Our Culture War Began...in an Italian Jail.

Today's Culture War is so bizarre it can seem inexplicable. It has though an origin story. It all began when the Left rediscovered the work of a brilliant but long-dead Italian philosopher.

Have you noticed how any time a totem of the identitarian Left is criticised it’s the Right that gets blamed for waging a Culture War? It happened again recently when Kemi Badenoch pledged to change the Equality Act to ensure women’s spaces are a no-go zone for perverts and their male genitals. The bigot.

Step forward …Alastair Campbell, the great bagpipe blowhard of Burnley, who claimed her announcement was motivated by an “ideological shitshow”.

When did protecting women become a shitshow? Perhaps it was when men like Campbell found a new seemingly progressive way to be sexist?

Campbell underlined his lack of self-awareness by slamming what he alleged was Badenoch’s “weaponisation of trans rights”. You’d think he might be leary of mentioning weapons given his role in enabling an actual war. One with….you know…real weapons.

400 000 people died in Operation Shock and Awe, which Campbell defended to the hilt. If you are looking for the definition of …….an ideological shitshow….that’s probably a good place to start.

The rest of the Gold Star liberalati soon lined up behind Campbell to denounce Kemi.

Ian Dunt claimed she was adopting “one side of a cultural crevice”. How exactly you adopt a crevice never mind a cultural one he did not explain.

Kemi’s motivation he said, cryptically, was “one singular black dot in the intentions, the tiny infinite abyss”. No, I’ve no idea what he is trying to say either but the word black appears to be doing some heavy lifting.

This response to Kemi’s perfectly reasonable proposal encapsulates the perplexing asymmetry of today’s so-called Culture War. A mild suggestion to protect the common sense of millenia, with which the vast majority of the electorate happens to agree, is traduced as a hate-filled attempt to sow division. Or something.

Meanwhile an army of angry activists infests our institutions and actively works to undermine the cohesion of our society. Yet the mainstream media refuses to consider that too…..might be part of …..a Culture War.

Some friends (and subscribers) complained about how my last post blamed the Left for the actions of nutjob activists. Truth is if I had posted this article first perhaps my claims would have been more convincing. For the truth is the Culture War we are embroiled in now really did begin on the Left. The people who launched it, for the most part, could never have guessed how it would then be taken over by a new generation of activists who self-identify as the Left.

Don’t get me wrong, by the way. The Left didn’t invent the notion that culture and politics are intertwined. Culture has always been contested. The ceremonies and traditions of the British monarchy have been endlessly reinvented or tweaked to suit circumstances. During World War One a parallel Culture War raged against all things German (for obvious reasons). The pressure even led the King to change the name of his own dynasty. The House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha became….the House of Windsor.

Da nah!

In 1849, the writer John Ruskin launched a design Culture War that ended up changing the look of every town and city in Britain. He denounced the elegant Palladian style in architecture as effeminate and argued that the jagged, thrusting Gothic style was more suited to Britain’s manly imperial mission.

Ruskin was convinced that changing the architecture around us could change human behaviour. A fantasy that has appealed to architects ever since. The rational utopian acrhitecture of Brasil’s planned capital, Brasilia hasn’t made its citizens any more rational or its political leaders less corrupt than they ever were.

History is full of examples of culture being used to reflect or amplify political struggles. Take this good-looking fellow I encountered at the wonderful exhibition ‘Six Lives’ currently at the National Portrait Gallery, about the wives of Henry VIII.

Sir Nicholas Carew was a conservative when it came to religion and sympathetic to Katharine of Aragon, Henry’s first wife. He conspired against Anne Boleyn who represented full-throated Protestantism. What becomes clear from the exhibition is that during Henry VIII’s reign everything you did, from what you wore and the texts you read to the company you kept and the religious sacraments you honoured, signalled culturally where you stood politically.

The modern Left is then far from being the only political force to fight a Culture War. It also has every right to do so. It would be strange if it didn’t. And it has often done so in the past. At the birth of organised labour in the late 19th and the early 20th Century, organisations like the Workers Educational Assocation took on culture directly, challenging the assumption only the middle classes or the rich should be able to access higher education. The adult education classes it ran included everything from astronomy to art.

For children, the Socialist Sunday Schools offered an alternative to those run by the Church and taught a non-religious version of the Ten Commandments. Number Two was “Love learning, which is the food of the mind.” If only today’s idiot identitarian Left had attended a Socialist Sunday School.

Number 8 was “Observe and think in order to discover the truth; do not believe what is contrary to reason”. Amen to that. In those days the Left wanted ordinary working people to enjoy the smorgasbord of Western society’s cultural riches. Not to destroy it.

What a sad contrast with today’s Culture War which is marked by a profound nihilism; one which attempts to convince us that commonsense is not only suspect but positively dangerous. Its identitarian fanatics despise optimism and spread despair with their mishmash of “critical thinking”, which is neither critical nor thinking.

Driven by their overlapping obsessions of racial revenge, eco-cataclysm and all things ‘queer’ these fruitloopies instead campaign openly to replace our society with some kind of utopian alternative. The details on that proposed alternative are about as sketchy as the manifesto of Queers for Palestine.

How then did we get from Sunday Schools and uplifting Commandments to museums trashing our history, schools trying to gaslight children into being queer and hospitals denying the basics of human biology? To understand that we have to travel back in time to an intellectual explosion on the Left.

I can speak with a modicum of authority on this event because I witnessed it first hand. Nowhere played a more pivotal role in launching this new-style Culture War than the surprisingly stylish magazine Marxism Today, the monthly journal of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

After I graduated -and finished a sabbatical in student politics - in the mid 1980s I moved to London to work on Marxism Today which was produced at the headquarters of the CPGB in St John’s St in Smithfield where I was one of the few members of staff who were not in the Party. It was where I met my mucker Suzanne Moore (and fellow non Communist) who joined the magazine to edit its Culture section.

I wanted to work at Marxism Today because the magazine combined genuine intellectual curiosity with a passion for design. This flashy modernity though was in marked contrast to the real culture of the Communist Party itself I observed among its fusty officials.

Sometimes when I was working late I would sneak into the cavernous office where its Executive Committee met and stare at the bust of Lenin that loomed over the room. I could not believe the seemingly rational people I interacted with during the day really thought this thug was some sort of hero. Surely they were just pulling my leg? They weren’t.

Whenever I stopped to chat with the lovely old Scottish guy on reception he would never fail to urge me to visit the workers paradise of East Germany or Poland. Or Hungary. I learned in the headquarters if the Communist Party that perfectly nice people could believe absolute nonsense. What I did not realise fully at the time was that the Communist Party was living on borrowed time. After the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Communist parties across Western Europe entered a period of crisis as the membership split between supporters of the brutal Soviet action and its critics.

In the UK this came to a head in 1977 when Martin Jacques became editor of Marxism Today. He represented the wing who believed the invasion was a disaster and indefensible. They became known as the Eurocommunists. Those who defended Soviet tanks mowing down student protestors in Prague were dubbed ‘tankies’. They gathered round the party’s daily newspaper, the Morning Star.

This split became irreconcilable in 1979 when Margaret Thatcher was elected. The ‘tankies’, like much of the Labour Left, believed industrial action by workers was the answer to Thatcher. Marxism Today argued otherwise. Its small group of highly influential intellectuals Jacques gathered round him, insisted the economy was no longer the frontline of struggle. It was now ….Culture.

This conviction was inspired by their rediscovery of the work of a long-dead Italian philosopher. His ideas had begun to spread around the Left but now Marxism Today popularised them by arguing they were the way to defeat Thatcherism. From experiments in municipal socialism like the GLC to a burgeoning academia he became the toast of a revitalised Left.

His ideas would also, in a twist of fate that sounds stranger than fiction, provide a road-map for a rebel group of left-wing Scottish nationalists who would eventually take over the Scottish National Party….and then Scotland itself.

The result would be an open declaration of Culture War both north and south of the border. It began with high hopes and often benign goals. In time though a new generation of activists nurtured on the presumptions of Queer Theory, Critical Theory and other sub-schools of clownery would use the networks of influence the Culture War had created and wriggle themselves deep into institutions where they sought to wreak havoc.

They would succeed beyond their wildest dreams until soon …no one was able to rein them in. This is the story of how a Culture War launched by the Left morphed into a nihilistic attack on the foundations of Western civilisation; imperilling everything both the Right and the mainstream Left held dear.