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This is scarcely surprising, since people who are trying to win a war will not hesitate to tell the crudest lies about reporters who are not in full support of their cause, or who question some dubious piece of propaganda they are promoting. Reporters routinely find themselves denounced as being at best the dupes, and at worst the paid lackeys of the likes of Saddam Hussein and Vladimir Putin.
How should a war correspondent respond to egregious lies? I often used to discuss this with my late friend and colleague, Robert Fisk, who was often subjected to poisonous abuse because his revelations had infuriated some guilty party caught in the act.
The dilemma which Fisk and I would gloomily mull over is by no means a new one. Rudyard Kipling, who knew a lot about attack journalism, wrote that a test of a person’s ability to cope with adversity was “if you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken/Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools”. He counselled not overreacting to provocation, though this is easier said than done.
Yesterday’s news remains very much with us, easily reached by pressing a few keys on a laptop. The velocity and quantity of information has vastly increased. A “fake fact”, which once might have been confined to some obscure and partisan publication, can now potentially command an audience of millions. In the case of Elon Musk, his barrage of messages is received by 211 million followers on X.
Pig politics
It is difficult to imagine a more glaring example of “fake facts” than Elon Musk’s accusation that Sir Keir Starmer, the former director of public prosecutions who dealt with child sexual abuse, is complicit in “the rape of Britain”. He goes on to describe Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister, as “a rape genocide apologist”. These allegations are false and disgusting, but I fear that the low-key approach of Starmer and the Labour Party in calmly refuting them shows an underestimation of the toxic phenomenon they face.
He may not intend any such thing, but the bizarre idea will inevitably lead the news. By promoting absurd myths about Haitian immigrants eating pet cats, he focuses public attention on some issue, such as immigration, which he knows will play to his political advantage.
This is a century already shaped by war - and inadequate leaders
Read MoreA century later, Trump and Musk employ the same – if updated – tactics as the sheriff, but the political punching power of false allegations has been vastly enhanced first by television and then the internet platforms. Trump had an advantage in that in both presidential elections, and during the Biden interregnum, he twice faced stilted and over-rehearsed candidates in Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris who had no effective antidote to his playbook.
Their way of operating is not entirely new. The one UK politician I have seen in action who most resembled Farage and Trump was Rev Ian Paisley, who knew exactly how to command the attention of a hostile media. What news editor could resist reporting his “Save Ulster from Sodomy” campaign against the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Northern Ireland in 1977?
I doubt if Starmer and his senior ministers are up for this sort of fight. They are surprisingly poor as professional politicians at blowing their own trumpets and drowning out the trumpets of others. They are curiously averse to appealing to patriotism in the face of Musk’s grotesque interference, and making a full scale assault on Tory and Reform politicians who echo Musk and Trump attack lines.
Further Thoughts
President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan bequeath a world in flames to the incoming Donald Trump administration. But such is the fear of Western governments and media of the “chaos” likely to be provoked by the return of Trump to the White House, that far too little attention has been given to the appalling chaos created or tolerated by the outgoing Democrats.
Biden was clearly suffering from impaired mental capabilities and judgement from the beginning of his administration four years ago. This cognitive deterioration began early, as the Wall Street Journal revealed on 19 December in a devastating expose that quotes a senior security official as saying, as early as the spring of 2021, a few months after Biden had taken office, that on certain days all meetings had to be postponed. “He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,” said the official.
Bret Stephens did so recently in the New York Times, saying that Biden himself may have been unaware of his failing mental awareness (this is often the case with people with mental health problems), though it would have been obvious to others. “But his entire senior staff must have noticed, and… they took advantage of it to enhance their own power,” writes Stephens. “It’s a national scandal that deserves a congressional inquiry.”
It appears to me that Blinken and Sullivan failed on all counts: the obliteration of Gaza by Israel is all too likely to lead to retaliatory action against it, regional war is already underway, and at least 45,000 Palestinians are already dead – with no sign of the slaughter ending.
Beneath the Radar
But had Washington followed his advice two and a half years ago, Ukraine might have got better terms than are now likely – and upwards of a million Ukrainians and Russians would still be alive and uninjured. Here is a somewhat negative CNN report on what Milley said. But it seems to me that events have confirmed that he was right.
Cockburn’s Picks
I have been reading We Don’t Know Ourselves by Fintan O’Toole, subtitled “A Personal History of Ireland since 1958”, which is the best book I have read about modern Ireland for years – it is also superbly well written.
This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
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