Bird’s Eye View – Hedges, Dawkins, Allen
Chris Hedges
The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, New York Times best-selling author, former professor at Princeton University, activist and ordained Presbyterian minister, occasionallly hits the mark:
‘The militarists, corporatists, oligarchs, politicians, academics and media conglomerates champion identity politics and diversity because it does nothing to address the systemic injustices or the scourge of permanent war that plague the U.S. It is an advertising gimmick, a brand, used to mask mounting social inequality and imperial folly. It busies liberals and the educated with a boutique activism, which is not only ineffectual but exacerbates the divide between the privileged and a working class in deep economic distress. The haves scold the have-nots for their bad manners, racism, linguistic insensitivity and garishness, while ignoring the root causes of their economic distress. The oligarchs could not be happier’ (Scheerpost, 5 February, tinyurl.com/bdethdd2 ).
Richard Dawkins
We often disagree with this professor too, but cannot fault him here:
‘“The only possible response is contemptuous ridicule,” he told the Daily Telegraph. “I shall continue to use every one of the prohibited words. I am a professional user of the English language. It is my native language. I am not going to be told by some teenage version of Mrs Grundy which words of my native language I may or may not use.”
Other experts also branded the alternatives “absurd” and argued they could cause confusion in scientific fields. They also pointed out that the terms “egg producing” and “sperm producing” were simply synonyms for male and female, and continued to confirm that sex is binary.”… The EEB Language Project, which was launched in this month’s Trends in Ecology and Evolution journal, is compiling a repository of “problematic words” that have been identified by US and Canadian scientists as harmful and it suggests alternatives. For example, participants have flagged the term “citizen science” saying it could be “harmful to people who do not have a nation state”‘ (15 February, tinyurl.com/3em7v59w ).
Workers have no country
But some so-called socialists, woke or not, insist otherwise:
‘Instead of seeing the world as being composed solely of geopolitical camps, socialist internationalists must evaluate every conflict based on the interests of working people and their struggle for freedom and equality. The revolutionary Leon Trotsky once wrote that, hypothetically, if fascist Italy pursuing their interests had supported the anti-colonial uprising in Algeria against democratic France, the internationalists should have supported the Italian arming of the rebels. It sounds quite right, and this did not stop him from being an anti-fascist. Vietnam’s struggle did not just benefit Vietnam; the defeat of the United States there had a significant (if temporary) deterrent effect on American imperialism’ (’Freedom Socialist Party’, February, tinyurl.com/2s4hv3bx ).
More nonsense. this time from the horse’s mouth:
‘Through carrying out the Renewal process, the Party has drawn five great lessons from its experience, which can also be considered five fundamental theoretical issues of the present-day Vietnamese revolution. Among the lessons, the Party emphasises the need to comprehensively, synchronously, and regularly implement the Party building and rectification work, place people at the centre of the Renewal process, and build a synchronous development institution in order to serve the goal of rapid and sustainable development of the country, with a focus on the socialist-oriented market economy institution’ (Voice of Vietnam, 2 February.
Even in the ‘socialist republic’, some are more equal than others as this headline attests: ‘Vietnamese tourist in Thailand reunited with his lost $194,000 Richard Mille watch’ (Yahoo, 3 February, tinyurl.com/3hvebumm ).
Dave Allen
The late, great and far from woke comedian may well have regarded that tourist as suitable material for a future sketch. One recent news item would almost certainly have attracted his attention:
‘Some Taliban fighters are sick of the 9 to 5 grind, complaining they’ve been sucked into urban life by working desk jobs to run Afghanistan’ (Business Insider, 10 February, tinyurl.com/yc5bz89b ).
Abdul Salam, 26, a farmer who fought for the Taliban several times, is on record as stating:
‘There is a proverb in our area that money is like a shackle. Now, if we complain, or don’t come to work, or disobey the rules, they cut our salary.’
Welcome to wage slavery, sucker! Allen famously observed:
‘You wake to the clock, you go to work to the clock, you clock-in to the clock, you clock out to the clock, you come home to the clock, you eat to the clock, you drink to the clock, you go to bed to the clock, you get up to the clock, you go back to work to the clock… You do that for forty years of your life and you retire — what do they fucking give you? A clock!’
Woke readers who are shocked, quite possibly offended, by our use of the term slavery should study the writings of a former slave:
‘The difference between the white slave, and the black slave, is this: the latter belongs to ONE slave-holder, and the former belongs to ALL the slave-holders, collectively. The white slave has taken from him, by indirection, what the black slave had taken from him, directly, and without ceremony. Both are plundered, and by the same plunderers’ (Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 1855, tinyurl.com/y78jy8mk ).
Workers of the world, woke or not, wake up!
These plunderers are found throughout the world- yes, in all the aforementioned countries too! ‘The typical CEO of a company listed on the S&P 500—a stock market index with 500 large publicly traded corporations – earned $18.8 million last year. That’s up roughly 21% from 2021, even though the S&P 500 index was down 20%’ (Time, 16 February, tinyurl.com/3h4samud ). Warren Buffett, whose 100 billion dollar fortune makes him the 6th richest person on Earth, was not joking when he said: ‘there’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning’ (New York Times, 26 November 2006, tinyurl.com/2n27mn5m ). Winning worldwide.
Next article: Material World – Live to work or work to live? ⮞