Media attacks on Seumas Milne

The British Media’s Indecent Attacks on Seumas Milne

The former Guardian columnist, now the Labour Party's Executive Director of Strategy and Communications, has been the target of a smear campaign.

By: Joe Emersberger

This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address: 
 "http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/The-British-Medias-Indecent-Attacks-on-Seamus-Milne-20151103-0024.html". If you intend to use it, please cite the source and provide a link to the original article. www.teleSURtv.net/english

This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address: 
 "http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/The-British-Medias-Indecent-Attacks-on-Seamus-Milne-20151103-0024.html". If you intend to use it, please cite the source and provide a link to the original article. www.teleSURtv.net/english

Telesur,

3 November, 2015

One of the lasting contributions Margaret Thatcher made to the world was the slogan “there is no alternative” or TINA as it has come to be known. She was referring to neoliberalism which is a menu of right wing economic policies. If you can’t get most people to like stuffing the pockets of the rich, the next best thing is to convince them that they have no choice. It was a crazy thing to say, but with the media’s help a lot of nonsense can be sold to the public. However, within the UK establishment press, TINA really does apply. That’s been dramatically illustrated by the attacks on Seumas Milne since October 20 when he was named the Labour party’s new Director of Communications.  

The day after Milne’s appointment was announced, an op-ed appeared in the U.K. Independent entitled "So Jeremy Corbyn, what made you appoint Seumas Milne, an apologist for murderous dictators?"

Listed below are other articles that trashed Milne since October 20. Apart from the hysteria, note the redundancy. A vilification campaign succeeds mainly through repetition. The list is very far from exhaustive. I am not including numerous articles from the self-satirizing Daily Mail among others:

“Milne is an apologist for terror, and wrong on almost everything”

“By hiring Seumas Milne, Jeremy Corbyn shows his utter contempt for real Labour voters...They don't relate to Guardianista apologias for terrorism”

“A former parliamentary Labour candidate has attacked Jeremy Corbyn's decision to appoint the 'fascism-apologist' Seumas Milne as his top advisor”

“Seumas Milne: Yet another Corbynista who loves 'humanity' but appears to hate people”

“Exclusive: Jeremy Corbyn's millionaire spin doctor Seumas Milne sent his children to top grammar schools”

Seamus Milne is on leave from the Guardian where, since 1984, he was not only a writer but a former opinion page editor. Milne has no equivalent in any big U.S. newspaper. Linda McQuaig, when she wrote regularly for the Toronto Star, arguably provided a similar level of dissent in a major Canadian newspaper.

An article that has been used to justify calling him a Stalinist was published by the Guardian in 2006. Milne wrote that the “fashionable attempt to equate communism and Nazism is in reality a moral and historical nonsense. Despite the cruelties of the Stalin terror, there was no Soviet Treblinka or Sobibor, no extermination camps built to murder millions. Nor did the Soviet Union launch the most devastating war in history at a cost of more than 50 million lives – in fact it played the decisive role in the defeat of the German war machine.” Milne’s article carefully and intelligently evaluated the evidence regarding the “Stalin terror.” Then, referring explicitly to the post-Stalin era in the Soviet Union, Milne wrote, “For all its brutalities and failures, communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality.”

Only a liar could read the article and claim that Milne was “attempting to rehabilitate Stalin.” As for what Milne wrote about the post-Stalin USSR, it takes quite a fanatic to sincerely read that as an apologetic for the Soviet governments of that era. If I write that there have been significant social and economic advances in the USA since the end of World War II, am I therefore an apologist for millions slaughtered in the Vietnam War, the destruction of Iraq that has cost about two million lives since 1990, the hundreds of thousands murdered as a result of US sponsored coups in Latin America, or the USA’s notoriously racist and trigger-happy police? Am I therefore an apologist for capitalism?

The attacks on Milne have come, predictably, from right wing outlets but also from a few that have a reputation for being progressive. What about the Guardian? Never mind loyalty to a colleague who has been at the newspaper for decades. If the Guardian offered a real alternative to the hard right press it would have quickly provided strong opposition to the attacks. As I write this, the Guardian has not published a single op-ed or editorial defending Milne. In fact, one very recent Guardian article stated that Milne had “praised Stalin.” I wrote to a Guardian editor about it and he defended the smear as being “gentle.” Nevertheless, the article was quietly amended. The reference to “praise” was removed, but it can still be misread to mean that Milne had written fondly of “Dear old Joe Stalin.”

There are some people at the Guardian who may be quite happy to see Milne tarred and feathered in the media. Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore, for example, posted a Facebook entry in which she reacted to Milne’s new job by saying “I fucking hate these public school leftists. Cunt central. Bye bye Labour". Owen Jones, on the other hand,said on twitter that the vilification of Milne was “deeply unfair.”

Revealingly, outside the Guardian (in fact outside the UK media entirely), articles forcefully defending Milne were immediately published. Neil Clark, writing for Sputnik News, described the “uproar among Britain's McCarthyite pro-imperialist faux-left.”On Counterpunch, John Wright called the campaign against Milne “a feral and unhinged scream from the swamp of reaction.”  Milne was silently tolerated by the UK media for many years, but now he is feared. He may help shift the UK’s political center of gravity to the left in ways he could not as a token radical leftist at the Guardian – hence the outrage and the lies. Fortunately, the establishment media is not omnipotent. It is, however, very destructive and in urgent need of deep reform.