From Les Raphael
A comment on Garrick Alder’s reference in Lobster 43 to the Zinoviev letter story. It’s a myth that the letter cost Labour the 1924 election, loaded with false implications, such as:
- that Labour had a majority to begin with (they only won 191 seats in 1923 – and only contested 427 out of 615);
- or that they had a serious prospect of winning one in 1924 (there were only about 100 winnable marginals, and only 40 of those were Tory-Labour – the rest were either Liberal-held, or three-way splits, when the Liberals had been keeping Labour out of office since 1923);
- or that the Tories’ 154 net gains in 1924 came from Labour (two thirds were from the Liberals);
- or that the increase in the Tory vote came from former Labour voters. Labour’s numerical vote increased by 24%: if Zinoviev was meant to reduce the Labour vote, it was a total failure. Labour’s vote was up on 1923 in almost every seat it contested, even in the ones it lost. As in that other mythical election, 1979, the one where millions of former Labour voters were so disgusted with the Left they switched to Thatcher, somehow leaving Labour’s national vote higher than in 1974, the Tory increase was caused by ex-Liberals (30 of Labour’s 40 net losses were caused by tactical voting for the Tories where the Liberals withdrew their own candidates in 1924), or by voters who had abstained in 1923 or had never voted before (the turnout was the highest between 1918-50).
The Mail’s stunt may have galvanised latent Tory voters – a lot of them ex-Liberals – but it didn’t cost Labour votes, or the election. A party than can increase its national numerical total by 24% and actually lose 40 seats doing it is obviously up against something more than a simple Tory smear campaign, or a simplistic Tory-up-Labour-down ‘swing’ model of what happens at British elections. Both parties were up in 1924 – it was the Liberals who lost most seats (they only contested 339) and votes. The Tory ‘landslide’ wasn’t at Labour’s expense, which is the implication of the in Zinoviev story; just as Thatcher’s win in 1979 was never caused by Labour voters switching to voting Tory, despite 23 years of outright lying about it by the media and the academics. There’s a latent Tory vote out there that can be mobilised by the media, the way it was in 1924 and 1979, and Labour’s had 80 years to work out how to stop them doing it. Blair, of course, prefers joining them to beating them.
From Phil Edwards
I expected my review of Russ Kick’s collection You are being lied to in Lobster 42 to be fairly controversial, but I was startled by the vehemence with which Kick and Edward Herman attacked the review – and me personally – in Lobster 43.
Unfortunately Kick and Herman appear not to have understood my criticisms of what I called the ‘white crow’ approach, let alone how those criticisms might apply to their own work. In the Introduction to his book, Kick makes three crucial assertions. First, he expands the category of ‘lies’ to include lies by omission, untrue statements which the speaker believes to be true and widely-held erroneous beliefs, as well as deliberate falsehoods. He then argues that lies – by implication, ‘lies’ of all these types – are usually in somebody’s interest: ‘the “answers” that are being handed to us….. are often incorrect, incomplete, and usually serve the interests of the people promoting those so-called answers’. Finally, he suggests a way of debunking lies – again, with the implication that this applies to ‘lies’ of all the above types. ‘All you need to do is find a single white crow to disprove the statement “All crows are black”. The contributors to this book are pointing out the white crows”.
Three conclusions follow from all this. Firstly, if you find an error, you can assume that someone is lying; even if the person passing on the error is sincere, somebody somewhere knows the truth and wants to suppress it. Secondly, in Kick’s words, ‘It’s much easier to reveal a lie than to reveal the truth’; or as I put it, ‘you don’t need to have the whole picture to know when it’s being distorted’. One white crow – one piece of evidence you believe to be true – is enough to expose a lie. Thirdly, given that ‘lies’ don’t have to involve deliberate deception, and that they may appear to have the weight of evidence behind them, telling the lie from the white crow of truth is up to you; if you are inclined to believe a piece of evidence which conflicts with a generally-accepted story, you can safely assume not only that your favoured evidence is the truth but that the accepted story is a lie. In short, the ‘white crow’ approach encourages hunting for vested interests whenever a ‘lie’ is detected; overvaluing weak evidence which appears to debunk a ‘lie’; and treating some stories (and some sources) differently from others, assuming that one is the mendacious received version while the other is the trustworthy white crow.
These assumptions are echoed in many contributions to the book – not least Kick’s own essay ‘Why does the Associated Press change its articles?’, which he defended in Lobster 43. Kick writes:
The world’s largest newswire releases a story in which two Congressmen say that diplomats and World Bank representatives hold sex slaves hostage in the US; one hour and eleven minutes later, that information – but only that information – is stripped out of the article. Yet no one asked for that to happen?
I can only repeat that we don’t know that anyone did this. Moreover, there’s no need to assume it: it’s easy to see how someone within AP could have spiked the allegation as unsubstantiated or ambiguous (there’s a reference to ’employees of the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund’ – which was it?). The explosive nature of the allegation would have made this decision particularly easy – and arguably appropriate. We don’t know that AP tends to disseminate lies, and given the reputation of AP it would be perverse to start from this assumption. We don’t know that people with vested interests pressurised AP to put out a lie, and again the simplest assumption is that this was not the case. All we have is an omission; we can’t know that we were being lied to.
Herman objects to my characterisation of his and Noam Chomsky’s ‘propaganda model’ as an exemplar of ‘white crow’ thinking. He writes:
the notion that Chomsky says that “what you believe is the truth and anyone saying otherwise is lying to you”, is imbecile nonsense. The idea that the propaganda model repres-ents a “critique of individual journalists”, is complete horseshit. That it divides the world into truth-tellers and liars, and that it focuses on lies is also unmitigated nonsense.
On the first point, anyone applying the propaganda model will, over time, classify some sources as relatively trustworthy and others as generally mendacious. This in turn encourages judging the validity of a story, firstly by whether it comes from a propaganda-friendly source, and secondly by whether it is consistent with other stories from propagandising sources. Certain types of story will tend to be classified as believable in principle and others approached with disbelief, however strong the evidence in their favour may appear to be. Using the propaganda model, in short, carries the risk of ending up ‘[knowing] that what you believe is the truth, and [that] anyone saying otherwise is lying to you’.
Secondly, I don’t think it’s disputable that Chomsky’s work on the propaganda model includes a ‘critique of individual journalists’, among other mouthpieces of elite-friendly propaganda. To put it another way, I believe that Chomsky judges people paid to spread lies as harshly as he would habitual liars, and rightly so. Where I part company with Chomsky is in the identification of the lies in question.
Finally, while the propaganda model does not require individual journalists to lie, it does make it possible to identify certain stories as lies – propagandistic distortions of the truth, serving the interest of holders of power. It follows that some journalists (or academics, or politicians) are consistent propagators of lies, while others uphold what Chomsky defined long ago as the duty of the intellectual, ‘to tell the truth and to expose lies’. There are lies, there are those who spread lies, and there are those who tell the truth.
The confident identification of truth-tellers and liars; the association of falsehood with elite vested interests; the differential weighting of trustworthy and propagandising sources: the propaganda model, however sophisticated and nuanced its practical application may be, bears all these marks of the ‘white crow’ world view. In its place, I commended a sceptical approach: you hear everyone out, you weigh everything up and – if you’ll pardon the expression – you trust no one. Every source has something to tell you, very few of them are simply lying through their teeth and nobody’s telling you the whole truth – arguably nobody can.
For a consistent sceptic, erroneous accounts may indicate that someone’s lying, or they may simply have been produced by fallible human beings. You start out by doubting the official story, but you keep an open mind and apply the same sceptical standards to all the alternative versions. Debunking an error is an endless process, even if you believe you’ve seen a white crow – or a flock of them. As evidence comes in you shift towards one version or another, but no one version is ever wholly endorsed – or wholly dismissed. Outright lies can rarely be identified with any certainty; rather, every account contains true and false. To a greater or lesser extent, all accounts are coloured by ignorance, prejudice, received ideas and ulterior motives; the task of the sceptic is to recognise this and make the appropriate allowances – consistently and without prejudice, as far as that’s possible.
This means analysing individual stories: a story’s veracity cannot be assessed in advance, by identifying the interests it appears to serve. Of course, people with influence over the media will find some stories more acceptable than others, and we would expect the output of the media to broadly follow those preferences. But this doesn’t necessarily say anything about the credibility of the favoured stories; in George Orwell’s words, some things are true even if you read them in the Daily Telegraph.
Finally, I notice that Herman accuses me of ‘engaging in genuine lying about Chomsky and his work’, by which I assume he means deliberately and knowingly writing falsehoods. I don’t believe that I’ve given Herman any grounds for this rather serious allegation. One of my criticisms of the ‘white crow’ approach is that it makes it possible to dismiss unwelcome assertions as lies. It’s ironic, if not entirely surprising, that Herman has responded to criticism along these lines by calling the critic a liar.
From Larry Isles
With regard to Scott Newton’s ‘Blair as Gladstonian imperialist’ in Lobster 42, sure, over Egypt’s once semi-independent caliphate (albeit heavily influenced by France), in its establishment of a military and financial ‘Protectorate’, Gladstone’s second administration strayed from the self-determination radicalism, so well expressed in his previous Midlothian campaign. Yet Newton places the rather circumscribed Egyptian ‘land grab’ in the same category as the ‘open-ended Anglo-American war against terrorism’.
Firstly, Victorian Liberalism permitted more open debate about ‘imperialism’ and ‘terrorism’ than New Labourism has allowed us. Newton would be better deployed recounting how Gladstone’s flexibility about such healthy debate enabled him to resist the financial, annexationist interests Newton senses hidden everywhere more effectively than lawyer cronies Blair and Hoon will ever understand today about the more explicit American oil intrigues from the Balkans to the northern Asian sub-continent basin.
So the very same Gladstone administration that Newton indicts for hypocrisy, in fact initially resisted for almost two years Bradford Liberal MP, former education minister William Forster who wanted ‘gunboats’ and outright ‘annexation’ of Egypt. Radical leader John Bright was openly allowed to critique the whole bloody ‘Protectorate’ acquisition to the poignant point of his own permanent resignation from both cabinet and the Liberal leadership of a party he had once helped to found.
Unlike today’s Afghanistan, Gladstone knew when to stop. Newton leaves out of his account the Gladstone administration’s refusal to whitewash Gordon’s disobedience of his ‘rescue’ instructions, leading to his death at Khartoum; even though both Tories and the Whigs still inside the Liberals were furious at the ‘Gladstonians’ refusal to sanction thereby the grab of the Sudan which Gordon had hoped to provoke. Likewise, Gladstone refused to engage in yet more civil liberties erosion against Victorian ‘terrorism’ on anti-Irish grounds.