In a two-part article at Quillette - Part 1, Part 2 - Jamie Palmer revisits the famous libel trial of 2000, where the Living Marxism crew under Mick Hume unsuccessfully defended their case that ITV journalists had blackened the good name of the Serbs in Bosnia, and the concentration camps for Bosnian Muslims weren't really camps at all, but were more like refuges.
As Palmer notes, there are many similarities in the LM Bosnia case to the denial by Chomsky and Herman in 1977 that the Khmer Rouge were guilty of horrendous crimes against the Cambodian people. In both cases the protagonists, for their own ideological reasons, were far more interested in exposing the supposed lies and fabrications of the Western media than they were in the victims: the Cambodian peasants or the Bosnian Muslims. And though history has come down irrefutably on the side of the defamed journalists - the Khmer Rouge, as we now know, were guilty of genocide, and the Serbs were guilty of atrocities against the Bosnian Muslims - neither Chomsky and Herman, or the LM crowd, have ever apologised or expressed any regret over their shameful writings.
Palmer deals with the LM-ITV trial at considerable length, but his conclusion is worth noting:
Fifty thousand Muslims lived peacefully in the Prijedor municipality before the war. By the time it was over, only 6,000 remained, the rest having fled or been murdered. The Croat pre-war population of 6,000 had been cut in half. Between 1992 and 1995, the Bosnian war claimed over 100,000 lives in total. According to the Research and Documentation Centre in Sarajevo, about 81 percent of the 38,239 civilians killed during the war were Bosnian Muslims. The bodies of many of these men, women, and children have been recovered from mass graves, some of which yielded hundreds of victims. In Srebrenica, as of 28 June 2019, the International Commission for Missing Persons had identified 6,982 of the roughly 8000 people reported missing after the massacre. And copious testimony at The Hague reaffirmed that, far from exaggerating the horrors of Trnopolje and Omarska, the ITN reports had cautiously underestimated it.
The evidence has been in for years: LM was as wrong about Bosnia as Herman and Chomsky were about Cambodia. As the writer and researcher Paul Bogdanor has observed of the latter’s genocide denial:
Anyone who reads the chapter on Cambodia [in Herman and Chomsky’s 1979 book After the Cataclysm] would be led to believe that the Khmer Rouge had done little wrong and quite a lot of good in Cambodia, and had been maliciously slandered by the Western media. The simple fact is C & H got it wrong and did so because they demanded absolute standards of proof from those like Ponchaud who had evidence of massacres by the Khmer Rouge, while their own notion that the media was being used for “imperialist” ends required no firm evidence at all. The evidence was made to fit preconceived ideas.
Neither Chomsky nor Herman ever acknowledged the enormity of their errors on Cambodia. And few of those who denied the Bosnian genocide have come to terms with the seriousness of their mistake, either. Ten years after the trial, Hume was still complaining bitterly about what a disgrace to free speech and justice the whole affair had been. When Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb commander responsible for the Srebrenica massacre and the shelling of Sarajevo, was finally arrested in 2011, Hume was still haggling over the number of dead in Spiked. “There is no doubt,” he allowed, “that Bosnian Muslims were murdered at Srebrenica. But as has been argued before on Spiked, everything from the numbers involved to the circumstances of their deaths is far more open to question than the standard version of the parable might suggest.”
As of this writing, Mick Hume’s Facebook profile photo shows him with his wife on the steps of the High Court, as though this were his finest hour. Hume, and those of his former associates who continue to defend Deichmann’s essay and LM’s broader record on Bosnia, are almost certainly beyond persuasion now. The more someone invests in a lie, the more painful it becomes to renounce. But it remains a lie even so.
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