De-Stalinisation, Broadsheet Style

There's a longer post on this topic coming soon - it may well be my first after my permanent return to the UK on Sunday - but here's a teaser of the subject matter. I hope I'm not the only one who feels suspicious of the broadsheet columns, representative of a whole subgenre of revisionist history (examples here and here of works which mask a political agenda behind the supposed urgency and objectivity of their message), which labour the 'Stalin as bad as/ worse than Hitler' point, as if anyone who has ever felt the slightest of leftish inclinations stands in need of reminding about what took place in the Soviet Union between 1922 and 1953.

Two quick points. First: are such arguments ever anything other than sententious point-scoring? Amis's Koba the Dread seemed to mark the beginning of his diversion into conservative truculence, which reached its apotheosis with the (quite literally) execrable 'The Last Days of Mohammed Atta' and the stunningly ill-advised essay 'The Age of Horrorism'. Since Koba, he's been wagging his finger, most probably at CW students at Manchester University, and making claims that are either so obvious that they can only represent the need of an increasingly intellectually bereft novelist for straw targets or wrong in a manner that is so outré as to be almost avant-garde. The 'Stalin = worst' argument brings to mind Patrick Hamilton's brilliant caricature Mr. Thwaites, the aging blimp in Slaves of Solitude who believes that it is the iconoclastic verve of his rants, rather than their bullying predictability, which sends the likable protagonist Miss Roach up the wall. For young writers, it's frustrating to see well-paid public intellectuals filling column inches/ broadcast schedules with opinions which, while inching ever closer to earning the epithet 'received', are presented as the product of someone daring to say the unsayable. It would be interesting to see a contemporary columnist discussing the historical conditions that drove the Soviet Union towards Stalin in the first place; after all, there's been plenty of attempts to historicise Nazism.

Second: Russophobia seems to be a sanctioned form of racism. I don't know what the majority of the mainstream media think the 'colour' revolutions in post-Soviet states are, but I'm fairly certain that they're anything but triumphs of social democracy. Furthermore, when Russians aren't being represented as the oppressors of 'Plucky Little Georgia' or the conquistadores of Baltic hyperspace, they're painted as barely-civilised invaders disguised in Gucci and Prada. Remember this?

Brighouse, Bootle, Featherstone, Speke...

Interesting, vaguely psychogeographic, article on the effects of the CC on the towns and cities of the M62 corridor here. I'm particularly taken with the rumour about Glasshoughton (spelled incorrectly in the article) Xscape. Indoor ski complexes somehow seem to gloss all of the industrial, economic, and technological upheavals of Britain in the Callaghan - Brown period, which I'm going to (probably annoyingly) call the 'long eighties' here. The visual, and some might say social, focal point of late-period-Ballard imaginative construct Milton Keynes is an Xscape which is visible from as far away as the M1 interchange: it's a frightening place (for a dyed-in-the-wool northerner) and an odd template for - and one has to use the word tentatively in the case of Rugby League Land's former industrial centres - the 'regeneration' of Britain beyond the Trent. Anyway, congratulations to the Observer for an engaging and refreshingly un-patronising article about the north.

Youll like this...not a lot, but you'll like it

Of course, everyone else in the world will have used the same title for posts on this subject. Lazy me.

South Bank's finest conservatively-minded celebrity magician has a blog. Sample excerpt:

Whilst on the plane to Barbados I saw the headlines about Prince Harry and an explosion of reaction to him calling a co-soldier a ‘Paki’. When I saw it had happened two years ago I had to ponder upon who caused the ‘explosion of reaction’. I don’t think it was Prince Harry if it was two years ago (because I didn’t hear the explosion then) but rather the media NOW who had just found out and decided to try to throw the shit as far and wide as they could. I wonder why? Who cares? After all isn’t it an abbreviation of Pakistani? I know that I couldn’t care less if someone calls me a ‘Brit’ and would think myself to be a pretty pompous ass if I did. The soldier concerned seemed to have treat it in the right way, recognised it for what it is, a nickname, and got on with living. How desperate can newspapers get? Oops sorry. Did I say NEWS papers? ; Isn’t this story to old to be considered as ‘news?

Woah, Paul. Outrageous. Someone's got to stand up for the decent majority in this country and stick it to the PC brigade blah blah blah blah. I'd suggest Paul and his ilk go and live on Charlie Brooker's imaginary 'Daily Mail Island', only the Mail seem to have got his goat by publishing unflattering pictures of Debbie McGee.

(Seriously, though: what makes some people think that 'Paki' and 'Brit' could possibly occupy equal ranking in the league table of offensive words?)

Also, I hope you have noticed that Daniels, although definitely not a 'pompous ass', ends many of his simple statements with either one or two question marks??

I hope he doesn't do any crazy magic on me now.

Now that I've moved here, and because I haven't opened a Hungarian bank account, I've had to take an active interest in exchange rates. I can tell you, for instance, that the people who run the exchanges at Luton airport are absolute crooks (278 HUF to the pound!) or that Sterling seems to have dropped by about 4% against the Forint in the last week. So, imagine my joy and surprise this morning when I logged onto BBC News and discovered George Osborne, the Old Etonian shadow chancellor who looks like nothing so much as one of the actors who play 'inept, corrupt, nepotistically-advanced politician #3' on Spooks*, is attempting to cash in politically on the economic crisis at the same time as collapsing the pound against every other currency in the world! As it seems to me, looking to make party-political headway by talking about a run on the pound is precisely the kind of thing which would cause a run on the pound.

You have to wonder just how many of the people who are responsible for the current crisis are personal (school) friends of Mr. Osborne. One might also think that the shadow chancellor would want to steer clear of stories about soiled banknotes after certain articles that were published during David Cameron's leadership candidacy...


* The ones who always try and stop what MI5 are attempting to do until Harry whips out a file containing pictures of them on yachts with prostitutes. Or Russian oligarchs.