Robert Fisk: Struck by Eurocentric fever, or a simple case of reportorial Mr Hyde?

Patrice Greanville

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Robert Fisk, a British journalist technically attached to The Independent ⁽¹⁾, is regarded by many as one of the last remaining authoritative and truthful voices on the Middle East, where the Big Lie is undisputed king. His integrity is legendary. His recent foray to Douma, (The search for truth in the rubble of Douma– and one doctor’s doubts over the chemical attack) where he reported (and thereby virtually certified) the truth about the non-existence of a gas attack, literally staged by the ubiquitous White Helmets (an event the Russians had repeatedly warned about) proved useful in shoring up the credibility of the Russo-Syrian version of events. His testimony was therefore important to the collapse of that Western false flag, although obviously more are constantly being planned. False flags, a form of elaborate lying cum compelling emotional manipulation, is intrinsic to the dynamic of imperialist war, simply another tool in their "hybrid war" arsenal, a field they actually pioneered many years ago and have since perfected into an art.

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Wrote Robert Fisk:

Before we go any further, readers should be aware that this is not the only story in Douma. There are the many people I talked to amid the ruins of the town who said they had “never believed in” gas stories – which were usually put about, they claimed, by the armed Islamist groups. These particular jihadis survived under a blizzard of shellfire by living in other’s people’s homes and in vast, wide tunnels with underground roads carved through the living rock by prisoners with pick-axes on three levels beneath the town. I walked through three of them yesterday, vast corridors of living rock which still contained Russian – yes, Russian – rockets and burned-out cars..

So the story of Douma is thus not just a story of gas – or no gas, as the case may be. It’s about thousands of people who did not opt for evacuation from Douma on buses that left last week, alongside the gunmen with whom they had to live like troglodytes for months in order to survive. I walked across this town quite freely yesterday without soldier, policeman or minder to haunt my footsteps, just two Syrian friends, a camera and a notebook. I sometimes had to clamber across 20-foot-high ramparts, up and down almost sheer walls of earth. Happy to see foreigners among them, happier still that the siege is finally over, they are mostly smiling; those whose faces you can see, of course, because a surprising number of Douma’s women wear full-length black hijab.

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[dropcap]F[/dropcap]isk is one of the best we can find in the mainstream these days, almost a relic from a more honorable past, but obviously he's not perfect, he's not 100% and probably does not care to be. If he were, his job would be finished even with The Independent, which brags about not applying "proprietorial influence on the writers". Still, Fisk still routinely uses the loaded trope "regime" so favored by imperialist disinformers to signify the Assad government, and he goes to great lengths to seem balanced by giving the spurious Western "version" of events a fair shake. The old objectivity compulsion, no doubt, now reduced to a mechanistic ritual empty of real conviction.

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I give these details because I was disappointed to see a piece by Fisk (on Counterpunch) in which he displays more than a generous portion of Eurocentric venom and condescension toward some Middle Eastern leaders—the late Gaddafi and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—to make his points. Can this be the same man? The main target of Fisk's tirade appears to be Trump, which is perfectly fine, and objectively supportable by tons of evidence which grows by the day. The man is vile and repellent, by any standard we choose. But Fisk uses Gaddafi for his semi-satirical comparison, a man who, for all his real or imagined flaws, led a nation that stood out in citizens' well being and who was a clear victim of Western savagery and betrayal (particularly by the repellent and utterly corrupt French Zionist Sarkozy), and who, not very smartly perhaps, tried to stand up against the anglozionist empire.

Here's a sample. It seems to me that there's a lot of eurocentric—especially British cultural taste in this assessment—and that some of the accusations are plainly unfair, and contextually hard to document. Were Libyans really subjected to the "vengeful wrath of Gaddafi" in the style accorded dissidents in many of  Washington's client states, like Guatemala or El Salvador, for example, to name just a couple, where sadistic death squads take care of anyone shaking or dissing the established plutocratic order? When you read Fisk's lines more closely what jumps out is that he is not so much evoking Gaddafi's autocratic style than grafting Trump's malevolent idiosyncrasies on the late leader, retroactively.

The political leader who most resembles Trump is the late Colonel Gaddafi of Libya.

The parallels are quite creepy. Gaddafi was crackers, he was a vain, capricious peacock of a man, he was obsessed with women, he even had a ghost writer invent a ‘Green Book’ of his personal philosophy, just as Trump had his business manual written for him. Gaddafi was vengeful towards his opponents but his views on the Middle East were odd, to say the least. He once advocated a one-state solution to Israel and Palestine which – in all seriousness – he suggested should be called ‘Israel-tine’. A bit like moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Trump’s White House is now like Gaddafi’s tent, which the Libyan leader took with him everywhere. Trump’s late-night television viewing was not unlike Gaddafi’s insistence that business must be done in his tent. Gaddafi’s handshake was legendary – so was his kiss from Tony Blair, who was as obsequious to Gaddafi in Libya as Theresa May was to Trump in Washington. Much good did it do Blair or May.

Gaddafi ran his business dealings through his family – now there’s a thought – and even maintained good relations with Russia. His speeches were interminable – he liked the sound of his own voice – and although he constantly lied, his audience was forced to listen and to fear his wrath. Above all, Gaddafi was completely divorced from reality. If he lied, he believed his own lies. He believed that he kept his promises. He believed in the world he wanted to believe in, even if this was non-existent. His Great Man Made River Project was supposed to Make Libya Great Again.

^{I said earlier that I was disappointed in Fisk because I like and respect the man; his iconoclastic spirit and fierce dedication to reporting exactly what he sees, and not some predigested propaganda crud required by the supervising editors back home, remain admirable and increasingly unique on this beat (the void has been providentially filled by brave citizen journalists like Vanessa Beeley, Eva Bartlett and others of that ilk).  So why the gratuitous invective against leaders of the beaten down, repeatedly assaulted Third World? Hard to explain, frankly, so we won't go there as that is psychobabble's domain.}

Still, Fisk is Fisk, and he knows his priorities, one of the first apparently being to report and underscore the truth with a view to putting out the numerous fuses lit by the compulsive arsonists in the region, the chief creep in this regard, by a wide margin, Benjamin Netanyahu, a man who clearly has no real respect for life, or else would not be such a pathological and, at this point—tedious warmonger.

Fisk concludes his essay with some worthy thoughts, again, they do not quite wash away the sheer capriciousness of the attack on Gaddafi, and the slights on the embattled Syrians, but they do have healing power. His slap that US foreign policy (via I suppose the tunneling Neocons) has become Israel's bitch is well worth quoting:

Of course, we know what Trump’s breaking of the Iranian nuclear deal means – quite apart from his lies and fraudulent arguments about the original agreement: the United States is now a part of Israel’s foreign policy. The Arabs used to say that Israel was an American state. Now the US has become part of the Israel state. That infamous speech contained seven references to “terror” in relation to Iran – “state sponsor of terror”, “supports terrorist proxies”, “reign…of terror”, “a regime of great terror”, “funds…terrorism”, “support for terrorism”, “the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism” – and so on and so forth. This is almost as good as Benjamin Netanyahu’s speeches at the UN.

And we are supposed to believe, like children, that Shiite Iran is supporting Sunni Muslim al-Qaeda – when it’s been fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq and Syria. We are supposed to believe that Iran’s long-outdated “intelligence documents” provide “definitive proof” that Iran’s promise of not pursuing nuclear weapons is a lie. But what is America worth now – in the Middle East or anywhere else (North Korea comes to mind) – when it can so blatantly tear up an international treaty agreed by the US government itself. That used to be what some European leaders – one in particular – did in the first part of the 20th century.

I'll leave you with that.

—PG

(1) Click on orange button below for a summary description of The Independent.

[bg_collapse view="button-orange" color="#4a4949" expand_text="About the Independent" collapse_text="Show Less" ]

The Independent is a British online newspaper.^[2] Established in 1986 as an independent national morning newspaper published in London, it was controlled by Tony O'Reilly's Independent News & Media from 1997 until it was sold to Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev in 2010.^[3] The last printed edition of The Independent was published on Saturday 26 March 2016, leaving only its digital editions.^[2]

Nicknamed the Indy, it began as a broadsheet, but changed to tabloid (compact) format in 2003.^[4] Until September 2011, the paper described itself on the banner at the top of every newspaper as "free from party political bias, free from proprietorial influence".^[5] It tends to take a pro-market stance on economic issues.^[6]

The daily edition was named National Newspaper of the Year at the 2004 British Press Awards.

In June 2015, it had an average daily circulation of just below 58,000, 85 per cent down from its 1990 peak, while the Sunday edition had a circulation of just over 97,000.^[7][2]

 

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