La Russophobe: Update on Svetlichnaya-Heartfield

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Update on Svetlichnaya-Heartfield

Letters, we get letters, we get lots of cards and letters every day!

When last we heard, little miss Julia Svetlichnaya was planning to sue Aftenposten and the Sunday Times for reporting that she had connections to the Kremlin which might have caused her to shade the truth when she reported that Alexander Litvinenko was a corrupt wacko (only after his demise, when he couldn't defend himself) in the British paper The Observer. As you may recall, her collaborator in the nasty business of smearing Litvinenko was one James Heartfield, whom we had identified as a wacky Marxist with a shadowy past. Turns out, the fellow is even more far out then we imagined. A reader writes with some additional details:

On the subject of James Heartfield, I looked at the sourcewatch link, and what caught my eye was the Living Marxism reference. But first I looked at his membership of the (British) Revolutionary Communist Party and saw the claim that he actually co-authored their manifesto! Well, to see what kind of Party they were, you can look at the quote below from the website of an ordinary regular leftie who was once a member of them:

......I attended a London-wide planning meeting at which the RCP's attitude towards the crisis in the Middle East was worked out on the basis of a thirty minute presentation, 'what is the rest of the left not saying?' It's hard now to convey the oddity of that experience. For the RCP then claimed some 500 members (and would peak two years later at over 1000). To calculate the errors of the entire British left meant taking into consideration not just Labour, and the larger Marxist parties (Militant and the SWP), but even the smallest of the sects (Socialist Organiser, Workers Vanguard, Workers Hammer): the views of each of these group had to be considered before an RCP line could be drawn.....

It really makes me wonder how he became the almost mainstream journalist and writer that he now is. Anyway, on the subject of the Living Marxism magazine, I happen to remember the fact that they went bankrupt after losing a libel case brought against them by British news agency ITN. This was because the magazine falsely claimed that ITN had fabricated evidence to make a television programme about concentration camps in Bosnia in 1992. I understand that the programme was instrumental in pursuading NATO to attack Serbia in 1995.

The reader suggests the Guardian's March 15, 2000 report "Poison in the Well of History" for further fascinating details.

Meanwhile, what about Julia's threatened lawsuit? Suddenly, she seems to have gotten very quiet. Hmmm, wonder what that means . . . it's either the calm before the storm or the hiding after the fraud.