In case anyone missed it, here's an extract from today's Guardian interview with Noam Chomsky.
Chomsky discusses Srebrenica- and once again gives his support to the excellent Diana Johnstone. Chomsky is absolutely right to talk of the 'hysterical fanaticism' about Bosnia in western culture- and the Stalinist response directed towards all those who dared- and continue to dare to question the 'party line'.
For neo-conservatives, the cause of Bosnian separatism was an obsession and inflating the casualty figures not just of Srebrenica- but of the whole Yugoslav conflict, became a political necessity. All the deaths in the conflict were tragic- but the deliberate exaggeration of casualty figures to justify the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 was an act of true depravity.
Q: Do you regret supporting those who say the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated?A (Chomsky): My only regret is that I didn't do it strongly enough
As some see it, one ill-judged choice of cause (by Chomsky) was the accusation made by Living Marxism magazine that during the Bosnian war, shots used by ITN of a Serb-run detention camp were faked. The magazine folded after ITN sued, but the controversy flared up again in 2003 when a journalist called Diane Johnstone made similar allegations in a Swedish magazine, Ordfront, taking issue with the official number of victims of the Srebrenica massacre. (She said they were exaggerated.) In the ensuing outcry, Chomsky lent his name to a letter praising Johnstone's "outstanding work". Does he regret signing it?
"No," he says indignantly. "It is outstanding. My only regret is that I didn't do it strongly enough. It may be wrong; but it is very careful and outstanding work."
How, I wonder, can journalism be wrong and still outstanding?
"Look," says Chomsky, "there was a hysterical fanaticism about Bosnia in western culture which was very much like a passionate religious conviction. It was like old-fashioned Stalinism: if you depart a couple of millimetres from the party line, you're a traitor, you're destroyed. It's totally irrational. And Diane Johnstone, whether you like it or not, has done serious, honest work. And in the case of Living Marxism, for a big corporation to put a small newspaper out of business because they think something they reported was false, is outrageous."
They didn't "think" it was false; it was proven to be so in a court of law.
But Chomsky insists that "LM was probably correct" and that, in any case, it is irrelevant. "It had nothing to do with whether LM or Diane Johnstone were right or wrong." It is a question, he says, of freedom of speech. "And if they were wrong, sure; but don't just scream well, if you say you're in favour of that you're in favour of putting Jews in gas chambers."
Monday, October 31, 2005
Sunday, October 30, 2005
How does he get away with it?
How does Nick Cohen get away with writing such tripe? In the Observer today there's a typically silly and
factually incorrect piece in which he talks of 'sectarian leaders from the Slobodan Milosevic mould ..... exploiting the double antipathy of race and class'... From the what mould Nick? Of the mould of the man who said 'Socialism in particular, being a progressive and just democratic society, should not allow people to be divided by national or religious identity' ? Ludicrously, Cohen accuses Milosevic's Yugoslavia of stirring up antipathy towards the Croats. When I organised a demonstration and petition signing outside the British Embassy in Budapest to protest at the NATO aggression against Yugoslavia in 1999, the first two people to sign my petition were Croats who had lived in Serbia for many years. They told me that they had never encountered any discrimination and had lived happily in Milosevic's Yugoslavia, unlike the hundreds of thousands of Serbs and gypsies who had been expelled from Franco Tudjman's Croatia.
Tudjman, you may recall was a man who once said that he would never allow a Jew, Serb or Gypsy to marry into his family. Cohen is from a Jewish background- and you might have thought he would mention the anti-semitic Tudjman and not the pro-Yugoslavia, socialist and anti-racist Milosevic in his article. But of course, for pro-war, B52 liberals like Cohen, a bit of unintelligent- and unsubstantiated Slobo-bashing is par for the course.
factually incorrect piece in which he talks of 'sectarian leaders from the Slobodan Milosevic mould ..... exploiting the double antipathy of race and class'... From the what mould Nick? Of the mould of the man who said 'Socialism in particular, being a progressive and just democratic society, should not allow people to be divided by national or religious identity' ? Ludicrously, Cohen accuses Milosevic's Yugoslavia of stirring up antipathy towards the Croats. When I organised a demonstration and petition signing outside the British Embassy in Budapest to protest at the NATO aggression against Yugoslavia in 1999, the first two people to sign my petition were Croats who had lived in Serbia for many years. They told me that they had never encountered any discrimination and had lived happily in Milosevic's Yugoslavia, unlike the hundreds of thousands of Serbs and gypsies who had been expelled from Franco Tudjman's Croatia.
Tudjman, you may recall was a man who once said that he would never allow a Jew, Serb or Gypsy to marry into his family. Cohen is from a Jewish background- and you might have thought he would mention the anti-semitic Tudjman and not the pro-Yugoslavia, socialist and anti-racist Milosevic in his article. But of course, for pro-war, B52 liberals like Cohen, a bit of unintelligent- and unsubstantiated Slobo-bashing is par for the course.
Saturday, October 29, 2005
The Silence of the Hawks
Lewis Libby, the Chief of Staff to Dick Cheney, and a man who was instrumental in shaping the 'evidence' for the case for going to war with Iraq- has been charged with obstruction of justice, lying to the FBI and committing perjury before a grand jury. Yet, faced with this big and important news story- how do pro-war websites and bloggers respond? Well, by ignoring it all together. Not a word from Norman Geras- a man normally so keen to give an opinion. Silence too from Oliver Kamm. And a deafening hush also from the otherwise very voluble Stephen Pollard. Compare the warmongers' reaction to the Libby affair to the way they are always so quick to make their voices heard when allegations against George Galloway are made.
In his report in today's Guardian, Julian Borger quotes David Gergen, a former adviser to Reagan and Clinton as saying that a move for a new inquiry on how America got into the Iraq war is now likely.
A full, independent inquiry into how a small group of neo-conservative fanatics managed to push both America and Britain into such a disastrous conflict cannot come a day too soon.
In his report in today's Guardian, Julian Borger quotes David Gergen, a former adviser to Reagan and Clinton as saying that a move for a new inquiry on how America got into the Iraq war is now likely.
A full, independent inquiry into how a small group of neo-conservative fanatics managed to push both America and Britain into such a disastrous conflict cannot come a day too soon.
Friday, October 28, 2005
The End of 'New Europe'
Here's a terrific piece from today's Guardian by Jonathan Steele on the end of Donald Rumsfeld's 'New Europe' .
The whole idea of 'New Europe' - a place beloved by pro-war, free market fundamentalists- was a fiction from start to finish. Although many of the governments in the region supported the Iraq war, the populations of the countries themselves, as opinion poll after opinion poll showed, were overwhelmingly opposed to the US-led aggression. And the myth of the 'dynamic free-market economies of Eastern Europe' is simply not borne out by the facts. In Poland, a country where 12% 0f the population are living in poverty, the long-suffering electorate have said enough is enough- and voted instead for a government and a President which puts social solidarity ahead of appeasing western multinationals.
And next spring, the neo-liberal coalition which runs Hungary will be booted out of office too.
Poland's disenchanted killed off 'New Europe'
Poverty and regional inequality helped win votes for a socially conservative, nationalist and Catholic president
Jonathan Steele
Friday October 28, 2005The Guardian
"New Europe" is dead, and that's official. The verdict is not that of an obscure thinktank. It comes from the central actor in the heartland of what was once deemed to be a bold new part of the old continent, namely the people of Poland.
In two recent elections, for parliament in September and for the presidency on Sunday, they gave most support to a party which wants a strong state and is highly suspicious of the free-market reforms of the last 15 years. It also has major reservations about the European Union.
Its victory offers an important reality check against the hot air of yesterday's Hampton Court talkathon and Tony Blair's latest calls to step up the pace of liberal reform. The biggest of the EU's new members is as attached to the old social model and as anxious about unregulated globalisation as the "no" voters in the French and Dutch referendums.
The "new Europe" tag was invented by Donald Rumsfeld in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq and initially covered foreign policy. Flushed with their post-communist freedom, it was claimed, eastern and central Europeans understood the value of Washington's international campaign to promote democracy better than western Europeans did. The claim soon proved inaccurate. The governments of "new Europe" supported the war, but majorities in the polls did not. Poles and Czechs were no more enthusiastic about having their troops in Iraq than people in Britain.
"New Europe" was then used to categorise attitudes to internal EU reform. It is this simplification which Poland's voters have exposed. The victorious Law and Justice party offers a traditional Catholic and nationalist platform, which is more about protecting inherited values than promoting further reform.
On social issues president-elect Lech Kaczynski is a man of the right, a critic of homosexuality and an advocate of the death penalty. After "nice" Lech Walesa, the Solidarity founder who became Poland's first non-communist president, we now have a "nasty" Lech, whose election was greeted in Brussels with warnings that he would be watched for any violation of EU standards. His twin brother, Jaroslaw, who led the Law and Justice party to victory in parliamentary elections, has similar views. He did not triumph outright and is still embroiled in fierce negotiations for a "grand coalition" which make Angela Merkel's enforced marriage to the social democrats in next-door Germany look simple.
The fact that Walesa and the two Kaczynskis are all former Solidarity activists shows how far Polish politics has moved from the romanticism of 1989 - and how much Solidarity, even in its first years, was an amalgam of not easily reconcilable interests: workers' rights, Catholic nationalism and westernising liberalism, to name just a few.
Simple slogans about freedom tended to exaggerate the political dimension of the Polish revolution. It also contained an important economic core. What happened in this autumn's Polish elections is the return of economics. During Poland's 16 years of neoliberal reforms, it did not matter much whether the governments which brought them in were post-communists or anti-communists. Economic strategies remained the same.
Now the electorate wants a rethink. At least those who voted do. Disenchantment with politicians of all stripes is high, with barely 40% taking part in September, the lowest turnout since 1989. The Civic Platform, which had expected to win but came second in both polls, is a radical "flat tax" party which advocates a 16% rate across the board. "Flat tax", which unashamedly goes against the philosophy that governments have a duty to promote income redistribution, was almost Angela Merkel's undoing as well. Her proposal to appoint a flat-taxer as finance minister caused a huge slump in her campaign.
Poland's elections exposed a divided country in which regional inequalities have got worse. The geographical split is not unlike Ukraine's. Poland's poor rural east and "rust belt", areas that benefited from postwar industrialisation and are now struggling, voted for the Kaczynskis. Warsaw and the more prosperous north and west chose the flat-taxers.
The results should not have been a surprise. The World Bank has just published its latest survey of central Europe and the former Soviet Union. The bank is hardly a leftwing propaganda outfit but its report, Growth, Poverty, and Inequality, shows how far the region still has to go to make up for the fall in living standards which came with the collapse of communism. In 1988 only 4% of the region's people were poor - defined as having an income of less than £1.25 a day. Now poverty affects 12%.
This is better than five years ago, when poverty affected 20% of the region's people. Things have got better thanks largely to the rise in world oil prices, which has pulled up the economy of Russia and some of its immediate neighbours. Among the countries covered by the World Bank, the eight new EU members are much better off. But the report shows that Poland, alone among them, has seen a further increase in poverty over the last five years.
It also found a growth in inequality between regions, with prosperity largely confined to capital cities while smaller towns and rural areas suffered. The World Bank notes that subjective impressions also matter. It talks of the "transition shock" caused by the sudden switch to market economics. "The socialist legacy of high access to social services (eg, heating) and infrastructure (eg, healthcare) which have since been eroded means that people feel an acute sense of deprivation," it says.
The lesson for the future is that assessments of progress and popular satisfaction must include socioeconomic factors as well as levels of political freedom. EU governments should not get involved in narrow crusades. Poland's neighbour, Belarus - which the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, has called "Europe's last dictatorship" - is sure to attract attention next year when it holds presidential elections. The World Bank survey is relevant here. While poverty went up in Poland, Belarus saw one of the sharpest declines, enjoying "broad-based economic growth beneficial to labour" in which the "benefits were broadly shared by the population".
Few doubt that the Belarus election will be less pluralistic than Poland's; but social solidarity, a strong state, and a government which attempts to lessen inequalities are what Polish voters have shown they want. The people of Belarus probably have similar views.
The whole idea of 'New Europe' - a place beloved by pro-war, free market fundamentalists- was a fiction from start to finish. Although many of the governments in the region supported the Iraq war, the populations of the countries themselves, as opinion poll after opinion poll showed, were overwhelmingly opposed to the US-led aggression. And the myth of the 'dynamic free-market economies of Eastern Europe' is simply not borne out by the facts. In Poland, a country where 12% 0f the population are living in poverty, the long-suffering electorate have said enough is enough- and voted instead for a government and a President which puts social solidarity ahead of appeasing western multinationals.
And next spring, the neo-liberal coalition which runs Hungary will be booted out of office too.
Poland's disenchanted killed off 'New Europe'
Poverty and regional inequality helped win votes for a socially conservative, nationalist and Catholic president
Jonathan Steele
Friday October 28, 2005The Guardian
"New Europe" is dead, and that's official. The verdict is not that of an obscure thinktank. It comes from the central actor in the heartland of what was once deemed to be a bold new part of the old continent, namely the people of Poland.
In two recent elections, for parliament in September and for the presidency on Sunday, they gave most support to a party which wants a strong state and is highly suspicious of the free-market reforms of the last 15 years. It also has major reservations about the European Union.
Its victory offers an important reality check against the hot air of yesterday's Hampton Court talkathon and Tony Blair's latest calls to step up the pace of liberal reform. The biggest of the EU's new members is as attached to the old social model and as anxious about unregulated globalisation as the "no" voters in the French and Dutch referendums.
The "new Europe" tag was invented by Donald Rumsfeld in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq and initially covered foreign policy. Flushed with their post-communist freedom, it was claimed, eastern and central Europeans understood the value of Washington's international campaign to promote democracy better than western Europeans did. The claim soon proved inaccurate. The governments of "new Europe" supported the war, but majorities in the polls did not. Poles and Czechs were no more enthusiastic about having their troops in Iraq than people in Britain.
"New Europe" was then used to categorise attitudes to internal EU reform. It is this simplification which Poland's voters have exposed. The victorious Law and Justice party offers a traditional Catholic and nationalist platform, which is more about protecting inherited values than promoting further reform.
On social issues president-elect Lech Kaczynski is a man of the right, a critic of homosexuality and an advocate of the death penalty. After "nice" Lech Walesa, the Solidarity founder who became Poland's first non-communist president, we now have a "nasty" Lech, whose election was greeted in Brussels with warnings that he would be watched for any violation of EU standards. His twin brother, Jaroslaw, who led the Law and Justice party to victory in parliamentary elections, has similar views. He did not triumph outright and is still embroiled in fierce negotiations for a "grand coalition" which make Angela Merkel's enforced marriage to the social democrats in next-door Germany look simple.
The fact that Walesa and the two Kaczynskis are all former Solidarity activists shows how far Polish politics has moved from the romanticism of 1989 - and how much Solidarity, even in its first years, was an amalgam of not easily reconcilable interests: workers' rights, Catholic nationalism and westernising liberalism, to name just a few.
Simple slogans about freedom tended to exaggerate the political dimension of the Polish revolution. It also contained an important economic core. What happened in this autumn's Polish elections is the return of economics. During Poland's 16 years of neoliberal reforms, it did not matter much whether the governments which brought them in were post-communists or anti-communists. Economic strategies remained the same.
Now the electorate wants a rethink. At least those who voted do. Disenchantment with politicians of all stripes is high, with barely 40% taking part in September, the lowest turnout since 1989. The Civic Platform, which had expected to win but came second in both polls, is a radical "flat tax" party which advocates a 16% rate across the board. "Flat tax", which unashamedly goes against the philosophy that governments have a duty to promote income redistribution, was almost Angela Merkel's undoing as well. Her proposal to appoint a flat-taxer as finance minister caused a huge slump in her campaign.
Poland's elections exposed a divided country in which regional inequalities have got worse. The geographical split is not unlike Ukraine's. Poland's poor rural east and "rust belt", areas that benefited from postwar industrialisation and are now struggling, voted for the Kaczynskis. Warsaw and the more prosperous north and west chose the flat-taxers.
The results should not have been a surprise. The World Bank has just published its latest survey of central Europe and the former Soviet Union. The bank is hardly a leftwing propaganda outfit but its report, Growth, Poverty, and Inequality, shows how far the region still has to go to make up for the fall in living standards which came with the collapse of communism. In 1988 only 4% of the region's people were poor - defined as having an income of less than £1.25 a day. Now poverty affects 12%.
This is better than five years ago, when poverty affected 20% of the region's people. Things have got better thanks largely to the rise in world oil prices, which has pulled up the economy of Russia and some of its immediate neighbours. Among the countries covered by the World Bank, the eight new EU members are much better off. But the report shows that Poland, alone among them, has seen a further increase in poverty over the last five years.
It also found a growth in inequality between regions, with prosperity largely confined to capital cities while smaller towns and rural areas suffered. The World Bank notes that subjective impressions also matter. It talks of the "transition shock" caused by the sudden switch to market economics. "The socialist legacy of high access to social services (eg, heating) and infrastructure (eg, healthcare) which have since been eroded means that people feel an acute sense of deprivation," it says.
The lesson for the future is that assessments of progress and popular satisfaction must include socioeconomic factors as well as levels of political freedom. EU governments should not get involved in narrow crusades. Poland's neighbour, Belarus - which the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, has called "Europe's last dictatorship" - is sure to attract attention next year when it holds presidential elections. The World Bank survey is relevant here. While poverty went up in Poland, Belarus saw one of the sharpest declines, enjoying "broad-based economic growth beneficial to labour" in which the "benefits were broadly shared by the population".
Few doubt that the Belarus election will be less pluralistic than Poland's; but social solidarity, a strong state, and a government which attempts to lessen inequalities are what Polish voters have shown they want. The people of Belarus probably have similar views.
Thursday, October 27, 2005
Stephen Pollard - the Fan of War, Destruction and Killing
Stephen Pollard, the man who once wrote; ''I am a warmonger. I am bloodthirsty. I am rabid. My friends want only peace and harmony, but I want to wreak destruction and killing', accuses me on his website of being a 'fan of ethnic cleansers'. It's rather like being labelled a supporter of violence by Adolf Hitler.
I have never written a single line, or uttered a single word in support of 'ethnic cleansing'. And neither have I ever been an 'apologist for mass murder' - another unsubstantiated- and indeed libellous claim often made by Pollard.
Pollard is of course referring to my opposition to the trial of Slobodan Milosevic at the Hague. For Pollard and his gang of serial regime changers (they're gunning for Syria now), Milosevic is guilty as charged. But for the rest of us, who believe in that quaint old notion that a man is innocent until proven guilty the case against Milosevic has in no way been proven. But of course, neo-conservatives don't let little things like the absence of evidence get in their way. These were the people who after all, told us day after day that Iraq possessed WMDS......
I have never written a single line, or uttered a single word in support of 'ethnic cleansing'. And neither have I ever been an 'apologist for mass murder' - another unsubstantiated- and indeed libellous claim often made by Pollard.
Pollard is of course referring to my opposition to the trial of Slobodan Milosevic at the Hague. For Pollard and his gang of serial regime changers (they're gunning for Syria now), Milosevic is guilty as charged. But for the rest of us, who believe in that quaint old notion that a man is innocent until proven guilty the case against Milosevic has in no way been proven. But of course, neo-conservatives don't let little things like the absence of evidence get in their way. These were the people who after all, told us day after day that Iraq possessed WMDS......
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Stephen Pollard: the very undemocratic democrat
Neo-conservatives make great play of how much they love democracy and freedom of speech.
But the reality is somewhat different. There is no greater example of neo-conservative hypocrisy than the journalist Stephen Pollard, a man who values debate and democratic discussion so much that he does not allow readers to add their comments on his webblog. As the following exchange shows, Pollard doesn't like it one little bit when others seek to challenge his assertions. Back in July, Pollard wrote a piece for The Times entitled 'How Not to Count Bodies' . The piece is enclosed below in its entirety as is the email I sent to Pollard in response- and also his very pompous reply. My wife Zsuzsanna also challenged Pollard on his assertions, but again received a brush-off. Pollard is very happy to accuse me, without any justification, of being an 'apologist for mass murder' and to denigrate the work of Dr Herold and Dr John Sloboda, but he seems very reluctant to debate the issues involved in a considered and non-abusive way. Could it just be, that he knows just how flimsy and contradictory his case is?
How not to count bodies (the Times) 21st July 2005
By Stephen Pollard
Splashed on the front page of The Independent yesterday, was the figure 24,865. "Revealed: Iraq’s Civilian Death Toll", read the headline.
It was not alone. The BBC’s bulletins ran with the same figure, as did the Daily Mirror and The Guardian — derived, said the latter, from "a detailed study of the human cost of the conflict".
There is only one problem with the figure — not that you would know it from the credulous reporting. It is an entirely arbitrary figure published by political agitators.
The figure was released yesterday by two organisations, Iraq Body Count and the Oxford Research Group. According to the BBC, the former "is one of the most widely-quoted sources of information on the civilian death toll in Iraq". Indeed it is — because the BBC itself reports its propaganda as fact.
One of the leading lights of the IBC is Marc Herold, a professor of economics and women’s studies at the University of New Hampshire. Professor Herold has attempted this trick before, when he "revealed" in December 2001 that there were then 3,800 civilian casualties in Afghanistan. The now-accepted figure at the time was two thirds less — about 1,200.
The reason his figures were so wrong then, and are almost certainly wrong now, is that the IBC’s methodology is designed to come to as large a total as possible. The organisation simply adds up all reports of casualties, no matter what the source or how scant the evidence. Hardly surprising, since the IBC’s associates are a veritable who’s who of anti-war activism.
The co-founder of IBC, John Sloboda, is also the director of the Oxford Research Group, an organisation "which seeks to develop effective methods whereby people can bring about positive change on issues of national and international security by non-violent means". Translated, ORG is a lobbying group with a political agenda.
Professor Sloboda describes himself as having "worked with the Committee for Peace in the Balkans". What that admirable title obscures is that the committee was, as he himself has put it, "essentially a lobbying and campaigning group against the Kosovo war". Having opposed the liberation of Kosovo, he turned to Iraq.
The civilian costs of the war have been greater than its advocates expected. It does not help in getting to the truth, however, when parts of the media report partisan lobbying as fact.
------------------------------------
Neil Clark email to Stephen Pollard
Re: How not to count war bodies-Stephen Pollard’s Thunderer 21st July 2005 Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2005 12:02:54 +0000
Dear Stephen,
So you believe the figure of 24,865 civilian deaths from the war on Iraq to be 'an entirely arbitrary figure published by political agitators'? . I wonder if you think the same of the figure of 500,000 Kosovan Albanians, which the US State Department claimed had been killed by Yugoslav forces in the war of 1999? After one of the most extensive forensic searches in history, only 4000 bodies have been unearthed, a figure which includes Serbs, Roma, Kosovan Albanians killed by the KLA, and those killed in the NATO bombings. Yet despite the lack of evidence, supporters of the war against Yugoslavia- a conflict for which you were an enthusiastic cheerleader, continue to talk of 'genocide' and to compare Slobodan Milosevic with Adolf Hitler. As you yourself conclude, it really doesn't help when attempting to discover true casualty figures, that parts of the media report 'partisan lobbying' as fact.
Yours,
Neil Clark,
Stephen Pollard’s reply:
Mr Clark,
I do not intend to get into an argument with an apologist for mass murder such as yourself. Your email has been placed on my junk filter, appropriately.
Stephen Pollard
Email to Stephen Pollard from Zsuzsanna Clark
Mr Pollard, Yesterday my husband Neil asked you a very simple and polite question in response to the claims you had made in your Times article 'How not to count dead bodies'. You replied in a very rude and dismissive way- calling my husband an 'apologist for mass murder'- which he most certainly is not. If you were to repeat that allegation in print, please be in no doubt that my husband would initiate libel proceedings against you. The suspicion is that you do not wish to answer the question because you know you are on extremely shaky ground. But you cannot expect to promote your opinions so forcefully in the media and not be challenged. You can ignore this email if you wish, and put me too in the 'junk mail', but I am sure that I will not be the last person attempting to receive an answer to this question. So here it is again:
You believe the figure of 24,865 civilian deaths from the war on Iraq to be 'an entirely arbitrary figure published by political agitators'. Do you think the same of the figure of 500,000 Kosovan Albanians, which the US State Department claimed had been killed by Yugoslav forces in the war of 1999? After one of the most extensive forensic searches in history, only 4000 bodies have been unearthed, a figure which includes Serbs, Roma, Kosovan Albanians killed by the KLA, and those killed in the NATO bombings. Yet despite the lack of evidence, supporters of the war against Yugoslavia- a conflict for which you were an enthusiastic cheerleader, continue to talk of 'genocide' and to compare Slobodan Milosevic with Adolf Hitler.
Zsuzsanna Clark
But the reality is somewhat different. There is no greater example of neo-conservative hypocrisy than the journalist Stephen Pollard, a man who values debate and democratic discussion so much that he does not allow readers to add their comments on his webblog. As the following exchange shows, Pollard doesn't like it one little bit when others seek to challenge his assertions. Back in July, Pollard wrote a piece for The Times entitled 'How Not to Count Bodies' . The piece is enclosed below in its entirety as is the email I sent to Pollard in response- and also his very pompous reply. My wife Zsuzsanna also challenged Pollard on his assertions, but again received a brush-off. Pollard is very happy to accuse me, without any justification, of being an 'apologist for mass murder' and to denigrate the work of Dr Herold and Dr John Sloboda, but he seems very reluctant to debate the issues involved in a considered and non-abusive way. Could it just be, that he knows just how flimsy and contradictory his case is?
How not to count bodies (the Times) 21st July 2005
By Stephen Pollard
Splashed on the front page of The Independent yesterday, was the figure 24,865. "Revealed: Iraq’s Civilian Death Toll", read the headline.
It was not alone. The BBC’s bulletins ran with the same figure, as did the Daily Mirror and The Guardian — derived, said the latter, from "a detailed study of the human cost of the conflict".
There is only one problem with the figure — not that you would know it from the credulous reporting. It is an entirely arbitrary figure published by political agitators.
The figure was released yesterday by two organisations, Iraq Body Count and the Oxford Research Group. According to the BBC, the former "is one of the most widely-quoted sources of information on the civilian death toll in Iraq". Indeed it is — because the BBC itself reports its propaganda as fact.
One of the leading lights of the IBC is Marc Herold, a professor of economics and women’s studies at the University of New Hampshire. Professor Herold has attempted this trick before, when he "revealed" in December 2001 that there were then 3,800 civilian casualties in Afghanistan. The now-accepted figure at the time was two thirds less — about 1,200.
The reason his figures were so wrong then, and are almost certainly wrong now, is that the IBC’s methodology is designed to come to as large a total as possible. The organisation simply adds up all reports of casualties, no matter what the source or how scant the evidence. Hardly surprising, since the IBC’s associates are a veritable who’s who of anti-war activism.
The co-founder of IBC, John Sloboda, is also the director of the Oxford Research Group, an organisation "which seeks to develop effective methods whereby people can bring about positive change on issues of national and international security by non-violent means". Translated, ORG is a lobbying group with a political agenda.
Professor Sloboda describes himself as having "worked with the Committee for Peace in the Balkans". What that admirable title obscures is that the committee was, as he himself has put it, "essentially a lobbying and campaigning group against the Kosovo war". Having opposed the liberation of Kosovo, he turned to Iraq.
The civilian costs of the war have been greater than its advocates expected. It does not help in getting to the truth, however, when parts of the media report partisan lobbying as fact.
------------------------------------
Neil Clark email to Stephen Pollard
Re: How not to count war bodies-Stephen Pollard’s Thunderer 21st July 2005 Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2005 12:02:54 +0000
Dear Stephen,
So you believe the figure of 24,865 civilian deaths from the war on Iraq to be 'an entirely arbitrary figure published by political agitators'? . I wonder if you think the same of the figure of 500,000 Kosovan Albanians, which the US State Department claimed had been killed by Yugoslav forces in the war of 1999? After one of the most extensive forensic searches in history, only 4000 bodies have been unearthed, a figure which includes Serbs, Roma, Kosovan Albanians killed by the KLA, and those killed in the NATO bombings. Yet despite the lack of evidence, supporters of the war against Yugoslavia- a conflict for which you were an enthusiastic cheerleader, continue to talk of 'genocide' and to compare Slobodan Milosevic with Adolf Hitler. As you yourself conclude, it really doesn't help when attempting to discover true casualty figures, that parts of the media report 'partisan lobbying' as fact.
Yours,
Neil Clark,
Stephen Pollard’s reply:
Mr Clark,
I do not intend to get into an argument with an apologist for mass murder such as yourself. Your email has been placed on my junk filter, appropriately.
Stephen Pollard
Email to Stephen Pollard from Zsuzsanna Clark
Mr Pollard, Yesterday my husband Neil asked you a very simple and polite question in response to the claims you had made in your Times article 'How not to count dead bodies'. You replied in a very rude and dismissive way- calling my husband an 'apologist for mass murder'- which he most certainly is not. If you were to repeat that allegation in print, please be in no doubt that my husband would initiate libel proceedings against you. The suspicion is that you do not wish to answer the question because you know you are on extremely shaky ground. But you cannot expect to promote your opinions so forcefully in the media and not be challenged. You can ignore this email if you wish, and put me too in the 'junk mail', but I am sure that I will not be the last person attempting to receive an answer to this question. So here it is again:
You believe the figure of 24,865 civilian deaths from the war on Iraq to be 'an entirely arbitrary figure published by political agitators'. Do you think the same of the figure of 500,000 Kosovan Albanians, which the US State Department claimed had been killed by Yugoslav forces in the war of 1999? After one of the most extensive forensic searches in history, only 4000 bodies have been unearthed, a figure which includes Serbs, Roma, Kosovan Albanians killed by the KLA, and those killed in the NATO bombings. Yet despite the lack of evidence, supporters of the war against Yugoslavia- a conflict for which you were an enthusiastic cheerleader, continue to talk of 'genocide' and to compare Slobodan Milosevic with Adolf Hitler.
Zsuzsanna Clark
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
The Neo-Conservative Gazette, 2nd September 1939
I found some copies of the 'Neo-Conservative Gazette' for September 1939 in the attic. Here's what their leading commentators then made of the German invasion of Poland......
ON THE GERMAN INVASION OF POLAND
2nd September 1939
David Aaronovitch
There are those who say that Germany should have acted within the framework of ‘international law’ and worked with the League of Nations to solve the problem of Danzig and the Polish Corridor. But I say well done Adolf ! The human rights of the German minorities in Poland are far more important than the niceties of international treaties. By ignoring ‘national sovereignty’ fetishists like the Conservative M.P. Winston Churchill and the pacifist lefties of the New Statesman and The Manchester Guardian, Adolf has shown himself to be a true neo-conservative. In fact, one could say the German Chancellor is the Father of All Neo-Cons. He's a man who puts human rights and regime change first, and silly little things like national borders last. Here’s to the Thousand Year Reich! And bring on the Low Countries!
REGIME CHANGE IN POLAND! BRING IT ON!
2nd September 1939, by Stephen Pollard
I am a warmonger. I am bloodthirsty. I am rabid. My friends want only peace and harmony, but I want to wreak destruction and killing. That’s why I am so in favour of Adolf Hitler and his ‘go get ‘em‘ foreign policy. OK, Adolf still hasn’t introduced a flat rate tax or introduced education vouchers, but no-one’s perfect. I have just written a new paper for one of the sixty-seven Think Tanks of which I am an Associate Fellow-on how privatising health care in Germany could free up even more money for Adolf’s rearmament programme and thereby bring regime change to even more of the poor repressed peoples of Eastern Europe. Copies of my biography on Sir William Joynson-Hicks are still available at £1 5/2d
WHERE’S THE GRAIN MONEY WINSTON?
2nd September 1939
Best of the Blogs: Harry’s Place webblog
We at Harry's Place rejoice that the Germany's humanitarian intervention to liberate the people of Poland has begun. But the big question of the hour will not go away. Where did Winston Churchill get the money from to own a string of racehorses and chain-smoke Havana cigars? The documents found by German journalists in the Ministry of the Interior Building in Prague last October- and published first in the Neo-Conservative Gazette, clearly show that Churchill's wife Clementine received a total of £1m from the Czech Government in the form of licences to ship Slovakian grain. It’s time for Winston to come clean and admit that his so-called principled opposition to Germany’s humanitarian foreign policy was based on pure financial greed. 'Gorgeous' Winnie must go to Berlin immediately and answer questions before the Reichstag Committee on Foreign Affairs. Nothing else will do! _________________________________________________________________
ON THE GERMAN INVASION OF POLAND
2nd September 1939
David Aaronovitch
There are those who say that Germany should have acted within the framework of ‘international law’ and worked with the League of Nations to solve the problem of Danzig and the Polish Corridor. But I say well done Adolf ! The human rights of the German minorities in Poland are far more important than the niceties of international treaties. By ignoring ‘national sovereignty’ fetishists like the Conservative M.P. Winston Churchill and the pacifist lefties of the New Statesman and The Manchester Guardian, Adolf has shown himself to be a true neo-conservative. In fact, one could say the German Chancellor is the Father of All Neo-Cons. He's a man who puts human rights and regime change first, and silly little things like national borders last. Here’s to the Thousand Year Reich! And bring on the Low Countries!
REGIME CHANGE IN POLAND! BRING IT ON!
2nd September 1939, by Stephen Pollard
I am a warmonger. I am bloodthirsty. I am rabid. My friends want only peace and harmony, but I want to wreak destruction and killing. That’s why I am so in favour of Adolf Hitler and his ‘go get ‘em‘ foreign policy. OK, Adolf still hasn’t introduced a flat rate tax or introduced education vouchers, but no-one’s perfect. I have just written a new paper for one of the sixty-seven Think Tanks of which I am an Associate Fellow-on how privatising health care in Germany could free up even more money for Adolf’s rearmament programme and thereby bring regime change to even more of the poor repressed peoples of Eastern Europe. Copies of my biography on Sir William Joynson-Hicks are still available at £1 5/2d
WHERE’S THE GRAIN MONEY WINSTON?
2nd September 1939
Best of the Blogs: Harry’s Place webblog
We at Harry's Place rejoice that the Germany's humanitarian intervention to liberate the people of Poland has begun. But the big question of the hour will not go away. Where did Winston Churchill get the money from to own a string of racehorses and chain-smoke Havana cigars? The documents found by German journalists in the Ministry of the Interior Building in Prague last October- and published first in the Neo-Conservative Gazette, clearly show that Churchill's wife Clementine received a total of £1m from the Czech Government in the form of licences to ship Slovakian grain. It’s time for Winston to come clean and admit that his so-called principled opposition to Germany’s humanitarian foreign policy was based on pure financial greed. 'Gorgeous' Winnie must go to Berlin immediately and answer questions before the Reichstag Committee on Foreign Affairs. Nothing else will do! _________________________________________________________________
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
