Thread by @K_Niemietz

I've just bought Squealer's book, and I already regret it.
It starts with an Ash Sarkar quote...

Doesn't get any better. The first few pages already contain a full set of leftie bingo. He also demonstrates that he still hasn't learned how to pass an Ideological Turing Test.

He doesn't get the Culture War at all. He thinks right-wingers are just people who suffer from neoliberalism, and who mistakenly blame their problems on Muslims.

And now, the inevitable whining about how "the media" is biased against them.
The guy literally never leaves the TV studio. And it's not just him. Corbo's commie kids were on TV more often than the weather presenters. They still are.

"In the interest of transparency, I should say that I write this book both as observer and participant."
-Ah, thanks for the heads-up. Wasn't clear so far.

"In 1986 the Greater London Council, under the leadership of the Labour left, was abolished altogether."
-Ha ha ha! He can't bring himself to name Ken Livingstone. Ken is like Venezuela, a former star of the Left that must now no longer be named.

And now Andrew Murray appears, but he's just "a key figure in the Labour left". No mention of his 40-or-so years in the Communist Party of Britain.
(Because they're low-status commies, you see.)

Now he does this super-annoying thing again, where he pretends to be the marginalised underdog, bravely defying an unassailable neoliberal hegemony.
It's just the exact opposite of the truth. The anti-capitalist Left has been culturally dominant for as long as I can remember.

And he sort of acknowledges that, by describing Naomi Klein's "No Logo" as "the defining book of a generation".
Which it was, of course. I was an undergraduate when that book was still the dernier cri, and I remember very well how THAT was the true hegemony of the time.

Conflicting narratives as well.
Narrative 1 says that neoliberalism seemed to work for a while, but in 2008, it was exposed for the sham that it was, and in response, the young became socialists.
Narrative 2 says that today's anti-capitalist movements go back to the 90s.

I'm not being pedantic here, it doesn't matter in and of itself whether it starts in 2008 or 1998.
It matters because if Millennial Socialism already started in the good years - you can't claim that it's just a rational backlash against objective failings of the system.

Still repeating the old myths about tax avoidance from UK Uncut (remember them?)
It was all bogus. It assumes that the UK government is somehow entitled to tax the overseas profits of UK companies. It's not.
iea.org.uk/publications/r…

Now celebrating the "kerfuffle with security officers", "the sound of glass breaking", "smashing windows" and "civil disobedience" (in the context of the students protests of 2010). Blames the police for the fact that it turned violent. Ah, well...

I've learned the first interesting fact: Squealer himself was the Godfather of the Corbo project, using his massive social media profile to pressurise MPs into nominating Corbo.
The whole thing might never even have happened without him.
Twitter truly is the real world.

We're back to the cheap rhetorical tricks (which the rest of his readers will obviously fall for).
Mentions some of the sillier Corbo-critical media coverage, such as "Corbo didn't bow on Remembrance Day".
Then mentions reports about his IRA support in the same breath. Hang on...

Spot the odd one out, eh?
He thinks that if he puts obviously silly accusation X, obviously silly accusation Y, and actually true accusation Z in one row, everyone will think that Z must also be an obviously silly accusation.
Except it isn't. The IRA stuff was all true.

Nice bit of gaslighting: "'Trot', and abbreviation for 'Trotskyist', was used with absurd and wild abandon."
McDonnell had literally said in an interview that the main influences on him had been "[t]he fundamental Marxist writers of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky". Of course he's a Trot

Now there's page after page after page after page of incessant whining about how intra-party opponents were mean to "Jeremy", trying to "sabotage" him.
It's not just boring, it's also unverifiable. I'm sure someone from the other side would tell a completely different story.

I don't know the details of what went on behind the scenes, inside the party, and I'm not hugely interested in it. But I just do not believe Squealer's version that Corbo was a generous, conciliatory bridge-builder, whose opponents rejected all of his peace offers. Because...

...if you were trying to build a coalition, and come to an arrangement with your opponents - you just wouldn't hire someone like Seumas Milne as your main guru. That appointment meant sticking up 2 fingers to his opponents, and saying "Suck it up, losers! I'm in charge now!"

I wasn't following the whole Corbo saga closely at the time, but I do remember that that was a controversial appointment, which antagonised lots of people.
What does Squealer have to say about that?
Nada, that's what. Milne is just suddenly there somehow.

Ah, speak of the devil: There's a subchapter on Seumie now.
I've always said that "PM Corbo" would really have meant "PM Seumas", de facto. Well - don't take it from me:

He's now trying to distance himself from the handling of the Skripal poisoning, while also denying the obvious truth: that it was not a "strategic" error, but a direct result of Corbo's and Milne's anti-Western worldview.
Tightrope walk, if ever I've seen one.

Makes a lot of Milne's token criticism of Russia, but then says that Milne "believes the Western encirclement of Russia is a threat to world peace, and [...] that the emergence of stronger powers such as Russia served as an important counterweight to US hegemony."
Yeah, well...

A surprisingly honest passage, this.

And now there's a dozen or so pages where he moans endlessly about how disorganised Milne was.
Well, Squealmeister, what did you expect? Milne wasn't hired because of his managerial talents, but because he's a communist who hates the Western world. Like Corbo.

A little digression:
There are basically two types of public intellectuals. There are those you read because you agree with them, and those you read because you think they have interesting things to say. They may know things you don't, or think about things in ways you wouldn't.

A classic example of the latter type would be Peter Hitchens.
You don't have to like Hitchens, but you can't accuse him of playing to the gallery, of telling his readers what they want to hear from him. He constantly upsets his own side. He's not tribal at all.

Squealer is a classic example of the former type. If you're a Leftie, you read him because he thinks what you think, but he can express it better than you could.
If you're a non-Leftie, you read him because you want to keep up with what the Left is up to. And he's representative.

In terms of sales figures, I'm pretty sure Squealer outsells Hitcho by at least a factor of 10. Because his views are fashionable, and high-status.
But his success, while vastly greater, is also much more unstable. He's always one wrong opinion away from losing most of his fans.

And that's a big part of what makes him so insufferable. He's not just wrong, he's purposefully wrong. He's wrong because he knows he has to be, in order to keep his fans on board.
Sometimes, knowing why someone is wrong makes it less bad. In his case, it makes it worse.

I had completely forgotten about my half-finished Squealbook.
Here is, finally, something he's right about: