Last time:
Wallace: Just change the record, man! You’re boring the arse o’ me, even if you are only a radically tendentious creation of my highly speculative fictional imagination, and not a real person.
Jezza: Well, at least you still HAVE an arse, hm?
One day, if you don’t support us, the capitalists will come and cut off your sorry petty-bourgeois-revisionist arse…
And requisition it and flog it on Ebay or some other undemocratic, top-down, non-cyber-proletarian-controlled neoliberal corporation.
(Or worse still, CAPITALIST corporation!)
Oh and by the way, you know, I think Stalin would just have LOVED Ebay.
Because, I mean, I don’t know, forgive me if I somehow conveniently forgot to mention this earlier, but Stalin was not a TRUE SOCIALIST!!!
Wallace: You might have dropped that shite in there somewhere, yes.
Anyway, somewhat more consequentially…
How about all this kerfuffle about ‘friends in Hamas?’
Jezza: You know, if I’m not allowed to say that, it’s just as well I didn’t start indiscreetly saying something genuinely silly like ‘Harriet’s friends in ISIS!’
Oh and by the way, value judgments aside, did you know these fellows in ISIS actually hate capitalists?
Well, I bet the evil neoliberal media didn’t tell you THAT one!!!
Of course, if you say ‘friends,’ you don’t have to agree with everything they do.
Actually, Harriet does have a few issues with ISIS.
By the way, I don’t know if I’ve said this before, but I’m not using weasel words. Yes I do mean ‘issues’ in a genuinely morally significant sense, and not in the way the word ‘issues’ is used in cheesy American sitcoms.
Still, a bird of the air told me you can be friends with ISIS (at a push), or indeed the Soviet Union (somewhat better), or Amnesty international (better still!), or the Khmer Rouge (best of all!)…
Without entirely and without qualification condoning every little thing they do and say.
I mean, believe me, I know what I’m talking about! And how could our colleagues possibly have known that any of the allies in one or two strategic alliances would go on to commit terribly vicious and cruel mass atrocities? I mean, how could we?
Wallace: Oh, shit… did you just quote Tony?
Jezza: Don’t say that. That’s very hateful.
Well, never mind… as a certain US partisan of a particular ideology of former unreconstructed Trotskyites, whose name begins with J-for-Jehovah-von-Watchtower and B for Berlusconi-Blatter-‘n’-Blair would say…
THAT’S JUST SEMANTICS, ISN’T IT!
Wallace: So, what’s your opinion on terrorism?
For?
Against?
Somewhere in the fuzzy Blairite-opportunist middle?
Jezza: Well, dialectically speaking…
Wallace: Shut it.
Jezza: That’s very hateful. I’m speaking up for you when you don’t have a voice.
I’m doing this all for you, you know. You’re using your education for mere petty, meagre, individual self-advancement, but I want you to use it for The Collective Interest and the objective and pressing rights and claims of Society and The Greater Good.
Wallace: Bit less metaphysical claptrap please.
Jezza: Ah! I know a practically minded man when I see one.
But to return to the earlier topic, I, I mean, that is to say, I mean TECHNICALLY, I don’t condone terrorism.
I mean, I hope you’re sitting down when I say this, but as a genuine Trotskyite non-fanboy-but-actually-REALLY-REALLY-DEVOTED-ACTIVIST-OF CONCRETE POLITICAL-THEORETICAL-AND-PRACTICAL-PRAXIS!!!…
Well, as just such a notable public figure, I genuinely, I don’t condone killing actual, literal, honest-to-God, genuinely authentic civilians. Let’s all be so charitable as to take that into consideration.
That said, and purely by way of a perfectly reasonable and minimal qualification…
I can begin to entertain understanding perfectly well, with not a few half-remembered portions of my rigorously principled former Trotskyite working conscience, why Hamas claim, for their part, that they are merely conducting purely moderate and mainstream school NUS bombings…
Shit, ‘NUS bombings?’ No, I actually meant BUS bombings.
But then, as Tony and Trotsky always used to say:
To err is but human.
Or, as Lenin and some edgy fellow radical socialists in Germany used to say:
“You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”
Yes, nothing like edgy German socialism to warm the cockles of one’s heart.
…
Well, I do love a bit of Liebknecht ‘n’ Luxemburg, you know.
***
Join us for part 3. I’m getting quite bored already, in case you hadn’t noticed…