Podcast #131

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Oct 9·edited Oct 9Liked by John Steppling

The ludicrous hyperbole around reported atrocities seems designed for an audience with no direct experience of warfare or oppression. A typical example is the sliced off woman’s breast used as a football – a rank impossibility. Only an affluent public weaned on CGI zombie flicks could ever have been taken in by that.

Covid was certainly a testing ground for the new “elastification” of reportage though in the UK I always thought that a pre-covid “taster” was provided by the attack on Jeremy Corbyn just before the 2019 election. This is the one where the BBC ran a full ten minutes on a vacuous content-free generation of fear mongering over “the precipice we face” and “the poison in our society” – this referring to a “Nazification” of the Labour Party. Granted that even the craven media refrained from playing the old “New Hitler” card for the avuncular Corbyn. But a steady drumbeat of “Labour’s anti-Semitism problem” managed to stick to an expedient degree.

The furore over the First Amendment is a fascinating demonstration of a crisis point in Western propaganda. The ruling class are in what might be described in vulgar fashion as a deep PR credibility problem. The much touted strengths of our alleged Western democracy are becoming increasingly incompatible with the necessary fabrications now demanded by the ruling class to cover that long anticipated capitalist crash now visibly looming. Speaking of which, I recall so many Leftist channels speak of this impending crisis of unprecedented dimensions up until 2020 when the whole covid phenomenon seemed to carry these same channels away into what seems to me to be a crafted diversionary route.

Shaenah’s suspicion of a CIA backed Leftist group echoes my own sad disillusion over the World Socialist Web Site. My view of that may be described as dialectical in that I think there is a definite intelligence influence there but to create a group that would derail genuine Marxists would necessitate employing genuine Marxist analysis to rope the “punters” in. . So a phony dissident group would, ironically (paradoxically?), have to be REALLY dissident up to a point. Thus we have a “controlled asset” that will have a volatile aspect. Though Max’s point that they may be genuine all the way – but sadly deluded COULD be true. But to continue to push the covid mantra even now without the slightest reservation seems very suspect to me. Even more suspect – and the WSWS’s ultimate disgrace – is the vitriol they poured over the Canadian protest convoy.

The facetious “Leftism” has now taken over. In the UK, this is embarrassingly spelled out by the tenacious grip that a significant portion of the population have on this notion that the Labour Party is “Left”, “Socialist”, “Communist” etc. – and all this decades after Thatcher explicitly called “New Labour” her finest achievement and even explained why. Corbyn was a blip, an anachronistic sigh of Old Labour that never had a hope in hell of kick-starting some drive back to the old “collective bargaining” model of industry.

Speaking of which, there was a creditable UK drama series recently called “Sherwood” that was set in a present day Nottingham community still scarred by the devastating splits in the mining union crafted by Thatcher’s spies back in the mid-80s. This brought back how necessary that deliberately provoked confrontation was to the brutal new neoliberal project.

(I recall that period well myself as a university student sharing a flat with a policeman who droned on about “the fuck-pig miners”. The fact that my old school mate and I had to share the flat with this odious individual is painfully significant since we interviewed a few candidates to share with and preferred others but did not feel we could rely on them to provide the necessary rent on time – which of course was no problem for a policeman.)

For me, the vicious smear campaign against Corbyn was the final coffin nail in any pretension that the Labour Party was some kind of valid Leftist institution. And the jaw-droppingly cynical admission of the media over the conniving of Blairite ghouls around Corbyn (Tom Watson etc.) was astonishing for its sheer candour in openly admitting that the neoliberals were solidly in charge and cared nothing whatsoever for any genuine democratic public opinion.

In the face of such public incomprehension of politics, it is par for the course that such non-issues as covid, transgender, etc. should become elevated to constitute the very definition of “Leftness”.

On the topic of declining standards of goods, Max mentioned paperbacks and I am the proud owner of a number of paperbacks by an American publisher called Dover who proudly boast about supplying “permanent editions” – very sturdy. They are the kind of books you know you don’t need to treat in that depressingly delicate manner. As opposed to the latest batch of the prestigious Penguin imprint which are often surprisingly “soft” and you already know even from a brand new copy that this won’t last, that the pages will brown probably within the next few months etc.

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Aesthetic Resistance

Podcast #131

John Steppling, Max Parry, Hiroyuki Hamada, Dennis Riches, Shaenah Batterson, George McIntyre & Lex Steppling

Discussion about this post