Extract:

Oborne: Oh, I can just give you a personal story, actually. I was a schoolboy in a boarding school in the West Country, England, called Sherborne, in the early 1970s, and there was a wonderful history teacher called Graham Stephenson, who was not at all liked by the school authorities. He was quite dangerous. He had a stick which he’d hurl at you in class, and that didn’t… But it was to keep us alert, and he did keep us alert. Before my time, but he wanted to take a school trip to the Les Événements in Paris in 1968 so that the boys could see history in motion.

But what I remember, and I really learned from it, this was the height of the Cold War, just around the time of the Chilean coup d’état, created by the CIA. It was a very dangerous time in the world. He brought down, and he used to do this a lot, the political officer of the Soviet embassy to speak to us about dialectical material and give the general Soviet view of the world. Soviet Weekly would be there alongside The Times Literary Supplement and New Statesman in the school library so we could read it. Now, the situation vis-à-vis Russia, between Russia and the West, was marked by deeper hostility then than it is now. It was the existential enemy of the West. It was perfectly reasonable at this school for us to be introduced to people who were going to tell us about how the Soviet Union saw the world. Now, that’s a brilliant thing.

By the way, Tim Garton Ash, who was another student there, just a year or two above me, who’s written a book about free speech, was another student of this great, great, truly great school teacher, history teacher. I’d like to know what he thinks. Because it really upsets me, for instance, that in Britain, Russia Today, RT, has been closed down. It’s not that I agree with RT particularly, but it’s just that it’s… We were allowed, as 16-year-old schoolboys, to read Pravda, Soviet Weekly. We were introduced to the officials from the regime, and we learned how the other side thought. We learned, we understood. And they had some decent points, by the way, I seem to remember. It didn’t mean that I ended up joining the Communist Party.

https://scheerpost.com/2022/04/26/the-chris-hedges-report-ukraine-and-the-worthy-and-unworthy-victims-of-war/