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    Re: Posting this again because I'm puzzled .... Archived Message

    Posted by scrabb on September 19, 2020, 10:01 pm, in reply to "Re: Posting this again because I'm puzzled ...."

    Thanks for those responses. I thought I might be a lone wolf out there in the wilderness with only his own paranoia for company.

    If I might pursue this line of thought a little further. Yes, money is a great motivator to keep you safely on the side of the privileged, but intelligence also comes into this. Both Boyd and Le Carre are highly intelligent people, and in Le Carre's case he has always been an outspoken anti-establishment figure with socialist sympathies. That's why I was taken aback that he should have signed the letter admonishing Labour (and Corbyn) for its supposed antisemitism. I thought at the time "Surely he must know the real reason, that the whole thing has been manufactured by Israel and its accomplices to stop Corbyn at all costs?" Didn't he know, for instance, about the Al-Jazeera undercover expose of Israeli officials and the Labour MP who was promised £1 million as a slush fund to smear Corbyn and undermine his campaign?

    If Le Carre did know about it, why didn't it open his eyes to the truth? And if he didn't, where's he been living? Under a rock?

    This is the crux of the problem for me, and one I fail to comprehend. Despite their upper middle-class upbringing and privileged education and personal wealth, are they wilfully ignorant of what is happening in the real world (in which case it's a damning indictment of their supposed intelligence) or do they actually know and choose to avert their gaze because the truth is too awkward and uncomfortable to live with? So they inhabit a zone of cognitive dissonance to maintain their peace of mind?

    Which is it?

    As for McGough, I'm even more at a loss. He's a working-class scouser who, yes, has a regular slot on the BBC as the resident poet, so he has to toe the line to some extent. But he didn't need to write this sick-making doggerel tribute to Kuenssberg, he could have just kept quiet. The fact he did write it means he fully buys into her status as the BBC's senior political correspondent and hasn't a clue about her pernicious and vindictive hounding of Corbyn during his entire term as leader of the Labour party and her silence on Julian Assange up to and including his show trial. This is the most flagrant dereliction on her part, not to report and comment fairly and impartially on one of the most (if not the most) important trials of the last 100 years.

    (I read somewhere that Kuenssberg, who tweets dozens of times a day about political matters, hasn't mentioned Assange once since 2017. I haven't checked this and stand to be corrected.)

    So again, I come back to my central question. Does McGough not know this, doesn't keep abreast with what is really happening, or is he in the picture and plays ball because he has his status and income to think about?

    It doesn't bother or surprise me that nearly all "journalists" in the BBC and corporate media go along happily with the prevailing ethos, -- it would be suicide not to -- or, like Andrew Marr, genuinely don't see the difference. But I can't figure out the likes of Boyd, Le Carre and McGough.












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