Tripe

Simon Heffer has been writing about unfashionable foods:

I must admit I have never been able to bring myself to eat tripe, though I did once have the honour of watching the late J Enoch Powell demolish a plate of it in a restaurant about 20 years ago. It had been a much-prized dish in the Black Country in Enoch's childhood, and he never lost the taste for it.

That figures.

At Shiraz Socialist

About the trial of Radovan Karadžić Jim Denham wrote a few days ago:

It will be interesting to see whether the “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” school of supposed “left-wingers” rally to the genocidal Karadzic, as they did to Milosevic. The loathsome Neil Clark, in the Morning Star (September 21 2009), for instance, listed 10 “leftist leaders who did not betray“, including “Some, such as Salvadore Allende and Slobodan Milosevic (who) ended up losing their lives on account of not sacrificing their principles…”

Clark is a particularly crass and disgusting power-worshipper who seems to get a kick out of glorifying mass murder and genocide. But the Morning Star is a quite widely-read publication supported by most British trade unions, regardless of their formal politics. Will the Star (with or without the sicko Clark) be defending Karadzic?

We wait and wonder. So far the latest hearings have only been referred to as part of a "World in Brief" item.

Update: OK, it is a newspaper with limited pagination, but this is equally brief.

Zsuzsanna Clark keeps digging

It is a rare occurrence for an article in the Mail on Sunday, discussed here, to inspire a subsequent piece in the Morning Star.

In Hungary apparently:

Kadar won public support with his liberalising reforms and his likeable [sic], modest manner.

How do we know?

The critics usually claim that their opposition was due to "human rights," but I believe a large part of their anti-communism can be explained by a single word. Snobbery.

That is a novel argument, the most credible reason is the absence of democracy in the former Soviet bloc and the other communist countries. The scare quote is not reassuring.

But for the snobs, the wrong class of people was in charge.

This is supposed to be a defence of a socialist country! Mrs Clark asserts the Chess Grandmaster

[Lajos] Portisch believes that had Kadar not had to leave school and take up an apprenticeship at an early age, he too could have become a chess grand master.

So his own loss was the workers' gain? When the Queen Mother died in 2002, A.N. Wilson came up with a similar argument about how she could have been a significant cultural figure under different circumstances. The word for this kind of approach is hagiography:

I regarded Kadar as a relative, like a favourite uncle or grandfather. I liked the way he talked - he was never pompous or condescending and never arrogant.

Almost a saint then.

As the respected British historian Eric Hobsbawm has stated, Kadar was "the most successful ruler of Hungary in the 20th century."

Hobsbawm is hardly a neutral observer. He was on the 'other' side in the Morning Star-CPB/Marxism Today-CPGB split more than twenty years ago. Which leads me to think describing him as "respected", for this readership, might have been a mistake. If so, what a shame.

Latest - Journalism has declined - Neil Clark

He has not been so unintentionally hilarious for a while. In a new First Post article Neil Clark has a pop at various journalists who have shocked him.

[T]oday, with the very future of print journalism under threat, there is an increased urgency to grab readers' attention. And that means out with mature, reflective and nuanced articles which deal with important issues, and in with gratuitously offensive columns which set out to raise readers' blood pressure. The number of complaints or hostile comments a piece generates doesn't matter - the main thing is that the article, and the newspaper in question, receives the maximum publicity.

Ofcause he is quite right to attack A.A. Gill and Jan Moir, but Clark forgets one journalist whose Comment is Free contribution offended so many people readers' responses had to be ended within three hours of the article being posted.

His own efforts cannot be excluded from what he describes.

Same old BNP!

Following the 'successful' resolution of the E&HRC case over the ban in the BNP's constitution of non-whites from party membership, this article from Comment is Free remains unsurprising.

Who would have thought the BNP capable of double standards?

Neil Clark's Fleet Street Letter piece from 2002

Further evidence of Neil Clark's ambivalent attitude to the BNP, rather than the hostility one would expect from someone genuinely of the left.

In an article from 2002 entitled "Democracy Is Under Threat From The EU, Not The Far Right" we find the following passage:

All over the continent it seems, so-called extreme rightwing parties are springing up and gaining votes from the older, more established mainstream political groupings. Even at home, the BNP is winning local election seats and increasing its national profile.

And:

It would be easy to accept the liberal elite’s interpretation of these events and seek to dismiss all these so-called ‘new-wave’ parties as racists or even fascists, and crudely try to play on people’s fear of immigrants as the reason for their growing success. To do so would, I believe, be a grave mistake.

His thesis is that far-right parties have gained support because of their 'sovereigntist' inclinations and their support for the death penalty. He concludes:

Far from being indicative of a crisis of democracy, the growth of the new-wave parties may in fact help to save democracy. It may finally jolt the Euro elite into listening to its people and delivering the kind of Europe they want to see.

In Clark's opinion "[n]o longer should we think in simple terms of left and right." To be fair, Václav Havel, one of his bête noires, has said something similar, but Clark's article reads like an attempt at softening opposition to the far-right.

Why is Neil Clark soft on the BNP?

Last June an article by Neil Clark for The First Post contained the following passage:

In the last few weeks in Britain we have been bombarded with articles from the liberal elite and Church leaders lecturing the plebs on the dangers of voting for the BNP. In spite of that - or possibly partly because it - the BNP now has two seats in the European Parliament.

As I have written before, this piece was in no way critic of the BNP. Perhaps Clark assumed his readers would be unaware that opposition to the BNP is not restricted to the "liberal elite". It is a phrase which the BNP leader Nick Griffin is inclined to use too, along with an assortment of right-wing Tories.

Yet Bob Crow, leader of the RMT union and a prominent member of the 800 strong Communist Party of Britain, someone Clark admires, has today put his name to a letter in The Guardian objecting to the appearance of Nick Griffin on tomorrow's edition of the Question Time television programme, a missive in which the politics of the British National Party are also found repugnant. I wonder if Neil Clark will now consider Crow to be a liberal.

Just Fancy That (2)

Last July Oliver Kamm found Neil Clark indulging in plagiarism. Zsuzsanna Clark, Neil's wife, has now done the same in an encomium for her native Hungary during the Soviet period. When the internet makes this practice easier to detect, it is really very, very foolish.

From an article dated 2 November 2002 in The Guardian:

When people ask me what it was like growing up in Hungary in the 1970s and 80s, most expect to hear tales of secret police, bread queues and other nasty manifestations of life in a one-party state. They are invariably disappointed when I tell them that the reality was quite different and that communist Hungary, far from being hell on earth, was in fact rather a good place to live.

From a Mail on Sunday article published today:

When people ask me what it was like growing up behind the Iron Curtain in Hungary in the Seventies and Eighties, most expect to hear tales of secret police, bread queues and other nasty manifestations of life in a one-party state.

They are invariably disappointed when I explain that the reality was quite different, and communist Hungary, far from being hell on earth, was in fact, rather a fun place to live.

Clark's still forthcoming book on growing up in Hungary has been in preparation for at least seven years, but she seems unable to check the limited amount she has published on the subject. Very silly. As yet, the book is unlisted on any publisher's website.

In the article itself she manages to imply János Kádár government was the result of the 1956 Revolution rather than a Soviet imposition after the tanks rolled in. Clark almost managed to get this point right in a 2006 First Post article, so why not now? Presumably Mail on Sunday readers can be more easily misled. The most telling omission of her writings is that during détente, Zsuzsanna Clark was born in 1968, the Kádár government was propped up by loans from western banks. The system was unable to sustain itself.

Clark's outline of television in Hungary also has a familiar ring to it. From a New Statesman article of 21 July 2003:

Saturday night when I was growing up meant a Jules Verne adventure, a variety show and a Chekhov drama. Foreign imports included The Forsyte Saga and David Attenborough documentaries. One of the most popular and talked-about programmes of the entire period was Poetry for Everyone, in which, each night, a famous actor or actress would recite a different poem.

Back to the Mail on Sunday:

When I was a teenager, Saturday night primetime viewing typically meant a Jules Verne adventure, a poetry recital, a variety show, a live theatre performance, or an easy Bud Spencer film.

Much of Hungarian television was home-produced, but quality programmes were imported, not just from other Eastern Bloc countries but from the West, too.

Hungarians in the early Seventies followed the trials and tribulations of Soames Forsyte in The Forsyte Saga just as avidly as British viewers had done a few years earlier. The Onedin Line was another popular BBC series I enjoyed watching, along with David Attenborough documentaries.

Admittedly an improvement, but we might assume western imports were restricted to just two series, plus the work of a zoologist? Was 'quality' material from the United States like Ellery Queen, to pick a series at random, never shown?

Just one more comparison from the writings of Zsuzsanna Clark. In a Guardian article from February 26 2007 on the Hungarian Pioneer movement, we find the following:

Our motto as Pioneers was Together for Each Other. It was not an empty slogan: it was how we were encouraged to think.

Back to the Mail on Sunday piece once again:

'Together for each other' was our slogan, and that was how we were encouraged to think.

Oh dear!

Update: Oliver Kamm also finds her account feeble.

The Spectator Parliamentarian of the year

It's the time of year for nominations. This comment caught my eye:

While one plucky soul, Neil Clark, nominates George Galloway for being ‘one of the few MPs not tied to the neocon/neoliberal junta that has dominated British politics for so long and which has embroiled us in a series of catastrophic and very costly wars’. It’s fair to say that Neil’s is a fairly solitary voice in the voting so far.

Clark asked for the mild derision in this suggestion for a Conservative publication's award, though admittedly members of other parties have won in the past. Galloway's voting record is one of the worst of all MPs. Surely Clark is either "solitary" or "almost solitary" rather than "fairly solitary?"

But wait, a day after Clark's "junta" comment was published, an article appeared on The First Post website lamenting the overthrow of Hungarian communism twenty years ago. The author, needless to say, is Neil Clark.

Update: BobFromBrockley gives Galloway a good going over.

Socialist Unity poster nauseates again

I commented here that the Socialist Unity blog sometimes has worthwhile articles when its authors are not defending dictatorships. This piece is a particularly blinkered example from the later category:

Today is the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the Peoples’ Republic of China. Shown here are just some of the thousands of people who will be celebrating in Tiananmen Square.

Relatives of the hundreds murdered by the regime in June 1989 are doubtless not so jubilant.

It was one of the great historical achievements of the Twentieth century to throw out the Japanese, and Western colonialists, and unite the country. The problems that faced China were staggering - and even today they struggle with poverty.

Mao deliberately created famine, glorified hard labour and blighted the country's civil society more thoroughly than Stalin did in the Soviet Union.

Modern China has achieved great things to become the world’s second largest economy, but it is still a developing country where rural areas have levels of development and poverty closer to Bangladesh than Germany.

It is easy to criticise China, but much of the criticism doesn’t take into account the historical context of their development, and the urgent requirement for economic growth as a precondition for social justice and progress. Nor do the critics acknowledge the degree to which the Communist Party of China is self-aware of the difficulties and negative aspects of Chinese society - but there are often no easy answers to solve problems overnight.

The article began as a commemoration of 'glorious rule' over sixty years. The article's author, Andy Newman, digs deeper in the comments section. He makes the following claim at comment 24: "At no time has China ever had anything comparable to Stalin’s great terror". And this at no.30:

What would be the social function of an “opposition party” in China, where the leading role of the CPC is embodied in the functioning of government? As of course you know, there are several independent political parties in China, represented in the Peoples’s Congress, and who have access to think tanks etc. These are similar to the old “bloc parties” in East Germany.

So that is alright then. Newman behaved in a crass way two months ago over the Gary McKinnon case, and looks like alienating his readers again.