THE
NEW RADICALS
But
as situation in Kosovo threatens to veer out of control, and
the rabidly nationalistic and totalitarian Kosovo Liberation
Army (KLA) launches a campaign to provoke a military conflict
with the Serbs and drag in the US, the War Party is launching
a counteroffensive – and the first victim was an idiosyncratic
British publication known as LM.
Formerly associated with a leftist group, and once known as
Living Marxism, the magazine was renamed and revamped
as the utter cluelessness of the world's last remaining orthodox
Marxists became all too apparent. While the original Marxist
doctrine was supposed to lead to the withering away of the
State, Marxism in power had always led to the expansion and
glorification of the State. Far from withering away, it grew
exponentially whenever socialists came to power – including
in their own country. In light of this, the editors declared
their new program: to uphold human freedom as an ideal, a
concept based on a "confident individualism." Bypassing the
Marxist vision of a socialist dictatorship – one that
would gradually (and counterintiuitively) decrease its own
power until the State was just a memory – they recaptured
what they thought of as the original anti-statist conception
of the Marxist idea and reinvented the idea of what it means
to be a radical. Their new mission was to oppose the tyranny
of "official and semi-official agencies" and challenged the
whole Blairite system of surveillance, stigmatization, and
repression: "from the police and the courts to social services,
counselors and censors."
HERETICS
In
short, LM began to develop a libertarian approach to
the British predicament. They also became a painful thorn
in the side of the Blairites, as articulate critics of Britain's
evolution into the dictatorship of the Third Way, with its
"hate speech" laws, its attempts to demonize and silence all
internal opposition, and its swaggering imperialism. The Blairites
really began to take notice, when, in 1999, Britain's Channel
4 broadcast "Against Nature," a three-hour documentary exposing
the wacko environmentalist nostrums that have infected the
British elites. As one outraged
account of the program by leftist George Monbiot –
posted on the UK's Urban75,
the most pretentiously hip rad-lib lefty-trendy site on the
world-wide web – puts it, the editors and supporters
of LM were given a platform to argue:
"that
greens are not radicals, but doom-mongering imperialists;
that global warming is nothing to worry about; that "sustainable
development" is a conspiracy against people; while germline
gene therapy and human cloning will liberate humanity from
nature."
A
RULING FROM ON HIGH
Heaven
forfend! How dare anyone suggest that animal rights
terrorists who destroy AIDS laboratories and threaten the
lives of dedicated scientists are anything but noble defenders
of cuddly wuddly rabbits and cute little white mice! Cultural
commisar Monbiot gleefully reports that
"The
Independent Television Commission, reviewing Against Nature
in response to hundreds of complaints, handed down one of
the most damning rulings it has ever made: the programme makers
'distorted by selective editing' the views of the environmentalists
they interviewed and 'misled' them about the 'content and
purpose of the programmes when they agreed to take part.'
Channel 4 was forced to make a humiliating prime time apology."
INDEPENDENT
OF WHAT?
In
the Orwellian nightmare world of Tony Blair's Britain, a polemical
documentary that advances unpopular truths is "reviewed" by
an "Independent Television Commission" that seems not to be
independent of elite opinion, and has the character of a semi-official
agency of government. If not, then who "forced" Channel 4
into making "a humiliating apology"?
THE
PICTURE THAT FOOLED THE WORLD
Against
Nature enraged the UK's rad-libbers, but LM's unrelenting
opposition to the Kosovo war, and especially its exposure
of the propaganda of the War Party, really had them frothing
at the mouth. For it was LM that exposed one of the
prime pieces of war propaganda, a famous photograph of an
emaciated man standing behind barbed wire that was published
all around the world as "proof" that the Serbs were running
concentration in Bosnia and that a new Nazism was rising from
the grave. We have published the photo before, on our front
page, along with LM's devastating
expose of how it was faked by the photographers of ITN,
Britain's no-so-Independent Television Network.
FAKING
IT
In
1992, on assignment in Bosnia, a film team led by Penny Marshall
was on the last leg of an assignment to cover alleged Serbian
"concentration camps" in the Serbian areas of Bosnia: so far,
they had come up with nothing, but at the last possible moment
stumbled on a convincing (and seemingly fool-proof) way to
fake it. In a small village that housed a refugee center,
they stopped to take photographs. By coincidence, a Serbian
film team was also there, no doubt to find images that matched
their own propaganda purposes, showing well-treated uncomplaining
refugees, free to leave at any time, in what looked to be
an ordinary facility, clean and orderly, bearing not the least
resemblance to a concentration camp.
THE
EYE OF THE CAMERA
Ah,
but the eye of the camera sees only what it wants to see,
and, if what it chooses to see isn't really there – well,
then, there are ways to get around that.. In the pages of
LM, German journalist Thomas Deichmann described how
Penny Marshall and her fellow fabricators of war propaganda
went around the camp, apparently not finding anything useful
– with the Serbian cameramen filming their every move.
The film exists, and in it one can clearly see that what Deichman
maintained in his piece – that the ITN crew had faked
the photo – was nothing but the unvarnished truth. As
Deichman described the scene:
"To
film these refugees, Marshall and her cameraman Irvin entered
a compound next to the camp area. Inside this small compound
[was] a kind of garage shed, an electricity transformer station,
and a brick barn. Before the war, horticultural products could
be bought there and tractors and construction machinery had
been housed in the barn. To protect all this from thieves,
the compound area of approximately 500 square metres had been
fenced-in with barbed wire a couple of years before. The erection
of the barbed wire fence had nothing to do with the refugees,
the camp or the war. When Marshall, Williams and Vulliamy
entered the compound next to the camp, the barbed wire was
already torn in several places. They did not use the open
gate, but entered from the south through a gap in the fence.
They approached the fence on the north side, where curious
refugees quickly gathered inside the camp, but on the outside
of the area fenced-in by barbed wire. It was through the barbed
wire fence at this point that the famous shots of Fikret Alic
were taken."
PENNY'S
PERFIDY
It
was the perfidious Penny and her ITN minions who were inside
the barbed wire, not the refugees. This confirmed the
suspicions of those who doubted the veracity of the ITN photo
to begin with, suspcions aroused by the curious fact that,
in the phony photo, the refugees are shown standing on the
side of the fence where poles hold up the enclosure. But fences,
as a rule, are fixed to poles from the outside. A strange
discrepancy, which led Deichman to investigate further. The
existence of the film, and a trip to the site, confirmed that
ITN, far from reporting news, has instead functioned as an
integral part of the NATO lie machine. "Independent" Television
Network my eye!
THE
EMACIATION OF TRUTH
But
how do we explain the emaciated condition of Mr. Alic, who
was made famous by this classic forgery? I mean, that guy
looked like he hadn't had a square meal in months, if not
years – right? Again, appearances are not always reality
– often they turn out to be the exact opposite. For it
turns out that Mr. Alic's condition was the result of childhood
tuberculosis. As Jared Israel relates in an excellent
piece we ran the other day,
"Filming
from inside the barbed wire, Marshall asked if anyone spoke
English. One man replied, Yes. Marshall spoke to him. Are
you a prisoner? No, said the man; we're refugees. Marshall
was clearly impatient. She pressed the man to criticize the
Serbian officials. The man insisted: the Serbs treat us well;
they give us food; the only problem is the weather is too
hot. Much too hot. Then Marshall spotted a tall, emaciated
man. What is wrong with that man, she asked. The Bosnian refugee
shrugged, said something about it being personal. (In fact
the emaciated man's appearance resulted from having had tuberculosis
as a child.)"
PULLING
A PENNY
Penny
Marshall is a shameless liar, a paid lackey of the War Party
who, not all that long ago, would have been kicked out of
every association of professional journalists and shunned
by all reputable news organizations for the rest of her miserable
life. Her name should by now have become a synonym for the
practice of forgery and the art of the finely calculated deception:
in a better world, when someone "pulls a Penny" on you, you've
been had. But not anymore.
DAVID
AND GOLIATH: AN ALTERNATE ENDING
Instead
of being held up as textbook examples of former journalists
devolved to the level of professional liars, Penny and her
crew were held up as the wronged parties in a libel suit brought
against LM by corporate giant ITN. Under the peculiarities
of British libel law, LM and its editors were held
to be guilty unless and until they could prove otherwise.
Their expert witnesses were not allowed to testify, and the
judge was openly biased in his remarks to the jury. Unable
to submit much evidence, hamstrung and vilified in the leftist
media as rabid right-wingers, the editors and publishers of
LM were bankrupted and closed down by the Blairite thought
police, using British libel law as a bludgeon to beat them
into silence. The editors, for their part, are unrepentant:
"The
only thing this court case has proved 'beyond reasonable doubt'
is that English libel law is a disgrace to democracy and a
menace to a free press. As libel defendants, we were assumed
to be guilty unless we could prove our innocence. The court
threw out all of our expert witnesses, including John Simpson
of the BBC and a leading QC. The judge's summing up was so
one-sided that it made ITN's overpaid barrister redundant.
And even though the central fact in our article concerning
the position of the barbed-wire fence in relation to the journalists
has never been seriously challenged, we could not win because
the law demanded that we prove the unprovable. We apologize
for nothing."
SENDING
A MESSAGE
The
ITN libel suit brought out the best of the intellectuals in
defense of free speech: the LM defense fund was endorsed by
more than 150 prominent authors, journalists, artists and
lawyers. A petition in defense of free speech was signed by
Doris Lessing, Fay Weldon and Auberon Waugh. Harold Evans,
the former Times and Sunday Times Editor, and
William Boyd, the author, have denounced ITN's decision to
sue as a serious threat to the freedom of the press. But we
didn't hear much about it in America; it was vaguely explained
away as having something to do with jolly old England's eccentric
libel laws. You know those Brits: I mean, what about that
Oscar Wilde? And then there's the David Irving case. What
won't they do for a dramatic courtroom scene, complete with
bewigged barristers and a slightly dotty old geezer of a judge:
see any episode of Rumpole of the Bailey, the popular
BBC serial. But more than the propaganda value of ITN's victory
in court is the value of the precedent it sets – and
the message it sends. The LM-ITN case is a warning
to others. The British elites are saying to the few dissidents
still resisting Blairization: "If you think you're going to
challenge us, expose our lies, and get away with it you are
very much mistaken – we will smash you, bankrupt you,
and perhaps jail you, in time, if you don't come around –
or shut up."
LOVE,
NATO-STYLE
This
is what we are up against, not only in Great Britain but worldwide.
In Bosnia, NATO shuts down radio and television stations guilty
of "hate speech," i.e. any speech that makes the historic
claim of Serbian nationalism as the most victimized of all
the Balkan peoples. In Kosovo, NATO troops stand by as Serbian
Orthodox churches burn, their relics defiled, and Serbian
monuments are pulled down by screaming KLA-led mobs. Serbs
are murdered in the streets for speaking their own language.
These are not acts of hate, you see, but of love, NATO-style.
A
SHORT HISTORY OF HERESY
In
the US, of course, they can't get away with anything quite
as blatant as the shutdown of LM – at least, not
yet. But they are working on it, believe you me, with "hate
speech" regulations on campus and a privatized Thought Police
that demonizes all dissent, on the right as well as the left,
as "extremist" and beyond the pale. This was the case with
the Kosovo war, the Gulf War, and, indeed, every war throughout
American history. You'll note that it is never the
proponents of mass murder and all-out war who are given the
"extremist" treatment, but only the opponents of said policy
who are so characterized, all the way back to the Copperheads
of the Civil War era. American opponents of World War I were
lynched by quasi-governmental bodies, tarred and feathered,
and their publications banned and burned. The America First
opponents of US entry into World War II were vilified as pro-Nazi
by left-wing journalists and their allies in British intelligence,
both of whom proliferated in the America of the 1930s. The
Vietnam war saw outright repression of a domestic antiwar
movement on a scale not seen since the turn of the century,
with opponents vilified by government officials and set up
for violence and repression by government agents. The Gulf
War saw the first wave of an ongoing smear campaign against
Patrick J. Buchanan, the journalist and commentator turned
presidential candidate who stood virtually alone in opposing
George Bush's war for the President called "a New World Order."
Buchanan was smeared relentlessly for months, but came out
not only unscathed but bold enough to launch his first presidential
campaign, under the slogan: "When I raise my hand to take
that oath of office, your New World Order comes tumbling down!"
A
LAST RESORT
The
Kosovo War is no different: opponents of this latest folly
were derided as "isolationists" and written off as little
more than shills for Belgrade. But as virtually everything
critics of the war predicted – chaos in Kosovo, the dictatorship
of the KLA, the mass murder and ethnic cleansing of the remaining
Serbs, the spread of instability into surrounding areas such
as Macedonia – has come to pass, it is getting more and
more difficult for the War Party to maintain the fiction of
their own righteousness. Their last resort is simply to shut
down their opponents, by whatever means necessary.
PSYOPS
IN ATLANTA
Another
method is to infiltrate the media with government agents.
According to a
shocking report by Geoff Metcalf in WorldNetDaily,
based on a report by Abe de Vries on Emperors-Clothes.com,
US Army personnel attached to the psychological operations
division were employed at CNN during the Kosovo war. Army
spokesmen openly admit that their "psyops" people had penetrated
the CNN newsroom in Atlanta: Metcalf quotes one Major Thomas
Collins as saying that it was all part of a perfectly innocent
"Training With Industry" program. These "trainees" "worked
as regular employees of CNN," according to Collins. "Conceivably,
they would havE worked on stories during the Kosovo war. They
helped in the production of news."
THE
SIDNEY BLUMENTHAL EFFECT
Government
employees disguised as "journalists" are hardly an unknown
species. The boundaries between the two professions grow blurrier
with each passing year, a phenomenon we might call the Sidney
Blumenthal Syndrome. And while not directly on the government
payroll, the rest of the journalistic pack might as well have
been for all the critical perspective they brought to the
machinations of the Clinton administration in wartime. CNN"s
coverage was the worst, hewing so closely to the government
line that the two seemed interchangeable – and now we
know why. But two can play the secret agent game, a point
brought home by a surprising – and encouraging –
recent report in a German newspape. . . .
A
SPY IN THE HOUSE OF NATO
While
Western media outlets have reported official suspicions of
a spy in the house of NATO, the
latest news is that the spy was an American. The
German newspaper Tageszeitung reports that it has been
contacted by an American officer who said he passed information
to Belgrade because NATO's attack on a sovereign nation was
illegal, immoral, and essentially a "blackmail ultimatum"
delivered to the Yugoslavs by the US and its allies before
the conflict – an accurate description of the Rambouillet
proposal, in which NATO demanded complete access to all of
Yugoslavia by its military forces. This mole is highly placed
at NATO headquarters, and was able to reveal top secret air
tasking orders, essentially instructions on where and when
to bomb selected targets. The Serbian armed forces were able
to move their military assets around based on this advance
information: thousands of Serbian lives were saved through
the courage, conscience, and conviction of this unknown hero
(or heroine).
IF
THIS BE TREASON . . .
If
this be treason, then let the patriots of the New World Order
make the most of it. As the US rampages through the Balkans,
and throughout the world, imposing its will on conquered peoples
and interceding in every dispute, the key to stopping it is
rebellion in the ranks of the imperial army. That was the
undoing of Rome, and of the Russian Czars: their soldiers
would no longer fight, and instead turned the guns around
– or, in the case of the Unknown Hero of the Kosovo war,
turned the tables. Among the biggest opponents of the President's
Kosovo policy are to be found in the US military, which resents
being used as a global crisis response team. This is a fruitful
area for the antiwar movement to develop its most important
contacts: right inside the US military machine. Even now,
the NATO-crats are getting ready for the next phase of the
Kosovo war, and the propaganda machine of the War Party is
kicking into high gear: meanwhile, in Washington, Pentagon
spokesman Kennth Bacon admits that there were "some security
problems" in the early stages of the war, to which one can
only add: you ain't seen nothin' yet – we hope!
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