PRIGENT-O'HARA: A TALE OF TWO SHITHEADS

In Sucked, we pointed out how Michel Prigent had suffered such a level of decomposition that he had eventually become ‘a graduate of the Larry O’Hara school of distortion and falsification’. Sure enough, on March 18th, this unhappy pair turned up at the I.C.A. to stalk Stewart Home. Unable to wait for Home’s turn to read, they disrupted another writer’s presentation. What argument they had with him remains unclear. They were asked to leave. O’Hara was quick to respond that he had paid the entrance fee. When a Black woman offered to refund him £10, he replied that he ‘did not take money from trash’. Again it is unclear why he should subject this person to such abuse.

Their latest leaflet contained yet more lies. We shall not deal with them here as more nonsense is likely to spew from these two shitheads’ pens. In this leaflet we shall confine ourselves purely to attacking these scum, pointing out the incongruity of their collaboration. In this, our aim is not to split them by showing how their trajectories are mutually exclusive. Such an approach would be to credit them with an integrity which they clearly do not possess. Contrariwise, our aim is that in their attempt to wriggle out of these contradictions, they shall seem even more ridiculous than ever — in fact no mean feat.

A hate that dare not speak its name

What has drawn these two gentlemen together is their obsession with Stewart Home. In pursuing this hatred they have abandoned all pretence at political analysis, which they claim spurred them to find fault with Home in the first place. As such, this is instructive in the way that political posturing often plays a more psychological than analytical role, allowing unwanted aspects of the self to be projected upon a victim. In this case, this process has broken free of its rationalist (and rationalised) moorings, to become something more like ‘demonic possession’! In the end, it is their own self-hatred which consumes them.

Prigent on O’Hara

If Prigent was at all consistent, he would be railing against O’Hara as a recuperator. O’Hara is a Green Party activist who wants to gloss over the differences between this electoral reformism and the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. It is understandable that Prigent should not wish to read Paradise Referred Back, a tedious pamphlet principally concerned with internal Green Party politics which O’Hara penned with Gary Matthews back in 1990. Prigent might whiffle on about how ‘it is no longer a matter of situationist theory, but proletarian theory’ (our emphasis), as if the Workers’ Council movement in Germany in the 1920’s did not develop proletarian theory long before the Situationists were even born! O’Hara fraudulently evokes this movement to resist the reduction of Green politics to electoralism. The Council Communists were anti-parliamentarian, opposing all participation in parliamentary elections, as opposed to the Social Democrats and Bolsheviks who wanted to combine parliamentary politics with trade union and other non-parliamentary activity. The whole pamphlet makes no mention of the working class or the proletariat — the nearest O’Hara comes to this is a remark as to whether peasants are supported ‘as merely a social class stratagem, or is backing cast in less prosaic terms as being due to the peasants organic link with the land, and (in the sense of Heidegger) "Being".’ O’Hara rejects an analysis based on class and instead opts for the ethereal categories of top Nazi theorist Martin Heidegger! Surely if Prigent wants to maintain even notional credibility as a ‘proletarian theorist’, he should subject his chum to forthright criticism instead of joining his lie-machine.

O’Hara on Prigent

On the face of it, O’Hara has little reason to criticise Prigent. O’Hara wormed his way into the confidence of Green Anarchist, without ever renouncing his involvement in constitutional politics. As he wanders rounds anarchist circles, many anarchists have forgotten that he is a member of a hardcore reformist organisation which aims to channel activism towards electoral politics. All the squabbles referred to in Paradise Referred Back, are pathetic compared to the debates in the workers movement about parliamentarianism – a very clear case of first time tragedy, second time farce. O’Hara’s role has been that of an entrist in reverse. He was able to persuade Green Anarchist to hand over their membership list to him for vetting, purely on the basis that he is ‘an independent investigator of the far right’.

In Greenline No. 130, O’Hara attacks David Icke for anti-semitism, and calls for the Green Party to distance itself from him. But why does he pal around with Prigent, who has published an anti-semitic pamphlet, Aleister Crowley’s Banned Lecture on Gilles de Rais (Chronos Publications 1993). Crowley blames the collapse of Roman civilisation upon ‘the spread of the slave morality of the Jewish communists of the period’. If you don’t get the point, he quotes chapter and verse, and underlines that the person who tried to hold out on the kitty in the early Christian community was a Jew. As O’Hara writes in his Greenline article, such an irrelevant ethnic reference is anti-semitic. Why doesn’t O’Hara distance himself from the Prigent, the publisher of this tract?

APOLOGY

In Sucked we suggested that the leaflet entitled NOT a review of "Guy Debord Is Really Dead", had been produced by Prigent. We had been led to this belief by the person who supplied us the leaflet. This was not true, and we admit to making a stupid mistake. As the leaflet praised J. Barrot’s critique of the Situationist International it was hardly likely to have been put out by Prigent, who has always condemned us for republishing Barrot’s text. We apologise for any confusion caused by this.

Original version of text published in slightly truncated form by Unpopular Books, London April 1996. In the published version the third paragraph, carrying the subheading ‘A Hate That Dare Not Speak Its Name’ was removed to make room for the Apology at the end.

Don't Give Up The Day Job (More on Prigent & O'Hara from Stewart Home).

Sucked (more on Prigent from Unpopular Books).

Feuds