The Life of Brian was rebroadcast on Saturday night, I watched it again for the umpteenth time and enjoyed it very much. I love the satire on left-sectarianism, because it's partly true but also in the spirit of the-only-thing-worse-than-being-talked-about-is-not-being-talked-about.
The trouble is LoB a millstone around our necks. A bit like Animal Farm and 1984, it is a work of fiction that's often taken as proving something in real life. Animal Farm doesn't prove that all attempts at socialism end in dictatorship. It is a work of fiction. If it proves anything it shows you shouldn't put pigs in charge of farms.
There are some who use the People's Front of Judea witticism as a form of alert. The left can and does involve itself in bitter, directionless faction fights; but doesn't every political persuasion? Isn't the Labour Party wracked by conflict between the Blairite and Brownite factions? Don't the Tories regularly tear themselves apart over the European Union issue? Aren't the BNP currently imploding?
But not every argument is a fruitless faction fight. Godwin's Law is invoked sometimes too often; occasionally the people we discuss are nazis. The same applies for the People's Front of Judea. Sometimes things have to be debated to a conclusion.
But the Life of Brian is also a prime weapon in Red Baiting. It often shows the red baiter's paradox. Revolutionary socialists are at the same time both Students Waving Placards and a Sinister Worldwide Plot; but they can't be both, they have to be one or the other. Get it right, either the left is too fractious to ever get it together (Life of Brian) or it is full of brilliant, machiavellian schemers secretly bent on absolute power (Animal Farm).
