Red Leader: Enemy activity has been slight

I've recently acquired a pamphlet published in 1949 by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics which gives a precis of the words and thoughts of Vladimir Lenin.

Utterly destroyed by civil war, economic collapse and, later, Western Capitalism, his ideals are now abandoned by all but the most brutal and atavistic lunatic Third World states, and even they have a Marxist version of it.

I thought I'd copy out a few selected quotes from pages and pages of Lenin ideology long forgotten by almost everyone in the UK, and probably the developed weeerld...

"The oppressing classes constantly hounded the [revolutionaries] and received their theories with the utmost savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander."

"In reality, the Trades Unions did not develop in absolute freedom but in absolute Capitalist slavery."

"The point at issue is [not] political struggle in general, but Revolution. Revolution consists in the proletariat DESTROYING the 'adminstrative apparatus' and the WHOLE state machine and replacing it by a new one"

Dunno about you, but it sounded good to me.

That all the ideology ended in The Red Terror, civil war, ruin and eventually Stalin's purges killing more people than the Nazis is a reminder that there's always an ever-madder bunch of lunatics who will always fuck it up for you.

They just don't get it, do they?

The Press Complaints Commission is now running with the idea that it should be granted power over blogs.

Peta Buscombe, the chairman of the PCC, has revealed her thoroughly shocking ambition to regulate blogging.

She's quoted on MediaGuardian as saying: "Some of the bloggers are now creating their own ecosystems which are quite sophisticated. Is the reader of those blogs assuming that it's news, and is [the blogosphere] the new newspapers? It's a very interesting area and quite challenging."

Now I'm sure her vaunting ambition won't extend to feeble little blogs such as my own.

I think she is setting her sights far higher up the food chain to draw a bead on Guido Fawkes and his ilk.

Well, good luck with that, Peta.

I hope you have a very thick skin to protect you from the diatribes Guido and Mr Holy Moly and the rest are likely to unleash upon you if and when you start to veer from theory to practice.

People with a bit of power under their belt seem to be unable to abide the idea of not being in control the internet and its blogs - even though in the UK they are governed by the same laws of libel and defamation that newspapers and any other media are subject to.

Well I fear that "they" will not be happy until every UK blogger is registered on some sort of weird government database and that everyone will have to abide by "The Rules" or face some form of retribution.

Probably not the same "The Rules" though that have allowed our law-making MPs to dodge capital gains tax and claim for mortgages they've already paid off.

But I can easily see a future where yer average blogger has to come clean about their real identity and provide details such as email addys etc, which will have to be checked and approved before allowing us access.

And if the Tories get in, their shadow media toff Jeremy Hunt is already promising a "big bang" approach to abolishing legislation presently prohibiting monopoly regional newspaper ownership.

So it's hard to imagine him putting up much resistance to a call to have troublesome bloggers cowering under the yoke of the Establishment.

Knowledge is power.

Information is power.

Controlling it can be an act of tyranny.

Someone famous said that, or something like it.

My writing hero is Hunter S Thompson.

Like many other people who scratch a living out of writing, I admired his total balls-out devotion to telling the truth. At least the truth that he saw. Not many people dare to do it.

He wrote this:

"The only other important thing to be said about Fear & Loathing is that it was fun to write, and that's rare — for me, at least, because I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work.

I suspect it's a bit like fucking — which is fun only for amateurs.

Old whores don't do much giggling.

Nothing is fun when you have to do it — over and over, again and again — or else you'll be evicted, and that gets old.

So it's a rare goddamn trip for a locked-in, rent-paying writer to get into a gig that, even in retrospect, was a kinghell, highlife fuck-all from start to finish... and then to actually get paid for writing this kind of manic gibberish seems genuinely weird.

So maybe there's hope. Or maybe I'm going mad..."

Yeah, and maybe there IS hope.

Although not fit to clean the dust from his hash-pipe, I agree with him and too often I find writing a ball-aching chore.

But I enjoy immensely writing this blog.

There is so much angst at present about BCUK and its strange band of followers, among whom I am proud to number myself.

But really it's a hopeless target to attack the medium.

Hunter would have relished, did relish, the instant response to his words.

If you can go to the bother - and have the belief - that people might be interested in something you have written and published on the internet, then I think you at least should have the courage of your convictions to defend it if called upon to do so.

Otherwise "publish" it in a diary at home and let it remain forever unsullied by anyone else's opinion or criticism.

Having said that, trolls and snarlers are one thing; geeks who have the fiendish ability to clone your blog and masquerade as you are something else and should be dragged across the town and beaten with whipchains.

And

"So much for Objective Journalism. Don't bother to look for it here — not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like sport scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms."

So this is Christmas.

Well it self-evidently is not, but my generous employers can't help themselves and are falling over each other to be the first to dish out the P45s.

Yes.

It's the Annual Merry Yuletide Redundancy spree.

This time last year, or rather, in few weeks' time this time last year, I was made redundant and had to re-apply for my own job.

Naturally, this created a good deal of seasonal angst and more than a touch of tinseled turmoil in my already exploding head, and it wasn't until Christmas Eve that I learned I was "safe."

Many colleagues weren't so fortunate and got the axe, and my own small part of the Evil Empire was decimated.

Now we're approaching the year-end, and off we go again.

Time to cash-in on a few quick job losses and get the headcount savings into this year's P&L ledger.

The London head office "benchmarking exercise" again is in full flow and we're being softened up by the executive class for their trite weasel words of how losing a few editors will "Bring-Our-Newspapers-Closer-To-The-Communities-We-Serve."

Arrant nonsense of course; cut and pasted from the dead lexicon of Management-Speak that's handed out to them along with the company BMW and BUPA health plan upon taking office.

Clipboard holders, Blackberry botherers and thrusting young corridor walkers of every stripe have a renewed spring in their step this month.

They perch, Meerkat-like, on the fifth floor, nostrils wide and twitching, their slitty eyes darting hither and yon for the next cost-saving scalp they can offer up to the chairman in the hope that, if they can prove themselves ruthless enough, they'll be invited along to the company summer golf weekend at La Manga, where they will serve the drinks and tug their forelocks to the board's best friends.

I KNEW it would happen again. I KNEW I should have flicked them the Vees and got out.

But...

Tag THAT.

Drugs and schools. A marriage made in heaven.

I was left wide-eyed in wonderment last night watching the TV news to first see some Greasy Government Suit moaning on that he'd lost all confidence in the nation's principal scientific advisor on drugs.

Yes.

He felt he could no longer trust the scientist to kiss his arse on his view that All Drugs Are Bad. So he sacked him.

Strange? I thought so.

But then the next item was an even Greasier Government Suit moaning on that he'd lost all confidence in the nation's parents.

Yes.

Because they LIE and CHEAT to get their children into a half-decent primary school.

And now he was going to fix it that anyone caught LYING and CHEATING again would have their collar felt and could well spend time at Her Majesty's Pleasure if they dared defy him.

And they ran some VT of a REALLY BIG room in Hackney Council stuffed to the rafters with spotty-faced, smirking snoopers, all paid from the public purse, whose sole job it is is to track down criminal parents hoping to get an education for their kids.

And instead of being embarrassed by this to the point of suiciding, the Greasier Suit was instead puffed up with pride at how fooking NAILS it made him look.

It had obviously never occurred to him, not for even a second, to consider why parents might LIE and CHEAT to this end.

Never occurred to him that instead of employing a thousand gobshites to pry and poke into the backgrounds of families, it might be a better idea to actually put a few bob into improving primary schools and thus - in a single bound - end the need for all the LYING and CHEATING which has so disgusted him.

And it also never occurred to this Suit-full-of-bugger-all that the nation's parents had by now lost all confidence in HIM.

Which, when you think about it, is really the point.

It was a tableau of pure Kafka and will stay with me for a long, long time.

Or at least until next May.