10: George Orwell wrote in 1944 that the term “fascist”—which properly describes a political and economic system—had become little more than a swearword, to be applied to any group a particular speaker didn’t like.

George Orwell wrote in 1944 that the term “fascist”—which properly describes a political and economic system—had become little more than a swearword, to be applied to any group a particular speaker didn’t like.

Trotskyites called Stalinists fascists and Stalinists called Trotskyites fascists and everyone who wasn’t a Catholic called the Pope a fascist. 

“I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else”, he wrote.

What is not always remembered is that he went on to say that when an English person calls someone a fascist, it is pretty clear what they mean. They are generally saying that that person is a bully. The word may have been abused, but it was not completely meaningless.

No, I have no idea who Chiang Kai-Shek was, either.

Clearly, in the last decade, the word woke has taken on the same function as the word fascist in a lot of people’s vocabulary: a catch all swearword to apply to everything that the speaker happens not to like. I have heard it applied to cubicles in men’s public toilets; the Last Jedi; the European Court of Human Rights; non-dairy milk, and I know not what else. [*]

But—like the word fascist—it is not entirely devoid of meaning. Tony Blair (PBUH) was correct to say that ordinary people know what they mean by it.

If a schoolboy calls his PE teacher a fascist, we get that he thinks the teacher is mean and authoritarian. If he thought the teacher was weedy and effeminate, he would call him something else. If he draws a cartoon in the school paper in which a man wearing an SS uniform is saying “Ve haff vays of making you fit: ze cold showers and ze cross country run in your UNDERWEAR” we would understand the target of the satire. We don’t really think that he really thinks that compulsory rugger lessons are part of a wider plot to annex the Sudetenland.

The problem comes when PE Nazi becomes part of our mental toolkit: when we can’t think of gym classes without thinking of Swastikas. When people start to say “Sports lessons should be abolished because paramilitary groups who believe in the superiority of the Aryan race meet in secret bunkers to invent new ways of giving fat kids a hard time” then rational discourse has come to an end.

But it may still be true that Mr Hicks was a rotten teacher. And, indeed, a bully.

Someone put a little cartoon on Twitter. In the olden days, it said, on the first day of term, teacher said “I hope you enjoyed your summer vacation. Let’s do some maths.” Now, it asserted, on the first day of term, teacher says “Communism good. Capitalism bad. There are seventeen genders.” A very wise man retweeted the cartoon, adding that most American parents do not understand that this is the literal truth.

Fascist, communist and woke are often merely figures of speech; and that’s fine. The problem comes when the figure of speech becomes the thing you actually believe. You call Mr Hicks a fascist because you don’t like him: you don’t like Mr Hicks because he is a fascist. You call Keir Starmer a communist because he wants to tax high pollution vehicles; you don’t agree with a pollution tax because Keir Starmer is a communist.

You might, I suppose, declare that from now on the word communist refers to any system of taxation, so anyone who believes in increased taxation is a communist by definition. You might announce that the word fascist is defined as “the belief that fourth-former’s should run three laps of the playing field on Tuesday afternoons, even if it is raining”. But that’s merely a kind of lexical inflation. If you declare that infinite means big then mathematicians will need a new word when they actually want to talk about infinity.

If a 1980s student union politician had called Margaret Thatcher a Nazi, we would understand them to be saying that she was “very right wing” and that being very right wing was very bad.

Since we knew that left wing student union politicians thought that right wing people were bad, this didn’t convey a whole lot of information. And that particular rhetorical tick never became mainstream: it was the province of Neil on the Young Ones as opposed to Guardian leader writers.

There would have been no point, in the 1980s, in saying that Michael Foot was left wing because he supported the Trades Unions. Everyone knew he supported the Trades Unions. And everyone knew that he was left wing. If you thought that Michael Foot was a wrong ‘un, you would have had to at least go through the motions of explaining why you thought organised labour was a Bad Thing.

But the vast incantatory power of the w-word is that it yokes the two concepts, left-ness and wrong-ness together. The logic goes like this: 

*All left wing opinions are woke.

*All woke opinions are left wing.

*All woke opinions are wrong.

*Therefore all left wing opinions are wrong

*And more excitingly: therefore all wrong opinions are left wing.

Ironically, George Orwell’s name is one of the words which has been reduced to a swear which can be applied to anyone you don’t like. But if it hadn’t been, I should be incline to describe the incantatory use of the W-word as Owellian.

[*] This week it was "woke" that the makes of the Simpsons lampshaded the fact that they had stopped using the visual gag about Homer strangling Bart 

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9: It is entirely possible to think that the Atlantic Slave Trade is quite a serious stain on Britain’s national history; and to simultaneously believe that street furniture should not be summarily removed as part of a popular demonstration.

It is entirely possible to think that the Atlantic Slave Trade is quite a serious stain on Britain’s national history; and to simultaneously believe that street furniture should not be summarily removed as part of a popular demonstration.

It is entirely possible to think that covering your mouth with gauze during a ‘flu epidemic is a sensible precaution, and to simultaneously think that governments have got no right to make laws telling people what to do with their faces.

It is equally possible to think that the medical evidence that masks inhibited the spread of Covid was pretty shaky and to simultaneously think that the government was doing the best it could under very difficult circumstances and we should all have stuck to the rules, even Boris Johnson.

It is entirely possible to think that it would be a good idea for the British Labour Party to have adopted a socialist programme, but to simultaneously believe that Mr Jeremy Corbyn campaigned inadequately during the European referendum and said some very ill-considered things about Jewish people.

It is equally possible to think that Jeremy Corbyn was a man of integrity and honesty, that the Jew thing was obvious bollocks from start to finish and to simultaneously think that Momentum’s socialist manifesto would have been a disaster in twenty first century Britain.

There are two sides two every argument, apart from the one about who created the Silver Surfer.

But a substantial minority of the human race believes that Covid Masks were part of a global conspiracy. A substantial minority of the human race believes that Jews (or space aliens, or Democrats, or the globalists, but when you scratch it, it usually comes down to the Jews) wanted me to wear a breath mask in order to acclimatise me to doing exactly what the government tells me. And to symbolise the fact that I have no right to free speech. And to show that white people are the real slaves and Black people are the real masters.

Or that someone in a high place just invented a pointless and irksome rule because he gets off on making pointless and irksome rules.

And a much larger group of people, people who don’t consciously subscribe to conspiracy theories, have picked up a general vibe that wearing masks is liberal, or left wing, or, as it is generally framed nowadays, woke. And that refusing to wear masks is the proper freedom loving commie hating stand up to authority back to blighty common sense spirit of the Blitz thing to do.

And I know that they think that.

And they know that I know.

And Sir Kier Starmer knows that I know that they know that I know.

So when I mask-up, I am not simply obeying perfectly sensible public health advice. I am also sticking it, very firmly, up the un-vaccinated bottoms of right wing conspiracy theorists.

And when you don’t mask up, you are not simply ignoring public health advice that you think is a bit silly. You are also refusing to take the knee to the liberal woke politically correct elites.

When the next pandemic comes—probably in time for Christmas—the government of the day will not make its choices based on finely balanced scientific advise. Not only. They will be consciously aware that masks are “a bit left wing” and not wearing masks is “a bit right wing”. And that will influence their decision.

They might say “We don’t care about the symbolism; we’ll just follow the science.” That would be the sensible thing to say. But “not following the symbolism and just following the science” itself has a symbolic value. To some people, the whole idea of being sensible is ‘a bit left wing’.

This is not a new situation. We are human beings; we have consciousness and language and we make up stories; we inhabit a universe of symbols as well as a universe of objects. Crosses and masks and shamrocks and poppies and lions and vegan sausages have powerful symbolic meanings about which people are prepared to go to war and write jolly stiff letters to the Daily Telegraph.

But we increasingly inhabit a symbolic universe which consists, not of complex texts to be interpreted by priests and shaman; but as collections of singular, irreducible nuggets of meaning.

I get that fuck and nigger and gollywogs and men’s dicks and Harry Potter are dirty or racist or pornographic or transphobic regardless of context. But we increasingly aspire to a conceptual universe where everything has context-free meaning.

There is no neutral space.

There are no actions which are not symbolic.

There are no thoughts outside of language.

Whoever is not with us is against us.

If you aren’t actively punching Nazis then you are sticking it to the Libtards.

Or very possibly vice versa.

Some time ago I wrote a short book, which I entitled One Hundred And Forty Characters In Search of an Argument.

It would now have to be titled “Two hundred and eighty characters in search of an argument or four thousand if you have a blue tick.”

I argued that the site formally known as Twitter tends to turn all debate into a game of “What side are you on?” It doesn’t really matter whether arguments are wrong or right, correct or incorrect, sensible or stupid. Arguments function only as bugle calls, as badges of identity, as signifiers of tribal orientation.

I reject your argument, not because it is illogical or factually incorrect, nor even because it is based on a false ideology. Rightness and wrongness are not qualities that arguments have. I reject your argument because it is the kind of thing that the kind of person who believes the kind of thing you believe might be expected to believe.

I happen to think that it would be a good idea for the UK to maintain free trade with the continent we are geographically part of. But there are good arguments against this.

I happen to think that it was quite a good idea for a female person to essay the role of Doctor Who. But there are good arguments against this.

I think that the rich should be slightly poorer and the poor should be slightly richer. But there are good arguments against this.

I think that women should have the final say about abortion. I don’t think that even nurses who murder babies should be hanged. I don’t think teachers should be allowed to beat students with sticks. Or indeed with anything else. I think that we need to radically reduce the amount of fossil fuel we burn. I think that Jack Kirby created the Silver Surfer. But there are good arguments against all these points. Except the last one.

But even quite serious politicians are increasingly reluctant to tell me what the good arguments are. They would rather tell me that the kinds of people who agree with me are lefties or remoaners or corbynites or wokies.

Since I wrote that book, the argument about identity and privilege has moved on. 

Or very possibly it has stayed in exactly the same place and I have caught up with it.

I now understand that European and American society is built primarily on white supremacy, and secondarily on patriarchy and also on a “Christian” hegemony. “The Left” now broadly means those who think that this is a bad thing and should be dismantled. “The Right” now broadly means those who benefit from the present state of affairs and want to maintain it. This is essentially the only political dividing line which matters. Every opinion, every action, every episode of Doctor Who and every flavour of Walkers Crisps is to be understood according to where it fits into that power struggle.

White supremacy does not mean “white people are in charge of every single interaction and every single organisation.” It doesn’t mean “people in military uniforms or with bedsheets over their heads burning crosses”. It means something more like “treating whiteness as the default state”; assuming that everything is or should be white unless it has a very good excuse not to be.

When I studied A level English literature in school every single book I studied was written by a white author. Every single character we studied was a white character. Except one. And he strangled his wife.

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8: There is going to be a new Harry Potter television series.

There is going to be a new Harry Potter television series.

It doesn’t seem especially surprising that the same book should be adapted twice in twenty years, and it doesn’t seem surprising that a book published at the turn of the millennium is still widely read. Kids are still reading the Famous Five after eighty years, and Alice in Wonderland after an hundred and eighty.

I agree with Ursula Le Guin that the Potter books are a collection of not-very-original fantasy tropes spun around a not-very-interesting boarding school story; and I share her irritation that a lot of people who are not-very-interested in fantasy hailed them as the last word in originality. But it is also true that the earlier volumes, at least, were jolly good fun. I remember my mother, who wouldn’t have recognised a fantasy trope if you dropped one on her head, laughing out loud at the “First Years are not allowed their own broomstick” letter when it was reproduced in a feature in the Guardian Saturday supplement.

What kind of fantasy story do you like?

Do you prefer one where magic is magical—a strange, spiritual, numinous, force? Do you like stories like Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea, with its True Names and Shadows and its Taoist, Jungian underpinning? Stories which drop you without explanation into universes which operate according to their own rules and leave you to figure out what the hell is going on? Phillip Pullman may have turned into a colossal bore, but there’s a real genius to the way he takes Daemons and Dust and The Authority for granted from page one.

Or do you prefer worlds where magic and wizards are utterly normal and not very mysterious at all; where encountering a unicorn is a bit like spotting a rare breed of gazelle? There have been half a dozen TV shows in which witches, ghosts, djinn, vampires and robots are presented as a normal part of suburban life, with hilarious consequences. A kid getting detention for not doing his potions homework is fun in exactly the same way that a cowboy saloon where the cowboys are aliens and the Indians are robots is fun.

The Potter books aren’t exactly spoofs, but they are closer in spirit to Terry Pratchett than they are to George R Martin. Pratchett had done the “Tom Browns Schooldays Only Magic” schtick eight years before Rowling.

It is always a bit annoying when something is over-praised. My bugbear used to be people who had never read any comic apart from Sandman telling me that Sandman was the only comic there had ever been in the history of comics that was worth reading. Some of them wrote introductions to the collected editions. The aforementioned mother used to get similarly miffed when people who had once heard a recording of Pavarotti at a football match claimed to be devotees of the opera. But it’s not a good look. Those of us who liked fantasy before it was cool should probably resist the temptation to tell the millennials that they are not allowed to like Hogwarts because Silmarillion.

Any interest I have in the Expanded Potterverse will be purely exegetical. Rowling is good at world-building; mediocre at plots; and very, very bad at writing. The existing films gave us the bare bones of her stories, but only the slightest hint of the lore. A TV show, with twelve or sixteen hours to spend on each volume, would give the whacky Hogwartian detail space to breathe; the contrived soapy plots time to unfurl, but would free us from the odious necessity of reading JKR’s prose. It may well be that the earlier, shorter volumes will have to be padded out, but JKR is by all accounts still alive and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future, so she will presumably be available to pump more background detail into the setting.

The branding seems weird. It appears that the TV show will emulate the look and feel of the movies (which are, we are told, the “core of the franchise”): it will not “re-imagine” the books. The current party line is that the movies transmute the pictures in JKRs head directly onto the screen, and therefore any attempt to visualise the setting differently would simply be incorrect. So we are going to end up with two equally authoritative adaptations of the same text, and, presumably, decades of argument about Canon.

We live in a world where there are more interesting TV shows than anyone can reasonably be expected to watch. But I might well give the series a look. It can’t possibly be as boring as the BBC’s adaptation of His Dank Materials.

I’d even by a ticket for The Cursed Child if it toured the regions.

But notice what is happening at this very moment.

The second I mentioned Harry Potter, my readership split into two factions.

Which side are you on?

Are you on the side which is thinking “Why is he even talking about this TV series? Why is he even contemplating watching it? Why is he even referring to it as Harry Potter? The correct terminology is ‘Those Shitty Wizard Books’”

Or are you on the side of the line which is already bulverising (q.v) my opinion? “Andrew only thinks that JKR is a bad writer because he doesn’t like her politics. He only thinks that her plots are derivative because she has been demonised by a hard-line trans cult. He only thinks her fantasy is unimaginative because he is part of a conspiracy to abolish lesbians. He only thinks her prose is poor because he can’t define the term woman correctly.”

As a matter of fact, Andrew does think that JKR’s public pronouncements on gender exhibit a vindictive wrong-headedness which borders on monomania. But he has had considerable practice in enjoying problematic texts. He thinks that you can believe that JKR is wrong about public lavatories and simultaneously be quite interested in what Netflix does with the new Harry Potter TV show.

But he is quite aware that in this respect he is in the minority. For very many people, Those Shitty Wizard Books have the same status as rag dolls which are not penguins, marble carvings of men’s front bottoms, and posters with the word FUCK on them.

Irreducible signifiers of wrongness.

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