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July 01, 2008
Tuesday
 
 
Samizdata quote(s) of the day
Guy Herbert (London)  Slogans/quotations

To succeed in modern politics you should take care to be a bland, self-preserving, sober, drugless, funless, dull-witted bore for years beforehand.

- Libby Purves, discussing leftyluvviedom's cultivation of the Two Minutes Hate1 against Boris Johnson.

----
1The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.
- George Orwell, '1984'

Comments

See:
http://www.newstatesman.com/society/2008/06/boris-regime-mcgrath-mayor

BTW, the NS is offering a free book to new subscribers. It's 'In Defense of Lost Causes' by Slavoj Zizek.
The blurb for this book says: "Zizek claims that, particularly in the light of the forthcoming ecological crisis, we should reinvent revolutionary terror and the dictatorship of the proletariat in the struggle for universal emancipation. We need to courageously accept the return to this Cause even if we court the risk of a catastrophic disaster."

Jeez.


Posted by Robert Hale at July 1, 2008 10:23 AM
It is hate that fuels such attacks, not love of your fellow man.

And unlike those 'leftieluvvies' spitting venom at Johnson no obsessional hatred was directed towards Ken Livingstone by anyone... oh wait


Posted by bronkertine at July 1, 2008 12:54 PM

I think the difference is hating Ken Livingstone has never been a badge of personal acceptability in right-wing circles, for anything very much. Where he has been hated it has been on account of his political persona, not class. And there's been very little fictionalising of the politics or personality, with the exception of the (to my mind) rather tiresome and unconvincing attempt by the Evening Standard to brand him anti-semitic, rather than rude-when-drunk, after his altercation with one of its reporters.

What's strangely reminiscent of the groupthink of Two Minute Hate is that even though a Conservative MP, Boris wasn't held up as an evil, racist toff until the moment he stood against Livingstone. His role up to then was as licensed eccentric, OK-for-a-Tory, the perplexingly pleasant right-winger.


Posted by guy herbert at July 1, 2008 04:02 PM

"We need to courageously accept "

He should swing from the gibbet for that split infinitive alone....

"Emancipation through terror" indeed.


Posted by Cleanthes at July 1, 2008 05:16 PM

I think the Internet has far surpassed the Two Minute Hate :-)


Posted by Alan K. Henderson at July 3, 2008 06:18 PM
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