Harigate- Part 3 of 3- Hopefully The Last Time Johann Hari Gets Mentioned Here

All of Hari's sins seem to derive from severe narcissism. This is fairly obvious in the case of his David Rose sock puppet where he writes things like this about himself:

'The only bully here is you, who is trying to insert false smears into an entry about an honest journalist who risks his life to report on human rights abuses and who has been given awards for his "courage" by Amnesty International, just because you think he is "self-publicising" and "a careerist".'

It also seems to like all his other failings- plagiarism, inventive reporting, blocking critics on Twitter, appearing as a talking head on any TV discussion show that would have him.

That there are literally hundreds of edits like that is remarkable.It also explains why he feels such deep and personal hatred towards those who remind him that he is not above everybody else- his vendetta against Christine Odone began when she told him not to use the New Statesman's printers for his personal use and his grudge against one of his professors began when he was told off for treating college staff like dirt.

Tim Worstall has written about Hari's economic ignorance for years, and this lack of knowledge about the things he is writing about extends into other areas, such as his piece on Haiti in which he clearly believed it was an island. When you realise that Hari wants to portray himself as a renaissance man it becomes clear why cannot simply acknowledge that he has no competence to write about an important event and move on. He has to reassure the World and himself that he really is a deeply learned figure who can comment authoritatively upon economics, post war history, climate science, Venezuela, Northern Ireland, literature, Big Brother and whatever other topic it is important for a commentator to discuss. To anyone knowledgeable in those fields his writings were often considered superficial but few people know enough about everything to call him out as a complete bullshitter. Though many were struck by his obnoxious behaviour when they did call him up on their area of expertise.

It is why he cannot simply admit that he was not up to the task of eliciting an interesting response in an interview and therefore simply lifts interesting quotes from other sources. It is why he cannot allow everyone to know that he had a fairly elite educational background.

He was not simply lazy and looking for shortcuts like Jayson Blair or a wild fabulist who enjoys making things up like Stephen Glass. He was constantly trying to assert and boost his status among his peers and the public.

It is also why he is still clinging with the assistance of his employers to the idea that he will one day be taken seriously as a commentator again. To realise that his name will not be spoken of alongside liberal intellectual icons like George Orwell, Christopher Hitchens or Roy Jenkins but instead be a footnote in a litany of fraudsters and fantasists alongside Stephen Glass, Damian McBryde and Jeffrey Archer must be exceptionally hard to take.

Yet it is exactly what he deserves.

Harigate- Part 2 of 3- Harigate Becomes Indygate

Johann Hari's inventiveness when it comes to reporting has been common knowledge for many years. See here for many examples. However in his faux-apology he still refuses to accept that he lied in his journalism. In particular he stands by the reporting from the Central African Republic that won him an Orwell Prize:

After it emerged that I had done this, some defenders of the powerful people I had taken on over the years for their wrongdoing saw an opportunity to try to discredit what I had written about them. Amid legitimate criticism of what I had done wrong, there were lots of untrue statements, but I’m hardly in a position to complain that some people saw it as an opportunity to take a free kick. 

In 2007, I travelled through the Central African Republic to report on the fact the French government had been bombing the country. An anonymous claim was made that I had exaggerated the extent of the French bombing, and that I had fabricated a quote from a French soldier on the ground. Two representatives of the NGO that I travelled with came forward to The Independent’s investigation into my journalism and they said my description of the bombing damage was entirely accurate, and that they have photographs of it. They also explained that they witnessed me speaking to several French soldiers when the person making these charges was otherwise occupied. 

The collosal self regard shines through- "defenders of the powerful people I had taken on over the years for their wrongdoing saw an opportunity to try to discredit what I had written about them".

As he is sticking to this story and the Independent have not fired him it must be assumed that they believe his denial. Which is to say they believe an absolutely extraordinary story- that African children were approaching French soldiers carrying the severed heads of their parents screaming for help- despite the fact that an aid worker who was there flatly refutes his claims.

Given that Hari's use of deceit has been proven- with anonymous libel on Wikipedia and misrepresenting other people's interview quotes as his own work- and he has had questions raised over his honesty since he was a student why would the Independent give him the benefit of the doubt over this wild tale? Is the aid worker who went to Private Eye with her complaint one of the shadowy "defenders of powerful people"?

Hari says that two other aid workers backed him up. However as it has already been established that they had become personal friends of his and he has used friends of his to support his lies before- by posing as the real life David Rose and Niko- that surely cannot carry any weight. It seems pretty unlikely that given the brazenness of the lies Hari admits to that his foreign reporting would be clean, as that is an area notoriously easy to fake.

It is quite clear that from the word go the Independent had no interest in investigating what Hari did. The absurd delay in investigating him, the fact that they did not speak to any of the other journalists who criticised him and the insistence in keeping the results of their investigation secret demonstrate this. 

The Independent's cover up means that they can simply not be trusted to report on any subject as they have made it clear that they do not respect their readers enough to tell them the truth.

Harigate- Part One Of Three- Wars Of The Roses

This week the Independent concluded their "investigation" into Johann Hari's various misdeeds. Just to go over them they came into three main categories:

• Plagiarism.
• Making things up.
• Anonymous wikipedia vandalism.

I will focus on the 3rd of these in this post (although I will post about the other two later this week and the cover up by the independent. In his graceless non-apology, Hari confesses to vandalising the Wikipedia entries of those who crossed him:

The other thing I did wrong was that several years ago I started to notice some things I didn’t like in the Wikipedia entry about me, so I took them out. To do that, I created a user-name that wasn’t my own. Using that user-name, I continued to edit my own Wikipedia entry and some other people’s too. I took out nasty passages about people I admire – like Polly Toynbee, George Monbiot, Deborah Orr and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. I factually corrected some other entries about other people. But in a few instances, I edited the entries of people I had clashed with in ways that were juvenile or malicious: I called one of them anti-Semitic and homophobic, and the other a drunk. I am mortified to have done this, because it breaches the most basic ethical rule: don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you. I apologise to the latter group unreservedly and totally.

First of all it is hardly a "few instances", his list of vandalism under his David Rose identity stretches to almost a thousand entries over the course of years. David Rose was not his only identity, he was also active on other forums and had at least one other pseudonym "Niko".

Furthermore his habit of anonymous defamation did not begin with being unhappy about noticing things were awry in his Wikipedia entry. As Private Eye has shown- he was posting nasty reviews of a University professor, Simon Goldhill,  on Amazon under a pseudonym as far back as June 2000- before Wikipedia was even founded.

It's amazing how consistent different people's stories about Hari are- someone pulling him for some poor behaviour and him claiming the disagreement is about some greater issue which casts him in a heroic light.

Goldhill says he told Hari off for being rude to staff- Hari claims the disagreement began when he defended Mo Mowlam. Christine Odone today claims her squabble with Hari began when she told him off for misusing the New Statesman printer- he claims it was some epic dispute over antisemitism and secularism.

Many of his Wikipedia edits demonstrate a similar level of pettiness- he is desperate to not let people know that he went to an exclusive independent prep school affiliated with Harrow, he is very keen for everyone to acknowledge what a serious intellectual he is.

yet ironically it demonstrates that he is not merely nasty but also rather stupid- his bogus identities had aroused suspicion  for years and the fact he was so incompetent as to use the Independent's offices to conduct the vandalism without understanding things like IP addresses, is beyond moronic.

In addition he appears to have roped in friends to pose as David Rose and Niko when he met real people. Roping in his friends to help cover up his misdeeds is quite significant when you consider his rebuttal of the allegations made about his reporting from the Central African Republic.

It would not surprise me if someone whose entry had been vandalised sues Hari- they may have easily lost writing gigs as a result of his defamation if a lazy editor had used Wikipedia to do a spot of background research.

He would deserve this.

Stick A Fork In Him, He's Done.

This has been my most productive blogging month for close to two years so far in terms of visits, links and my enthusiasm.

The subject that seems to bring the most hits is the Johann Hari career implosion.

So let's talk about that some more. I've disliked him for years but the scale of his disgrace makes me feel sorry for him. His career is over at the age of 32 and his reputation in tatters. A recap of the main scandals:

1. Harigate 1 was the plagiarism scandal which was probably survivable, 
2. Harigate 2 was the sockpuppetery revelations which were a hefty blow but other journalists have survived similar exposure (although their sock puppets didn't slander enemies.
3. Harigate 3 is the longstanding allegations of lying in his articles and fabricating quotes look have gained strength. He can't come back from being a confirmed liar.

Private Eye looks to have provided the final blow:

Hari did not hire a translator, instead browbeating a charity worker into translating for him. He promised to give her his notes when they returned so she could file her own report on the war, and then broke his word. He continued to hold on to the notes even after she complained to Simon Kelner, the Independent’s editor. “The reason for this became clear when his article came out, as most of the content differed from what interviewees told us,” the aid worker told us. Hari “completely exaggerated the extent of destruction in Birao”. He “completely invented quotes, in particular those of the French soldiers”. In one gruesome vignette, Hari had French soldiers telling a piteous story of how “children would bring us the severed heads of their parents and scream for help, but our orders were not to help them”. “They did not say this. I know because I was there and I did the translating for them.”

Inventing atrocities in a conflict zone, such as the one highlighted,  is something I spotted him doing a few years ago, although I initially assumed that he was simply gullible.

However the other interesting aspect is the position of the Independent's editor at the time, Simon Kelner. Despite the charity worker contacting him to raise concerns about this article and previous question marks raised about Hari, he doesn't appear to have made any efforts to look into the matter.

Indeed he actively vouched for Hari to the committee of the Orwell Prize and accused his critics in Harigate 1 of being politically motivated.

The Independent investigation into Johann Hari has to look at the editor who did not do their job editing his work.


Important Note: In accordance with the official Right of Centre Blogger's Code to which I am a signitory, I shall not be devoting any posts to covering the News International scandals in this much depth unless it is to say "What about the Mirror?"

The Murdochalypse- The Left Reacts

On this blog I like to ensure that a range of opinions are heard, so I've asked a few of the leading left wing commentators in this country to say what they think of the News Internaitonal hacking scandal and the collapse of the Murdoch bid for BSkyB.


George Monbiot-

When Belsen was liberated the world said “Never Again”, a sentiment many of us have found ourselves muttering in similar circustances this week as Wapping undergoes a the same fate.

Just as the war didn’t end at Belsen we must march on to our Berlin and a final victory over Rupert Murdoch and the corporate power elite who distort the conciousness of the bovine masses. To the point where many people look on views like mine- such as bringing back airships or forcing people give over their spare rooms to wild eyed tramps- as being in some way extreme.


Laurie Penny

For young people like me Rupert Murdoch is irrelevant- we get our news from Twitter & Facebook or from grafitti scrawled hastily on walls as we run from a police baton charge.

In the squats and bedsits of Britain, the Sun is regarded by my generation little more than a daily instruction guide teaching men how to rape.

But while he’s totally irrelevant to what commentators describe as “the Laurie Penny Generation” he is clearly the most evil man alive and in charge of the current fascist government. In the middle of a running battle with the police, a protester wiped the tear gas from his eyes and said- “aren’t you that creepy woman in her mid twenties who hangs around with teenagers all day telling them that their going to overthrow the system?” “We are all like Milly Dowler, dying while the News of the World violates our bodies”.

Johann Hari

When Belsen was liberated the world said “Never Again”, a sentiment many of us have found ourselves muttering in similar circustances this week as Wapping undergoes a similar fate.

Just as the war didn’t end at Belsen we must march on to our Berlin and a final victory over Rupert Murdoch and the corporate power elite who distort the conciousness of the bovine masses. To the point where many people look on views like mine- such as bringing back airships or forcing people give over their spare rooms to wild eyed tramps- as being in some way extreme.

Seamus Milne.

Yes people had their private phone calls hacked and yes secretive methods were used to determine a target’s whereabouts. However if they had nothing to hide then they had nothing to fear from being scrutinised. The fact that even their own friends were willing to share their personal details shows just how untrustworthy these so called victims were.

{Note from Editor: "Seamus we are talking about News International not the Soviet bloc"}

Oh right, sorry for that misunderstanding….. absolutely sickening stuff by the neoliberal oligarch Rupert Murdoch, sickening.

Ed Miliband.

The government has acted in a reckless and provocative manner. These strikes are wrong.

More On Johann Hari's Sock Puppet Theatre

Jack of Kent has a wonderful post investigating "David Rose" the fanatical Wikipedia editor who has devoted so much time to defending Hari and attacking his enemies. One of the commentators has noticed that before his jihad against the enemies of Hari "David Rose's" previous edits concerned "John Lyon School" which just happened to be the former school of..... Johann Hari.

Another commentator, Bensix, links to a comment that I made about 4 years ago on another blog about an equally fanatical Hari fan who posted on dozens of blogs under the name "Niko":

Niko does seem a bit obsessed with defending Hari. If you google ‘Niko’ ‘Johann Hari’ there are hundreds of results. Usually there follows a mention that Hari went to the Congo last year so he can’t be criticised.

He also finds this hilarious riposte to "Niko" on another site:

“Niko” says:

I also only knew about this post because of a link from hari’s website…

Actually, you first came here from a Technorati search for “johann hari”. You must be a devoted fan of Mr Hari’s, constantly searching for mention of him on the internet, and dropping by here generously to inform us about his double first and digging up articles from his archive. Of course, the alternative, that you are in fact Mr Hari himself, is also amusing to contemplate…

He really is a preening knobhead isn't he?

Johann Hari- Wiki Warrior

Nick Cohen writes about the Johann Hari scandal:

I learned that Johann Hari was a journalist who was better at attention-seeking than truth-telling when a small American journal asked me to reply to his review of What’s Left, a book of mine on the dark forces in liberal-left politics. I looked at it and was astonished. It was not that he disliked my ideas — he was entitled to disagree — but that he had attacked a book I had not written. He pretended that I believed the West had been right to support Saddam Hussein while he was gassing the Kurds when I had said the opposite. He made up stories about my parents, good people he had never met, to show me in a bad light.
.....
I thought no more about it until I looked at my entry on Wikipedia. As well as learning that I was a probable alcoholic, a hypocrite and a supporter of Sarah Palin, I noticed that all reviews of my work were missing except Hari’s effort. Far from saying that he had made wild allegations and I had responded by quoting from the book, a writer working under the pseudonym ‘David r from Meth Productions’
.....
I put Hari to the back of my mind again until Cristina Odone told me a strange story. She was deputy editor of the New Statesman during Hari’s time there and had the sense to doubt the reliability of his journalism. After she crossed him, vile accusations appeared on her Wikipedia page. She was a ‘homophobe’ and an ‘anti-Semite’, the site alleged, and such a disastrous journalist that the Catholic Herald had fired her. Her husband, Edward Lucas, went online to defend her reputation, but ‘David r from Meth Productions’ tried to stop him. Mr ‘r’ gave the same treatment to Francis Wheen, Andrew Roberts and Niall Ferguson after they had spats with Hari.

I noticed that a few years ago, the same identity also defended Hari in the comment sections of blogs which I can't link to because Harry's Place no longer archives its comments.  David r from Meth Productions happily has an IP address which turns out to be:

: 217.118.112.0/20

descr: Interoute Telecommunications (UK) Ltd

origin: AS8928

notify: hostmaster@interoute.net

mnt-by: INTEROUTE-MNTNR

changed: george@interoute.net 20040211

source: RIPE

person: Franc Tundidor

address: Independent News & Media

address: Independent House

address: 191 Marsh Wall

address: London

address: E14 9RS

address: UK

Meth Productions doesn't seem to actually produce anything except pro-Hari propaganda.

This is another reason why the naivity defence doesn't work for Hari- he is an extremely nasty individual who has gone to great lengths to smear and slander those with the integrity to point out his tendency to lie.

Via

Media Ethics

The Independent's proprietor, Evgeny Lebedev,  gives a lecture on media ethics:

Addressing an audience at Independent Voices 5x15 at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, Mr Lebedev was taking part in a discussion on free speech that also featured Max Mosley, the former Formula One chief, Charlotte Harris, a leading media lawyer, the actress Ruby Wax and Johann Hari, columnist on The Independent.

He maybe ought to have thought through the guest list a bit.

Bizarro Hari

Given that Johann Hari has been caught stealing quotes elicited from other interviewers and claiming them as his own, what would a Bizarro World Johann Hari be like?

Presumably he'd take dramatic quotes and falsely attribute them to other writers.

Oh wait he does that too! Claiming that a quote by a 1960s Archbishop of Canterbury that "a nuclear war would involve nothing more than the transition of many millions of people into the love of God, only a few years before they were going to find it anyway" came from Christopher Hitchens's book God is Not Great. It doesn't.

One of the amusing aspects of that episode is seeing the self proclaimed scourge of lazy thinking and sloppy journalism, Ben Goldacre, retweeting such an extraordinary quote uncritically and seeming to be largely unperturbed that he's been misled.

* As Yaffle told me when I interviewed him the other day- "I'm no fan of Hari" he said, rolling his eyes, before pausing "but it really is Hitch's quote, verbatim - just not from the book.". Which means in this case Hari is only guilty of being too arrogant to correct a trivial error.

Repost From February 2010- Johann Hari Guest Post

The Lies You've Been Told About Mordor.

The shadow looming over Middle Earth – the shadow of Sauron– furrows his big, non corporeal brow, pats my knee, and tells me about the night he knew he was going to die. “I will never forget – in the early hours, I said goodbye to my ringwraiths. I kissed them goodbye and blessed them.” He knew in his gut he was not going to survive that long, bloody day in the third age, when he and his allies finally decided to stage a revolution against the hated Elvish order. However he survived and since that day he has felt blessed.

Now the Middle Earth armies are once again beating the drums of war against Sauron and his people. They say he is a tyrant but tell that to Gogdush, a 14 year old Orc whose life has been transformed Sauron’s social housing policies. He sobs as he shares his recollection of life before Sauron over dinner- “Before Sauron we were marginalised and kept from enjoying our share of the resources of Middle Earth, we weren’t even able to get food”. He hands me some of the casserole he heats on a small stove whose warm glow is easily outshone by the radiance of my self righteousness, I chew into the tender yet hard to identify meat, by the look of the small yet furry primate foot it isn’t anything I’ve tasted before. “It’s a native delicacy, which we weren’t allowed to touch before Sauron”, Gogdush tells me.

Yet Middle Earth leaders frequently describe Sauron as being a source of pure evil intent on dominating the world. “This is nonsense” Sauron says angrily, "just because we are using our natural resources to construct giant towers that overshadow the entire planet and to raise Orcish armies that doesn’t mean that we are the bad guys”. He’s right of course, the tower building programme is actually one of Sauron’s great success programmes, the towers are capable of sustaining more people than the sprawling individualistic burrows that dominate the Shire, and have a much lower environmental impact.

The second lie told about Sauron’s Mordor is that it is a place of misery and joylessness. In fact it has a flourishing arts and crafts scene, even Sauron himself likes to make jewellery! However I’m here to ask probing questions, such as his record on gay rights:

“Orcs are soulless and sexless creatures who are not borne of the fruit of love but raised asexually from the barren earth of Mordor, since they are neither male nor female homosexuality is a conceptual impossibility, very much like Independent journalists in that sense.”

Quite, it goes without saying that neither Rohan or the Shire have achieved such perfect gender balance yet. But what about Mordor’s labour laws, under which many citizens have to work up to 60 hours a week?

“Look we are a developing country, some of our labour laws need improving and who is likely to accomplish that, me or a Gandalfian puppet?”

Indeed and it is true that labour relations have greatly improved since Sauron returned from his 3000 year exile.

No Mordor is not perfect, yes the relationship between Sauron and Saruman- who was of course backed by the West until he switched sides, is troubling but as I sit in the middle of an Orc camp surrounded by hideous inhuman creatures, I ask myself who are we to condemn these people and the leaders striving to improve their situation?

Shock As Renowned Liar Found To Have Made Things Up.

Johann Hari has been caught stealing quotes made by interviewees with other journalists and attributing it as his own work.

It has been clear for years that Johann Hari is a liar, and that he makes things up. Even if you don't include claims that seem preposterous but can't actually be disproved the evidence is overwhelming.

Private Eye discovered Hari's propensity to lie back in 2003:

Not that startling, surely, especially if they are regular readers of Johann Hari. He began his career as the voice of yoof in July 2001, just after finishing his university finals, by boasting about his drug habit to the readers of the New Statesman. “Another Cambridge May Week has rolled around,” he wrote, “and I, like half of Cambridge, celebrated with a few tabs of Ecstasy and the odd line of coke.”

Fleet Street editors were thrilled: the Sindie reprinted his piece, and a few months later the London Evening Standard invited him to do an encore. Hari obliged by defending “the Ecstasy I know and love” against the tut-tutting of the Home Secretary. “Clearly, David Blunket needs to be informed of the basic facts about one of Britain’s most popular drugs,” he raved. “If he fancies tying one, I’ll be happy to take him to a decent club. But in the meantime, I’ll try to explain why so many of use the drug weekly.” He duly went on to describe the sensation of being “loved up” and “at one.”

In fact, however, the young rascal had never taken Ecstasy: before writing his lyrical account he had to phone a friend and ask what it felt like! And now, less than two years later, he has already forgotten his brief incarnation as an e-fiend. “Ecstasy defined the generation of my older siblings, not mine,” he wrote in the Indie two weeks ago. “Ecstasy is out.”

No matter: it served its purpose, and Hari was on a roll. A couple of weeks after his original ecstasy article he went to Genoa for the G8 summit and sent a vivid dispatch to the New Statesman about the death of anti-globalisation protester Carlo Giuliani. “On Friday, before the real business of the summit began, the police shot him twice in the head and then ran him over,” he reported. “They killed him, even though he carried no weapon other than a fire extinguisher. When I saw the scene, I couldn’t believe so much blood had poured from just one body.” Yet, as several witnesses can attest, Hari wasn’t there, having hailed a taxi to escape the scene some time before Giuliani was killed.

Now that he’s a full-fledged pundit, Hari has been pontificating in the Indie and on Newsnight about his support for a war against Saddam Hussein. The Iraqis want to be bombed, he says, even if more than 100,000 of them die: he knows, because he’s been there and talked to them. “Last October, I spent a month as a journalist seeing the reality of life under Saddam Hussein,” he wrote on 10 January. “Most of the Iraqi people I encountered…. Would hug me and offer coded support.”

Actually, Hari spent two weeks in Iraq as a holidaymaker, on a package tour visiting ancient archaeological sites. He wrote about the trip in the Guardian on 3 December last year. In that article, however, he complained that it was “very difficult to get Iraqis to express their feelings… I blundered about asking fairly direct political questions, which caused people to recoil in horror… Many people asked quite genuinely ‘why your government hates the Arab world’.” He also met many “dignified, stoical Iraqis” and “doe-eyed children” who complained about western sanctions.

The only person who eventually offered “coded support” was an old man in a souk who had visited London in the 1970s. “After much oblique prodding, he said warmly, ‘I admire British democracy and freedom.’ He held my gaze. ’I very much admire them.’ He added, ’We do not know what is coming. The news we receive here is… unclear.’”

And, er, that’s it. Yet in an Indie column on 15 February, Hari claimed that people in Iraq asked him: “When will you come to free us? When will we be able to live again?” Since these pleas from Iraqis yearning for the bombers to arrive must surely have struck him as newsworthy, why didn’t he mention them in his original Guardian feature?

Answer comes there none. The only question troubling this journalistic wunderkind at the moment is why on earth British newspaper readers suspect that hacks “just make up stories.”

Since 2003 he has carried on lying- inventing an interview with a jihadist who had slashed the throats of 4 female Israeli soldiers (no such incident has ever happened). He was also caught out claiming to have interviewed a former Iraqi human shield volunteer who had seen the light, which was equally bogus.

Johann Hari has been making things up for over a decade and yet he remains a national newspaper columnist and a regular talking head on various BBC programmes. Maybe this latest scandal will sink him but it probably won't and even if it does his presence will be filled with another fabulist like Laurie Penny or someone like that.

Hari + Economics = Fun

Johann Hari calls for a Keynsian approach to getting the economy going. Apart from getting economic history completely wrong (for example President Hoover did not slash spending, he increased it faster than anyone in history had done up to that point), there is something else about it too.

Like all of the press advocates of Keynsianism who advocate higher public spending in a downturn. Keynes encouraged counter cyclical spending- spend more in a recession but less in a boom. Hari was not demanding that Gordon Brown rein in spending while he was running budget surpluses during the boom years. Therefore it can only be concluded that Hari 's support for Keynsianism is opportunistic and he merely supports whatever theory will encourage further public spending at any given time.

Via.

Parody Singularity.

At the time I posted the Hari-Mordor piece, I hadn't read this 2004 Johann Hari article.

Science Fiction writer David Brin has exposed the dark values of Tolkien’s world by coaxing us to imagine the point of view of the evil wizard Sauron and his troops. "Sauron’s army was the one that included every species and race on Middle Earth, including all the despised colours of humanity, and all the lower classes," he explains. "Might they have imagined they were the good guys, with a justifiable greivance worth fighting for, rebelling against an ancient, rigid, pyramid-shaped, feudal hierarchy toppled by invader-alien elves and their Numenorian-colonialist human lackeys? Sauron, champion of the Middle Earthling!"

Really, I give up!

Also today is a good day for guest posts as Joseph Harker writes about racism over at Mark Wadsworth's blog.

Guest Post: Johann Hari Reports From Mordor.

Editors note: It's been a while since I had a guest post, neither Gordon Brown nor Liam Donaldson have agreed to come back here, so my standards may have slipped, I did try to fact check the report but was threatened with a libel writ if I implied that it may not be entirely accurate.


The Lies You've Been Told About Mordor.

The shadow looming over Middle Earth – the shadow of Sauron– furrows his big, non corporeal brow, pats my knee, and tells me about the night he knew he was going to die. “I will never forget – in the early hours, I said goodbye to my ringwraiths. I kissed them goodbye and blessed them.” He knew in his gut he was not going to survive that long, bloody day in the third age, when he and his allies finally decided to stage a revolution against the hated Elvish order. However he survived and since that day he has felt blessed.

Now the Middle Earth armies are once again beating the drums of war against Sauron and his people. They say he is a tyrant but tell that to Gogdush, a 14 year old Orc whose life has been transformed Sauron’s social housing policies. He sobs as he shares his recollection of life before Sauron over dinner- “Before Sauron we were marginalised and kept from enjoying our share of the resources of Middle Earth, we weren’t even able to get food”. He hands me some of the casserole he heats on a small stove whose warm glow is easily outshone by the radiance of my self righteousness, I chew into the tender yet hard to identify meat, by the look of the small yet furry primate foot it isn’t anything I’ve tasted before. “It’s a native delicacy, which we weren’t allowed to touch before Sauron”, Gogdush tells me.

Yet Middle Earth leaders frequently describe Sauron as being a source of pure evil intent on dominating the world. “This is nonsense” Sauron says angrily, "just because we are using our natural resources to construct giant towers that overshadow the entire planet and to raise Orcish armies that doesn’t mean that we are the bad guys”. He’s right of course, the tower building programme is actually one of Sauron’s great success programmes, the towers are capable of sustaining more people than the sprawling individualistic burrows that dominate the Shire, and have a much lower environmental impact.

The second lie told about Sauron’s Mordor is that it is a place of misery and joylessness. In fact it has a flourishing arts and crafts scene, even Sauron himself likes to make jewellery! However I’m here to ask probing questions, such as his record on gay rights:

“Orcs are soulless and sexless creatures who are not borne of the fruit of love but raised asexually from the barren earth of Mordor, since they are neither male nor female homosexuality is a conceptual impossibility, very much like Independent journalists in that sense.”

Quite, it goes without saying that neither Rohan or the Shire have achieved such perfect gender balance yet. But what about Mordor’s labour laws, under which many citizens have to work up to 60 hours a week?

“Look we are a developing country, some of our labour laws need improving and who is likely to accomplish that, me or a Gandalfian puppet?”

Indeed and it is true that labour relations have greatly improved since Sauron returned from his 3000 year exile.

No Mordor is not perfect, yes the relationship between Sauron and Saruman- who was of course backed by the West until he switched sides, is troubling but as I sit in the middle of an Orc camp surrounded by hideous inhuman creatures, I ask myself who are we to condemn these people and the leaders striving to improve their situation?