As we know now the Revolution will not be televised….however it was…. it was called ‘Citizen Smith’, a television comedy show I believed….I was mistaken…it was in fact a documentary following the Glorious Path to Revolution of one Paul Mason…or as we knew him then, Wolfie Smith, Foxy to his friends.
Citizen Smith was “the artistic gesture that stood for its rebel aspirations and its thwarted dreams”….but now those dreams have been reborn and Paul Mason can once again pretend he is manning the barricades singing the Internationale (Billy Bragg version of course)
‘Stand up, all victims of oppression
For the tyrants fear your might
Don’t cling so hard to your possessions
For you have nothing, if you have no rights .’
I don’t normally give Mason much thought but an article about someone else brought him to mind and a vague image I’d had of him coalesced into a lucid and descriptive reality.
Harriet Sergeant is a researcher at a political think tank who befriended a black teen gang in South London and followed their activities for over three years.
She has written a book about the time she spent with them called ‘Among The Hoods’….the Sunday Times’ review mentions that it is an unsettling book….because of Sergeant’s ‘peculiar, over emotional involvement with her subjects…it is as though she has an underclass crush.’
It goes on to say ‘Sergeant reminds me of a middle-class adolescent who becomes obsessed by the cool edginess of the ‘street’ and its handsome denizens……the book reads like a love letter.’
Sergeant herself says ‘I became like a proud mother forever talking about them and boring my friends….’why,’ asked my son once in exasperation, ‘is your phone full of photographs of gang members – but not one of me?’
It might be interesting to see who is on Mason’s phone….just how many radicals or Occupy members are providing him with happy memories?
Mason is obsessed with radicals and alternate lifestyles and the Occupy movement. He even believes Occupy has spawned a new art movement:
‘There has been so much art centred around the Occupy protests that it is beginning to feel like a new artistic movement. What defines it, and could it supplant the world of the galleries?’
‘Like modernism it has started with the sudden import to America of a meme of revolt from outside …It is the art of outsiders….anti-commercial: much of it is in fact done “off the side of a desk” by people trying to hold down real-world jobs. And its aim, like Occupy, is to change American politics.
“There’s a global uprising for democracy going on,” says Read, “and these artists are trying to champion that movement”.
Wow, exciting…except of course it’s nothing new…Occupy didn’t invent protest art….it has been around forever…how many ‘classic’ artists, the ‘old masters’, were subversives and painted hidden messages into their paintings?
Mason spends a lot of time reading Orwell. “He’s my hero. Not only because I think he is the greatest English literary figure of the 20th century but also because I share his understanding of what journalism, political analysis, shooting the breeze and fiction are there to do. Orwell sacrificed everything – including working at the BBC – to confront the truth of what was happening in the world.”
No sign of mason doing that, taking his flip flops and tent and living it for real rather than getting vicarious thrills from the sidelines of his well paid job. And I’m not sure Mason understands anything Orwell said(see later).
Here Mason voices his fears that without Occupy et al and their guiding hand we would have…..
“The worst thing would be if we ended up in three years with an acutely polarised social situation in a Western country, and the entire elite going: ‘Where the heck did this come from? Who is the bloke with a small moustache?’ You’ve got to arm yourself against these eventualities.”
He freely admits he is “very enthusiastic about people challenging entrenched ideologies”.
Isn’t that exactly how you end up with a ‘Hitler’ or a ‘Stalin’? The whole structure of society is smashed, broken down with no overall authority allowing in the most active, energetic, organised and powerful groups to step into the power vacuum…as has happened in Egypt where the Muslim Brotherhood is in the process of taking over.
What Mason is endorsing is mob rule..those who shout loudest or do the most damage get to make the rules…..anarchy and bloodshed is the only outcome of such naive notions.
‘It does often seem remarkable just how well tuned in Mason is to the protesters. The original “20 Things” post, which apparently is a game changing bit of insight, was inspired by an evening in the pub with the anarcho-squatters at London’s Really Free School. They had a sign on their door saying “journalists f**k off” – they were pretty strict about enforcing it too. But they invited Mason to the pub. “Actually, they taught me a lot.” he says.’
What has he learnt….
“The greatest source of hope for me is to see a generation rising who think all forms of hierarchical ideological activity are rubbish.”
So social structure, respect for authority and living by some form of rules is ‘rubbish’.
Mason is a child.
Mason is also pretty keen on this bunch of no hopers…‘students in the self-designated “Research and Destroy” collective at the University of California, Santa Cruz, issued their famous “Communique from an absent future”: “‘Work hard, play hard’ has been the over-eager motto of a generation in training for … what? – drawing hearts in cappuccino foam … We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow. And the jobs we work toward are the jobs we already have. What our borrowed tuition buys is the privilege of making monthly payments for the rest of our lives.” ‘
This is another of his thoughts on Western society:
‘For the future to be better, we need to break with an economic model that no longer works. For the graduate without a future is a human expression of an economic problem: the west’s model is broken.’
Here is an example of his muddled thinking:
‘However on politics the common theme is the dissolution of centralized power and the demand for “autonomy” and personal freedom in addition to formal democracy and an end to corrupt, family based power-elites…..and this one is troubling for mainstream politics: are we creating a complete disconnect between the values and language of the state and those of the educated young? ‘
Now is that not Tory doctrine…small government, people taking responsibility for themselves and the power to make their own decisions?
Mason claims that the whole ‘new’ wave of protest movements derives from this:
1. At the heart if it all is a new sociological type: the graduate with no future
Which of course is rubbish….graduates, with proper, useful, qualifications, have never been more in demand.
Why take my word for it:
‘It’s not that bad to be a graduate, despite what Left-wing agitprop merchants like Paul Mason might tell you.
‘I’ve had it with Paul Mason. Newsnight’s economics editor, while clearly an intelligent man, is as openly partisan and fiercely Left-wing as it gets. Ever since writing his book, Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere, last year, the man has become a roaming, state-sponsored propagandist for the types of young people who quite like the idea of Occupy London. He’s the sort of Lefty who rants about the “end of the neoliberal experiment” between interviews with dreadlocked, dope-smoking hippies squatting in some Arab oil trader’s Chelsea townhouse.
What’s most annoying is the idea that people on Twitter and people hanging around at Occupy and people living in squats are the voice of my generation.’
Mason claims that all the ideologies, the ‘isms’ are being rejected by the youth…really…has he not seen who voted for what in Egypt….or the Green movement or the Occupy movement….call them what you like but essentially most is derived from an ‘ism’…Marxism.
Mason explains that never before has it been possible to connect so many people and have them work together in the aim of reaching one political goal….the internet and social networking has made this possible.
Really?
In a speech to the House of Commons on November 5, 1919, Winston Churchill said: “…Lenin was sent into Russia … in the same way that you might send a vial containing a culture of typhoid or of cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy. No sooner did Lenin arrive than he began beckoning a finger here and a finger there to obscure persons in sheltered retreats in New York, Glasgow, in Berne, and other countries, and he gathered together the leading spirits of a formidable sect, the most formidable sect in the world … With these spirits around him he set to work with demoniacal ability to tear to pieces every institution on which the Russian State depended.”
I didn’t know Lenin was logged on and tuned in.
Even in the backward and remote North West Frontier in the 1800’s the whole country could be mobilised by word of mouth in no time and vast hordes of angry Pathans incited to descend upon the British with murderous intent.
Mason’s ’20 Things’ post is either blindingly obvious, wrong or old hat. Mason is caught up in the romance of ‘revolution’ like many of his BBC colleagues and is reliving the exciting student radical days when he was an angry young man who achieved absolutely nothing with all that anger and now looks to spur on the next generation to do what he couldn’t…which is presumably smash capitalism from the way he writes.
It is remarkable that the BBC employ him at all, even more remarkable that they thought he was a fit person to edit Newsnight…..someone of such obviously antagonistic and anti-Capitalist ideas and almost violent views of society is perhaps not someone that could be trusted to present an impartial view of events surrounding the collapse of the banking industry.
Because he is so enamoured with Orwell I’ll leave the last word to his hero…which might make you think Mason hasn’t actually read much of his writing:
‘The general weakening of the whole British morale that took place during the nineteen-thirties, was the work mostly of the left-wing intelligentsia.
The mentality of the left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in half a dozen weekly and monthly papers. The immediately striking thing about all these papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion. There is little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who live in a world of ideas and never expect to be in a position of power. Another marked characteristic is the emotional shallowness of people who live in a world of ideas and have little contact with physical reality. The really important fact about so many of the English intelligentsia is their severance from the common culture of the country.
In the general patriotism of the country they form a little island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. …it is their duty to snigger at every English institution.
All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British…if the fascist nations judged we were ‘decadent’ and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly responsible.’
