The problem with this is not so much its 'content' (this is easily dismantled or, better still, ignored as the nonsense that it is). It's not the fact that Bracken cannot distinguish between maverick one-off opinions, and Zizek, established criticisms of NATO's treatment of Yugoslavia, nuanced and subtle understandings and criticisms of power and hierarchy. It's also not so much that he patently has little or no knowledge of the broad themes he conveniently throws in. No, all of that is irrelevant.
It is perfectly acceptable to be ignorant of many issues and topics. It is of course absolutely acceptable to voice opinions, be they contradictory, illogical, ill-informed, ignorant etc as in Bracken's case.
What is bamboozling, however, is why an company like the Guardian (or CiF - an offshoot of this) would deem it appropriate or indeed relevant to publish such guff.
The Web 2.0 phenomenon has created space for such ramblings to be published, namely on a personal, non-authoritative site - in much the same way that I use this blog (The stuff I collate here ends up here for a purpose - namely because I don't send these particular written texts to authoritative publishers and precisely because it is quickly digestible).
So there are two observations: One is the fact that PeterBracken evidently has no self-awareness and thus cannot judge correctly the 'quality' of his 'text'. Secondly, and perhaps more seriously, is the stance the Guardian/CiF have taken in this respect, namely a kind of 'You Tell Us' approach. The Guardian still enjoys a position of authority and to publish fantasies smacks of relativism of the highest order. As brutal as it may sound, but not every opinion is equally valid or equal. Therefore, an organ that published an article by Ulrich Beck within 30 minutes as it publishes an 'article' by PeterBracken has completely and utterly lost its way.
10 comments:
Was just moaning earlier on Cif that you and Heresiarch rarely there! You're getting top marks from the posters
The Bracken piece was terrible. I considered posting but in the end decided that to do so would be pointless. There were so many holes in it that it would take a year to unpick them. The central argument of course is the Nick Cohen one - albeit that at least Cohen avoids the tortured and pompous style that Bracken uses to disguise his vacuity. Then there is the complete inability to understand any of the complexity of 'liberalism' and, within that, a conflation of neo-liberalism, classical liberalism, neo-conservatism and liberal interventionism. Bracken's 'authentic leftism' is merely the re-heated platitudes of New Labour (for whom I believe he used to be some sort of communications adviser). The whole article was completely without merit.
Anyway, I am glad I did not comment not least because I notice that when Olching made brief and appropriately contemptuous comments Bracken snapped back that their brevity must mean that his arguments were unassailable. But when someone else (freemanmoxy I think) engaged at length, Bracken taunted him that this must mean that the article was worth engaging with! That kind of ego is simply impossible to enter into discussion with.
As for the wider issue of CiF, well that has been a deteriorating forum for some time. As regards the commissioning of this particular piece, my impression is that there has developed a cosy little coterie, encompassing some posters and some CiF staff, on the WDYWTTA thread and, within that, Bracken has rather bizarrely been identified as a 'thinker' of some sort. Which indeed he is: a thinker of unoriginal and largely meretricious thoughts expressed with immense self-satisfaction and monstrous egotism. To the extent that these same qualities seem to characterise cif itself it is unsurprising that Bracken's ramblings get given page space. Indeed, especially given the number of posts his articicle has received, I would not be at all surprised to see more from him.
Which will be another good reason to avoid CiF altogether, as I increasingly try to.
By the way, as presumably is obvious, this Peter is not Peter Bracken!
Peter Guillam.
Hi Edwin,
Many thanks, but, as Peter (Guillam) rightly says, the place (CiF) is a cosy void.
Bracken is a moron; I don't think there is much more to say about him. He really does not understand the subject matter he attempts to describe.
Yes, this was noticeable when Freemanmoxy offered very clear and damning criticisms (not that Bracken understood this) or indeed the issue of his understanding of Yugoslavia. There is simply no response (and if there is it's framed in some pseudo-populist manner: 'Ooh, look at you with your fancy ivory tower knowledge!').
It's as if there's an automated shut-off mechanism whenever such people are confronted with substance.
That OZKT2 is another one of those. Small intellect, big ego, even bigger contributor 'C' (what on earth has he written on? An idiot's take on Chomsky?).
Peter, it's as you suggest, there is little mileage in CiF. As I said, I don't really blame the commenters (comment is free, after all), but the Guardian who have demonstrated a truly neoliberal way of thinking (clicks, customers, money -- fuck the content).
This is now not really a recent development, but it has been the case since they changed the layout (to make it more gimmicky and 'networky'). It really has never recovered (coupled with horrible shifts in political accent).
Hi Peter - if you mean PB has a fan club of some sort on whaddaya I don't agree. I post regularly on whaddaya and he gets snarled at on a regular basis - indeed a week or so ago I asked for an end to what I saw as Bracken-baiting as it was beginning to resemble a mobbing.
I am hardly cosy with PB - I think my only exchange with him was a disagreement - but aggravatingly, when you say that you feel a poster is getting too much stick you may get accused of being cosy with them when your feelings are not cosy at all (same thing happened when I objected to people shouting at Imogen Black).
Anyway, even I don't class the current Bracken thread as mobbing - it's a pretty poor piece and deserves all the blasting it's getting - and no one does it better than Olching.
The forum question - whether or not Cif has deteriorated - is a good one and I think I'll suggest it as a topic, see how that one goes down. Cif seems to me me to be well overheated, though in my case I am pretty jaded and find myself talking bollocks more often than not.
Perhaps the real reason PB is getting blogs is because they provoke a lot of hits which is what they want, irrespective of politics. I thought Cath's last piece was pretty poor but it got a lot of hits.
Cif is very odd at times. There was a blog by Brian May on the gassing of badgers which lots of posters seemed to think was hilarious - in fact it was a well-written and well-argued piece, but a lot of posters thought it had been put up to be laughed at.
I think I just spend too much time there.
Hi Edwin
Just to say - if needs be - that my comment about PB and the WDYWTTA thread coterie wasn't in any way meant to refer to you (and in fact I hadn't clocked you as a regular on it).
On the fact that, as you say, PB often gets roundly criticised on that thread. Yes, sure. But my point is that in the process he is constituted as someone with 'provocative' ideas, worthy of discussion - wrongly, in my view, because I think his ideas are banal. And for that reason, I suspect, is being given a platform on CiF which he wouldn't otherwise have.
One reason I think that analysis is right is contained on the first sentence of his article where he says something like 'I am often asked' - as if he were some great savant, with hordes of, as he puts it, 'interlocutors' hanging on his every word - 'what I mean by the term the deluded left', and then gives a link to a WDYWTTA thread where, indeed, he gets a pasting for his notion of the 'deluded left'. So, yes, I think there is a relation between what almost seems like a sub-community of CiF - and crucially the only one routinely interacting with CiF staff - on that thread and his being given a platform.
Oh god I didn't think it was a reference to me Peter! Sorry I need to take more care posting or better still just visit and read Olching (as i normally do) and not post.
I think my instinct is right that the Cif Lords just want hits but you may also be right about the coteries. I don't mind Peter Bracken at all really though I don't share his politics, but it is a bad blog and I think we're going to see more like this - it had about 800 hits this morning am sure it has many more now.
Anyway sorry Peter - all I meant was I hang about there and i hadn't spotted any yea-PB movement!
Well, I just read the article (but not the 1000-odd responses. It's a cliché, but sometimes life really is too short). As Peter G says, it's seems to be largely a rehash of Nick Cohen's "What's Left", which, even then, wasn't a particularly original thesis. Having said that, there are contradictions inherent in the stance of the anti-imperialist left, (especially when, as is often the case, the "oppressed" are themselves "oppressors"), and just because it's a banal opinion, does not make it totally untrue.
I rarely dip into CiF these days. This is partly because of late, I've been kept rather busy oiling the wheels of global capitalism, but also because I reckon the law of diminishing returns has kicked in. The number of articles, and responses, has grown quite significantly in the last year or so, and whereas you might find the occasional gem, you have to wade through far too much dross to find them.
As to why Peter Bracken got the commission to write a piece on which has no more expertise than many dozens of other CiF contributors, I can only assume that this is because he makes a lot of noise and tends to provoke strong reactions (as evidenced by this blog), and the CiF team like that, for obvious reasons.
@Pat Davers
Agreed. All Bracken could muster up was nit picking on incoherent responses from that element of the "hard left" that does rationalise terrorism to the point of justifying ir, as does Seumas Milne. I put two blogs on my new blogsite "London calling" as I'm now back in the UK.
The best demolition of the Bracken and Cohen position was offered by the liberal social democratic historian Tony Judt who wrote in the LRB in 2006
"For what distinguishes the worldview of Bush’s liberal supporters from that of his neo-conservative allies is that they don’t look on the ‘War on Terror’, or the war in Iraq, or the war in Lebanon and eventually Iran, as mere serial exercises in the re-establishment of American martial dominance.
They see them as skirmishes in a new global confrontation: a Good Fight, reassuringly comparable to their grandparents’ war against Fascism and their Cold War liberal parents’ stance against international Communism. Once again, they assert, things are clear.
The world is ideologically divided; and – as before – we must take our stand on the issue of the age. Long nostalgic for the comforting verities of a simpler time, today’s liberal intellectuals have at last discovered a sense of purpose: they are at war with ‘Islamo-fascism’.
... Christopher Hitchens and other former left-liberal pundits ( are ) now expert in ‘Islamo-fascism’, Beinart and Berman and their kind really are conversant – and comfortable – with a binary division of the world along ideological lines. In some cases they can even look back to their own youthful Trotskyism when seeking a template and thesaurus for world-historical antagonisms.
In order for today’s ‘fight’ (note the recycled Leninist lexicon of conflicts, clashes, struggles and wars) to make political sense, it too must have a single universal enemy whose ideas we can study, theorise and combat; and the new confrontation must be reducible, like its 20th-century predecessor, to a familiar juxtaposition that eliminates exotic complexity and confusion: Democracy v. Totalitarianism, Freedom v. Fascism, Them v. Us."
That's independent dissenting thought.
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