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    Re: Jonathan Cook goes to town on Monbiot. Archived Message

    Posted by brooks on October 8, 2020, 2:06 pm, in reply to "Jonathan Cook goes to town on Monbiot."

    Brilliant expose by Cook, but a little too easy on Monbiot at the end. A couple of quotes:

    And that, sadly, is because Monbiot is not the free thinker, the fearless investigator of difficult truths, the leftwing conscience he claims to be. It is not really his fault. It is in the nature of the function he serves at the Guardian – and with which I am only too familiar myself from my years working there.


    This stance is not imposed on him. He does not receive orders from Guardian editors to smear OPCW whistleblowers or to restrain himself from tweeting forthright support for Assange. Instead he has imbibed the corporate culture of the Guardian – as I once did, as most of us do in our daily lives – as a sanity survival strategy, as way to placate the cognitive dissonance that would overwhelm him if he did not.

    The problem lies not with Monbiot. It lies with us. We continue to ignore the fact that we are being played by the system, that we are being placated by pale offerings like Monbiot...


    This seems to be an awfully polite way to say he’s an unprincipled shill-for-hire who has betrayed every principle he claims to stand for out of venal careerism. Cognitive dissonance doesn't "overwhelm" someone who refuses to sacrifice these principles to their career. As I've said before, the battle lines have been drawn as starkly as they can be at this final descent of western civilization into barbarism. The persecution of Assange represents the most ominous signpost in that descent and by his Judas-like betrayal of him, Monbiot has chosen what side of the line he's on. So maybe the problem does not lie with Monbiot, but his sell-out is a metaphor for it the capitulation of the liberal intelligentsia that is a big part of it.

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