The Mark of Cain is a film made by Channel Four about a group of young British soldiers in Iraq. In it “Iraqi detainees are mistreated at the hands of the soldiers; de-sensitised by violence and encouraged by their mates.” According to the Guardian it is based on more than 100 interviews with soldiers, their families, MPs and others. It also draws heavily on the courts martial of soldiers accused of torturing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners. It is due to go out on Thursday. A lot of people are saying that it shouldn’t be shown because it might encourage negative feelings towards British troops in the Middle East, in particular those marines and sailors who are currently being held in Iran.

I just finished re-reading The Colditz Story, a documentary account by a former prisoner of war, P.R.Reid, of the lives and antics of British POWs held in Germany during the Second World War. In it he frequently mentioned how grateful he and his fellow prisoners were for the protections they enjoyed under the Geneva conventions. It contrasted pretty starkly with the dismissive and flippant attitude towards those conventions that I’ve been hearing from politicians and commentators recently.

One of the reasons why we need commonly agreed ways of treating prisoners of war is that we want to protect our own service men and women when they are captured. If we choose to disregard or cynically bypass the fragile standards that do exist it is they who will end up paying the price. So I think that this week, when everyone is thinking about the British prisoners in Iran, is the perfect time to show a drama about the mistreatment of prisoners during conflict. Where human rights are concerned you really should do unto others as you would have others do unto you. The contrast between the way Iran has treated their British prisoners and the way the British have treated some of their own prisoners-of-war should be obvious to even the most thick-skulled Daily Mail reader.

“Whispering” Alan Johnston has gone missing in Gaza, he may have been kidnapped. He’s the BBC correspondent there but before that he was an editor on a World Service News programme, the World Today. When I was working as a producer he was my editor and he was one of the most kind and helpful people I have ever worked for. He is also a careful and principled journalist and full of enthusiasm for his job. I once met him in Clapham High Street, on his way to interview someone for a documentary, and he told me how lucky he thought he was to be able to do something he loved so much and get paid for it. I really hope he’s OK.

So this is the blogosphere’s big chance. Big media has been muzzled by the courts and only the free press, the plucky political bloggers, are free to tell us the whole story. (I’m talking about the Cash for Honours story, but of course you knew that!)
As soon as the BBC was prevented from running last night’s story about an embarrassing email, possibly involving “two members of Tony Blair’s inner circle” I knew that the the baton would be taken up by Media 2.0. Free from the shackles of partisan proprietors and government interference they would be able to tell the story that the mainstream media cannot.
How wrong I was. They have nothing to say at all. It’s not just because they’re too chicken, it’s also because those bloggers who take an interest in this sort of story don’t want to do anything that might weaken any eventual prosecution of a member of the government.
It’s tactical reporting, they only report things that they hope will lead to an outcome that they desire. In other words it’s not journalism at all. Journalists, even quite bad ones, all realise that they have a responsibility to do stories whether or not the reporting of a story will lead to a happy (or a sad) ending. The point is that you just report the facts, you don’t try to decide the outcome.
This is why bloggers will never replace journalists, or at least, I hope they never do.

The Iranian government is baiting the Israelies again. First it was a competition for cartoons about the holocaust, now they’re running a conference to discuss whether the holocaust actually happened at all. They are trying to demonstrate that the West is as intolerant of discussion about the holocaust as some Muslims are of discussion about the prophet Mohammed. Not only is it a childish point, but it’s also clearly inaccurate. How many people have been murdered or condemned to death for holocaust denial? David Irving doesn’t seem to be living in fear for his life, unlike Salman Rushdie. The truth is that Islam in Iran still has a very long way to go; they are in no position to talk about freedom of speech.

I was wondering if David Irving had been invited to the Iranian conference when I accidentally found myself on his ‘Campaign for real History’ site today. I really didn’t mean to be there, honest guv’. I followed a link from the excellent Cabinet Magazine to an article from the November 1938 edition of Homes and Gardens which offered its readers a breathless Hello-style guided tour of Adolf Hitler’s “Bavarian retreat”. It’s a hilariously gushing piece, originally published on the web in 2003 by Simon Waldman. IPC magazines, the publishers of Homes and Gardens, made him take it down so lots of other people, including David Irving, published it and now they’ve given up trying to supress it.

It’s not surprising that IPC was embarrassed by the article. By November 1938, when it was published, Hitler was already a dictator, having supressed all opposition parties and murdered at least 77 opponents within his own party, the Luftwaffe had killed more than a thousand Spanish civilians bombing the undefended town of Guernica and the Nazi racial purity laws were all in place including measures banning Jews from having professional jobs, bidding for government contracts and attending public schools.

The fact that Homes and Gardens was prepared to publish such a paean to the Führer shows how widespread support was for the Nazis and their policies in Britain at the time. When people talk about how the second world war was fought against the scourge of Nazism it’s worth remembering how many people in the UK and US only started objecting to it once Germany seemed to be a threat to their own countries, they didn’t give a hoot before then. In the current context of attacks upon our own civil liberties it’s also worth remembering that a brutal, authoritarian regime can still look very respectable even when it’s already well on its way to killing millions of people.

The Guardian story about the Homes and Gardens article
The Homes and Gardens article (not on David Irving’s site)