White Riot; a critical account of punk’s racial history
I interviewed the authors of a new book from Verso Press exploring the complex, contradictory ways in which punk has interacted with the politics of race. You can read it over here.
Brian Whelan interviews the authors of a new book from Verso Press exploring the complex, contradictory ways in which punk has interacted with the politics of race.
From its birth punk rock has been obsessed with identity, exploding into the mainstream in the late 70s with filth and fury proudly exclaiming ‘no future’, the movement has traveled across the globe surviving four decades and many premature pronouncements of its death.
A new book hopes to trace the history of punk rock’s racial identity, following the legacy punk has created from its origins in the white rebel music of the late ‘60s through to the thriving scenes today in Indonesia, Brazil and Mexico.
Nasa scientist refutes Hari’s prize-winning article, media awards drag their feet
As revelations emerged about legal threats received by the Orwell Prize from lawyers at the Independent last week I made an unpopular statement about how nobody would want to win the prize again.
How could anyone want to win this award when it allowed Johann Hari’s bad journalism to go unnoticed? Well, it could be worse, the Orwell Prize have spent weeks working to investigate and correct their error, leaving other media awards conspicuous by their silence.
Hari isn’t just a former winner of the Orwell Prize, he has received quite a few awards over the years and after taking a look through the list, it looks like he might even be able to hang on to some of them. Some, not all.
The EDL have been making a lot of noise over the last few days about how they aren’t violent like their Norwegian comrade. This video, showing horrific race attacks on the London Underground, was posted on Facebook profiles of EDL members on 21 June 2011. Manchester AFA speculate on the source here.
David Samuels’ serious factual errors about Sean Garland
In August of 2009 the Independent published an article entitled ‘Counterfeiting: Notes on a scandal’ by US ‘non-fiction writer’ David Samuels. The piece contains a number of serious factual errors that damage the reputation of a 77-year-old Irish man currently facing extradition to the US under disputed charges.
The article was published a long time ago, I am aware, but many journalists will no doubt be working from clippings when his court case resumes this Wednesday. Thanks to the Web any article with good SEO can linger for years spreading mistruths. All the worse when hosted on the website of a highly respected newspaper.
I wrote to the Indy outlining the errors last week. Why they won’t just take the piece down baffles me. I know they’re not keen on admitting when they’re in the wrong but perhaps they might if enough people ask nicely on Twitter.
Using another article published in the Indy I’d like to show them how wrong Samuels has got this story. I won’t speculate on his motivations.
Samuels’ second par reads;
“Garland was a lifelong terrorist who had personally engaged in deadly attacks on British soldiers and police in Northern Ireland since the 1950s, and whose exploits were said to have inspired Tom Clancy’s novel Patriot Games (1). As the political wing of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) entered into fitful negotiations with Protestant groups in the 1990s, Garland served as chief of staff for “the Official IRA” or OIRA, which rejected the idea of a peace deal in favour of the continuation of bombings, bank robberies and other politically-motivated crimes (2).”
Pretty serious charges;
(1)The reference to ‘Patriot Games’ is a mistaken reference to the popular Irish rebel song ‘The Patriot Game’ by Dominic Behan. That David Samuel can’t tell the difference between a fictional spy tale about the CIA and this song shows a worrying lack of research.
(2)Here Samuels mistakes the Official IRA, who began their ceasefire in May 1972, for the Real IRA, a splinter from the Provisional IRA – themselves a splinter of the Official IRA in the 70’s. The OIRA are now a historic footnote, the RIRA continue an unpopular terror campaign.
The Indy was already aware of both of these facts surely, having published a lengthy piece on Sean Garland in December 2005 by David McKittrick, who gets it right;
In the 1950s he (Garland) joined the IRA, who then instructed him to infiltrate the British Army to procure arms. He carried out his mission successfully, the IRA seizing guns from an Army barracks with his inside help.
In his own words, he was “actively involved in organising and participating in a number of major operations from 1955-56”. The most famous of these was when he led an IRA squad that attacked a police station in County Fermanagh where two IRA militiamen, Sean South and Fergal O’Hanlon, were shot dead. A republican song acclaims, “Another martyr for old Ireland, Sean South from Garryowen”. Garland was seriously wounded in the incident. In the years that followed, he was imprisoned on various occasions in both parts of Ireland for IRA activities.
When the organisation split into traditional and Marxist factions in the late 1960s he opposed the “narrow nationalism” of the Provisionals, and pursued a left-wing political path as one of the leaders of what was known as the Official IRA. That faction announced a ceasefire in 1972, but for years remained intermittently involved in violence.
The OIRA did continue to be involved in violence, just not a sectarian war or national liberation struggle against the British state. I wrote in Sunday Mirror, 2009;
OFFICIAL IRA gunmen were given military training and arms by communist North Korea…The Official IRA, which was linked to the Workers Party, admitted making trips to the totalitarian regime during the 80s - at the same time the party had seven elected TDs, including current Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore and former leader Pat Rabbitte.
That would be the same Gilmore and Rabbitte who are now in power as part of a coalition government in Ireland. The former is Táiniste (deputy PM), the latter a minister.
Further on Samuels makes another serious error;
Garland was a self-proclaimed Marxist who dressed like a professor and served as head of a far-left faction called the Irish Workers Party that had never elected a single one of its members to any mainstream political body.
Contrast with McKittrick;
The Workers Party once held a number of seats in the Irish parliament, but its strength has been greatly reduced.
In fact, the Workers Party at their peak had seven members of parliament (TDs) in Ireland along with an MEP and dozens of councillors. Up north they held ten seats in the early 70’s and elected a number of councillors over the years. The party still has two elected councillors in the south.
Again, Samuels seems to be thinking of another group, most likely Republican Sinn Fein (political wing of the Continuity IRA) a group whose entire outlook opposes everything Garland argued for in the republican movement.
A decent history of the Workers Party was published in 2009, you can read my write up on it from my local newspaper days here.
Given his inability to get the basic Wikipedia facts right, allowing Samuels to go on to make claims like the following is editorial madness;
…needed foreign currency to fund an estimated $100 million a year in donations to Hezbollah and other terrorist organisations - who, as it happened, were being trained in bomb-making in Lebanon by Sean Garland.
Sean Garland’s campaign against extradition has the backing of politicians across the political spectrum both north and south of the border. I have no involvement. For more information on his extradion you can read this blog - http://seangarlandextradition.wordpress.com/
(Disclosure; in January 2010 I built a website, wrote copy and did some layout for the relaunch of Look Left magazine, funded by the Workers Party along with a million other publications I was writing for at the time.)
This NOTW supplement cover will never see the light of day so I thought I’d share it here. I suppose it is now something of a rarity since the paper has closed.
There were fears earlier this year that Thatcher would go the same Saturday night as a big UK sports celeb. Of course its standard procedure for papers to have pre-made obits for major public figures.
A London GAA team have turned Ireland’s economic gloom into a recession success story as they harness the football skills of newly-arrived immigrants. » My piece on Yahoo! Eurosport
Johann claims he just takes quotes from the subject’s own writings, but we’ve already established here and here that he is also taking other people’s interviews and passing them off as his own.
This is probably the last blog post I’ll do on this so I’d ask that you take a good look and make up your mind. I contacted the original interviewer Matthew Todd from Attitude magazine this morning and he confirmed that he had interviewed Gareth Thomas first and set Johann up with this interview. In return, Hari nicked some of his quotes.
For the first 35 years of his life, Thomas tried to bury his sexuality. He confides: “I used to visualise it as a little ball. I know it’s crazy, but I’d imagine this little ball in my stomach and I’d have an encounter with a man and the ball would just be there. Then from that day to the next encounter, be it one month, two months, three months, all I could see was this gold liquid dripping out of the ball. That was the real me seeping out … I didn’t want it to be there. I’d walk along cliffs and think it would be much easier if I just fell off.”
I can’t find the original Attitude interview online but luckily Walesonline reprinted it on January 18th and properly cited it-
He said: “I tried to bottle it up, but I could feel it, it was there in my stomach.
“I know this sounds crazy but this shows how much stress I was under, I used to visualise it as a little ball.
“I’d imagine this ball in my stomach and I’d have an encounter with a man and the ball would just be there.
“Then from that day until the next encounter, be it one month, two months, three months, all I could see was this gold liquid dripping out of the ball.
“That was the real me seeping out. My mind would tell me when there was no more to seep out and unfortunately, I would have to cheat on the person I loved the most. I will feel terrible about that until the day I die.”
This was sent to me by someone who wishes to remain anonymous but has been aware of Hari’s practice for a while. They explain;
My feeling is that this doesn’t fit with Hari’s other explanation - this is not something Thomas has said in his own writing. It is a rather vulnerable, beautiful quote which another journalist got out of him by gaining his trust. Hari has made it look like he said it directly to him. By saying it doesn’t matter if you quote a previous text, he’s missing the concept that subtle new nuances will always come out in a new conversation and you can always take out the “uhhs and umms”. I’m sure Thomas wouldn’t dream of complaining because he seems like any easy going guy and it’s a well-meaning piece but that’s not the point either. Getting good quotes out of an interviewee should be part of an interviewer’s skill.
Apparently I have started a ‘shitstorm’, according to some of my peers. I’m quite busy at work today but while the debate rages over whether Hari’s defence is acceptable or not I’d really like people to jump in and check his quotes themselves.
I like this one from ‘The Bravest Woman in Afghanistan: An Interview With Malalai Joya.
I ask if she was frightened, and she shakes her head. “I am never frightened when I tell the truth.” She is speaking fast now: “I am truly honoured to have been vilified and threatened by the savage men who condemned our country to such misery. I feel proud that even though I have no private army, no money, and no world powers behind me, these brutal despots are afraid of me and scheme to eliminate me.”
I am truly honoured to have been vilified and threatened by the savage men who have condemned our country to such misery. I feel proud that even though I have no private army, no money and no world powers behind me, these brutal despots are afraid of me and scheme to eliminate me. But it is not really me these men fear - they fear the wrath of our people who know the crimes they have committed. They know they cannot evade justice indefinitely, and the Afghan people have already decided the verdict.
Orwell Prize winning hack Johann Hari has some explaining to do. After reading a recent blog post detailing how he seems to have plagiarised large parts of his interview with Antonio Negri I thought I’d have a closer look at his work.
As a test I picked a recent interview of Hari’s at random and went through his quotes, doing a basic check for plagiarism. The results are pretty damning.
For two decades British anti-fascists fought a cold blooded battle for control of the streets against burgeoning far-right movements, Brian Whelan meets the authors of a controversial new book by activists who were there on the frontlines.
Just last year the BNP put forward 338 candidates for the UK parliamentary election, the biggest fielding by the far right the country had ever seen, topping the National Front’s 303 candidates in 1979.
The party gambled and lost, failing to win any seats and losing their 12 seats on Barking Council. The British left declared the BNP to have been finally defeated, decimated and no longer a threat.
However, veteran members of Anti-Fascist Action (AFA) have a different analysis, they point out that the BNP have more than tripled their vote and say things are going to get a lot worse.
“ If this big swing to Labour happens as predicted you could have the position where Eamon Gilmore is ahead of Enda Kenny…I would be up for negotiations to support a Labour-led government. ”
