Brendan O’Neill the cartoon character, Part Two

This is a follow-up to our most recent post about the self-parodying Brendan O’Neill.

His most recent article about the Blueshirt Thugs who have invaded Britain and France to escort the Torch of Shame, is beneath contempt and does not warrant any detailed analysis or response.    Suffice it to say (or, you can read his article for yourself, and thereby waste your time), his thesis is that there are no logical or otherwise intelligent reasons for Britain, or France, or (soon) Australia to object to, or to protest against, the gang of Chinese thugs who escorted the Torch in London and Paris, other than reasons based on blinkered racial stereotypes.

An Artist’s advice To Brendan O’Neill, Failing Cartoonist

Recipe for a cartoon caricature of a British Marxist:

1. One young to middle aged native White male Brit; Irish ethnicity is especially tasty due to inherited grievances against the British Crown and Government;
2. Roman Catholic background and resentment of same will expedite the marination process (disclaimer, we are only speculating about the subject’s ethnic and religious background);
3. Stew in own juice during adolescence; protract adolescence indefinitely by removing to virtually any British university’s departments of Social Sciences, journalism or any related studies; mix and stir with similar vegetables;
4. Feed the subject (he’s being cooked alive, you know) a steady diet of stale, desiccated intellectual biscuits left over from the 19^th century –the standard fare of the intellectually bankrupt British intelligentsia – heroic materialism (Brunel and Marx have the same flavour), opportunistic employment of the rhetoric of “progress”, and the kind of over-serious obsession with irony which so often makes the British a self-parodying nationality;
5. Return to pot and stir in whatever remains in the bottle (imported from Russia circa 1930s) of the Leninist fallacy of attributing “motives” to arbitrarily designated “classes”; remove any insurgent recognitions of doublethink – let the subject believe he really CAN read minds even though he’s a materialist!
6. Serve with self-parodying supercilious expression, chin cocked downward, eyebrows arched, eyes narrowed, lips pursed;
7. As a cartoonist I would make especially good use of those eyebrows’ very unnatural – dare we call it? – “posturing”.

Meet Brendan O’Neill – or a caricature of a common type whom he resembles – the self-described Marxist editor of “Spiked” magazine, the successor of the now extinct, puerile London based rag, “Living Marxism”. His recent article, “China-Bashing, A Cartoon Pursuit” (via China Digital Times), endeavours to caricature in broad strokes the personalities, minds and motivations of those – yes, “those”, you know, “THEM” – who protested against the Olympic Torch in London. He has lambasted the “cartoonish” nature of the protesters, and of their employment of visually and rhetorically blunt instruments of propaganda, including their targeting of “China’s cute, cartoonish mascots” for abuse and contempt.