Is journalism and treason now joined at the hip?

Gerard Jackson
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 3 July 2006

Treason is an ugly word and an even uglier crime. In simple language treason is the act of betraying one’s country to those who would destroy it and enslave its people. This definition is so simple that leftwing sophisticated journalists sneer at it. To them treason is merely relative with one country’s traitor being another country’s hero. This is the appalling moral and intellectual state of current Western journalism. The moral rot runs so deep that one despairs of living long enough to see any improvement.

This insidious situation didn’t appear overnight: it’s one that has been slowly evolving over many decades. To illustrate this point I shall to draw attention to the repulsive Helen Trinca, a vivid example of a moral void. When she was The Australian’s London-based correspondent she wrote a sickening article (17 December 1994) that went a long way in whitewashing the treasonous behavior of Richard Gott, a London journalist with the left-wing Guardian and a paid KGB agent of influence.

Helen Trinca described Gott, in his own words, as an “incorrigible leftist,” allowing him to sound like some harmless old journo with leftist views. She did, however, mention that his colleagues called him Pol Pot because of his sympathy for that homicidal regime. She also claimed that it was only an allegation, obviously implying that Gott's leftist colleagues were lying. Gott, according to Trinca, was pro-leftist but not pro-Soviet, neglecting to point out that in his fashionable Hampstead house there hung, in a prominent position, a large portrait of Joe Stalin.

Now Helen Trinca did not deny that Gott acted for the Soviets, on the contrary: her technique was to deny any treasonable intent by trivialising his actions and questioning whether they were even unethical.

The heart of the matter is whether Gott worked for a regime whose objective was the destruction Britain’s open society and its replacement with a Soviet-style totalitarian state. The answer, without a shadow of doubt, is that he did.

Gott was fingered, as Trinca clearly inferred, by Oleg Gordievsky, a Soviet defector. Gordievsky’s testimony is particularly damning given that he was a high-ranking KGB officer, the KGB’s London resident, the man who prepared a highly classified history of the KGB’s operations in Britain and other Western countries for the KGB, and who was also a British agent from 1974 until his defection from Moscow in 1985.

Not only does Gordievsky know where the bodies are buried, he helped bury them. Because of him, British intelligence knew exactly what Gott (codenamed RON) and others on the KGB payroll were up to and even how much they were paid and when. There is no doubt that Gott took KGB money. This brings us to Trinca’s risible claim that Gott did nothing treasonable.

Technically she is correct: morally she lied. True, he did not sell secrets. Instead, he willingly worked to promote the interests of a vicious tyranny whose intention, as he well knew, was Britain’s destruction. A tyranny that had cold-bloodedly murdered tens of millions of its own citizens. And yet the progressive little Miss Trinca saw nothing immoral in this.

One only has to read Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow, Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps, Reflections on a Ravaged Century or Nikolai Tolstoy’s Stalin’s Secret War to get a mind-numbing idea of the awful magnitude of the Soviet Union’s barbarism. Despite these facts Trinca could find nothing reprehensible about Gott’s loyalties or treacherous actions.

In fact, she had the absolute gall to finish her calcimine puff job by comparing Gott’s treason to the activities of those who cooperated with the Congress of Cultural Freedom because it had received CIA money just as Gott had received KGB blood money.

The Congress was set up by anti-totalitarian intellectuals like Arthur Koestler to defend liberty, the open society and to resist the expansion of the Soviet empire. Yet Trinca viciously insinuated that these democrats were no better than those who betrayed their countries to the KGB. This is like comparing the functions of a war-time London policeman to those of an SS officer in a concentration camp because they both wore uniforms and worked for the state.

This is called moral equivalence; a wretched concept that morally bankrupt leftists like Trinca use when faced by the moral turpitude of a communist state or one of its Western stooges. According to this wicked concept, no matter how evil a communist state is Western states are just as bad. (The same filthy technique is used to malign Israel and justify Islamofascist terrorism).

At least the Gott affair gave us an opportunity to observe just how morally degenerate most of our journalists are, an assessment that their so-called reporting on the liberation of Iraq and the attacks on Israel has amply confirmed.

*This shameless apologist for the sadistic Castro also published a book slavishly following this vicious thug’s propaganda line. Naturally the leftwing press just loved it, just as they love his paean to the thuggish Hugo Chavez.

Note: The sanctimonious Trinca now works for Fairfax Press and is the editor of AFR Boss magazine. Fairfax also publishes the Sydney Morning Herald, aka The Saddam Times and The Age, aka The Spencer Street Soviet.

The Murdoch journalist who whitewashed treason

The media can no longer be trusted to side with democracy and common decency

Why journalists cannot be trusted with their country's secrets

Gerard Jackson is Brookes' economics editor

Subscribe to BrookesNews Bulletin