13: I take it that this was the fork on which Diane Abbot wilfully impaled herself.

I take it that this was the fork on which Diane Abbot wilfully impaled herself.

In a lot of liberal discourse, racism doesn’t mean bigotry or prejudice in general; it specifically means white supremacy. Race specifically refers to the distinction between former colonial powers and former colonised people; between former slaves and former slave owners. It is, as a children’s book I have read helpfully puts it, a story made up by white people to make them feel less bad about the bad things which other white people have done in the past.

A Jew can’t, on this definition, be the victim of racism any more than a Chinese person can be the victim of Anti-Semitism. Which is not at all the same thing as saying that chucking bricks through the windows of your local takeaway is perfectly okay.

Once the distinction was explained to me, I fully grasped it and saw it as valid. This is why I no longer wish to celebrate being white--because white means “a descendent of the people who treated Black people as livestock and industrial machinery” and Black (on this definition) means “a descendent of one of the people who was so treated”.

But I can perfectly well celebrate being a Bristolian of Kernow/Cockney heritage.

Interpreting “you can’t be racist towards Jews” as meaning “anti-Jewish bigotry is perfectly fine” is at best a wilful misunderstanding and at worst a pun.

But sending a letter to a national newspaper and not realising that the statement is inflammatory is not very bright; particularly when you are a prominent political figure.

Discussing whether or not the letter was inflammatory is also quite inflammatory, which is one of the reasons I no longer write articles of this kind.

“Asking what woke means is a woke deflection strategy used by woke people who won’t admit that woke things are woke. Woke is much too complicated an idea to explain in a single sentence, but by Trump, I know it when I see it.”

It is, in fact, perfectly possible to define complicated ideas in short sentences.

--“The branch of Christianity which holds that people are predestined to go to heaven or hell, and which emphasises the moral virtue of hard work.”

--“A political movement that believes that the state should control all the resources and share them fairly among the people.”

--“A theory of literature which holds that books contain meanings other than the ones the writer consciously intended.”

--“The Son is God, the Father is God, the Holy Ghost is God: the Son is not the Father or the Holy Spirit; the Father is not the Holy Spirit or the Son; the Holy Spirit is not the Son or the Father.”

Well: okay, maybe not the last one.

But we shouldn’t try to hold the far-right to a single definition of woke, any more than we can hold Diane Abbot to a single definition of racism.

There is no shame in sometimes using the w-word as synonym for “liberal” and at other times using it to mean “a person who believes the theory race is a story made up by white people to justify them being in charge of everything.” And it would perhaps be fairer if people like me asked “In what sense are you using the word?” rather than “What does the word mean?”

Meaning is not singular and texts require exegesis. The meaning of Lord of the Rings is not limited to what Tolkien meant by it, “but what did Tolkien mean by Lord of the Rings?” is a perfectly good question.

I don’t think Brian Michael Bendis created Miles Morales because he wanted to dismantle white supremacy.

I think he thought that “the death of Spider-Man” was a cool idea for a story that could be tried out in Ultimate Spider-Man without harming a half-century of mainstream Marvel continuity. I think he thought that Spider-Man is quintessentially a New Yorker and there are a lot of Hispanic people in New York so it would be a fun twist if Peter Parker’s replacement was a young Puerto-Rican. Peter Parker was, like his creators, very probably a non-religious Jew.

Brian Michael Bendis wasn’t part of a shadowy conspiracy, nor was he operated by a mysterious cabal of Cultural Marxists. Ultimate Spider-Man and Into The Spiderverse are not, in that sense, woke.

But, if you already believe that white supremacy is a good thing and ethnic representation is a bad thing then the Miles Morales character flies in the face of your ideology. He says, by his very existence, that not all heroes and protagonists are necessarily white. There is no reason for him to be Hispanic—the stories aren’t particularly about his ethnicity—but he surely sends a message to minority kids that they can be superheroes too.

When you say that Ultimate Spider-Man is woke, I am entitled to ask “In what sense are you using the word?”

Do you mean that the writer is part of a shadow conspiracy to dismantle white supremacy?

Or is woke merely the word you use to describe stories which feature non-white characters?

Is there a literal cabal of cultural Marxists who surreptitiously hide liberal ideas in superhero comics?

Or is woke simply the word you use to describe liberal ideas?

Does the Woke Mob exist?

Or are they simply a figure of speech?

If people believe the devil exists, then some of them will become satanists and black magicians.

But hardly any of them will become atheists, and lots of them will be forewarned against possible diabolical temptations.

If people don’t believe in the devil, then it is easier for the devil to tempt them into mortal sin and easier to make them deny God as well. But on the down side, hardly any of them will become witches or devil worshippers.

So argues Screwtape in a letter to his nephew.

But Hell, he says, is developing it’s ultimate weapon; the Materialist Magician, the human who worships Satan but doesn’t believe that Satan exists. When this is achieved, he says, victory in the war against Heaven will be in nearly won.

It isn’t clear if C.S Lewis had seen the Usual Suspects when he wrote this line. He’d probably read Baudelaire: he’d read everything. He’s mainly scoring a cheap point against people like Bernard Shaw and HG Wells who didn’t believe in God but were prepared to talk about a pantheistic life-force; and perhaps also against soft-scientists like Freud and Jung who sometimes drifted into mystical and religious language.

The Woke Mob doesn’t exist: any more than the Political Correctness Brigade or the Social Justice Warriors exist. I suppose that if members of the Democratic Party were really baby-eating-alien-space-lizards there would be a way of finding out; say by running a midichlorian count or pointing Rom’s energy analyser at them. 

There really was an American Communist party in the 1950s and some of its members really did carry cards.

If there is no actually existing organisation you can prove controls the colour of chocolate beans and the configurations of public toilets, then the word woke is no use to you. It’s just one more synonym for liberal. “Liberal things are liberal because they are liberal” is not a great rallying call. We fear the Woke Mob and the Political Correctness Brigade and the Social Justice Warriors because they have power and agency and malicious intent.

But they don’t exist. There is no shadowy confederacy of Jews plotting the downfall of civilisation from a secret Volcano base in Frankfurt. There is no man in an office painting the Smarties pink.

But suppose you could both believe in the Woke Mob and not believe in it?

Suppose it was a real malign entity, distinct from people whose opinions just happen to be to the left of yours?

Suppose it was like the voice of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Doctor Strange’s Ectoplasmic Self?

Suppose that it was like the tongues of fire at Pentecost.

Free floating. Invisible. Malignant. Real.

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12: There are two other possible usages of the W-word

 There are two other possible usages of the W-word.

It might specifically refer to the belief-system I outlined above. If you think that we live in a white, male “Christian” world, and that literally everything either reinforces this state of affairs or contributes to its demolition, you are woke. If you disagree, then you are anti-woke.

Now, this definition has the great advantage of being true, or at any rate of being not entirely devoid of meaning. Little boys really are brought up to believe that pink is an effeminate colour and that effeminacy is bad. So the decision to sell nice chocolates with pink food colouring in them and to say that it’s fine—even cool—for little boys to eat them does in a tiny small way break down the idea that male is the natural, default state of humanity and that female is a weird deviation that any normal person would want to avoid. Pink Smarties really are, to that extent, and on that definition, woke. And Rowntrees very probably knew that when they added them to the Smartie tube. Casting Ncuti Gawa as Doctor Who is woke, in that it in a tiny almost insignificant incremental way pushes back at the idea that all the important and cool jobs would naturally and automatically be done by white people. Remembering to say eid mubarak to your Muslim colleagues is woke because it scratches away at the idea that “Christian” festivals (Christmas, Pancake Day, Easter, Saint Valentines Day, Whitsuntide, Guy Fawkes Night, All Hallows Eve) are neutral, universal, human festivals, where Eid and Yom Kippur and Diwali are alien and exotic and threatening—which in turn breaks down the idea that you would naturally expect white “Christians” to be in charge of everything. Pink Smarties and gay Doctors and inclusive festivals really do move us closer to the world that the so terrifies the Right—the world in which people are just people and the colour of your skin, the shape of your genitals and your word, if any, for God, don’t convey any particular advantage or disadvantage.

Many people seem to honestly believe that there is a man in a biscuit factory whose whole job is to make Wagon Wheels smaller.

It is perfectly natural to ascribe agency to things that you don’t like. If you get a wart on your nose and you don’t understand where warts come from then why not believe it was put there by that weird old lady who lives by herself with a broomstick and cat? (Before the invention of the Dyson bagless vacuum cleaner, every old lady owned a broomstick.) There are whole Facebook groups dedicated to talking about how much better television was in the Olden Days, which indeed it was, but it only takes a paragraph or two before “Wasn’t the Generation Game marvellous?” morphs into “Why did they cancel the Generation Game” and thence “Of course they banned the Generation Game because it wasn’t woke.”

We are familiar with the process:

-People are coining neologisms to make terminology more inclusive.

-Some of these neologisms are a bit silly.

-They won’t let me call cripples cripples any more.

-The Political Correctness Brigade won’t let me call cripples cripples any more.

-The Political Correctness Brigade is a front for the Cultural Marxists (which is to say, the Jews).

-The Cultural Marxists (which is to say, the Jews) are plotting to destroy civilisation.

-The idea that we should avoid demeaning language is part of a Jewish plot to destroy civilisation: it is more or less your patriotic duty to call disabled people cripples and dumb and spastics.

A man on the internet told me that Anti-Semitism means the belief that there is a secret cabal of Jews controlling the world, or at any rate trying to, and that terms like Globalist and the Rothschilds are coded Anti-Semitism.

Tropes about Jews having big noses, or being avaricious, or liking chicken soup—even blaming them for killing Jesus—are bigoted and racist and nasty, but they are not, strictly speaking Anti-Semitic.

This definition makes sense. Talk about the Israel Lobby controlling Hollywood or having too much influence over American foreign policy is Anti-Semitic. The Gringots Goblins, not so much. A statement is Anti-Semitic by virtue of the fact that it contains Anti-Semitic tropes: you don’t get to insinuate that Jews inveigle themselves into positions of power and then let yourself off the hook because some of your best friends are Jews. (Even if some of you best friends are, in fact, Jews.) Jeremy Corbyn may very well have been anti-racist (he was) and may very well have seen anti-Jewish bigotry as a particularly nasty form of racism (he did) but pictures of Jewish bankers playing Monopoly on the back of Africans are Anti-Semitic in themselves, and Anti-Semite is the name we give to people who disseminate those kinds of images.

But this isn’t the only way the word is ever used. If I say “Some people are reluctant to stage the musical Oliver! because Fagin is a bit of an Anti-Semitic caricature” then there would not be a great deal of point in saying “Har-har that’s not what the word even means.”

But it might be helpful to say “In what sense are you using that word?”

The narrower definition leads us into counter-intuitive positions. You could perfectly well attend synagogue every Sabbath, observe the high holy days, keep a kosher kitchen and also speak about the state of Israel in a way which implied the existence of a shadowy international plot: in which case you could perhaps be described as a Jewish Anti-Semite. Saying that many of the people who have been kicked out of the Labour party are themselves Jewish isn’t the “gotcha” I once thought it was.

Socialists think that rich people exploit the poor; and that banks and financial institutions are mostly run by rich people. They think that taking power away from the bankers and giving it to ordinary people would be a good thing. I think it overwhelmingly likely that when Corbyn disseminated images of the anti-Jewish mural he sincerely believed that he was disseminating an image of an anti-capitalist mural. That is certainly how I understood the image when it was first drawn to my attention. But once it was pointed out to me, I saw that the image was anti-Semitic whether I understood it or not.

Since Jews have been historically stereotyped as rich and greedy, there is a danger that any attack on rich, greedy people could be misinterpreted as an attack on Jews.

But equally, it is possible that genuine Anti-Semites might frame their propaganda as anti-banker or anti-landlord, in order to give themselves an air of plausible deniability.

And the bankers and landlords might accuse anyone being critical of them of being secret Jew-haters.

There is even a danger that we would start to say that socialism is in itself Anti-Semitic; and a person saying “there is no room for Anti-Semitism in this party” really meant “there is no room for socialism in this party.”

It would remain true that Anti-Semitism exists and that Anti-Semitism is horrible. On any definition.

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11: When a Doctor Who fan says that the Chris Chibnall era was woke he may just be swearing.

When a Doctor Who fan says that the Chris Chibnall era was woke he may just be swearing.

But he may be saying that the series was excessively preachy: that there were too many scenes in which the main character directly addressed the audience and explained that racism was bad or that climate change was a serious problem, often with manipulative incidental music playing in the background.

The person who uses the word in that sense is not merely swearing, but actually saying something. A show might have a left wing ideology but not, in this sense, be woke: because the political message is left implicit but not hammered home. We might say that classic Star Trek—full of moralising speeches-to-camera—was (in that sense) woke, but that the current Star Trek: Discovery (which has some characters who happen to be gay and some other characters who happen to be trans but rarely makes a big song and dance about it) is not woke.

But in practice, when someone applies the w-word to a TV show he is playing the definition game.

-Preachiness is woke.

-Woke is bad.

-Any story with an anti-racist message is preachy.

-Therefore any story with an anti-racist message is woke.

-Therefore any TV show which is not actively racist is bad.

The same circularity plays out, much more unpleasantly, around diverse and racially colorblind casting. It might be that some director has at some time cast a not-particularly good actor in a major role because he doesn’t think his show should consist entirely of white faces; and we might legitimately describe this as tokenism or virtue signalling.

I think, in practice, it works in much more subtle ways: faced with the choice between staging a very good production of Hamlet “as Shakespeare intended”—with white faces and Elizabethan ruffs and authentic Danish accents—and an equally good production of Hamlet set in Africa with a black-British cast, the theatre manager goes for the all-black production because the former has been done ten trillion times before and the latter hasn’t.

But for some people the only conceivable reason to cast a dark skinned actor in a classic play (and the only conceivable reason to cast a dark skinned actor to play a superhero who was drawn as white in the 1940s; and the only conceivable reason to create a brand new comic book character of Hispanic or Pakistani heritage) is to perform a process described as box ticking or filling quotas.

And again, the two ideas are amalgamated:

-All non-white casting is the result of diversity targets and quotas.

-Diversity targets and quotas are woke.

-Woke is bad

-Therefore all non-white casting is bad.

-Therefore you should boycott Disney and Netflix.

Why do you liberals accuse everyone you disagree with of racism?

As a matter of fact, the casting of Doctor Who does all come down to quotas.

In the 1970s, there was a quota system in place at the BBC. One category was “The percentage of lead roles played by white people.” The required quota was 100%. Tom Baker was cast as Doctor Who in order for the BBC to achieve this diversity target (0%).

The hundred per cent white, zero diversity target was in practice very difficult to achieve. The BBC resorted to affirmative action campaigns whereby, if the storyline called for a character to be Black or Asian, the character nevertheless had to be played by a white person in ridiculous make-up.

The reduction of the white quota from 100% to 70% was certainly a politically motivated decision. It had a small tendency to incrementally demolish the system which says that normal humans are always white and that those normal humans ought to be in charge of everything. People who don’t want this system demolished are entirely correct to think that this is a Bad Thing.

Whenever Chris Claremont introduced a new character into the X-Men, he would ask rhetorically “is there any good reason why this character should not be a woman?” He had his faults as a writer but there is a good deal to be said for that approach. There was certainly a period in the X-Men where we kept encountering female senators, female doctors, female trawler captains and even female scientists.

The Right (again, quite correctly from their own point of view) frame the question the other way around. Their question is always “is there any good reason why this person should be a woman—or Black, or not a ‘Christian’”. They are not against black people having jobs in the media, but they always have to be what they call “necessary”. Of course a black man can play a police officer provided his colour is important to the plot. Otherwise, it’s just virtue-ticking for the sake of box-signalling.

Why, they ask sixteen or seventeen times in the course of one article, would you cast a Black person as Hamlet if the text doesn’t require it? Why cast a trans person as Doctor Who’s assistant when the story is just about space travel and monsters and not about gender? The stock response when someone speculates about Black James Bonds or Black Supermen is but-you-wouldn’t-cast-a-white-person-as-Nelson-Mendela-or-the-Black-Panther-would-you?

Which quite brilliantly illustrates the difficulty.

We can have Black characters in stories which are (to some extent) about Blackness; but in all other cases, characters must be white. The burden of proof is on the Black or Asian or female actor to justify their existence.

I think that if you are going to carry on making James Bond movies, you should treat them as historical artefacts and set them in the era that Ian Fleming envisaged: late 1950s, early 1960s; cold war glamour; air-travel a luxury available only to the fabulously rich; casual misogyny the order of the day. But if you can imagine a Bond seventy years out of his time, in a world of mobile phones and artificial intelligence, when the enemies are more likely to be Iranian terrorists than the Reds, with a female head of MI5, but can’t imagine a Bond with dark skin, then I think that it is ethnicity, not textual fidelity, you have a problem with.

We know what Superman and James Bond and for that matter Father Christmas and Jesus look like: and it is not necessarily racist to be disappointed if the character in the new film looks different from the Superman of our imagination. I myself found myself watching Wakanda Forever and finding it hard to connect the Namor I saw on the screen with the character of the Sub-Mariner as he had been established in more than seventy years of comic books.

But because I am not a racist, I didn’t think it mattered.

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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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