Melanie Phillips writes ...
... regarding her journalism on family issues during the 1990s:
Then as now, I was scorned and vilified by the ‘progressive ‘ intelligentsia. I had become reactionary, right-wing, ultra-right-wing, a harker-back to some mythical golden age of the fifties, a moraliser, an extremist, a bigot, a fascist, demented.
I'm sure that there's a word for this figure of speech, probably coined by Robert Conquest (who gave us, in the course of his analysis of Communist apologetics of the 1960s concepts like "rhetorical questions to which the answer is clearly no", and "words like 'basically' and 'fundamentally' used in contexts where 'not' would cleary be more accurate").
It's sort of a 'transferred epiphany', isn't it?
ReplyDelete"No shit, Sherlock"?
ReplyDeleteCuriously, I've just answered the survey on Clive Davis's blog. He said, "I like to think that the headbangers who used to clog up the comments section here weren't actually typical of the clientele." Naturally I told him that having Mad Mel in the blog-next-door so to speak was a brilliant tactic for diverting the trolls.
ReplyDeleteMatt's only right about the second sentence. The first is hysterical paranoia. The intelligentsia really don't do much collective scorning or vilifying. They do sigh and tut a bit, but that's hardly the stations of the cross. Anyway, why would Mel deny that she is a moraliser (which she claims she was 'scorned' as)? Isn't that what she thinks she is?
Do you have a cite for the Robert Conquest stuff? Google just turns up you in various comments sections.
ReplyDeleteDidn't Bernard Levin once successfully sue somebody for saying he was moving to the Right?
ReplyDeleteThere's not a rhetorical figure handy in my lexicon, though there's a psychological one: projection, sir, in the classic Freudian sense. Or 'pro-jec-tion!' in the Jon Stewart sense.
ReplyDelete'...a harker-back to some mythical golden age of the fifties...'
ReplyDeleteClive Davis (MP's co-blogger on the Speccie): "Perhaps Peter Hitchens' golden age never existed." These progressive intelligentsia get everywhere.
It's a bit like, "Oh yeah, I'm *really* looking forward to the accusations of pre-emptive sarcasm."
ReplyDelete"And your point is?..."
ReplyDeleteSelf-knowledge?
ReplyDelete