"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in"
(Leonard Cohen)
"Ignore all proffered rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say"
(Michael Moorcock)
"Look for your own. Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings."
(Andre Gide)

"I want my place, my own place, my true place in the world, my proper sphere, my thing which Nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought all my life-time."
(Nathaniel Hawthorne)
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
(Franz Kafka)
"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated"
(John Donne)
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
(Robert J. Hanlon)
"Life is beautiful, but the world is hell"
(Harold Pinter)

Friday, April 19, 2013

Thatcher Funeral: A Woman who was Hated

Should expect better from the left
EXTRACT: The Socialist Workers Party’s response to Thatcher’s death has been atrocious. As part of Socialist Worker’s “Rejoice! Thatcher’s dead special pull-out”, we are treated to a picture of Thatcher with a noose around her neck and the headline: “Gotcha! Now get the rest” (April 13).

Sorry, comrades, this is utterly crass - and says a lot about the frighteningly bad politics of the SWP. Yes, we all know - yawn - that the Socialist Worker editorial team were aping The Sun’s vile headline about the sinking of the Belgrano in 1982. Jolly good, no doubt, that Ian Burrell of The Independent has described the headline as a “breakthrough” or “triumph” for Judith Orr, current editor of Socialist Worker, writing that the paper’s “name was everywhere” (April 12). Orr herself is obviously proud as punch that the “Gotcha!” headline/image went “across the world as being the most defiant front page celebrating the end of Thatcher”. Enjoy your 15 minutes of fame, comrade.
Socialist Worker is deluding itself and treating its readers as idiots, not for the first time. Neither the SWP nor anybody else on the left ‘got’ the 87-year-old Thatcher - nature did. What are we supposed to do - wait for all Tory politicians, or perhaps the entire bourgeoisie, to die of natural causes? A brilliant revolutionary strategy. What the headline actually did was reveal the SWP’s impotency, advertising the fact that it has no answers and - like the left in general - is programmatically directionless. Get real, comrades.

1 comment:

Garth said...

The Socialist Worker is deluded if it believes that its readership holds enough water to fill a charity collection bucket with piss.

Don't get me wrong - Thatcher dead? That's great, now lets move on and change the way we deal with these people we 'elect' to RULE over us.

The Socialist Worker has become what it seeks to destroy.