This Guardian article should have been titled: "Dear Owen..."

[aliasundercover]

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/11/so-sally-rooneys-racist-only-if-you-choose-to-confuse-fiction-with-fact

From time to time, I forget that Nick Cohen is a gifted writer who turns his phrases well:

In Normal People, Sally Rooney has her female lead think, “cruelty does not only hurt the victim, but the perpetrator also, and maybe more deeply and more permanently”. The victim may get over it. The abuser must always live with the knowledge that they are a thug.

Rooney published Normal People in 2018 as cancel culture was turning from a sideshow into a fiery inquisitorial movement. If its perpetrators are “more deeply and more permanently hurt” than their targets, the pain does not slow the delivery of half-truths and outright falsehoods for a moment.

The remainder of the piece exceeds this standard,

I'm consistently impressed that the Observer is managing to do this. There must be the equivalent of blood on the floor in the editorial Slacks there.

What a brilliant article … wish there was an applauding emoji on Mumsnet.

He's such a good journalist. An important article.

That urge to please is the less dramatic but more lasting danger of heresy hunts on the left (and the right). Frightened people go along with them for fear they will be condemned as heretics if they do not. The result is a culture that appears self-confident on the surface but is sterile and conformist underneath. You don’t have to look far to find it. It is all around you.

Oof.

Occasionally, when I try to talk about progressive witch-hunts, I am met with the response that I should focus my energies on the malign actors with real power on the right. I do, and accept it is true that in England, but not in Nicola Sturgeon’s Scotland, authoritarian conservatives have more power than their progressive counterparts, and use it to purge the BBC and government bodies of any dissident voices

What? What's that supposed to mean?

He's saying that the Tories have more power in England, but the SNP hold the power in Scotland.

What? What's that supposed to mean?

I came here to cut and paste that exact paragraph and to say the same thing.

Far too dense to be of any use. I suspect that the Scotland part has been shoehorned in and were it to be edited out, then the paragraph might make sense.

I like many of Cohen's ideas but his articles focus too much on how clever Cohen regards Cohen to be.

Cohen's writing to me is deliberately opaque to enable him to occupy a liminal space between left and right so he can freely move about in order to be in the correct position to comment on the wrongness of others.

He could be a better writer if he didn't use his writing to be slippery enough to enable him to slide over to be in the right over whatever topic he's occupied with.

Historians who investigated the files of the Gestapo in Nazi Germany estimated that personal malice motivated 40% of denunciations to the secret police: wives who wanted husbands out of the way so they could be with their lovers (and vice versa) and workers taking office politics to the extreme.

Please tell me that I'm not the only one who had a cold, small, heart thump on reading that. 40%? I was aghast at this after following up the link and recognising the chilling effect here:

The German public progressively realised uttering critical comments against the regime in public had to be avoided. A study of denunciations from the court files of the Bavarian city of Augsburg shows that in 1933, 75 per cent of cases began with a denouncement after overhearing anti-Nazi comments in pubs, but in 1939, this figure had fallen to 10 per cent.

www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/careless-whispers-how-the-german-public-used-and-abused-the-gestapo-1.2369837

The dangers of speaking in public and the drive to self-censorship for fear of severe consequences from those who are exercising malice. However, I should highlight that judges frequently threw out the cases brought before them by the Gestapo.

The source for the Irish Times piece is: The Gestapo: The Myth and Reality of Hitler’s Secret Police by Frank McDonough

www.amazon.co.uk/Gestapo-Reality-Hitlers-Secret-Police/dp/1444778056?tag=mumsnetforu03-21

And, I don't know if this is an error, but a quick look at an Amazon review revealed these somewhat different figures to Cohen's:

Much of the Gestapo preliminary work was helped by two categories: first, Blockleiter / Block leaders, official party nosey-parkers who regularly visited tenements of 40-60 people, whose official function was handing out party literature, ration cards, collecting subscriptions, organizing funding winter drives, but in the neighbourhood locals sensed their duties went much further to inform, including warning the interested authorities to withdraw benefits from any “work-shy” characters…

The second, 26% of Gestapo cases, were initiated by members of the public, 20% coming from women turning against husbands, the rest from men bad mouthing the colleagues they frequented at work and in bars. A lot were based on personal grudges, and never related to the main complaint – like the listening to foreign broadcasts or making defeatist or anti-Nazi comments in bars under the influence of alcohol. It was simply because marriages were failing in wartime and one or the other wished to legitimise fast track divorces; judges and Gestapo officers were not blind and they felt they were wasting their time investigation pointless sordid affairs. Occasionally, the historian unearthed that Nazi German justice moved in strange ways against the denouncer and s/he found her/himself punished and frogmarched as a common criminal into “preventive custody”.

I'd need to consult the book to check what McDonough wrote but it's still chilling at its heart.

@ArabellaScott

He's saying that the Tories have more power in England, but the SNP hold the power in Scotland.

Yes, the worst paragraph in the piece.

And the Conservatives are using that power to block appointments and to ease out dissenting voices that they don't want in key organisations. They are also using their power to make appointments to key positions and in key organisations.

Stunning writing.

20% coming from women turning against husbands

I wonder what proportion of these women had violent husbands.

If you want to see how the cesspit of twitter responded to Jessie Tu's hatchet job, you might be pleasantly surprised:

twitter.com/search?f=live&q=Jessie%20Tu%20sally%20rooney%20until%3A2021-09-13&src=typed_query

I do think that cancel culture is so incredibly toxic, although revelled in by a minority of social media wannabees, that most people will ultimately reject it. I can imagine Gen Z seeing it play out during their school years, and when they move on and grow up, they'll have had their absolute fill of it.

@MrsTerryPratchett

20% coming from women turning against husbands

I wonder what proportion of these women had violent husbands.

I've literally just been trying to look this up on Google books where there is no preview of the pages that mention this but the snippets give examples of just this. The ones I've included are about alcoholism and DV; another was about a man who gave his wife an STD etc.

It’s a digression but Tu, an Australian, was really complaining that a novel by an Irish novelist set in Ireland features characters who are white and drink “unrealistic amounts”
of tea?

I don’t know if “racist” is exactly the right word for that, but it’s quite a display of unabashed ignorance.

@nauticant

What? What's that supposed to mean?

I came here to cut and paste that exact paragraph and to say the same thing.

Far too dense to be of any use. I suspect that the Scotland part has been shoehorned in and were it to be edited out, then the paragraph might make sense.

I like many of Cohen's ideas but his articles focus too much on how clever Cohen regards Cohen to be.

Agreed.

The grammar is poor. The comma splice after "I do" in the second sentence is completely wrong and mangles an already mangled sentence.

It is not, in my view, the given that he seems to assume that authoritarian powers in England are suppressing progressives.

The bit about Scotland is, as you say, shoehorned in. At best it adds nothing; at worst it's a serious misunderstanding of Scottish political life and the role authoritarianism plays.

@ArabellaScott

He's saying that the Tories have more power in England, but the SNP hold the power in Scotland.

That's true at the political level, but I'm not convinced it is so clear cut at the social level. The authoritarian left is quite happy to throw its weight around in England too.

@ArabellaScott

He's saying that the Tories have more power in England, but the SNP hold the power in Scotland.

I sort of got that despite the mangled grammar. My question was as much about the accuracy of the paragraph as about its meaning.

@MrsTerryPratchett

20% coming from women turning against husbands

I wonder what proportion of these women had violent husbands.

Not many I would think, many victims of DV lack the courage to recognise that they are victims and to report.

many victims of DV lack the courage to recognise that they are victims and to report.

Well now of course. Because what holds women in these relationships is complex psychology and threat. But if you get the gestapo to remove the man, there is no threat. And what held women in relationships back then was less complex; societal pressure and lack of rights. I'd argue that historically marriage was different.

Just musing anyway. It's probably impossible to work out. Although PP's link up thread does tend to imply there may have been some cases.

Eh?

I've not read the book (couldn't get past the first couple pages).

This a something a character in the book thinks?

I mean so what?

Characters in books think and do all sorts of things.

Anyone making a hooha (I've not heard of any hooha) can say what they wish.

It's nonsensical to get angry about the thoughts of an imaginary character.

Don't get it.

@ArabellaScott

That urge to please is the less dramatic but more lasting danger of heresy hunts on the left (and the right). Frightened people go along with them for fear they will be condemned as heretics if they do not. The result is a culture that appears self-confident on the surface but is sterile and conformist underneath. You don’t have to look far to find it. It is all around you.

Oof.

👏👏👏

Welcome to the world we live in, where To Kill A Mockingbird is condemned for promoting a White Saviour narrative, and some inner London schools cannot teach Arnold Wesker's "Roots" for fear of being accused of cultural appropriation.

That's true at the political level, but I'm not convinced it is so clear cut at the social level.

He agrees with that point.

In any event, power’s ability to harm is relative. It depends on where you stand. In most of the liberal culture industries the fear of public shaming by progressives is far greater than the fear of state punishment.

Embarrassing Tony Blair did this and it was left unchecked for years. Some believe that this has led to the state we're in re trans rights. I have no idea where a solution is to be found - true impartiality in appointments is not to be found.