern Leftism (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1975)

The late 1960s saw a wave of radical ferment and agitation erupt in America and France. In America, the Students for a Democratic Society and other groups campaigned against the Vietnam War and for a radical reform of American society, while Black civil rights activists like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X demanded the end of segregation and improved conditions for Black Americans. This radical agitation was marked by race riots and left-wing terrorism by groups like the Weathermen. I think that most people on this side of the Atlantic are probably more familiar with the American situation than the French through the close ties between Britain and America in the Special Relationship. But France also experienced a wave a radical unrest beginning with the occupation of the Sorbonne by radical students in 1968. These then established contacts with ordinary workers, who struck in sympathy, and there was a wave of wildcat strikes. By the end of the decade and the early 1970s, sections of the radical left were turning to kidnapping and terrorism. Although the French revolutionary activism of these years may be less-well known, it has nevertheless impressed itself on British memory and culture. The left-wing French director, Jean-Paul Godard, produced a film about the agitation and unrest around Jagger and the Stones preparing to record ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. The Sex Pistol’s manager, Malcolm McLaren, spuriously claimed to have been a member of the Situationists, one of the radical groups involved in the unrest. And the ideas of ideologues like Guy Debord have found a readership and supporters among the British left. Way back in the 1980s there was a volume of revolutionary texts from 1968 published, I think, by the Socialist Workers Party. And the radical unrest and its turn to terrorism is covered by Guardian columnist Francis Wheen in his book on ‘70s paranoia.

Gombin was an academic attached to the Centre de la Recherche Scientifique. His book isn’t a history of the revolutionary movement of the late 60s in France, but an examination of its ideology. He calls this ‘Leftism’ and contrasts it with ‘extremism’, which is how he terms radical Marxism. This is the extreme left-wing Marxism, often Trotskyite, which approaches or has some of the ideas and attitudes of the Leftists, but does not go as far as them by rejecting Marxism. And ‘leftism’ itself could be described instead as post-Marxism. Gombin explains that Marxism came late to France, and as a result the gap of a quarter of century or so until French intellectuals and activists caught up with the radical experiments and revision of Marxism carried out by the German, Hungarian and other eastern European Communists and radical socialists in the council and communist revolutions of 1919 and the early 1920s. The revelations of the horrors of Stalin’s brutal dictatorship in the USSR, the gulags and the purges, came as a shock to left-wing intellectuals in France and elsewhere. The Communist party had uncritical accepted the lie that the former Soviet Union was a workers’ paradise. In response to these revelations, some Marxist intellectuals like Sartre condemned the purges and gulags, but otherwise remained faithful to the Communist party. Others went further and joined the Trotskyites. But a few others were moved to use Marx’s critical methods to examine Marxism itself, and rejected many of its central doctrines.

The revolutionary movement was led by a number of different groups, such as Socialism ou Barbarie, Rouge et Noire, the Situationists and radical trade unions like the CFDT, which had originally been set up a social Catholic organisation separate from the socialist trade unions. There seems to have been no overarching ideology, and indeed the radicals explicitly rejected any ideology that sought to dictate the course of the revolution. Nevertheless, there were a set of key ideas and attitudes shared by these groups. This rejected all hierarchies, those of modern, capitalist society, the trade union leadership and the patriarchal family, as well as the education and university system. They adopted wholeheartedly Marx’s slogan that the emancipation of the working class should be done by the working class, while also creating new ideas responding to the new welfare state and affluent society.

The viewed Marxism and trade unionism as a response to the conditions of the 19^th century, when the working class had to concentrate on winning concessions from the capitalists and authorities in order to survive. However, the establishment of the welfare state had removed the threat of death and deprivation, and so the workers could now move on to the task of reforming society itself. The expanded Marx’s doctrine of alienation so that it didn’t just cover capitalism’s alienation of the worker from the goods he produced, and the latter’s fetishization, but also the alienation created by the affluent society. People’s real needs and desires were suppressed, and false needs created instead. Work should be playful, but instead the worker suffered boredom.

They also considered that there was a fundamental similarity between the capitalist west and the Soviet bloc, which resulted in them calling the USSR’s brand of state socialism ‘State capitalism’ in contrast to the ideal socialism in which society would be run by the workers. Communist rule in Russia had not liberated the workers, but instead created a new governing class. Unlike western capitalism, the Communist bureaucracy did not own the properties and industries they directed, but otherwise held the same power and privilege that in the west was held by the capitalist elites and industrialists. Changes in capitalism had also resulted in a cleavage between those who owned the companies, and those who directed and managed them. As a result, the struggle in the west was between workers and directors, not workers and owners. Soviet Communism was dubbed state capitalism as it was held the bureaucratic socialism of the USSR resembled that of western capitalism, the difference being that in the Soviet bloc all industries were owned by the state rather than private capitalists. One ideologue, Burnham, considered that Fascism and Communism were both examples of ‘state collectivism’, with the difference between the two being that private industry was retained under Fascism. Burnham was a vicious anti-Semite, and had previously urged the workers to unite with the Fascists against the Jews.

The radicals also rejected critical Marxist doctrines like dialectal materialism and its claim to have produced a science of capitalist development. In his later writings, Marx had believed that he had uncovered the sociological laws that would lead capitalism inevitably to give way to socialism. The Leftists rejected this because it was removed the voluntarist element from revolutionary activity. Instead of revolutionaries deliberately setting out to overturn capitalism and usher in the new socialist society, this attitude instead that all they needed to do was wait for it all to happen on its own. In their view, this attitude was closer to the evolutionary socialism of Bernstein than the Marxism of 1848. They rejected Lenin’s doctrine of a centralised party of active revolutionaries, because the workers on their own could only attain trade union consciousness. This, according to the Leftists, had resulted in a bureaucratic class that ruled over the workers, and was certainly not the vanguard of the working class as it was declared to be by Lenin. They did, however, believe in some kind of central party or organisation, but this would only be to guide and suggest possible ideas and actions, not to dictate a revolutionary programme. And all revolutionary ideas and policies should be subjected to the rigorous test of whether they worked in practice. If they did, they were true. If not, they were ‘ideology’, used in the same sense of Marx’s ‘false consciousness’. The revolutionary could only be carried out by the conscious will of the workers, as they became aware of their mission to reform society, independent of any ideas of social progress or objective historical conditions. There was therefore a radical subjective aspect to their conception of revolutionary activism in opposition to Marx’s ideas of historical progress according to object material conditions. Some of them also challenged Marxism-Leninism’s materialism, in which consciousness arose from matter and was merely matter reflecting itself. This got them attacked as ‘Idealists’ by the Communists.

They rejected the patriarchal family as an institution which brought up and trained the worker to accept hierarchical authority and his position in society as a worker, as well as the sexual repression that resulted from the prohibition of extra- and premarital sex. In fact, the student revolt that sparked the ferment started with a question about this by a student at the Sorbonne to a visiting government minister, who come to open the university’s swimming pool. The student also queried him about the university’s rules against male students entering the women’s halls. Well, as the poet once said, sexual intercourse was invented in 1963.

As for the institutions that should be used by the workers to govern politically and manage industry, there seems to have been a difference of ideas. Some, like the Dutch astronomer and Marxist Pannekoek, argued for worker’s councils like the German Raterevolution of 1919. Others refused to speculate, except to state that they should be created by the workers in response to the conditions of the time and the situations they were faced with. Regarding the conduct of the strikes, these were carried out through workers’ meetings on the shop floor, who would then elect a strike committee that would then take their grievances and demands to management. Some observers felt that this harked back to France’s native socialist and revolutionary traditions that predated Marx. The shop floor meetings were, in their view, related to that of the sections during the French Revolution.

Apart from these political and industrial ideas and aspirations, there were also a set of revolutionary ideas about the proper reform of the arts. These looked back to the attacks on official art by the Dadaists and Surrealists, but felt that they had failed in their mission to create an anti-art. They therefore looked forward to a new, revolutionary society in which everyone would be an artist or a poet.

Well, the revolutionary agitation passed with the sixties and first years of the 1970s. Wheen seems to suggest that it ended when one group was about to bomb a millionaire’s yacht but finally drew back. Nevertheless, the terrorism carried on over this side of La Manche with the IRA in Northern Ireland and in Britain by the Angry Brigade, an anarchist group. In France the anarchists, syndicalists and Anarcho-Syndicalists were largely excluded from the revolutionary movement. Some of this was due to the antagonism between anarchists and Marxists and to the isolation of the anarchist groups themselves. By 1968 these had declined in membership and largely confined themselves to keeping the flame alive and commemorating great anarchist revolutionaries of the past, such as the Ukrainian Nestor Makhno.

The revolutionary movement of 1968 is now over fifty years in the past, overtaken in Britain and America by Reagan and Thatcherism. These two started a political counterrevolution aimed at preventing such a situation ever happening again. The right-wing, if not reactionary philosopher, Roger Scruton, said in an interview in the Spectator that he had been a socialist. But he was in France during the revolutionary movement, and was horrified by their ‘anti-civilizational rage’. The ideologues of the period still have an influence in the radical left. People are still reading and gaining inspiration from Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, for example. I think they also exerted an influence on the anti-capitalist movement of the ‘90s and noughties. Their protests had a deliberate carnivalesque aspect, with costumed marches, puppets and so on, which seems to have drawn on the ideas of the Situationists and other revolutionaries.

I strongly believe, however, that the leftist rejection of the family has had a profoundly negative effect on western society. The Tory right loathes Roy Jenkins because of the socially liberal legislation he introduced in the late 60s Labour government. This decriminalised homosexuality and made divorce easier. Jenkins was certainly not as socially radical as the revolutionaries across the channel. In 1982 he, Shirley Williams and David Owen left the Labour party to form the SDP on the grounds that the party under Michael Foot was now too left wing. Still, the Daily Heil once denounced him as the man who had ruined Britain. Jenkins probably had completely different motives for his legislation than the Revolutionaries. In Britain the movement for the legalisation of homosexuality had started, or at least had the support, of Winston Churchill. Churchill had been worried about the danger of gay ministers, civil servants and others establishment figures being blackmailed by the Soviets because of their sexuality. As for divorce, I think this came from the humane desire to stop people being trapped in unhappy, loveless marriages, especially to brutal, violent partners. John Mortimer in his one-man show in the ‘90s recalled that before Jenkins’ reforms, the only cause for divorce was adultery. There was one man, who was so desperate to divorce his wife, that he came home in different hats so that people would think she was being unfaithful.

Unfortunately, there were radical activists, hostile to the institution of marriage and the traditional family. I can remember a pair who turned up on an edition of the lunchtime magazine programme Pebble Mill in the 1970s to present their views, much to the disgust of many of the programmes’ viewers. The result has been a rise in fatherless families. I am very much aware than many unmarried mothers have done an excellent job of raising their children, but the general picture is grim. Children from fatherless homes perform less well at school and get poorer, lower-paid jobs. They are more likely to turn to crime, do drugs and engage in promiscuous sex. Many Black activists are particularly concerned about this and the way these issues are especially acute in their community.

As for workers’ control, I would love a degree of it introduced into industry, but not to the exclusion of parliamentary democracy. And while the radicals have a point in that trade unions hierarchies have frequently acted to stifle revolutionary activism by the workers, trade unionism as a whole was tarnished by the wildcat strikes that broke out against the wishes of the union leadership. It’s resulted in the caricature of union activism presented by the Tories in which Britain was held hostage to the union barons and its economy and industry weakened by their strikes. We desperately need a revival of trade union power to protect workers, especially with Sunak and the rest of them preparing to scrap the EU legislation protecting workers’ rights.

And with an ever-growing number of people in Britain relying on food banks to stave off starvation, because the Tories have wrecked the welfare state, we’ve gone back to the early conditions of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, when trade unionism and other forms of working class activism are very much a matter of survival.

On the plus side, I think the revolutionary movement has left a tradition of radical working class activism, which is no longer confined to either left or right. French working people seem much less willing to put up with government dictates than Brits, as shown in the Yellow Vest protests and the marches and riots against Macron raising the official retirement age. This has been admired by many Brits, including YouTube commenters and people on talk show phone-ins. We really need some of that spirit over this side of the Channel.

There is no doubt, from the position of democratic socialism, that the radicals went too far. Nevertheless, the continue to inspire members of the radical left with rather more moderate aims now protesting against predatory, exploitative capitalism, the exploitation of the environment, and racism, although this is not an issue that the book considers. Nevertheless, it was there, at least in the views and campaigns of post-structuralist Marxist activists.

Saturn as the Abode of the Dead in Victorian Science Fiction

I put up a post the other day about an early 20th century SF story from 1901, in which Jesus Christ is raised on Mars and sent to Earth by the Martians to enlighten us. They rescue Him from the crucifixion, and bring Him back to Mars. It struck me that the story may have been an influence or at least prefigured the idea that later arose among UFO contactees and researcher that Christ was an alien. The best-known of the various UFO religions that believe this is the Aetherius Society, founded in the 1950s by former taxi driver George King. King was into eastern mysticism, and became aware of his mission as spokesman for the Space Brothers when he heard a voice in his kitchen one day telling him to prepare to be the voice of interplanetary parliament. The Aetherius Society believes that King was the recipient of spiritual messages from Aetherius, an alien on Venus, and that Jesus is also there on the planet. Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Israel, also claimed that he’d been taken aboard a UFO and shown how Jesus and his predecessor as head of the religion, W.D. Fard, were also on Venus. Both Christ and Fard were Black, and Fard was directing and preparing for the coming apocalyptic war against the Whites that would free Black America.

Looking through the SF collection Born of the Sun again today, I found another early SF story with a religious or supernatural dimension. This was John Jacob Astor’s 1894 A Journey in Other Worlds, in which Saturn is inhabited by the spirits of the dead. I think this was influenced by contemporary spiritualism and trends in psychic research. The followers of the 18th century Swedish scientist and mystic, Immanuel Swedenborg, believed that he had travelled in spirit across the Solar System and that the various planets were inhabited, including by the spirits of the departed. This was also the same time, I think, that mediums like Helene Smith believed that they were receiving telepathic messages from Mars. The Surrealists were fascinated by these mediumistic accounts, and one collection of Surrealist writings contains a drawing, done automatically, of Mozart’s house on either Jupiter or Saturn. There’s definitely a religious element in much Spiritualist speculation about space and early Science Fiction, and I’m very sure that this has had an influence on the UFO phenomenon and its accounts of contacts with spiritually advanced, benevolent alien beings.

Salvador Dali Wanted Materialist Religion to Destroy Christianity and Enslave Non-Whites

The Torygraph has published a piece today revealing that a letter has come to light from the Surrealist painter Salvador Dali from the 1930s, in which he reveals just what an anti-Christian, fascist sympathiser he really was. It dates from 1935. Dali had already been suspended from the Surrealists the year before because of comments praising Hitler, amongst other things. In a nasty bit of social snobbery he said that the train crashes he most enjoyed were those in which only third-class passengers were killed. The Torygraph article also states that in another letter in which he claimed that one of the reasons why he was expelled from the Surrealists 1939 was his positive view of the lynchings in America. He loved Hitler, was fascinated by the Swastika and apparently thought the Nazi party were an example of Surrealism in action.

Uggh. Pass the sick bag!

The Torygraph article begins

‘Salvador Dalí wanted to enslave races he considered inferior and establish a new “sadistic” world religion, a newly-discovered letter has revealed. 

In the letter, which was written by Dalí in 1935, the artist proposed the enslavement of “all the coloured races” as part of a new world order that would be “anti-Christian and materialistic, based on the progress of science”. 

“The domination or submission to slavery of all the coloured races” could be possible, Dalí wrote, “if all whites united fanatically”. He also insisted on the need for “human sacrifices”. 

As Europe was threatened by the fascist regimes of Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy, Dalí’s letter to André Breton, the French writer and co-founder of the surrealist movement, speaks of the need for “new hierarchies, more brutal and strict than ever before” to “annihilate” Christianity. 

“I believe that we surrealists are finally turning into priests,” Dalí wrote.

Scornful of Christianity’s “altruism”, he added: “We don’t want happiness for ‘all’ men, rather the happiness of some to the detriment of others”. 

The letter was recently discovered in the digitalised personal archive of Sebastià Gasch, an art critic from Barcelona who died in 1982. It was published on Thursday by Spain’s El Pais newspaper.’

For the complete article, go to: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/entertainment/music/salvador-dali-wanted-to-enslave-non-white-races-and-create-new-sadistic-religion-letter-reveals/ar-AA11lIAc?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=6310a88ab5f4477185b311aaebce1ed5

Dali scarpered to American during the War, returning afterwards to Spain as a supporter of the Fascist leader, General Franco.

Dali was a great artist but a revolting human being. He was greedy for fame and money, which is why some of the other Spanish Surrealists nicknamed him ‘Avida Dollars’. Malcolm McLaren presented a programme on him on Radio 4 a few years ago, in which he compared the publicity-hungry, media-savvy Dali with contemporary British artists like Damian Hurst and Tracey Emin. Well, Dali did share with Hurst, Emin and the rest of the Young British Artists the urge to shock as well as the pursuit of fame and cash, but YBAs, for all their excesses can never be accused of Nazism. Dali also wasn’t averse to selling his friends out to the authorities. Dali emigrated to America with Luis Bunuel, who also hailed from Catalonia. The two had worked together on the Surrealist films Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or, both now regarded as classics of cinema. Surrealism was a mixture of Freudianism and Marxism, and many of the Surrealists were members of the Communist party. Bunuel was one of them. On arrival in the Land of the Free, Dali snitched that Bunuel was a commie to the FBI, and made little effort to excuse himself for doing so when Bunuel confronted him on his betrayal. Bunuel himself emigrated to Mexico where he continued to make Surrealist, anti-Christian films.

I’m fascinated by the Surrealists and love Dali’s art, but the man himself is quite a different matter. I can well believe, despite his later conversion to the Catholicism, that at heart he was an atheist with a hatred of the religion to which he nominally belonged. I didn’t realise he was so racist, however. This was definitely against the Surrealist ethos, which was firmly against imperialism, but patronised the world’s indigenous peoples as seeing their art and culture based as based on the Freudian unconscious. This was the respectable scientific view at the time, but modern anthropologists have rejected it. Instead they see indigenous art and culture as the products of centuries or millennia of conscious intellectual development and no more based on the irrational or Freudian unconscious than our own.

As one of the best known of the Surrealists, Dali is a fascinating figure and he painted some of the greatest works of 20th century art. But as this letter shows, he was in many ways a squalid human being.

James Lindsay on Post-Modern Marxism and the Indoctrination of Children in Sex Education

This is one of the serious videos I want to post and discuss. What Lindsay says is alarming and should leave any decent person deeply concerned about the direction sex education is taking in America and increasingly over here. Because he argues that the recent inclusion of real pornographic material as educational tools and very detailed discussion of different sexualities and gender identities isn’t by accident, nor is it done, as it claims, to help gay or transgender students. Rather it’s a deliberate ploy by a noxious coalition of post-modernist Marxists and MAPs – Minor Attracted Persons, or paedophiles to the rest of us – to destroy childhood innocence. The intention is not to help children properly understand their developing sexuality and anatomy, but to increase their anxiety and unhappiness in order to create socially disaffected young people alienated from their parents and society, ready to start the revolution.

Conspiracy theories like this have been going round the Conservative right for donkey’s years, usually ascribing this to ‘cultural Marxism’, the Frankfurt School and the Italian Communist, Antonio Gramsci. I didn’t give them much credence, especially as the term ‘cultural Marxism’ is derived from the Nazis ‘Kulturbolschevismus’, ‘Cultural Bolshevism’, and was part of their noxious anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. It sounds so bonkers and extreme, that if it appeared in the pages of Daily Heil, I would have quite happily disregarded it. But Lindsay is an American mathematician and part of the group, with Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose, that has taken on postmodernist Critical Theory and its offshoots – Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory, Postcolonial Theory, to show how pernicious and destructive these ideas actually are. He’s familiar with the literature, although he states his knowledge of it isn’t perfect and he needs to do more reading. But he cites the lead thinkers to back up this argument.

Lukacz and the Destruction of Childhood Innocence

For Lindsay, this all started with George Lukacz, one of the leaders of the 1919 Communist Revolution in Hungary. Lukacz started sex education in Hungarian schools with the deliberate intention of fomenting radical dissent amongst the students against traditional, Christian society and morality. He introduced pornographic material similar to what is now being promoted in American schools. There was a outrage a few weeks ago about one of the Young Adult books now being recommended as part of American Sex and Social Development Education. This was explicitly about the character’s exploration of queer sexuality and included a scene where one individual has oral sex with a girl wearing a strap-on dildo. He also introduced notions of different sexual identities. This is because Lukacz, and later postmodern Critical Theorists, hate the idea of childhood innocence. They see this as part of a mechanism by repressive capitalist society to repress children’s sexuality in order to redirect it towards capitalist work. They also have similar ideas about ‘White innocence’. They don’t like people growing up in environments where race is not an issue and where folks value each other for what they are, rather than the colour of their skin. This is another function of repressive, exploitative capitalism. Only Whites are racially innocent, as Blacks and other ethnic minorities have to live with the reality of a very racialised society. Lindsay states that this is nonsense, as the attacks on White culture over the past 30 years have shown.

Bela Kun’s Communist government was overthrown, and Lukacz fled to Germany, where he met the Frankfurt school of Marxist scholars, including Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Horkheimer and Felix Weil, who bankrolled the movement. These took up his ideas and later imported them into America after the rise of the Nazis in Germany. Also influential in this movement was Gramsci and his ideas of cultural hegemony. Gramsci turned the Marxist doctrine of the economic base determining culture on its head. Faced with the failure of the working class to rise up and overthrow capitalism, he theorised that what was needed was to change the prevailing culture. Lukacz and the others saw five main obstacles to spreading Marxism in Europe. One of these was religion. They also hated the natural bond between parents and their children, which also acts as a stabilising influence. According to Lindsay, they see sexuality and people as an ‘identity without essence’. They don’t have a fixed identity, and so Critical Theory deliberately tries to destabilise this even further, to create more confusion and discontent, and break the bond between children and parents as part of a wider campaign to discredit traditional culture. Lindsay compares this with Mao’s Cultural Revolution, its attack on the ‘Four Olds’ and the use of children to inform on and persecute their parents. These ideas were behind the far left discontent on the 1960s. Capitalism had produced rising living standards, and the working class were no longer interested in overthrowing capitalism. Marxist intellectuals were therefore determined to find a new revolutionary class, and so began looking towards other social groups like gays. The sexual radicalism of the 60s was part of a wider Marxist attack on traditional social mores.

Capitalism’s Suppresson of the Libido

Lindsay recognises that the monogamy the Queer Theorists despise is difficult for humanity. People aren’t good at it. Nevertheless, he believes that there is a human sexual morality and that traditional Christian morality roughly approximates to it, but not perfectly. I think Lindsay is an atheist/ Humanist. He is also aware that Christians have persecuted gays. But Queer Theory isn’t about solving those problems, and the Marxist sexual radicals have promoted paedophilia. In the 1980s Judith Butler, one of the founders of Queer Theory, wrote a book defending paedophilia. He also talks about a book by Herbert Marcuse which tried to mix Freud and Marxism to challenge what he saw as capitalism’s suppression of the libido and redirection into capitalist work. This also aimed at destabilising the personalities of the young minds, which were to be indoctrinated with this teaching, but felt they would emerge as ideologically ‘mature’ individuals. Lindsay notes that this is about spreading political awareness amongst children. Marcuse’s use of ‘mature’ rather than adult is deliberate.

Most Teachers Want to Teach, Not Indoctrinate

Lindsay has nothing but loathing and contempt for these ideas and their promoters. He states at one point that they should be in jail, which is fascistic but understandable if he’s right about what’s going on. If this is being done to normalise paedophilia and to exploit young people’s discomfort about their emerging sexuality, it it’s not about genuinely helping gay and transgender children but about making their confusion and maladjustment worse, then it has no place in schools. In contrast to the scare stories about Commie teachers indoctrinating students, most teachers are severely normal people. They don’t wish to indoctrinate students but simply stand in front of a class and teach their subject. And these are boring, traditional subjects like maths, science, history, geography, whatever. I don’t know what the situation is in America, but in Britain Tony Blair brought in very strict legislation banning indoctrination in schools. All that is needed to stop the extremists doing it in Britain is simply to discipline and sack them according to the law. But I do agree that anyone deliberately promoting paedophilia to children should be banged up behind bars.

Mobilising People against Queer Theory

I think Boghossian, Lindsay and Pluckrose are people of the left, not Conservatives. Pluckrose now defines herself as a liberal rather than a socialist, although she says her actual political ideas haven’t changed. Lindsay wants a coalition of people from left and right, Republican and Democrat, Black and White, to challenge and attack these ideas. People should be aware of what their children are being taught in schools. And if their kids are being fed literature like that wretchedly explicit book, they should confront the school board, film it and then try and place the video on YouTube. It won’t be accepted, because the platform will view it as pornography. Case proven.

Older Marxists Not Sexual Radicals

If Lindsay is correct, which he seems to be, then the right’s attack on ‘cultural Marxism’ is actually right, and definitely needs to be fought. But this doesn’t mean that anything else the right says – about free markets bringing prosperity, for example, is correct. The 60s were an era of prosperity partly because government was strongly involved in business and economic growth. And the Critical Theorists’ view of sexual morality is strongly contrary to the life styles and views of many of the older generation of working class Marxists. Instead of believing in free love, most of them believed in marriage and the family. When Andre Breton, the Pope of Surrealism, gave a lecture on free love to the French railwaymen’s union in the 1920s, his solidly Communist audience were very definitely not impressed.

What Lindsay says about the influence of Marxist critical attacks on traditional sexuality and its influence on 60s radicalism is important, if true. The attack on marriage and promotion of free love went far beyond Marxism into anarchism, situationism and similar movements, and I’d always assumed it was due to ideas that predated Marx and which were held across the radical left. In many cases, I think that’s true. But there does seem to be a definite Marxist strategy there as well. It explains why so many revolutionaries of that period were also rebelling against traditional sexual morality.

There is a danger here of starting a new McCarthyism in which anything vaguely left-wing is suddenly smeared as ‘Communist’, like the Right tried to do with Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in Labour.

But Queer Theory does seem to be utterly pernicious and really needs to be fought.

Cartoonist Kayfabe on Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ‘Panic Fables’

Alejandro Jodorowsky is a Chilean-French film director and comics creator. He was responsible for a number of very bizarre Surrealist films, such as Holy Mountain, one of which features a battle between the Incas and invading conquistadors as enacted by frogs in period costumes. In the 1970s he tried to make a film version of Frank Herbert’s classic Dune, which would have starred Orson Welles as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, his son, Brontis, as Paul Atreides, and Mick Jagger as Feyd Rautha. Concept art was by H.R. Giger, Salvador Dali, Chris Foss and legendary French comics artist, Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud. Dali would also have played the Emperor of the Universe. However, the great Surrealist stipulated that he would only act for half an hour. So Jodorowsky planned to make a robotic Dali to play the Emperor for the rest of the film. The film was, however, abandoned when the producers stopped funding due to mounting costs. Jodorowsky and Moebius weren’t dismayed, and used the material they had already produced for the film as the basis for their comic book, The Incal. Although it was never made, Jodorowsky’s Dune has influenced a number of later SF movies and a film version of The Incal is now underway.

In this video, hosts Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg look through Panic Fables, produced when Jodorowsky was living in Mexico. Jodorowsky had been teaching mime at university, but was now blacklisted. He could no longer teach or make films. He therefore turned his creative talents into comics. Panic Fables describe themselves as teaching initiatory wisdom. This doesn’t surprise me, as I go the impression that Jodorowsky has a very strong interest in esoteric mysticism. However, this doesn’t impress one of the Kayfabers. He’s from Pittsburgh, and so when someone talks about mystic knowledge, it seems to him to be all about separating the rich from their money. The pair are nevertheless impressed by Jodorowsky’s creativity, commenting on his drawing style and unique use of colour in the strips. They also wonder what American influences may have reached Jodorowsky from north of the border, as it was published at the same time the first underground comics were beginning in America, and both Jodorowsky’s work and the undergrounds mark a radical departure from contemporary comics.

Panic Fables are obscure much less well-known than Jodorowsky’s films or his comics with Moebius, The Incal and then The Metabarons. But the video about them give an insight into his considerable creativity during this period, when the Mexican authorities were trying to close him down.

Jodorowsky and Waititi Talk about the Prospective Incal Movie

Yesterday I put up a video from Quinn’s Ideas discussing the filming of the French SF comic The Incal by New Zealand director Taika Waititi. The comic was created by the Chilean-French surrealist film director, Alejandro Jodorowsky and French comics legend Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud. I found this video on YouTube by Humanoids Inc. in which Jodorowsky and Waititi talk about the movie. I think Humanoids Inc. must be the current legal title of Les Humanoides Associes, which was the name adopted by the group of French comics creators behind the influential SF comic Metal Hurlant of which Jodorowsky and Moebius were a part.

The video begins with an extract from Frank Pavich’s 2013 documentary, Jodoroswky’s Dune in which Jodorowsky explains that after the failure of his attempt to film Frank Herbert’s Dune, he took his material and put into the Incal, which became his Dune. It moves to the present day, where Jodorowsky says that if he was forty, he’d be angry and depressed that someone else was filming The Incal, because he’d feel that it had been taken away from him. But as he’s 92, he can’t – physically can’t – do it himself. Jododrowsky nevertheless seems to have confidence in Waititi, but declares that the film director is God. He controls everything in a movie. And he’s not interested in directors who are only concerned with making money, but with those who want to change the world. Well, this was his attitude when he set about filming Dune in the 1970s. He says in Pavich’s documentary that he wanted to make a movie like the coming of a god. The video then moves on Waititi, who says that he always finds something new in The Incal when reading and re-reading it. He was attracted to the book because it deals with fundamental questions about who we are and what we’re all looking for, and he likes the idea that the hero bumbles about, not really knowing what he’s doing. He compares him to Jack Nicholson’s character in Chinatown, who similarly doesn’t really know what he’s doing and has a clownish appearance due to the plaster across his nose. The Incal’s hero is also bumbler but at the same time the most important man in the universe.

Jodorowsky’s Dune is one of the great unmade films. The ideas and concept art developed for the movie not only produced Jodorowsy’s series of Incal books, but also his The Metabarons. They also influenced later films like Star Wars and Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element. This could be a great, stylish but weird film, given Jodorowsky’s roots in surrealism and the source material. It’ll be interesting to see how it all turns out.

Jewish Voice for Labour Sends Report on Real Labour Anti-Semitism to EHRC and Forde Enquiry

Starmer’s continuing purge of the Labour left, and especially left-wing Jews critical of Israel, is meeting resistance. As Mike put up yesterday, Pamela Fitzpatrick has put the bargain basement Stalin on notice that she may take legal action against the Labour party for her ‘autoexclusion’. Starmer wants to expel because last year she gave an interview to Socialist Appeal, one of the four groups he wants to expel from the Labour party. But this was at a time when Socialist Appeal was still perfectly acceptable. This is retroactive justice, the criminalisation of individuals and groups for actions that were perfectly legal at the time they were committed. It’s a hallmark of tyrannies and dictatorships from Nazi Germany to Stalin’s Russia, as Fitzpatrick herself has pointed out. She tweeted

I am starting to wonder, given my line of work, as to whether the practice of introducing laws with retrospective effect, the presumption of guilt until proven innocent, the denial of appeal rights and lack of fair process is to be future Labour policy for our justice system.

This is, of course, grossly hypocritical coming from Starmer. As Steve Sammut pointed out, between 1986 and 1988 Starmer was editor of Socialist Alternatives, a magazine published by the International Marxist Tendency. Labour Party Marxists are another group Starmer has decided to expel, despite the fact that, unlike Militant Tendency in the 1980s, I’ve seen zero evidence that they are an entryist group trying to take over the party. Indeed, many of the socialist societies that came together to form the Labour party were either Marxist or Marxist influenced. And when the scandal about Militant hit Labour in the 1980s, the Swedish Social Democrats responded by saying that they had absolutely no problem with the Marxists remaining in their party, providing that they didn’t engage in those tactics. These tactics, used to subvert democracy in the party, have been taken over and applied wholesale by the real entryists, the Blairites now headed by Starmer and David Evans in the NEC.

And let’s be clear – this is an inquisition. Starmer is actually using the language used by the Christian and Roman Catholic church to excommunicate heretics. The concept of ‘autoexclusion’ was devised in the fourth century to justify the excommunication of the Donatist schismatics of north Africa. The argument was that the Church isn’t excommunicating them. Rather they are excommunicating themselves through their beliefs and actions. It’s a doctrine that isn’t confined to the sphere of religion, however. Andre Breton, the ‘Pope of Surrealism’, used it when he wanted to throw dissident artists out of his artistic movement. His victims included a group of Christian artists interested in using the techniques of Surrealism to explore their religion, which caused the militant Marxist atheist to go berserk.

But Jewish Voice for Labour are also showing the real anti-Semitism behind these purges.

They have just submitted a report to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission and the ongoing Forde Inquiry showing that the vast majority of the witch hunt are Jews. Four out of five of those accused of anti-Semitism are Jewish. If we had a decent media in this country, this would be reported and more than demonstrate that these accusations have nothing to do with real anti-Semitism. Instead, it’s all about protecting Israel and presenting the Board of Deputies as the real representatives of Britain’s very diverse Jewish community. Of course, the Board are nothing of the sort. Tony Greenstein and other great Jewish activists and bloggers have demonstrated that the Board really represent only the United Synagogue, who seem to be the Jewish members of the Conservative party at prayer, just as the old adage said that the Anglican Church is for Christians.

Mike reports that JVL’s statement, submitted on the 24th August 2021, runs

“We have become aware of seven new investigations of Jewish Party members. Notifications of new investigations and auto-exclusions are arriving on a daily basis.

“This means it would appear that over four times more Jewish than non-Jewish Labour Party members have faced actioned complaints of antisemitism.  The disproportion is even greater in relation to JVL Committee members and officers. The staggering numbers suggest that these Jews are nearly three hundred times more likely to be investigated than non- Jewish Labour Party members. In all these cases the charges of so-called antisemitism are deeply offensive.

“Dozens of Jewish members are now being targeted by Labour as antisemites, for voicing an understanding of antisemitism that is a direct product of our Jewish political and personal heritage.

“The effect of rejecting or ignoring complaints made by JVL members of antisemitism; our experience of bullying and harassment; and the refusal to consult or involve JVL in, for instance, the EHRC required Action Plan; all show disdain for our status and roles as Jews.”

Their personal understanding of real anti-Semitism appears to me to be absolutely incontrovertible and corresponds to what the founders of modern anti-Semitism actually said. Slugs like the Austrian anti-Semitic politico, Carl von Schoenerer, stated that they hated Jews simply for being Jews. Their religion or other opinions were immaterial. Indeed, there was a nasty little rhyme they sang that said that Judaism wasn’t the issue. The ‘swinishness’ was in the blood. This is quite different from the verbose, convoluted and extremely flawed definition of anti-Semitism formulated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and used to chill criticism of Israel, as one of its authors, Kenneth Stern, has admitted.

And Jewish Labour members like Andrew Feinstein have pointed out the massive injustice in smearing decent, anti-racist Jews as anti-Semites when so many of them have been personally affected by the Holocaust. He regards their persecution by a reactionary Labour party leadership as indefensible.

And he’s right. I’ve read that half of the British Jewish population lost family members in the Shoah. And the victims of the NEC’s and now Starmer’s witch hunt has included proud, decent Jews, who have personally experience anti-Semitic abuse and violence, as well as anti-racist gentiles who have also suffered the same for their activism in support of the Jewish community.

The overwhelming preponderance of Jews as victims of the anti-Semitism witch hunt should absolutely put the lie to any claim that these people are really self-hating and anti-Semitic.

This is all about silencing criticism of Israel, and particularly Jewish critics, because their simple existence refutes the lies and propaganda by Netanyahu and his British supporters that all Jews everywhere are proud Israelis, and that the British Jewish community uncritically supports Israel.

And the witch-hunt against left-wing Jews in the Labour party is part of a strain of political anti-Semitism stretching back to the wretched Protocols of the Elders of Zion. One of the accusations levelled by the right against their opponents on the left is that they follow the classic anti-Semitic conspiracy theories by confusing Jews with capitalism and the control of the government and the economy. But the Protocols of the Elders of Zion also claimed that Jews were also responsible for socialism and communism. A little while ago I blogged about a letter from Craig Ferguson published by the JVL at their site, which pointed out that British anti-Semitism was originally targeted at left-wing Jews. The British newspaper magnate who published the Protocols in the 1920s himself drew a distinction between loyal, patriotic British Jews, and radical, communist Jewish immigrants flooding in from the continent. The witch-hunters clearly seem to be guided by that kind of anti-Semitism in their attacks on JVL. The Labour MP Neil Coyle even called for their expulsion along with other ‘commies’.

And Michelle Laufer clearly showed Starmer’s personal hypocrisy in targeting entirely decent left-wing Jews considering his own dismal record of lies and intriguing as party leader in this tweet:

I’ve just heard Starmer on the radio saying he and Labour need to be honest with the British public so they can learn to trust the Labour party again. As a Jewish member of the Labour party who has had to watch other Jewish members abused, suspended and expelled as anti-
Semitism has been weaponised, I’d like to know if he’s going to be honest about this. Is he going to be honest about the fraudulent way he in which he became leader, his broken pledges, the gerrymandering of Party democracy, the silencing of members of criticise apartheid Israel, his fawning obedience to the Board of Deputies who do not represent the views of the majority of Jews in this country and the imposition of antisemitism training by the Zionist Jewish Labour Movement.

Well no, of course Keef Stalin isn’t. He’s an authoritarian liar, and this would destroy him and the other Thatcherite entryists driving this witch-hunt, as well as his attempts to ingratiate himself with all those Tory voters out there.

Mike concludes his article with these comments

And the problem isn’t anti-Semites; it’s him – and the entryists who are supporting him because they know falsely accusing Labour socialists (the people for whom the party was originally created) of a heinous offence will make the party unelectable, leaving the way clear for the Tory corruption that we have seen under Boris Johnson.

I think it’s just a matter of time until this particular house of cards comes crashing down around Starmer and his allies.

I hope so. And I hope it brings down everyone else who was involved in this vicious vilification and persecution of decent people, including David Evans and the woefully misnamed Jewish Labour Movement.

Videos of CGI Recreations of Vehicles and Castle for Jodorowski’s ‘Dune’

Alejandro Jodorowski’s Dune is one of the great, unmade films. Jodorowski himself is a Chilean-French film director and comics writer. A Surrealist, he made a series of very bizarre films, such as the western El Topo. In the early ’70s he set about making a film version of Frank Herbert’s classic SF novel, Dune, despite never having read it. This would have starred Mick Jagger as Feyd Rautha, Orson Welles as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen and the great, bonkers Surrealist artist Salvador Dali as the Emperor of the Known Universe. Equally impressive were the artists he hired to produce the concept art and designs for the spaceships and other vehicles and settings for the film. These included H.R. Giger, the creator of the infamous Alien, French comics artist Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud, and Chris Fosse, the force behind a thousand SF paperback covers. The film was never made, as the producers cut its funding at the last moment. However, the work on the movie was never wasted, as Jodorowski and Moebius used it as the basis for their comic The Incal and The Metabarons. It has also been immensely influential on later SF movies, including Ridley Scott’s ’80s classic, Bladerunner.

These two videos have been made and put up on YouTube by Monochrome Paris, a group that wishes to recreate in CGI Jodorowski’s aborted film. They have so far managed to recreate Duke Leto Atreides’ car, which was designed by Fosse, and Baron Harkonnen’s castle, which was the suitably horrific work of Giger.

Here’s the link to the car video:

Reviving Jodorowsky’s Dune in Virtual Reality [Chris Foss Vehicle test – Real-time 3D] – YouTube

And this is for Harkonnen’s Castle:

Reviving Jodorowsky’s Dune in Virtual Reality pt II [HR Giger – Real-time 3D] – YouTube

I think the two videos are great, and it would be really superb if they were able to recreate the entire movie in CGI. Unfortunately the videos are from 2019 and so I don’t think their proposed movie will ever be made. It would still be good if they were able to produce more videos of some of the other designs for the movie, such as the space tugs towing the containers of spice through space, a space pirate ship and the Harkonnen’s own spaceship, which were all designed by Chris Fosse. They’re included along with his other art, included concept designs for Bladerunner, Alien and Superman 2 in the book 21st Century Fosse.

Starmer’s Purge Dictated by Board of Deputies’ Hit List

This comes from a piece on The Electronic Intifada from 20th November 2020, by their main man, Asa Winstanley. Winstanley’s another decent, committed anti-racist, who was purged due to accusations of anti-Semitism. The reality is that he’s no such thing. But he is a pro-Palestinian activist, as you can tell from the title of the online magazine he contributes to. The article reports the finding by another pro-Palestinian activist, Becky Massey, that she and ten other members of the Labour party were expelled on the demands of the Board of Deputies of British Jews in a hit list the Board submitted to Starmer on 11th May 2020. Massey discovered she was on the Board’s list of people they wanted expelled and on a Labour party email chain discussing her after making a subject access request for the information the party hold on her. Massey was sent the letter of expulsion on the evening of the day of the email chain. Coincidentally, Starmer had also paid a visit that day to the Jewish Labour Movement. A Labour party spokesperson at the time categorically denied that the meeting had in any way been connected to Massey’s or anybody’s expulsion. That can be taken with a pinch of salt, as the Jewish Labour Movement, previously Paole Zion, has been demanding the expulsion and suspension of left-wing members and pro-Palestinian activists for years. And there is hints that the two are connected. The Board later wrote that they had sent the Labour Party a list of eleven people they wanted expelled, and were heartened that Starmer had met the JLM.

Labour party apparatchiks in the email chain discussed suspending Massey with a view to her ‘autoexclusion’. Like all authoritarian movements, the party deliberately uses language to imply that they’re not at fault, but the victim. The term ‘autoexclusion’ means to state that somehow, those expelled did it all themselves. Andre Breton, the ‘pope of Surrealism’, used to say the same thing whenever anyone queried him for expelling people from his movement. The letter sent to Massey herself simply said that she had been suspended subject to the approval of the NEC’s next meeting. Another line in the email chain, which somehow escaped redaction, indicates that Starmer was actively involved in the expulsion, or at least knew full well about it. It reads “Subject: RE: For LOTO: Rebecca Massey.” LOTO’s an acronym for ‘Leader Of The Opposition’. In other words, Starmer appeared to have interfered politically in the case, which is one of the accusations levelled at Jeremy Corbyn.

The Board’s Hit List

Strangely, neither the Board nor the Labour party offered any comment when they were contacted about this The Electronic Intifada. The article states that although the Board claims to represent the Jewish community, much of its activity is protecting Israel’s crimes and that in 2013 its president wrote ‘We lobby unashamedly for Israel’.

Revealed: the Israel lobby’s Labour hit list | The Electronic Intifada

The article descibes Massey as ‘a leading activist in one of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s most visible branches, in Brighton on the south coast.’

I don’t know her, but Tony Greenstein appears to be a member of the same branch. He’s also been expelled and smeared as an anti-Semite, despite being Jewish. From what I’ve read of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign on Tony’s and other websites – many of which are also by Jewish supporters of the PSC – the organisation most definitely does not accept real anti-Semites. They’ve also been highly successful in boycotting local shops selling goods made in the occupied West Bank or which are owned by businesses based there. They’ve also embarrassed the local, Sussex Friends of Israel outfit, or however they describe themselves. There are videos up on the net showing the pro-Israel activists threatening and abusing the pro-Palestine demonstrators, despite claiming in their literature that they stand for peaceful and respectful debate. The Sussex pro-Israel bunch also seem to have some very bizarre members. One is a balding, clean-shaven bloke, who claimed on his website to be an Orthodox Jew, despite his appearance to the contrary. Massey is almost certainly no kind of anti-Semite, but another victim of the Blairite’s and the Israel lobby’s campaign to purge the party of left-wingers and pro-Palestinian activists.

This also seems to show that Starmer himself is deeply implicated in these expulsions. Which should come as no surprise considering the revelation by The Canary that two organisations devoted to attacking left-wing sites and blogs as ‘fake news’, the Center for Countering Digital Hate and Stop Funding Fake News, were set up and run by Blairites with links to him.

As for the Board of Deputies, they are an unrepresentative organisation that smears and persecutes left-wing, pro-Palestinian Jews and gentiles. They are not a part of the Labour party, but through the smears and lies of the political and media establishment, have been allowed dictatorial control over it.

This needs to end now. It should be Starmer who is on trial for his crimes against Labour, not these decent people. And the control of the Board should be resisted and them shown up for their malign interference, smears and libels.

Darren Grimes: Respectable Journalist or Shape-Changing Alien Invader?

The Sunday before last, August 23rd 2020, Zelo Street put up a piece reporting the outrage when Sunday Morning Live decided to hold a debate about education. Unfortunately, one of the so-called ‘experts’ they invited on was professional Guido Fawkes windbag was Darren Grimes. A man, who can fairly be said to be one of the most ignorant people in journalism, and that’s against stiff competition like Sarah Vine, Julia Hartley-Brewer and Harry Cole, political editor of the Scum. Way back in the 1930s when the great Surrealist painter Salvador Dali fled to America to escape the Spanish Civil War, he declared that his mission was to cretinise the public. Well, Dali passed away in the late 70s, but he left his great mission to the Tory party. Back in the 1980s Private Eye reviewed one book by the new Tory thinkers that were coming through. I think it was by the late Roger Scruton, but I’m not sure. The book stated that Conservatism, based as it is on tradition, is silent and incoherent until forced into action. This was a clear statement of the anti-intellectualism that’s at the heart of Tory politics. It forced the Eye to ponder whether there was an optimum level of cretinisation. Had Prince Philip reached it? And one those seeming to carry on this mission to misinform the public spreading lies and sheer ignorance is Darren Grimes.

How Grimes gets invited onto the Beeb as any kind of authority is something of a mystery. He’s working class, and has something of a chip on his shoulder about his origins, feeling that he is looked down upon because of this and the fact that he has a northern accent. But this is what happens when you support a party run by elite public school types on behalf of elite public school types. They have elocution lesson at school deliberately to lose any regional accent they have. And this automatic connection between received pronunciation and leadership is explicitly stated by the British military. One spokesman for the British army, quoted in an article back in the 1980s stated very clearly that if you want to be a British officer, you should lose your regional accent otherwise you wouldn’t be respected by the troops. I’ve met a lot of squaddies, and in general they don’t respect the officers because of the bullying, sneering attitude so many of them have towards their men and women, along with stories of stupid orders that have led to disaster given by commanders against the advice of their NCOs.

Grimes also feels he’s despised because he didn’t complete his degree. He’s a failed fashion student. Okay, academic intelligence doesn’t automatically equate to being generally well-informed and intelligent. It’s just one form of it. When I was at school we were told that only 5 per cent of the British population went to university. That changed rapidly with the expansion of higher education in the 1990s with the creation of the new universities out of the older colleges and polytechnics. Then came Blair and New Labour, who wanted 50 per cent of the population to attend university. The result is that something like 46 per cent of the school leavers now go on to university. But this also means that there are plenty of older people, who are naturally very intelligent, but didn’t get a chance to go when they were children. Their intelligence shouldn’t be underestimated. But Darren Grimes isn’t one of them either.

In one of his pieces, he praised the Tories for breaking out of the old New Labour Oxbridge elite. It’s another falsehood, and the truth is exactly the opposite of what he said. New Labour senior figures came from a range of different universities. Blair attended Aberdeen, Gordon Brown Edinburgh. Another senior cabinet minister went to Newcastle Upon Tyne, I believe. It is the Tory administrations of Dave Cameron, Tweezer and now Boris Johnson that’s stuffed full of the Oxbridge elite. And then there’s that little incident of Grimes’ interview with David Starkey, in which he let the Tudor historian get away with all manner of racist nonsense. Including the really offensive statement that slavery couldn’t be a holocaust, because there are ‘too bloody many of them’ now around. Grimes’ appearance on Sunday Morning Live resulted in a number of peeps going on Twitter to ask the obvious question: how did someone as stupid and ignorant as Grimes get invited onto the Beeb. Zelo Street quotes a number of them, beginning with Mic Wright, who said  “I studied Education at Cambridge University (2:1). I am a school governor. I have written about education issues for 15 years. I am the first in my family to attend university. I have lots of broadcast experience. And now on [SML] … Darren Grimes, an expert in nothing”. Rosa P asked

“What the hell does [Darren Grimes] actually know about anything? Surely you should have some expertise in any area to give an opinion on the BBC. Grimes, you had little to offer to the discussion other than telling us you did an apprenticeship in media studies … Made the mistake of putting [SML] on. Their expert panel discussing education includes Darren Grimes, whose sole qualification is that he once attended a school. I try to defend the BBC but they do themselves no favours with this nonsense”.

‘Pad’ pointed out the hypocrisy of Grimes himself for appearing on the Beeb when he wants to defund it. “Is Brexit gobshite Darren Grimes, whose Twitter header is a photo of him appearing on the BBC and who was, once again, on the BBC this morning talking utter bollocks, still a part of the ‘grassroots’ campaign to [Defund the BBC]?”

John Traynor’s answer to this conundrum was succinct: “BBC has arsehole Darren Grimes on because it doesn’t understand balance in broadcasting”.

Zelo Street concluded his article with this:

‘What, one has to ask, is the point of inviting pundits with some expertise, who are prepared to research their subject, just to find they have to debate with Darren Grimes, whose USP is to whine about people calling him an idiot. Because he is one.

Having an opinion is not the same as knowledge. Know the difference, BBC people.’

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/08/bbc-and-darren-grimes-oh-dear.html

 

The mention of Grimes reminded of the very brief description of an evil alien race in Ed McNab’s The Alien Spotter’s Handbook or How to Save the Earth. This was a children’s humorous book published in 1982, which mixed real astronomy with a less than reverent treatment of astrology, as well as Fortean phenomena like frog falls and the Devil’s hoof prints in Devon, the Mary Celeste and so on, with simple stage magic tricks and instructions how to make your own simple telescope and periscope around the fictional narrative that there is an alien plot to take over the world. This was discovered by the fictional Dr. Qwax. Evidence for this malign plot came when experts examined an alien probe that landed in Peterborough. Ostensibly friendly, further investigation revealed that it was far more sinister, with a secret compartment containing computer games like ‘Kill the Human’. It’s written as a guide to uncovering these covert alien invaders, including those who have taken over members of your family, like your dad or granny. There are plenty of the kind of daft jokes children of all ages love, and 2000 AD and the mighty Tharg also get a mention. One of the jokes is a spoof list of pop songs secretly written by aliens. And one of them is The Grymes They Are a-Changin’ by the Metamorphs. This has a footnote helpfully explaining that they are ‘Shape-Changers from a very dense planet. Grymes specilise in Heavy Metal Rock musicians.’

Gyrmes/Grimes – this must be it then. Grimes is really a Gryme, a shape-changing alien from a very dense planet, who has disguised himself as a human as part of this insidious alien plot. It has to be! It can’t be because he actually has any real journalistic talent.