From: salyavin808 <no_re...@yahoogroups.com>
To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2014 11:32 AM
Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: Revolution by Russell Brand review
Excellent review, I think Brand's revolution will go down well around here:
atheists as the enemy of reason because they don't believe in the supernatural!
It's a nice idea, I think his problem comes from the fact that he's just got
into TM and probably believes the promise that it will save the world, but what
he doesn't get is that we sceptics have been waiting for the evidence he thinks
must be obvious for a very long time.
I can see Brand joining Buck's call for dissenting voices to be silenced, as if
they have any power over reality! The world is as it is, our opinions of it
change nothing about how it works. I think the fear of criticism is one of
losing the underlying point of something and having to accept that it's less
than what you thought. This is, or should be, a harmless adjustment that Brand
will have to make one day, or fade even further from credibility when people
take him seriously and ask what it is that he actually means by embracing
mysticism as a solution to society's problems.
But I wonder why he doesn't mention TM by name? Is that a good thing?
I don't pay any attention to Russell Brand (who can take anyone seriously who
found Katy Perry attractive or interesting enough to marry?), but I suspect he
doesn't mention TM because he's realized that its PR and credibility are even
less regarded than his own.
but Brand - and everyone round here- wants to change the political system
using meditation at a distance.
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote :
Revolution by Russell Brand review – the barmy credo of a Beverly Hills Buddhist
The comedian’s desire to lead a global revolution is undermined by his smug,
shallow manifesto
[‘He discredits leftwing thought’: Russell Brand addresses anti-austerity
demonstrators at a rally in London in June. Photograph: Rex Features]
Nick Cohen
Monday 27 October 2014 05.00 EDT
The rich can buy anything in Britain, and they have now brought us their own
opposition. Russell Brand is the voice of the discontented wealthy. He tells us
that money can’t buy you love – which I already knew – and that only the
complete overthrow of the existing system and embrace of mysticism can take us
from “the shallow pool of the known” to the “great untamable ocean” beyond.
I was prepared to dismiss Revolution as the swollen ramblings of a jaded celeb.
Brand leaves you in little doubt that he is trying to escape the ennui that
follows trying everything once except incest and folk dancing. “It’s only
because I decimated my life by aggressively pursuing eating, wanking, drinking,
consuming and getting famous that I was forced to look at spiritual
alternatives.” Inspiring a revolution – for such is his ambition – is one of
the few thrills to have escaped him. “The revolution cannot be boring,” he says
as he encapsulates his thoughtlessness in one phrase. “We’d all be a bit
disappointed if utopia and ditching capitalism boiled down to ‘We want to be a
bit more like Germany’ – fuck that.”
His writing is atrocious: long-winded, confused and smug; filled with
references to books Brand has half read and thinkers he has half understood. At
one point, he discusses whether our perception of reality is a mentally
constructed illusion (don’t ask me why). “So,” Brand says in a conclusion
worthy of a Thought for the Day vicar, “when Elton John said Marilyn Monroe was
‘like a candle in the wind’ he was probably bloody right, and if he wasn’t
we’ll never know.” At another, Brand argues that spirituality is the road to
revolution, a belief that would have baffled every revolutionary leader in
modern European history. “We’re all doing the same thing, dreaming the same
dream, in the words of Belinda Carlisle,” he announces in a sentence that is so
syrupy a Barbie doll might have written it, and worse – much worse – misquotes
Ms Carlisle.
For all that, Brand is worth taking notice of because he is the nearest Britain
has to a revolutionary populist. The right and far right have Nigel Farage. The
Islamists have George Galloway. Scottish nationalists have (or had) Alex
Salmond. These demagogues boom out certainties that make the tentative policies
of conventional leaders appear pale and timid. “Get out of the European Union.”
“Get out of the Muslim world.” “Get out of Britain.” Get out, and with one
convulsive act of renunciation, you can escape the complexity that blights your
lives.
Television news producers are as world-weary as any burnt-out celebrity. They
want Brand to be their new Farage and draw hundreds of thousands to their
failing programmes. I am not saying that there is not a need for a left
populism to confront financial power and environmental degradation. But Brand
is a religious narcissist, and if the British left falls for him, it will show
itself to be beyond saving.
His book tells us much about him and little about the rest of humanity. Brand
says that he is qualified to lead a global transformation, not because of the
quality of his thought, but because he has transformed his private life. “I may
not have overthrown a government. But [I have] navigated myself from one set of
feelings where drinking and drugs were my only solution to a state where I
never drink or take drugs.” It is perhaps too easy to reply: “Well, bully for
you.” I accept that freeing yourself from addiction and finding inner peace can
have more beneficial effect than any political programme the powerful can
implement. But Brand is offering his Beverly Hills Buddhism as a political
programme, not a self-help guide. Everything is corrupt, his theory runs. All
politicians are the same. Reforms won’t do, and no one can expect him to
relinquish his fortune until there has been “systemic change on a global scale”
(a useful condition that
last one).
The systemic change that means the most to Brand is an embrace of meditation
and pantheism. The greatest villain of Revolution is not a super-rich financier
but Richard Dawkins. Brand denounces him as a “menopausal” proponent of
“atheistic tyranny” because Dawkins denies the existence of the supernatural.
He pulls a succession of shabby tricks to bolster his claim that religion does
not authorise oppression. Anyone who claims that Jesus, Allah, Krishna or the
fountainhead of any other religion endorses homophobia instead of the “union of
all mankind” is “on a massive blag”, he says. Brand has to ignore Leviticus’s
edict that the punishment for men who sleep with other men is death, St Paul’s
hysterics about lesbianism and the hadiths that have Muhammad saying that the
punishment for sodomy is death by stoning. In other words, he has to ignore
several millennia of real and continuing religious repression, so he can make
his
spiritualism sound emancipatory rather than cranky.
Comrades, I am sure I do not need to tell you that no figure in the history of
the left has seen Buddhism as a force for human emancipation. If it were, Sri
Lanka would be a paradise rather than a site for ethno-religious slaughter. Nor
has any revolutionary leader said that atheists will be the revolution’s first
target. In our times, only Islamist counter-revolutionaries dream of their
suppression.
Brand might have designed the political programme that follows to discredit
leftwing thought. The revolutionary state should revoke the charters of
corporations with revenues larger than the nation with the smallest gross
domestic product. According to the World Bank, that nation is Tuvalu in
Polynesia with a GDP of $37m – which means that Brand wants to close all large
and many medium-sized businesses. Food production must be localised and organic
– which means Brand wants hyperinflation, starvation and the bankrupting of
African food exporters. And personal debts should be abolished – which means
that Brand wants to crash the credit system and return us to a barter economy.
In an unintentionally revealing moment, Brand describes attending a trade union
march against austerity. He complains that the protesters are not like Islamic
State terrorists but “flaccid” and placid. He has a case. For all its many
faults, the British left does not imitate Isis. It does not commit genocide and
practise sexual slavery. Its “revolution”, when and if it comes, will consist
of boring, gradual attempts to restrain an economic system that is running
amok. Russell Brand will want no part of its tedious reforms and will go off in
search of bigger thrills.
The sooner he leaves the better.
Revolution by Russell Brand review – the barmy credo of a Beverly Hills Buddhist
Revolution by Russell Brand review – the barmy credo of ...
Russell Brand’s desire to lead a global revolution is undermined by his smug,
shallow manifesto, wr...
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