Engerland — the dialectic’s point of change…
How we derailed a Tory cultural warfare offensive
When you watch a mass cultural event build, take place, reach a critical crescendo — and then re-stabilise, into a new and scratchy disequilibrium — you need a specific language to describe it.
Since most of the British press have never read Hegel their ability to grasp what just happened is reduced to a series of garbled exclamations.
So thank f**k for the dialectic. What’s happened was a classic example of what the antifascist poet John Cornford once called “the dialectic’s point of change” — the sudden shattering of a political glacier, under severe geomorphic forces.
It was tragic, it was glorious, it ended with drunken bonehead sticking a lighted flare up his backside (see above) and then the ignominious failure of a Tory stratagem.
Over the past five weeks we saw the Conservative government seize on a collective decision by the England football team to ‘take the knee’ as an opportunity to mobilise their reactionary voting base against “woke”.
As I wrote on 8 June: the subtext was a straight read-off from the thought architecture of modern fascism. The knee is to English football what Critical Race Theory is to academia: a foreign and alien ideology…
