[Oz-envirolink] Monbiot on Durkin - Global Warming Conspiracy

[hugh spencer]

http://population.org.au/

and

From: David Spratt <dspratt at bigpond.net.au>
Sender: greenleap at yahoogroups.com

And boy - do I hate extensive format editing!!!.....grrrr! - but thanks
David - very eye opening!!
H



The politics of Martin Durkin

I wonder how enthuisiastically the Australian right's climate deniers would
be embracing their now love-child, Martin Durkin, if there had been more
public discussion about Durkin's sectarian left history, and his role in
producing other fraudulent "documentaries".

Its been very convenient keeping the politics out of this one!

Below, some past commentaries form George Monbiot on Durkin
david -----------David Spratt   dspratt at bigpond.net.au

QUOTE: "Line by line, point by point, Against Nature follows the agenda
laid down by the [cranky sect called the Revolutionary Communist Party]
RCP..... The assistant producer of Against Nature, Eve Kaye, was one of the
principal coordinators of the RCP/LM. [LM = journal "Living Maxism"] The
director, Martin Durkin, describes himself as a Marxist, denies any link
with LM, but precisely follows its line in argument. The series starred
Frank Furedi, previously known as Frank Richards, LMís regular columnist
and most influential thinker, and John Gillott, LMís science correspondent,
both billed as independent experts. Line by line, point by point, Against
Nature followed the agenda laid down by LM: that greens are not radicals,
but doom-mongering imperialists; that global warming is nothing to worry
about; that ìsustainable developmentî is a conspiracy against people; while
germline gene therapy and human cloning will liberate humanity from nature.
The Independent Television Commission, reviewing Against Nature in response
to hundreds of complaints, handed down one of the most damning rulings it
has ever made: the programme makers ìdistorted by selective editingî the
views of the environmentalists they interviewed and ìmisledî them about the
ìcontent and purpose of the programmes when they agreed to take part. -
Channel 4 was forced to make a humiliating prime time apology.
---------
The revolution has been televised

<http://www.monbiot.com/archives/1997/12/18/the-revolution-has-been-televised/>h
ttp://www.monbiot.com/archives/1997/12/18/the-revolution-has-been-televised/

Channel 4's Against Nature series turns out to have been made by an obscure
and cranky sect

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 18th December 1997.

There has never been a series on British television like Channel 4ís
Against Nature, which ended with a debate on Tuesday night. The
environmentalists it interviewed were lied to about the contents of the
programmes. They were given no chance to respond to the accusations the
series made. They were misrepresentated to the extent of falsification. One
couldn't help suspecting that Against Nature was driven not by healthy
scepticism but by shrill ideology.

If this were so, where might it have come from? At first we thought the Far
Right might have been involved. But, over the last three weeks, another
picture has begun to form. Against Nature IS the product of an extreme
political ideology, but it comes from a rather different quarter: an
obscure and cranky sect called the Revolutionary Communist Party.

Frank Furedi, the series - key interviewee and a protagonist in Tuesday's
debate, has been described as the father of the modern RCP. He is a regular
contributer to the RCPís journal, Living Marxism. Of the two main
contributers to the third programme, one, John Gillott, is Living Marxism's
science correspondent. The other, Robert Plomin, though not RCP, has
recently been interviewed sympathetically by the magazine. Martin Durkin,
the director of the three programmes, describes himself as a Marxist: the
only brand of Marxism which follows the line the series takes is the RCPís.

The husband of his deputy, Against Nature's assistant producer, is the
co-author of the RCP's manifesto and Books Editor of Living Marxism.

Line by line, point by point, Against Nature follows the agenda laid down
by the RCP.

 Greens, both the series and Living Marxism maintain, present themselves as
radicals, but are really doom-mongering imperialists, engaged in the
deification of Nature and the rejection of human progress. Global warming
is nothing to worry about, while sustainable development is a conspiracy
against people. Greens have plotted with the film industry to make science
terrifying. Genetic engineering and human cloning are not to be feared but
cherished, as they will liberate humanity from nature.

The ideologues in the series have some strange bedfellows, but the RCP has
always been good at making selective alliances, whether it is promoting
anti-environmental ideas, or campaigning against a ban on landmines and in
favour of the Bosnian Serb forces and the Hutu militias. Its members are
controversialists, but more than just that: the principle targets for their
attacks are alternative outlets for radical action.

I had scarcely broached this subject on Tuesday night's debate when Martin
Durkin began - and I do not exaggerate - screaming. I was a McCarthyite and
a despicable conspiracist. What on earth did his personal political views
have to do with this series?

Well, rather too much. The RCP and its associates can make as many
programmes as they like as long as they do so openly and honestly. Indeed,
among its perversities and cheap controversialism, the RCP has some
interesting and provocative views, which are worth hearing and debating.
But Martin Durkin and his commissioning editor, Sara Ramsden, maintain that
Against Nature is not a polemic, but a well-balanced documentary series.
There was no presenter; instead we were instructed, in true documentary
style, by an authoritative voice-over. The RCP/Living Marxism interviewees
were not captioned as such, but presented as independent experts.

It's an extraordinary coup for a tiny group of cranks: three hours of prime
time propaganda. But how on earth did they pull it off? It is inconceivable
that Channel 4's top decision-makers also belong to the party. But many
television executives hate environmentalism. They see it as a grim memento
mori at the bottom of the picture, spoiling the good news about cars,
clothes and consumerism. So when the film-makers suggested an all-out
assault on environmentalists, their proposal fell on fertile ground. The
revolution, as the RCP sees it, has been televised.
--------
Modified truth

<http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2000/03/16/modified-truth/>http://www.monbiot.c
om/archives/2000/03/16/modified-truth/

Channel 4 has hired a charlatan to make its science programmes

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 16th March 2000
\
In October 1998 a television producer named Martin Durkin took a proposal
to the BBCís science series, Horizon. Silicone breast implants, he claimed,
far from harming women, were in fact beneficial, reducing the risk of
breast cancer. Horizon commissioned a researcher to find out whether or not
his assertion was true. After a thorough review, the researcher reported
that Mr Durkin had ignored a powerful body of evidence contradicting his
claims. Martin Durkin withdrew his proposal. Instead of dropping it,
however, he took it to Channel 4 and, astonishingly, sold it to their
science series, Equinox.

To help him make the programme, Durkin hired Najma Kazi, a highly respected
TV researcher and producer who was previously a research biochemist. After
two weeks she walked out. "It's not a joke to walk away from four or five
monthís work" she told me, "but my research was being ignored. The
published research had been construed to give an impression that's not the
case. I don't know how that programme got passed. The only consolation for
me was that Iím really glad I didn't put my name to it."

But the programme was broadcast, in May last year. Silicone implants, it
insisted, appeared to reduce the incidence of breast cancer. Women claiming
that their operations had caused severe health problems were dismissed as
cranks, malingerers and compensation chasers. The researchers who believed
that there was a problem were accused of practising "junk science".

Mr Durkin has often been accused of taking liberties with the facts. In
1997 he made a series for Channel 4 called "Against Nature", which compared
environmentalists with Nazis, conspiring against the world's poor. No one
would suggest that green claims should not be subjected to critical
examination, but the people he interviewed were lied to about the contents
of the programmes and given no chance to respond to the accusations the
series made.

The Independent Television Commission handed down one of the most damning
verdicts it has ever reached: the programme makers "distorted by selective
editing" the views of the interviewees and "misled" them about the "content
and purpose of the programmes when they agreed to take part."  Channel 4
was forced to make a humiliating prime time apology. After the series was
broadcast, I discovered that the assistant producer and several of its
interviewees worked for the right-wing libertarian magazine masquerading as
"Living Marxism", which has just been successfully sued by ITN. All the
arguments Against Nature made had been rehearsed in LM.

So what do you do with a director with a record like this, who has brought
your channel into disrepute, who has misled both his contributors and his
audience? If you are Michael Jackson, the head of Channel 4, you commission
him to make more programmes.

On Monday, Channel 4 will broadcast a 90-minute Equinox programme about
genetic engineering, made by Martin Durkin and called, appropriately
enough, "Modified Truth". Already it appears that the programme-making has
suffered from Mr Durkinís characteristic approach. "I feel completely
betrayed and misled', reports Dr Mae-Wan Ho, a geneticist Durkin
interviewed. "They did not tell me it was going to be an attack on my
position."

Neither Martin Durkin nor, extraordinarily, Charles Furneaux, the
commissioning editor of the science series Equinox, has a science
background. They don't need one, for science on Channel 4 has been reduced
to a crude manifesto for corporate libertarianism.

When Michael Jackson arrived at Channel 4, he cancelled a series called
Global Raiders, on which a quarter of a million pounds had already been
spent. It would have examined the adverse impacts of big business around
the world. Since 1989, according to the research group 3WE, Channel 4 has
reduced its international factual output by 56 per cent. Holiday programmes
have boomed, but "ecological programming now appears to be virtually
extinct".

The station, in other words, is censoring not just a few ideas, but entire
subject areas. Serious coverage of science, the environment, the developing
world and, above all, abuses of corporate power, has been all but stamped
out. The Mark Thomas Comedy Product is a glowing exception, but I suspect
it is allowed on air only because it makes people laugh.

Perhaps intellectual honesty is too fusty, too boring, for the chic,
post-modern Channel 4. But perhaps there is something else at work, perhaps
we should question whether senior staff have come to identify themselves
with the companies providing their revenues, and are, as a result, seeking
to modify the truth. If so, then it is hardly surprising that they have
handed so much work to a charlatan.


--------
Living Marxismís interesting allegiances

<http://www.monbiot.com/archives/1998/11/01/far-left-or-far-right/>http://www.mo
nbiot.com/archives/1998/11/01/far-left-or-far-right/

By George Monbiot. Published in Prospect Magazine, November 1998

Thereís no question that Britainís libel laws are unfair. Intended to
protect the individual, they are routinely used by large corporations to
discourage their critics. Confronted with almost limitless resources, the
best QCs money can buy and the prospect of ruinous costs and damages, the
defendants almost always back down, whether or not they believe their cause
to be just. The result is that a significant arena of public life has been,
in large part, placed beyond the bounds of free speech.
A few courageous souls with little to lose and a point to prove have
withstood the corporate assault, and allowed the case to proceed to court.
Today the undisputed heroes of free speech are the "McLibel Two", the
unemployed people who defended themselves against McDonalds and won a
famous partial victory. But they could soon be joined by another plucky
crusader for human freedom, a small but tenacious magazine called Living
Marxism, or LM.

In 1997, LM published an article claiming that the broadcasting company ITN
had fabricated its dramatic discovery in 1992 of prisoners held by the
Bosnian Serbs. "The picture that fooled the world" argued that ITN's
footage, in which emaciated Bosnian Muslim men clung to barbed wire, showed
not a detention centre, as ITN maintained, but a safe haven for refugees.
The Bosnian Serb soldiers at the camp were not detaining the Muslims but
defending them.

ITN instituted proceedings for libel. The corporation insisted that it had
no choice but to defend its journalists'  reputations. LM argued that ITN
had plenty of opportunities to defend itself, without resorting to the
courts. Some of the world's leading liberals leapt to the magazine's
defence: Harold Evans, Doris Lessing, Paul Theroux, Fay Weldon and many
others condemned ITN's "deplorable attack on press freedom". The Institute
of Contemporary Arts, bulwark of progressive liberalism, enhanced LMís
heroic profile by co-hosting a three-day conference with the magazine,
called "Free Speech Wars". With the blessing of the liberal world, this
puny iconoclastic David will go to war with the clanking orthodoxies of the
multinational Goliath.

This, at least, is how LM would like its struggle to be seen. But there is
more to this David than first meets the eye. His may be less of the great
liberal cause that his supporters would like to believe. For the closer one
looks at LM, the weaker its link to the oppressed appears, and the stronger
its links to the oppressor. It has, in other words, less in common with the
left than with the fanatical right.

The magazine was launched in 1988 as an outlet for the Revolutionary
Communist Party, a bizarre controversialist sect which split from the
"International Socialists" in the 1970s. Soon the RCP was collapsed into
Living Marxism, which, hovering between three different parent companies,
later changed its name to LM. Its mission, the editors announced, was to
promote human freedom based on a "confident individualism". There should be
no limits to human action, least of all those imposed by "official and
semi-official agencies - from the police and the courts to social services,
counsellors and censors."

LM would not hesitate to present uncomfortable truths to power, whatever
the cost might be. In this spirit, or so it would have us believe, in
February 1997 it recruited the fearless investigative journalist Thomas
Deichmann to tell the real story behind the Bosnian enclosures. Only it
wasnít quite like that. Deichmann was an engineer by training, not a
journalist. His writing was largely confined to an obscure German magazine
called Novo, which he used repeatedly to defend the Bosnian Serb leadership
against charges of murder, torture, rape and ethnic cleansing. He presented
himself as a witness for the defence at the trial of the Serbian war
criminal Dusko Tadic.

LMís contributers do seem to have the most extraordinary contacts. Late
last year, Channel 4 devoted its Sunday night peak slot to a three-hour
series called Against Nature. By seeking to impose limits on progress, the
series alleged, environmentalists are the true heirs of the Nazis.

The assistant producer of Against Nature, Eve Kaye, was one of the
principal coordinators of the RCP/LM. The director, Martin Durkin,
describes himself as a Marxist, denies any link with LM, but precisely
follows its line in argument. The series starred Frank Furedi, previously
known as Frank Richards, LM's regular columnist and most influential
thinker, and John Gillott, LM's science correspondent, both billed as
independent experts. Line by line, point by point, Against Nature followed
the agenda laid down by LM: that greens are not radicals, but
doom-mongering imperialists; that global warming is nothing to worry about;
that "sustainable development" is a conspiracy against people; while
germline gene therapy and human cloning will liberate humanity from nature.
The Independent Television Commission, reviewing Against Nature in response
to hundreds of complaints, handed down one of the most damning rulings it
has ever made: the programme makers "distorted by selective editing" the
views of the environmentalists they interviewed and "misled" them about the
"content and purpose of the programmes when they agreed to take part."
Channel 4 was forced to make a humiliating prime time apology.

Channel 4 is by no means the only mouthpiece of counter-revolutionary
Capital of which LM contributers seek to make good use. Joan Phillips, who
is director of LM's sister organisation, the London International Research
Exchange, and helps Deichmann to explain away Serb atrocities in the pages
of LM, works under the name of Joan Hoey as the Economist Intelligence
Unitís Balkans analyst. Frank Furedi has recently been offering his
services to the major superstores and the Food and Drink Federation,
proposing to "educate" consumers towards a "less emotive" consideration of
food safety. Strange Marxists these, who offer such solace to Capital.

Itís arguable, of course, that, pending the revolution, even Marxists have
to engage with global capital to make a living, but this doesn't explain
the next mystery: LM's association with overtly rightwing organisations.
The March 1998 edition ran a substantial article by Ron Arnold, claiming
that the Unabomber is an environmentalist, ergo all environmentalists are
terrorists. Ron Arnold is Executive Vice President of the Centre for the
Defense of Free Enterprise, one of the wackiest far-right campaigns in the
United States, established to promote "individual rights, free markets,
private property and limited government". Simultaneously, the CFDE used
Channel 4's publicity briefing for Against Nature as the "guest editorial"
on its website.

This year, the avowedly anti-imperialist LM began running articles by Roger
Bate of the Institute for Economic Affairs, which advocates, among other
interesting ideas, that African countries should be sold to multinational
corporations in order to bring "good government" to the continent. In the
Against Nature series, LM's contributors rubbed shoulders with Larry Craig,
a far right Republican senator and fundraiser for the raving "Alliance for
America"; Julian Simon, who was Ronald Reagan's favourite economist, and
Michael Gough, who, like Simon, belongs to a hard-right libertarian
think-tank called the Cato Institute. All maintained an identical political
position, lining up to identify the liberals and lefties of the
environmental movement as covert Nazi sympathisers.

As you wade through back issues of Living Marxism, you can't help but
conclude that the magazine's title is a poor guide to its contents. LM
contains little that would be recognised by other Marxists or, for that
matter, by leftists of any description. On one issue after another, thereís
a staggering congruence between LMís agenda and that of the far-right
Libertarian Alliance. The two organisations take identical positions, for
example, on gun control (it is a misconceived attack on human liberty),
child pornography (legal restraint is simply a Trojan horse for the wider
censorship of the Internet), alcohol (its dangers have been exaggerated by
a new breed of "puritan"), the British National Party (it's unfair to
associate it with the murder of Stephen Lawrence; its activities and
publications should not be restricted), the Anti-Nazi League (it is
undemocratic and irrelevant), tribal people (celebrating their lives
offends humanity's potential to better itself; the Yanomami Indians are not
to be envied but pitied) animal rights (they donít have any), and global
warming (it's a good thing).

The two organizations share a strangely one-sided conception of freedom,
celebrating and defending the "freedom to" of those with the power to act,
while dismissing threats to the "freedom from" of those who might be
affected. So, limiting the scope of racist publications insults our
humanity, even though they might incite racists to beat up black people,
while restricting car use is a fundamental assault on liberty, even though
being hit by cars is now the commonest cause of death for children between
the ages of one and fourteen. "It is those who have suffered the most," LM
tells us, "who should be listened to the least."
Both organizations also appear to believe that the weak and vulnerable are
best served by being allowed to fend for themselves, without interference
from "do-gooders" and "puritans'. Left to their own devices, both adults
and children are capable of resisting tobacco advertising, alcopops,
paedophiles and pornographers, whatever the imbalance of power between
perpetrator and victim may be. Indeed corporations, LM appears to suggest,
should be free to do whatever they want, except sueing LM for libel.

But the similarities end with the ideology. While the Libertarian Alliance
is a shabby, disaggregated outfit, LM is professional and well-organized.
Glossy, well-written and cleverly edited, distributed largely for free,
supported by its own research organization and an excellent website, the
magazine seems to have no shortage of money, yet no obvious sources of
major funding.

So who is this strangely armoured David?

Where do his politics come from?

 Can LM's editors really be such deranged Marxist fundamentalists that they
are seeking to hasten the triumph of capitalism, the better to speed its
downfall? Or are they trying to destroy alternative outlets for radical
action, in the hope that the revolution, when it comes, will be untainted
by heresy? Whatever the explanation may be, LM, with its extreme right-wing
allies and extreme right-wing views dressed in left-wing clothes, is doing
more to confuse and destabilise the left than any overtly right-wing
organisation.

Had the magazine been named "Living Libertarianism" or "Living Reaganism",
one wonders how willing the liberal establishment would have been to leap
to its defence. Oppressive as ITN's suit might be, LM's survival is no
great liberal cause. For its new-found champions on the liberal left can be
assured of just one thing: that of all political classes, LM hates them the
most.


__,_._,___

end


"As we peer into society's future, we - you and I, and our government -
must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease
and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the
material assets of our grandchildren without asking the loss also of their
political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all
generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow".


   Dwight Eisenhower Farewell Address, January 1961
____________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Hugh Spencer    Director of Research  |
Cape Tribulation Tropical Research Station |   Phone/Fax (61)07 4098 0063

Australian Tropical Research Foundation    | http://www.austrop.org.au/

"The Bat-House", Environment Centre.       |
PMB 5 Cape Tribulation via Mossman         |     Hugh at austrop.org.au

Queensland 4873 Australia                  |
___________________________________________|________________________________    



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