I disagree almost completely with George Monbiot’s political ideas, but I share his curiosity about the Revolutionary Communist Party, that’s Living Marxism, no: LM (as LM for Living Marxism as in L for nothing M for nothing), no Spiked, that is to say Institute of Ideas. Who are these people?
Here is the Monbiot version, from last Tuesday’s Guardian:
The organisation began in the late 1970s as a Trotskyist splinter called the Revolutionary Communist party. It immediately set out to destroy competing oppositionist movements. When nurses and cleaners marched for better pay, it picketed their demonstrations. It moved into the gay rights group Outrage and sought to shut it down. It tried to disrupt the miners’ strike, undermined the Anti-Nazi League and nearly destroyed the radical Polytechnic of North London. On at least two occasions RCP activists physically attacked members of opposing factions.
In 1988, it set up a magazine called Living Marxism, later LM. By this time, the organisation, led by the academic Frank Furedi, the journalist Mick Hume and the teacher Claire Fox, had moved overtly to the far right. LM described its mission as promoting a “confident individualism” without social constraint. It campaigned against gun control, against banning tobacco advertising and child pornography, and in favour of global warming, human cloning and freedom for corporations. It defended the Tory MP Neil Hamilton and the Bosnian Serb ethnic cleansers. It provided a platform for writers from the corporate thinktanks the Institute for Economic Affairs and the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise. Frank Furedi started writing for the Centre for Policy Studies (founded by Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher) and contacting the supermarket chains, offering, for £7,500, to educate their customers “about complex scientific issues”.
In the late 1990s, the group began infiltrating the media, with remarkable success. For a while, it seemed to dominate scientific and environmental broadcasting on Channel 4 and the BBC. It used these platforms (Equinox, Against Nature, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Counterblast, Zeitgeist) to argue that environmentalists were Nazi sympathisers who were preventing human beings from fulfilling their potential. In 2000, LM magazine was sued by ITN, after falsely claiming that the news organisation’s journalists had fabricated evidence of Serb atrocities against Bosnian Muslims. LM closed, and was resurrected as the web magazine Spiked and the thinktank the Institute of Ideas.
All this is already in the public domain. But now, thanks to the work of the researcher and activist Jonathan Matthews (published today on his database www.gmwatch.org), what seems to be a new front in this group’s campaign for individuation has come to light. Its participants have taken on key roles in the formal infrastructure of public communication used by the science and medical establishment.
I am in favour of good science, progressive technology, and I’m pretty sure I like genetic engineering insofar as I understand it. Above all, I’m in favour of what Monbiot calls “individuation”, and despise the idea that this makes me or anyone else who believes in it “far right”, i.e. (the old smear) in league with Nazis (who flatly opposed “individuation”). And “confident individualism” sounds great, and I believe that it is restrained by the confident individualism of other individuals. I’m against gun control, and against banning tobacco advertising.
So, does all that make Spiked/Institute of Ideas good guys? Apparently. I’m confused about the Balkans. I don’t know what LM/Spiked’s stuff about Serb atrocities that according to them were not atrocities makes them. Probably best not get involved in that one now, although I can’t stop anyone. I still don’t know what to make of Neil Hamilton, but I have many friends who back him to the hilt, give him awards, ask him to make speeches and generally make much of him at a time when few others will.
I definitely do not like the sound of “Revolutionary Communist Party”. That sounds very bad. I despise the whole idea of “Living Marxism”. That makes these people sound ridiculous and evil at the same time. And I also despise any organisation which identifies itself with initials which did once stand for something, but which it later pretends stand for nothing but a casual name, like Fred or Colin or Beverley. I remember asking them about this during their LM as in LM, meaning LM and nothing but LM phase. What does LM stand for? – I said. LM they said. Nothing to do with Living Marxism, Karl Marx, that old gaffer? No? No. LM. LM meaning LM. Standing for nothing except LM.
Odd. Worse: brazenly contemptuous of the thought processes of other people. Suggestive of a bunch of people who think that reality means – or can be made to mean – simply and entirely what they say it means. As Monbiot says, a cult. And now, does Spiked or the Institute of Ideas have anything to do with LM, as in nothing but LM? I haven’t asked them, but I bet the answer is another idiotic and brazenly contemptuous blank wall.
If they’d said, when the question of not calling themselves Living Marxism any more came up for discussion, that after thinking about it they’d come to realise that Marxism was tripe and in fact not “living” at all, so they were changing their name to something sensible, fine. I could have understood that. I might even have joined. But if any such public statement was made, I entirely missed it.
When they were LM as in Living Marxism, I could laugh and sneer, and keep clear. But for years now now these people have been sending me emails inviting me to their events, and when I get there, everything seems absolutely sensible (provided you forget about LM as in Living Marxism as in Revolutionary Communist Party). And now, once again, George Monbiot – who has long been as suspicious about them as I have long been, I because I despise their past, he because he despises their present, and both of us because we’d love to know how they see their future – is seriously skewering them in the Guardian, as has his pal Jonathan Matthews.
The danger is that RCP/Living Marxism/LM/Spiked will discredit any idea they have anything to do with. Do all those corporations who back them realise what they are dealing with? Maybe they do, far better than I do, but in ways I’ve not been told about.
Was all that “Revolutionary Communist Party” stuff a pure piece of flypaper to confuse the left, and are they sincere in their currently expressed beliefs in science, “individuation”, etc.? If so, why don’t they come clean and say so?
So. Who the hell are these people? What the hell do they think they are doing? Any comments that make (any) sense of them would be most welcome.
From the sounds of their earlier activities (actively attacking competing far-left movements) it sounds like they may have had their current agenda all along. Seems brilliant, campaign as a bunch of fringe lefty radicals and then infest all the rest of them and collapse them. I think we could all give them a round of applause if it really was that straightforward, at any rate they sound like contributors to TechCentralStation or Reason magazine now, lets just cross our fingers that their veering to the right (or what monbiot says is the right) didn’t have the same goals…
I went along to one of their events earlier this year. Good crowd, quite expensive, v. plush. How do they do it I wondered?
Anyway, the point was that afterwards in the pub I tried asking them what it was they believed. Blank wall. I mean, complete blank wall.
It has taken me years to realise and even then it still comes as a shock that when people don’t answer the question it is usually because they are either lying or have something to hide.
Here is what the Guardian wrote about the filthy Serbolshevik liars at Living Marxism:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/itn/article/0,2763,184815,00.html
Poison in the well of history
Ed Vulliamy, The Guardian, March 15, 2000.
Living Marxism accused ITN of distorting the truth about Bosnia. Now, it faces ruin after losing the ensuing libel battle. Ed Vulliamy, who filed the first reports on the horrors of the Trnopolje camp, explains why an unholy alliance of Serb apologists and misguided intellectuals had to be defeated in court — The Guardian.
Some will say that Living Marxism won the “public relations battle”, whatever that is. Others will cling to the puerile melodrama that ITN’s victory in the high court yesterday was that of Goliath over some plucky little David who only wanted to challenge the media establishment.
But history — the history of genocide in particular — is thankfully built not upon public relations or melodrama but upon truth; if necessary, truth established by law. And history will record this: that ITN reported the truth when, in August 1992, it revealed the gulag of horrific concentration camps run by the Serbs for their Muslim and Croatian quarry in Bosnia.
The law now records that Penny Marshall and Ian Williams (and myself, for that matter) did not lie but told the truth when they exposed this crime to the world, and that the lie was that of Living Marxism and its dilettante supporters who sought, in the time-honoured traditions of revisionism, to deny those camps existed.
Of course Living Marxism was unable to offer a single witness who had been at Trnopolje, the camp they claimed to be a fake, on that putrid afternoon of August 5, 1992. Indeed, they were unable to produce any witnesses at all. Unlike any member of Living Marxism or their sympathisers, I was there with ITN’s cameras that day. We went to two camps: Omarska and Trnopolje.
Living Marxism does not like to mention Omarska: there, we saw little, but enough: skeletal men drilled across a yard and devouring watery stew like famished dogs before being bundled out. One man said:
“I do not want to tell any lies, but I cannot tell the truth.”
The truth emerged with time. Omarska turned out to be the kind of place where one prisoner was forced to bite the testicles off another, who had a live pigeon stuffed into his mouth to stifle the screams as he died in agony. The yard at Omarska was a killing field, prisoners obliged to load the mutilated corpses of their friends on to trucks by bulldozer.
Trnopolje was a marginally less satanic place, some of whose prisoners were transferred from other hideous camps to await forced deportation. Others were rounded up and herded there like cattle, or had even fled there to avoid the systematic shelling and burning of their homes.
Unknown to us when we pulled up on the road, in disbelief at the sight before us, it was the former group that was held captive behind the now celebrated barbed wire fence.
At the time I paid little attention to what would become Living Marxism’s myopic obsessions: such as which side of which pole the old barbed wire or fresh barbed wire was fixed. There were more important matters, such as the emaciated Fikret Alic’s (accurate and vindicated) recollections of the night he had been assigned to load the bodies of 250 men killed in one night at yet another camp.
If it is still of any remote interest, I will say this:
I now know the compound in which these terrified men were held captive to have been surrounded on one side by recently reinforced barbed wire, on two sides by a chain-link fence patrolled by menacing armed thugs and on a fourth side by a wall. But so what? This was a camp — I would say a concentration camp — and they were its inmates.
What does it take to convince people? The war ground on, the British foreign office and Living Marxism in perfect synergy over their appeasement of the Serbs while other, worse camps were revealed. The bench in The Hague issued its judgment on Trnopolje in 1997: a verdict that described the camp as infinitely worse than anything we reported — an infernal place of rape, murder and torture. Witness after witness confirmed this.
The Financial Times enthusiastically re-iterated Living Marxism’s claims of a fabrication, but published a hasty and grovelling retraction when it looked at LM’s non-evidence.
It was dispiriting to have to report that in the first year of what was proclaimed as the new united, democratic Europe such places as Trnopolje and Omarska existed.
It was worse still to return to London and find an obscure group of supposed intellectuals putting such effort into trying to convince society that the camps had been a fabrication and that I had committed perjury when testifying to their existence and horrors at the war crimes tribunal at The Hague.
My friends and colleagues Marshall and Williams — brave reporters of the highest calibre — were being branded as liars. I suffered a whole lot less but there was a steady stream of hate mail. “You piece of shit,” read one letter from an LM supporter revelling in the destruction of Vukovar, “probably a nasty little Jew.'”
Those most horribly insulted, of course, were the disbelieving camp survivors and relatives of the dead. I happen to believe that those who survive and are left bereaved by such monstrous crimes are owed at least one thing. They should be given back their lives by an admission that what happened happened. Their sanity requires that history records and acknowledges the truth of the atrocities that were committed against them and those they lost.
Richard Tait, editor of ITN, realised that three things had to be reclaimed. One, the reputation of his correspondents and his programme. Two, the trustworthiness of front-line, on-site reporting in general. And three, the need to etch the truth about those camps into history. Tait was the man who in private and in his affronted, righteous anger used the words “revisionism” and “fascism” without blushing.
When ITN sued in pursuit of these aims, the company of course ran the risk that such action would draw attention to LM’s revisionism. But no one could have predicted the degree to which, rather than be dismissed as a foul revisionist trick, Living Marxism’s claims would become a matter for voguish tittle-tattle among bored intellectuals on the sofas of the Groucho Club.
LM played its hand well but the rot in the British intelligentsia made it easy for them to do so. LM succeeded in entwining the two issues of the libel writ and denial of the camps. Some of their supporters argued that they accepted the truth of the genocide but nevertheless felt compelled by ITN’s supposedly heavy-handed use of the libel laws to speak out in favour of those who denied the carnage. But such distinctions were utterly unconvincing. Those who helped LM cannot fail to recognise that by doing so they also stirred the poison LM had dropped into the well of history, playing their own role in denying a genocide.
By this entwinement, genocide was devalued into a “media debate”, something to chitter-chatter about over grilled sea bass and pale Belgian beer.
Hungry for controversy, a sizeable portion of London’s intelligentsia lined up to support Living Marxism. They rallied round those who had named me and others as liars in the name of free speech — so why not name them too, the great, the good and the up-and-coming? Fay Weldon, Doris Lessing, Harold Evans, Toby Young, and even a handful of contributors to this newspaper. A diverse coterie, eager to sip Living Marxism’s apparently excellent claret at the ICA, to eat their canapés and run alongside the rotten bandwagon of revisionism. But how, and why?
One could argue about post-modern ennui and the paucity of values in a society obsessed by packaging. One could argue very cogently about the complete inability to understand fascism, about “victim-hatred” and the strong historical strand of British appeasement of Europe’s tyrants, from Franco and Hitler to Milosevic. There was also a mutated strand of anti-Semitism in a lot of this, the Muslims being, in their way, the Jews of Bosnia. But the most tangible answer lies, I think, in the way revisionism works in a bored society, whether you are David Irving or Living Marxism. For just as the Serbs were the tinpot Nazis of the Balkans, so Living Marxism is the tinpot Holocaust denier, appealing to the same cheap slogans.
There is at the moment a remarkable convergence of trials: ITN vs Living Marxism wraps up in the high court; in The Hague, four guards at the Omarska camp go on trial. And also in London, Irving’s case against Deborah Lipstadt, for her book Denying the Holocaust, approaches its denouement.
Like Irving, Living Marxism tried — and to a degree succeeded — in couching its argument on the reality of Trnopolje as a matter of free speech. This was LM’s most grotesque deceit. Free speech has nothing whatsoever to do with LM’s agenda. Although it denied it in court, Living Marxism — on this issue at least — is first and foremost an apologist for the genocide orchestrated by Belgrade.
Thomas Deichmann, the author of the original LM piece on Trnopolje, was a defence witness for the camp-roving thug Dusko Tadic, who in 1997 became the first man to be convicted in The Hague for crimes against humanity — many of those crimes having been committed in Trnopolje and Omarska. One of Tadic’s attorneys, Mikhail Wladimiroff, has since published his own revisionist views of Trnopolje in LM.
Deichmann has also been a regular contributor since his original article: one of his less subtle efforts was a grovelling interview with the man at the apex of the Serb’s genocidal command structure, Radovan Karadzic, on whose authority we went to the camps in the first place. Karadzic is not wanted in The Hague for genocide, but Deichmann’s article was entitled “War Criminal or Whipping Boy?” No prizes for guessing which thinly-veiled conclusion Deichmann came to. LM’s continuous flagellation, in successive articles, of us “bloody liberals” and “cosmopolitan types” who contested the genocide became almost tedious — while the views of the authors were more interesting.
As is by now well-known, Living Marxism has become adept at finding or placing supporters in what it regards as influential positions in the media. This is all perfectly above board: the Times was desperate enough to offer LM’s editor, Mick Hume, his own column. The signatories of LM’s letters are familiar bylines across Fleet Street. But the pivot of Living Marxism’s activities in the mainstream is, for some reason, the Economist Intelligence Unit, which has at times, backstage, been torn asunder by arguments over key positions held by the group’s leading members.
Two of these are a Serb called Laza Kekic, the author of some of the most virulent attacks on the “bloody liberals”, and Joan Phillips, who also works under the name Joan Hoey. This is the text of an email that came my way from Kekic to Hoey, written after the Nato bombardment of 1995 that produced the Dayton agreement:
“The Serbs have come back from far more difficult moments in the past. In the meantime, should accept and swallow a lot and consolidate what’s left. Can even do Eurospeak and fluff on about the Balkan peace and co-operation in the meantime. Then, at some future date, the obliteration of the Muslims, the Albanians, and last of all the Croats. That’s my perspective. And there’s little else left to say.”
Indeed there isn’t. The message was sent from Kekic’s electronic address at the Economist Intelligence Unit on September 14, 1995, at 10.11am. Others in the series of emails involve chatter about gainful contact with David Owen and friendly journalists at the BBC and Observer.
At one point during the trial, LM produced video footage shot by what it called Bosnian-Serb Television, which did indeed have a crew there that day. But these particular images, it emerges, came from a third camera, a camcorder held by a man in military fatigues I remember well; LM was serviced in that instance by Serbian military intelligence.
The point is this: “free speech” has nothing to do with what is going on. Living Marxism’s attempts to re-write the history of the camps was motivated by the fact that in their heart of hearts, these people applauded those camps and sympathised with their cause and wished to see it triumph. That was the central and — in the final hour, the only — issue. Shame, then, on those fools, supporters of the pogrom, cynics and dilettantes who supported them, gave them credence and endorsed their vile enterprise.
Where do these people stand on private property? As I understand it, Trotskyists believed that the state would wither in a perfect communist society, which sounds superficially libertarian. However, without the right to private property it would be anything but. At first glance the Spiked site has much about free speech and social permissiveness, but not much on economics.
A queer shoal of fish, indeed. For me, they lose all credibility by opposing censorship of child pornography. Anybody who condones the dissemination of images of children being raped or otherwise brutalised is beyond the pale. This isn’t a free-speech issue; as Andrew Vachss points out time and again, such images are evidence of crimes, full-stop, and should be regarded as nothing less.
Crosbie,
They are still marxists. All they have done is tactically reposition themselves and (as has already been pointed out) with some success. They still believe in collective ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange but refuse to admit this publicly.
They avoid all discussion of economic matters because otherwise they could have to come clean and then the gig would be up.
These guys do seem to say the right things on a lot of subjects, but firstly I think calling most greens Nazis is a little extreme. (I am happy to point to similarities between certain aspects of green ideology and fascist ideology, but most greens aren’t actually genocidal).
Secondly, and much more importantly, I really don’t think you can dismiss the Balkan thing. If these people genuinely believe that the Serb atrocities did not occur and (presumably) that the US had some other agenda in intervening (or was wrong to intervene) in the Balkans, then they really aren’t any people I want to know.
I am with everybody else in wanting to know exactly who these people are and what their agenda is, however.
Tim – while I’m in agreement with your conclusions, I’m curious about how the Andrew Vachss argument works. As far as I know, looking at the evidence for crimes as an unauthorised person isn’t illegal – or in jurisdictions where it is, certainly isn’t treated as seriously by the legal system as the possession of child pornography.
Brian,
Sometimes the LM crowd remind me of the guy in your short story The Lion’s Share, trying to push forward capitalism to provoke revolution. And yet every intellectual push they make only helps capitalism and hurts the modern “left”. Make no mistake, they are Marxists still. I was close friends with an LMer at University. The theory is good old historical inevitibilty, but the heretical idea is that capitalism is regressing and that the enlightenment is being undone by greens and other assorted riff-raff. The Marxists must save capitalism so that the revolution can occur! They’re barmy but harmless.
They sound kind of like Marxists who actually read Marx, and payed attention to some bits that most Marxists would rather ignore.
The bits about how, if the proletariat isn’t miserable enough to revolt, that it’s every good communists duty to support and further whatever the most advanced capitalist market system there was available.
So the workers got pulled out their misery by unions and such, forestalling the revolution. Well, this lot seems to perhaps be somewhat serious about furthering capitalism so that the state can eventually wither.
Suddenly remembering this almost always ignored point is how the CCP recently justified allowing Capitalists to join the Party.
“A queer shoal of fish, indeed. For me, they lose all credibility by opposing censorship of child pornography. Anybody who condones the dissemination of images of children being raped or otherwise brutalised is beyond the pale. This isn’t a free-speech issue; as Andrew Vachss points out time and again, such images are evidence of crimes, full-stop, and should be regarded as nothing less.”
And since when is it illegal to look at or posess evidence of crimes?
In fact, wouldn’t it be in the interests of justice for the evidence of a crime to be disseminated far and wide while being impossible to destroy? While we’re at it, if it were legal to posess images of sexual crimes, how many people would willingly release such images, knowing that anyone could show them to the police without fear? About as many as the number of people that take pictures of themselves committing murder and post them on the Internet for all to see.
Not only that, but child pornography law also bans images of activities that are perfectly legal in the jurisdiction in which they take place.
As for the fact that former Marxists seem to be espousing pro-freedom positions, maybe they’ve finally “seen the light” and realized what was patently obvious to anyone that paid attention to actual Communist states, and experienced a true conversion. Or maybe not.
I’m rather a fan of Spiked!, and recommend it. Its writers don’t always agree with one another, and they are not right all the time. The same is true of Samizdata. Would you evaluate, say, the US government on the basis of deductions from how Monbiot characterises it?
I’m alarmed by “who are these people?”–as if you need credentials and antecedents to be on the right side of an argument. If many of the writers of this blog were traced back to connections with The Alternative Bookshop or the FCS, I shouldn’t be at all surprised. Does that make their current views better founded and less open to criticism?
Nor would I be really surprised or upset if some Samizdatas had some Socialist Worker history followed by Damascene conversion to free markets. Stranger things have happened. What matters is who you are now. What you stand for.
Monbiot’s wrath seems to be because he can identify a group of people he’d expect to be his shock-troops going the wrong way. Not only have they not been persuaded by his modernisation of 70s ultra-leftism, they are batting for the other side. He’s a Manachaean, like so many fanatics. You’re either with him or a servant of the Evil One. Changing your mind is a sign you were tainted from the beginning, couldn’t have been in good faith then, and can’t be in good faith now.
In truth, people do change. They can be rationally persuaded. (Though much, much less than we might hope.) Sometimes things are only what they seem to be. Unless you believe that, what are you doing writing blogs and speaking on the radio in favour of personal liberty?
I laughed my arse off over this piece. Just when I think Monbiot can’t get any sillier, he proves me wrong. He made Furedi (author of a couple of very good books) and Hume et al. sound like a cross between the Illuminati, the Bilderbergers and the Masons.
And furthermore I think perpetually nailing those people to the cross of the Bosnia story is immensely hypocritical. A whole host of journalists believed unquestioningly in the Jenin ‘massacre’ because that’s what they wanted to believe. Are they also a vast evil conspiracy?
The Marxists must save capitalism so that the revolution can occur! They’re barmy but harmless.
Thanks for the explanation angloshere. The whole thing was baffling me until you said that.
I was on the periphery of the RCP for a while, and find this subject rather interesting.
Monbiot is guilty of huge distortions in this piece, but he has certainly found some great material.
What became the RCP split with what became the Socialist Workers around 74. (The Socialist Workers thought that
a revolution was imminent. I think we can agreed that the RCP was right here.)
The splinter group then split again around 79 into the RCP and the RCG over whether the
third world and immigrants would organise a revolution. The RCP appear to have been right
here, also.
During the miners’ strike, they said that Scargill’s tactics amounted to “all pits except in
Yorkshire are negotiable.” They also said that the strike would fail. They appear to have
been right on this point.
During the first gulf war, they opposed western intervention on the grounds that the Iraqi
people would get shafted in the end. This is topical, but a reasonable point of view.
They are in favour of scientific progress, including genetic engineering and eugenics. This
is VERY topical. This is a view they have held since at least 1990.
During the early 90s, Furedi published an article called “Midnight of the Century”, which suggested
that conditions for revolutionary parties were the worst ever, and that the party needed to
reorganise around opposing postmodernism, and win the argument that progress was possible. This
is presumably where Monbiot’s “entryist” stuff comes from.
Regarding the Bosnia stuff, their angle was that the Serbs were being portrayed as the only bad guys. In court, it came out that the iconic picture of an emaciated man behind barbed wire was in fact taken over wire surrounding the camp generator. However, they seem to have been trying to make facts fit their theories.
Where the RCP were interesting was the training program they put their supporters through. This
included theory classes on subjects ranging from philosophy (Furedi wrote the introduction to
a book called “Ideology and Superstructure”) to organisation and writing. Each member was rotated
through organisational postings, doing things like independent research on specialist subject,
coordinating marches or organising speakers for meetings. In a sense, they were running their
own university/management training course.
With this training background, it is hardly surprising that these guys are making an impact.
I was once on the fringe of the RCP in the early 1990s but was in the end disgusted with them. When stopping off at a motorway service station on return from a conference my city’s RCP organiser ate the contents of her tray before arriving at the checkout, thus paying only for her drink. RCP members believed in taking what the hell they wanted legal or not, from our present ‘state’ because they don’t believe in it. In my view the base immoral standards of these people would carry over into their post revolutionary world, they are grasping hypocrites who are fundamentally materialists annoyed at not being allowed to have whatever they want. Their view that everyone can have whatever they want in a post revolutionary world is a direct line to their deeper psyche of hate and resentment. They seem to assume that we all want the same thing anyway and that it is material at all times. Sorry this is a very unacademic note, but its been a long time since I thought about my experiences with these people, but I remember a lot of gut feelings from in amongst them.
Well, this is all very interesting. Couple of other points:-
* For the supporters of the devils-incarnate position, I wait with excitement for some confirmation (from Notes From the Borderland / Lobster maybe?) that they were in fact shilling for Special Branch or such like in the old days. Safe enough for the truth to be told now etc etc – what say you, Clare, Mick, Frank?
* For the good-work-gaiety-of-nations position, what about considering that all they ever really wanted to do was run glossy magazines, appear on Question Time and generally be media stars? And maybe like some other ambitious people, they didn’t quite understand this about themselves at the time. Again, what say you?
Me, I tend to a something-smells-about-this-lot position. At the height of the ITN business, when lots of questions were being raised about LM’s rather too secret finances (and why did no one get to the bottom of this, I wonder?), I remember being at some event when a perfectly reasonable suggestion was put to (I think) Clare Fox. If LM really wanted the (they said) unreasonable and unfair suspicions about their finances to go away, all they would have to do would be to publish a pie chart showing relative proportions (e.g. sponsorship, endowment, subscriptions, bank loan, private capital etc etc). This would (presumably) have quelled suspicions without compromising funding.
Anyway, nothing of the kind ever appeared so I stopped thinking they were innocent put-upons. They had the chance to clear the air, and it was/is suspicious that they didn’t use it.
Anyone know any more?
It would be useful to add that the secretive and immensely powerful Bilderberg Group not only support ‘globalization’ but sees it ad an ESSENTIAL pre-cursor to their liberty-shattering ‘New World Order’.
For more on the Bilderberg Group and its annual, secret and heavily-guarded Bilderberg Conferences, see:
http://www.survivalistskills.com/bildpres.htm
http://www.survivalistskills.com/BILDNEWS.HTM
http://www.survivalistskills.com/bild98.htm
http://www.survivalistskills.com/HERALD.HTM
http://www.survivalistskills.com/NICSTORY.HTM
These meetings are attended by select members of the US and British politcal and financial elite, among others, and the decisions taken THERE annually decide what the world will think of America [and Britian] thereafter.
There’s an excellent selection of other articles from the ‘New World Order Intelligence Update’ (http://www.nwointelligence.com) archived at http://www.rarehistorybooks.com/NWOLINKS.HTM and are also mirrored at http://www.torontochristianbooks.com/NWOGOV.HTM.
Well worth reading for insight into how the world REALLY works [politics included1].
I often wonder who the hell George Monbiot thinks he is.
Of course the views of Spiked do not resemble in any way Monbiot’s fantasy description quoted above.
But don’t take my word for it – have a look at Spiked-online. It’s all perfectly clear and refreshingly sensible.