The spectator
Stalin's Cannibals
What the new book Bloodlands tells us about the nature of evil.
By Ron Rosenbaum
Posted Monday, Feb. 7, 2011, at 2:17 PM ET
How much should the cannibalism count? How should we factor it into the growing historical-moral-political argument over how to compare Hitler's and Stalin's genocides, and the death tolls of communism and fascism in general. I know I had not considered it. I had really not been aware of the extent of the cannibalism that took place during the Stalinist-enforced famine in the Ukraine in 1933 until I read Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder's shocking, unflinching depiction of it in Bloodlands, his groundbreaking new book about Hitler's and Stalin's near-simultaneous genocides.
For th! e past three decades, beginning with what was called in Germany the Historikerstreit, or historians' battle, continuing with the 1997 French publication of The Black Book of Communism (which put the death toll from communist regimes at close to 100 million compared with 25 million from Hitler and fascism), there has been a controversy over comparative genocide and comparative evil that has pitted Hitler's mass murders against Stalin's, Mao's, and Pol Pot's.
I had been all too vaguely aware of the role the Stalin-imposed Ukraine famine played in the argument—according to many calculations, it added more than 3 million dead to the sum of Stalin's victims.
But I suppose that, without looking deeply into it, I had considered Stalin's state-created famine a kind of "soft genocide" compared with the industrialized mass murder of Hitler's death camps or even with the mi! llions of victims of Stalin's own purges of the late '30s and the gula gs they gave birth to.
Snyder's book, while controversial in some respects, forces us to face the facts about the famine, and the cannibalism helps place the Ukraine famine in the forefront of debate, not as some mere agricultural misfortune, but as one of the 20th century's deliberate mass murders.
Students of comparative evil often point out that Stalin caused a higher death toll than Hitler, even without taking the famine deaths into account; those losses were not treated the same way as his other crimes or as Hitler's killing and gassing in death camps. Shooting or gassing is more direct and immediate than starving a whole nation.
But Snyder's account of the Ukraine famine persuasively makes the case that Stalin in effect turned the entire Ukraine into a death camp and, rather than gassing its people, decreed death by famine.
Should this be considered a lesser crime because it's less "hands-on"? Here's where the accounts of cannibalis! m caused me to rethink this question—and to examine the related question of whether one can distinguish degrees of evil in genocides by their methodology.
The argument has been simmering for some time because it has consequences for how we think of events in contemporary history. Nazism, it is generally agreed, cannot be rehabilitated in any way, because it was inextricable from Hitler's crimes, but there are some on the left who believe communism can be rehabilitated despite the crimes of Stalin, and despite new evidence that the tactics of terror were innovations traceable to his predecessor Lenin.
There are those like the Postmodern sophist Slavoj Žižek who argue that Stalin's crimes were his aberrational distortion of an otherwise admirably utopian Marxist-Leninism whose reputation still deserves respect and maybe a Lacanian tweak in light of the ! genocidal reality of Marxist/Leninist regimes. But can one really sepa rate an ideology from the genocides repeatedly committed in its name?
In reviewing Bloodlands in The New York Review of Books, my Slate colleague Anne Applebaum observed:
[U]ntil recently, it was politically incorrect in the West to admit that we defeated one genocidal dictator with the help of another. Only now … has the extent of the Soviet Union's mass murders become better known in the West. In recent years, some in the former Soviet sphere of influence … have begun to use the word "genocide" in legal documents to describe the Soviet Union's mass killings too.
Are there distinctions to be made between Hitler's and Stalin's genocides? Is it possible—without diminishing Hitler's evil—to argue that Stalin's crimes were by some measures worse? If we're speaking of quantity, Stalin's m! ass murder death toll may have far exceeded Hitler's, with many putting the figure at 20 million or so, depending on what you count.
But quantity probably shouldn't be the only measure. There is also intent. To some, Stalin's murders are not on the same plane (or at the same depth), because he may have believed however dementedly that he was acting in the service of the higher goal of class warfare and the universal aspirations of the oppressed working class. As opposed to Hitler, who killed in the service of a base, indefensible racial hatred.
But on the other hand, one could argue, Hitler too may have believed he was serving an idealistic cause, "purifying" humanity of a "plague bacillus" (his charming term for Jews) like a doctor (he often compared himself to Koch and Pasteur).
Indeed, I'll never forget the moment, which I recount in Explaining Hitler, when the great historian H.R. Trevor-Roper leaned toward me over a coffee table in London's Oxford and Cambridge Club after I'd asked him whether he felt Hitler knew what he was doing was wrong. No, Trevor Roper snapped, "Hitler was convinced of his own rectitude."
I find it hard to understand anyone who wants to argue that the murder of 20 million is "preferable" to anything, but our culture still hasn't assimilated the genocidal equivalence between Stalin and Hitler, because, as Applebaum points out, we used the latter to defeat the former.
Consider the fact that downtown New York is home to a genuinely likable literary bar ironically named "KGB." The KGB, of course, was merely the renamed version of Stalin's NKVD, itself the renamed version of the OGPU, the secret police spearhead of his genocidal policies. And under its own name the KGB was responsible for the continued murder and torture of dissidents ! and Jews until the Soviet Union fell in 1991 (although of course an ex-KGB man named Putin is basically running the place now).
You could argue that naming a bar "KGB" is just a kind of Cold War kitsch (though millions of victims might take issue with taking it so lightly). But the fact that you can even make the kitsch argument is a kind of proof of the differential way Soviet and Nazi genocides and their institutions are still treated. Would people seek to hold literary readings at a downtown bar ironically named "Gestapo"?
The full evil of Stalin still hasn't sunk in. I know it to be true intellectually, but our culture has not assimilated the magnitude of his crimes. Which is perhaps why the cannibalism jolted me out of any illusion that meaningful distinctions could be made between Stalin and Hitler.
Perhaps we've failed to assimilate what we've learned about Stalin, Soviet communism, and Mao's communism (50 million may have died in the Great Leap Fo! rward famine and the Cultural Revolution's murders) because for some t ime the simmering argument had a kind of disreputable side. In the mid-'80s there were German historians such as Jürgen Habermas accusing other German historians such as Ernst Nolte of trying to "normalize" the Nazi regime by playing up its moral equivalence to Stalinist Russia, by suggesting even that Hitler's murderous methods were a response to Stalinist terror and genocide, which some saw as an attempt to "excuse" Hitler.
But the disreputable uses to which the argument has been put—normalizing Hitler by focusing on Stalin's crimes—should not blind us to the magnitude and consequences of those crimes.
There is no algorithm for evil, but the case of Stalin's has for a long time weighed more heavily the ideological murders and gulag deaths that began in 1937 and played down the millions who—Snyder argues—were just as deliberately, cold-bloodedly murdered by enforced famine in 1932 and 1933.
Here is where the shock of Snyder's relatively f! ew pages on cannibalism brought the question of degrees of evil alive once again to me. According to Snyder's carefully documented account, it was not uncommon during the Stalin-imposed famine in Soviet Ukraine for parents to cook and eat their children.
The bare statement alone is horrifying even to write.
The back story: While Lenin was content, for a time anyway, to allow the new Soviet Union to develop a "mixed economy" with state-run industry and peasant-owned private farms, Stalin decided to "collectivize" the grain-producing breadbasket that was the Ukraine. His agents seized all land from the peasants, expelling landowners and placing loyal ideologues with little agricultural experience in charge of the newly collectivized farms, which began to fail miserably. And to fulfill Five-Year Plan goals, he seized all the grain and food that was grown in 1932 and 1933 to feed the rest of Russia and raise foreign capital, and in doing so left the entire Ukrainian! people with nothing to eat—except, sometimes, themselves.
I'v e read things as horrifying, but never more horrifying than the four pages in Snyder's book devoted to cannibalism. In a way I'd like to warn you not to read it; it is, unfortunately, unforgettable. On the other hand, not to read it is a refusal to be fully aware of what kind of world we live in, what human nature is capable of. The Holocaust taught us much on these questions, but alas, there is more to learn. Maybe it's better to live in denial. Better to think of human history Pollyanna-like, as an evolution upward, although sometimes I feel Darwin spoke more truly than he knew when he titled his book The Descent of Man. Certainly one's understanding of both Stalinism and human nature will be woefully incomplete until one does read Snyder's pages.
Here is an excerpt:
In the face of starvation, some families divided, parents turning against children, and children against one another. As the state police, the OGPU, found itself oblig! ed to record, in Soviet Ukraine "Families kill their weakest members, usually children, and use the meat for eating." Countless parents killed and ate their children and then died of starvation later anyway. One mother cooked her son for herself and her daughter. One 6-year-old girl, saved by other relatives last saw her father when he was sharpening a knife to slaughter her. Other combinations were, of course, possible. One family killed their daughter-in-law, and fed her head to the pigs, and roasted the rest of her body."
According to Snyder "at least 2,505 people were sentenced for cannibalism in the years 1932 and 1933 in Ukraine, although the actual number of cases was most certainly greater."
One more horror story. About a group of women who sought to protect children from cannibals by gathering them in an "orphanage" in the Kharkov region:
"One day the children suddenly fell silent, we turned around to see what was happenin! g, and they were eating the smallest child, little Petrus. They were t earing strips from him and eating them. And Petrus was doing the same, he was tearing strips from himself and eating them, he ate as much as he could. The other children put their lips to his wounds and drank his blood. We took the child away from their hungry mouths and we cried."
"And appetite, an universal wolf/ So doubly seconded with will and power/ Must make perforce an universal prey/ And last eat up himself." So Shakespeare wrote, but note that he is speaking not just of the appetite for food, but for power. Stalin was the true cannibal.
How should one react to this? There may only have been a few thousand cases, compared with the millions Stalin starved or murdered, compared with Hitler's slaughters, but there is something in these accounts that forces one to realize there are depths of evil one has not been able to imagine before. Killing another human being, killing millions of human beings. Evil. But forcing parents to cook and eat their! children—did one know this was in the repertoire of human behavior? Must we readjust radically downward our vision of human nature? That any human could cause or carry out such acts must mean many are capable of it.
The point of the controversy really should be not whether Hitler or Stalin was worse, but that there was more than one of them, more than two of course: There are also Pol Pot and the Rwandan killers, among others.
Even if those 2,500 arrests for cannibalism were dwarfed by the numbers of those 2 million or more starved to death, they have something unspeakable to say, something almost beyond words. In the light of these reports, can those such as Slavoj Žižek still defend Marxism for its utopian universalism and dismiss the cannibalism as unfortunate unintended consequences of too much zealousness in pursuit of a higher cause? Just a detour on the road to Utopia. Tell us, Mr. Žižek, please. (And by the way, to scorn Postmodern Marxism is not ! to defend the failings of Postmodern capitalism.)
Should we hold different kinds of genocide differentially evil? One would think brutal direct mass slaughter to be the worst form, but forcing human beings to descend to cannibalizing their children goes beyond physical torture and killing. It is spiritual torture, murder of the souls. In a way more vicious and wicked because the enforced self-degradation is unimaginable in its suffering.
We know what it says about Stalin and his henchmen, all too willing to be accomplices of this horror. But what about the cannibals? How should we regard them? Purely as victims, with no choice? Certainly they must have suffered mentally and spiritually more than we can imagine. But does that mean they didn't have a choice? If we accept they had a choice are we blaming the victims? Or is it clear they were driven insane by starvation—and cannot be held fully culpable by reason of diminished capacity? On the other hand not every family that starved to death turned to cannibalism; were they of stron! ger moral constitution?
Snyder is very careful about this. He concedes "cannibalism is a taboo of literature as well as life, as communities seek to protect their dignity by suppressing the record of this desperate mode of survival. Ukrainians outside the Soviet Union have treated cannibalism as a source of great shame."
This is an almost too carefully, thus confusingly, worded sentence. It seems as if he's saying that some communities haven't sought to suppress the facts, but feel shame—"Ukrainians outside the Soviet Union." But there is no more Soviet Union. What did or do the Ukrainians who now have their own nation feel? What are they supposed to feel? Victimized into being perpetrators?
These are not easy questions, the ones about how to evaluate degrees of evil. I spend probably too much time thinking about them. Sometimes there are distinctions without a significant difference. Here are some very preliminary thoughts:
—Even if the cannibal! ism was confined to a few thousand and the larger genocides involved m illions, they are not irrelevant to the heart of darkness revealed in the "bloodlands" that lay between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
—There are some distinctions, but no real difference, between Hitler's and Stalin's genocides. Once you get over 5 million, it's fair to say all genocidal monsters are alike.
Finally, the only other conclusion one can draw is that "European civilization" is an oxymoron. These horrors, Nazi and Communist, all arose out of European ideas, political and philosophical, being put into practice. Even the Cambodian genocide had its genesis in the cafes of Paris where Pol Pot got his ideas. Hitler got his ideas in the cafes of Vienna.
"After such knowledge," as Eliot said, "what forgiveness?"
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Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler. His new book, How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III, comes out in March 2011.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2284198/
© 2010 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
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Tuesday, 8 February 2011
Wednesday, 2 February 2011
SO MANY SURVIVORS
http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/docview.asp?did=1000619924&fid=1725
Globes ("Israel's Business Arena") - Tuesday 1st February 2011 - 14:56
Germany doubles aid to Holocaust survivors to €110m
Claims Conference VP Shlomo Gur:
“The money is for social and nursing services for Holocaust
Survivors worldwide. Half of the 520,000 survivors reside in Israel.”
The German government will double aid to Holocaust survivors to €110 million in 2011, from €55 million, Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) VP Shlomo Gur told the Knesset Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs Conference today.
Gur said that the money was intended for social and nursing services for Holocaust survivors worldwide, whom he estimated at 520,000, half of who reside in Israel.
Committee member MK Lia Shemtov (Israel Beiteinu) said that the Ministry of Finance should also increase its allotments to the Holocaust survivors fund, and that the fund's managers should increase its fundraising efforts abroad.
She said that many Holocaust survivors could not afford to buy medications, dental care, glasses, hearing aids, or dialysis.
Holocaust survivors fund deputy director Yehuda Dim said that the fund received applications for aid from 20,000 survivors, who were still waiting because there was no money to finance them.
Globes ("Israel's Business Arena") - Tuesday 1st February 2011 - 14:56
Germany doubles aid to Holocaust survivors to €110m
Claims Conference VP Shlomo Gur:
“The money is for social and nursing services for Holocaust
Survivors worldwide. Half of the 520,000 survivors reside in Israel.”
The German government will double aid to Holocaust survivors to €110 million in 2011, from €55 million, Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) VP Shlomo Gur told the Knesset Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs Conference today.
Gur said that the money was intended for social and nursing services for Holocaust survivors worldwide, whom he estimated at 520,000, half of who reside in Israel.
Committee member MK Lia Shemtov (Israel Beiteinu) said that the Ministry of Finance should also increase its allotments to the Holocaust survivors fund, and that the fund's managers should increase its fundraising efforts abroad.
She said that many Holocaust survivors could not afford to buy medications, dental care, glasses, hearing aids, or dialysis.
Holocaust survivors fund deputy director Yehuda Dim said that the fund received applications for aid from 20,000 survivors, who were still waiting because there was no money to finance them.
Monday, 24 January 2011
Economics for Beginners
Dear Taxpayers (and others):
Sometime this year, taxpayers will again receive another ‘Economic Stimulus’ payment. This is indeed a very exciting programme, and I'll explain it by using a Question & Answer format:
Q: What is an ‘Economic Stimulus’ payment?
A: It is money that the government will send to taxpayers.
Q: Where will the government get this money?
A: From taxpayers.
Q: So the government is giving me back my own money?
A: Only a smidgen of it.
Q: What is the purpose of this payment?
A: The plan is for you to use the money to purchase a high-definition TV set, thus stimulating the economy.
Q: But isn’t that stimulating the economy of China?
A: Shut up.
Below is some helpful advice on how to best help the U.K. economy by spending your stimulus cheque wisely:
If you spend the stimulus money at Asda or Tesco, the money will go to China, Taiwan or Sri Lanka.
If you spend it on petrol, your money will go to the Arabs.
If you purchase a computer, it will go to India, Taiwan or China.
If you purchase fruit and vegetables, it will go to Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala.
If you buy an efficient car, it will go to Japan or Korea.
If you purchase useless stuff, it will go to Taiwan.
If you pay your credit cards off, or buy shares, it will go to management bonuses and they will hide it offshore.
Instead, keep the money in the UK by:
1) Spending it at car boot sales, or
2) Going to night clubs, or
3) Spending it on prostitutes, or
4) Beer or whisky or
5) Tattoos.
(These are the only UK businesses still operating in the U.K. )
Conclusion:
Be patriotic: go to a night club with a tattooed prostitute that you met at a car boot sale and drink beer and/or whisky day and night.
Yours most respectfully,
Gideon ‘George’ Osborne,
Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Sometime this year, taxpayers will again receive another ‘Economic Stimulus’ payment. This is indeed a very exciting programme, and I'll explain it by using a Question & Answer format:
Q: What is an ‘Economic Stimulus’ payment?
A: It is money that the government will send to taxpayers.
Q: Where will the government get this money?
A: From taxpayers.
Q: So the government is giving me back my own money?
A: Only a smidgen of it.
Q: What is the purpose of this payment?
A: The plan is for you to use the money to purchase a high-definition TV set, thus stimulating the economy.
Q: But isn’t that stimulating the economy of China?
A: Shut up.
Below is some helpful advice on how to best help the U.K. economy by spending your stimulus cheque wisely:
If you spend the stimulus money at Asda or Tesco, the money will go to China, Taiwan or Sri Lanka.
If you spend it on petrol, your money will go to the Arabs.
If you purchase a computer, it will go to India, Taiwan or China.
If you purchase fruit and vegetables, it will go to Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala.
If you buy an efficient car, it will go to Japan or Korea.
If you purchase useless stuff, it will go to Taiwan.
If you pay your credit cards off, or buy shares, it will go to management bonuses and they will hide it offshore.
Instead, keep the money in the UK by:
1) Spending it at car boot sales, or
2) Going to night clubs, or
3) Spending it on prostitutes, or
4) Beer or whisky or
5) Tattoos.
(These are the only UK businesses still operating in the U.K. )
Conclusion:
Be patriotic: go to a night club with a tattooed prostitute that you met at a car boot sale and drink beer and/or whisky day and night.
Yours most respectfully,
Gideon ‘George’ Osborne,
Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Jewish media censorship in USA
January 17, 2011
Kevin MacDonald's Daily Show Adventure
By Kevin MacDonald
Jared Taylor just had a nice column at VDARE.com on his adventures following absolutely groundless news reports that Arizona shooter Jared Lee Loughner was linked to Taylor’s American Renaissance. His account says a lot about how Political Correctness is enforced in the media. Politico, having eagerly picked up the story that Loughner was linked to AR, happily agreed to run Taylor’s account of how he stood up to the smear. But his article was pulled, just after Taylor sent the following description of AR at her request to Politico Opinion Editor Allison Silver [Email her]:
“My magazine takes a conservative position on race and immigration and argues that diversity of the kind we are supposed to be celebrating is a weakness for the country, not a strength.”
Silver claimed that “there has been too much of a time lag”. Taylor comments sarcastically:
“We really do live in fast-moving times, don’t we? A story can go from ‘fascinating’ and ‘swell’ to stale news in less than 12 hours. Or even from ‘Got it, thanks!’ to stale news in a little over an hour.”
A strikingly similar thing happened to me last summer, during the Elena Kagan SCOTUS confirmation process.
I got an email from Miles Kahn, [Email him] a producer of The Daily Show, inviting me to go to New York to film an interview with Samantha Bee, one of the show’s reporters.
It was a tough decision—several people I asked said it was a bad idea. Ms. Bee is famous for skewering unwary interviewees, as in this bit on “A San Antonio good Samaritan [who] uses camera-mounted rifle technology to allow disabled hunters to shoot live exotic animals via the Internet”. And, of course, the show gets to edit the interview. (On the advice of a friend, I asked to tape the interview myself, but—perhaps significantly—Kahn refused.) Still, I eventually agreed, perhaps on the theory that there is no such thing as bad publicity.
So I flew across the country, at The Daily Show’s expense, showed up at The Daily Show studio on the far west side of Manhattan at 9:00AM for what would be a 3-hour session that would be later cut to fit the format. Ms. Bee, the “always pregnant lady”, was very pregnant with her third child at the time—probably a record for well-off White career women in New York. I was tempted to congratulate her for being a paragon of White fertility but restrained myself. Kahn sat in with us.
The ostensible reason for the interview: I had written some blogs on the Elena Kagan nomination, which was a particular obsession of mine (see here, here, here, here, here, and here.) Main theme: How can someone with absolutely no scholarly qualifications or any other relevant experience get nominated to the highest court in the land? Answer: Ethnic networking. Two other blogs dealt with the Kagan nomination as a symptom of the decline of WASP America (see here and here). This point (which had been separately albeit blandly raised in some MSM commentary) was to be the focus of the interview. It just goes to show you that you never know who is reading your stuff!
Quite a bit of the interview was on how Justice John Paul Stevens, whose retirement occasioned Kagan’s nomination, exemplifies the pathologies of WASP America: The ultimate non-ethnic actor. I thought I might as well get something out of my trip to New York, so I subsequently posted my interview notes on my Occidental Observer webzine: John Paul Stevens as Prototypical WASP Main theme: Stevens was principled to a fault, and he is naïve to think that non-Whites are as principled as he is. I wrote:
“Stevens and [David] Souter are naive. Their devotion to ideas and principle along with similar attitudes of a very large number of like-minded Whites will cast a long, deadly shadow as we head into the future. All the research shows that ethnically divided societies are prone to conflict and have less of a civic sense — for example, people in ethnically divided societies are less likely to contribute to public goods like health care. The new elite is much more likely to act out their historical grudges against the White majority than to uphold WASP ideals. Ethnicity matters.” [VDARE.com links added]
Of course, it could be said that Kagan is principled too—the principle being “Is it good for the Jews?”—but that’s a whole other ballgame.
I added another detail in my interview with Bee that somehow never got into my other writing on Kagan. After managing to get tenure at the prestigious University of Chicago Law School with almost no publications, Kagan went to work for the Clinton administration. After failing to be confirmed as a judge on the U.S. District Court of Appeals, she tried to return to her tenured position at the University of Chicago, but was rejected because of her lack of commitment to scholarship.
Kagan then got a non-tenured visiting professor position at Harvard—a very low rung on the academic totem pole (although admittedly a pretty prestigious pole). But shortly thereafter, she miraculously became dean of Harvard Law, as a result of the actions of someone whose Jewish identity and commitment have never been a secret—as New York Magazine’s Jason Zengerle put it[(Judging Kagan, May 14, 2010]: “Were it not for [Larry] Summers [who had worked with her in the Clinton Administration], she would probably be grading law-school finals right now rather than prepping for her Senate confirmation hearings.”
To paraphrase Mel Brooks’ line, it’s good to have Jewish connections.
A memorable moment in our interview of the decline of the WASPs was when I informed Bee that Ralph Lauren (ne Lifshitz) is Jewish. Apparently this was news to her and she pretended to start sobbing uncontrollably. I apologized for shattering her illusions!
After the Kagan-Stevens thing, the interview veered into unexpected territory. Kahn was busy passing questions to Bee on a whole range of topics. I talked about Jewish media influence, Bee joking “you should see what it’s like around here!” Shades of Rick Sanchez! (The Daily Show’s star, Jon Stewart, was born Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz).
After another note from Kahn, Bee asked me what American Jews should do. I answered that the first thing they should do is stop supporting massive non-White immigration.
Ms. Bee seemed surprised that I was not a WASP—that I grew up Catholic in a small city in Wisconsin. There seemed to be an effort to get me to say bad things about the WASPs I had known.
But my general message was that what did in the WASPs were the traits like moral idealism so characteristic of John Paul Stevens — not exactly the image that plays well in the media. I told them that I always thought that I could have become part of the WASP club myself if I had just decided to take up golf and get a job where I would make a bit more money than college professors make. In sociology-speak, the boundaries separating me from them were permeable. Indeed, one of my childhood friends was a wealthy Catholic who was well ensconced in the local country club WASP milieu.
I was asked about anti-WASP movies, the classic being Caddyshack where WASPs are depicted as snobbish, dishonest, vain, pompous, dim-witted, and sexually repressed. I forgot to mention that our local Jewish surgeon (there were maybe two Jewish families in town) was also a member of the local country club scene—but he behaved nothing like the Rodney Dangerfield character in Caddyshack.
I was also asked about my affiliation with American Third Position party. I kept reiterating the point that everyone has ethnic interests and that people who don’t have a sense of ethnic identity and interests will simply lose out to those that do—a knockdown argument if ever there was one. Bee paraphrased the argument as urging Whites to “get in the game”. Sounds like a good slogan for A3P!
I was told that the piece would run in a week or two. But nothing happened. Eventually, Kagan was officially confirmed. Not long after, Kahn sent me an email saying “I wanted to let you know that due to circumstances beyond my control, the piece featuring your interview won't be airing. I'm so sorry we weren't able to feature it, but this happens from time to time.”
Oh, well.
Of course, one never really knows why the interview wasn’t aired. Maybe it genuinely was no longer topical. But my taping in New York was in early July. Kagan was confirmed in early August. It’s hard to believe that The Daily Show normally wastes so much time. It’s daily, isn’t it?
But the suspicion must be that, as with Politico and Jared Taylor, the senior media honchos do not want discussions of race, White identity and interests, or Jewish influence in a way that gets outside the box of Political Correctness.
Lower-ranking MSM operatives apparently don’t always get this message, but they are brought up pretty sharply.
The only exceptions are Archie Bunker types who can be easily skewered. I have no doubt whatever that, if I had come across to Bee and Kahn (and their superiors) as a nut case, the interview would have been aired.
And of course, from MSM point of view, they are absolutely right. The greatest power of the MSM is the power to define the boundaries of acceptable political discussion. The ideas I was expressing must be seen as espoused only by people who are uneducated, criminal and/or mad. Hence the fervent desire to find that Jared Lee Loughner had ties to White advocacy.
Until this intellectual monopoly is broken—as the internet is to some extent doing—there will be no movement on big issues like immigration, especially legal immigration.
And anti-White organizations will continue to have the doomsday weapon: being able to end careers with charges of “racism” and “anti-Semitism” simply for writing or saying things that are well-thought out, reasonable, and factually-based—but beyond the pale.
The good news for me: it was a learning experience in how the media elite works.
And I greatly enjoyed dinner with supportive friends on the night before the interview. They can’t take that away from me.
Kevin MacDonald [email him] is professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach and a frequent contributor to The Occidental Observer. For his website, click here.
Kevin MacDonald's Daily Show Adventure
By Kevin MacDonald
Jared Taylor just had a nice column at VDARE.com on his adventures following absolutely groundless news reports that Arizona shooter Jared Lee Loughner was linked to Taylor’s American Renaissance. His account says a lot about how Political Correctness is enforced in the media. Politico, having eagerly picked up the story that Loughner was linked to AR, happily agreed to run Taylor’s account of how he stood up to the smear. But his article was pulled, just after Taylor sent the following description of AR at her request to Politico Opinion Editor Allison Silver [Email her]:
“My magazine takes a conservative position on race and immigration and argues that diversity of the kind we are supposed to be celebrating is a weakness for the country, not a strength.”
Silver claimed that “there has been too much of a time lag”. Taylor comments sarcastically:
“We really do live in fast-moving times, don’t we? A story can go from ‘fascinating’ and ‘swell’ to stale news in less than 12 hours. Or even from ‘Got it, thanks!’ to stale news in a little over an hour.”
A strikingly similar thing happened to me last summer, during the Elena Kagan SCOTUS confirmation process.
I got an email from Miles Kahn, [Email him] a producer of The Daily Show, inviting me to go to New York to film an interview with Samantha Bee, one of the show’s reporters.
It was a tough decision—several people I asked said it was a bad idea. Ms. Bee is famous for skewering unwary interviewees, as in this bit on “A San Antonio good Samaritan [who] uses camera-mounted rifle technology to allow disabled hunters to shoot live exotic animals via the Internet”. And, of course, the show gets to edit the interview. (On the advice of a friend, I asked to tape the interview myself, but—perhaps significantly—Kahn refused.) Still, I eventually agreed, perhaps on the theory that there is no such thing as bad publicity.
So I flew across the country, at The Daily Show’s expense, showed up at The Daily Show studio on the far west side of Manhattan at 9:00AM for what would be a 3-hour session that would be later cut to fit the format. Ms. Bee, the “always pregnant lady”, was very pregnant with her third child at the time—probably a record for well-off White career women in New York. I was tempted to congratulate her for being a paragon of White fertility but restrained myself. Kahn sat in with us.
The ostensible reason for the interview: I had written some blogs on the Elena Kagan nomination, which was a particular obsession of mine (see here, here, here, here, here, and here.) Main theme: How can someone with absolutely no scholarly qualifications or any other relevant experience get nominated to the highest court in the land? Answer: Ethnic networking. Two other blogs dealt with the Kagan nomination as a symptom of the decline of WASP America (see here and here). This point (which had been separately albeit blandly raised in some MSM commentary) was to be the focus of the interview. It just goes to show you that you never know who is reading your stuff!
Quite a bit of the interview was on how Justice John Paul Stevens, whose retirement occasioned Kagan’s nomination, exemplifies the pathologies of WASP America: The ultimate non-ethnic actor. I thought I might as well get something out of my trip to New York, so I subsequently posted my interview notes on my Occidental Observer webzine: John Paul Stevens as Prototypical WASP Main theme: Stevens was principled to a fault, and he is naïve to think that non-Whites are as principled as he is. I wrote:
“Stevens and [David] Souter are naive. Their devotion to ideas and principle along with similar attitudes of a very large number of like-minded Whites will cast a long, deadly shadow as we head into the future. All the research shows that ethnically divided societies are prone to conflict and have less of a civic sense — for example, people in ethnically divided societies are less likely to contribute to public goods like health care. The new elite is much more likely to act out their historical grudges against the White majority than to uphold WASP ideals. Ethnicity matters.” [VDARE.com links added]
Of course, it could be said that Kagan is principled too—the principle being “Is it good for the Jews?”—but that’s a whole other ballgame.
I added another detail in my interview with Bee that somehow never got into my other writing on Kagan. After managing to get tenure at the prestigious University of Chicago Law School with almost no publications, Kagan went to work for the Clinton administration. After failing to be confirmed as a judge on the U.S. District Court of Appeals, she tried to return to her tenured position at the University of Chicago, but was rejected because of her lack of commitment to scholarship.
Kagan then got a non-tenured visiting professor position at Harvard—a very low rung on the academic totem pole (although admittedly a pretty prestigious pole). But shortly thereafter, she miraculously became dean of Harvard Law, as a result of the actions of someone whose Jewish identity and commitment have never been a secret—as New York Magazine’s Jason Zengerle put it[(Judging Kagan, May 14, 2010]: “Were it not for [Larry] Summers [who had worked with her in the Clinton Administration], she would probably be grading law-school finals right now rather than prepping for her Senate confirmation hearings.”
To paraphrase Mel Brooks’ line, it’s good to have Jewish connections.
A memorable moment in our interview of the decline of the WASPs was when I informed Bee that Ralph Lauren (ne Lifshitz) is Jewish. Apparently this was news to her and she pretended to start sobbing uncontrollably. I apologized for shattering her illusions!
After the Kagan-Stevens thing, the interview veered into unexpected territory. Kahn was busy passing questions to Bee on a whole range of topics. I talked about Jewish media influence, Bee joking “you should see what it’s like around here!” Shades of Rick Sanchez! (The Daily Show’s star, Jon Stewart, was born Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz).
After another note from Kahn, Bee asked me what American Jews should do. I answered that the first thing they should do is stop supporting massive non-White immigration.
Ms. Bee seemed surprised that I was not a WASP—that I grew up Catholic in a small city in Wisconsin. There seemed to be an effort to get me to say bad things about the WASPs I had known.
But my general message was that what did in the WASPs were the traits like moral idealism so characteristic of John Paul Stevens — not exactly the image that plays well in the media. I told them that I always thought that I could have become part of the WASP club myself if I had just decided to take up golf and get a job where I would make a bit more money than college professors make. In sociology-speak, the boundaries separating me from them were permeable. Indeed, one of my childhood friends was a wealthy Catholic who was well ensconced in the local country club WASP milieu.
I was asked about anti-WASP movies, the classic being Caddyshack where WASPs are depicted as snobbish, dishonest, vain, pompous, dim-witted, and sexually repressed. I forgot to mention that our local Jewish surgeon (there were maybe two Jewish families in town) was also a member of the local country club scene—but he behaved nothing like the Rodney Dangerfield character in Caddyshack.
I was also asked about my affiliation with American Third Position party. I kept reiterating the point that everyone has ethnic interests and that people who don’t have a sense of ethnic identity and interests will simply lose out to those that do—a knockdown argument if ever there was one. Bee paraphrased the argument as urging Whites to “get in the game”. Sounds like a good slogan for A3P!
I was told that the piece would run in a week or two. But nothing happened. Eventually, Kagan was officially confirmed. Not long after, Kahn sent me an email saying “I wanted to let you know that due to circumstances beyond my control, the piece featuring your interview won't be airing. I'm so sorry we weren't able to feature it, but this happens from time to time.”
Oh, well.
Of course, one never really knows why the interview wasn’t aired. Maybe it genuinely was no longer topical. But my taping in New York was in early July. Kagan was confirmed in early August. It’s hard to believe that The Daily Show normally wastes so much time. It’s daily, isn’t it?
But the suspicion must be that, as with Politico and Jared Taylor, the senior media honchos do not want discussions of race, White identity and interests, or Jewish influence in a way that gets outside the box of Political Correctness.
Lower-ranking MSM operatives apparently don’t always get this message, but they are brought up pretty sharply.
The only exceptions are Archie Bunker types who can be easily skewered. I have no doubt whatever that, if I had come across to Bee and Kahn (and their superiors) as a nut case, the interview would have been aired.
And of course, from MSM point of view, they are absolutely right. The greatest power of the MSM is the power to define the boundaries of acceptable political discussion. The ideas I was expressing must be seen as espoused only by people who are uneducated, criminal and/or mad. Hence the fervent desire to find that Jared Lee Loughner had ties to White advocacy.
Until this intellectual monopoly is broken—as the internet is to some extent doing—there will be no movement on big issues like immigration, especially legal immigration.
And anti-White organizations will continue to have the doomsday weapon: being able to end careers with charges of “racism” and “anti-Semitism” simply for writing or saying things that are well-thought out, reasonable, and factually-based—but beyond the pale.
The good news for me: it was a learning experience in how the media elite works.
And I greatly enjoyed dinner with supportive friends on the night before the interview. They can’t take that away from me.
Kevin MacDonald [email him] is professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach and a frequent contributor to The Occidental Observer. For his website, click here.
Saturday, 22 January 2011
British Brainwashing Corporation a mafia of effete decadents.
Left-wing bias? It's written through the BBC's very DNA,
says Peter Sissons
Last updated at 1:55 AM on 22nd January 2011
For 20 years I was a front man at the BBC, anchoring news and currentaffairs programmes, so I reckon nobody is better placed than me to answer the question that nags at many of its viewers — is the BBC biased?
In my view, ‘bias’ is too blunt a word to describe the subtleties of the pervading culture. The better word is a ‘mindset’. At the core of the BBC, in its very DNA, is a way of thinking that is firmly of the Left.
By far the most popular and widely read newspapers at the BBC are The Guardian and The Independent. Producers refer to them routinely for the line to take on running stories, and for inspiration on which items to cover. In the later stages of my career, I lost count of the number of times I asked a producer for a brief on a story, only to be handed a copy of The Guardian and told ‘it’s all in there’.
If you want to read one of the few copies of the Daily Mail that find their way into the BBC newsroom, they are difficult to track down, and you would be advised not to make too much of a show of reading them. Wrap them in brown paper or a copy of The Guardian, would be my advice.
I am in no doubt that the majority of BBC staff vote for political parties of the Left. But it’s impossible to do anything but guess at the numbers whose beliefs are on the Right or even Centre-Right. This is because the one thing guaranteed to damage your career prospects at the BBC is letting it be known that you are at odds with the prevailing and deep-rooted BBC attitude towards Life, the Universe, and Everything.
At any given time there is a BBC line on everything of importance, a line usually adopted in the light of which way its senior echelons believe the political wind is blowing. This line is rarely spelled out explicitly, but percolates subtly throughout the organisation.
Whatever the United Nations is associated with is good — it is heresy to question any of its activities. The EU is also a good thing, but not quite as good as the UN. Soaking the rich is good, despite well-founded economic arguments that the more you tax, the less you get. And Government spending is a good thing, although most BBC people prefer to call it investment, in line with New Labour’s terminology.
All green and environmental groups are very good things. Al Gore is a saint. George Bush was a bad thing, and thick into the bargain. Obama was not just the Democratic Party’s candidate for the White House, he was the BBC’s. Blair was good, Brown bad, but the BBC has now lost interest in both.
Trade unions are mostly good things, especially when they are fighting BBC managers. Quangos are also mostly good, and the reports they produce are usually handled uncritically. The Royal Family is a bore. Islam must not be offended at any price, although Christians are fair game because they do nothing about it if they are offended.
Queen Elizabeth II was not a favourite at the BBC
The increasing tendency for the BBC to interview its own reporters on air exacerbates this mindset. Instead of concentrating on interviewing the leading players in a story or spreading the net wide for a range of views, these days the BBC frequently chooses to use the time getting the thoughts of its own correspondents. It is a format intended to help clarify the facts, but which often invites the expression of opinion. When that happens, instead of hearing both sides of a story, the audience at home gets what is, in effect, the BBC’s view presented as fact.
And, inside the organisation, you challenge that collective view at your peril. In today’s BBC only those whose antennae are fully attuned to the corporation’s cultural mindset — or keep quiet about their true feelings — are going to make progress.
Moreover, making progress these days doesn’t mean just achieving the influence and prestige of a senior job with the world’s greatest broadcaster, once considered reward enough. For those breaking through into the senior ranks, there’s now big, big money and a gold-plated pension to be had.
Which is why, although there has been plenty of grumbling on the shop floor about the escalation of pay for top BBC managers in recent years, it’s muted. No one wants to wreck his or her chances of a well-paid place in the promised land. The newsroom has many talented journalists of middle rank, who know what’s wrong with the organisation, but who don’t rock the boat for fear of blowing their futures.
Not that talent alone is enough to get on at the BBC. The key to understanding its internal promotions system is that, for every person whose career is advanced on ability, two are promoted because it solves a problem for management.
If Human Resources — or Personnel, as it used to be known — advise that it’s time a woman or someone from an ethnic minority (or a combination of the two) was appointed to the job for which you, a white male, have applied, then that’s who gets it.
But whatever your talent, sex or ethnicity, there’s one sure-fire way at a BBC promotions board to ensure you don’t get the job, indeed to bring your career to a grinding halt. And that’s if, when asked which post-war politician you most admire, you reply: ‘Margaret Thatcher’.
What the BBC wants you, the public, to believe is that it has ‘independence’ woven into its fabric, running through its veins and concreted into its foundations. The reality, I discovered, was that for the BBC, independence is not a banner it carries principally on behalf of the listener or viewer. Rather, it is the name it gives to its ability to act at all times in its own best interests.
The BBC’s ability to position itself, to decide for itself on which side its bread is buttered, is what it calls its independence. It’s flexible, and acutely sensitive to which way the wind is blowing politically.
Complaints from viewers may invariably be met with the BBC’s stock response, ‘We don’t accept that, so get lost’. But complaints from ministers, though they may be rejected publicly, usually cause consternation — particularly if there is a licence fee settlement in the offing. And not just ministers, if a change of Government is thought likely.
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair was a BBC favourite according to Sissons
Back in October 1995, the then leader of the Opposition, Tony Blair, made his big speech at the Labour Party Conference — but on the Six O’clock News, there was every chance it would be upstaged by the verdict in the sensational OJ Simpson trial in the U.S., which was expected at the same time. Even at the conference itself delegates crowded round TV sets for the news, and it wasn’t to see a rerun of Tony.
Alastair Campbell, Blair’s press secretary, was having none of it. He faxed the BBC and ITN ‘not to lose sight of the importance to the country of Mr Blair’s speech’. He wanted it to lead the news. ITN ignored his letter. The BBC made sure the Six O’clock News complied.
That spoke volumes. Such a letter from a spin doctor would have been binned on principle by the great editors of ITN who I worked for before joining the BBC. At the BBC, the instinct, faced with such a plea from a party of the Left standing on the brink of power, was to do as requested.
All Governments work hard on influencing the news agenda, but what I found uncomfortable during my years presenting the Nine O’clock and Ten O’clock News was how blatant those attempts to pressurise the BBC became, particularly at General Election time.
The party machines all had the internal BBC telephone numbers of the editors of the major news programmes, whom they would try to bully in person, both before and after the programmes went out.
I remember a night when the editor’s phone rang after the Nine O’Clock News. It was a direct call from No:10, questioning her judgment and complaining about our political coverage that night. This wasn’t a call to the director-general, or the head of news, but to a harassed and tired editor who had been on duty for 14 hours.
‘Tell him to get stuffed,’ I advised her. She rolled her eyes, knowing better than I the row that would be caused by that.
One of the things that always puzzled me at the BBC was the lack of inspirational leadership. There were exceptions.
My favourite editor when I chaired Question Time was notable for his total loyalty to me and the rest of his team. If things went wrong, he saw it as his job to take the bullet. That was not the BBC way — the old saying ‘Deputy heads must roll’ still raises a smile, but only because of the truth it contains.
Most of the managers I had over me had status and rank, on paper. In reality, they had little talent except the dark art of surviving at the BBC and alienating those who were answerable to them. I was always struck by how few senior people there were to look up to and to learn from.
It had been very different at ITN where I began my career as a television journalist. It had a tremendous esprit de corps and bosses whom you would follow over the top when they blew the whistle. You were always aware that someone was in charge who would say the seven most important words in any newsroom: ‘Here’s what we are going to do.’
Working at ITN wasn’t always a bed of roses. I can remember fights and disagreements, strikes and setbacks. But I never felt the chronic lack of motivation that comes when you work for an organisation that is rudderless.
ITN, it must be said, had the advantage of being small. The BBC, by contrast, has become so big and complex that it is virtually unmanageable. Those at the top of one of the world’s greatest communications businesses seem to find it impossible to communicate on a personal level with those who work for them.
Many of them were once convivial colleagues, but the dead hand of the BBC knocks the stuffing out of them, and the climate of fear — fear usually of making a decision — finishes them off.
The BBC is one of our most important national institutions. It is revered around the world, and many of its products, in entertainment and drama, are unsurpassed. But at its core is news, and BBC News is an unhappy place, under-performing and directionless.
Paradoxically, it’s never had more people involved in journalist training and laying down editorial guidelines.
What it lacks is a leader whose lodestone isn’t The Guardian; who will draw a line on political correctness; who’s not afraid to hire some people who don’t fit the BBC template; who will kick backsides when merited; who will promote solely on talent; who will remind all interest groups that they don’t have an entitlement to BBC airtime; and who will do the job for the prestige and not the money.
And pigs might fly!!!! On a day-to-day basis the people who ran BBC News were rarely seen on the shop floor. If a visitor to the BBC’s huge newsroom at Television Centre were to ask who was in charge, you wouldn’t be able to point to any individual in the room.
Harassed programme editors would be summoned to editorial meetings on the management floors above, and the sentiment most often expressed when they returned was that they had wasted valuable time reading lists to each other and explaining the day’s news to the man or woman notionally at the helm.
Too many senior executives were just playing out their roles, oblivious to how irrelevant they had become to what was actually being done in the news factory below. Colleagues told me that they had not just lost respect for their highly-paid bosses, what they felt was now total contempt. What they were looking for was leadership, and all they got was management.
Developments like this increasingly disturbed and depressed me. They came to a head just before the 2009 local and European elections, when time was starting to run out for the Brown Government.
I was at Television Centre preparing to anchor the 5pm-6pm news, the centre-piece of which was to be an extended interview that I would conduct with Labour’s deputy leader Harriet Harman.
I did what I have always done before thousands of interviews in my 45 years as a broadcast journalist. I drew up a list of the most important current issues that I felt she needed to be asked about, drafted a few core questions, and scoured the newswires and morning papers for anything I’d missed.
Then it started — a steady stream of email messages from producers telling me what to ask. Three or four of them all wanted to have their say, and they seemed particularly twitchy about Harman being interviewed by me, unsupervised. Most seemed to be fully paid-up members of her fan club.
BBC news producers have a perfect right to try to ensure that a news presenter sticks to their agenda — it is the BBC way. But too many of them are concerned not about what will be the best thing to do journalistically, but about what will best please the news executives on the floors above. The two are not necessarily the same thing.
I managed to bat away most of the stuff suggested to me, and the way the interview might go took shape in my mind. Then, half an hour before transmission, a producer arrived with a list of questions for Harriet Harman emailed in by viewers.
This was news to me, but I had no choice in the matter because they had already been set up with captions, and it was my job simply to put them to her. After that, if there was time — and the interview was to run to no more than eight minutes — I could put some questions of my own.
I was asked what I had in mind, and I said that I was going to ask her about a row brewing in the morning papers about Gordon Brown not inviting the Queen to the 65th anniversary commemoration of D-Day. The response shocked me. I was told this was not a topic worth raising because it was ‘only a campaign being run by the Daily Mail’.
I have no doubt that if it had been the lead in The Guardian or The Independent, I would have been instructed to nail Ms Harman to the wall. I did ask the question, and she, clearly uncomfortable, promised a statement when she had found out all the facts.
But as I drove home that evening, I asked myself if I wanted to go on working for the BBC. By the time I arrived home, I’d decided to leave.
Extracted from When One Door Closes by Peter Sissons, published on February 2 by Biteback Publishing at £17.99. © Peter Sissons 2011. To order a copy at £14.99 (p&p free), call 0845 155 0720..
Comments (31)Here's what readers have had to say so far.
Very enlightening article, but it doesn't suprise me. Peter Sissions has just gone up a few notches.
- Aryan, Wales, 22/1/2011 02:38
The Guardian sells only 250 000 copies a day (and falling). Take away the bulk buying by libraries, quangos, unions, universities, charities, and BBC and the real figure is 50 000 genuine purchasers mostly in West London. Yet the Guardian has a monopoly on BBC recruitment adverts (many millions each year from licence fees) which subsidise it and drive the genuine purchases (looking at the jobs). Why will no MP and certainly not Jeremy Hunt Culture secretary challenge this ?
- Jonathan Stuart-Brown, Walsall, 22/1/2011 02:35
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1349506/Left-wing-bias-Its-written-BBCs-DNA-says-Peter-Sissons.html#ixzz1BkcNQiIZ
says Peter Sissons
Last updated at 1:55 AM on 22nd January 2011
For 20 years I was a front man at the BBC, anchoring news and currentaffairs programmes, so I reckon nobody is better placed than me to answer the question that nags at many of its viewers — is the BBC biased?
In my view, ‘bias’ is too blunt a word to describe the subtleties of the pervading culture. The better word is a ‘mindset’. At the core of the BBC, in its very DNA, is a way of thinking that is firmly of the Left.
By far the most popular and widely read newspapers at the BBC are The Guardian and The Independent. Producers refer to them routinely for the line to take on running stories, and for inspiration on which items to cover. In the later stages of my career, I lost count of the number of times I asked a producer for a brief on a story, only to be handed a copy of The Guardian and told ‘it’s all in there’.
If you want to read one of the few copies of the Daily Mail that find their way into the BBC newsroom, they are difficult to track down, and you would be advised not to make too much of a show of reading them. Wrap them in brown paper or a copy of The Guardian, would be my advice.
I am in no doubt that the majority of BBC staff vote for political parties of the Left. But it’s impossible to do anything but guess at the numbers whose beliefs are on the Right or even Centre-Right. This is because the one thing guaranteed to damage your career prospects at the BBC is letting it be known that you are at odds with the prevailing and deep-rooted BBC attitude towards Life, the Universe, and Everything.
At any given time there is a BBC line on everything of importance, a line usually adopted in the light of which way its senior echelons believe the political wind is blowing. This line is rarely spelled out explicitly, but percolates subtly throughout the organisation.
Whatever the United Nations is associated with is good — it is heresy to question any of its activities. The EU is also a good thing, but not quite as good as the UN. Soaking the rich is good, despite well-founded economic arguments that the more you tax, the less you get. And Government spending is a good thing, although most BBC people prefer to call it investment, in line with New Labour’s terminology.
All green and environmental groups are very good things. Al Gore is a saint. George Bush was a bad thing, and thick into the bargain. Obama was not just the Democratic Party’s candidate for the White House, he was the BBC’s. Blair was good, Brown bad, but the BBC has now lost interest in both.
Trade unions are mostly good things, especially when they are fighting BBC managers. Quangos are also mostly good, and the reports they produce are usually handled uncritically. The Royal Family is a bore. Islam must not be offended at any price, although Christians are fair game because they do nothing about it if they are offended.
Queen Elizabeth II was not a favourite at the BBC
The increasing tendency for the BBC to interview its own reporters on air exacerbates this mindset. Instead of concentrating on interviewing the leading players in a story or spreading the net wide for a range of views, these days the BBC frequently chooses to use the time getting the thoughts of its own correspondents. It is a format intended to help clarify the facts, but which often invites the expression of opinion. When that happens, instead of hearing both sides of a story, the audience at home gets what is, in effect, the BBC’s view presented as fact.
And, inside the organisation, you challenge that collective view at your peril. In today’s BBC only those whose antennae are fully attuned to the corporation’s cultural mindset — or keep quiet about their true feelings — are going to make progress.
Moreover, making progress these days doesn’t mean just achieving the influence and prestige of a senior job with the world’s greatest broadcaster, once considered reward enough. For those breaking through into the senior ranks, there’s now big, big money and a gold-plated pension to be had.
Which is why, although there has been plenty of grumbling on the shop floor about the escalation of pay for top BBC managers in recent years, it’s muted. No one wants to wreck his or her chances of a well-paid place in the promised land. The newsroom has many talented journalists of middle rank, who know what’s wrong with the organisation, but who don’t rock the boat for fear of blowing their futures.
Not that talent alone is enough to get on at the BBC. The key to understanding its internal promotions system is that, for every person whose career is advanced on ability, two are promoted because it solves a problem for management.
If Human Resources — or Personnel, as it used to be known — advise that it’s time a woman or someone from an ethnic minority (or a combination of the two) was appointed to the job for which you, a white male, have applied, then that’s who gets it.
But whatever your talent, sex or ethnicity, there’s one sure-fire way at a BBC promotions board to ensure you don’t get the job, indeed to bring your career to a grinding halt. And that’s if, when asked which post-war politician you most admire, you reply: ‘Margaret Thatcher’.
What the BBC wants you, the public, to believe is that it has ‘independence’ woven into its fabric, running through its veins and concreted into its foundations. The reality, I discovered, was that for the BBC, independence is not a banner it carries principally on behalf of the listener or viewer. Rather, it is the name it gives to its ability to act at all times in its own best interests.
The BBC’s ability to position itself, to decide for itself on which side its bread is buttered, is what it calls its independence. It’s flexible, and acutely sensitive to which way the wind is blowing politically.
Complaints from viewers may invariably be met with the BBC’s stock response, ‘We don’t accept that, so get lost’. But complaints from ministers, though they may be rejected publicly, usually cause consternation — particularly if there is a licence fee settlement in the offing. And not just ministers, if a change of Government is thought likely.
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair was a BBC favourite according to Sissons
Back in October 1995, the then leader of the Opposition, Tony Blair, made his big speech at the Labour Party Conference — but on the Six O’clock News, there was every chance it would be upstaged by the verdict in the sensational OJ Simpson trial in the U.S., which was expected at the same time. Even at the conference itself delegates crowded round TV sets for the news, and it wasn’t to see a rerun of Tony.
Alastair Campbell, Blair’s press secretary, was having none of it. He faxed the BBC and ITN ‘not to lose sight of the importance to the country of Mr Blair’s speech’. He wanted it to lead the news. ITN ignored his letter. The BBC made sure the Six O’clock News complied.
That spoke volumes. Such a letter from a spin doctor would have been binned on principle by the great editors of ITN who I worked for before joining the BBC. At the BBC, the instinct, faced with such a plea from a party of the Left standing on the brink of power, was to do as requested.
All Governments work hard on influencing the news agenda, but what I found uncomfortable during my years presenting the Nine O’clock and Ten O’clock News was how blatant those attempts to pressurise the BBC became, particularly at General Election time.
The party machines all had the internal BBC telephone numbers of the editors of the major news programmes, whom they would try to bully in person, both before and after the programmes went out.
I remember a night when the editor’s phone rang after the Nine O’Clock News. It was a direct call from No:10, questioning her judgment and complaining about our political coverage that night. This wasn’t a call to the director-general, or the head of news, but to a harassed and tired editor who had been on duty for 14 hours.
‘Tell him to get stuffed,’ I advised her. She rolled her eyes, knowing better than I the row that would be caused by that.
One of the things that always puzzled me at the BBC was the lack of inspirational leadership. There were exceptions.
My favourite editor when I chaired Question Time was notable for his total loyalty to me and the rest of his team. If things went wrong, he saw it as his job to take the bullet. That was not the BBC way — the old saying ‘Deputy heads must roll’ still raises a smile, but only because of the truth it contains.
Most of the managers I had over me had status and rank, on paper. In reality, they had little talent except the dark art of surviving at the BBC and alienating those who were answerable to them. I was always struck by how few senior people there were to look up to and to learn from.
It had been very different at ITN where I began my career as a television journalist. It had a tremendous esprit de corps and bosses whom you would follow over the top when they blew the whistle. You were always aware that someone was in charge who would say the seven most important words in any newsroom: ‘Here’s what we are going to do.’
Working at ITN wasn’t always a bed of roses. I can remember fights and disagreements, strikes and setbacks. But I never felt the chronic lack of motivation that comes when you work for an organisation that is rudderless.
ITN, it must be said, had the advantage of being small. The BBC, by contrast, has become so big and complex that it is virtually unmanageable. Those at the top of one of the world’s greatest communications businesses seem to find it impossible to communicate on a personal level with those who work for them.
Many of them were once convivial colleagues, but the dead hand of the BBC knocks the stuffing out of them, and the climate of fear — fear usually of making a decision — finishes them off.
The BBC is one of our most important national institutions. It is revered around the world, and many of its products, in entertainment and drama, are unsurpassed. But at its core is news, and BBC News is an unhappy place, under-performing and directionless.
Paradoxically, it’s never had more people involved in journalist training and laying down editorial guidelines.
What it lacks is a leader whose lodestone isn’t The Guardian; who will draw a line on political correctness; who’s not afraid to hire some people who don’t fit the BBC template; who will kick backsides when merited; who will promote solely on talent; who will remind all interest groups that they don’t have an entitlement to BBC airtime; and who will do the job for the prestige and not the money.
And pigs might fly!!!! On a day-to-day basis the people who ran BBC News were rarely seen on the shop floor. If a visitor to the BBC’s huge newsroom at Television Centre were to ask who was in charge, you wouldn’t be able to point to any individual in the room.
Harassed programme editors would be summoned to editorial meetings on the management floors above, and the sentiment most often expressed when they returned was that they had wasted valuable time reading lists to each other and explaining the day’s news to the man or woman notionally at the helm.
Too many senior executives were just playing out their roles, oblivious to how irrelevant they had become to what was actually being done in the news factory below. Colleagues told me that they had not just lost respect for their highly-paid bosses, what they felt was now total contempt. What they were looking for was leadership, and all they got was management.
Developments like this increasingly disturbed and depressed me. They came to a head just before the 2009 local and European elections, when time was starting to run out for the Brown Government.
I was at Television Centre preparing to anchor the 5pm-6pm news, the centre-piece of which was to be an extended interview that I would conduct with Labour’s deputy leader Harriet Harman.
I did what I have always done before thousands of interviews in my 45 years as a broadcast journalist. I drew up a list of the most important current issues that I felt she needed to be asked about, drafted a few core questions, and scoured the newswires and morning papers for anything I’d missed.
Then it started — a steady stream of email messages from producers telling me what to ask. Three or four of them all wanted to have their say, and they seemed particularly twitchy about Harman being interviewed by me, unsupervised. Most seemed to be fully paid-up members of her fan club.
BBC news producers have a perfect right to try to ensure that a news presenter sticks to their agenda — it is the BBC way. But too many of them are concerned not about what will be the best thing to do journalistically, but about what will best please the news executives on the floors above. The two are not necessarily the same thing.
I managed to bat away most of the stuff suggested to me, and the way the interview might go took shape in my mind. Then, half an hour before transmission, a producer arrived with a list of questions for Harriet Harman emailed in by viewers.
This was news to me, but I had no choice in the matter because they had already been set up with captions, and it was my job simply to put them to her. After that, if there was time — and the interview was to run to no more than eight minutes — I could put some questions of my own.
I was asked what I had in mind, and I said that I was going to ask her about a row brewing in the morning papers about Gordon Brown not inviting the Queen to the 65th anniversary commemoration of D-Day. The response shocked me. I was told this was not a topic worth raising because it was ‘only a campaign being run by the Daily Mail’.
I have no doubt that if it had been the lead in The Guardian or The Independent, I would have been instructed to nail Ms Harman to the wall. I did ask the question, and she, clearly uncomfortable, promised a statement when she had found out all the facts.
But as I drove home that evening, I asked myself if I wanted to go on working for the BBC. By the time I arrived home, I’d decided to leave.
Extracted from When One Door Closes by Peter Sissons, published on February 2 by Biteback Publishing at £17.99. © Peter Sissons 2011. To order a copy at £14.99 (p&p free), call 0845 155 0720..
Comments (31)Here's what readers have had to say so far.
Very enlightening article, but it doesn't suprise me. Peter Sissions has just gone up a few notches.
- Aryan, Wales, 22/1/2011 02:38
The Guardian sells only 250 000 copies a day (and falling). Take away the bulk buying by libraries, quangos, unions, universities, charities, and BBC and the real figure is 50 000 genuine purchasers mostly in West London. Yet the Guardian has a monopoly on BBC recruitment adverts (many millions each year from licence fees) which subsidise it and drive the genuine purchases (looking at the jobs). Why will no MP and certainly not Jeremy Hunt Culture secretary challenge this ?
- Jonathan Stuart-Brown, Walsall, 22/1/2011 02:35
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1349506/Left-wing-bias-Its-written-BBCs-DNA-says-Peter-Sissons.html#ixzz1BkcNQiIZ
Jews working the suckers again
If ever you’ve got half an hour to spare and feel like peering deeply into “intergenerationally transmitted” persecution mania, then this is the ‘must read’ for you.
This kind of psycho-babble has been deployed in the defence of Jews arrested, charged and convicted of ‘hate-crime’ hoaxes perpetrated “to alert the world to on-going anti-semitism....” (In regard to that kind of activity, check out the work of the non-political American academic Laird Wilcox at: http://www.lairdwilcox.com/ .)
Meanwhile, go to:
http://www.baycrest.org/If_Not_Now/Volume7/default_11222.asp
Baycrest - Vol 7, Winter 2007.
Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma
from Holocaust Survivors to their Children
by Diane Harvery, Toronto
Introduction
The Holocaust had and still has a deep effect on the children of survivors. “They grew up in the shadow of psychic conflicts stemming from bereavement, mourning, guilt feelings and anxiety, which often resulted in overprotection and over expectation.”
(Wardi, 1992, p.x)
During their childhood, children of Holocaust survivors or 2nd generation survivors, as they have come to be known, have been the unwitting recipients of their parent’s trauma. Survivor parents have unconsciously transmitted onto their children much of their own traumas, as well as investing them with all their memories and hopes.
The study of transgenerational transmission of the Holocaust trauma is full of complexities. It becomes almost impossible to precisely understand what kind of parents, having experienced what kinds of trauma, at what age, and in which context, will transmit what kinds of message, in what ways, to what kinds of children, and with what consequences (Gottschalk, 2003). There are common sensitivities that all 2nd generation survivors feel including: the desire to protect their parents; feelings of mourning and loss; not wanting to be a burden to their parents; heightened sensitivity to suffering people in general; and, prevalent feelings of guilt and anxiety.
This kind of psycho-babble has been deployed in the defence of Jews arrested, charged and convicted of ‘hate-crime’ hoaxes perpetrated “to alert the world to on-going anti-semitism....” (In regard to that kind of activity, check out the work of the non-political American academic Laird Wilcox at: http://www.lairdwilcox.com/ .)
Meanwhile, go to:
http://www.baycrest.org/If_Not_Now/Volume7/default_11222.asp
Baycrest - Vol 7, Winter 2007.
Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma
from Holocaust Survivors to their Children
by Diane Harvery, Toronto
Introduction
The Holocaust had and still has a deep effect on the children of survivors. “They grew up in the shadow of psychic conflicts stemming from bereavement, mourning, guilt feelings and anxiety, which often resulted in overprotection and over expectation.”
(Wardi, 1992, p.x)
During their childhood, children of Holocaust survivors or 2nd generation survivors, as they have come to be known, have been the unwitting recipients of their parent’s trauma. Survivor parents have unconsciously transmitted onto their children much of their own traumas, as well as investing them with all their memories and hopes.
The study of transgenerational transmission of the Holocaust trauma is full of complexities. It becomes almost impossible to precisely understand what kind of parents, having experienced what kinds of trauma, at what age, and in which context, will transmit what kinds of message, in what ways, to what kinds of children, and with what consequences (Gottschalk, 2003). There are common sensitivities that all 2nd generation survivors feel including: the desire to protect their parents; feelings of mourning and loss; not wanting to be a burden to their parents; heightened sensitivity to suffering people in general; and, prevalent feelings of guilt and anxiety.
Friday, 21 January 2011
Churchill A Corrupt Drunk
AN OBSESSION THAT CAUSED MILLIONS TO DIE IN WORLD WAR II
Documentary hails Judeophiliac Churchill
Documentary hails Churchill as Zionists' greatest ally
By MARTIN KNELMAN
The Toronto Star Tuesday, 11 January 2011
Documentary on Churchill and Jews aired on Jan. 17.
TORONTO — Millions of people credit Winston Churchill, Britain’s
inspiring wartime prime minister during its darkest hours, with
saving the world from Hitler.
But was Churchill also — as we’ve rarely heard — the greatest
ally the Jewish people have ever had?
The answer is a passionate yes, according to Barry Avrich,
whose compelling documentary — An Unlikely Obsession:
Churchill and the Jews — will have its premiere at 10 p.m.
Monday on the Vision channel.
“When I was first approached about making a film based a book
by Martin Gilbert,” Avrich recalls, “I said ‘No, I’m the wrong guy
for this project.’ But then I read the book, and I met Gilbert, and
I undertook some research on my own. I pored over the material,
trying to connect the dots. What I discovered is powerful stuff.
By then I was hooked. I knew what a great subject this was,
and I had to make the film.”
Avrich runs a major Toronto marketing firm but moonlights
directing, producing and writing movies. Typically he does one
film a year. But the past year has been far from typical. For the
second year in a row, he made a screen version of a Stratford
Shakespeare Festival production; The Tempest, already a hit
in HD at Canadian cinemas, will be released in the U.S. in May.
And next month TIFF’s Bell Lightbox will present the premiere
of Unauthorized, Avrich’s titillating portrait of Hollywood mogul
Harvey Weinstein. His next project: a documentary about
veteran comedian David Steinberg, featuring a concert
performance.
Jewish celebrities acclaim Sir Winston
The proposal to make the Churchill film had come from Michael
Levine, the Toronto entertainment lawyer, agent and occasional
producer. Gilbert, a renowned British scholar and author, was one
of Levine’s clients.
Gilbert had spent 20 years writing the official 10-volume biography
of Churchill. He had also written many books on Jewish subjects.
In his book about Churchill and the Jews, Gilbert argued that it
was largely thanks to decades of support from Churchill (going
back to World War I) that the state of Israel was born in 1948.
One of Churchill’s old friends described him as being “too fond of
Jews.” And it has also been said that Sir Winston’s strong support
for creating a Jewish homeland did not always win him friends.
But is Alan Dershowitz, the celebrated Harvard law professor,
exaggerating a tad when he claims that there really ought to
be a huge statue of Sir Winston in Jerusalem? If he’s right, then
Churchill ought to loom as large in the story of Israel’s birth as
those legendary Zionist prophets Theodor Herzl and Chaim
Weizmann.
Dershowitz is one of many intellectual celebrities who appear on
screen. Yes, it’s a talking heads film of the traditional variety,
but what an array of heads! Among those who pop in and out
of the frame, offering insights into Churchill’s and his obsession
with the Jewish dream of establishing a homeland, are fallen
media tycoon Conrad Black (doing his first TV interview since
being released from jail), historian Margaret MacMillan (author
of Paris 1919); and, of course, Sir Martin Gilbert. Z
Took inspiration from Old Testament tales
The off-screen narrator is that man with the golden voice,
Gordon Pinsent.
The starry commentators tell the story of how at a time of
casual anti-Semitism at the highest social and political levels
of post-Victorian British society, Churchill took inspiration from
Old Testament tales, aspiring to become a latter-day Moses.
Denouncing pogroms in Russia even while British voters wondered
what events so far away had to do with them, Churchill hob-
nobbed with influential Jewish leaders and articulated the view
that the foundations of modern civilization and ethics came out
of Jewish history — for which he felt the rest of the world should
show its gratitude.
Not all historians agree with Gilbert. Some claim Churchill’s main
motive was to extend the power of the British Empire, and that
at some points he sacrificed Jewish interests in an effort to
protect access to Arab oil.
“Churchill’s support for a Jewish homeland may have wavered
now and then over the years,” Avrich says. “But mostly he was
giving the cause huge support when no other world leader was
doing so. Not Franklin Roosevelt in the U.S. and certainly not
William Lyon Mackenzie King in Canada.”
http://www.thestar.com/article/920129--documentary-hails-churchill-as-zionists-greatest-ally
Documentary hails Judeophiliac Churchill
Documentary hails Churchill as Zionists' greatest ally
By MARTIN KNELMAN
The Toronto Star Tuesday, 11 January 2011
Documentary on Churchill and Jews aired on Jan. 17.
TORONTO — Millions of people credit Winston Churchill, Britain’s
inspiring wartime prime minister during its darkest hours, with
saving the world from Hitler.
But was Churchill also — as we’ve rarely heard — the greatest
ally the Jewish people have ever had?
The answer is a passionate yes, according to Barry Avrich,
whose compelling documentary — An Unlikely Obsession:
Churchill and the Jews — will have its premiere at 10 p.m.
Monday on the Vision channel.
“When I was first approached about making a film based a book
by Martin Gilbert,” Avrich recalls, “I said ‘No, I’m the wrong guy
for this project.’ But then I read the book, and I met Gilbert, and
I undertook some research on my own. I pored over the material,
trying to connect the dots. What I discovered is powerful stuff.
By then I was hooked. I knew what a great subject this was,
and I had to make the film.”
Avrich runs a major Toronto marketing firm but moonlights
directing, producing and writing movies. Typically he does one
film a year. But the past year has been far from typical. For the
second year in a row, he made a screen version of a Stratford
Shakespeare Festival production; The Tempest, already a hit
in HD at Canadian cinemas, will be released in the U.S. in May.
And next month TIFF’s Bell Lightbox will present the premiere
of Unauthorized, Avrich’s titillating portrait of Hollywood mogul
Harvey Weinstein. His next project: a documentary about
veteran comedian David Steinberg, featuring a concert
performance.
Jewish celebrities acclaim Sir Winston
The proposal to make the Churchill film had come from Michael
Levine, the Toronto entertainment lawyer, agent and occasional
producer. Gilbert, a renowned British scholar and author, was one
of Levine’s clients.
Gilbert had spent 20 years writing the official 10-volume biography
of Churchill. He had also written many books on Jewish subjects.
In his book about Churchill and the Jews, Gilbert argued that it
was largely thanks to decades of support from Churchill (going
back to World War I) that the state of Israel was born in 1948.
One of Churchill’s old friends described him as being “too fond of
Jews.” And it has also been said that Sir Winston’s strong support
for creating a Jewish homeland did not always win him friends.
But is Alan Dershowitz, the celebrated Harvard law professor,
exaggerating a tad when he claims that there really ought to
be a huge statue of Sir Winston in Jerusalem? If he’s right, then
Churchill ought to loom as large in the story of Israel’s birth as
those legendary Zionist prophets Theodor Herzl and Chaim
Weizmann.
Dershowitz is one of many intellectual celebrities who appear on
screen. Yes, it’s a talking heads film of the traditional variety,
but what an array of heads! Among those who pop in and out
of the frame, offering insights into Churchill’s and his obsession
with the Jewish dream of establishing a homeland, are fallen
media tycoon Conrad Black (doing his first TV interview since
being released from jail), historian Margaret MacMillan (author
of Paris 1919); and, of course, Sir Martin Gilbert. Z
Took inspiration from Old Testament tales
The off-screen narrator is that man with the golden voice,
Gordon Pinsent.
The starry commentators tell the story of how at a time of
casual anti-Semitism at the highest social and political levels
of post-Victorian British society, Churchill took inspiration from
Old Testament tales, aspiring to become a latter-day Moses.
Denouncing pogroms in Russia even while British voters wondered
what events so far away had to do with them, Churchill hob-
nobbed with influential Jewish leaders and articulated the view
that the foundations of modern civilization and ethics came out
of Jewish history — for which he felt the rest of the world should
show its gratitude.
Not all historians agree with Gilbert. Some claim Churchill’s main
motive was to extend the power of the British Empire, and that
at some points he sacrificed Jewish interests in an effort to
protect access to Arab oil.
“Churchill’s support for a Jewish homeland may have wavered
now and then over the years,” Avrich says. “But mostly he was
giving the cause huge support when no other world leader was
doing so. Not Franklin Roosevelt in the U.S. and certainly not
William Lyon Mackenzie King in Canada.”
http://www.thestar.com/article/920129--documentary-hails-churchill-as-zionists-greatest-ally
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