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.

Seamus Milne Does History- Oh Dear

Compare and contrast- Seamus Milne discusses the history of Communism and the history of the British Empire:

Nazi Comparisons:

With the USSR are bad-

The fashionable attempt to equate communism and Nazism is in reality a moral and historical nonsense. Despite the cruelties of the Stalin terror, there was no Soviet Treblinka or Sobibor, no extermination camps built to murder millions.

With the British Empire are entirely reasonable-

No wonder Hitler was such an enthusiastic admirer of Britain's empire, which he described as an "inestimable factor of value". The echoes of Nazism in the colonial record are unmistakable

The Ends Justifies The Means:

With the USSR, yes-

communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality. It encompassed genuine idealism and commitment, captured even by critical films and books of the post-Stalin era such as Wajda's Man of Marble and Rybakov's Children of the Arbat. Its existence helped to drive up welfare standards in the west, boosted the anticolonial movement and provided a powerful counterweight to western global domination.

With the Empire, no-

But the question, as Colin Jones, president of the Royal Historical Society, puts it, should be: "Which narrative?" If Britain had genuinely come to terms with its imperial history, no senior politician would have dared suggest celebrating it or mobilising apologists to sanitise its record for schoolchildren.

The British empire was, after all, an avowedly racist despotism built on ethnic cleansing, enslavement, continual wars and savage repression, land theft and merciless exploitation. Far from bringing good governance, democracy or economic progress, the empire undeveloped vast areas, executed and jailed hundreds of thousands for fighting for self-rule, ran concentration camps, carried out medical experiments on prisoners and oversaw famines that killed tens of millions of people.

By the numbers:

For the USSR, we must avoid an "ideologically-fuelled inflation game":

The real records of repression now available from the Soviet archives are horrific enough (799,455 people were recorded as executed between 1921 and 1953 and the labour camp population reached 2.5 million at its peak) without engaging in an ideologically-fuelled inflation game.

With the Empire we can cherry pick sources about death tolls from idealogically fuelled nutjobs whose estimates are more than ten times those of mainstream historians:

To this day, Kenyan victims of the 1950s campaign of torture, killing and mass internment are still trying, and failing, to win British compensation during a "counter-insurgency" war that, by some estimates, left 100,000 dead.

Etc etc.

Obama Is White.

According to Shameless Milne he is:

What credibility is there in Geneva's all-white boycott?

I was hoping for an MSM writer to defend Durban 2 so I could sanctimoniously attack them for their hypocrisy and stupidity, but Milne is the only one to do so and I just don't feel motivated to do so.

Milne's command of the fact remain as firm as it as ever been:

The dispute was mainly about Israel and western fears that the conference would be used, like its torrid predecessor in Durban at the height of the Palestinian intifada in 2001, to denounce the Jewish state and attack the west over colonialism and the slave trade. In fact, although it was the only conflict mentioned in the final Durban declaration, the reference was so mild (recognising the Palestinian right to self-determination alongside Israel's right to security) that the then Israeli prime minister, ­Shimon Peres, called it "an accomplishment of the first order for Israel".

Shimon Peres was Israel's PM in September 2001! Who knew?

Shameless Bilge.

Shameless Milne decides to apply his vast intellect and deep understanding of world affairs to Latin America. Joy.

I would have just commented at the Grauniad's site but as is traditional they are furiously censoring criticism of Milne but instead I'll do a partial fisking here.

On 9 October 1967, Che Guevara faced a shaking sergeant Mario Teran, ordered to murder him by the Bolivian president and CIA, and declared: "Shoot, coward, you're only going to kill a man." The climax of Stephen Soderbergh's two-part epic, Che, in real life this final act of heroic defiance marked the defeat of multiple attempts to spread the Cuban revolution to the rest of Latin America.

Actually his last words were "Don't shoot. I am Che Guevara. I am worth more to you alive than dead"

But 40 years later, the long-retired executioner, now a reviled old man

Reviled by whom? Certainly not the Bolivian peasants who were only too glad to help get rid of the T-Shirt salesman.

Teran was treated as part of a programme which has seen 1.4 million free eye operations carried out by Cuban doctors in 33 countries across Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa. It is an emblem both of the humanity of Fidel Castro and Guevara's legacy, but also of the transformation of Latin America which has made such extraordinary co-operation possible.

You know if I wanted to highlight the "humanity of Fidel Castro" I'd keep quiet about his involvement in Africa.

The seeds of this Latin American rebirth were sown half a century ago in Cuba. But it is also more directly rooted in the region's disastrous experience of neoliberalism, first implemented by the bloody Pinochet regime in the 1970s

The Pinochet regime was bloody, although considerably less so than Castro's regime. Secondly if 'neoliberalism' is so disastrous how come Chile is so much wealthier than the rest of Latin America now? Back in the 1950s Cuba was richer than Chile so if you want to compare their current status we can see which philosophy works best.

Cuba, famous for first world health and education standards - with better infant mortality rates than the US - in an economically blockaded developing country.

Cuba's literacy rates and infant mortality figures were always very good long before the arrival of Castro. In fact before Castro Cuba's infant mortality figures were the 12th best in the world compared to around 30th best today. Does Shameless want to guess as to who established Cuba's education system?

Less well known is the country's success in diversifying its economy since the collapse of the Soviet Union

That's a nice euphemism for promoting child sex tourism.

I must admit I'm a little bit surprised that Seamus Milne is such a avid fan of 'Che'. What on earth can he see to admire in an over privileged and somewhat dim radical who used the poor as an excuse for promoting his extremist ideas....

Shameless Seamus & Sad Vlad.

Having you illusions shattered is never easy, I remember how I cried for days when I learned that Santa Claus wasn't real, it ruined my 21st birthday. Now another dream is coming to an end because it appears that far from being a well informed expert on current affairs, Seamus Milne is in fact an utter ignoramus who bullshits his way through subjects he is barely capable of comprehending and butchers the facts mercilessly in order to fit the party line. In his latest column Shameless informs his loyal readers:

There has been much talk among western politicians in recent days about Russia isolating itself from the international community. But unless that simply means North America and Europe, nothing could be further from the truth. While the US and British media have swung into full cold-war mode over the Georgia crisis, the rest of the world has seen it in a very different light. As Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore's former UN ambassador, observed in the Financial Times a few days ago, "most of the world is bemused by western moralising on Georgia". While the western view is that the world "should support the underdog, Georgia, against Russia ... most support Russia against the bullying west. The gap between the western narrative and the rest of the world could not be clearer."

It's only the West that objects to Russia's behaviour. Alas the rest of the world doesn't appear to want to play along with Milne's wish fulfillment fantasy of the third world masses uniting behind a challenger to AmeriKKKan capitalist hegemony.

Russia faced increased diplomatic isolation over its military action against Georgia on Thursday, with its Asian allies failing to offer support and France saying EU leaders were considering sanctions.....

Even China, which often sides with Russia in diplomatic disputes, issued a veiled criticism of Moscow's actions, saying it was "concerned about the latest changes in South Ossetia and Abkhazia" and calling for dialogue to resolve the issue.

In fact Putin is now claiming that the Americans made him attack Georgia. This would be like George Bush claiming that the Bilderberg Group were behind the invasion of Iraq. Searching for conspiracy theories is quite common, but when the man who makes the decisions claims that that the Illuminati are behind it all this is either full blown insanity or desperate backtracking from someone who has overplayed his hand.

This supports the theory I put forward last week that Putin is in fact a moron.