Russell Brand’s Revolution: Using Rape And Hitler’s Publisher To Spark The ‘Divine’
RUSSELL Brand, age 39, has written Revolution, a book dedicated ‘To the divine, mischievous spark in you”.
Craig Brown reviews in the Mail:
‘Russell Brand wants YOU to join the Revolution’ is the pithy way his publishers, Century, put it. Oddly enough, Century is a part of Penguin Random House, itself a division of the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann and Pearson PLC, the largest education company and book publisher in the world, and owners of the Financial Times…
Brand doesn’t like the Daily Mail, which once declared “HURRAH FOR THE BLACK SHIRTS”, but he can work with Bertelsmann which only in 2002 “admitted it lied about its Nazi past and that it made big profits during Adolf Hitler’s reign in Germany using Jewish slave labour”.
Mail bad. Never forget. Bertelsmann fine. Forget and forgive. (And Brand is no fan of Nazis.)
Brown adds:
His belief in small, democratic collectives clearly does not extend to the publishers of his own book; he never bothers to explain why not…
Russell Brand’s act is a good one. He dosn;t ahve to explain. You don’t have to review the book. His job is to be entertaining. And he can be.
‘No, we don’t know if there will still be some inequality, some hierarchies, some conflict. We do know that there are alternatives and we can no longer remain pallid and listless in the cellar like Fritzl’s kids.’
Is he really comparing himself and the rest of us to Josef Fritzl’s daughter, who was raped and held captive for 24 years, along with the seven children to whom she gave birth? If he isn’t, is he just having a joke? And if so, what sort of joke?
It’s clearly not his best joke. But it’s a line with oomph. It got him noticed.
This, however is just wrong:
He pays a call on Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy, ‘where he is forced to live for reasons I’ve never fully understood’. Well, most people understand them perfectly well: Assange was wanted in Sweden on suspicion of rape, and evaded extradition by taking refuge in the embassy.
You could stick to the fact. But where’s the fun in that?
Posted: 26th, October 2014 | In: Books, Celebrities Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
