Spiked (magazine)

Spiked

File:Spikedlogo.png
Type of site	Politics
Owner	Brendan O'Neill
Created by	Mick Hume
URL	http://www.spiked-online.com
Commercial	No
Registration	No

Spiked (also written as sp!ked) is a British Internet magazine focusing on politics, culture and society from a humanist and libertarian viewpoint.

Editors and contributors

Spiked is edited by Brendan O'Neill, following Mick Hume's departure in January 2007, and features regular contributions from James Heartfield, Michael Fitzpatrick, Patrick West, Rob Lyons, Nathalie Rothschild, Tim Black, Duleep Allirajah, and Frank Furedi.

Origin

The magazine was founded in 2000 after the bankruptcy of its predecessor, Living Marxism, a magazine whose point of view has been described by The Guardian as "extreme corporate libertarianism" and by J. G. Ballard as "the most interesting and provocative magazine I have read for many years". LM, an acronym for Living Marxism, closed after losing a libel case brought against it by the broadcasting corporation ITN. The case centered on LM featuring an article by Thomas Deichmann called 'The Picture that Fooled the World' that alleged that the photographer who took the famous ITN picture of Bosnian Muslims behind a barbed-wire fence in a Bosnian Serb-run camp during the Yugoslav war gave the false impression that this was a Nazi-style concentration camp. Deichmann claimed that it was really the photographer who was in a fenced-in area and that it was a transit camp.

ITN won and the ensuing award and costs, estimated to be around £1 million, bankrupted LM and its publishers.

Stance

The magazine focuses on issues of freedom and state control, science and technology. It seeks to counter positions such as multiculturalism, environmentalism and what they see as a recent trend in Western foreign policy: humanitarian intervention.

A prominent focus of the magazine is the defence of the freedom of speech. Spiked says that it opposes all forms of censorship, by the state or otherwise. Its writers call for a repeal of libel, hate speech and incitement laws. They have criticized laws targeted at pedophiles. Spiked also regularly critique risk society; animal rights; political correctness; and environmentalism. As regards the latter, a particular Spiked target has been what they see as "exaggerated" and "hysterical" interpretations of the scientific consensus on global warming.

Other notable positions of Spiked are their opposition to the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and Western aid for or interference in developing nations in general.

Spiked has been described by journalists such as Johann Hari and George Monbiot of pursuing a right-wing and pro-corporate agenda under a guise of being left-wing. Some have said that Spiked's stance has more in common with free-market libertarians than with the left.

Frank Furedi, interviewed in Spiked, responded that the stance of LM and Spiked springs from the tradition of the "anti-Stalinist left". He argued that the reason why many in the left tradition have difficulties in identifying these ideas with the left is that they completely misunderstand the humanist political position of being progressive in terms of human progress, science, rationality and freedom, and yet be completely anti-state:

...much of the left in the twentieth century tended to be influenced by Stalinist and Social-Democratic traditions, which means they could not imagine that you could be left-wing and anti-state...so they were confused by us. But that was their fault, not ours. It was a product of their own abandonment of liberty in favour of ideas about state control.

Furedi listed Marxist activists, politicians and writers who he said had influenced LM and Spiked, including Roman Rosdolsky, Henryk Grossman, György Lukács, Paul Mattick, Christian Rakovsky, and Leon Trotsky.

The journalist Nick Cohen described Spiked's positions as mere attention seeking:

if you strip revolutionary defeatism of its revolutionary content, you have what modern editors and producers want: contrarianism, the willingness to fill space and generate controversy by saying the opposite of what everyone else is saying just because everyone else is saying it – an affectation most people get over around puberty.

Accusations of Entryism

George Monbiot and the Lobbywatch network of websites argue that Spiked ideas are simply a front for their corporate funding. Monbiot and Lobbywatch therefore have also accused the contributors of Spiked (and its predecessor, LM (Living Marxism) Magazine) of adopting a strategy of entryism into the media, communications and science networks. For example, Monbiot posits what he calls the “LM Network” — and goes on to state that this 'network' is responsible for the formation of front groups, the infiltration of pressure groups, think tanks and governmental advisory committees to pursue what he sees as an agenda suiting a diverse range of corporate funders. Spiked has responded at length to these allegations and vehemently denied that they are paid to provide a corporate point of view:

spiked has never "taken money from the fossil fuel industry", and those organisations that do sponsor us do not dictate our editorial agenda. It is testament to the small-mindedness of today’s illiberal liberal commentators that they think anyone who criticises green authoritarianism must be in the pay of Big Oil.

Monbiot is also on record expressing his hope that members of the "LM network" lose their jobs and are no longer accorded scientific credibility, given what he sees as an alleged lack of scientific credentials. In particular, he had hoped that his Lobbywatch article, 'Invasion of the entryists', would have had more of an impact than it did — prompting sackings and scientists and others to question their associations.

Spiked dismiss the claims as conspiracy theory and liken such critics to McCarthyites. For example, Brendan O'Neill has stated:

From their craven search for hidden agendas to their spider-web linking of various individuals to their censorious and McCarthyite demands: they might be treehuggers by day, but these individuals share all the worst traits of the most hardened conspiracy theorists.

In other articles Spiked has compared these critics to the tiny group of neo-Nazis who have accused them of being a Jewish front organization — and have asserted that these critics have limited themselves to attacking Spiked's associations (with certain companies and institutions) rather than tackling its ideas.

Therapy Culture

A long-standing thread in the Spiked critique is what they identify as 'Therapy Culture' - a culture where the victim takes ascendancy and where rationality and logic is replaced by emotions and feelings. For Dr Michael Fitzpatrick, the core issues here are about agency and political autonomy and he argues "we should stop surrendering our sovereignty to the 'therapeutic state'".

The medicalisation of personal problems may relieve the individual of moral responsibility, but at the cost of allowing the therapeutic state to control personal behaviour and psychic life.

Environmentalism and global warming

Spiked has been consistently critical of environmentalism. It accuses environmentalism of misanthropy for supporting cuts in population and economic growth, particularly in response to climate change. James Heartfield, for instance, argues that the environmentalist concern with cutting back growth is linked to elitist prejudices:

The ecological outlook is an expression of middle-class rage at the masses ... Environmentalism, like all political discourses that take shortage as their starting point, will tend towards misanthropic solutions. Any movement that begins with the view that mankind must be curtailed to reduce the pressure on the environment will have to start thinking how it will select those who must make sacrifices.

George Monbiot has accused Spiked of climate change denial: "there are articles on Spiked Online that say there is no [climate change] problem and that take the side of the anti-scientists, the climate change deniers."

Spiked has not denied that human carbon emissions are contributing to climate change. Spiked criticises what it sees as the political interpretation of this fact put forward by the environmentalist movement. For example, in 2007 James Woudhuysen and Joe Kaplinsky argued that "the IPCC's fairly sober summary of climate science has been spun [by environmentalists] to tell a story of Fate, Doom and human folly." Josie Appleton argued that: "Today's 'global warming story' — where morality equates to carbon calculating — owes more to the anxious zeitgeist than scientific findings."

Spiked criticises environmentalists for preferring to reduce economic growth in response to climate change, rather than to expand it by finding alternative sources of energy. Furedi argues that "innovation is necessary, not only to deal with climate change, but also to produce a great deal more inexpensive energy in order that more people can enjoy the fruits of modern society." Spiked contributors have thus written in defence of hydroelectric and nuclear power, often dismissed by environmentalist campaigners.

Spiked gave favorable coverage to the film The Great Global Warming Swindle which argued against the scientific consensus that global warming is "very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (man-made) greenhouse gas concentrations".

Spiked Review of Books

The Spiked Review of Books is a monthly online literary criticism feature, based at Spiked. The launch in May 2007 coincided with controversy in the United States following the scaling back of newspaper book review sections. The Spiked Review of Books features editorials by Brendan O'Neill and interviews, essays and reviews by a range of writers, many of whom are regular contributors to Spiked, such as Frank Furedi, Jennie Bristow and Josie Appleton. The cover illustrations are by Jan Bowman.

Funding

Spiked receives its funding via online advertising and organising online debates, surveys, seminars and conferences; with a variety of partners, corporations and organisations. It also receives donations from readers. In October 2009, Spiked appealed to readers for £20,000 to ensure its continuation.

See also

• Revolutionary Communist Party (UK, 1978)

External links

• Sp!ked Online
• Theresa Clifford: Is Wikipedia part of a new ‘global brain’? (Spiked article)
• Lobbywatch entry on Spiked
• Frank Furedi Official Website
• Mick Hume's column in The Times
• James Woudhuysen Website
• James Heartfield Website