Journalists From England

"Freedom is not genuine if some people are too poor or too weak to enjoy it, and equality is not genuine if some people are ruled by others. The crucial contribution to political theory made by anarchists is this realization that freedom and equality are in the end the same thing."

"In part coming of age listening to Throbbing Gristle, Monte Cazazza and so on... basically industrial music and No Wave defined my tastes. So, I really entered Burroughs via post-punk… and to me his ideas of sound, cut-ups, infrasound, and so on, all informed the mise-en-scène of first wave industrial music. The fact that he really found an audience in post-punk and punk showed some aesthetic lineage. In Against Control – when I look at the records released around Burroughs – I mention the releases by Giorno Poetry Systems, and I think you can really see some shared ideas about the nature of communication amongst the artists there. It’s telling to me that so many of the musicians and bands that are on those records emerged from punk and industrial music."

"The critic has a purpose, but I don’t see my writing as trying to judge a work, trying to communicate its good or bad points to a reader. To me, my hope is that this dossier may open-up new areas of cinema for readers, and point at new avenues for investigation, which is all I would hope for. If it merely defined any emergent orthodoxy-of-extreme-cinema I would feel it had failed."

"Arabs are not the sons of the desert, but its father."

"For many people heterosexual anal intercourse is still the most transgressive sexual act imaginable. Anal sex renounces any pretence of procreation, it is commonly believed to be unpleasurable for women, it has socio-cultural connotations of male homosexuality, and it is commonly thought of as dirty and faecal. It was illegal in Britain until 1994 and remains forbidden in parts of the western world. Not a sexual act commonly considered to be romantic nor worthy of a celebratory pop song, if discussed at all, anal sex is seen predominately as a Sadean fixation and hardcore porn staple. Certainly it is never viewed as an act of love. Je t’aime moi non plus is a film that is defined by distorted and fragmented bodies, scatological desires and erotic excesses. Even to contemporary audiences, this is a film that stinks of “perversion”, that reeks of sweat, cum, urine, shit and soiled panties, but this not a “perversion” troubled by dull clichés of morality or simplistic notions of sexual normality (a normality which clearly does not and never has existed), rather this is a “perversion” that moves outwards, extending beyond culturally ascribed limits, diving into a veritable sewer of infinite possibilities. “Perversion” may have traditionally been prescribed by those with power as a discursive naming which seeks to label the “perverse” as “other” but “perversion” always already exists as a commonplace, although in a repressed form. My response to the cultural implementation of the perverse is simultaneously celebratory and rigorous, my desire to explore and articulate, to both engage and ejaculate, to become the will to perversion."

"Thompson's work combined passion and intellect, the gifts of the poet, the narrator and the analyst. He was the only historian I knew who had not just talent, brilliance, erudition and the gift of writing, but the capacity to produce something qualitatively different from the rest of us, not to be measured on the same scale. Let us simply call it genius, in the traditional sense of the word. None of his mature works could have been written by anyone else."

"When the dust settles from the end of the Cold War, EP Thompson will be viewed, along with Mikhail Gorbachev and Vaclav Havel, as one of the key individuals who influenced the course of events in the 1980s."

"E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’...has set the tone for much writing about popular protest."

"[W]orking-class consciousness is no longer the talismanic concept it once was among historians. In retrospect it is clear that E. P. Thompson's magical evocation in The Making of the English Working Class (1963; rev. edn. 1968) brought a prominent line of inquiry to its culmination. Perhaps this should have been obvious at the time, given the author's determination to define class, not in material terms, but as a product of the daily experience of individual men and women."

"The life and work of E. P. Thompson exemplified the social and cultural struggles that were taking place in the Britain of the 1950s and 1960s, a period which gave the working class access to higher education in a way that had never happened before. His writings, polemical, astringent and tough minded, had an imaginative sweep which questioned social complacencies and compelled institutions and individuals to look beyond their own narrow concerns and their conception of their past."

"Unlike the extreme radical, the Peace Movement does not make light of physical death. In fact, it feeds almost entirely upon the age-old fear of it. A few half-hearted realists (E.P. Thompson among them) admit that the probable consequence of unilateralist policies would be Soviet domination in some form. They know also that, much more than socialism (which they favour), it would be the end of most of what we, and even they themselves, value. But that, apparently, is less important than saving our own skins."

"The man who has done more than anyone else to rouse the national conscience over nuclear weapons is E. P. Thompson... Like Gladstone, who felt himself called away from writing about the Christine doctrine of eternal punishment to lead the agitation over the Bulgarian atrocities, Thompson abandoned his scholar's desk and the book that he is writing on William Blake last autumn to devote himself to the anti-nuclear cause."

"The distinctive contribution of working people to the agitation for Reform between 1789 and 1832 is brilliantly invoked in E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class."

"He once called himself the Muggletonian Marxist, and the title is too tempting to resist. He claimed some special affinity with one associate of the sect, William Blake, and all those who ever heard him lecture on the subject must at least draw some comfort from the fact that he completed this volume before his death. Almost every page offers fresh evidence, not merely of his vast, overflowing erudition, but of his wit, his humanity, his soaring historical imagination, the combination of qualities which made the publication of The Making of the English Working Class such an event not merely in the writing of English history but in the politics of our century."

"John Mortimer: Now that nuclear weapons exist, you have to face the fact that you would rather be conquered by, say, the Russians than have the world blown up? Thompson: Yes, I think so. Don't you? Mortimer: Better red than dead? Thompson: Yes. Mortimer: So, if nuclear weapons had existed in 1939, we would have had to accept conquest by Hitler to save a nuclear war? Thompson: Yes."

"[I]n the early eighties, I was turned aside once again, by the emergency of the “second cold war” and by the heavy demands of the peace movement. I do not regret this: I am convinced that the peace movement made a major contribution to dispersing the cold war, which had descended like a polluting cloud on every field of political and social life."

"...class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which men are born—or enter involuntarily. Class-consciousness is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas, and institutional forms. If the experience appears as determined, class-consciousness does not. We can see a logic in the responses of similar occupational groups undergoing similar experiences, but we cannot predicate any law. Consciousness of class arises in the same way in different times and places, but never in just the same way."

"I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "Utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties."

"We must commence to act as if a united, neutral and pacific Europe already exists. We must learn to be loyal, not to 'East' or 'West' but to each other, and we must disregard the prohibitions and limitations imposed by any national state."

"We are going to stop those piffling cruise missiles, you know, on land if not on sea. What we have to do is seize this moment of mass consciousness to move directly into the structures of the Cold War themselves, the blocs behind the missiles. We have to keep to some very large and simple ideas – like remaking Europe and putting peace and liberty together... This is the most serious political work I have ever done or will ever do in my life. It won't last long. If we succeed a little, the politicians will move in and take it off us."

"Get your boys ready. However this turns out, there'll be trouble—and they'll need more than tear gas and pepperballs to deal with it." "I see," Assad said, unhappy. A nod to the ASPS, and the soldiers opened more cases, taking out compact FN P90 submachine guns. "Another contingency," he told Nina and Macy. "I really hope we don't have to use them, Mr. Chase."

"I became a journalist by accident, and stayed one. Just as well; I have no other talent whatever, even in the most modest and rudimentary form. I can't paint or compose or write novels; I couldn't be a businessman or financier; I would be impossible as a teacher and a disaster as an actor."

"Stealthily the computer advanced, vanguard of the technological revolution, hailed as the cure for all mankind's ills and denounced as the baleful force which would first enslave and then destroy us all."

"Political cynicism strode on, quickening its pace; and no wonder. Attempts were made from time to time to authorise the presence of television cameras in the House of Commons, to bring the sight of the legislature at work into the homes of the people, and thus forge stronger links between voters and voted-for, to the lasting benefit of both."

"Courageous, self-willed and frantically energetic, Levin holds strong views which he enunciates with unambiguous force."

"Solzhenitsyn is certainly the hero of our time that Levin says he is, but it does no good for Levin to gush over him as if he were Kiri Te Kanawa. Just as Levin's admiration for Kiri Te Kanawa would count for more if he interrupted his praise of her undoubtedly gorgeous voice to point out that in Lieder concerts she has occasionally been known to sing a stanza with its lines in reverse order, so his admiration for Solzhenitsyn would count for more if he could entertain the possibility that Solzhenitsyn's challenging call for a unifying sense of purpose on the part of the free world is a contradiction in terms. If the free world had a unifying sense of purpose it would not be free."

"He can no more say it short than A.J.P. Taylor can say it long. In the long sentences of Proust you can still hear the aphoristic tradition that started with Pascal. In the long sentences of Levin you can hear a tradition being forgotten."

"Come; if you were worried about your children eating too many things with sugar in them, because you feared it would harm their teeth, which would you do - stop the Mars bars or ensure that they brushed their teeth thoroughly? You would vote for the toothbrush? Well, the food-wowsers would vote the other way, and that is how you know them."

"When he wrote that 1,500-word piece for The Times using just one full-stop, it wasn't to show off his command of syntax and semi-colons (well, maybe it was a little), but because that's how his brain worked: marshalling metaphors, highly selective facts, quixotic asides and fearless insults into a single, uninterruptible narrative that rolled on and on rather like his beloved Wagner's operas, but with considerably more jokes."

"The explosion of peaceful, mass revolt which has ended Soviet rule from Berlin to Bucharest - and will shortly end it also from Lvov to Vladivostok - was set off not by the eloquence of charismatic leaders, not by hatred of the oppressors, not by hope of gain, but by that tiny yet searing flame which is in us all, and which no Niagara of oppression, hunger or torture can ever extinguish."

"But it is silly to brand liquor as the cause of alcoholic self-destruction, when far more deep-rooted psychological problems are responsible, with drink (and now, of course, drugs) being only the means."

"It is the fact that the longing for freedom is not just embedded in every true soul's heart."

"As for trying to be funny — well, long ago the late proposed that typographers should design a new face, which would slop the opposite way from italics, and would be called "ironics". In this type-face jokes would be set, and no-one would have any excuse for failing to see them. Until this happy development takes place, I am left with the only really useful thing journalism has taught me: that there is no joke so obvious that some bloody fool won't miss the point."

"As I say, I know nothing of wheeler-dealers and their wheels. I do, however, know a little about human beings, and a lot about the English language, and I needed no more than that to button my back-pocket in case Mr Cornfeld went by."

"I said that although the customers of these shops are directly involved, ultimately it concerns everybody, and so it does. For it epitomises two tendencies in our world, and both of them are nasty."

"My work, in which I have had much success, as the world counts success; the causes, great and small, in which I have laboured; the varied passions I have chronicled in this book; as soon as the comparison is made, the answer is plain."

"But once upon a time, we could play shove ha'penny, and read a penny dreadful, and sing a song of sixpence, and take the King's shilling; and once upon a time even further in the past, five sparrows could be bought for two farthings, and yet not be forgotten. Somehow, the transaction would not have had the same effect if the sparrows had been sold for two pee."

"We live in a querulous age; more, we live in an age in which it is argued that to be happy is frivolous, and expecting to be happy positively childish."

"As a child he had been brought up in the grim backstreets of 1930s Somers Town (between St Pancras and Euston stations) by his mother and her parents — Jewish refugees from Lithuania. His father had walked out on them when Bernard was three. That early betrayal, I always felt, explained a lot about why he stayed a bachelor. It was as if he used his intellect to dazzle because he found it difficult to communicate, or commit, on an emotional level."

"Parliamentary government does not suit the Germans. They cannot conceive of loyal opposition or of opposition without personal animosity. They care little for individual freedom. But they do care for equality and they have a passion for justice. Egalitarian States tend to be despotic, and when the passion for justice becomes a frenzy that moves whole multitudes, it will lead to extreme injustice."

"Socialism is always destructive of liberty unless it be adulterated and restricted. The Germans who supported the Revolution of 1918 and made the Republic possible wanted freedom and Socialism, not realizing that they could not have both. They wanted Socialism the more of the two, but failed, because they were unable to command sufficient power. But they had freedom—the freedom that enabled a new form of Socialism, namely National Socialism, to establish itself."

"The Russian Socialism of the German Communists, the liberal Socialism of the Social Democrats, the national, and therefore German, Socialism of the National Socialists—Socialism, in one form or another, was desired by the vast majority of Germans. In the end, Socialism prevailed."

"Justice is not humane if it is never severe."

"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."

"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."

"What happened to the German genius under the National Socialist visitation? Books were banned or burnt, works of art were destroyed or cosigned to lumber rooms, artists were condemned to solitude, writers were silenced or driven into exile. Upon the genius of Germany a crude, anti-scientific, anti-philosophical, pseudo-religious ideology animated by a narrow, ruthless fanaticism were impressed. Despite its youthful fervour, Hitler’s National Socialism was not a rejuvenation."

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

"Like Marx and Lenin, Hitler is an anti-capitalist. And as ‘capitalism ’ is evil, it is, in Hitler’s eyes, Jewish. Anti-Semitism and anti-Capitalism frequently go hand in hand—the Pan-German movement before the war and Austria’s anti-Semitism were strongly anti-capitalistic. Hitler made them indissoluble in Germany. He succeeded in bringing about a fusion of class hatred and racial hatred, of revolutionary socialism and revolutionary nationalism."

"National Socialism, like Marxism, lives on hatred. There is no easier method of concentrating hate than anti-Semitism. The Jew, made to look gross and hideous, becomes the symbol of all that is hateful, of the enemy in the abstract and in the concrete. The Jew of caricature, the Jew with the hooked nose, dark, curly hair and fleshy lips, is made to symbolize evil as such in the eyes of the Nazi, just as the capitalist of caricature is made to symbolize evil as such in the eyes of the Communists."

"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."