The Ugliness of the Beautiful Game.

The cult of football is alive as ever, especially in Britain where the English pride themselves as the inventors of the beautiful game. It is unclear, at least to me, what is so beautiful about the sight of over twenty millionaires chasing a bladder around a field. Chomsky would remind us of the role sports play in training us to be submissive to authority as well as the tides of irrational jingoism. This shouldn't be taken lightly as it was George Orwell who noted "The nationalist does not only not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." The rampant flag-waving and patriotic chanting emanates from the delusion that the England team embodies the spirit of the nation. Indeed many are left intoxicated by the ecstasy of these non-events. The power of the mass event should not be understated. It's forgotten that the concerts and music festivals we enjoy today come from the same model of the mass rally which Hitler used in the 1930s.

Peter Hitchens has compared it to Pagan cults, and for good reason, but we shouldn't take football as a Pagan exploit entirely as it is essentially prolefeed. And the aristocratic fans of Paganism are too often forgotten. It used to be that Christianity was for the poor while the ruling-class remained largely Pagan until the 19th Century in Britain. The aristocratic radical Nietzsche wanted to undo Christian values in order to return to the life-affirming polytheism of Ancient Greece. If anything football is not elitist even if it is particularist rather than universalist, it is open to all and for all. And it is the particularism of football - the preference for us over them - that holds a great link with Paganism. The loyalty to the team matters most, it can get you beaten up in some places. The worship of heroes, special clothing, the celebration of "seasons" and singing are all symptomatic; another particularist deed is racism. It isn't a coincidence that the neo-völkisch movements of Scandinavia are Pagan and call for white supremacy and a return to Odin worship in the same breathe.

The emergence of football hooliganism is not a coincidence, the fact that these hooligan elements are typically racists and right-wing extremists is also not a coincidence. The primary base of recruitment into the EDL were these thugs, the ex-BNP leadership itself comes out of hooliganism. This isn't to say that the sport of football is inherently fascistic. For 20 years Kick It Out has campaigned against racism in British football now, which is something that Eastern Europe and a lot of other places lack. But it is the case that there are a great many people who were whinging that the England manager Fabio Capello at the time was not English. There is plenty of talk about the high presence of foreign players in our teams. There is undeniably an element of nationalism that has been harnessed as part of the base of support for football teams. The shirt you were aligns you with a specific team in the same way that the flag links you with a nation, the glory of which reflects back on you.

The race relations of football have been on blunt display recently. Hodgson thought it appropriate to leave Rio Ferdinand out of the Euro 2012 Squad for "footballing reasons" and include John Terry. Even though it was John Terry who called Anton Ferdinand a "fucking black cunt" and will soon be in court for doing so. Kick It Out might condemn Hodgson's handling of Rio Ferdinand. There was the time when Ron Atkinson described a player as a "lazy thick nigger" with Jimmy Hill coming to his defense on the grounds that the comment is just harmless fun in the football culture. We don't like to remember the days when fans lobbed bananas at black footballers. Today in Poland the fans can be seen waving banners with such slogans as "Death to Hook Noses!" For many it matters that England is finally managed by an Englishman. No doubt some will think that the English team will finally be victorious after 46 years, even though we didn't actually win in 1966 - an unacceptable fact to be uttered in the pubs of our weary little island.

Roy Hodgson played for Berea Park FC as part of a white-only league in the years before Apartheid was brought down in South Africa. Of course, Hodgson has since "come out" as an admirer of Nelson Mendela in the years since the end of Apartheid. He states that he played in South Africa for footballing reasons rather than political reasons. This isn't inconsistent as the sport is an institution of continuity around which the masses can huddle while the establishment remains largely the same. It is a part of society's wallpaper, an investment for the business class and a source of national pride for the masses. The managerial function in society to regulate the passions of the masses. The need for an identity marker to derive a higher meaning had to be sated to dull the rages of class instinct. It is no coincidence that the counter-revolution has come to Egypt around the same time that there was an explosion of ultra-violence at a football match. Similarly as social democracy began to be torn apart in Britain in the 1970s and 80s there was a great wave of football violence.

As Terry Eagleton observes "If every rightwing thinktank came up with a scheme to distract the populace from political injustice and compensate them for lives of hard labour, the solution in each case would be the same: football." The game provides mediocre forms of solidarity for the masses who gather around particular teams. This can't be said for high culture, the prolefeed excludes no one in its particularity. The teamwork can be seen as selfless for the most part, though this is undermined by the celebration of the obscene wealth accumulated by the likes of David Beckham and Cristiano Ronaldo. The sport combines intimacy with Otherness in celebrity form, the hero we worship is just like us really and so we could be him one day. The game may have a place carved out for "experts" but it transforms its viewers into experts too. This is why my understanding of the subject is limited to the political and the theoretical. Eagleton goes on to add "Football offers its followers beauty, drama, conflict, liturgy, carnival and the odd spot of tragedy".

David Starkey, Black Culture & the Riots.

Wiggers with Attitude?

In the aftermath of the riots David Starkey decided it was wise to bring up Enoch Powell and argue that a specific point made in the 'Rivers of Blood' speech was "absolutely right". He was keen to reassure the audience that Powell was wrong in that it was not "inter-communal violence" and that it is cultural rather than racial. It would be generous to David Starkey to designate him as a cultural chauvinist, which is perfectly consistent with the monarchism and nationalism to which he subscribes. David Starkey is a provocateur in the tradition of an insolent dinner guest crowing just to offend and shock. In this instance the bespectacled historian was at dinner with an Oxbridge liberal, a leftist and a crime novelist. The outrage was over comments such as "The Tiber did not foam with blood but flames lambent, they wrapped around Tottenham and wrapped around Clapham." As if that were not bad enough Starkey went on to claim the problem is that "the whites have become black" and that the black politician David Lammy sounds "white" when you close your eyes.

At first he pinned the riots as an "extension of commercialism" and the exuberant consumerism of British society, though he is intelligent enough to understand that the consumer boom was born out of the implosion of social democracy and the emergence of Thatcherism in it's wake. Therefore to manage the contradiction between rapacious individualism and the moral opposition to senseless violence Starkey wheels in racially charged rhetoric which will scandalise the liberal intelligentsia and split the commentariat down the middle. At which point the working-classes can make a cameo appearance in the guise of the angry crowd yelling "Enoch was right!" It is now highly unlikely that there will be any debate over the issues behind the riots as the media discusses whether or not David Starkey is a racist. Notice David Starkey asks of Owen Jones "You glorify Rap?" and then backs off as Dreda Say Mitchell points out that the rappers only reflect the materialism of the world. Brian Cox was right to call Starkey "utterly corrupt" last year.

It could have been a conscious effort to further derail the political discourse away from any meaningful discussion of inequality and police brutality. It could just be a simple case of racism masquerading as cultural conservatism. Time will tell if David Starkey distances himself in the future from such remarks. The insinuation of a respectable historian that this is somehow related to an imported "black culture" of crime is just false. In the halcyon days of vanilla Britain, at the finest hour of our country, back in 1940 juvenile crime accounted for 48% of all arrests and there were over 4,500 cases of looting from then until 1941. There were even cases of firemen looting burned-out shops, teenagers stripped the clothes off of corpses to sell and some even cut-off the fingers of the dead to get at their rings. These could not have just been the "wiggers" who had watched too much MTV and absorbed an awful lot of 50 Cent's anger before going out to spit it out into society. As a result of this level of bullshiting we're unlikely to see any real solutions in Britain, just a right-ward shift that will lead us down the road to more riots in the future.

Cultural Blackness?

Originally the issue of race was raised on Newsnight before Starkey crawled out from his hole, it was Gavin Esler who wondered if the riots had anything to do with "black culture" or even MTV. We should bare in mind the relations of base and superstructure when we're talking about culture in this way, that the superstructure is generated by the base in order to justify and defend itself. Simultaneously the superstructure has the potential to undermine the base in spite of the interdependent relations between them. Take Rap music, usually it defends the status quo in it's portrayal of a anti-political and anti-intellectual form of underground capitalism in which collective organisations (e.g. gangs) can still function meaningfully. It at once embodies society's institutional corruption and it's opposite with an emphasis on a warped set of codes and rituals. The misogyny and homophobia found rampant in the music videos and lyrics is born out of a thoroughly impotent masculinity.

It is not coincidental that Rap music becomes incredibly popular and influential in the late 1980s onwards at the peak of Reaganism. Look at the socio-economic situation for young black men in particular, especially in the US where there was a brief opening for black people in the 70s as civil rights were gained through harsh struggle. But with the financialisation of the economy millions of African-Americans became part of a superfluous population. The black economy of drugs provides an alternative to the business system which has excluded black people for decades. Not only is it an alternative to financial capitalism, where the wasps of Harvard still thrive, it provides a welfare system that has been completely destroyed in the US. It is also an expression of rage against the police for the murder and persecution of black people, NWA captured the anger bubbling beneath the surface just before the battering of Rodney King sparked the LA riots in 1992. Ultimately, mainstream rappers are only looking to establish a black aristocracy which stands as a reflection of the white elites.

Rap music is not the source of riots and crime, rather it is linked to it through economic circumstances. The riots were not a coherent and organised expression of political dissent. It was mass-rage against the police along with elements of the same consumerism we have all indulged in. Where does this anger come from? In 1997 and 1998 there were around 8,000 stop-and-searches, by 2008 to 2009 that had risen to 150,000. The use of Section 60 between 2005 and 2010 has increased by 300%, originally Section 60 was introduced to combat football hooliganism; over the same time period the stop-and-searches of black people increased by 650%. From 1998 to 2010 over 330 people have died mysteriously in police custody, surprisingly 75% of the people who died were white and not so surprisingly 90% were male aged between 25 and 44. Let alone the level of unemployment and economic stagnation in this country which has plagued the poor for years. The decisions undertaken by the rioters were not justified, but the grievances are legitimate and real.

The Media Diagnoses of the Riots.

The commentariat have peddled a variety of theories around the recent riots we have seen in Britain. The common characteristic across the mainstream media, with a few exceptions here and there, specifically The Guardian and The Independent, is that there are no excuses for the violence. Inequality and police brutality are not excuses for this kind of behaviour. But generally the media have been scrambling around in search of answers for the explosion of rage onto the streets of Britain. These are just some of the bizarre theories that the press are running to prop up the easy answers of the political class, as well as some of the views popular on the internet these days about every issue and this issue is no different.

Living on Benefits, Why not loot JD Sports? A culture of dependency and entitlement has been engineered to secure votes for the Labour Party. The end result has led to a significant number of the British population scrounging and lying idle with impunity. Then these pampered scum decide to get up off of the sofa and raid JD Sports even though they're loaded from all the generous benefits they've been showered with for years and years. Why shop at Ted Baker when you've been thousands of pounds to piss away in tax-payer's money? Why not trash JD Sports even though you can afford better? Perhaps these people would grow better values rather than ganja if we cut off all state-benefits. While we're at it we might as well sell-off the schools and the NHS for these ungrateful yobs.

It's all them Bloody Foreigners! The riots are the result of uncontrolled mass-immigration and the state-doctrine of multiculturalism. The participants are black and this is not just a coincidence. It has gone on for long enough, the problem is "feral black gangstas and Islamist fast-breeding sex pests are the problem." Multiculturalism has failed, we need to return to British values and start with shooting rubber bullets and firing water cannons at the mob just as we have done in Northern Ireland for so long - and with sexy results! The time has come to send these people back and sort our country out! Because isn't that what we really defeated Hitler for? If only it wasn't for the international left-wing conspiracy to subdue the unremitting greatness of the White Man by telling not to use the n-word and reminding him about the suffering of black people.

It's not Blacks, it's Black Culture. On Newsnight Gavin Esler turned the debate about causes to the "black culture" of short hair, bling, guns, drugs, gangs, bitches and Rap music. So these young people have been riled up by the sounds and sights of "black culture", Paul Routledge identified rap music as "the pernicious culture of hatred around rap music, which glorifies violence and loathing of authority." These youths have been watching far too much MTV which has led them to leave bookshops intact only to steal immodium on mass from Boots. We better tell 50 Cent to tone down the violent anti-police and pro-crack rhetoric because it's gone too far. Better yet for the country, shoot rubber bullets at anyone who can say "innit" and bring back Showaddywaddy!

It's the Blairite Bullshit! The Labour Party has been soft on crime for years but never so much as it was when Tony Blair led it in government from 1997 to 2007. David Hughes informs us in a minuscule article, almost as minuscule as his Johnson, that it is Tony Blair who led Britain down the road towards bleeding-heart liberalism. "A year before he became Prime Minister he delivered a speech on law and order that came close to condoning shop theft. Blair said that "hard-pressed" single mothers or pensioners pocketing "treats" were not a serious concern. He told a meeting of retailers that the real threat came from organised gangs." Before you could say tiny Johnson the Labourites were giving jacuzzis and X-Box 360s to hard-core criminals.

There's just too much Fucking! The breakdown of family values, which in turn led to the collapse of moral values, was inevitable as the liberal elite has instigated a cultural revolution of permissiveness. The "chickens have well and truly come home to roost" for the liberal experiment of letting people fuck around led to the shameful rise of the Single Mum! No wonder the kids of today are running amok in the street and burning cars, if only their parents had sexual ethics then they wouldn't have even been born! Melanie Phillips claims the Labourites introduced "the sexual free-for-all of ‘lifestyle choice’" and "told girls that they could, and should, go it alone as mothers." The rest is history, from single-parent family to stealing a carpet.

Bring Back Sir Paul and I don't mean McCartney! At The Daily Mail James Slack (an appropriate name for such a fopdoodle) wondered if the departure of Sir Paul Stephenson from the Met over the phone hacking scandal contributed to the riots in any way. After all the "vast experience" of Sir Paul could have come in handy against these bastards. The carnage had to be stopped and only Sir Paul could help them, he was a 'good copper' with an "iron will" by all accounts but then the political class ripped him from the heart of the Met in a fit of "lust for media blood" in the midst of the phone-hacking scandal that has engulfed The News of the World along with the whole of News International, the Conservatives and the Met. The left-wing establishment is determined to undermine the police and let off these rent-a-mob rioters.

This is Generation GTA! An unnamed police officer, speaking to The Evening Standard, blamed the riots on the ultra-violent game series Grand Theft Auto in which players are encouraged to commit mass-murder. The officer told the paper that these "Kids out of control. When I was young it was all Pacman and board games. Now they're playing Grand Theft Auto and want to live it for themselves." The entire GTA series has taught the adults of tomorrow that it is proper to go for a good looting just for fun, even if it means shooting innocent bystanders and killing hookers after you've banged them in your Volkswagen GTI. It has turned them into philistines! Where's the decency of Pacman gone? Shoot the Houser brothers! Life would be so much simpler if we were all colourful round objects bouncing around in a maze...

These people are lacking in... intelligence, aspiration and responsibility. This is what led to the looting of stores! It is what has made them unemployable, so they languish on the dole or get involved in dealing drugs. A "stunted feral view of the world" is behind the violence and looting, which was nurtured by a rampant entitlement culture that rewards the undeserving "vermin" that make up the under-class in Britain. There was no police to stop it, so the irresponsibility and stupidity of these people was allowed to run amok. The lowest of the low do not deserve the houses they've been given by the state and we should seize them back. That's the way to combat homelessness before the Olympics! The rights of these fucking muppets outweigh the responsibilities they endure and the only way to deal with these animals is to restore consequences to their actions. There are literally thousands of undeserving pricks in our society and we shouldn't tolerate them stepping out of line.

I blame Wayne Rooney. The former editor of The Telegraph Max Hastings blamed the poor role-model that Wayne Rooney has been for kids today and wrote in The Daily Heil, he said: "How do you inculcate values in a child whose only role model is footballer Wayne Rooney -- a man who is bereft of the most meagre human graces?" Sure they can learn a good ork impression, master the language of the Scouser and maybe kick a few through a window or two... but where are the morals going to come from?! The "wild beasts" in the streets are no better than the polar bear that had the audacity to eat an Etonian called Horatio, it was only the natural instincts that were being followed and no one will shoot them for it "unlike the bear". Oh if only Diana were here!

The Animal Spirit of Rupert Murdoch.

Risk and Reward.

Originally, Rupert Murdoch won the bid to takeover The News of the World in 1968 from old money Sir William Carr and soon cornered the shareholders before shoving Carr out of the picture completely in 1969. Sir William Carr had picked Murdoch over Bob Maxwell because Maxwell was a Czech and he found Rupert Murdoch to be a "gentleman", the Establishment found Murdoch most "ungentlemanly" for giving Carr the boot. Murdoch went on to buy The Sun and drag John Profumo through the mud once again for shagging Christine Keeler back in 1963 when Profumo was Secretary of State for War. The affair had scandalised high society and wrecked a government. The issue for the Establishment was that Profumo had been rehabilitated after his charitable work in the East End, Murdoch was simply out to destroy a man for profit. Now with the public disgusted Rupert Murdoch has slashed off the infected limb of his own media-body, there is no room for sentimentality with this old fart. There are bigger things at stake, as in BSkyB.

Everyone was just so appalled to find that the media empire of Rupert Murdoch is not just limited to a narrow right-wing agenda to prop up his favourite politicians and it has reflexively hacked the phones of not just the rich and powerful but dead soldiers too. We find that the Conservative Party and the police - both of whom have helped Murdoch crush a strike in the past - are entangled in the conspiracy ran out of the Murdoch red-top. It is clear that there is no low that the parasites in the press will not stoop to for a good yawn. Of course, it took the revelation of bugs in the phones of the victims of terrorism, warfare and serial killers as celebrities are fair game and politicians are the scum of the earth to most people. It should be no surprise if we consider that it was the Murdoch press that published vicious lies about the Hillsborough disaster, including the smears that fans robbed the dead, attacked police officers and urinated on paramedics. To some it would seem that Rebekah Brooks has proven that gingers have no soul! But it is Rupert Murdoch who has no soul whilst the lower minions would only be replaced if they were not complicit.

After the most recent revelations in the phone-hacking scandal I wonder if Kelvin MacKenzie is still thanking God for Rupert Murdoch. No doubt the answer from that meat-headed shit sack would be an emphatic "YES!" Murdoch would express no less from a Thatcherite pig he has fed well over the years in his role as editor of The Sun. MacKenzie maintained The Sun as a buffet for the working-class where they were spoon-fed a diet of sex, death and football meshed in a conservative agenda on immigration, gay rights, multiculturalism and welfare. Kelvin MacKenzie once said of his readers "You just don't understand the readers, do you, eh? He's the bloke you see in the pub, a right old fascist, wants to send the wogs back, buy his poxy council house, he's afraid of the unions, afraid of the Russians, hates the queers and the weirdos and drug dealers. He doesn't want to hear about that stuff (serious news)." Whatever pays the mortgage is alright at News International.

The public outrage struck as the Yuppie Mephistopheles was on the verge of the biggest deal of his life and it has been delayed until September, which gives the Mephistopheles some breathing room and some time to do a bit of "spring cleaning" to ensure a smooth deal before the year is out. There is little chance that the Coalition will oppose the demands of the man who threw the support of 40% of British media behind the Conservative Party in 2010 and, as usual, Murdoch's man won the election. This should not be a surprise as Murdoch backed Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair. That is the reason we found David Cameron was ever so keen to put Jeremy Hunt on the job after the hilarious outburst from Vince Cable, who would apparently act as a "Gang of One" against Rupert Murdoch. Of course, Vince Fable was not meant to be biased against Murdoch so the government found someone who could ease the deal through in a quiet way. That's where Jez Cunt came in handy!

In his article in The Guardian Kelvin MacKenzie inquired "Cynical eyebrows were raised when Murdoch gave assurances over the independent future of Sky News. Why?" First of all, out of the 247 editors who work for Rupert Murdoch none opposed the Iraq war. It is clear that there is no problem of independence when all the editors are reactionary pigs. Even Rupert Murdoch has admitted that News International supported the foreign policy of the Bush administration on the Middle East in particular. It was Rupert Murdoch who immediately throw Fox behind the Republican Party in the 1980s and even more so in the 1990s, beginning with a fawning tribute to Ronald Reagan at the Republican Convention. There was a cultural shift in emphasis at Fox when Murdoch took over, race issues and AIDS were at the top of the list at the time. The channel became a lot more sophisticated after Roger Ailes, a long-time mudslinger for the GOP, was put in charge of the newly launched Fox News Channel. It was Rupert Murdoch who contributed $1 million to the Republican Party in 2010.

Remember this is the same man who has meant to have taken on the Establishment, it took "guts" and "management skill" to do so according to Kelvin MacKenzie who has nothing but celebratory words for the Murdoch monopoly. News International is a family business which Rupert built up from his inheritance and will no doubt be passed down to young James in a few years. This is not particularly different from the Old Boys' Network of the Establishment, which Murdoch has railed against only as a buccaneer capitalist with no time for tradition and society. It was not "risk" that the Murdoch press was built on, but cold calculations which oiled the wheels and restrained anyone who got in the way of a smooth running operation. Notice as soon as the advertising goes AWOL there is an immediate reaction from Murdoch, we find Glenn Beck has been axed as his rating dwindled and Waitrose boycotted his lunacy. It is the same at The News of the World, Murdoch was "standing by" Rebekah Brooks and the paper until the public disgust was too costly.

Just as Kelvin MacKenzie wishes that there were hundreds of Rupert Murdochs in Britain to "wipe out" unemployment, as if the cure of unemployment is entrepreneurial adventurism, we find that it is the staff at The News of the World who are paying the price for the contemptible practices of a media outlet. Though it must be noted that the individuals who write for the Murdoch press are there because they hold particular beliefs in most cases, otherwise they would be somewhere else and this goes for the BBC crowd too. At the same time, it is not the case that every employee (particularly the lowest of the low) of News International is a right-wing maniac who has enriched themselves at the expense of the political discourse. It is not a concession of the 'trickle-down' variety to be concerned for the jobs that have been destroyed by Murdoch to secure a grubby business deal. This is precisely what the "animal spirit of capitalism" is all about, Rupert Murdoch kills jobs not creates jobs.

As Laurie Penny points out it is imperative that the momentum of rage against News International is allowed to fade away only for the Mephistopheles to assimilate BSkyB. The Conservatives want this all to go away for obvious reasons given the close relationship between government and media, let alone Andy Coulson's role in Cameron's anti-climactic rise. The Labour Party are clearly impotent with Ed Miliband making a pathetic call for Rebekah Brooks to resign, it looks even more pathetic as the entire newspaper is thrown away just a few days later. This means that the media oligarch is at least responsive to public outrage against his odious rags. Perhaps it is time to build a bonfire out of copies of The Sun and The Times, for we cannot allow this man to buy 60% of BSkyB and dominate over 40% of the media in this country. The concentration of such power in the hands of one man is intolerable just from a slight glimpse at his record.

Sign this petition and attend any protests you can!

The Narcissist Chef and the Oliver Army.

The Messiah is Back!

Cower, brief mortals, in the face of Jamie Oliver, the kitchen-dwelling Messiah who will lead you away from your life of sinful indulgence and into the promised land of raspberry vinaigrette and shaved ginger in everything. After smiting the Turkey Twizzler from our school kitchens, Jamie has set his shoulder to the wheel to rid the world of fat people forever. And he’s absolutely right to do so. Those fucking fatties, who needs them? Wasting space, sweating profusely, clogging up malls, encouraging rogue parts of the brain to visually speculate on their sex life, I hate those fat bastards. And Jamie’s got help; David Starkey, an arsehole with horn-rimmed glasses, taking a break from taking massive liberties with history and annoying everyone with even the vaguest knowledge of the Tudors, has decided to join the crusade against the well fed.

So we’ve got not one, but two celebrities telling us that lard-arses need to slim down or risk a trip to the fat-gulag, and they’re damn right to do so. If any of our readers are fat, then we want them to put down this paper and go be fat someplace else. Now. NOW! SCHNELL! The one word that keeps echoing inside the cranium whenever Jamie Oliver does anything these days is “Masturbation”, of a vigorous and mightily offensive variety (except for Jamie’s ego). He just jerks and jerks and jerks until his great pillow-like face is puffy and red and the nation is on its knees lapping up his ejaculate and crying for more, because it’s as delicious as one of his runny meals.

Really, there’s so much wrong with his “Dream School” (bearing in mind that dreams aren’t real, and can be extremely harrowing) that we would need a flow chart rather than an article to show all the ways. For one thing, it’s cropped up at a bad time for education, and the government, rather than funding a proper school with real teachers for a year, is blowing just as much money on a weeklong school with celebrity teachers touted as “brilliant minds”. Ellen Macarthur sat on a boat that sailed itself, eating muesli bars and intermittently bursting into tears for a few weeks, and now she’s a brilliant mind. I spend all my time in my apartment eating Pot Noodles and having intermittent psychotic breaks. How long is it until I’m declared a “brilliant mind” by the middle-class twat brigade? Or perhaps you’d prefer Alistair Campbell, architect of New Labour, spin doctor and professional goat-fuck? Perhaps Simon Callow, a shrieking ponce masquerading as an actor. Still not satisfied? We’ve got Cherie Blair, who I just can’t look at anymore after the descriptions of the filthy Catholic sex she shared with our erstwhile Prime Minister. This immediately leads us back to that little man with blood on his hands who still hasn’t learnt that you can take a horse to water but you can’t make it suck you off. But we digress…

So, we’ve assembled our rogues gallery of “brilliant minds” we proceed to browbeat kids into swallowing the ideals that Oliver espouses. And it’s utterly, utterly harrowing to watch. The sheer moral presumptuousness of it all is enough to make us spit out our Turkey Twizzlers, compounded with the horrific bigotry against people who are more heavy-set than the national average which curdles the blood. Jamie Oliver isn’t doing this out of goodness. He’s doing it because he’s a zealot. He knows better than you, and he’s going to make you follow his ideals because you’re a moron. There’s also the aforementioned self-glorification. His masturbatory ideals aren’t marketed to the people he’s trying to convert, they’re made for all the upper-middle class mothers with small children called Jake, driving around in Chelsea tractors with the radio perma-locked to The Archers, who can nod sagely whenever Jamie declares that fat people should be locked up until they learn, the stupid fat cunts.

The Oliver Twizzler.

What Mr. Oliver and the Twat Brigade have missed is the fact that people have every right to be fat. More than that, the fact that the working classes can afford to be well-fed, and can afford to have a constant supply of food, is a sign that our society is truly successful. Jamie Oliver is doing what Morgan Spurlock did in the USA; having a smug little laugh behind his sleeve at the lower classes, and he should be ashamed of himself. While people of all incomes can afford the occasional McDonald’s or KFC meal, not everyone is able to afford fresh imported ginger or cilantro dressing to drizzle over their noisettes of goat’s cheese and beetroot quiche.

Jamie’s oft-touted line that “people in Africa eat better than we do” is either grossly misinformed at best or a fucking insult at worst. He’s living the celebrity lifestyle as the Yuppie Messiah, and has seemingly forgotten that people just can’t relate to the kind of ideals that he’s spouting. At the same time Oliver seems blissfully ignorant of the fact that in more unequal societies there are higher obesity rates, which we’re all aware of whenever we picture the average Yankee though Jamie’s head seems to be devoid of such imagination. Celebrity chefs are on TV to turn cooking into a spectator-sport that can fill in the innumerable gaps between adverts – which are what really matter to the producers – they’re not there to save us all from the horrors of cholesterol. The famous school dinners campaign which “liberated” our generation from the Turkey Twizzler (which were delicious by the way) and in the end it only succeeded in driving people to ingenious lengths of smuggling junk food into the glorified factory farms for little robots, otherwise known as primary and secondary schools. Just like with obesity there are real problems in education, which cannot be resolved through nutrition and narcissistic feel-good trips.

In education there is a contradiction between jumping through hurdles, by memorising what is just needed to pass exams and then regurgitating on command, versus the kind of critical thought essential to education. Many good teachers try to stimulate thought and creativity, which is often incongruous to the rigid curriculum of ideas of a few “brilliant minds” that we must dutifully ingest. Rather than looking to resolve this contradiction, which often produces conformity on mass, Jamie Oliver emerges with a “quick-fix” solution to massage his ego. Note that this is at a time when pressures of intellectual conformity are being intensified by the government. Funding for the humanities is being cut whilst science and maths are being prioritised, because innovation and creativity in science and maths will contribute to the running of the economy whereas sociology just might lead to greater criticism of the economic order. In the midst of this Jamie Oliver affectively jumps on the Tory bandwagon to have kids swallow the ideas of the ‘brilliant minds’.

At the risk of sounding cold, callous and malicious, which we are, we would not hesitate to say that this whole Dream School project has only redoubled our desire to see Jamie Oliver lowered into a gigantic meat grinder and then moulded into an enormous Oliver Twizzler (please, sir, I want some more) after which we can have David Starkey fired out of a Napoleonic cannon into the side of the HMS Victory, Ellen Macarthur can be placed in a death maze, and Alistair Campbell can be repeatedly kicked in the crotch to the tune of ‘Things can Only get Better’. All of which would conclude with Robert Winston being sawed in half in the name of making science ‘fun’ for kids. We hate to be less eloquent than normal, but Jamie Oliver, you can fuck off.

Note: Originally written by JT White and Josh Ferguson for the Heythrop Lion about a week ago.

The American Experience.

The First Casualty of War.

 

Ricky Gervais once joked that the Second World War may have the best ending but the Vietnam war has the best sound track. He was referring to the horrendous use of the atomic bomb against the Japanese as less "entertaining" than the music of the 1960s. In doing so, whether intentionally or not, Gervais highlights the way war has been reduced to the realm of entertainment today. As we all know, since the end of the Vietnam war there have been countless efforts to immortalise the conflict on the big screen for all to see. The best of these films are often listed as Platoon, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket. The Kubrick film being my personal favourite. But there are problems with the so-called anti-war films that have focused on the war which raged from the early 60s under JFK to the mid 1970s under the caretaker administration of Gerald Ford.


The problems of films like First Blood and Missing in Action are self-evident, as such films do not pretend to be anything more than a shallow display of steroid-fuelled jingoism and a mere excuse for a angry white man to go "wild". The problems of films that claim to show us the true horror of war are not often discussed in the same light. Even though the films, which take a less "positive" look at the Vietnam war, have made false depictions of the Vietnamese. One such instance being in The Deer Hunter where American POWs are forced to play Russian roulette for the pleasure of sadistic Vietcong. Thus, justifying the ruthlessness which Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken demonstrated in gunning them down to escape. It is the scars, both physical and psychological, of war that are depicted in the film. But only the scars inflicted on the minds and bodies of American soldiers.

Let's look at Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola's take on the Vietnam war, which was an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Conrad's novella takes place in the Congo Free State, a private-colony of the Belgian King Leopold II, and the characters are working for a trading company which brutally exploits African workers. Apocalypse Now takes place in war-ravaged Vietnam and Cambodia, the main characters are soldiers. It is Cambodians who replace the Africans as the brutalised people, but also as "primitive savages" who worship Kurtz as a God. In Apocalypse Now Kurtz recalls a humanitarian trip to inoculate children for polio in a Vietnamese village, the Vietcong went into the village and then hacked off the arms of the inoculated children. Kurtz wept at the sight of the pile of little arms, before learning to admire the will of the Vietcong to commit such atrocities. Kurtz says "If I had 10 divisions of those men, then our troubles would be over very quickly."

The emphasis on the American experience of the war is a characteristic that practically all films on the Vietnam war share. The Vietnamese experience is severely neglected, even though it was 6 million Indochinese who died during the war. Not only is the war depicted from the side of the aggressor, it is the subjective experience of the war by soldiers carrying out the invasion which is the focus of such films. The objective violence of war, which is inherent to war regardless of the existence of any particular person, which becomes subjective violence in war films. Subjective violence in the sense of violence as impacting directly on individuals, violence which is partly dependent on the existence of an individual. Take Platoon the mass-killings and fraggings that take place is all part of Charlie Sheen losing his innocence, which is the "first casualty of war" according to the film's tag line.

Far from actually taking a moral position on the war these films actually obfuscate the important issues of the war. Instead opting to focus in on the perpetrator's traumatic experience, which enables the ethical and political background of the conflict to be suppressed. Why was the US in Vietnam? This question goes unanswered in most, if not all, American war movies. The fact that it was the events at Pearl Harbour that drove the Europeans out of South-East Asia and by the early 1950s colonial powers were struggling to maintain power.  Around this time the US government supported the French in their bid to regain dominance over Indochina. This attempt failed and the US ended up backing a nationalist regime in the South of Vietnam as the North was taken over by communists. In the 60s, the US moved to destroy all currents of independence in Vietnam - whether communist or nationalist - to prevent a "domino effect" across South-East Asia. 

In We Were Soldiers, which was dedicated not just to the Americans who fought at Ia Drang but also the Vietnamese who died there, the fall of French colonialism in the region is depicted in the opening scene. The problem in the ambush of French soldiers by Vietnamese rebels is that it is the Vietnamese who remain faceless aggressors and the French who are the victims of the assault. This goes as far as portraying a Vietnamese man literally stabbing a French officer in the back with a bayonet. It is the French who are overwhelmed, disarmed and executed mercilessly. This scene is supposed to explain how the Vietnam war "began", but it takes one battle out of context. The battle of Ia Drang was one of the last in the First Indochina war, which spanned 8 years and ultimately brought an end to over 60 years of French colonialism in the region.

It is as if the American film industry is obsessed with Vietnam in particular because it is commonly perceived as such a loss for the US and a pointless waste of American life. Not because it was fundamentally wrong and immoral, but because almost 60,000 Americans died in a senseless war. Never mind the 6 million people slaughtered all over South-East Asia, not just from Vietnam but Laos and Cambodia as well. It could also be argued that the US succeeded in its goals in Indochina, most currents of independence were eradicated and these countries were reduced to satellites of China. In that sense, the Vietnam war was no loss for the US and the thousands of Americans who died in the war did die for a cause - an immoral cause. The Americans were not the victims of this war, the people of Indochina were. Thus, a film about the Vietnamese experience of war is well over due.