Your Host’s Idea of Hell (2)

In my nightmare I’m sitting in this audience of socialists and communists, unable to leave, while other socialists and communists – more statusful socialists and communists – spend an hour telling me how “serious” they are, and how important and “dangerous” their ideas are. Amid references to Lenin, Marx, Gramsci and other totalitarian fantasists, I’m also told how much these gathered “radicals” value humility. After all, when a room full of unhappy leftists say they want to “break the government” and initiate a “revolutionary transformation of society” – in their own image – humility is the word that springs immediately to mind.

Then, while I try biting down on my own neck, Laurie Penny starts to speak, at length, almost randomly. “We need to be talking seriously about trauma,” says she. Because “it’s quite difficult for the left to talk about how it’s feeling.”

A note of caution. The linked video – hailed as “a very good discussion” – lasts for the better part of an hour, and you won’t get that time back. Though there is, I suppose, a grim humour in listening to denunciations of the “elite” and the “establishment” from a blowhard Trotskyist who, like his peers, wishes to be those things, only much more so.

Previously in hell.




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