This is a guest post by Contentious Centrist

Here is an article by Patrick West from the website “Spiked”, which describes itself as “an independent online phenomenon dedicated to raising the horizons of humanity by waging a culture war of words against misanthropy, priggishness, prejudice, luddism, illiberalism and irrationalism in all their ancient and modern forms.”

The article is intended to satirize Jerry Springer’s appearance on a BBC1 programme in which he spoke about his family origins, “a Jewish family which fled the Third Reich in the 1930s…”

West seems to be angry at Springer, who has made his reputation from a TV talk show which exploits the “idiotic, toothless, morbidly obese man and woman from Alabama or Kentucky, or any other template Southern state”.

We get the idea. West does not like trashy Americans, and he does not like how Springer makes a living. Still, it’s hard to understand what his main beef is: maybe that a Jewish family had managed to flee from the Nazis and then produced a son like Springer?

West thinks Jews always speak about how the Germans were not “very keen” on them. It is so “hackneyed” and so “very tiresome”! Enough already!

“All families have skeletons in their closets“, West generously concedes, going on to detail the skeletons in his own family’s closet. Imagine, having as an ancestor the “incompetent prime minister who lost Britain the War of Independence against the American colonies“, or a grandfather who was “features editor of the Daily Mail in the 1930s, where he championed Mosley’s fascist Black Shirts”, or maternal grandparents in Dublin, who “used to host dinner parties for the German ambassador in the 1940s.” Anyone who read the book or saw the film “The Remains of the Day” will know immediately what kind of family milieu West is descended from.

And you see, he has to live with the disgrace of having Nazi-sympathizers for his grandparents. But unlike the lachrymose Jerry, Patrick does not whine about it! He consoles himself with the knowledge that his own mother “was a leading feminist in Ireland ” and a father who though “ a veteran journalist in Vietnam”, was not even anti-American!

Somewhere along this account, he squeezes in the obligatory throat clearer: “I’m not anti-Jewish. In fact, I am exactly the opposite. I’m very pro-Israeli, because I think the Jews are a nation of geniuses.”

Impossible to begin to untangle the knots in this article:

The expressed ennui at Jewish persistent memory;

the sneering trivialization of the Holocaust as “Horrible Germans” not being “very keen on Jews” ;

the astonishing re-packaging Holocaust’s second-generation trauma as “family skeletons”,

then compounding the injury by the disclosure that the author’s own “family skeletons” were Nazi Sympathizers;

and the declaration that he, personally, thought Jews are a nation of geniuses, a reason he advances for being “pro-Israeli” and therefore not to be suspected of antisemitism.

What was supposed to be, so I suspect, a biting critique of Jerry Springer’s mawkish account of his family history became a painfully immature and disjointed concoction of national histories, baffling euphemisms, even more baffling hyper-statements, with some anti-American insults thrown in for good measure.

What I want to know is how exactly does this article wage “a culture war of words against misanthropy, priggishness, prejudice, luddism, illiberalism and irrationalism in all their ancient and modern forms.”
Because Patrick West’s article embodies all these flaws.