From: Rakesh Bhandari
>Catching up with email. I must say that I am pissed at LM. Though I rarely
>agreed with them, I found them stimulating and witty. I wish they had made
>some concessions in their legal battle before being driven to the wall. But
>perhaps they were just too he man to concede a little to protect for the
>long run a project well worth protecting. It seems to have been a tactical
>blunder for which they have been forced to pay way too high a price. I
>express my regret to Jim H and Russell.
While I can't speak for LM, I think it is important to point out that the magazine comes from a tradition where political positions always meant more than just posturing on the net. This wasn't just about tactics as Rakesh seems to think. Principled politics have in the past meant arrest, imprisonment and physical confrontation with reactionaries and the cops - even in that supposed haven of democracy, the UK. It seems that the consensus this time was that they could not avoid a fight in court despite an understanding that the odds were against them. I don't think that there is any danger that the project itself will grind to a halt as a result of the closure of the magazine. The general failure of the "left" to take a stand on the LM case and generally on issues of free speech, will however unfortunately probably rebound on everyone.
Russell
As LM Editor Mick Hume put it:
>...we will not be silenced...Whatever happens, the project LM has pursued
over the past three years,
of trying to set a new agenda for public debate, will carry on one way or
another.
and
>We have apologised for nothing, but we are not going to appeal. Life is too
short to waste any more time in the bizarre world of the libel courts. We
never wanted to get involved in this case. The polished-wood atmosphere of
Court 14 at the Royal Courts of Justice is no place for journalists to
debate such important issues. As I told the judge and jury in the witness
box, I believe that people should have the right to judge the truth for
themselves in the court of public opinion. What we are allowed to read or
hear should not be dictated by ITN, their lawyers, or even the High Court.
Exactly what Mr Justice Morland thought of my irreverent intervention was
not recorded.
>There is now an injunction preventing me from going into any further detail
about the story of Fikret Alic, the barbed-wire fence and the journalists at
Trnopolje. Fair enough - I have no wish to make it my
lifetime's work. But I will continue to raise the broader concerns which led
us to publish Thomas Deichmann's article in the first place and,
reluctantly, to fight the legal case: concerns about press freedom,
journalistic standards, and the exploitation of the Holocaust.
>The last of those three issues remains particularly close to LM's heart. We
have published many articles pointing out the dangers of today's unhealthy
obsession with the Holocaust. Which made it all the more infuriating to read
Ed Vulliamy's screeching feature in the Guardian the day after the verdict
(especially coming after Julia Hartley-Brewer's fair reports of the case in
the same paper), in which he branded LM 'the tinpot Holocaust denier'. In
fact, as I said in my evidence during the trial, it is precisely because LM
is concerned to counter the rewriting of history that we have pointed out
how dangerous it is for people like Vulliamy to compare the Bosnian civil
war to the Nazi genocide. 'The Holocaust is an absolutely unique horror in
history', I argued then, 'the great crime of the twentieth century, and if
you start putting it on a par with civil wars of today you can only diminish
its horror, I think, and you do a disservice to the victims of the Holocaust
by making those kind of inappropriate comparisons'.
Reproduced from LM issue 129, April 2000