Fallen+heroes,+sacred+facts,+Andrew+Murray,+Guardian





=Fallen heroes, sacred facts=


 * Andrew Murray, Guardian, “Comment is free”, 18 January 2008**

//The Guardian's reporting of the 1919 murder of Liebknecht and Luxemburg is an object lesson in how journalism, then as now, is susceptible to spin//

Comment is free, but facts are sacred. So said CP Scott in 1921, and it's right there on the Cif [|homepage].

How ironic, then, that the Guardian should have got its comment spot-on, but its facts all over the place on one of the central events of 20th-century European history - and on CP Scott's watch, too.

We learn from the archive article (see below) on today's leader page that, on January 18 1919, the Guardian marked the murder in Germany of the Spartacist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg with an editorial praising the former for resisting militarism and the latter for being "perhaps the most remarkable of all women produced by the socialist movement". Spot-on.

But it is on the facts of the murder that the Guardian's contemporary news report goes awry. That Rosa's surname is misspelt ("Luxembourg") is the least of it. To put it bluntly, the paper's Berlin correspondent appears to have fallen for a dodgy dossier of the day, produced by some Junker Alistair Campbell.

"Liebknecht was shot by soldiers while attempting to escape after being arrested, and Rosa Luxembourg was killed by an infuriated mob from whom an escort vainly endeavored to protect her," the paper reported. More details follow, of Liebknecht trying to run away, and the mob dragging Luxemburg from the police car, shouting curses. "It was impossible to help her. It is said she was shot."

Time to set the record straight. Liebknecht and Luxemburg were detained and shot by German army officers organised through the Freikorps. Liebknecht, hated by the military for his opposition to the war from 1914 onwards, was no more "shot trying to escape" than the several hundred other Spartacist leaders who mysteriously met their end in exactly the same way in the first three or four months of 1919. The modus operandi of the military, seized with the fear that their social privileges were to be swept away in a revolution, was to detain the militants and, when they were safely in custody, execute them without ceremony. It was a crude but effective means of beheading the progressive movement, and an example followed since by reactionaries from Spain in the 1930s, to Indonesia in the 1960s, to Colombia today.

Neither the rightwing German judiciary nor the Social Democratic government, having formed an alliance against socialism with the army general staff, had any interest in investigating this rash of deaths in custody. Indeed, the government of Ebert and Noske was only too pleased to see their rivals for working-class leadership eliminated, and may, in fact, have ordered the killings.

As for Rosa Luxemburg, had a Berlin "mob" been anywhere to hand at the time, it would have directed its efforts to securing her release from the captors who, far from striving to protect her, speedily upgraded themselves to being her executioners, rifle-butting her to the ground, shooting her in the head and dumping her body in a canal.

Well, Berlin was chaotic at the time and perhaps the Guardian correspondent's contacts in the insurgent working-class movement were lacking, so he fell for the reactionary spin. Since history turned on those murders - and of the thousands of other German revolutionaries killed at the same time, by the same people - these falsehoods should not be given fresh legs 89 years on.

There are many reasons why the German revolution failed in the years after the first world war. But one of the most important, without a doubt, was the extermination of the leadership of the socialist working-class. Had the revolution succeeded, then the Bolsheviks in Russia would have been sprung from the isolation that led to such immense difficulties, the whole of continental Europe might have turned to socialism, the rise of Hitler would have been entirely averted, even the British bourgeoisie might have realised the game was up ... and we would not today be contemplating a headline revealing that the very rich have got even richer after ten years of government by the political descendants of Ebert and Noske.

But as Rosa herself said in her last known [|text], written the day before her murder: "'Order prevails in Berlin!' You stupid lackeys! Your 'order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already 'rise up again, clashing its weapons' and to your horror it will proclaim with trumpets blazing: I was, I am, I shall be!"


 * From: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/andrew_murray/2008/01/fallen_heroes_sacred_facts.html**

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