[lbo-talk] Palast's Palimpsest: Lying About Galloway.

[John Lacny]

Galloway is not my favorite political figure (though his performance in 
front of the Senate was absolutely thrilling), and his salute to Saddam's 
"indefatigability" was stupid. And I am sure that Palast's interest here is 
that he supports the anti-war movement and does not want Galloway to emerge 
as a sort of spokesman for it, for fear that his kookiness will discredit 
us. But if Palast thinks this is a real danger -- particularly in the United 
States -- then he has been living in Britain for too long. Galloway is a 
blip on the screen here, and no one cares about him but the few of us who 
pay attention to this inside baseball. It does not justify one -- let alone 
two -- commentaries from a credible left investigative journalist. I also 
thought that the comment about him being rich now was a cheap shot, unworthy 
of Palast's body of work and reminiscent of the right's pseudo-populist 
attacks on Michael Moore here; I actually wrote to Palast about this, and 
his assistant said that Palast himself actually agreed and thought that the 
comment about Galloway having money was a mistake.

Further, Galloway does deserve eternal credit for at least one very 
important thing, and that was standing by the British miners when most 
everyone else had abandoned them twenty years ago. That sort of thing goes a 
long way in working-class communities, as it should. And I am not interested 
in the bleatings of a journalistic pipsqueak like Johann Hari on this 
subject, especially since he's accumulated some blood on his own hands as a 
scribe for the powers-that-be in supporting this war from the very 
beginning. With Galloway at least you know he's going to be on your side 
when it matters; that's much more than can be said for Hari or for any 
two-bit drunk with inflated literary pretentions whose name is best not 
mentioned (and who is not worth debating -- another note to Galloway).

I do not know much about the substance of the allegations against Galloway 
in the Mariam Appeal, nor do I care to read more extensively on them at this 
moment, but I do say that I am deeply skeptical of them, especially in light 
of what I know of an earlier even I've already alluded to. The British 
tabloids smeared Arthur Scargill as an agent of Qaddafi and as a pilferer of 
money raised for striking miners; all of this turned out to be lies, all of 
it literally orchestrated by MI5, and Scargill turned out to be 
squeaky-clean. You can call him a fanatic if you want (I call him the 
greatest and most principled trade unionist of the post-war English-speaking 
industrialized world, with the possible exception of Jim Matles, who had a 
similar personality and political background), but Scargill followed Mao's 
injunction to never steal so much as a spool of thread from the masses. The 
campaign against Galloway -- which as I recall began with the "discovery" of 
some memo of uncertain vintage in the ruins of Baghdad -- has looked 
suspiciously like this from the very beginning. I am not willing to assume 
that Galloway "must be guilty of something" just because a lot of people are 
saying so.

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John Lacny
http://www.johnlacny.com

Tell no lies, claim no easy victories