'Living Marxism' and 'Tory sleaze'

If, like any sensible person, you're uninterested in the history of obscure far-Left groupuscules, don't read on. But Stephen Pollard makes a pertinent observation about a defunct magazine called, counterintuitively enough, 'Living Marxism', whose principal writers now make a living advancing some occasionally quite sensible libertarian thoughts in the broadsheet newspapers:

We should never forget who these people are, and where they come from. They are Marxists who found in the 1980s that everything in which they believed - their entire world view - was collapsing around them. They had two choices: quietly disappear from view with their tails between their legs; or re-invent themselves. They chose - hugely successfully - the latter.

As I say, they do sometimes say interesting things. But I nonetheless regard them with contempt, and I object to being lectured about the way world works by people who have had their entire belief-system shattered.

I agree, especially given the particular reason that Living Marxism (which rebranded itself as 'LM' magazine) is no longer with us. It is advanced in this BBC report from March 2000:

ITN and two of its reporters have won £375,000 in High Court libel damages from a Marxist magazine which claimed they had faked pictures of Bosnian Serb war crimes.

Reporters Penny Marshall and Ian Williams were each awarded £150,000 over the Living Marxism story which called into question ITN's coverage of the Bosnian war.

The left-wing magazine was also ordered to pay £75,000 to ITN for libelling them in a February 1997 article.

LM mounted a fairly successful campaign to attract support from media and arts figures on the grounds that they were a small outfit being sued a by a huge one. Suffice it to say that, knowing the issues reasonably well from some of the parties involved, I consider ITN were absolutely justified in defending the integrity of their reporters by suing the magazine. To see why, assuming you have a strong stomach, try this informative account by an academic Leftist of a pernicious phenomenon, and note LM's role in the business:

Supporters of the Milosevic regime and apologists for the Bosnian Serbs began a long propaganda campaign in the mid-1990s to obscure what really happened at the camps near Prijedor. Unraveling this fabric of deceit takes us along the fringes of the Stalinoid Left, and reveals how Project Censored [the organisation the author is criticising] got caught up in the whitewash. The impetus for the cover-up began with the trial of Dusko Tadic, the first case completed through conviction and sentencing by the ICTY.

Tadic was the former owner of a café in Kozarac, a town near Prijedor, and a member of the reserve traffic police. He was arrested in Munich, Germany, in February 1994 and brought to the Hague to stand trial for numerous heinous crimes, including the beating and torture of several men at the Omarska camp on various dates between June 18 and July 27 of 1992--the last of which took place within 10 days of the visit to Omarska by the ITN crew. The Tadic trial began in May 1996 and lasted through October.

The final witness for Tadic's defense was German freelance writer Thomas Deichmann, who appeared as a media expert, presenting an argument that witnesses against Tadic could identify him only because numerous news stories on German television had made Tadic's image well known. After a long string of prosecution witnesses had claimed to have known Tadic for years, Deichmann's testimony was evidently not persuasive, as the court issued a guilty verdict in May 1997 and a sentence in July 1997. Among the many offenses cited in the sentencing judgment for which Tadic was found guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt" was a particularly horrendous sexual mutilation of a man at Omarska.

After the Tadic trial, Deichmann visited Trnopolje in December 1996 and talked with Bosnian Serb officials about the camp, which had been closed down shortly after the ITN visit in August 1992. He wrote an article for the German magazine Novo, which was then translated and published in the British journal Living Marxism in February 1997 under the title "The Picture that Fooled the World," claiming that the famous ITN photo of Fikret Alic had been staged to falsely portray the facilities as concentration camps and the Serbs as modern-day Nazis.

This was the libel that ensured Living Marxism was No Longer Living.

I came across LM at first hand only once, when I worked on the election campaign of Martin Bell, the former BBC war correspondent turned Independent politician, against the Tory MP Neil Hamilton in the 1997 general election. (British readers will recall that Hamilton had become an intense embarrassment to his party owing to allegations of financial impropriety. He lost his seat by a landslide, and later lost a libel action against the owner of Harrods, Mohamed Al Fayed, who had said Hamilton had been the recipient of cash payments from him.) In that election campaign, which did enormous damage to the Conservative Party nationally, proceedings were entertainingly punctuated by an announcement from LM magazine that they were supporting Neil Hamilton. Their reasons were later stated in an interview that the magazine conducted with the embittered and disgraced object of their endorsement:

Hamilton is preoccupied with Labour's role in stitching him up, but it would be just as true to say that Bell is a media construct. The fantasy of standing above party politics for the 'higher principle' of decency is originally the Guardian's. The paper's intervention into the Tatton poll was part of a wider disdain for the adversarial politics of parliamentary democracy. As far as the radical intelligentsia at the Guardian are concerned mass politics is a Dutch auction in which the lowest common denominator always wins.

The Bell candidacy was an attempt to side-step any political debate in favour of a moralistic and artificial debate about the relative character of the two candidates. '"Wankers of the world unite!" seems to be his slogan', suggests Hamilton. Bell's canvassers were well briefed, and their arguments were all laid out on the Guardian's own election website ('The charges against Neil Hamilton'), which the luckless Hamilton has only just discovered: 'I now see where Martin Bell got all that crap he was spraying round in the election.'

For the record, and late though it may be to say so, these allegations are rubbish. No election material was published by Martin Bell's campaign that I had not seen and in most cases written, and it had nothing to do with The Guardian's election web site. (The newspaper is, moreover, hardly a source that I would readily take material from: I take some pride in having drafted an election manifesto so right-wing that Hamilton was incapable of outflanking it.) But given the role of Living Marxism/LM Magazine in libelling honest reporters who told the truth about Serb atrocities, I make the following entreaty: please, Mr Hamilton, do not allow your name and reputation to be used by publications of such standards of ethics and veracity.

Comments

[john b]

I take some pride in having drafted an election manifesto so right-wing that Hamilton was incapable of outflanking it

Good to know the "being a man of the left" is working out for you...

please, Mr Hamilton, do not allow your name and reputation to be used by publications of such standards of ethics and veracity.

I know there's some irony intended here, but anyway...

The way I read the LM case is that while the magazine was horribly wrong, it did what its editors believed was right. Remember that although the Bosnian Serb atrocities were the worst of that conflict, the media ignored the horrible things done by the other two sides - and LM was an outfit that was sceptical of / hostile to Big Media to start with. A reasonable conclusion is that LM genuinely believed ITN made up war crimes to suit its agenda.

ITN was, of course, legally entitled to defend its reputation in court (whether going on to hound LM to ruin was a morally just move or an egregious assault on a harmless, marginal, and interesting publication is a question for the gallery).

Neil Hamilton, meanwhile, is a shameless, self-enriching liar.

It would be a challenge to draft a consistent and plausible moral code under which the editors of LM were considered the ones of lower moral fibre.