David Craig, on December 14th, 2024weekend blog
First an apology. I’m about to give an opinion of Private Eye magazine. But I don’t actually read it anymore. Some years ago I had a subscription. But I cancelled it as I found the magazine seemed to be getting rather boring. I now only buy Private Eye when I’m in a station or airport to help pass the time while waiting for inevitably delayed trains or flights as I haven’t mastered the art of spending 18+ hours a day on my phone.
Let’s list what are probably some of the major issues of our time:
- Ukraine war – how much was NATO (and especially the Biden/Blinken administration) responsible for provoking the Russian invasion by throwing Putin’s warning that NATO should not move one inch further towards Russia’s borders back in Putin’s face?
- Origin of Covid-19 – it’s possibly rather important to know whether this virus evolved naturally in some animal or was brewed up in, and then leaked from. a filthy, badly-run Chinese lab conducting ‘gain of function’ research on bat viruses, research which was funded by American taxpayers with money funnelled through an intermediate company in order to circumvent a US ban on ‘gain of function’ work.
- Safety and effectiveness or otherwise of mRNA vaccines – given that hundreds of millions of people were encouraged/coerced into getting mRNA vaccinations against Covid-19 and given that vast sums are now being invested in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia amongst other countries to develop future mRNA vaccines against all sorts of conditions, it’s important to know whether this vaccine technology is actually safe or whether it causes more damage than it prevents
- Is there really a ‘Climate Crisis’ – as several Western countries are committing economic suicide and impoverishing their people by trying to transition from using cheap, reliable fossil fuels to replacing these with expensive, unreliable, intermittent supposed ‘renewables’ it is perhaps important to establish whether there really is a ‘Climate Crisis’ or whether anthropogenic global warming is the greatest scientific mistake/scam ever made by mankind
Why do I mention these? It’s because I bought a copy of Private Eye magazine a few weeks ago. Of course, I don’t expect Private Eye to cover all the above issues in each edition. In the copy I bought, of the above issues it only deals with climate change. Climate change makes a few appearances in this edition of Private Eye. There’s some criticism of some guy for being an investor in fossil fuels while also funding work suggesting (accurately in my opinion) that the UK government’s plans for Net Zero are unrealistic. And there’s a more prominent piece criticising the latest COP meeting for not achieving anything and criticism of some world leaders for not even turning up. And I think I remember seeing something else. But it was so brilliant and insightful and incisive that I can’t quite remember what it was.
But the bottom line is that there is no suggestion in the Private Eye which I bought that the whole man-made global climate catastrophe is the biggest load of nonsense ever pushed by the elitist establishment and their P4P prostitute supposed ‘scientists’.
Moreover, I have a feeling from the very few copies of Private Eye which I have read that Private Eye has been similarly circumspect in its coverage of some other major issues such as the reasons for the Ukraine war, the origin of Covid-19, the possible/probable/definite (delete as appropriate) dangers of mRNA vaccine technology and the Global Warming scam. After all, if Private Eye had been courageously exposing the truth about these issues:
- it should have been warning us that people like the Polish-born chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Shalikashvili and defence Secretary Les Aspin, as well as his successor William Perry and many other senior US defence and political figures warned that further NATO expansion eastwards would lead to conflict with Russia and disaster
- there would be no need for leading scientists around the world to risk their careers and livelihoods trying to show that Covid-19 definitely came from a Chinese lab leak. That’s the kind of scandal that a magazine like Private Eye should have been all over. In fact Private Eye has, in my ignorant, humble opinion, been put to shame for its lack of curiosity by Sky News Australia’s brilliant expose of the Chinese authorities’ culpability and cover-up
- we wouldn’t need so many medics like oncology progessor Dr Angus Dalgleish, cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra, Dr John Campbell and journalists like the brilliant Mark Steyn to warn us of the likely damage mRNA vaccines were causing. Again, a magazine like Private Eye should have been investigating the increasingly worrying statistics of vaccine harms and leading the charge against further mRNA vaccinations
- we wouldn’t have so many respected scientists fighting against the official narrative of a man-made global climate catastrophe while Private Eye, from the little I read, criticised governments for their inaction and made fun of those who thought the whole thing was nonsense
And if Private Eye had been a bit more courageous, we wouldn’t need websites such as the excellent Daily Sceptic or Simon Webb’s YouTube channel History Debunked or many others of their ilk
If I am right that Private Eye has been more than careful in its coverage of these issues, a cynic might be tempted to wonder what might be the cause of Private Eye’s carefully-chosen, rather non-controversial positions. Has the magazine just become old and boring and pro-establishment like many of its writers? Or is there a more disturbing reason for the magazine’s apparent circumspection?
If I were a cynic, and I am not a cynic, I might be so idiotic and deranged as to point at the fact that Private Eye’s head honcho, Ian Hislop, has also had a (what I assume to be lucrative) career making TV documentaries (mainly, I think, for the BBC) as well as appearing for decades in the BBC’s supposedly totally spontaneous (or maybe heavily scripted?) allegedly hilarious programme Have I got News For You. A cynic, thus not me, might wonder whether this largely BBC-based broadcasting career would have been possible had Private Eye magazine come out as being:
- a ‘Putin apologist’ by criticising NATO’s eastwards expansion
- or a ‘lab leak conspiracy nutcase’ when the admirable Dr ‘Frankenstein’ Fauci of “I am the science” fame assured us that the virus had a zo-onotic origin
- or ‘anti-vaxxer’ by daring to question the safety and effectiveness of the ‘safe and effective’ mRNA vaccines
- or, perhaps worst of all, ‘a climate denier’ by suggesting that the whole climate crisis story was just a way for the globalist elites to increase their control over us.
I suspect that had Private Eye come out as possibly being ‘Putin apologist’ or a ‘lab leak conspiracy theorist’ or as ‘anti-vax’ or as ‘climate denialist’, then the BBC might have dropped Hislop faster than if he had been found to have leprosy or, even worse, had admitted he supported Reform. But, of course, I am not a cynic so I would never suggest that Private Eye’s chosen positions on some rather important issues could have in any way been influenced by the Private Eye boss’s apparently productive relationship with our national broadcaster.
So, why hasn’t Private Eye magazine been more vocal in uncovering the truth around so many key problems facing the world? Why has this been left to so many others when Private Eye has for years claimed to expose the lies of the powerful and to hold them to account? I’ll leave that conundrum up to smart people like you to solve.
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Exactly my reasons for giving up my subscription this year – I had been reading less and less of the magazine for some time as its content seemed to resemble ‘Sociall Media’, but it lost both its satirical and investigative natures some time ago. Exposing(?) the occaisional issue (such as the PO) is good and the cartoons are often cleverly done, but not enough any more for me to struggle through the dross (especially as I had to wear 2 pairs of glasses to read the small print!)
You could ask what is the point of any of the media. The same applies to the politicians, which we should be more concerned about. There are some critical websites on specific issues but they seem to be going over the same ground. It is impossible to know whether they have had any influence. Mark Steyn and Neil Oliver have both been cancelled by GB News which tells us a lot. There is one issue we need to understand and that is why academics and people we once thought we could trust are now lying to us about almost everything and these are the people responsible for educating our children.
I am reading Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive, which was written 50-60 years ago and it could have been written yesterday. She talks about education using the Comprachicos from folklore who used to physically deform children for amusement. She compare modern education to this say that is designed to prevent children developing their minds and thinking skills. This is apparent in their fear of climate change. But many adults seem to be infected with the same beliefs, and this is what they are – a belief and not based on any rational concept.
Ayn Rand developed the philosophy she called Objectivism and she seems to have little regard for other philosophers. She approves of Aristotle, and puts all the blame for modern thinking on Immanuel Kant. In her view he started the trend to replace rational thinking and evidence with emotional beliefs. This seems to describe exactly what we have today. It is impossible to influence ideas that are not rationally based. Socialism has also used this ideology by making people financially dependent on the state and taking over responsibilities from families and encouraging their breakup.
I read a book of letters written by Einstein but it didn’t include any replies so was not very good in my view but he made one important observation about experts. He compared them to the Tower of Babel, saying they were now so specialised and used specialist language that they were no longer able to communicate and see the bigger picture. I have seen it said that education is limited to that required to do the jobs the government wants and nothing else.
Government and corporate money also plays a big part. Government funding is used for a lot of research and it only keeps flowing if the government gets what it wants. Businesses control the regulators. Government is funding green energy so businesses support it. Big pharma got billions from the government for vaccines so neither will see a problem with them. The banks get bailed out when bankrupt. Wars always benefit the arms manufacturers and the bankers which is why there are so many. We are the mugs that let the governments take as much of our money as they want and then use unlimited debt when they cannot tax us any more. The media is owned by a few large organisations.
Returning to Ayn Rand, her philosophy makes a distinction between collectivism and individualism, with the emphasis on the latter. Every political and religious organisation is collectivist. They tell people what to think but not why. Rights can only be individual, but they have now become collectivist and supporting minority groups which takes away the free speech of the majority.
The only way out of this is anarchy – “the organization of society on the basis of voluntary cooperation, without political institutions or hierarchical government”.
I doubt this is possible. People don’t want it because they don’t want to take responsibility for themselves. We will see the collapse of the west and it will rise again making the same mistakes as every previous civilisation.
Enjoy it whilst you can.