Alex Doherty | ukwatch.net

Britain's 9/11 "Truth Movement" – Who's Responsible?

Alex Doherty — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 04:48:06 +0000

As the sixth anniversary of the September 11th attacks passes the 9/11 conspiracy industry shows no sign of decline. While most adherents to the various conspiracy theories reside in the United States and the middle east, the conspiracy circus – or “the 9/11 truth movement” as it styles itself – is an increasingly visible presence in the UK. Initially an internet based affair, the UK conspiracy advocates have developed national and local campaigning groups who organise public meetings, teach-ins and film showings and they have become a visible and vocal presence at anti-war demonstrations. Their most high-profile supporter and organiser in the UK is David Shayler, the former Mi5 operative and recent converts to the cause include the widely respected journalist and Middle East expert Robert Fisk and prominent gay rights and anti-war activist Peter Tatchell.

As with most conspiracy theories of this type a wide range of scenarios regarding the events of September 11th 2001 are proposed (the most disturbing being an anti-semitic variant according to which Jewish employees at the WTC had prior knowledge of the attack and did not turn up to work on 9/11). The most popular theory and the one advocated by the “mainstream” of the 9/11 truth movement alleges that the attacks were perpetrated by the Bush administration in order to advance the imperial designs of the neo-con cabal. They allege that the planes that struck the towers were not sufficient to bring down the two towers, but that the towers were instead brought down by controlled explosions. They further claim that the Pentagon was not struck by American Airlines Flight 77, but was instead hit by a cruise missile launched by the American military. Putting to one side the fact that the theory appears to indicate a tremendous desire on the part of the conspirators to get caught red-handed (what kind of evil masterminds decide to vastly increase their chances of being found out by planting explosives in the twin towers and launching a missile in broad daylight at the Pentagon?), there is no serious evidence that contradicts the standard account of what occurred on September 11.

The advocacy works in the way standard to other such supposed conspiracies, (JFK, Bilderberg, the faked moon landings etc.) – by cherry picking evidence, elevating minority accounts that support the theory while completely ignoring the voluminous testimony that backs the standard picture, and lying about the credentials of the “experts” that support the conspiracy theory. To date there is not a single peer-reviewed study in any scientific or engineering journal that butresses the conspiracy theory. It is telling that doubters are usually not pointed in the direction of any scholarly work but instead towards a slickly produced home made video called “loose change”, which it is claimed has been watched by over 100 million people. The theory relies substantially on the “who benefits” question: the US government benefited tremendously from the attacks – therefore they must have carried it out themselves. But the Bush administration were hardly the only people to benefit from the attacks – the attacks were a gift to repressive regimes the world over. (Russia and China conspicuously used the attacks to justify clampdowns on their Muslim populations – were the attacks therefore a Sino-Russian conspiracy?)

The theorists are at a loss to explain how the Bush administration succeeded in covering up an operation that would have required the involvement of thousands of people when US governments have been unable to cover-up scandals of peripheral interest to the US population (Iran-Contra, Watergate, the “secret” bombing of Cambodia etc). Nor do they explain why, if it was indeed an inside job, the Bush administration so severely mis-managed the media side of the operation. Why in the immediate aftermath was George Bush scurrying from airbase to airbase rather than striking heroic poses – unlike Mayor Giuliani? Nor do the theorists explain why, if the US administration was capable of carrying out and covering up such an elaborate plot, they did not bother with the relatively simple task of planting WMD in Iraq.

Many of the conspiracy theory advocates also believe the 7/7 London tube bombings to have been an “inside job”, and their reasoning is no better in this case – doubt is cast on the perpetrators by pointing out that one of them was a teaching assistant and that the bombers were well thought of within their communities (in the same vein one could perhaps argue that Hitler could not have known what his armies were doing in eastern Europe in the 1940s, since he was a vegetarian who was known to be kind to animals and children). In the case of suicide bombers the conspiracy theorists happen to be in total agreement with the mainstream media in depicting suicide bombers as near-psychopathic monsters devoid of all humanity, motivated only by hatred and bereft of any legitimate grievances. In reality such authentic monsters are few and far between.

The various 9/11 and 7/7 conspiracies are so ludicrously devoid of sense that, as Diana Johnstone notes, one has to consider a “psychological explanation”. George Monbiot has suggested that the theory is in effect a displacement activity, a flight into fantasy by people too terrified to confront the myriad problems humanity faces:

“Faced with the mountainous challenge of the real issues we must confront, the chickens in the “truth” movement focus instead on a fairytale, knowing that nothing they do or say will count, knowing that because the perpetrators don’t exist, they can’t fight back. They demonstrate their courage by repeatedly bayoneting a scarecrow.”

Arguing against the suggestion that the public’s readiness to believe the 9/11 theories is in a sense rather hopeful – revealing as it does the public’s open contempt for elite figures and institutions – Alex Cockburn argues that:

“9/11 conspiracism stems from despair and political infantilism. There’s no worthwhile energy to transfer from such kookery. It’s like saying some lunatic shouting to himself on a street corner has the capacity to be a great orator.”

Manuel Garcia Jr, who has done as much as anyone to rebut the conspiracy theories, takes Cockburn’s despairing position to its logical conclusion:

“What I have come to realize from my entire 9/11 experience… is that the public is basically irrational…

“We are doomed. When I began writing for a public audience, my naive technical idea was that if people understood the facts, they would move out of superstition, and we “all” could agree on the nature of “the problem” and then it would be almost obvious what actions to take to fix it. But, people live for their superstitions. We are no better than the caricatures of natives in 1930s jungle movies, hopping about in crazed deadly frenzy because of our “ju-ju”.”

Cockburn is no doubt correct regarding the “political infantilism” of the 9/11 cult. The decline of orthodox marxism, while welcome in many ways, has unfortunately allowed the most extreme forms of irrationality to proliferate amongst the organised left. As with the rise of the susperstitious grab bag of new age spiritualism following the decline of organised christianity, the gap left by orthodox marxism has to a large extent been filled by various paranoid creeds – in particular a primitivist form of lifestyle-anarchism (a trend in anarchist thought that would have been profoundly alien to the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists, say).

As for despair it is probably significant that the numbers of conspiracy advocates in the UK swelled following the invasion of Iraq. Many no doubt took the message (consciously or otherwise) from the failure of the February 15th demonstration and the subsequent demonstrations to stop the invasion that the public is politically impotent and incapable of derailing the so-called war on terror. Unlike Cockburn and Garcia, I can’t agree that the conspiracy theorists are simply irrational imbeciles incapable of valuable political action, (one has to wonder why Garcia believes he is immune to the generalised insanity he describes). It seems to me that while many left critics have been quick to criticise the conspiracy theorists, they have not asked how the saner sectors of the organised left have contributed to the rise of such paranoid fantasies. It is in fact hardly surprising that many took the message from the Iraq protests that the hard slog of political activism is a waste of time, since strategic and tactical issues are so rarely debated on the left, and the achievements of the anti-war movement and dissident activism more generally are so poorly articulated.

In Regime Unchanged, writer and activist Milan Rai notes that just prior to the February 15th demonstration, the MOD, rattled by the scale of domestic opposition, hastily put together contingency plans for the withdrawal of British troops from the invasion force. How many of those who demonstrated are aware of this? How many of them are aware that while Britain’s involvement was not prevented, protest did work in other countries – most conspicuously in Turkey, usually a steadfast ally of the United States, but which refused to accede to US requests to allow an invasion of Northern Iraq from Turkish territory. How many of those demonstrators are aware that, while they did not prevent the invasion, the protests and the continuing dissidence since may have affected the way in which the war has been waged? The Iraq war has been monstrously brutal – hundreds of thousands of people, maybe more, have been killed, and the worst refugee crisis in the history of the middle east – even surpassing the flight of the Palestinians in 1948 – has been created. Nonetheless, despite the escalation of the air war the USAF have not resorted to carpet bombing urban centres (Fallujah excepted), as they did in Indo-China in the 1960s and 70s.

It is important to note that the worst bombing campaigns in history – against Cambodia, South Vietnam and Laos – occurred in large part because of the absence of public protest, which was mostly confined to the bombing of North Vietnam; the lesson being that when the public is exercising no control over the government, the brutality of the western powers is essentially limitless. For instance, it has recently been discovered that a greater tonnage of explosives was dropped by the USAF on the peasant society of Cambodia than were dropped by the western allies in all theatres during WWII including the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, making Cambodia perhaps the most heavily bombed country in history. Again how many are aware of these matters? How many are aware that there is good evidence that the American anti-war movement may well have averted the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam by the Nixon administration? How many understand that while tens of thousands may have been slaughtered by the US-backed Latin America terror states during the 1980s, that slaughter was nonetheless in a certain sense a victory, since the protest movements succeeded in preventing the US government from intevening with direct military force – which would have led to casualties on a par with Vietnam.

Most disturbingly, the concrete achievements of humanitarian dissidence are not only unknown to those new to activism (as a great many on the February 15th demonstration were) but also to many committed activists. A year after the invasion, frustrated by the failure to discuss such matters, I attempted to start a debate on the issue within the university anti-war group I was involved in. I began by asking other members of our group why we were still organising, despite what was widely perceived to be our failure to stop the Iraq invasion. The answers I got were for the most part along the lines of “we have to make a stand – we have to be seen to be still protesting” and other variations on the “fight the good fight” theme. Few of us, it seemed, really believed we were going to effect meaningful change, few even were aware that we had achieved anything at all. It is hard to see how someone new to activism or someone disillusioned in the post-invasion period would be motivated by such sentiments, or inspired by people with so little faith in the possibility of retarding or halting war crimes. It is surely unsurprising that many drifted into the comforting arms of the 9/11 truth movement.

There is a more general point here. While much of the public is profoundly distrustful of the elite sectors of our society, their understanding of social realities is in many respects deeply distorted. In particular, though the public to a large extent perceives that it is lied to and manipulated, the methods of social control are not widely understood. An obvious example is the role of the mainstream media. There is deep distrust of the media in the UK – many are aware that the media was a handmaiden to the invasion of Iraq – continually accepting and boosting government assertions regarding Iraq’s imaginary WMD programme. But while the public may be aware that they are lied to, the mechanics of the media’s institutionalised deceit largely elude them. The prime example regarding the media is the fact that the public for the most part totally misaprehends what the economic function of the commercial media is – believing as they do that the corporate press is in the business of selling newspapers to readers, when in reality they are in the business of selling audiences to other businesses. Newspapers do not make their profits from their circulation – in fact they don’t even break even on sales alone – their profits are made from, and thus their orientation is towards, their advertisers. Knowing this factor – along with others – it becomes rather less surprising that a “free press” caters so obediently to the demands of power and privilege. But without such knowledge, it is not surprising that many instead grope towards other explanations – and the most obvious one that arises is the notion of powerful shadowy figures deciding amongst themselves what the press will say.

Another method of social control that the left does not do enough to expose is the manipulation and distortion of history. Mainstream historical narratives present history for the most part as the plane on which Great Men (and the occasional woman) decide the course of history. The nature of the dominant institutions of our society and the efforts of ordinary people to resist and change them is for the most part obscured; our culture instead reduces major historical change to a game of great personalities far removed from grassroots struggle (so Martin Luther King was the civil rights movement, Emily Pankhurst was the suffragete movement, etc). Of what little the public do learn about popular movements is a hopelessly distorted picture, the recent celebrations of the abolition of slavery being a conspicuous example – attention being focussed on famous individuals such as William Wilberforce rather than the countless participants in slave revolts and grassroots dissidence whose names we will for the most part never know. One might expect that one of the more important tasks of the left would be to counter mainstream narratives of this type. In reality, while the picture is complex, the left to a large extent reinforces this emphasis on prominent individuals. Most recently the anti-war movement has surely not done enough to emphasise the essential continuity of the Blair and Bush governments. The groups surrounding these two figures may have distinguished themselves by their extreme contempt for public opinion and international law, but again these are matters of degree – the Clinton and Major administrations, for instance, presided over the murderous sanctions regime against Iraq, which led to perhaps a million deaths above the normal; it is therefore only relatively recently that the Bush and Blair governments have approached the body count attributable to their more “reasonable” predecessors.

Britain’s imperial violence and internal failings are not the products of particular individuals – the internal structure of the dominant institutions of our society makes the appearance of murderous figures such as a Blair or a Thatcher an inevitablity, and these individuals are essentially interchangeable. Had Neil Kinnock or John Smith become prime minister, there would it is true have been discernible differences in the policies pursued – and given the power concentrated in the executive, even small differences can have profound consequences for those at the sharp end of government policy. Nonetheless, such differences remain a matter of emphasis. Regardless of who had won the 1992 election, Britain would have retained its neo-imperial foreign policy, maintaining the economic drain from the third world to the first (or rather, from the third world to a tiny minority in the first). Economically Britain would have remained a deeply unequal society, in thrall to the narrow sector of the population that is currently experiencing unheard of levels of wealth whilst one in four children are born into poverty -and as for notions of economic democracy and Self-management these would have seemed just as exotic and unlikely under a Smith or a Kinnock as under Blair and Brown. And yet despite the fact that the problems we face are fundamentally the problem of institutions that reward cruelty, dishonesty and violence, the left continues to focus its attention on the iniquities of specific individuals. If we persist in ascribing institutional violence and deceit to individual actors, we can hardly plead innocence if many, as in the case of 9/11, come to view history as the interplay of various shadowy conspiratorial cabals intriguing against the public.

Alex Doherty is a member of the ukwatch.net collective.

alex@ukwatch.net

Project for a Participatory Society - UK

Alex Doherty — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 03:22:48 +0000

Exclusive to ukwatch.net, Alex Doherty talks to Mark Evans – founder of the Project for a Participatory Society – UK

What is the Project for a Participatory Society – UK? How did it come about?

The Project for a Participatory Society is a UK based initiative started in 2006. It was set up to facilitate the coming together of UK based social justice activists who, along with others in different parts of the world, are interested in developing and organising around participatory vision and strategy as discussed on ZNet.

When I say “started in 2006” I mean that this was when a conscious commitment to try to set something up was made. Since the initial conception there was of course a lot of work to be done trying to make the idea real. We have made slow but steady progress over the past year or so putting the basics for the organisation into place.

After making the initial commitment the first thing that needed to be done was to establish “Our Basic Organising Framework”. This document lays out, amongst other things, our purpose, our values, our internal culture and structure without which no serious organisation can take place. This document was then sent out to various people who have been working on participatory vision and strategy for feed back.

We then compiled a list of UK based contacts from ZNets Penpal facility and contacted everyone on that list asking them if they would be interested in this project. Of the initial 500 contacts about half of them “failed” and of the remaining we recieved something like 30 to 50 positive responses asking to be kept informed of any developments.

PPS-UK seems to take its principle inspiration from the writings of Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel in particular the theory of “complementary holism” first put forward in ‘Liberating Theory’ what is it about their approach you find so useful? How has their work informed the founding of PPS-UK?

Like a lot of people out there I feel very unhappy with the way in which society is organised and managed. I wanted to try and do something about this and so over many years I got involved in various campaigns with different organisations. This was a real learning experience – but mostly in the negative sense of how not to do things. I very soon became aware of the shortfalls of single issue campaign work, of the difficulties of working in traditional coalitions and perhaps most of all of the dogmatic culture of the old left which seems to lead to stagnation and factions (interestingly the opposite to what they claim to be about).

This dissatisfaction with existing options led me to search for a conceptual framework for organising that addressed these problems. It seemed to me that a failure to find, develop and implement a new radical-progressive organising framework would condemn the left to a future of continued decline. That framework turned out to be what is sometime refered to as “complimentary holism” which as you say was first put forward in “Liberating Theory”.

This framework is relatively easily to understand, which is important if you are interested in working towards a participatory society – as I am. It is also a framework that developed out of both a practical and theoretical understanding of the history of the left. I should also say that this framework is more than just a framework for organising – it is also proposed as a means of understanding historical continuity and changes as well as contemporary social dynamics.

It identifies four social spheres that go to make up society – kinship, community, economic and political. One of the basic insights presented in ‘Liberating Theory’ is that none of these spheres should be seen as more imortant than the other. Typically the various constituencies that go to make up the left take the opposite position, organising as though one of the spheres is of prime concern. For example anarchists tend to prioritise the political sphere over the other three; feminists tend to prioritise the kinship sphere; Nationalists tend to prioritise the community sphere and Marxists tend to prioritise the economic sphere. This is what is called a monist theory and whilst all four constituents may feel that they have a genuine commitment to solidarity its not hard to see how this approach leads to factions within the movement.

A slightly more sophisticated approach comes with what is called a pluralistic approach where by say an anarcho-syndicalist prioritises both the political and economic spheres or where by a socialist-feminist prioritises the economic and kinship spheres. However this approach still prioritises some spheres over others which again leads to tentions within the movement.

In line with the framework proposed in ‘Liberating Theory’ PPS-UK organises around all four social spheres in a conscious effort to overcome these problems and hopefully to contribute to the building of a much healthier culture of solidarity within the left and therefore a much more effective movement.

Can you tell us about the projects PPS-UK is involved in?

Well first of all, projects and other activities are initiated and run by PPS-UK activists – there is no leadership spoon-feeding activists campaign ideas or delegating tasks. Activists who initiate and/or participate in projects and other activities that go under the “banner” of PPS-UK must respect and operate within Our Basic Organising Framework.

At the present we have five projects posted on the site -‘Solidarity Works’ is a simple but important project that provides links to organisations that PPS-UK activists want to express a feeling of solidarity with and to encourage others to work with.

‘Intellectual Self-defence’ is an on line resource that introduces the notion of a “propaganda managed democracy”. This project includes a recommended reading list plus links to appropriate organisations. ‘Project for a Participatory Trade Union Movement’ facilitates the coming together of trade union activists who want to join forces to promote and organise for a participatory economy. ‘Project for a Participatory Credit Union’ has been set up to investigate the possibility of establishing a credit union as a means of creating a financing system to fund ParEcon Businesses. We are also looking at organising a PPS-UK Forum which will include talks and debates on participatory vision and strategy, project development sessions, courses on intellectual self-defence and media production workshops.

PPS-UK advocate the development of relatively detailed blue-prints for models of a future society – for instance the Particpatory Economic model, is there not a danger in developing such definite aims? Are diverse movements likely to be able to agree to such specific aims? Moreover is there not a danger that people living within a debilitating social reality that undermines rationality and compassion will come to advocate goals that will perpetuate the various maladies of contemporary society?

Many people on the left become concerned about the development of vision and some people become very hostile towards any attempts at proposing what the social justice movement might adopt as its long term objectives. Whilst I think that the concern is entirely valid I think that the hostility is unwarranted. The concern is valid for the obvious reason that we might get our vision wrong and therefore in this sense there is a very real danger. But this danger is not specific to the development of vision, it is also true of strategy and every other activity that we get involved in. Recognising this danger should not lead us to abandon our efforts but should instead lead us to be more carefull about what we advocate and how we organise.

Furthermore some people seem to think that developing vision is somehow undemocratic and elitist. I dont understand this at all – what they are basically saying is that if, for example, someone has an idea for an alternative to the corporate divsion of labour or markets, for example, then they are not allowed to discuss it. It is a very strange position. You can’t help but ask who’s being undemocratic?

There are two basic ways forward – one is to organise using broad principles as guildance, the other is to consider possible alternative institutional features. Despite the concerns of developing more detailed alternative institutions (as with ParEcon) the problem with the broad principles approach is that its hard to inspire people with such vague notion such as freedom and justice alone. I think given the history of the left (which hardly inspires confidence) and in todays world of spin (which renders words like freedom and democracy virtually meaningless) people require more than vague notions. They need compelling vision that is discussed and agreed upon – but always open to further refinement.

Whether people can agree on such specific aims only time will tell. But its worth mentioning that we dont really have that much to choose from. Take the economic sphere for instance – what are the actual options for the anti-capitalist movement? What are our options for an alternative to private ownership? To top-down management? To the corporate division of labour? To Markets? To rewarding ownership? As it turns out our basic options are quite limited. I feel quite confident that if we clearly identify our basic options and simply ask which of these options best reflects our values then a lot of agreement can be reached. If we can get this far then I think we are more than half way to building a popular movement. Its a lot of hard work, but pretty straight forward.

As for “people living in debilitating social reality that undermines rationality” in my experience most people aren’t anywhere near as irrational as the left generally seems to think. Most people make perfectly rational choices given their circumstances and based on the information they have. Personally I think that people know that things aren’t right, they know that they are being lied to, they know that they are being exploited. The point is that they dont see an alternative – this is why developing compelling vision is so important. Yes we live in a debilitating social reality – but one that principally undermines hope.

Buddhism and Radical Politics

Alex Doherty — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 12:58:42 +0000

UK Watch’s Alex Doherty interviews David Edwards of Medialens on the relationship between Buddhism and radical politics…

You are perhaps best known now as one half of Medialens – the media monitoring project. However before the founding of Medialens you had already written two books which attempted a synthesis of buddhist insights regarding the human condition with the institutional analyses of the radical left. What is it that you feel Buddhism has to contribute? What can radical activists learn from Buddhism?

My first book, Free to be Human (Burning All Illusions in the US) explored how Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s propaganda model could help in understanding the root causes of modern social, psychological, spiritual as well as political problems. I mentioned Buddhist ideas alongside a range of influences – Howard Zinn, Joseph Campbell, Erich Fromm, Leo Tolstoy, different mythologies around the world, and so on. Buddhism was a small part of that. My second book, The Compassionate Revolution , was an attempt to argue that the most powerful response to modern political and environmental problems is radical awareness rooted in compassion and concern for others, rather than anger and hatred. There was a far more concentrated focus on Buddhism, but my concern was to suggest an exploration of the case for a compassionate motivation, rather than specifically for Buddhism.

That aside, the first thing to say about Buddhism is that it isn’t a religion, in the sense that most people understand the word. Webster’s New World College dictionary defines religion as “belief in a divine or superhuman power or powers to be obeyed and worshipped as the creator(s) and ruler(s) of the universe”.

By that definition, Buddhism isn’t a religion at all. Not only does Buddhism reject the existence of a creator God ‘out there’, it argues that this idea is itself the projection on a cosmic canvas of a belief in the existence of an independent Self ‘in here’. Buddhism argues that Descartes’ assertion, “I think therefore I am”, contains the most pervasive superstitious faith of all – belief in the existence of an autonomous, inherently existent Self, or ‘I’.

Buddhism suggests we try to find the permanently existing Self. Is it found in any particular part of your body – your nose, arm, leg? Obviously not. Is
it your feelings of anger, love, compassion? But these are fleeting, they do not endure. Is it your thoughts? But then there must be millions of constantly changing selves. Well, then, is there a thinker behind the
thoughts? Buddhism rejects the idea – thoughts arise from conditions; there are thoughts and awareness of thoughts, but there is no thinker, no Lord of
the Mind, creating the thoughts. For example, no one chooses to be angry when insulted – ‘Now I will become angry’ – anger simply arises. And certainly no one thinks, ‘Now I will have the thought “Now I will be
angry”’. The idea that it is appropriate to be angry also just arises; it’s not created by some kind of homunculus in our heads.

And if we argue that the ‘thinker’, the Self, is something separate from the body, from feelings and thoughts, what on earth would that entity look like?
What could it possibly be? How much of ‘me’ would really exist apart from my body, thoughts and feelings?

That aside, Buddhism is primarily a system of thought and action focused on identifying the true causes of suffering and effective responses to it. So, arguably, it is much more a system of psychology than a religion. Its central claim is that by understanding for ourselves the deepest causes of unhappiness, we can learn to experiment with responses that counter that suffering.

This is significant because it follows that blind faith and obedience have no place, or should have no place, in Buddhism. If we mindlessly defer to
some external authority – some priesthood, Buddha or God – without thinking for ourselves, without truly understanding what is being said, then we will
not achieve the authentic understanding of the causes of suffering and so will be powerless to help ourselves. Also, these changes must come from our
own understanding – we cannot be transformed psychologically by external forces. Simply mouthing fine words, bowing obediently, praying to an omniscient power, and so on, are powerless to effect change in our minds. It would be like visiting a therapist – worshipping at his or her feet would
not help us overcome childhood traumas and depression, say.

This is why I generally don’t describe myself as a ‘Buddhist’. For many people, the term suggests submission before a god-like idol, the abandonment
of independent critical thought for comforting, superstitious beliefs. Personally, I have always been very wary of organised religion, as I am of
all hierarchical systems of power. It has always seemed to me that irrational authority, conformity, idolatry and abuse of power are par for the course. But this is not the whole story – we need to separate the ideas from the people who abuse them, and also recognise that large numbers of very sincere contemplatives, practitioners and teachers have achieved remarkable depths of insight and compassion. If we reject a system of thought solely on the basis that it has been exploited for corrupt ends,
then we should reject all systems of thought – Hitler called himself a socialist, after all! If we reject ideas, we should do so on the basis that they are irrational and unhelpful. Erich Fromm wrote:

“The task of critique is not to denounce the ideals, but to show their transformation into ideologies, and to challenge the ideology in the name of the betrayed ideal.” (Fromm – Beyond The Chains Of Illusion, Abacus, 1989, p.126)

A further point I think needs emphasising is that we need to approach these ideas with as much of an open mind as possible. Buddhism is an extraordinarily sophisticated and subtle system of thought. It has often been completely misunderstood and misinterpreted by Westerners who have clumsily compared it to Christianity, Islam and other religions. Much of
early Western academic commentary on Buddhism – suggesting, for example, that it was “quietistic”, “indifferent to suffering” and so on – was not
just wrong, it was an exact reversal of the truth. Very often, what people have dismissed is in fact not Buddhism at all (actually, Dharma, the word
‘Buddhism’ doesn’t exist in the countries of its origin), but a trivialised, distorted version of Buddhism.

What, for me, is so interesting about Buddhism is that it challenges our most common sense notions about the causes of happiness and suffering. It’s very easy in our society to believe that getting what we want – a beautiful, fascinating partner, money, leisure, holidays, whatever – will make us happy.

The problem with this attempt is that we are placing our own happiness at the centre of our attention, at the centre of our personal universe, as it
were. Bear in mind that the fact that we’re chasing these things means we haven’t got them yet, or at least that haven’t got enough of them. So what
does that mean? It means we’re placing what we want at the centre of our attention. That’s another way of saying we’re placing what we lack, our problems, at the centre of our attention. This is like putting a
psychological lens over our problems – they seem much bigger. This attempt at happiness, then, immediately places our problems front and centre; they immediately seem more severe, more important. This is already a cause of suffering. I’m sure you know people who do nothing but talk about their problems – what they need, what they haven’t got. It’s as if they’re playing a lead role in some cosmic drama – the whole world is focused on just them and their problems. No doubt we all do this to some extent, but it’s clear
that excessive self-focus plays a crucial role in making our problems seem far more severe.

What Buddhists suggest is that when we shift our attention away from our happiness, from our problems, all of this suffering, all of this sense of being deprived of what we must have – of our problems being hugely terrible and important – begins to lift. So how do we make that shift? We do it by putting other people’s suffering and happiness at the centre of our
attention. To the extent that their problems seem real and important, ours can seem less severe, more manageable by comparison. Crucially, although we
may feel intense compassion for the suffering of others, this does not need to be depressing and crushing because it precisely annihilates the cause of
psychological suffering – egotism and self-obsession. On the contrary, compassion can be profoundly uplifting, motivating and inspiring. Steven
Stosny, a relationship therapist – who to my knowledge is not a Buddhist – offers an interesting thought experiment:

“Imagine that you’re in a desert so vast that it would take five days to walk out of it. You have enough water for only three days. In other words, you cannot save yourself. But you know that rescue teams are out looking for you, and there’s a good chance you’ll be rescued before you run out of water. You come across a young child, say less than three years old. The
child is dying now, and will die now, unless you share your water. Of course there’s a risk to that. If you share the water, you’ll both die tomorrow, and you might have been rescued on the second day.

“So what will you do? Share the water? Or watch the child die?

“If you think that you might not share the water and give yourself an extra day to be rescued, the rule is that you cannot walk away – if you withhold the water, you must watch the child slowly die, lips cracked, eyes bulging, tongue swelling, skin parched and burned. Imagine how much you would have to fight off the humane instinct to give the child a drink of
water.”

Stosny invites us to imagine how we would feel if we helped the child:

“Close your eyes for a moment and imagine that you are trying to comfort this frightened child in this barren desert. You are the only person in the world who can make her feel better right now. You’re hugging her, rocking her, whispering to her or singing to her, doing whatever you would do to comfort her… [And] she is calming down. She’s holding tightly onto you,
feeling soothed, peaceful, and good, because of you. She feels secure and comforted, wrapped in your compassion.” (Stosny, You Don’t have To take It
Any More!, Free Press, 2006, pp.76-77)

Here’s the curious thing – doing this with compassion, and even imagining you’re doing it, can be a source of happiness and peace of mind. Whereas the pursuit of personal happiness through desire leaves us anxious, frustrated, bored and depressed; working for the benefit of others relieves our suffering and the suffering of others.

By now, there is credible scientific evidence to show that Buddhist monks meditating intensively on compassionate thoughts of the kind outlined by
Stosny achieve high levels of peace of mind and happiness. These appear to be states of psychological well being far beyond what most of us normally
experience. And there is not a corporate product, service, or other source of self-indulgent pleasure, anywhere in sight. I have written about some of
the evidence here.

The problem for most of us is that experiencing this in any depth takes real work – we need to rein in a deeply entrenched tendency to selfishness. But
how can we do this? How do you turn this giant oil tanker of self-centred momentum around? How do you even persuade yourself it’s what you want to do
(if indeed you do)? It’s like Newtonian physics – the equal and opposite force to selfish concern is concern for others. It’s not enough to do have one generous thought, to feel compassion occasionally for a loved one – it takes years and years of intense focus on restraining and reversing greedy, angry and selfish thoughts and actions. Over time, it is claimed this really can progressively remove our selfish tendencies, and the psychological “pollutants” like craving, pride, jealousy and hatred, with a corresponding increase in psychological and even physical well-being.

So that’s really the whole Buddhist ‘path’ – reversing the tendency to self-concern through compassionate training and insight into the non-existence of the self – in the belief that this leads to genuine
happiness for ourselves and everyone around us.

This is all very interesting to me; first, because in my own experience I have never found happiness to be achievable through the pursuit of self-interest. Secondly, because I think our faith in selfish happiness is the real cause of the destruction of the Third World and indeed of our planet. That’s what ultimately drives the state-corporate system, our
complicity with it, and our complacent refusal to join the struggle to change it.

Buddhism doesn’t challenge corporate capitalism at its weakest point – that it exploits the Third World and wrecks the environment – but at its allegedly strongest point: that it delivers happiness to people selfish enough to be part of it.

There are plenty of non-Buddhist writers and thinkers who have looked and, increasingly are looking, into this subject – Erich Fromm, Richard Davidson,
Oliver James, Tim Kasser, Richard Layard, Martin Seligman, Steven Stosny, and others. The whole ‘positive psychology’ movement is exploring these
issues. So my own concern is really not with Buddhism as such, it’s with the whole idea of concern for others as a source of personal and political solutions.

*Many on the left might be reluctant to engage with Buddhism since it is often portrayed as a quietest religion which encourages introspection at the
cost of collective action. How accurate do you think this depiction of Buddhism is?*

As discussed above, I think this is one of the many early misunderstandings. In his book, in The Hope of Nibbana, Winston King described the goal of “equanimity” in Buddhism:

“It is seemingly a calm detachment of eternity mindedness that has little interest any longer in the ordinary affairs of men… the possessor of equanimity goes on, completely unshaken emotionally or mentally by the world’s mental, moral, or social disturbances.” (Winston King, In the Hope of Nibbana: Theravada Buddhist Ethics, LaSalle, Open Court, 1964, p.162)

This is badly mistaken. In fact equanimity is sought precisely in order to facilitate a feeling of unlimited compassion for all sentient beings. The
goal is to throw off restricted compassion and love for one person, one family, one nation or race, the better to embrace all equally. This is said to be a stepping stone towards the true goal: the “unusual attitude”. Which is?:

“Here when cultivating the unusual attitude, its special force is that you think, ‘I alone take upon myself the burden of causing all sentient beings
to have happiness and the causes of happiness; I alone take upon myself the burden of causing all sentient beings to be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.’”

So what level of motivation is this intended to generate?:

“For the wise and compassionate who carry the great burden of [suffering of] sentient beings upon their shoulders, moving slowly like a swan is not attractive: When self and other are tightly bound,
one must make enormous effort.”

Buddhism essentially provides a set of tools based on the conviction that happiness for ourselves and others is achieved through ethical behaviour – through thinking and working for the benefit of others. The idea is that you mix these psychological tools with whatever you’re doing – if you are a doctor, teacher, writer, waiter, the idea is that you incorporate the
compassionate, altruistic motivation in whatever you’re doing. How you make use of these tools is up to you. So you can absolutely incorporate Buddhist
ideas into activism and live a very active and vibrant existence.

*From your books it seems that you follow the “agnostic Buddhism” of writers such as Stephen Bachelor, for whom matters such as reincarnation and
karma are not taken seriously.*

Yes, I would describe myself as agnostic. Buddhists in fact don’t argue for the existence of reincarnation, but for ‘rebirth’, which is not quite the same thing. The concepts of rebirth and karma are tied up with the equally problematic issue of ‘emptiness’ or sunyata. The latter argues for dependent origination, the idea that objects do not exist as they appear – as independent, inherently existing phenomena. It is argued that while objects do exist, they are essentially no more solid and real than the objects we
experience in dreams.

The problem here is that it is claimed that this view of reality cannot be understood, much less experienced as real, without intensive development of concentration, analytical meditation and penetrative insight. This takes a very serious level of commitment and determination over many years. I, for example, have a superficial intellectual understanding of ‘emptiness’, but no deeper realisation, so I can’t really comment. I don’t dismiss these issues out of hand by any means, I try to keep an open mind. But, as
discussed, my own focus is very much on the potential of compassion as a response to problems rooted in greed, hatred and ignorance.

*In a chapter of his book ‘The Awakening Of The West’, devoted to the Vietnamese Buddhist master Thich Naht Hanh, Stephen Batchelor writes:

“Thich Nhat Hanh and his fellow Buddhist activists sided neither with the Communist north nor the anti-communist south. Nor did they harbour any
desire for political power themselves. They sought understanding instead of conflict.”

I imagine you would not agree with this description of a war between a communist north Vietnam and an anti-communist south. Why have Buddhists accepted mainstream narratives such as this? What accounts for the political innocence of Buddhist thinkers?*

Or we could ask: what accounts for the political innocence of Christian, Muslim, socialist and anarchist thinkers?

My point is that some Buddhist thinkers are indeed very innocent politically, whilst some are very astute. Having said that, modern Buddhism
does typically focus on the psychological causes of suffering in individuals. It is much less concerned with social factors – education, culture, politics, economics – generating these causes. The emphasis is
simply to rid the mind of the causes of suffering regardless of their origins. I think this is particularly true of Western Buddhists.

Most people in the West have been deeply deceived by the propaganda system – Buddhism has often been incorporated into this deceptive world view. Erich
Fromm argued that psychoanalysis quickly became a tool, not for achieving full human sanity, but for fitting industrial man into an essentially insane
corporate society. I think one can argue that Buddhism in the West has often been distorted in a similar way. After all, what does it mean to be compassionate but not concerned with understanding the truth about
state-corporate power – with its many massacres in the Third World, its systemic poverty, starvation and oppression? To (rightly) focus on increasing our kindness with friends and family, with ethical behaviour, without focusing also on the fact that our government is killing and mutilating hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, right now, doesn’t make
sense to me.

I feel Western Buddhists would benefit greatly from a more profound analysis of the political and economic factors boosting the greed, hatred and ignorance that fuel the “afflictive emotions”. In what way do
state-corporate factors promote greed, self-obsession, cynicism, hatred of foreign enemies? That’s really what I tried to discuss in my first two books. On the other hand, there is the clear danger that if Buddhism became radicalised, it would be targeted by the propaganda system in the way that socialism and communism have been. Perhaps being ostensibly apolitical helps valuable ideas pass through the propaganda filter system into the mainstream. I’m not sure, it’s not something I really have an answer to.

What do you think Buddhists can learn from the radical left?

As above, I think they can learn from systemic analyses that reveal the political and economic causes of suffering. I think the classic ‘three poisons’ of Buddhism – greed, hatred and ignorance – are entrenched in self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing political and economic systems. These shape our minds and culture to ensure we are serviceable to these
greed-based requirements. I think understanding the goals and biases built into a corporate culture helps enormously in extricating oneself from its illusions. For example, if someone thinks it’s cool to smoke, it helps to know that that notion has not simply emerged out of human nature in the natural way of things; it’s an idea that has been endlessly boosted and reinforced by a million moments of ruthless corporate cultural propaganda (Hollywood stars have long been paid to smoke in films, for example). We can start to see ‘common sense’ ideas as psychological Trojan Horses.
Personally, I think it’s a mistake that Buddhism has so little to say about these issues.

Do you think that other religions are as valuable as Buddhism in providing meaningful insights and a way to exist in the world?

I haven’t looked into other belief systems, religions and mythologies to anything like the same extent. The comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell argued that to look beneath the surface of the major human mythologies and cultures, is to discover essentially the same set of ideas: that phenomena do not inherently exist as fundamentally separate objects, that penetrating the illusion of the Self gives rise to unconditional compassion, and that this is the source of true happiness as well as a boon for the world around us. That’s why Campbell called his classic work ‘The Hero With A Thousand Faces’ – it’s the same compassionate vision beneath the many hundreds of cultural forms.

I think this emphasis on unity and compassion does indeed underlie many traditions. But it is often obscured by the corruptions and depredations of
history and power. Tony Blair, for example, believes it is possible to be a Christian and to wage war – a view Tolstoy deemed completely fraudulent and in fact absurd. He wrote in his Notes For Soldiers:

“You are told in the Gospel that one should not only refrain from killing his brothers, but should not do that which leads to murder: one should not be angry with one’s brothers, not hate one’s enemies, but love them. In the law of Moses you are distinctly told, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ without any reservations as to whom you can and cannot kill.” (Tolstoy – Writings on
Civil Disobedience and Non-Violence, NSP, 1987, p.40)

He also wrote:

“A Christian nation which engages in war ought, in order to be logical, not only take down the cross from its church steeples, turn the churches to some
other use, give the clergy other duties, having first prohibited the preaching of the Gospel, but also ought to abandon all the requirements of morality which flow from Christian law.” (Ibid, xiv)

You have been quite critical of the organised left for the “righteous anger” directed towards powerful individuals in our society. As with Buddhist thinkers you argue that anger is neither productive nor appropriate and you have claimed that elite elements themselves are victims of the propaganda system. Is it not entirely understandable to feel anger towards privileged individuals responsible for monstrous crimes such as a Blair or a Putin for example? In what way can such figures be considered victims?

Well I have to agree its understandable because I get angry, too. By the way, this immediately indicates a difficulty with even having this discussion. To propose restraint on anger and an increase in compassion can seem, for some people, inherently dubious. After all, we could be forgiven for thinking that implicit in the promotion of compassion is the suggestion that the promoter is, him/herself, a paragon of virtue. So it can immediately seem like some kind of backhanded exercise in self-promotion. That is not what Im trying to do. My own failings – and they are many, believe me – are really irrelevant to the discussion. For me the issue is whether we, all of us, are harmed by anger and benefited by compassion, and whether we can change.

My focus on righteous anger isnt about criticising people on the left for being righteous. Plenty of people reject the idea that its a good thing to be angry when you dont get what you want – like a kid who explodes because his parents wont give him an ice cream. But its much more challenging to take issue with the anger people feel when they see gross injustice, suffering, and so on. Thats a very different subject. Thats what I mean by righteous anger.

I think there are two issues here: 1) Is it beneficial or destructive to be angry with these powerful individuals? 2) If we decide its destructive (my own view), is it possible to do anything to rein in the anger?

On the first question, there is any amount of serious scientific evidence to show that anger is devastating to our physical and psychological health. Doctors like Prof. Redford Williams of Duke University describes it as being like taking a powerful poison every day of our lives. He writes:

“When John Barefoot followed them up recently, he found that among those lawyers whose Ho [hostility test] scores had been in the highest quarter of their class twenty-five years earlier, nearly 20 percent were dead by age fifty; in contrast, only 4 percent of those with Ho scores in the lowest quarter had died.” (Redford Williams and Virginia Williams, Anger Kills, Seventeen Strategies for Controlling the Hostility That Can Harm Your Health – HarperPerennial, 1994, p.37)

“On research conducted on doctors: As they aged from twenty-five to fifty, those UNC doctors whose Ho scores had been in the upper half at age twenty-five were four to five times more likely than those with lower scored to develop coronary heart disease and nearly seven times more likely to die from any cause… in addition to contributing to higher death rates via increased coronary rates, hostility might also be contributing to increased risk of cancer as well.“ (p.36)

Psychologically, anger leads to all kinds of problems – anxiety, depression, wrecked relationships, loneliness, isolation and so on:

“As a group, hostile people are unhappy. Timothy Smith, a University of Utah researcher, and his colleagues have found that college students who score high on the Ho scale report more hassles and negative life events, along with less social support.” (Ibid, p.40)

I think chronic anger is very destructive of progressive movements and organisations – a few moments of rage can wreck good working relationships. It also alienates the public who are heavily influenced by the propaganda system and who often have no idea why activists are so angry. They assume they must be witnessing some kind of mass neurosis – people sort of acting out their weirdness. The rage feeds perfectly into the propaganda system which is very happy to portray people on the left as dangerous, violent lunatics who are a threat to society. Thats a wonderful way to get the public to rally round the status quo. Ive written more about this here.

My own view is that compassion – the urge to relieve the suffering of others – is the most powerful dissident motivation. If you look at some of the really notable progressive thinkers and activists – people like Fromm, Chomsky, Herman, Pilger, Zinn – I think compassion is really at the heart of what theyre doing. I think it explains their ability to steer a path through the delusive influences and traps of the propaganda system. The suffering of others is too real, too important, for them to be deceived, to compromise, to hold their tongues. After all, why should it be that just these people can see through the deceptions when so many others cant? In debating with journalists Ive found they are often 100% sincere in their belief that the media is free, the West is benign, and so on. So what separates them from the people Ive mentioned? Are the dissidents just very smart? I dont think thats it at all – there are plenty of smart people who are completely deceived by societys illusions. I think compassion – the sense that people are suffering terribly and its our personal responsibility to do something about it – helps neutralise the personal greed, ambition and egotism that hook us into the propaganda version of reality, that prevent us from seeing through it.

The reason I mention this here is that Buddhists claim anger has the effect of annihilating compassion in the mind. You cant feel compassion and anger at the same time; they are mutually exclusive. So rather than focusing on what is best for the people were trying to help, our focus shifts towards attacking and punishing the perceived enemy – big business, politicians, journalists and so on. The shift may not be obvious, but its crucial and changes the impact of what were doing.

There are other consequences – if compassion is annihilated by anger, that makes the mind vulnerable to greed and egotism, because there are no longer these psychological counter-forces present in the mind. So its no surprise if dissidents primarily motivated by anger – suffering the attrition of constant rage – become exhausted by the whole struggle, start to feel the whole thing is futile and start moving in a more self-centred direction. Maybe they return to the corporate world, or have retired to some more quietistic life or whatever. That happens a lot.

This is all very simplistic, obviously – I dont mean to suggest its as black and white as this. We all surely have a mixture of motivations, but I think these issues are worth bearing in mind.

So is it possible to counter anger even for powerful people, say Tony Blair?

We can reflect that Blair is a product of conditions beyond his control – he sees the world in a way dominated by his education, upbringing, friends, family and colleagues. Would he think and act the same way if he had been exposed to different conditions? Is he to blame for the conditions that have shaped his world view? We can ask if he is the sole destructive actor or condition, or is he merely one link in a chain of cause and effect that precedes and transcends him? We can argue, for example, that what has been done to Iraq is actually the culmination of billions of selfish thoughts in individuals over decades, even centuries. After all, where does corporate greed for oil come from? Where does militarism come from? Does it come from Blair? So we can see Blair as being to some extent a tiny part of a vast picture. Hes not really the issue.

If you want to get metaphysical, we can reflect on Blairs lack of inherent existence – who or what actually is Tony Blair? Is he his mind? Which part of his mind – which thought? Is he any particular thought? Is there a creator of thoughts that we can call Blair, or do thoughts merely arise from conditions beyond the control of some background creator, like bubbles forming in a glass of lemonade?

If you believe in karma – or just in the destructive consequences of living a selfish, egotistical, cruel life – you can imagine the suffering Blair will undergo as a result of his uncompassionate actions and as a result of ageing, sickness and death.

We can reflect that if we can muster some compassion for him then this strengthens our compassion for other people who appear less guilty of terrible crimes, less harmful. We visit a gym to lift weights to become stronger, do we not? If we can compassionately lift Blair in our minds, then our compassion will surely be untroubled by most other tests in life.

So there are these ideas – if we reflect on them often enough, particularly as part of some kind of meditation, then they can certainly reduce anger. This can mean we have a clearer, more rational mind that allows us to do more and better work for the benefit of others. I think reducing anger protects our motivation – anger seems very powerful, but it provides a short burst of often quite blind energy that soon exhausts itself.

In the preface to ‘Free To Be Human’ you remark that your work on these topics has been largely shunned – not just by the mainstream but by left publications as well. Does this remain the case? What do you attribute this to?

Yes, it is still very much the case. There is a terrible addiction to specialisation in modern society – ‘Our magazine publishes this kind of material, not that kind.’ Some editors even insist they have a ‘house style – so all their articles have to conform to that style. How tedious is that?! There is also a terror of disagreement, of open discussion and debate. To challenge someone’s arguments often leaves them feeling horribly ‘attacked’ and ‘insulted’, almost violated. There is also a fear of difference, of stirring things up, of being creative. I think this may be the result of our being constantly exposed to a corporate culture that loathes honesty, openness, disagreement and clashing ideas. Corporations want you to see their products and services one way only – in their best light. They want everything to be perfectly controlled, contained and sterilised to the maximum benefit of their public image. And because this
appearance is generally a fraud – the reality is often far less attractive, satisfying and desirable, with many destructive side-effects – they dread people speaking out honestly, randomly, creatively about real issues. Then the cat risks leaping out of the bag. The anarchist writer Rudolf Rocker summed this up brilliantly:

“Political power always strives for uniformity. In its stupid desire to order and control all social events to a definite principle, it is always eager to reduce all human activity to a single pattern. Thereby it comes into irreconcilable opposition with the creative forces of all higher culture, which is ever on the lookout for new forms and new organisations and consequently is as definitely dependent on variety and universality in human understandings as is political power on fixed forms and patterns”(Rocker, Culture and Nationalism, Michael E. Coughlan, 1978, p.82)

We are all victims of this brainwashing to different degrees. So, typically, Buddhist magazines do not like to hear about politics – dismissed as ‘negative’ – and left magazines do not like to hear about Buddhism and
compassion – dismissed as ‘sentimental’ and ‘naieve’.

As far as the left goes, there is huge disdain, even contempt, rooted in deeply entrenched Western arrogance towards Third World cultures that stretches back to the Enlightenment, and beyond. The Buddhist writer and teacher Alan Wallace makes the point:

“For centuries we in the West have wondered whether intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe. If there are highly advanced, intelligent beings out there, what might they have to teach us? Along similar lines we can ask: is there intelligent life on our planet outside of our Euro-American civilisation? Of course that sounds like a dumb question, but it’s still worth asking, since there persists an attitude in our society that we know more about everything than any previous generation and more than any other ‘less developed’ society today.” (Wallace, Buddhism With An Attitude, B. Alan Wallace, Snow Lion, 2001, p.8)

The West has science, technology, power, and we tend to believe this proves we are more modern, more sophisticated, more hard-headed and wise, almost
more evolved, than any other culture in history. So when we approach a tradition like Buddhism, we are looking down as though from a great height at what we assume is primitive, superstitious nonsense. This is a genuine tragedy because, in my experience, our culture is in many ways far less sophisticated, certainly from an ethical and philosophical standpoint.

It is said that many years ago a rather pompous Western professor sat down for tea with a Zen Buddhist master and arrogantly demanded that he be told
what this Zen business was all about. The Zen teacher calmly poured tea into the professor’s cup. He continued pouring until the cup was full and then
overflowing. The professor was shocked: “It is overfull. No more will go in!” “Like this cup”, the master said, “you are full of your own opinions
and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”

In exactly this way, the left dismisses Buddhism as organised religion and can summon up any number of horrors from history to indicate that it’s a
fraud perpetrated by the ruling classes to control the masses. The left also has deep faith in anger as a source of motivation and a badge of commitment – the angry mind naturally dislikes all talk of compassion and restraint!

'Guardians of Power' - UKWatch Review

Alex Doherty — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 01:27:00 +0000

Review of ‘Guardians Of Power’, David Edwards and David Cromwell, Pluto £14.99

In the United States there exists an organisation devoted to providing regular radical critique of the mainstream media; that organisation is FAIR (Fairness And Accuracy In Reporting). Founded in 1986, FAIR is a relatively well-funded institution with a staff of twelve. They have some 55,000 subscribers to their regular action alerts and they produce a bi-monthly magazine – Extra! – to which more than one hundred and fifty writers have contributed. In the United Kingdom the only comparable organisation is Medialens, founded in 2001 by David Edwards and David Cromwell. Essentially a two man operation, almost all of the more than three hundred Medialens media alerts so far published have been penned by the two Davids. Run as it is on a shoestring budget with only one full-time member of staff it is some tribute to them that they are comparable to FAIR in the quality and importance of their work. [1]

Edwards and Cromwell have also managed to find the time to put together the first of hopefully many Medialens books. The book, entitled “Guardians of Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media“:http://www.medialens.org/bookshop/guardians_of_power.php, is a distillation of the media alerts they have produced over the last four years. For this reason those familiar with Medialens will find much of the material familiar. Nonetheless even for those who have followed their work closely the book is of tremendous value both because it stands as a record of their day to day work and also because the accumulated weight of evidence they present, revealing as it does a media that is a supine and highly disciplined servant of power, should put to bed any lingering doubts about the societal role of the liberal media in this country.

As well as offering a compelling critique of the media in general the book offers chapter-by-chapter case studies of media complicity in the vast crimes of the British and American governments. Reading through these examples one finds oneself in awe at the medias staggering achievements. For instance portraying the brutal Serbian counter-insurgency campaign in Kosovo (which did not begin to approach the contemporaneous exploits of our Russian and Indonesian allies) as a sequel to the Nazi holocaust was no mean feat. Cromwell and Edwards catalogue some of the extraordinary statements made by apparently sane media commentators at the time perhaps the most startling being Andrew Marrs racist ruminations on the callous brutality of the Serbs and the KLA (Kosova Liberation Army):

After the permafrost, the beasts. We are not well prepared for this. The idea that our people should go and die in large numbers appals us. Killing our enemies appals us too. The war-hardened people of Serbia, far more callous, seemingly ready to die, are like an alien race. So, for that matter are the KLA.

Perhaps an even more impressive achievement of the media has been to repeatedly present Iraq as a credible threat to the western powers. Iraq being such a powerful military force that at the very height of its power it was incapable of defeating Iran, despite the tacit support of the United States and despite the post-revolution decimation of Irans officer corps. A nation so fearsome that by the time of the 2003 invasion its military budget was smaller than tiny Kuwaits.

Focussing on the daily disasters in Iraq it is easy to forget the sheer obscenity and enormity of what we have done to the country since 1991. Edwards and Cromwell rightly remind us of the devastation already inflicted on Iraq prior to the deadly sanctions regime and the Anglo/American invasion:

To understand the impact of sanctions, we need to first recognise the scale of the destruction wreaked on Iraq by the 88,500 tons of allied bombs dropped during the 1991 Gulf War. Eric Hoskins, a Canadian doctor and coordinator of a Harvard study team, reported that the allied bombardment effectively terminated everything vital to human survival in Iraq electricity, water, sewage systems, agriculture, industry and health care.

All of Iraqs eleven major electrical power plants as well as 119 substations were destroyed Eight multi-purpose dams were repeatedly hit and destroyed this wrecked flood control, municipal and industrial water storage, irrigation and hydroelectric power Twenty-eight civilian hospitals and 52 community health centres were hit.

Allied bombs damaged 676 schools, with 38 being totally destroyed. Historic sites were not immune- 25 mosques were damaged in Baghdad alone

In the three chapters on Iraq Edwards and Cromwell detail media complicity in downplaying and distorting the reality of the US/UK imposed sanctions and the constant attempts to shift the blame onto the Baathist regime. Despite there being no credible evidence contradicting the view of the UN (and most of the world) that the sanctions killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the British liberal media retained its commitment to the party line.

When one Medialens subscriber, an 83 year-old veteran of WWII, offered a polite and considered rebuttal to the mainstream distortion carried in the Observer, Roger Alton, the papers editor, sent this reply:

This is just not true its Saddam whos killing all the bloody children, not sanctions. Sorry.

In their discussion of the weapons inspectors Edwards and Cromwell point to an especially interesting example of media discipline – it has become an article of faith for the media and the government that in 1998 the UNSCOM inspectors were thrown out by the Iraqi regime, plainly demonstrating Iraqi non-compliance with the weapons inspection process. As they point out, at the time the media reported what really happened that the inspectors were withdrawn at the request of the Americans in the build up to the desert fox bombings- yet the same media that initially reported the facts quickly switched to the official view. Edwards and Cromwell comment:

Did all these journalists somehow forget the reports they must all have seen four years earlier? Or were their memories and capacity for independent thought somehow overwhelmed by government propaganda? This points to a truly remarkable feature of media performance that large numbers of individual journalists can come to move as an obedient herd despite easily available evidence contradicting the consensus view.”

The catalogue of achievements goes on and on: justifying the terror bombing of Afghanistan, obscuring western responsibility for the near genocidal atrocities of the Indonesian army in East Timor, whitewashing the ousting of Jean Bertrand Aristide from the presidency of Haiti, and depicting major war criminals (with more blood on their hands than Bush jr.) such as Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton as benevolent and charming elder statesmen.

As Edwards and Cromwell emphasize: perhaps the most terrifying demonstration of the media’s inability to convey even an approximate representation of reality is to be found in its coverage of humanitys current flirtation with ecological apocalypse. While the liberal media, and in particular the Independent, do offer occasional description of the ongoing destruction of the bio-sphere they are seemingly incapable of identifying the major cause the suicidal logic of 21st century state sponsored capitalism which places short term profits above continued human existence. It is as if a newspaper in 1945 offered an accurate description of the devastation of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings but somehow forgot to mention who the perpetrators were…

While the media do report the latest disasters and dramatic warnings, there are few serious attempts to explore the identity and motives of corporate opponents to action on climate change, or to draw attention to the true significance of their folly. The refusal to respond to the threat is presented almost as a natural human phenomenon, or is loosely blamed on America or China. But in fact the opponents of action are easily identifiable.

The book is not though without its faults. In their description of the structural constraints of the media Edwards and Cromwell take as their starting point the Propaganda Model hypothesised by Edward Herman and elaborated by himself and Noam
Chomsky in the groundbreaking work Manufacturing Consent: The political Economy of the Mass Media. The model outlines five “filters”, which serve to shape and distort the news, keeping reporting within relatively narrow ideological boundaries.

Edwards and Cromwell take it that the model, developed as it was to offer an explanation for media subservience in the United States, fits perfectly well for the British media. For the most part this is true the pressures on newspapers and commercial television are basically the same (and the results do not differ very much either). The model is problematic though when applied to the BBC since filters one and two (the constraints of corporate ownership and advertising) do not apply. There are though other constraints on the BBC which Medialens have noted to some extent elsewhere ; it is a shame that some of their better insights regarding the BBC are absent from this work.

There is also an omission in their account of the medias coverage of the build-up to the invasion of Iraq. While the media’s deceit regarding Iraqs non-existent WMD is enormously important the focus on WMD has served to obscure perhaps an even more astonishing achievement in relation to Iraqi intent. That is, the media presented it as a given that if Iraq did indeed possess WMD an invasion would be justifiable as a pre-emptive strike. The fact that there was essentially zero reason to believe that the Baathist regime would attack either Britain or the United States if in possession of chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons was never allowed to arise. The fact that dissident voices were reduced to spending so much time demolishing the WMD evidence (which should properly have been understood as irrelevant to the question of using military force) reveals how well the media was able to define the limits of acceptable debate.

Nonetheless these are relatively minor flaws in an outstanding book. Guardians of Power is a very important work, which will no doubt prove an invaluable resource for all of those who wish to see a more humane media and a better world.

Alex Doherty is a member of the UKWatch collective

alex@ukwatch.net

Notes:

[1] And some tribute to the British left’s failure to build worthy and enduring institutions.

Propaganda and the BBC

Alex Doherty — Thu, 03 Feb 2005 23:37:07 +0000

In a speech given at the Enviromedia conference in Johannesburg in October of last year, George Monbiot, one of Britains best journalists offered an explanation for the general subservience of mainstream reporting in the UK. During his speech he remarked that thankfully there are a few British media institutions which we can be somewhat proud of:

“there is a very limited number of outlets that I would broadly describe as ‘free’. By free I dont mean that the product is given away. I mean that it is free from the direct influence of private proprietors…

“The most famous is the BBC. It is not free of all influence, by any means. It is run by the state and financed by a tax on the ownership of televisions, called the licence fee. From time to time it is spectacularly and disastrously disciplined by the government, generally acting in concert with the right-wing press. It operates in a hostile environment, and the perspectives of its enemies the enemies of free speech often inform its coverage of the worlds affairs. But there is no proprietor to tell it ‘you cannot do such and such because that offends the interests of my shareholders’.”

Whilst it is certainly true that the BBC is not subject to precisely the same constraints as a private corporation the absence of such constraints on their own should not lead us to perceive it as being “free”. Few would be impressed if a commentator were to explain that the North Korean media was “free” because they are not subject to commercial pressures unlike their North American counterparts, for instance.

The relatively high esteem in which Monbiot holds the BBC seems to be shared by much of the British population. While commercial broadcasters have successfully challenged the BBCs dominance in the provision of entertainment, the BBC remains unassailable in the provision of news in times of crisis. This was confirmed during the invasion of Iraq. According to an ICM poll some 93% of the UK population followed the first two weeks of the invasion on the BBC. The poll also revealed that the BBC is the broadcaster most trusted by the general public.

If Monbiot is correct and the BBC is “freer” than the rest of the media we would expect that its performance during the war would be substantially (or at the very least detectably) superior to other broadcasters. What little research there has been indicates otherwise.

A study of the four main British broadcasters BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky – carried out by the Cardiff School of Journalism found that the BBC followed a more pro-government line than its commercial rivals. It revealed that the BBC was twice as likely to use government sources as ITV and Channel 4, and that the BBC also used more military sources than the other channels. The BBC was less likely to use either official Iraqi sources or independent sources such as aid agencies that were often highly critical of the war. The BBC also appeared to significantly downplay Iraqi casualties: Only 22% of BBC stories concerning the Iraqi population were with regard to Iraqi casualties, compared with figures of 44% and 30% for Channel Four and Sky. The BBC was more likely to unquestioningly relay false stories such as the non-existent scud missiles supposedly fired into Kuwait in the early stages of the war as well as the mythical Basra “uprising”. The study also made reference to the Prime Ministers claim that captured British soldiers had been executed by the Iraqi authorities, a claim Downing Street retracted the next day. The BBC relayed that claim but, unlike other broadcasters, not the retraction.

A second study was carried out by the Media Tenor group which looked at the performance of different broadcasters in five countries. They found that of the broadcasters monitored the BBC gave least airtime to dissenting opinion with just 2% of airtime given over to opponents of the war. In their subservience the BBC even managed to outdo an American broadcaster- ABC who gave a positively respectable 7% of airtime over to dissenting views.

When presenting the findings of the Cardiff study Professor Justin Lewis remarked that:

far from revealing an anti-war BBC, our findings tend to give credence to those who criticised the BBC for being too sympathetic to the government in its war coverage. Either way, it is clear that the accusation of BBC anti-war bias fails to stand up to any serious or sustained analysis.

Yet how can this be since the BBC, unlike its commercial rivals, is free? The answer (as in the case of the North Korean media) is of course that the BBC is not free at all, but is merely subject to different forms of control.

THE PROPAGANDA MODEL

In ‘Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media’ Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky introduced the concept of a propaganda model as an alternative framework for understanding commercial media. The model outlines a series of filters through which the raw data of news passes leaving the public with only the cleansed residue. As their study only dealt with corporate media several of the filters are inoperative with regard to the BBC – such as the constraints imposed by advertising, private ownership, and profit orientation. It is the absence of these constraints which (whether he is aware of the model or not) lead Monbiot and others to conclude that the BBC is free. However, in their place we can suggest another propaganda model with a similar set of filters, some peculiar to the BBC.

Government appointments – the director general and the board of governors: the first filter

The BBC is regulated by a board of governors, the twelve members of which are appointed by the Queen on the advice of government ministers, as the BBC puts it, (instruction might be a more accurate term). The boards brief is to safeguard [the BBCs] independence, set its objectives and monitor its performance.

The governors appoint the BBCs director general and with him they pick the executive committee, made up of the directors of the BBCs sixteen departmental divisions. The performance of each division is overseen by the government appointed governors. A variety of advisory bodies are consulted by the governors but the board is not obliged to act on any advice it receives.

For the most part, the members of the board are drawn from a narrow elite sector of society with intimate links to government and big business, unsurprisingly given that the appointments are at the governments discretion. The remaining members of the board are tokenistic figures drawn from the arts world and charitable organisations. Given the backgrounds and interests of the board members it is deeply unrealistic to believe that they will encourage the BBC to in any way seriously challenge powerful interests.

The politicisation of Board appointments has long been recognised and became glaringly evident in the 1980s:

“If the BBC was to be encouraged to be friendly towards the Governments project, you needed to be sure of the loyalty of those who ran it Qualified but unsympathetic candidates were not appointed, while ill qualified ones were Hugo Young in his biography of Mrs Thatcher quotes a colleague: ‘Margaret usually asked “Is he one of us?” Before approving an appointment.’” (‘Power Without Responsibility’, James Curran and Jean Seaton)

With the merging political consensus and the effective end of a meaningful two party system that followed the establishment of the New Labour project both parties whether in government or opposition can rest assured that newly appointed board members will always be one of us.

Economic constraints and the licence fee as control mechanism: the second filter

The esteem in which the BBC is held by Monbiot, (and so many others) is largely derived from the fact that it does not carry advertising and is therefore felt to be above commercial pressures. This in turn serves to endow the BBC with a certain quality that commercial broadcasters are unable to replicate. The BBC is instead funded by a licence fee paid by the viewers which is subject to review every ten years. The licence fee renewal is at the governments own discretion, giving the government a powerful means to bring the corporation under control.

An interesting early example of the power granted the government by this mechanism of control is given by James Curran and Jean Seaton in their classic work on the British media ‘Power Without Responsibility’. In 1935 the BBC planned a series on the British constitution with a variety of speakers including the communist Harry Pollitt and the fascist Sir Oswald Mosley. The Foreign Office objected on the grounds that Pollitt could not be allowed to broadcast as he had recently made a speech supporting armed revolution.

While being opposed only to the communist Pollitt (and not the fascist Mosley) the Foreign Office recognised that it might be more efficacious to ban the series on the grounds of preventing Mosley from speaking. In the face of the BBCs obstinate refusal to cancel the program the government turned to the licence fee:

The matter was finally brought to an end when the Postmaster General wrote to Reith [then Managing Director of the BBC] pointing out that as the Corporation licence was due for renewal, it would be wiser to comply with government demands.

The series was dropped.

Governments are not always so explicit but the licence fee threat is always there in the background and most governments have at some point threatened to revoke the licence. Furthermore the government is at liberty to reduce or freeze the licence fee thereby inflicting dramatic reductions in the BBCs budget. The BBC responds to these threats and constraints by periodically engaging in radical reform of itself in an effort to protect itself from government intervention. The desire to keep the government on side thereby leads to a pervasive culture of self-censorship. If the BBC did not behave in this manner it is doubtful whether it would now exist in its present form, as Curran and Seaton put it:

The Corporation only survived by voluntarily and lavishly doing to itself everything a hostile government wanted.

The BBC often boasts that because it is funded by the viewers it is insulated from the financial imperatives that the commercial sector is subject to, but in fact the tight control of the corporation and the financial limitations forced upon it by the government has meant that in reality the BBC is driven by the need to keep costs low as much as any commercial broadcaster. The desire to protect itself has meant that the BBC has little incentive to challenge the government and the interests it represents.

Sourcing: the third filter

As described in ‘Manufacturing Consent’, the media are predisposed to go to official sources such as governmental and corporate centres. This occurs largely due to the financial constraints that both the BBC and the corporate sector are subject to. The government and other centres of domestic power (corporations, political think tanks etc) are reliable sources of information, they provide briefings, press conferences and leaks; as Herman and Chomsky emphasize it makes sense from a financial point of view to concentrate journalists at the centres where news reliably occurs. In this way, the government and other official sources effectively cover some of the costs of news production that might otherwise be borne by the broadcasters; a capacity which is not shared by alternative sources of information:

In effect, the large bureaucracies of the powerful subsidize the mass media, and gain special access by their contribution to reducing the medias costs of acquiring the raw materials of, and producing, news. The large entities that provide this subsidy become routine news sources and have privileged access to the gates. Non-routine sources must struggle for access, and may be ignored by the arbitrary decisions of the gatekeepers.

Additionally the official status of such centres confers upon them a certain prestige that unofficial sources cannot compete with, it is felt by mainstream news organisations that official sources are to be trusted and that information can be passed on safely without the need to check in any great detail, if at all.

The pressure on the BBC to make savings and to demonstrate its economic viability can only serve to discourage BBC journalists from investigating alternative sources of news and instead to focus intensively on official sources.

Flak: The fourth filter

As with the sourcing filter, “flak” is common to both corporate broadcasters and publicly owned media such as the BBC. The term flak refers to critical reactions to the coverage of a particular media institution or media subset, for example the centre left press (Guardian, Independent etc). Flak is produced by sectors of the press, powerful individuals, the government, quasi-governmental institutions, and non-governmental pressure groups.

The effect of flak is to sharply delineate the boundaries of reasonable debate and to de-legitimise views which are considered more extreme than those presented by the liberal media. As a side benefit the production of flak allows the left media to present themselves as adversarial trailblazers committed to challenging the powerful when in fact they slavishly follow the cross-party consensus.

For decades the BBC has been under constant attack from the largely conservative press for its supposed left-wing bias and the attack greatly intensified during and after the invasion of Iraq. However the BBC was defended by the minority liberal sector during this period. It is instructive to observe how the issue was framed by one of the Guardians chief commentators, Polly Toynbee. In an article entitled ‘BBC needs a Bullywatch’, Toynbee made an impassioned defence of the corporation. The BBC was as she put it (probably accurately):

In graver danger than many of its friends may realise… It has never come under such an ominous onslaught of attacks from so many directions.

She argued that the governments attack on the BBC was unjustified since there is Independent academic evidence showing it was the most balanced. As Toynbee does not say which academic evidence she is referring to we must assume she is referring either to the Media Tenor study or the Cardiff findings (maybe both). However, contradicting Toynbee’s assertion, the two studies did not find that the BBC was the most balanced, rather they found that the BBC was at the more extreme end of pro-war bias amongst broadcasters. Here Toynbee is setting the limits of acceptable debate: the BBC was either biased against the government or (as is Toynbees view) was balanced and objective (regardless of what the facts reveal). This is not to say that the alternative view of a firmly pro-war BBC offered here was entirely excluded from the media (it maintained a toe hold at the Guardian and the Independent), but for the most part this alternative story was articulated by the dissident community through alternative media rather than within the mainstream. Worryingly there is evidence to suggest that the barrage of flak was so effective that it caused a decline in the BBCs trust ratings during the conflict. This was due not to its pro-war subservience but rather because of its perceived anti-establishment and anti-war bias, a perception that was entirely the creation of the flak producers.

The War on Terror – the dominant discourse: the fifth filter

The last filter in Herman and Chomskys propaganda model is the ideology of anti-communism. This filter operated as the prevailing ideology accepted and shared by the major media institutions and operated as the orthodox underlying framework for mediating events for a variety of useful purposes:

This ideology helps mobilize the populace against an enemy, and because the concept is fuzzy it can be used against anybody advocating policies that threaten property interests or support accommodation with Communist states and radicalism. It therefore helps fragment the left and labor movements and serves as a political-control mechanism. If the triumph of communism is the worst imaginable result, the support of fascism abroad is justified as a lesser evil. Opposition to social democrats who are too soft on Communists and play into their hands is rationalized in similar terms.

The discourse of anti-terrorism is of course rather similar to that of anti-communism: both offer a radically distorted Manichean view of the world. The favoured states (the US and UK and, to a lesser extent, their allies) are cast as the repositories of freedom and justice, engaged in a desperate struggle with what George W Bush, echoing Reagan and other illustrious predecessors, calls the evil doers, (Al-Qaeda, Saddam Hussein, the Islamic Iranian regime at present, the Soviet Union and its satellites in the past). The simplicity of the position was eloquently put by Bush Jr when he stated that you are either with us or with the terrorists. Terrorist acts are typically presented by the BBC as discrete events separated from all historical, social and political contexts. Within the mainstream media it is verging on the treasonous to even investigate the reasons for such acts.

The anti-terror discourse underpins BBC reporting; terrorism is primarily discussed as a security matter and terrorists themselves are portrayed as vicious sub-humans motivated by the desire to inflict pain and suffering and to rob us of our political and religious rights. Claims that terrorists hate our freedom are accepted without question and the idea that the atrocities committed by terrorists might stem in part from legitimate grievances is not to be countenanced.

Another effect of the discourse is to exclude the idea that the British and American governments and military might be acting for anything other than essentially benevolent reasons. Instead in the media portrayal we are always fighting with good intentions and for noble purposes. Occasionally of course we may go awry but this is because of mistakes often stemming from being too zealous in our desire to see freedom and justice triumph, or else it is the result of corrupt individuals who are not a reflection of the institutions they represent. This is what the British historian Mark Curtis calls the concept of basic benevolence:

The ideological system promotes one key concept that underpins everything else the idea of Britains basic benevolence. Mainstream reporting and analysis usually actively promotes, or at least does not challenge, the idea that Britain promotes high principles democracy, peace, human rights and development in its foreign policy.

CONCLUSION

George Monbiots view of the BBC would not be significant if it were not so widespread. A couple of months ago I was a member of an audience that was exhorted by George Galloway MP to treasure the BBC. Galloway is perhaps the most visible member of the British Stop the War Coalition, yet it seems he cant have paid much attention to the BBCs treatment of the coalition. While the build up to the war witnessed the largest anti-war demonstration in British history, the BBC responded by refusing to interview the organisers of the demonstration. Andrew Bergin, the Stop the War Coalition press officer commented that:

Representatives of the coalition have been invited to appear on every TV channel except the BBC. The BBC have taken a conscious decision to actively exclude Stop the War Coalition people from their programmes.

One might think that an urgent task for the British left would be to educate the public about an institution that should properly be regarded as the most dangerous propaganda weapon in the country. Unfortunately it seems that we are still in dire need of some education ourselves.

This article is based on a longer piece that can be found at NASPIR – see link above). He welcomes your correspondence: alex@ukwatch.net