Twice in Saturday’s paper – in a news piece about the Labour leader’s links with the Stop the War Coalition (Report, 12 December) and in an interview with Andrew Murray, the campaign’s chair, – you illustrate not only how a blatant misreading of what people have written becomes received knowledge, but that StWC’s chair himself has foolishly fallen into the same trap.
The Chris Floyd blog Empire Burlesque, which was carried for a while by StWC (incidentally, under a misleading headline that StWC itself contributed), referred to Paris “reaping the whirlwind” of western intervention. Murray claimed that the blog did not “completely condemn the Paris massacres”. Floyd wrote to you earlier in the week criticising this falsehood (Letters, 8 December), but it bears repeating that his blog unequivocally condemned the massacres: “I write in despair. Despair of course at the depravity displayed by the murderers of innocents in Paris tonight.” As Floyd asked Murray more recently: “Is that not ‘complete’ enough for you?”
The other blog that has been traduced in this tawdry affair is Matt Carr’s Infernal Machine. He wrote about Hilary Benn’s speech to the Commons that “the jihadist movement that ultimately spawned Daesh is far closer to the spirit of internationalism and solidarity that drove the International Brigades than Cameron’s bombing campaign”. People who should know better – as well as those who clearly don’t –have claimed that this meant he was morally equating Daesh with the International Brigades. Anyone who has seen anything of Carr’s work will know that this inference is utterly false. But they need only read the “offending” blog itself, in which Carr writes: “Whether Daesh is fascist or not, it is certainly a savage and dangerous movement which needs to be defeated.” That should have been straightforward enough even for the likes of Murray.
Before the internet, this kind of thing happened with papers’ cuttings files: once a mistake was included it was very difficult to get it corrected. We have the same situation but many times worse, because, primarily through social media, a lie becomes truth almost instantaneously and is repeated everywhere. It is sad that the Guardian has contributed to this rotten process just as much as the more ill-intentioned parts of the media, as well as, even worse, StW itself.
Dr Richard Carter
London
• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com
