Seizing back control: The ILX lol brexit is how we're all gonna die thread.

I'm sure the publishers might have been more interested in highlighting the anti-imperialism of the work rather the writer being a cunt and would have maybe edited out anything like that?

It's almost as if there are some elections this week.

That's a pretty big maybe.

If I was in the business of selling books, I'd think (small) maybe .. say.. highlighting Gogol's glaring antisemitism in the preface to Dead Souls might not be a good move. There is plenty of material out there on the subject.. just saying .. I mean wtf do I know!

If it's like two sentences out of 900 pages would it be mentioned? Maybe. I'd have to read the book though. I read stuff all the time that makes me cringe, there's a horrible glaring bit of racism in Henry Green's "Party Going" that I've never once seen referenced in forewords, introductions, critical studies, reviews etc

Iirc Hobson is known to be anti Semitic but in other works it’s a lot more obvious. Corbyn should have disavowed the views - the work can stand up on its own without being seen to gloss over Hinson’s belief that Jewish people control the banks/are behind wars - but it’s a pretty canonical text and others have mentioned that Tristram Hunt has done a programme on him that doesn’t mention this.

Put it this way; if it was anyone but Corbyn it’s not a story, because people write forewords all the time without bothering to disavow the bad deeds/views of the authors/subjects. I mean, Boris Johnson’s outrage about criticism of Churchill tells me exactly how worthwhile reading his book about him would be.

But Corbyn has a history of associating with dodgy types and stuff like the mural incident, and so people can ask the question “Did he not see it or did he just not care?”

I haven't read anything by J. A. Hobson so I look at the wiki page which went from no mention of antisemitism at 0504 today to his currently being one of the most influential English antisemites of the period with a new antisemitism subsection to the criticism section so jeremy corbyn will likely be given an opportunity to amend the foreword in light of this information

That one brief bit in At Swim-Two-Birds where yer man lapses into whimsical cowboy pastiche, n-words and all, took me aback I have to say xps, different time of course and probably making a fair point about yankee culture or something but still. not cancelling the damn thing mind

his anti-semitism is mentioned in passing in his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry, but isn't remarked upon further, presumably because his views reflected or at least weren't completely out of step with the prevailing attitudes of his times. If this is the case for the ODNB it's difficult to see why Corbyn should have picked up on this in a preface which seems to have been about the work and not about the man.

"But Corbyn has a history of associating with dodgy types and stuff like the mural incident, and so people can ask the question “Did he not see it or did he just not care?”"

The political football also means it's hard to judge to give any kind of definitive answer. No doubt we'll be here again.

Even if he just stuck to the Drains + Manholes Appreciation Society crowd, they'd probably find some drain in his collection that has what looks like an impression of Hitler's face on it. But he can be a dozy old bastard sometimes. That mural incident was totally embarrassing. But mild compared to Boris and the Kipling quoting incident in Myanmar or JRM turning up at a pro-Nazi group dinner.

I was thinking as I wrote my post above about Thackeray, and how I had been idly reading some piece about Vanity Fair that mentioned the novel was originally serialised in Punch. I didn’t know that, I thought, and while reading Thackeray’s Wikipedia page I found what better-read people itt will already know - that Thackeray was one of Punch’s most famous contributors. But I also found that he was mainly responsible for the magazine’s coverage of Irish people, and I felt really uncomfortable reading this, because I instantly recalled being in history class the first time I saw these infamous Punch cartoons of Irish people and getting the nature of anti-Irish sentiment in a way that cuts through immediately. It’s really funny because you can read about policy and deaths caused towards Irish people and know that they thought of Ireland and its people as lesser, but there’s something really visceral about looking at cartoons of Irish people depicted as subhuman that just smacks that point home.

Does it ruin Vanity Fair for me? No, but it makes me think more critically of Thackeray, who clearly saw me and people like me as less than, even when they were starving and dying without dignity. I always sort of sideeye any mentions of Punch that go on about how great and satirical and biting it was without mentioning how fucking racist it was too.

But yeah, I entirely get the criticism of this foreword.

Somehow this latest Corbyn attack was not a Guardian exclusive despite this article from 2015 referencing the foreword
https://amp.theguardian.com/politics/blog/2015/sep/14/jeremy-corbyn-victory-were-visible-in-2008

I mention this because in Sunday’s Observer, the Cameron henchman and born-again egalitarian Steve Hilton, reminds the “political elite and their allies” that they are “the causes of Corbyn”. Why? Because they let those who didn’t cause the crisis bear most of the burdens of readjustment while those who did got away with it.

funny that Corbynism was being identified as the main problem back in them halcyon days of austerity, and preparing for the remain victory in the big ref!

This seems fair to me:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/01/jeremy-corbyn-blind-antisemitism-hobson

Now, plenty of people have spoken in general about Hobson – who was indeed an important and influential thinker on the British liberal left – without feeling the need to note Hobson’s bigoted views of Jews, which were hardly uncommon in that period. Fair enough. But Corbyn was not merely referring to Hobson and his thought in general: he was writing an extended assessment of a specific text – engaging directly with it. And yet across the eight pages Corbyn wrote, there is not so much as an acknowledgment of the racism within that text.

He might have made the move Finkelstein himself made when writing recently about Churchill, in a column headlined: “Winston Churchill was a racist but still a great man”.

It's a preface to a book of non-fiction that contains explicitly antisemitic passages, as Freedland demonstrates. Surely this should have warranted at least a passing mention on the prefacer's part? Surely whataboutism does nothing to address the issue at hand?

You mean the issue of why no-one other than Jeremy Corbyn has ever been attacked for ignoring JA Gibson's anti-Semitism?

xp did you read the other comments I made earlier on this specific point?

... Hobson

It’s ok, I called him a different name earlier too

You mean the issue of why no-one other than Jeremy Corbyn has ever been attacked for ignoring JA Gibson's anti-Semitism?

Were the others writing prefaces to one of his books?

I don't take issue with your overall analysis, gyac – it seems as fair to me as Freedland's.

"And yet across the eight pages"

a whole eight pages, there was about 38 pages in the Gogol short stories book preface- that doesn't mention antisemitism once iirc. Not saying it is right - but I presume when you get these gigs the brief isn't to accentuate everything dodgy about the writer. And why the fuck should some dilettante LOTO be judged differently at the preface game than literary experts who do much more long-winded prefaces, and commit the same faults?

Literary critics aren't politicians and a book of short stories isn't a book of political economics.

I don't see it as an anti-semite smoking gun or anything but it's fair grounds for a "blind eye" criticism.

according to the wiki page for J. A. Hobson's Imperialism which included no reference to antisemitism before 0525 today:

Hobson was one of the most influential English antisemites of the period,[3][4] and while Imperialism does not contain the "violent anti-Jewish crudities" of his prior works,[5] it does include an accusation that there was an international conspiracy of Jewish financiers.[6][7] According to history professor Norman Etherington this section of financiers seems irrelevant to Hobson's economic discourse, and was probably included since Hobson truly believed it.[8]

Of course, I read it last night!

Thanks to the FT’s chief political correspondent for making my point for me (re: Churchill)

woke left: John Hobson’s casual racism was merely the product of his era

also woke left: Tear down all statues of the monstrous Winston Churchill

— Jim Pickard (@PickardJE) May 1, 2019

Never seen anyone calling for statues of Winston Churchill to be torn down tbh.

Not really gonna wade into the Corbyn thing apart from the edge of the discussion here about fiction, imo fiction is significantly different to political writing for the purposes of this discussion. A fiction writer doesn't really control or own the world they create, not least if they're good, they may have abhorrent views or have done bad things in their lives but I dunno, good fiction by nature is ambiguous and asks questions about the human condition. It's a partnership between the writer and the reader.

Of course there can be instances of characters behaving terribly and sometimes a sense that the writer is endorsing this behaviour, though that's the point at which it ceases to be good I guess. I feel like fiction exists to ask questions or create doubt as much as anything else, as such someone endorsing Gogol or whatever just isn't really comparable.

I seldom feel like good fiction has narrowed my outlook on the world, though I guess there are a lot of books whose specific quality is the skill with which the writer draws the minds of insular or narrow-minded characters.

New Guardian podcast on the TOIEC thing has some factual errors and lack of context but serves to keep the issue on the front page a while longer.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/audio/2019/may/01/accused-of-cheating-another-immigration-scandal

If anything, I think Amelia Gentleman’s reporting actually understates the culpability of the government. It repeats the suggestion that, of the 51k people who took the tests, ETS said that 30k definitely cheated and 20k probably did. I am not sure this is quite correct. Exam boards, by and large, will not say that candidates have ‘definitely cheated’ without proper documentary evidence. What they will say, based on suspicious patterns of results, audio recordings, etc, is that the evidence of cheating is strong enough to revoke the score / certificate. This is closer to ‘on the balance of probabilities ‘ rather than ‘beyond all reasonable doubt’, wrt legal standards. There will have been some that fell into the ‘beyond all reasonable doubt’ category but aiui, ETS told the government that it was working with degrees of probability at the time.

May’s Home Office, rather than ETS, essentially took the ‘probables’ and turned them into ‘definites’, deporting people with no right to appeal based on evidence they knew was not all that robust and, generally, hasn’t held up in the out-of-country appeals that have come before the courts.

xp I dunno, I'm currently in the process of making a book (the content of which is mostly politically unproblematic afaict) written a century ago by someone who later became an outspoken anti-Semite. I have known since the start of the project that if I include some sort of introduction, which I probably won't, I will make a reference to her antisemitism because the alternative is to ignore it and I don't feel I can ignore it. If I don't include an introduction I will have to find another way of noting it, in an accompanying blog or something similar.

May has asked Williamson to fuck off, apparently. But such is her authority no guarantee he is sacked.

xps to FH:

André Gide quipped that 'on ne fait pas de la bonne littérature avec de bons sentiments', which can be parsed in many ways, but I think it's fairly uncontroversial to say that we cannot judge a work of literature on the basis of good intentions alone, although these may of course factor into the equation. Conversely, terrible intentions – Dostoevsky's panslavic Christian Orthodox suprematism, for instance – can and often do result in supposedly 'demonic' characterizations that are, in fact, more interesting than whatever benevolent or heroic figure they were meant to foil in the first place. We tend to assume (rightly, in my opinion) that a good writer is able to temporarily suspend the political 'utopia' they wish to see prevail in day-to-day existence.

Literature (and/or art) turns the world upside down, for good or ill, and it even deflects authorship on some level: Gogol or Céline or Lovecraft are partly robbed of their proper names by the act of writing fiction, wherein 'I' routinely refers to someone or something other than the author him/herself, whereas Hobson – or any other economist/social scientist/political analyst, etc. – writes as a citizen, even as an 'expert' exerting his right to participate in public discourse, which implies infinitely more ethical agency and responsibility than literature. In other words, Hobson must potentially answer (and be tried) for his views in person, whereas in modern democratic societies the artist is generally exempt from that responsibility (assuming it concerns a work of art and not an essay, in which case the exact same rules apply).

That said, I do think it's important to highlight unsavoury biographical data when prefacing, say, Taras Bulba, as long as the overarching thesis isn't something unforgivably simplistic such as 'what you are about to experience, dear reader, is a barely veiled antisemitic pamphlet, and nothing else'. Hobson's case is even more straightforward, especially when you're invited to write a preface to a book that itself contains antisemitic passages. After all, your responsibility as prefacer is to shape the reader's interpretation, even 'improve' it – you are there precisely to direct the reader's attention towards key aspects of a book on which you are presumed to be an authority.

Anyhow, this very much ties in to the discussion we were having earlier over in the metal thread about a beloved Polish band whose members are likely fascists.

Williamson gone.

Stupid to leak, unbelievably stupid to lie about it.

Gavin Williamson not just new Defence Sec but also - as young, Northern, comprehensive educated son of Labour voters - new tip for next PM

— Nick Robinson (@bbcnickrobinson) November 2, 2017

lol

Jeremy Who? J.A. What? This story has just blown Corbz The Anti-Semite right off the front pages for the foreseeable.

lol at Sky's coverage for the last 15 minutes consisting of a film of Williamson leaving No. 10 and walking off right frame followed by a film of Williamson entering from left frame and walking into No. 10 followed by film of Williamson leaving No. 10 and walking off right frame followed by a film of Williamson entering from left frame and walking into No. 10 followed by film of Williamson leaving No. 10 and walking off right frame followed by a film of Williamson entering from left frame and walking into No. 10 followed by film of Williamson leaving No. 10 and walking off right frame followed by a film of Williamson entering from left frame and walking into No. 10 followed by film of Williamson leaving No. 10 and walking off right frame followed by a film of Williamson entering from left frame and walking into No. 10...

It was completely fucking obvious he was the leak from the start and he should probably be sacked for being too stupid to be trusted in a vital Cabinet post.

My favourite Gavin Williamson story is when he decided to pardon two ferocious army dogs following a campaign by The Sun and turned up to do the photoshoot only to find them ready to rip his throat out, so had to be positioned a longggg way in front. https://t.co/gj5yumhmag pic.twitter.com/402LkQBCfW

— Jim Waterson (@jimwaterson) May 1, 2019

Been ages since we had a traditional Wednesday sacking.

I will always wonder what he had on the PM to get that job. He was always incredibly unpopular and ill-suited.

Who next? Will the Tugmonster be asked to step up to the big leagues? Is it finally time for Alan Mak to shine?

It's Penny Mordaunt.

Used to be the Chief Whip, so I'm sure he knows a lot of juicy stuff. (xp)

Ah balls.

CRONUS IN YR COUNTRY'S HOUR OF NEED

Tower of London for Gav surely?

xp eight legs bad, four legs better

Penny Mordaunt brings her own cat to Westminster office to tackle mouse problem https://t.co/vvioFDiylD

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) September 15, 2016

I expect nothing less than Williamson's immediate resignation from the World Owl Trust btw.

This is a hell of a sacking, that letter is fierce as the genre goes. Suspect it’s partly because GW is about the sole individual T. May can actually be strong against, and not least because he is only there in the first place because she was too weak to put anyone with support in that job.

So it’s something of a self-own, in that light, but because nobody likes GW it won’t come across that way.