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Friday 18 July 2008

Living Marxism lives on

David T at Harry's Place has an excellent post on what he calls The Rise of the Professional Contrarians:

There's another piece by RCP-er, Brendan O'Neil on Comment is Free. It is about whaling. He has called it "Harpoon this Ecoimperialism"

You don't need to read it. You can guess what he will say. You can always guess what RCP commentators will say. The Frank Furedi Personality Cult only have a handful of ideas, and they recycle them, tediously. 

...It might make a good parlour game: pick any subject, and then write a cod RCP article on the subject.

Dangerous sports? "We must confront our risk obsessed society and reclaim human agency and our faith in the possibility of human progress. Let's all do the Cresta Run blindfolded!"

Food safety laws? "We must confront our risk obsessed society and reclaim human agency and our faith in the possibility of human progress. A bit of botulism never did anybody any harm!"

Bear bating? "We must confront our risk obsessed society and reclaim human agency and our faith in the possibility of human progress. We care more for the welfare of bears than we do for liberty and freedom!"

The Srebrenica massacre? "Never happened. Whoops!"

You can't blame the RCP lot for being trollish contrarians. They've ALWAYS been like this - right back to the days when they were vocal in their opposition to "safe sex" and AIDS education. I forget why. Something to do with risk and fear, and the superior efficacy of beetroot based cures, I think.

There is something deeply annoying about being lectured by people whose every belief has been exposed as intellectual fraud, and turned over with the collapse of Marxism, but who are now 'more capitalist than the capitalists'. Their successor organisation, the Institute of Ideas, ought to be treated as the front organisation for a particularly deceitful brand of communists that it is. Instead it is a treated by people who should know better as if it was merely a sparky progenitor of debate.

The LM crowd were - typically of such people - defenders of Milosevic. As such, they happily accused those journalists who reported his ethnic cleansing of distortion. When ITN sued for libel after two of its journalists were libelled by LM, the magazine was forced to close. On the very day it closed, Claire Fox set up the Institute of Ideas.

The Guardian journalist Ed Vulliamy, who filed the first reports on the Trnopolje camp, was bang on in his assessment of those who treat with LM crowd: 

Those who helped LM cannot fail to recognise that by doing so they also stirred the poison LM had dropped into the well of history, playing their own role in denying a genocide...Living Marxism's attempts to re-write the history of the camps was motivated by the fact that in their heart of hearts, these people applauded those camps and sympathised with their cause and wished to see it triumph. That was the central and - in the final hour, the only - issue. Shame, then, on those fools, supporters of the pogrom, cynics and dilettantes who supported them, gave them credence and endorsed their vile enterprise.

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