Here is what these right-wingers promote via LM and 'spiked.com' before and after losing all their LM assets in a libel suit when they tried to "prove" that evidence of the atrocities against the Bosnian Muslims was faked (as referenced in the Wiki quotes in the deleted post). This is the kind of group you are calling 'real liberals' like yourself.
The primary channels for promoting the network's ideology, after their LM magazine was sued out of existence, are Spiked-online and the Institute of Ideas (IoI).
Colonised lobby groups include Sense About Science, the Genetic Interest Group, Progress, and the Science Media Centre .
Over the years they have also been accused of setting up a series of their own front groups:
* Africa Direct - denying the genocide in Rwanda
* Audacity.org - no restraints on devolopment, no to sustainability
* Campaign Against Militarism (CAM) - no to military intervention
* Families for Freedom - risks to children are grossly exaggerated
* Feminists for Justice - no laws on date rape
* Freedom & Law - no to state intervention
* Global Futures -concerns about risk are greatly exaggerated
* Internet Freedom - no restrictions on paedophilia, race hate etc.
* Irish Freedom Movement (IFM) - no to the peace process
* Libero! - libertarian football supporters!
* The Litigious Society - no to a 'compensation culture'
* London International Research Exchange (LIRE) - denying Serb nationalist atrocities
* Maverick Club - yes to dinner and 'debate'
* Transport Research Group - yes to big roads
* Workers Against Racism (WAR) - no to all immigration controls
* WORLDwrite - anti-green gap years and school exchange
From
http://www.lobbywatch.org/lm_watch.html The March 1998 edition ran a substantial article by Ron Arnold, claiming that the Unabomber is an environmentalist, ergo all environmentalists are terrorists. Ron Arnold is Executive Vice President of the Centre for the Defense of Free Enterprise, one of the wackiest far-right campaigns in the United States, established to promote “individual rights, free markets, private property and limited government”. Simultaneously, the CFDE used Channel 4’s publicity briefing for Against Nature as the “guest editorial” on its website.
This year, the avowedly anti-imperialist LM began running articles by Roger Bate of the Institute for Economic Affairs, which advocates, among other interesting ideas, that African countries should be sold to multinational corporations in order to bring “good government” to the continent. In the Against Nature series, LM’s contributers rubbed shoulders with Larry Craig, a far right Republican senator and fundraiser for the raving “Alliance for America”; Julian Simon, who was Ronald Reagan’s favourite economist, and Michael Gough, who, like Simon, belongs to a hard-right libertarian think-tank called the Cato Institute. All maintained an identical political position, lining up to identify the liberals and lefties of the environmental movement as covert Nazi sympathisers.
As you wade through back issues of Living Marxism, you can’t help but conclude that the magazine’s title is a poor guide to its contents. LM contains little that would be recognised by other Marxists or, for that matter, by leftists of any description. On one issue after another, there’s a staggering congruence between LM’s agenda and that of the far-right Libertarian Alliance. The two organisations take identical positions, for example, on gun control (it is a misconceived attack on human liberty), child pornography (legal restraint is simply a Trojan horse for the wider censorship of the Internet), alcohol (its dangers have been exaggerated by a new breed of “puritan”), the British National Party (it’s unfair to associate it with the murder of Stephen Lawrence; its activities and publications should not be restricted), the Anti-Nazi League (it is undemocratic and irrelevant), tribal people (celebrating their lives offends humanity’s potential to better itself; the Yanomami Indians are not to be envied but pitied) animal rights (they don’t have any), and global warming (it’s a good thing).
The two organizations share a strangely one-sided conception of freedom, celebrating and defending the “freedom to” of those with the power to act, while dismissing threats to the “freedom from” of those who might be affected. So, limiting the scope of racist publications insults our humanity, even though they might incite racists to beat up black people, while restricting car use is a fundamental assault on liberty, even though being hit by cars is now the commonest cause of death for children between the ages of one and fourteen. “It is those who have suffered the most,” LM tells us, “who should be listened to the least.”
Both organizations also appear to believe that the weak and vulnerable are best served by being allowed to fend for themselves, without interference from “do-gooders” and “puritans”. Left to their own devices, both adults and children are capable of resisting tobacco advertising, alcopops, paedophiles and pornographers, whatever the imbalance of power between perpetrator and victim may be. Indeed corporations, LM appears to suggest, should be free to do whatever they want, except sueing LM for libel.
But the similarities end with the ideology. While the Libertarian Alliance is a shabby, disaggregated outfit, LM is professional and well-organized. Glossy, well-written and cleverly edited, distributed largely for free, supported by its own research organization and an excellent website, the magazine seems to have no shortage of money, yet no obvious sources of major funding.
So who is this strangely armoured David? Where do his politics come from? Can LM’s editors really be such deranged Marxist fundamentalists that they are seeking to hasten the triumph of capitalism, the better to speed its downfall? Or are they trying to destroy alternative outlets for radical action, in the hope that the revolution, when it comes, will be untainted by heresy? Whatever the explanation may be, LM, with its extreme right-wing allies and extreme right-wing views dressed in left-wing clothes, is doing more to confuse and destabilise the left than any overtly right-wing organisation.
Had the magazine been named “Living Libertarianism” or “Living Reaganism”, one wonders how willing the liberal establishment would have been to leap to its defence. Oppressive as ITN’s suit might be, LM’s survival is no great liberal cause. For its new-found champions on the liberal left can be assured of just one thing: that of all political classes, LM hates them the most.
From
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/1998/11/01/far-left-or-far-right/From a much more recent interview with Monbiot:
We all have networks of people that we interact with. What makes this so different? Why do you find it so worrying?
There are two reasons why I find it worrying. The first is that the agenda they pursue appears not to be pursued overtly. For example, when they ran the magazine Living Marxism it was very far from a Marxism journal - it was just about as far from a Marxist journal as you could possibly get. And it seemed to me that the title was a direct and deliberate attempt to distract attention from the fact that this was a far right wing libertarian publication which was using the terms of the left to make it look as if the positions it was taking were new and unusual ones. Whereas in actual fact they were very well trodden ones, but well trodden by people like the Libertarian Alliance who in theory were at the other end of the political spectrum.
I have never heard of the Libertarian Alliance before.
Mad as a pile of buckets. But what Living Marxism did, I felt, was to give the impression that it was saying something new because it was dealing with the issues from a left perspective whereas it was very plainly dealing with them from a right perspective. And it was taking a line almost identical to that taken by right wing organizations - particularly some of the business come lobbyist organisations in the US, such as the Heritage Foundation, the CATO Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute - and so they were able to play very effectively on this semblance of left parties. People find it is very hard to believe that a magazine called Living Marxism would be a right wing magazine. And so they said ‘oh look - the left has come up with something new - really I think that maybe we should be following this line ourselves’. It led to a great deal of confusion really, including among some people I know.
But it also gave, particularly Channel 4 who were the primary targets of the network’s manoeuvres, it gave them an excuse to run a lot of right wing diatribes, indeed some extreme right wing diatribes, while claiming that it was doing nothing of the sort.
This is particularly 'Against Nature'?
‘Against Nature’. There was a series called ‘Zeitgeist’. There was a programme called ‘Attack of the Killer Tomatoes’. There was a programme called ‘Storm in a D cup’. All those and more involved the network’s members. And all took an almost identical line. And a line which was identical to that of Living Marxism. And in every case Channel 4, if you challenged them on this, could say ‘well, we should represent the whole of the political spectrum including the far left’. And you’d say ‘but this isn’t the far left - this is the far right’. And they would say ‘no, no, no - Living Marxism’. And that made things doubly difficult for critics. One because it distracts attention from the fact that Channel 4 had itself turned very sharply to the right under Michael Grade and Michael Jackson. From about 1992, it really swung quite sharply to the right.
So it wasn’t just political naivety on the part of Channel 4?
Well, they always claim that they want to get up people’s noses and upset people - and they do that very well. They upset the left all the time. But I see precious little evidence of them getting up the noses of the right and upsetting the right - it just doesn’t seem to happen. And it was partly the agenda, in particular, of Michael Jackson because I saw how the agenda was imported from BBC 2, where he was previously the controller.
But also, of course, it just happens to fit the needs of the advertisers. If you launch ferocious attacks on environmentalists there couldn’t be anything better from the point of view of the advertisers because the greatest political threat to the continued profitability of some of the major advertisers - like car companies, oil companies – is from environmentalism. So Channel 4 was able to say ‘well, of course we are not taking a right wing position on this - because this is the position articulated by a left wing outfit’.
So to get back to your original question, that is one reason why it concerns me. Because what you see is not what you get. And so that, for me, was a principle reason for trying to publicise what was happening and what they were doing.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/lm_george_monbiot.html (edit out extraneous clause.)
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