JOHN CLEESE SLAMS 'COWARDLY BBC'

by Brian Bamford

 Ludwig Wittgenstein said: 'Humour is not a mood but a 

way of looking at the world.'  'So if it is correct to say

that humour was stamped out in Nazi Germany, that 

does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or

anything of that sort, but something much deeper and

more important.'

Perhaps to understand what that 'something' is, it would be best

to look at humour as something strange and incomprehensible. 

For example, the philosopher Wittgenstein enjoyed reading 

  American detective novels and the casual humourous way 

they bumped off their characters. For instance in 

'Rendezvous with Fear' by Norbert Davis desribes a man 

named Garcia cross-eyed with a thin yellowish face sat 

drinking beer the colour and consistency of warm 

vinegar.  Meanwhile, when Doan shoots Bautiste Bonofile, 

another 'bad man', the romantic but naïve heroine, Jane

asks with concern:  'Is he hurt?' 'Not a bit' says Doan, 'he's

just dead.'

****************

JOHN CLEESE has laid into the "cowardly and gutless and contemptible" BBC after an episode of Fawlty Towers was removed from a BBC-owned streaming platform.

A 1975 episode titled The Germans was taken off UKTV's streaming service because it contains "racial slurs".
In it, the Major uses highly offensive language, and Cleese's Basil Fawlty declares "don't mention the war".
Cleese wrote on Twitter: "The BBC is now run by a mixture of marketing people and petty bureaucrats."
He added: "I would have hoped that someone at the BBC would understand that there are two ways of making fun of human behaviour.
"One is to attack it directly. The other is to have someone who is patently a figure of fun, speak up on behalf of that behaviour."

Skip Twitter post by @JohnCleese

I would have hoped that someone at the BBC would understand that there are two ways of making fun of
human behaviour

One is to attack it directly.

The other is to have someone who is patently a figure of fun, speak up on behalf of that behaviour

Thank of Alf Garnett...

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) June 12, 2020

Report

End of Twitter post by @JohnCleese

He went on to compare the situation with that of Alf Garnett, the racist character in sitcoms Till Death Us Do Part and In Sickness and in Health.
"We laughed at Alf's reactionary views. Thus we discredited them, by laughing at him," Cleese wrote.
"Of course, there were people - very stupid people - who said 'Thank God someone is saying these things at last'. We laughed at these people too. Now they're taking decisions about BBC comedy."
He continued: "But it's not just stupidity. The BBC is now run by a mixture of marketing people and petty bureaucrats. It used to have a large sprinkling of people who'd actually made programmes. Not any more.
"So BBC decisions are made by persons whose main concern is not losing their jobs... That's why they're so cowardly and gutless and contemptible. I rest my case."

'Audience expectations'

UKTV also operates channels including Gold, and many of its channels and its digital player were taken over by the BBC's commercial arm BBC Studios last year. A BBC spokesman declined to comment.
A UKTV spokesman said: "UKTV has temporarily removed an episode of Fawlty Towers The Germans from Gold's Box Set.
"The episode contains racial slurs so we are taking the episode down while we review it. We regularly review older content to ensure it meets audience expectations and are particularly aware of the impact of outdated language.
"Some shows carry warnings and others are edited. We want to take time to consider our options for this episode."

****************************************

'ON CERTAINTY' in the Coronavirus

 On Being Cock-Sure about Covid-19
by Brian Bamford

SHORTLY before he died, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote:  "I do philosophy now like an old woman who is always mislaying something and having to look for it again: now her spectacles, now her keys."*

This humility of the philosopher contrasts with the terrifying certainty that is being thrust upon us daily by various forces from the political left and the right.
Yet it fairly describes the dilemma facing governments at the moment over the coronavirus pandemic.

Today I have had two e-mails in my in-box:   one a Special Issue (March 2020) of Labour Internationalist, containing a dramatic statement dated 24 March 2020 on the Covid-19 pandemic by the Organising Committee for the Reconstitution of the Fourth International (OCRFI), and another from 'Defend Our NHS' is now confidently declaring:  'The coronavirus letter you’ve just been sent by Johnson is a lie.'

And the Labour Internationalist with bold determined conviction in a subtitle declares:  'The failed capitalist system and the governments that serve its interests:  they are guilty and responsible for the growth of the coronavirus pandemic!'

'Wishful Thinking'

It is not only the Marxists who are brimming over with confident conclusions, in that case catostrophic conclusions, but we all like to embrace wishful thinking.  Tim Harford in his recent column in the Financial Times warned:  'Wishful thinking is a powerful thing', and he went on to write:  'When I read about a new disease modelling study from the University of Oxford, I desperately wanted to believe.  It is the most prominent exploration of the "tip of the iceberg hypothesis", which suggests that the majority of coronavirus infections are so mild as to have passed unrecorded by the authorities and perhaps even by the people infected.'

If true?  That could mean that many of us have already had the virus and have probably developed some degree of immunity to it.  'Herd Immunity' was the concept that in the earlier stages of this crisis the government seemed to be following.

Yesterday, Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, an epidemiologist Sydney, Australia, wrote an essay in ScienceAlert on this approach:
'It's hard to predict things in a pandemic.  The situation changes so much on a daily basis that everything you thought you knew last week is wrong by the end of the day.  Things are changing so fast that even the solid certainties that we thought we were sure of – the reproductive rate, the symptoms of the infection, the key to making a good quarantine – are suspect and need to be re-evaluated.'

Despite all the bluster of the cock-sure political lobbyists in the current crisis, there are still a lack of reliable facts and data to form firm conclusions.

Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz continued:
'But among all this uncertainty, I can say for sure that there is one thing that I would never have seen coming: the discussion about herd immunity. It is so out of the blue that the first time a journalist asked my opinion on whether it was effective for the coronavirus, I literally laughed out loud because I assumed they were joking.'

About 15-years ago another epidemiologist, Prof. Ioannidis, published a study entitled 'Why Most Published Research Findings Are False'.  He wrote on March 17th, this year, that Covid-19 'might be a one-in-a-century evidence fiasco', because some infections are being missed, and we have no idea how many.  Consequently we have no idea how deadly Covid-19 actually is.

Hence, there is still no certainty to how things will turn out with the pandemic.

'The will to certitude'

Wittgenstein's 'On Certainty' was a text that can plausibly be interpreted as an anthem against the human will to certitude and mastery of the world.  Most obviously, it reminds us that uncertainty is an intimate, everyday matter.  There is a personal dimension of the experience of not knowing exactly who we are, what our world is and where both we and our world are heading.  Big talk of global spikes and planetary spectres of uncertainty is one thing.  Daily living with uncertainty is another. 

This is why particularly we shouldn't be surprise if the Marxists around Labour Internationalist want to declare a forthcoming catastrophy in the making owing to capitalist government's handling of the pandemic.  Or that a lobby group for the NHS want to use the current crisis as part of its campaign strategy to get more funds.  

There’s a French proverb that runs rien n’est sûr que la chose incertaine (nothing’s certain but uncertainty).  This could easily be a motto for democracy.  Considered as a political form and as a whole way of life, democracy is like no other.  The totalitarian or authoritarian mind craves the comfort of a political line that resolve the uncertainties.

But how do the uncertainties of our age compare with the great religious turmoil of the late medieval and early modern period, masterfully analysed by Jean Delumeau: the fears of damnation and death mobilised by the church and compounded by episodes of military violence, famine, disease and the widespread belief in witchcraft and other forces of magic?

The unknown consequences of the current crisis could well give rise to political delusions or even religious expectations.  We could anticipate that uncertainty is fickle and capricious tormentor of the human condition and conviction.

**************************************

*  Nothing is forever. Uncertainty, the twin of certainty, cannot be banished from human affairs. Not even taxes and death are certain, we could say.  Although Wittgenstein doesn’t put things this way, truth claims, paradoxically, stir up doubts about truth.  Truth is a contaminant of truth.  Its yearning for certainty calls into question things that are taken for granted.  Nothing is certain but the uncertainty of the unforeseen.  Hence Wittgenstein appeals for greater humility about what we know, or suppose we know.

REVIEW: The Spanish Revolution 'Explained'

Review:  'Lessons of the Spanish Revolution 1936-39' 

by Vernon Richards (introduction by David Goodway). 

£15.00 ($21.95) Published by PM Press / Freedom Press.

reviewer Brian Bamford

Spanish Civil War &  

Sinful Post-Hoc Reasoning *

VERNON RICHARDS, a former long-term editor of the anarchist newspaper Freedom, in his introduction to the First English Edition (1953) of his 'Lessons of the Spanish Revolution' made a modest admission of his own limitations as he tried to counter his  critics:  'Some have cricised me for being wise after the event and for writing on events of which I was but a spectator from afar.  I mention these criticisms as a warning to the reader of my limited qualifications for dealing with such a complex subject.  But I feel I should in my defence also point out that that most of the criticisms I have made in this book were expressed by me in 1936-1939 in the columns of the journal Spain and the World.'

When recently I spoke to the historian David Goodway, who wrote the introduction for this current PM PRESS edition, he suggested that his distance from the events in Spain allowed Vernon Richards to be more 'objective' in his analysis. His remark did not entirely surprise me both because it reflected the view of other people in the Freedom group with whom I have discussed this matter, but additionally this approach fits with what Dr. Goodway argued when I attended one of his lectures at a Northern Radical History Network event in Bradford in April 2013, where he passionately argued that historians in the nature of things all develop a narrative, and then go on to relentlessly pursue the advocacy of that perspective.  Thus, history becomes a form of the art of advocacy and polemical presentation. 

'History is what historians do'?

'History is what historians do', declared Isaiah Berlin in his book 'The Proper Study of Mankind'.

Post-hoc reasoning is the fallacy where we believe that because one event follows another, the first must have been a cause of the second.  In some cases this is true, but other factors may be responsible.

Did the decision of the CNT to participate in the governments first in Barcelona and later in Madrid lead to a degeneration of the integrity of the whole of the Spanish anarchist body politic?  Was the leadership to blame for the compromise of principles or was it also a dereliction of duty on the part of the rank and file in the CNT?

In Chapter XX Vernon Richards responds to some of the critics of the original English edition.who claimed he had 'over-emphasised the faults of the leaders of the CNT-FAI' and 'had been "over-charitable" to the rank and file members of the revolutionary organisations.'   Richards admits these criticisms are 'valid, though we (he) also believes that we (he) has erred in the right direction!'

He argues further:  'The rank and file saw - or "instinctively felt" - more clearly than the leaders, and we (he) have no doubt in our mind that the action of the workers in raising the barricades in Barcelona in May 1937 was a last desperate attempt to save the revolution from strangulation by the Jacobins and the reactionary politicians who had insinuation by themselves once more into positions of power.  Barcelona in May 1937 was to the Spanish Revolution what Kronstadt, sixteen years earlier, had been to the Russian Revolution.'

The seeds of the 'Lessons of the Spanish Revolution'?

VERNON Richards admits in his Introduction (1953) that his historical account would never have been written but for the publication of the first two volumes of La CNT en la Revolution Espanola by Jose Peirats.  Other sources he gives are Diego Abad de Santillan's Por que perdimos la guerra and Gerald Brenan's Spanish Labyrinth.  

Recently Stuart Christie told me that Vernon Richards had written this history in response to Felix Morrow's Revolution & Counter-Revolution in Spain (New York: Pathfinder, 1938).  I haven't been able to confirm this but in his Biographical Postscript in 1972 Vernon Richards welcomed 'more material.... from.all quarters on the left' including Felix Morrow's  book.  

Stuart Christie e-mailed me to say:  'My recollection of Vero’s book was that it was an attempt to respond to Felix Morrow’s half-decent 'Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain’.

What is notable about Felix Morrow's Trotskyist account here is that he, like so many Marxists, focuses on the correct  political leadership and he argues that the anarcho-syndicalist CNT 'had changed little since its origin in the Cordoba Congess of 1872' and being 'Hopelessly anti-political, it played no role in bringing the Republic', adding  'Spain would not find its ideological leadership here'.  

Mr. Morrow concludes his analysis:  'Thus, the (Spanish) proletariat was without leadership to prepare it for its great tasks, when the republic arrived.  It was to pay dearly for this lack!'

What Morrow is doing here is using apriori or cookbook thinking in which he and Leon Trotsky use to make sense of the Spanish context in the historical background and development of the Spanish Civil War and to create a blueprint for what to do.  He takes the view that what was needed in the Spanish conflict was a 'Bolshevik methodology' (p6 of 'Revolution & Counter-Revolution in Spain' pub. by Pathfinder) arguing:
'The making of the Soviet Union and its achievements - a peasant country like Spain - were extraordinarily popular in Spain.  But the Bolshevik methodology of the Russian Revolution was almost unknown.  The theoretical backwardness of Spanish socialism had produced only a small wing for Bolshevism in 1918.'   

And yet most of the Spanish anarchists rejected the Bolshevik model.  Indeed, one of the main concerns of the adherents of the CNT and the anarchists in the FAI in July 1936, was to avoid what they saw as the errors associated with the development of the Russian Revolution.   Vernon Richards presents it thus in Ch. IV entitled 'ANARCHIST DICTATORSHIP OR COLLABORATION AND DEMOCRACY':
'The dilemma of the "anarchist and confederal dictatorship" or "collaboration and democracy" existed only for those "influential militants" of the CNT-FAI who, wrongly interpreting their functions as delegates, took upon themselves the task of directing the popular movement. '

Mr. Richards begins by saying:  'The first mistake, it should be remembered, was made in the early days of the struggle, when an ill-armed people were halting a carefully prepared military operation carried out by a trained and well-equipped army, which no one, not even some of the "influential members" of the CNT-FAI, imagined could be resisted.'

Richards concludes:  'The slogan of the CNT-FAI leadership - "the war first, the revolution after" - was the greatest blunder that could have been made.'
He supports this with a quote from Diego Abad de Santillan:
'We knew that it was not possible to triumph in the revolution if we were not victorious in the war.  We even sacrificed the revolution without noticing that that sacrifice also implied the sacrifice of the objectives of the war.'

Against this there is the view of Paul Preston, perhaps currently the most widely read historian in the English language on the Spanish Civil War, who argues:
'While exhilarating to participants and observers such as George Orwell, the great collectivist experiments of the autumn of 1936 did little to create a war machine.... The May events witnessed by Orwell in Barcelona were provoked by the need to remove obstacles to the efficient conduct of the war.  Despite incorporating the working class militias into the regular forces and dismantling the collectives, Negrin's government still did not achieve victory - not because its policies were wrong but because of the international forces arrayed against the Republic.'

Shortly before I embarked on this review one of  Preston's former students sent me this e-mail:
'The bottom line is Paul’s (Preston) fundamental and unshakeable belief that the absolute priority on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War should have been to focus on the conventional war effort and not on the Revolution, which was detrimental to that effort — and his total support for the actions of the Negrin government and the integrity of Negrin himself.'

On the 15th, July 2016, during an interview with the historian Ian Kershaw, entitled 'The Last Days of the Spanish Civil War', Paul Preston had even claimed that Negrin was 'the Churchill of the Spanish republic - the great War Leader.'   

The main danger in philosophy, as Lars Hertzberg identifies it, is the danger of apriorism, the idea that we can tell how things “must be”.  It strikes me that some English historians like Sir Paul Preston and Dr. David Goodway readily embrace apriorism: Preston in 'The Spanish Holocaust'** and Goodway in his claim that all historians pursue and advocate a preconceived narrative.*** 

Yet Isaiah Berlin in his monumental book The Proper Study of Mankind wrote:  'History does not reveal causes; it presents only a blank succession of unexplained events.'   

In Sir Paul Preston's interview above with Ian Kershaw, Preston said that he intended to write a book about the 'guilty men' and specified Largo Caballero as a principle culprit in this respect.  Similarly Mr. Richards reveals his own bias when commenting on Burnett Bolloten's book, which he otherwise admires, he writes:  'The new material I think presents the socialist/trade union leader Largo Caballero in too favourable a light - as a victim of intrigues - whereas he was an old fox, as are all trade union leaders - not least the anarcho-syndicalist variety, such as Lopez, Peiro, and Pestana.'

I remember Jim Pinkerton, the former International Secretary of the old Syndicalist Workers' Federation, once told me that Vernon Richards would never join a trade union because it was not in his nature to do so.  At one point in this book he even describes a trade union as if it were what the sociologists call a 'total institution':  
'And trade unions just like other self-contained concentrations of human beings, such as prisons, armies, and hospitals, are small-scale copies of existing society with its qualities, as well as its faults.' 

Like Vernon Richards I've spent some time in prison in the UK, and in the summer of 1963, I was even held in a dungeon in a small village in the province of Segovia, and I can tell him that there is a vast qualitive difference in these experiences to being a rank and file member of a trade union in either the UK, in the T&G in Gibraltar, or in the La Linea branch of the CNT in Spain.  
 
Mr. Richards demonstrates his apriorism in the section subtitled 'Anarchism and Syndicalism' which begins by declaring:  'In organisations with a mass following, the small anarchist minority can only retain its identity and exert a revolutionary influence by maintaining a position of intransigence.' 

Then Richards concludes by telling us and the Spaniards struggling to tackle the privations of the Civil War, that:  'Thirty years earlier, Malatesta, with that profound understanding of his fellow men which inspired all his writings, had clearly seen the effects of the fusion of the anarchist movement with the syndicalist organisation...'  

In reviewing this book it is clear that it is well worth reading the present work, for as Jose Peirats in 1954 wrote:  'It is important to anarchists to draw the lessons of the facts and actions of their own movement.'    Yet Peirats argues Richards's book which extols Malatesta and anarcho-communist insurrection over the anarcho-syndicalist General Strike has flaws as well as virtues.  Indeed I seem to recall that Peirats book on  The CNT in the Revolution Espanola arguing that the anarchists were in fact 'too insurrectionary' in so far as they seized the towns and then neglected the small pueblos.

And yet, though I would have you read these histories I am mindful of what Peirats said about the Vernon  Richards' Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, he declared:  
'este obrita' (small work) is too 'severo' and 'demasiado lateral' (too bias) and 'selectivo'.  Peirats concludes that 'none of his (Richards's) statements will be contradicted by history' but it is necessary 'to give to facts their relative importance.'

We must be aware that all these historians Richards, Goodway, and Preston are guilty of  apriorism.  Both Richards and Preston, have criticised Orwell for his original naivety about both the situation in Spain when he went to Spain.  That, in my view, makes Orwell's observations more reliable because it helps him to observe the unfolding of events without the clutter of preconceived notions.

Lars Hertzberg takes up this question 'apriorism' by addressing an issue that was absolutely fundamental for a philosopher like Wittgenstein: the question of honesty.  According to Hertzberg, Wittgenstein always regarded honesty as an issue in philosophy, and the question of what it means to “try to keep philosophy honest” is unavoidable for anyone working in the Wittgensteinian tradition.  Hertzberg is not saying that philosophers in that tradition are more honest than others.  His point is rather that for Wittgenstein “a concern with one’s intellectual honesty is internal to the difficulty of philosophy”. 

In the case of the historians like Richards, Goodway and Preston, their primary concern is the art of advocacy. 

When Peirats writes it is necessary 'to give to facts their relative importance' it is because he is conscious that Richards has undervalued the experience of the heat of the moment in the context of the Spanish Civil War.  When I wrote in Freedom an obituary for Frederica Montseny**** in January 1994, Vernon was critical complaining to Charles Crute that it was too sympathetic to 'someone like her' and that that I hadn't refered to his own book.  Frederica had joined the republican government as a Minister but had later admitted that it was a mistake.

Helenio Capellas, the Catalan anarchist whose father was in the same Los Solidarios group as Durruti and Garcia told me in the 1990s that while Durruti was not so bright, Spanish anarchism had a lucky escape when Garcia Oliver didn't succeed in dominating the anarchist movement, because he would have proven to be a bit too much like an anarchist Lenin.

This is what Peirats means when he claims Richards is too severe on 'individuals' by which Richards means those guilty folk who joined and supported the republican government: I remember in 1964 reading in a  glossy Spanish Civil War history publication on a news-stand, that was produced by people sympathetic to Franco, and it claimed that the effect of anarchists joining the government was shocking in its effect on Spaniards in the 1930s.  

“Propuesta Premio Nobel de la Paz al Generalísimo Franco”

In 1964, General Franco's Spain commemorated 'XXV años de paz franquista : sociedad y cultura en España hacia', and I was with my family in the Andalucian town Ronda in the August of that year when the festival was in full swing; indeed 1964 was also the year that Franco was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Peace.  At that time I was just discovering Ronda a town which Ernest Hemingway and Ava Gardner spent time, but it was also where my one-year old eldest son caught a dose of hay fever and started to vomit and failing to keep his food down.  A visit to the local Chemist - we could't afford a doctor - who gave us suppositories (Spain at that time depended on imported French medicine and it meant using suppositories for more ailments than constipation) which cured him within a couple of days.

But such everyday problems are trivial to the historian who works on a grand scale.  The problem with the historians according to Tolstoy is that 'Everything is forced into a standard mold invented by the historians:  Tsar Ivan the Terrible,... after 1560 suddenly becomes transform from a wise and virtuous man into a mad and cruel tyrant.  How?  Why? - You mustn't even ask...'  

This is what Dr. David Goodway has already admitted above and it is something which truly represents the poverty of the historians.  At least Goodway was honest about that,   But Vernon Richards, unlike his companera Marie Louise Berneri, never went to Spain during the Civil War.  He later, after 1958 helped to set-up a resort on the Costa Brava.  In that way he had contact with the Catalans and found that in the rural areas the people in the villages 'talked openly, because they knew who could not be trusted in the community, whereas in Barcelona, for instance, you did not know your neighbour at the next cafe table and therefore talked openly at home or outside away from the crowds.'  That seemed  consistent with my own experience in Alicante in 1963 and later in Andalucia; I remember what a shock it was in 1967 when I went to live briefly in Portugal, in Elvas, and found the Portuguese talking freely in bars about politics.

The texture of life & 'unreal histories'

or how historians get fat?

When Isaiah Berlin***** addressed what Tolstoy had to say about the historians he quoted from the War and Peace, epilogue, part 1, chapter 1:  'If we we allow that human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility of life [i.e. as a spontaneous activity involving consciousness of free will] is destroyed.' 

According to Berlin: "Tolstoy wanted to write a historical novel whose 'principal aims was to contrast the 'real' texture of life, both of individuals and communities, with the unreal picture presented by historians.  Again and again in the pages of War and Peace we get a sharp juxtaposition of 'realty' what 'really' occurred - with the distorting medium through which it will later be presented in the official accounts offered to the public, and indeed be recollected by the actors themselves - the original memories having now been touched up by their own treacherous (inevitably treacherous because automatically rationalising and formalising) minds.  Tolstoy is perpetually placing the heroes of War and Peace in situations where this becomes particularly evident."

What we have in these histories of the historians is what Tolstoy calls the 'great illusion' which he sets out to expose.  The historian Paul Preston in the interview already referred to with Ian Kershaw,  related about when he went to Spain:  'Of course the Spain of the late 1960s, was much nearer to the Spain of the civil War than the Spain of today, ... original memories.'  He also made a joke to Kershaw:  'I was thin when I went to Spain'.  Since then he's made a good living writing about little else.


It is because of this defect attributed to the historians so clearly perceived by Tolstoy, that explains why George Orwell's 'Homage to Catalonia' with all its limitations is in the end is so much more a populat and influential to the work of the professional historians of the likes of Paul Preston.   As I write this Sir Paul Preston himself is having to admit his debt to Gerald Brenan, formerly a member of the Bloomsbury Group; with  ‎Lytton Strachey,  Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and E. M. Forster, and later author of The Spanish Labyrinth: an Account of the Social & Political Background of the Spanish Civil War.  Brenan was more of an anthropologist than a historian and besides the Spanish Labyrinth wrote about village life in Andalucia, as was  Julian Pitt-Rivers who wrote People of the Sierra a study of the village of Grazellema a short bus ride from Ronda.  Franz Borkenau  produced an eye-witness accounts in the The Spanish Cockpit as a sociologist who visited Spain in the midst of the war in 1936 and 1937.  Even Vernon Richards and Jose Peirats were really autodidacts rather than professional historians, and I believe they were better off for this.

I together with my young wife lived for over a year in the home of a recently widowed seamstress and her two daughters, Conchita and Pepita, in the fishing village of Denia.  It was there that my eldest lad was born in August 1963.  Vernon Richards refers in his biographical postscript to Margarita Balaguer, an eighteen-year-old seamstress in a haute.couture fashion house 'which she had attempted  unsuccessfully to collectivize found the liberation of women the most rewarding of all the revolutionary conquests.  For as long as she could remember she had fought the accepted notion that 'men and women could  never be friends.'  Now she found she had better friends among men than among women.  A new comradeship had arisen."  I don't know what my seamstress landlady, Senora Lola, in Denia, would have had to say about that all those years ago when we went to tidy-up her dead husband's niche in the cemetery on All Souls Day in 1963.  Last month, some 65 years after General Franco was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, the socialist goverment of the acting Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sanchez has had the remains of its former dictator from the state mausoleum in the Valley of the Fallen, where he was buried in 1975, for reburial in a private grave, and  Sanchez claims it is a step towards national reconciliation, the exhumation was the most significant move in years by Spanish authorities to lay the ghost of the general whose legacy still divides the country he ruled as an autocrat for nearly four decades.  Meanwhile Catalonia is in crisis over the imprisionment of the Catalan nationalist leaders, and a poll by the pollster 40dB for EL PAÍS is suggesting that Spain which will be holding its fourth general election in four years his coming Sunday, and yet the new vote is not likely to break the prolonged political stalemate, according to a survey by the pollster 40dB for the newspaper EL PAÍS.


*  Logic and Sin in the writings of LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN by Philip R. Sheilds:  Bertrand Russell was fond of relating the following story about Ludwig Wittgenstein's student days at Cambridge:  "he used to come to my rooms at midnight and, for hours, he would walk backwards anf forwards like a caged tiger.  On one such evening, after an hour or two of dead silence, I said to him, 'Wittenstein, are you thinking about logic or about your sins?'  'Both,' he said, and then reverted to silence." .'

**Danny Evans in the Bibliographical Postscript to 'Lessons of the Spanish Revolution' writes:  'Paul Preston, has moved in the opposite direction to the drift of specialist historiography, providing increasingly caricatured depictions of Spanish anarchists in his later work, most notably 'The Spanish Holocaust' (London: Harper Press, 2013).'

***  Dr. Goodway in his portrayal of the job of the historian at the 4th Northern Radical History Network meeting held on Saturday 20 April 2013, in Bradford

****    In November 1936, Francisco Largo Caballero appointed Montseny as Minister of Health. In doing so, she became the first woman in Spanish history to be a cabinet minister.^[2] She was one of the first female ministers in Western Europe (but preceded by Danish Minister of Education, Nina Bang and Miina Sillanpää of Finland). She aimed to transform public health to meet the needs of the poor and the working class. To that end, she supported decentralized, locally l-responsive and preventative health care programs that mobilized the entire working class for the war effort. She was influenced by the anarchist sex reform movement, which since the 1920s had focused on reproductive rights and was minister in 1936 when Dr. Félix Martí Ibáñez, the anarchist director general of Health and Social Assistance of the Generalitat de Catalunya, issued the Eugenic Reform of Abortion, a decree that effectively made abortion on demand legal in Catalonia.  Once in exile took the view that it was an error for the anarchists to have participated in the republican government in 1936.

***** The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays by Isaih Berlin (PIMLICO) 1998.

  

The Axeman Cometh & Ludwig Wittgenstein

 ASPECT BLINDNESS in ROCHDALE & BEYOND

by Brian Bamford

Editorial Note:  Below I have tried to lay out

the editorial position of our NV Blog in the light of the 
axeman's attack on a team of tree surgeons after
a group of Asians in the Newbold area of Rochdale 
had trapped them, called them 'white bastards' and 
cut off one of their hands.  

 https://www.gmp.police.uk/news/greater-manchester/news/news/2019/october/Four-men-have-been-jailed-for-their-part-in-a-brutal-gang-attack-which-left-a-man-with-life-changing-injuries-after-being-hit-with-an-axe-in-Rochdale/

As I write these words Barack Obama, the former US 
president has  called out the cancel culture on the 
Internet, saying that it is not an effective form 
of activism.  

He said: “This idea of purity, and you’re never compromised, 

and you’re always politically woke and all that stuff, 

you should get over that quickly.  The world is messy. 

There are ambiguities.”   

https://www.nytimes.com › politics › obama-woke-cancel-culture

 We believe the case of the actions of axe man in Newbold 

Rochdale illustrates better than any form of words the

dilemma facing the liberal left and community relations.

The Newbold axeman case better than any clever intellectual 

argument clearly shows us the 'aspect blindness' of the 

current spirit of our age.  

For the relevant post on the story of the Newbold gang's assault on the tree surgeons go to:

https://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk › blog › when-is-a-hate-crime-not-a-hat..    

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“What can be shown cannot be said,” that is, what cannot be formulated in sayable (sensical) propositions can only be shown. - Ludwig Wittgenstein.

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WHEN Northern Voices was established in the summer of 2003 at a meeting in The Buffet Bar on the Stalybridge Station in Greater Manchester, it was decided we would produce a regional publication dedicated to local news and cultural issues in the North of England.  The editorial in the first issue began with a quote from Ray Monk's biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein:

'We do not ... need to consider imaginary wild tribes to find examples of people with a world picture fundamentally different from our own.' 

Even among our neighbours we can find distinct differences as the curious Newbold axeman case shows so clearly here and Ray Monk no doubt had in mind what Wittgenstein had already said to one of his students: 'Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same ... Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different.'

At that time we wrote: 'Northern Voices' editors seek to find variety and differences within our local northern communities at street-corner level.  We do not seek easy generalisations and simple minded explanations, which so often lead to hole-in-corner ideas and solutions.'

Since then we have tackled a wide variety of news stories, cultural events, political scandals, and items of interest to northerners.  In doing so we have built up a readership outside the narrow confines of what has been called the political left to embrace a more general northern constituency.

This blog aims to establish a web presence for Northern Voices. It will feature some current and past articles from the printed journal, as well as things that don't quite fit in the magazine - both for editorial and technological reasons.

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SNOWFLAKES IN AUTUMN!

by Brian Bamford

THE pears are ripe early this year and are already falling from the trees in the orchards and it's only just Harvest Festival, yet in the political world of the 'loco left' the snowflakes are already drifting all around us.  Someone called Ms. Maria Beatrice Giovanardi has launched a petition online calling on the publisher of the Oxford  University Press to delete words which she, and 30,000 others who have signed the petition, regard as offensive to women.

According to a Daily Star editorial yesterday:  'They want all the slang terms for women banned from the English dictionary,  This includes words such as "bird" and "biddy".'

Logically the Daily Star editor argues:
'Of course there will be those who find terms like these offensive.  But many others - both men and women - will not. 

'And the simple fact is these words are part of our everyday language. 

'You can't start axing them just because they give a select few the hump.' 

The Star editor has a point, because to start axing everyday words would impoverish  the English language.

A nephew of mine has sought to keep certain concepts and words away from his children by strictly censoring the our language and utterances when his kids are anywhere near within earshot. 

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein writes in Philosophical Investigations that the meaning of a word is its use in a language (Wittgenstein 1953, I, sec. 43):

'Words get their meaning by virtue of their relationships with other words and their use.'

Words are tools for expressing meaning in the everyday world.  Those with a schoolmaster mentality may not like that, and they may wish to control our use of language by some centralised diktat, but they will just have to lump it!

Yet the Snowflakes themselves are utterly naive if they think they can destroy disagreeable thoughts by expunging slang words they don't take a shine-to from the dictionaries; words are tools which we use to express our thoughts and meanings in the world.  Words exist independently of their dictionary definitions.  Indeed, Katherine Connor Martin from the Oxford University Press said in response to these detractors that a word 'will not be excluded from the dictionary solely on the grounds that it is offensive or derogatory', adding 'our dictionaries strive to reflect, rather than dictate language.'

Dictionaries in the natural course of things have to be constantly updated to keep up with changes in use of language.  In other words dictionaries follow the meanings and use in the real world, not the other way round.

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Tory Debates: 'Words have consequences'

Power Politics Smelling Around a Lampost

by Brian Bamford

DURING the Tory leadership debate on the 30th, June, the BBC was accused of bias and the Daily Mail ran an headline: 'BIASED BRAZEN CONTEMPTABLE' and an editorial entitled 'A farrago of deceit and naked BBC bias'.  The editor Geordie Greig wrote:  'One questioner was an imam ('Abdula from Bristol'), who took Mr (Boris) Johnson to task over his use of Islamaphobic language.'  

What the Imam questioner from Bristol asked was did Boris accept that 'words have consequences?'

Boris then admitted that some of his remarks might occasionally have caused some plaster to off the ceiling, but added that people sometimes chose to 'escalate' his comments. 

Ludwig Wittgenstein was once quoted as saying:   'A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.'

Despite Geordie Greig's protestations about BBC bias in the Daily Mail, the Imam was justified in asking his question which was of interest to the public.

more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/ludwig_wittgenstein_147252

A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/ludwig_wittgenstein_147252

The roots of this question stem from a column in the UK’s Daily Telegraph newspaper on 5 Aug 2018, in which Johnson wrote that while he doesn’t support a burqa ban in Denmark, he does think they’re 'ridiculous' because they make women look like 'letter boxes' and 'bank robbers.'

But Johnson was also perfectly entitled to describe the effect the asthetic style of the burka had on him:  'If you say that it is weird and bullying to expect women to cover their faces, then I totally agree,' Johnson wrote.  'I would go further and say that it is absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes.'

Months later in December 2018, Boris Johnson was cleared by an internal Tory Party internal inquiry of breaching the Conservative Party’s code of conduct by comparing veiled Muslim women to letter boxes and bank robbers when an independent panel decided the former foreign secretary was 'respectful and tolerant' and was entitled to use 'satire' in his newspaper column in August.

When I worked at Arrow Mill in Rochdale in the early 1970s, the Pakistani textile spinners there told me that at that time their women-folk wouldn't wear the veil because we natives would laugh at them.  At that time there were less Asian women in the UK, and what shocked most people was that the women usually trialed behind their men-folk when they where out walking in the streets.  It was years later when the fashion of the burka became more commonplace among Muslim women in the UK.

From a logical point of view  'words have consequences' because words are tools to shape meanings in the way a chisel would impact an impression on a piece of wood.  Polemics is the art of throwing eggs or delivering blows in the businesslike manner of a boxer (see Wittgenstein reference above).

In response to this we are told that the critics of Boris will tell us that they are offended and that what Boris writes is a form of 'hate speech'.  Well they may well make this claim as such people often do as they are very vocal.  Yet, others may thus equally respond, as Queen Gertrude did in Shakespeare's play Hamlet:.  'The Lady Doth Protest Too Much, methinks'. 

Most writers on Northern Voices have been clearly committed to libertarian anarchism as rooted in free speech, and question the squeamishness of those who make claims that they are perennially offended by something or other.  The squeamish are now categorised as 'snowflakes'. 

Yet are the squeamish simulating their 'offence' to close down free speech in the way that is available to any human being?  Here we are dealing with something like a private language or the philosophical 'problem of other minds'.  We have words that refer to sensations like being 'offended' or being 'in pain', but we have no way of knowing if these sensations are fake or not.

To throw into relief the possible artful practices of squeamish human 'snowflakes' let us consider what Wittgenstein asks about a dog:

'Why can’t a dog simulate pain? Is he too honest? Could one teach a
dog to simulate pain? Perhaps it is possible to teach him to howl on
particular occasions as if he were in pain, even when he is not. But the
surroundings which are necessary for this behaviour to be real
simulation are missing.'

We can however go further and distinguish between the artful human snowflake and the dog by what Russell B. Goodman writes about in his essay 'Thinking about Animals:  James, Wittgenstein, Hearne': 

'Dogs can be sneaky or deceptive, and that there are stories of
dogs pretending to be injured and doing other clever things. So
perhaps a dog can simulate pain. Would the dog then be dishonest?
Wittgenstein is making a revealing little joke here, based on the
incongruity of saying that dogs either are or are not honest. They
do not have a form of life in which honesty is a major component
in the way that for example, hiding bones and smelling lampposts
are.'

Thus honesty, hypocrisy, sincerity and what could be called human decency, do not form part of the dog's universe.  What could be said about Boris's comments on the Burka and the claim of his alleged Islamophobia is that he is there to entertain and is simply attention seeking when he talks about letter- boxes.  After this week's latest debate with Jeremy Hunt, Eamonn O’Domhnaill, 48, a finance manager from Ireland, was unimpressed with both candidates but said:
'I don’t believe Boris Johnson is taking this seriously - there has been far too much buffoonery.'.

We all know Boris is believed to have favoured remain in the run-up to the referendum.  It is tempting to suggest that there is a certain Fastaffian amorality about his politics which places him closer to Russel B. Goodman's dog smelling round a lamppost as he seeks the Tory leadership..

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HUMOUR, IRONY & JONATHAN SACKS

by Brian Bamford

Anti-Zionist Jewish demonstration

IN the NEW STATESMAN last week the former chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks said: ‘Jeremy Corbyn is “an anti-Semite” who has “given support to racists, terrorists and dealers of hate”.’

In 2013, in a speech to a meeting convened by the Palestinian Return Centre in 2013, Corbyn spoke about the importance of history and of how necessary it was for people to understand the origins of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

He then praised a speech he had recently heard by Manuel Hassassian Palestinian ambassador at a meeting in parliament, in which the Palestinian ambassador to the UK gave an 'incredibly powerful' account of the history of Palestine.

During the speech Corbyn had said of a group of British 'Zionists' that: 'They clearly have two problems. One is they don’t want to study history and, secondly, having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don’t understand English irony either.'

This so insensed Jonathan Sacks that he claimed it was as divisive, as Enoch Powell’s speech in that 'it undermines the existence of an entire group of British citizens by depicting them as essentially alien'.

Irony is described in the Oxford Dictionary definition as 'the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect.'

When Ludwig Wittgenstein the Jewish philosopher considered the similar claim that humour was lacking in Nazi Germany he wrote in his notebook reflections 'Culture and Value' that:
''Humour is not a mood, but a way of looking at the world.  So, if it's right to say that humour was eradicated in Nazi Germany, that does not mean that people were not in good spirits or anything of that sort, but something much deeper & more important.'  [88e 'Culture & Value']

Probably Jonathan Sachs would find this comparison offensive, but Wittgenstein considered:
'What is it like when people do not have a sense of humour?  They do not react properly to each other.  It is as though there were a custom among certain people to throw someone a ball, which he is supposed to catch & throw back; but certain people might not throw it back, but put it in their pocket instead.'  [95e 'Culture & Value']

In the context of the current dispute in the media, I suppose Wittgenstein would say that some people are not playing the ball. 

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Elections, Pitchford Inquiry & Vain Expectations?

 WE are publishing the newsletter below from the

Blacklist Support Group.  We publish it as we

always do, but without any great expectations

or hopes with regard to any kind of plebian victory 

resulting from the General Election.  While we may 

agree with Ludwig Wittgenstein that William the Conquer

got himself a good bargain in 1066, generally we side with

Orwell who said:  'The corruption that happens in England 
is seldom of that kind [overt].  Nearly always it is more in the 
nature of self-deception, of the right hand not knowing what 
the left hand doeth.  And being unconcious it is limited.'
(See The Lion & the Unicorn').  That is why, in the final
analysis, Northern Voices cannot fully embrace the optimism
of the Blacklist Support Group either with regard to the
Pitchford Inquiry or indeed in their expectations from a
Labour Government.  We wish the blacklist campaigners
well, but we cannot stomach the necessary self-deception
involved in promoting the Labour Party.
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EVERY political party in the General Election is claiming to be the voice of the workers. Blacklisted construction workers know the score:

1. Labour pledges a public inquiry into blacklisting: That gets our vote!

http://www.labour.org.uk/index.php/workers/

This pledge was announced by John McDonnell in St.George's Hall, Liverpool last week in front of the huge Blacklist Support Group banner.  

2. Article in today's Morning Star exposing the failure of the ECGR and British courts to protect blacklisted workers and challenging political parties to grant basic employment rights to all workers in the UK.   If workers rights cannot be protected by judges in the UK or the European Court of Human Rights, then it is time to change statutory legislation. 

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-dc1a-No-blacklist-justice-for-Britains-agency-staff

3. In the same week as the ECHR ruling above, blacklisted electrician Frank Morris, is sacked again. This time on an NHS hospital. Let's hear candidates queue up to call for Frank Morris to be reinstated.  

Reel News video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iKhQdLpUm4&t=129s

4. Spycops

New 59 page ruling from the undercover police public inquiry. Releasing the cover names of undercover police officers who spied on activists is a 'priority' but Lord Justice Pitchford allows Met Police another 12 months extension to carry out 'risk assessments' in preparation for more anonymity applications.  But the police are not engaged in 'delaying tactics', oh no.

https://www.ucpi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/20170502-ruling-MPS-applications-re-SDS.pdf

Victims boycott Scottish police internal investigation

http://campaignopposingpolicesurveillance.com/2017/05/03/spycops-victims-boycott-scottish-inquiry/

Scottish activist spied on by police seeks judicial review to win a Scottish inquiry

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/undercover-policing-scotland/

Other than John McDonnell and Jenny Jones, most politicians have been surprisingly quiet about the spycops scandal. 

5. May Day greetings from the Blacklist Support Group to all sisters, brothers & comrades fighting for their rights around the globe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh6vCsfaKWU&t=3s

6. Dates for the diary:

Friday 5th May - Blacklisted worker turned academic Dr Jack Fawbert speaking on Corporate Crime 7 Blacklisting at Anglia ruskin University in Cambridge 

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/anglia-ruskin-university-community-engagement-1110250731

22nd May - Last day to register to vote in General Election

https://www.gov.uk/register-to-vote

7. And finally:

Congratulations to the blacklisted workers and rank & file activists elected to represent construction on the UNITE Executive Council Frank Morris, Royston Bentham, Tony Seaman & Joseph Pisano

Blacklist Support Group

Professor Paul Preston: 'Holocaust Denier'?

Is Paul Preston a soft core 'holocaust denier'?

THE academic, Professor Paul Preston , described in his book ‘THE SPANISH HOLOCAUST’ as ‘the world’s foremost historian of twentieth-century Spain’; in 2012 published an account of what he called ‘inquisition and extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain’.  By the standards of today, as spelled out by the holocaust expert Deborah Lipstadt this week, this comparison of the holocaust now amounts to what she calls 'soft core holocaust denial'. 

In view of recent developments with regard to the Trump administration’s skirmishes with the Jewish community’s claim to ownership of the term ‘Holocaust’, ought we now to be revisiting Pro. Preston’s employment of the word in the context of the Spanish Civil War? 

Deborah Lipstadt is Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies, who wrote 'Denying the Holocaust’ (1993), this week in responding to the recent blunders of the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, she stated in The Alantic journal:

‘The Holocaust was something entirely different. It was an organized program with the goal of wiping out a specific people. Jews did not have to do anything to be perceived as worthy of being murdered. Old people who had to be wheeled to the deportation trains and babies who had to be carried were all to be killed. The point was not, as in occupied countries, to get rid of people because they might mount a resistance to Nazism, but to get rid of Jews because they were Jews...’

What we have here from Deborah Lipstadt is a claim to Jewish exceptionalism, which specifically excludes claims like that of Prof. Preston about the Spanish tragedy in the 1930s. 

In the last century the linguistic philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, critising dictionary definitions, argued that the meaning of a word is in its use.  

Having seen the recent film 'Denial' portraying Deborah Lipstadt's defence in the defamation case brought against her by the historian David Irving, it would seem that Ms. Lipstad wants to control the meaning of certain words in a totalitarian manner, which would put the words like holocaust in a kind of sacred category which demands an iron law defence of the meaning 'holocaust' that would have offended Wittgenstein. 

Thus, Deborah Lipstadt told the New York Times this week:

‘The de-Judaization of the Holocaust, as exemplified by the White House statement, is what I term softcore Holocaust denial. Hardcore denial is the kind of thing I encountered in the courtroom. In an outright and forceful fashion, (David) Irving [another historian] denied the facts of the Holocaust.’

As a conversational analyst I would view this as an attempt by Ms. Lipstadt and others to seize control of certain words like 'holocaust' and to deny use of the use of words to other groups like the gypsies etc. and even to poor Professor Preston's depiction of 'The Spanish Holocaust', as a form of intellectual totalitarianism or bullying..

What we are getting here from Professor Lipstadt and others in the 'holocaust industry', is a kind of tyranny of words, dictated and developed by an ideological group with political vested interests.

Trump: Civilisation in the Salon & Locker Room

Escaping Derogatory References and Membership Characterisation Devices!

DONALD J. Trump described his words spoken over a decade ago about women as 'locker room banter'.  When Kenneth Clarke in his book and later TV program 'Civilisation' said about the historical rise of the French salon in the 18^th century, was that the nature of the saloon by a social mixing of the sexes, was that it had a moderating effect on the behaviour and conversation of the people involved in so far as the saloon restrained vulgarity, obnoxious and other uncouth conduct by both men and women.  I suppose the 20^th century tap-room in the average public house by separating the sexes and allowing the unrestrained free flow of talk, jokes, banter and gesticulations would have had the opposite effect.

Nigel Farage, according to the current Private Eye, has justified Donald Trump's remarks  about 'feeling-up' women as follows:  'It's the kind of thing, if we are being honest, that men do.  They sit around and have a drink  and they talk like this.'

Any collectivity of either sex be it a 'Hen Party' or 'Bachelor Do' or even an ordinary workplace on the shop-floor is likely to produce conversation and conduct which in another context would raise eyebrows.  In the same way that an academic community of scholars has its own 'interpretive community' and special forms of talk so the average shop-floor setting often has tribal language which would be distinct from from other social engagements with people.  In the foundry at Holcroft Castings & Forging in Rochdale, where I worked  as a maintenance electrician in the 1980s, the terms 'split-arses', and other derogatory expressions were often used to refer to women in general or more specifically in referring to lasses in the machine departments. 

In the Daily Mail, Quentin Letts writes:  'No one talks like that in the locker room of the gym I use.'

That's surprising, because when |I was about 12-years-of-age I had a job as a scorer for the Tweedales & Smalley factory second eleven cricket team, and it was there in the pavilion changing-room that I first began to encounter how grown working-class men talk in groups on occasions when women are not present.  Before that as an eldest child I also heard how women when they think they alone with their own sex talk together about men:  I often heard how my grandmother and mother in private discussed men judgementally, not with foul language of course, but with comments that judgementally loaded blame and curses on male members of the family.  In a way it sometimes amounted to objectifying men by stereo-typing them.

In this circumstances to pretend shock or surprise at what Donald Trump has had to say in the setting in which he was recorded, is a little over-the-top or even naieve. 

Whenever we talk about the meaning of words, rather than reaching for some lazy feminist or a tin-pot politically correct interpretation. perhaps we should consider what Ludwig Wittgenstein had to say in his 'Philosophical Investigations': 

'Think of tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screw-driver, a rule, a glue-pot, glue, nails and screws.  -- The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects.  (And in both cases there similarities.)'

The meaning of a word is in its use; just as the significance of a tool is in its use.  When I was an apprentice electrician in the late 1950s it was a common trick of leg-pulling tradesmen to send young apprentices to the stores to get a 'rubber hammer'.  The absurdity of the 'rubber hammer' is that it is unlikely to accomplish any utility of persuading anything it hit to move or do the job for which a hammer is normally intended.  Wittgenstein asks in 'Philosophical Investigations':

'Imagine someone's saying:  “All tools serve to modify something.  Thus the hammer modifies the position of the nail, the saw the shape of the board, and so on.”  And what is modified by the rule, the glue-pot, the nails?- “Our knowledge of a thing's length, the temperature of the glue, and the solidity of the box.”-- Would anything be gained by this assimilation of expressions?--'

When a wheelwright at Holcroft Castings uses the term 'split arses' to refer to a women or all women, the words would modify our idea of women perhaps in the sense of the picture theory of language; just as a hammer hitting a nail will modify the position of the nail or a screw-driver may transform the position of a screw and if its a wood-screw it may also modify a piece of wood. 

Words are becoming ever more dangerous things use in a world of surveillance were privacy is in short supply, perhaps we should join Wittgenstein and resort to whistling or sign language.

I've no room to talk because besides doing journalism now I have, in the past, been involved in anthropological investigations and conversational analysis in which I used tape-recorders to surreptitiously record everyday talk by union officials, and others, for the purpose of research.  In a sense we are a bit hypocritical.

'Danish Girl' for Decorative Dazzle

'DON'T be dazzled,' the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein told one of his students.  'The Danish Girl' is the much promoted film of the latest fashionable addiction (yet, the fashion changes so quickly that as you read this it may already by then be dated).  Architecturally the film is a divine distraction which one critic has called 'a period drama... all period and no drama'.

 

It's is all about the scenery, and there's little sign of any inner life in the life of the painter and pioneer transsexual.  Eddie Redmayne moves the eyes quivering to the right and and we're urged to believe that a bleeding nose and stomach cramps are symptoms of transsexual in transformation. 

 

It's not got the psychological power of something like Hitchcock's 'Vertigo'.  I have just seen a local

performance in Little Hulton, Salford of 'Ali Baba & the Forty Thieves', and the cross-dressing

there was for me more enthralling than that in 'The Danish Girl'.