The Judge RANTS!
Date: 22/07/15
The Basenji Media
Last Sunday night (local time), Channel 9 television in Australia broadcast a documentary entitled Lords, Spies And Predators.
In it, a man who had been placed in the 'care' of the notorious Kincora Boys Home in Northern Ireland described how he was - to all intents and purposes - 'hired out' as a serial victim of sexual abusers of children. He then went on to identify some of the people who were either abusers themselves, or who connived at the abuse, or who conspired to cover it up.
Duly identified were such figures as the notorious Soviet agent Anthony Blunt, über-spook Maurice Oldfield and Louis Mountbatten, cousin of Queen Elizbabeth of England and hero-like figure to her idiot son.
Now, these are merely allegations, and the individual doing the identifying may have motives other than uncovering the unspeakable; but even if that were to be the case, one thing stands out from the story so far, namely, the way it has been covered in the UK media.
Or, rather, the way it hasn't.
One would have thought that, given Brit hacks' current obsession with hounding minor celebs from forty years ago into chokey or even the crem for their predilections for sexual misconduct with juveniles, and given their permanent avidity for stories surrounding the monarchy, this was a tale which - even with the caveat mentioned above - would warrant a certain degree of exposure.
And yet...
Search the website of the Grundiad over the last three days (long enough even for England's Most Famous Liberal Newspaper™ to have caught up a bit): nowt. Do the same in the Nyezavisimaya: nitchevo. The Toryglyph? Only a previous story on the subject from three months ago, and one in which the principal figures alleged against in the documentary were never even hinted at. And it almost goes without saying in these times that the BBC News website gives no mention of it.
Instead, it has been left (with the honourable exception of Scotland's The National) to a small website called Exaro to research and give a wider distrubution to the story.
This is...curious. Given the subject matter and the names in the frame, such a lack of coverage would be puzzling, were it not for a number of aspects of the whole Kincora scandal going back decades, not least the involvement of the 'security forces' in both the abuse and its concealment, including (but by no means limited to) the use of the information to blackmail or otherwise buy the 'co-operation' of figures in poltics and the media who might otherwise be 'troublesome'; and the strange case of intelligence officer Colin Wallace, one of the first to blow the gaff on what had been happening (and was, at the time, still happening) at Kincora, and whose reward was to spend six years in prison following a wrongful conviction for manslaughter.
It is clear enough for anyone who cares to consider the matter that the events in and around Kincora involved the commission of very serious crimes by some very senior figures, and that other people of similar rank and influence were key in protecting those figures from justice (and thus, let it be remembered, denying that justice to their victims, most of whom were left permanently and even fatally damaged not merely by the abuse but by their inability to get anyone bar the odd courageous journalist to take their claims with the proper seriousness).
That nearly the whole of the official media - private and public - should have connived at such a situation at all was lamentable; and yet that is what they clearly did. That they should have been accomplices to it for so long is little less than an outrage. That they are still clearly in cahoots with it leaves one little option but to view everything that they print or broadcast with the deepest suspicion. And thus are the wells of public discourse poisoned.
That the official media are deeply embedded with the power structures of this land - political, economic and socio-cultural - is no longer in any way remarkable; it's what most of them have always done, if less obviously. But when a story has all the elements which usually guarantee coverage - famous pervs, the spooks and Our Dear Royal Family Gawd Bless 'Em - then the blatant nature of the non-coverage means that they are no longer capable of feeling the slightest shame or conscience about it.
And why, dear reader, did I pick the title The Basenji Media for this piece?
The basenji is a species of African dog.
It can't bark.
