Journalists From England

"Lenin and Hitler are quite unashamed in their constant advocacy of ruthlessness, of the bloodiest wars and upheavals. Throughout all Marxian and National Socialist literature there is not a trace of pity, magnanimity, forgiveness, or of any generous feeling, not one word of respect for honor or for righteousness—not one trace of toleration, not the slightest appreciation for a foe who might be brave, or even right in his own way."

"Every enlightened, humane, and patriotic Englishman has been ashamed, upon occasion, of what his country has done and will be fearful of what she may do yet. He would be a Pharisee were he to assume that there is a separate England of evil-doers: that this England is not his England, the real England, but another England."

"That the individual has any rights of his own, even the right to live, has no meaning at all to Lenin or Hitler."

"Marxism has led to Fascism and National-Socialism, because, in all essentials, it is Fascism and National Socialism."

"For twenty years the Russian people have been agonizingly stretched and bloodily mutilated to fit the Procrustean bed of the Marxian ‘theory.’ The attempt to impose Marxism has been abandoned. The theory itself remains sacrosanct, but those who would still put it into practice are shot, imprisoned, or exiled. The Soviet Union is a despotism working through a secret police and a subservient bureaucracy. This alone is the denial of a doctrine essential to Marxism, namely, the ‘withering away’ of the State. So far from ‘withering away,’ the Russian State has greater coercive power than any other in the world."

"Marxism would be a phenomenon of little more than historical interest, seeing that it has failed even in its principal stronghold, were it not so closely akin to National Socialism. National Socialism would have been inconceivable without Marxism."

"We have referred to Marxism and National Socialism as secular religions. They are not opposites, but are fundamentally akin, in a religious as well as in a secular sense. Both are messianic and socialistic. Both reject the Christian knowledge that all are under sin and both see in good and evil principles of class or race. Both have enthroned the modern Caesar, collective man, the implacable enemy of the individual soul. Both would render unto this Caesar the things which are God’s. Both would make man master of his own destiny, establish the Kingdom of Heaven in this world. Neither will hear of any Kingdom that is not of this world."

"The Marxist really believes that Marxism is ‘scientific.’ The National Socialist really believes that the Racial Principle has something to do with serious biology."

"If capitalist realism is so seamless, and if current forms of resistance are so hopeless and impotent, where can an effective challenge come from? A moral critique of capitalism, emphasizing the ways in which it leads to suffering, only reinforces capitalist realism. Poverty, famine and war can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the hope that these forms of suffering could be eliminated easily painted as naive utopianism. Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism’s ostensible ‘realism’ turns out to be nothing of the sort."

"For the ‘little man’ the Marxist feels far greater hatred than for the capitalist. The ‘little man’ is worse than counter-revolutionary.’ He is unrevolutionary, and to be unrevolutionary is, in the eyes of the Marxist, to be a kind of leper. Marxists are habitually contemptuous of the ‘petit bourgeois mind’ as not a mind at all, but something reptilian, something infinitely mean and ignominious."

"A moral critique of capitalism, emphasizing the ways in which it leads to suffering, only reinforces capitalism realism. Poverty, famine and war can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the hope that these forms of suffering could be eliminated easily painted as naive utopianism. Capitalism realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism's ostensible 'realism' turns out to be nothing of the sort."

"Lenin is a would-be destroyer of religion, Hitler a corrupter of religion. The National Socialist attack, accepting as it does much of liberal theology and natural religion, is far more dangerous to Christianity than the godlessness of its decay. Lenin would destroy the altar or at least promote its decay. Hitler would preserve the altar while replacing the Cross of Christ by the Swastika."

"No cultural object can retain its power when there are no longer new eyes to see it."

"The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief. It is impossible to conceive of fascism or Stalinism without propaganda – but capitalism can proceed perfectly well, in some ways better, without anyone making a case for it."

"Christianity is never safe, but where there is one atom of Marxism or National Socialism left, Christianity is in mortal danger—and so are Marxism and National Socialism wherever there is one atom of Christianity left."

"What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation:the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture. WItness, for instance, the establishment of settled 'alternative' or 'independent' cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures or rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. 'Alternative' and independent' don't designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact 'the' dominant styles, within the meainstream."

"Initially, It might appear to be a mystery that bureaucratic measures should have intensified under neoliberal governments that have presented themselves as anti-bureaucratic and anti-Stalinist. Yet new kinds of bureaucracy - 'aims and objectives', 'outcomes', 'mission statements'- have proliferated, even as neoliberal rhetoric about the end of top-down, centralized control has gained pre-eminence. It might seem that bureaucracy is a kind of return of the repressed, ironically re-emerging at the heart of a system which has professed to destroy it. But the resurgence of bureaucracy in neoliberalism is more than atavism or an anomaly."

"He who is never ashamed of his country has as little patriotism as he who is never proud of his country."

"This is in part a consequence of the inherent resistance of certain processes and services to marketization. (The supposed marketization of education, for instance, rests on a confused and underdeveloped analogy: are students the consumers of the service or its product?) The idealized market was supposed to deliver ‘friction free’ exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that ‘More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority’s services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services’. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as ‘market Stalinism’. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement."

"The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its 'system of equivalence' which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography or Das Kapital, a monetary value."

"The new defines itself in response to what is already established; at the same time, the established has to reconfigure itself in response to the new. Eliot’s claim was that the exhaustion of the future does not even leave us with the past. Tradition counts for nothing when it is no longer contested and modified. A culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all."

"The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its ‘system of equivalence’ which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or Das Kapital, a monetary value. Walk around the British Museum, where you see objects torn from their lifeworlds and assembled as if on the deck of some Predator spacecraft, and you have a powerful image of this process at work. In the conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts. Capitalist realism is therefore not a particular type of realism; it is more like realism in itself."

"It is said that only when the Germans are weak and disunited are they great—great, that is to say, in art and letters, in science, in speculative thought."

"It would be a mistake to regard this market Stalinism as some deviation from the ‘true spirit’ of capitalism. On the contrary, it would be better to say that an essential dimension of Stalinism was inhibited by its association with a social project like socialism and can only emerge in a late capitalist culture in which images acquire an autonomous force. The way value is generated on the stock exchange depends of course less on what a company ‘really does’, and more on perceptions of, and beliefs about, its (future) performance. In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms."

"Capitalist realism no longer stages this kind of confrontation with modernism. On the contrary, it takes the vanquishing of modernism for granted: modernism is now something that can periodically return, but only as a frozen aesthetic style, never as an ideal for living."

"But Germans are not interested in freedom as the English understand it. When they say freedom, they do not mean the liberty of the individual to do what he likes within the limits imposed by the written and unwritten law, but the liberty of the nation to do what it pleases in defiance of international law."

"Believing as he does in force and determined to secure nothing by peaceful means that can be secured by violence, the Marxist lives in hope of wars and crises that will so unbalance the social order and so loosen the restraint imposed by law and custom, that violence can achieve a maximum breadth and intensity. The situation then arises which the Marxist terms ‘revolutionary.’ It is the situation he desires because he believes that only then is the ‘final and decisive battle possible.’ To Lenin —as to Hitler—the Great War was welcome because it promised to fulfill the revolutionary dream."

"They also drew their £1000 in five gold sovereigns and the "goolie chit." This remarkable document was first introduced to the Americans in the Gulf War, but the ritish, who have been flying combat in those parts since the 1920s, understood them well. A goolie chit is a letter in Arabic and six kinds of Bedouin dialect. It says in effect, "Dear Mr. Bedou, the presenter of this letter is a British officer. If you return him to the nearest British patrol, complete with his testicles and preferably where they ought to be and not in his mouth, you will be rewarded with £5000 in gold." Sometimes it works."

"Martin laughed. "President Bush," he said, "and all the people around him will act according to their upbringing. Which is based on the Judeo-Christian moral philosophy supported by the Greco-Roman concept of logic. And Saddam will react on the basis of his own vision of himself.""

"Uh-unh. Islam has nothing to do with it. Saddam doesn't care a fig for the hadith, the codified teachings of the Prophet. He prays on camera when it suits him. No, you have to go back to Nineveh and Assyria. He doesn't mind how many have to die, so long as he thinks he can win."

"The man with ten minutes to live was laughing."

"Not really. There's a quantum leap in moral philosophy when you cross the Jordan."

"The British Secret Intelligence Service works out of Century House, a rather shabby building south of the Thames between the Elephant and Castle and the Old Kent Road. It is not a new building and not really up to the job it is supposed to do and so labyrinthine inside that visitors really do not need their security passes; within seconds, they get lost and end up screaming for mercy."

"Rawlings was a burglar and a thief, but like much of the London underworld he would not have anyone "trash" his country. It is a fact that convicted traitors in prison, along with child molesters, have to be kept in seclusion because professional "faces," if left alone with such a man, are likely to rearrange his component parts."

"What you are saying," suggested Martin, "is that Iraq decided to use Model-T Ford technology, and because everyone assumed they'd go for Grand Prix racers, no one noticed."

"In Moscow, the warrant officer radio operator removed his headphones and nodded toward the teleprinter. "Faint but clear," he said. The printer began to chatter, sending out a screed of paper covered with a jumble of meaningless letters. When it fell silent, the officer beside the radio tore off the sheet and fed it through the decoder, already set to the formula of the agreed one-time pad. The decoder absorbed the sheet, its computer ran through the permutations, and it delivered the message in clear. The officer read the text and smiled. He telephoned a number, identified himself, checked the identity of the man he was addressing, and said: "Aurora is 'go.'""

"You got it, son. People forget—the old Model-T Ford may be old, but it worked. It got you there. It carried you from A to B. And it hardly ever broke down."

"What I like about Dacre is that each day he arrives at work determined to crush the life out of his rivals."

"Back in the business of journalism, there are no short cuts to producing a great newspaper. You need one vital ingredient: a great editor. If you've got one, you will succeed; if not, you will fail. That's why Paul Dacre is worth considerably more than a million pounds a year."

"Dacre, the nation's bully-in-chief is, like all bullies, a coward: he refused to go on the Today programme yesterday to argue his case. He never dares face his critics, happy to fry alive all and sundry, never apologising, never explaining. There is a good reason for this: the stance his paper takes on just about everything is so internally contradictory and inconsistent that he could never survive even minimal scrutiny. The Mails mishmash of lurid scandal, bitching about women and random moralising zigzags all over the place, dishing out pain and praise often according to who it has succeeded in buying with its limitless chequebook, or who has infuriated it by selling their wares to another bidder."

"The time has come to offer our thanks to one of the best Presidents this Union has had for a long time. The enormous amount of work he has done, the countless committees he has headed, the energy he has contributed to the general running of the Union have all undoubtedly improved the welfare of the Leeds student."

"Make them laugh, make them cry, or make them angry."

"[I]ts patronising, right-on, sanctimonious political correctness gets me so angry it would give me the energy and the willpower to get off that island"

"Today’s Tories are obsessed by the BBC. They saw what its attack dogs did to Hague, Duncan-Smith and Howard. Cameron’s cuddly blend of eco-politics and work-life balance, his embrace of Polly Toynbee – a columnist who loathes everything Conservatism stands for but is a totemic figure to the BBC – his sidelining of Thatcherism and his banishing of all talk of lower taxes, lower immigration and Euro scepticism, are all part of the Tories’ blood sacrifice to the BBC God. Now, I’m not really worried about this. The Conservatives can look after themselves. What really disturbs me is that the BBC is, in every corpuscle of its corporate body, against the values of conservatism, with a small "c", which, I would argue, just happen to be the values held by millions of Britons. Thus it exercises a kind of "cultural Marxism" in which it tries to undermine that conservative society by turning all its values on their heads. Of course, there is the odd dissenting voice, but by and large BBC journalism starts from the premise of leftwing ideology: it is hostile to conservatism and the traditional Right, Britain’s past and British values, America, Ulster Unionism, Euro-scepticism, capitalism and big business, the countryside, Christianity, and family values. Conversely it is sympathetic to Labour, European Federalism, the State and State spending, mass immigration, minority rights, multiculturalism, alternative lifestyles, abortion and progressiveness in the education and the justice systems."

"For my part, I plead guilty to having tweaked, in my time, the Remainer nose of the otherwise admirable FT but your writer’s ludicrous caricature of the Mail, before I stepped aside at 70 after 26 years in the chair, is unrecognisable from the paper that in those years increased its circulation by nearly a million in a contracting market and made billions in profits. ... It also — with the selfless efforts of the magnificent team of journalists Lord Rothermere allowed me to put together — won an unprecedented number of awards for the quality of its journalism and its countless great campaigns whether launching the war on plastic, cleaning up Britain, Alzheimer’s awareness, dignity for the elderly or justice for [the murdered teenager] Stephen Lawrence. ... As for Mr Greig, I congratulate him for making a solid start as editor and continuing so many of those campaigns but I’m sure he’ll forgive me for suggesting that he (or his PR) defers his next lunch with the FT until he has notched up a small fraction of those journalists' achievements."

"I was particularly pleased to learn recently that Paul Dacre, the finest and most successful newspaper editor in this country, earns in excess of a million pounds a year."

"I was really shocked by the statement of Mr Dacre the other day, that his editorial policy is driven by commercial interests. I think that is about the most unethical thing I've read for a long time and, what's more, from the most surprising source, as I have great respect for his abilities. Indeed, many years ago when he was editor of the Evening Standard, he agreed to leave then and come and edit the Times and I was extremely pleased and Associated quickly made him editor of the Daily Mail, I have no doubt at a vastly increased salary, where some friends of mine may disagree with this strongly, but I think he's been a great success. But I was shocked when he said that his policies now, the editorial policy of the Mail is driven by commercial interests. That's on a record here somewhere."

"It is nearly three years since the Mails headline "Enemies of the people" detonated a national debate over whether judges were hijacking political powers. Written five minutes before deadline, this somewhat clunky reference to an Ibsen play was meant to capture Brexit ministers’ rage at the court’s ‘undemocratic’ decision to insist parliament must vote on triggering Article 50. Interestingly, the Telegraph’s front page that day, "The judges versus the people", was almost identical, but it was the Mail, the chatterati’s favourite bogeyman, that was criticised. Was this fair? ... That "Enemies" front page, which reflected the view of ministers and a great many Britons, was excoriated by the same liberals. So do I regret it? Hell no! Newspapers are meant to be provocative, outrageous even. Striking the right balance between the law and politics is never going to be easy. If that front page helped raise consciousness about this vital debate, then I can face my maker with equanimity."

"The real enemy, if you like, is within. For the regrettable truth is that, increasingly, considerable sections of Britain’s media conspire to undermine mass-circulation newspapers. So tonight I would like to pose the question: why is the British newspaper industry so full of self-loathing? I have commented before on of what I have dubbed the "subsidariat" – those media outlets who cannot connect with enough readers to be commercially viable, and whose views and journalism are only sustained by huge cross-subsidy from profitable parts of their owners’ empires or by tax payers’ money. Fair enough. There is a case for subsidy though the longer I live the more I come round to the view that – in most cases - it ultimately perverts everything it touches. In the media, it produces a distorting prism, actually incentivising its recipients to operate in splendid isolationism, far removed from the real world that the great majority of readers and listeners have to live in. But my question is why does not a day go by that the subsidariat papers – blissfully oblivious of their own pocket-sized shapes and circulations – don’t carry the obligatory sneer at the tabloid press? Why does not half an hour go by that the high priests of the subsidariat, the BBC, can’t resist a snide reference to the popular press, again blissfully oblivious that all too often they are following agendas set by those very popular newspapers whose readers pay their salaries. Why does not a week go by that the media supplements and their columnists do not denigrate our industry as a whole?"

"Let it be said loud and clear that the Mail, unlike News International, did NOT hack people's phones or pay the police for stories. I have sworn that on oath. No, our crime is more heinous than that. It is that the Mail constantly dares to stand up to the liberal-left consensus that dominates so many areas of British life and instead represents the views of the ordinary people who are our readers and who don't have a voice in today's political landscape and are too often ignored by today's ruling elite. ... The truth is that there is an unpleasant intellectual snobbery about the Mail in leftish circles, for whom the word 'suburban' is an obscenity. They simply cannot comprehend how a paper that opposes the mindset they hold dear can be so successful and so loved by its millions of readers. Well, I'm proud that the Mail stands up for those readers."