Brand and Paxman
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Just to note I saw the Channel 4 programme Gogglebox was having their 'selective' viewers watch and comment on Brand's interview so I decided to watch it to find out what 'oridinary' people would have to say. I was expecting his views to be scorned at and ridiculed but they were, to my surprise, some sympathetic voices. Couple of them never voted as waste of time as nothing changes and one woman 'got it' that revolution was about a change in our thinking about the world and not about guns on the street. Comment was made he didn't put forward a solution and that some of the language was over their head. Admittedly, it is an entertainment show chasing viewers and advertisers but encouraging to see people discussing his views in interview.
At the risk of derailing the thread . “The BBC is part of a “conspiracy” preventing the “radical changes” needed to UK democracy, Greg Dyke the corporation’s former director general has said.The BBC is part of a “conspiracy” preventing the “radical changes” needed to UK democracy…He wanted a commission to look into the “whole political system”. But he said: “I fear it will never happen because I fear the political class will stop it…I tried and failed to get the problem properly discussed when I was at the BBC and I was stopped, interestingly, by a combination of the politicos on the board of governors, one of whom was married to the man who claimed for cleaning his moat, the cabinet interestingly – the Labour cabinet – who decided to have a meeting, only about what we were trying to discuss, and the political journalists at the BBC. Why? Because, collectively, they are all part of the problem. They are part of one Westminster conspiracy. They don’t want anything to change. It’s not in their interests.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8265628.stm Now it is simply a matter of deciding if Jeremy Paxman is part of the conspiracy i agree with you that we should strike when the iron is hot and make the most of the opportunity. There is no dispute about that. But on the long term, we should realise that Brand may well be a flash in the pan and we need to build our propaganda on something much more sustainable.
STOP with the cynicism DO what you can Brand is saying it out loud, which as hardly ever done, at least here in America. All kinds of people are roused up right now because of the meltdown.
Fuckin right! So what if he's a flamboyant blowhard. Have we ever heard opinions like his expressed in such an earnest way on telly ever before? I can see the boat coasting away whilst party dithers and debates. Not really the fault of the WSM being so tiny but rather individual egos.
alanjjohnstone wrote:i agree with you that we should strike when the iron is hot and make the most of the opportunity. There is no dispute about that. But on the long term, we should realise that Brand may well be a flash in the panMaybe, like Sinead O'Connor 20 years ago (though she got it right about the Catholic Church and child sex abuse):http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1990s/1993/no-1061-january-1993/%E2%80%9Cabolish-money%E2%80%9D-%E2%80%93-sinead-o%E2%80%99connorBut, as others (not just me) keep saying, we can and should use the opening to get a better hearing for our case.Twenty years later the author of the Sinead O'Connor article will be writing the one on the Brand interview for the December issue of the Socialist Standard.
"But before we change the world, we need to change the way we think. ..Total revolution of consciousness and our entire social, political and economic system is what interests me, but that’s not on the ballot." and"The freethinking social architect Buckminster Fuller said humanity now faces a choice: oblivion or utopia. We’re inertly ambling towards oblivion, is utopia really an option?" Russel Brand. But then he is an 'ex-druggie' and a 'clown' Brand is going to get a lot of crap from the media and politicians for saying what he is saying.( most of which we agree with.) If we join in and simply slag him off it will appear that we are attacking the very ideas we hold ourselves.More to the point, the impending assault on Brand is what we can expect if and when we get some decent publicity. I am not suggesting we defend him but I personally would show support for the ideas he expresses and which coincide with our own. http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/russell-brand-is-far-from-trivial-on-newsnight-he-made-paxman-look-ridiculous-8901524.html
No revolutionary movement was ever yet caused by propaganda alone. Conditions make revolutions. Conditions have caused, and are causing, an tremendous change in the attitude of the people. Brand is one of the effects of this change. Yes, i agree with admice – it was the economic meltdown that created a space for ourselves to fill but Occupy, Indigados, the Arab Spring, the Brasil protests and now Brand, has filled a vacuum. It is leaves us only to critique what they are doing. What we have to do is make sure he does NOT become the figurehead or the spokes-person of the revolution. Ozy."have we ever heard opinions like his expressed in such an earnest way on telly before"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9a2Mqrsv9fY
And while i am at it – what about this?1988, my how the yars fly http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rZbvi6Tj6E The song received heavy radio play in Tunisia in 2011 during the Tunisian revolution.
Oh why, not hung for a sheep rather than a lamb…thankfully no 3 limit post here. Dick Gaughan's Revolution http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAxVc6Fm21k
On the subject of being an 'ex-druggie'. The mining community I come from – and indeed the working class in general – is full of 'ex-druggies' (and therefore cannot be trusted) thanks to the Thatcher government 's attack on the miners and the Blair government's injection of heroin into the ex mining communities (no pun intended). We refer to them as recovering addicts and some are very close to me." So, if we can't trust a recovering addict……….
Here's something interesting for the Brand bashers on this thread. You may be interested to know what company you are keeping. A Labour supporting comedian by the name of Robert Webb.http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/10/31/robert-webb-russell-brand_n_4180398.html?utm_hp_ref=ukHere's a bit from the article:Writing a response piece in the current edition of the magazine, the Peep Show actor criticised Brand for effectively "telling a lot of people that engagement with our democracy is a bad idea".Webb said Brand's article had had the opposite desired effect on him, as he decided to rejoin the Labour Party after reading it.“What were the chances, in the course of human history, that you and I should be born into an advanced liberal democracy? … That we can say what we like, read what we like, love whom we want; that nobody is going to kick the door down in the middle of the night and take us or our children away to be tortured?” he said.“The odds were vanishingly small. Do I wake up every day and thank God that I live in 21st-century Britain? Of course not. But from time to time I recognise it as an unfathomable privilege."On Remembrance Sunday, for a start. And again when I read an intelligent fellow citizen is ready to toss away the hard-won liberties of his brothers and sisters because he's bored.”He said that one lesson from history was that revolution “ends in death camps, gulags, repression and murder.”Who is the clown?
Alan, are you suggesting that Brand is the greatest revolutionary thinker since Wolfe Smith? If so that is not such an insult. Look what Monty Python did with comedy. Then there is Charley Chaplin:"Although I am not a Communist I refused to fall in line by hating them.""I was opposed to the Committee on Un-American Activities — a dishonest phrase to begin with, elastic enough to wrap around the throat and strangle the voice of any American citizen whose honest opinion is a minority of one." If the workers had listened to Wolfe they may have avoided Iraq, Afganistan …..and austerity
That intro is certainly stirring stuff and the shout of "Power to the People" from the rooftops. The intro to other clips show the cliched che-guevara t-shirt. Rest of the show had its humourous moments taking the piss out of the stereotype Leftists. Comedy has always produced politics. Even Groucho Marx had his marxist moment. See this video clip. http://socialist-courier.blogspot.com/2013/09/marx-and-wage-slavery.html?q=wage+slavery Al Lewis – Grandpa from The Munsters show, was a bit of a radical standing for the Green Party in New York and mustering over 50,000 votes. This speech of his is worth posting, given a month after 9/11 "I may offend some people but Mrs. Lewis' son doesn't care! Doesn't care! What happened on September 11th was inevitable. Inevitable! Inevitable! It was horrific. Approximately five thousand lives were lost. Don't get angry with me. Just listen to the message. Were those lives more valuable than those school children who died of shrapnel in an action that was directed, promoted and paid for by the US government? Were the lives on September 11th more valuable than the … hundred thousand people who were killed in Guatemala? In Nicaragua? You want me to go down the list in killing? Was that horrific? Was that terror? And you want to talk about terror? Again, I don't care if you are angry. As we can now see, from the Freedom of Information acts – the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an act of terror! There was no military objective involved … One other thing. September 11th happened. The initial, 'Let's bomb them into the stone age.' 'Let's wipe them out.' 'Let's kill them.' Americans suffer from short or long term memory loss … Baruch Goldstein. You know who he was? He was an Israeli captain who went in on a Friday in the mosque and machine gunned them with an automatic rifle and killed them. Did any of you … raise the human cry, 'Let's bomb them into the stone age?' Were their lives less valuable than those at the World Trade Center … if you go now – NOW – to Israel there is a memorial to Baruch Goldstein! I want to ask you something. There were nineteen people involved in the September 11th attacks… that airplane was a bomb because of the high-octane gasoline. It was a flying bomb. Those nineteen men. What would Americans do if some place in the Middle East they erected a monument to them? Who says that our lives are more valuable than his or hers? Where is it written? Where? Where is it written?" Now that was real honest emotion. Real anger. http://www.democracynow.org/2006/2/6/extra_grandpa_al_lewis_speaks_at i hope your download attempts is better than mine, though.
Nice post Alan. I guess you are trying to prove that Russell Brand's talk of revolution is less than genuine by offering up another entertainers emotional political outburst.Well you sold me. I never saw Al Lewis, do his thing, but I saw Russell Brand getting angry and frustrated with Paxman, and it looked real to me. But I guess it boils down to a personality thing. Russell brand is an ex drug addict, self confessed sex addict and flamboyant comedian. I guess some people just can't help judging others on past history and personal preference.
I'm the balance – some seem to have wet dreams over RB – i am the wet blanket. But to be a balance in case no-one is aware of the 2008 beardless Paxman-beardless Brand interview here is a link. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYM7SzJMKnshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-NCDovAWB8
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