Glastonbury is not the story here. Genocide is the story

Sometimes you live within such a moron culture that you have to avoid wrestling with pigs. Such is the dilemma with having to discuss opposition to war crimes and genocide in the context of the British media.

As Philip Proudfoot puts it: “The British Establishment is having a nervous breakdown—banning Palestine Action for red paint and histrionics over Glastonbury and Kneecap. This is a pathological reaction: guilt, fear, and dread that they’ll never escape their complicity in over 20,000 dead children. When we look back and ask how this happened, we will remember their role in excusing, deflecting, and denying siege famine, the destruction of hospitals, and the targeting of aid workers and journalists. They must be chased out of public life.”

The hysteria surrounding the musicians at a profoundly defanged and corporate music festival is extraordinary, as extraordinary as the complete hypocrisy of the Free Speech Brigade of the right and far-right Crusaders in their own never-ending Culture Wars. Here’s the bon vivant Andrew Neil: “I hear you want your US visa back? Huh! Shut the F—- up!” (Adapted from words by B Vylan) to which the irrepressible Ash Sarkar reminded us of Andra back in 2021 stating: “Cancel culture is insidious, it stands against everything we have stood for since the enlightenment onwards and that is why it is serious.”

The challenge is the same for the right as the left. You can stand for free-speech but you have to be able to stand for that principle even with people who’s view you disagree with. This weekend, quelle surprise as they say in Neil’s newfound home in Grasse (Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, France), the normally vocal ‘libertarian right’ were conspicuous by their absence. And, despite the avalanche of political pressure from the English tabloids …

… we have already established that the BBC is, far from being a hotbed of pro-Palestinian journalism, or even fair-minded media, does in fact have a crisis of impartiality and nepotism and has been ‘captured by the government’ in the words of Alan Rusbridger.

Rusbridger has pointed out why the BBC’s coverage of Israel is so biased, and how efforts to fix the appointment of Ofcom and to pack the important Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee all emanate from the same handful of people.

Rusbridger has laid out how one members of the four-strong Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee (which oversees questions of impartiality) is none other than Robbie Gibb, the owner of the Jewish Chronicle. (Sir) Robbie Gibb (he was the official Downing Street spokesman for Theresa May’s government) has been the sole owner and director of the Jewish Chronicle since 2020  – the very same magazine that has long campaigned for a “parliamentary inquiry” into the BBC’s coverage of Jews and Israel (and succeeded). It’s in this extraordinary context of patronage and nepotism that the ‘calls on the BBC’ should be put.

Outrage Fatigue

Another aspect of this is the extent to which it’s impossible to have a proper conversation about culture among the contrived hysteria. The poet and former Children’s Laureate Michael Rosen has said: “The poet Adrian Mitchell talked about ‘compassion fatigue’. If there’s ‘outrage fatigue’ then a lot of people seem to have used up their outrage on Bob Vylan and don’t have any left for dead Palestinians. Shouting slogans is clearly worse than killing people.”

Rosen has pointed out that the history of artists evoking violence is not entirely new citing ‘Masters of War’ by Bob Dylan (a song specifically aimed at Robert McNamara, Curtis LeMay and Allen Dulles, inspired by Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address warning about the “military-industrial complex) in which Dylan writes:

“And I hope you die and your death will come soon
I’ll follow your casket in the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand over your grave
To make sure you are dead.”

Dylan sang it at Glastonbury in 1998. More recently you could look to Morrisey’s Margaret on the Guillotine (…the kind people have a wonderful dream…), or Elvis Costello’s Tramp the Dirt Down …

History is replete with artists using violent evocative language to express the visceral hatred of power or state violence. The banal point is that this is not the same as real-world violence. The state of public discourse is so meaningless that we are reduced to having to write such sentences.

The debate raises profound questions not just about the government capture of the BBC – a public broadcaster has become a state broadcaster – but also the entire tenor of the public debate in Late Britain.