Talk:Barry Horne (activist)/Archive 1

Work in progress

I've started expanding this article, but it's still very much a work in progress, so if anything seems a bit unbalanced or repetitive, I hope to be improving it soon. Any input would be most welcome. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 22:32, Apr 11, 2005 (UTC)

Intro

I decided to move the Guardian quote...somewhere, but sat there and puzzled about where exactly it belonged. I ended up putting it at the end of the background section (for now) and leaving more general talk in the intro. It is rather strong in calling Horne a "nobody", and its blanket condemnation of the animal rights movement as a "terrorist group", so I didn't think it deserved such prominence unless balanced by a quote praising Horne. I'm prepared to accept that this may be related to my POV that Horne wasn't what I would call a terrorist (based on my knowledge of his actions). It's not easy to write NPOV about this controversial man and I can recall getting into several arguments about him when he died. Good work SlimVirgin! — Trilobite (Talk) 03:29, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Trilobite, thank you. I appreciate that. And I agree with you that he was not a terrorist. However, most people think he was, and The Guardian was without a doubt echoing majority opinion, among scholars (particularly scientists), journalists, police, and the general public. It is also a dramatic quote, and so is a good thing, purely in terms of the writing, to end the intro with, in my view.

The sentences you replaced it with, while less dramatic, are in a sense more problematic: "While media reaction to his death tended to portray him as a terrorist, many in the animal rights movement who continue to regard Horne as something of a martyr point out that his campaign was aimed at the destruction of property and not at killing or injuring people; a fact acknowledged at his trial."

You'd have to say who (with a citation) points this out, otherwise it's your own argument, which is OR. My aim with this article (and I haven't finished it) is to end up with something purely factual and therefore stable. X said this, Y said that, and everything that isn't attributed should be non-argumentative and non-controversial. That's the aim, anyway. ;-) SlimVirgin ^(talk) 03:39, Apr 26, 2005 (UTC)

My reasoning for leaving out a source for this view was that it was a kind of continuation of the preceding sentence, in which we have animal rights activists who view him as a hero; and then the mention of the aims of his campaign is backed up by what was established at the trial, though you're right that these two things don't quite cover it and are not adequate in an article such as this where hard facts are more important than ever. And it did have a hint of OR about it. However, the Guardian quote, while dramatic and a good reflection of majority opinion, twists the definition of terrorism to include Horne (bringing us back to the old argument about what constitutes terrorism), and indeed the whole animal rights movement. The reader is perhaps left to take this strong piece of POV as a fact. I've moved the quote back but qualified it with the bit about not targeting people, which I think is key to the Horne case and deserves to go in the intro. I've been careful not to say that this makes the Guardian wrong to call him a terrorist, leaving the definition of the term to the reader. Feel free to reword my clumsy sentences :-) — Trilobite (Talk) 04:12, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I had to pop out there briefly and so had to shorten my last post. What I had in mind was that, during the 68-day hunger strike, Barry Horne became just about the most hated person in the UK, particularly toward the end of it. There wasn't a single positive or neutral article about him in the mainstream press: in fact, I don't recall such uniformly POV journalism about any other subject. It wasn't just the Telegraph, but the Guardian and Observer too. The Independent was slightly better but not much, and the tabloids were dreadful. Then there was the Channel 4 documentary entrapping Robin Webb, and all this was before ARM issued its death threat, at which point the press went wild, and Newsnight etc got involved. And they were all calling it terrorism (undefined as usual). The overseas press wasn't much better, though Sweden was slightly more sympathetic. Therefore, whether we agree or not, that was very much the majority view of him and ought to be reflected in the intro (though I take your point about the property-only aim of his campaign). The other thing I like about that quote is that it's pure drama, and therefore might encourage the reader to read on, which is part of the point of an intro. So that was my reasoning: not wanting WP to label him, but wanting to show that others did, and in choosing the Guardian, I felt I was choosing a newspaper that might have been expected to reflect a more nuanced position, but it didn't, and that tells us something, not about Horne, but about people's view of this kind of activity. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 04:36, Apr 26, 2005 (UTC)

Yes, that's a good assessment of the media portrayal, and I hadn't supposed you wanted WP to label him. I guess my concern was more that we could look at these things more carefully than the newspapers did at the time and that it perhaps wasn't a good idea to give such credence to their generally poorly thought-out assessments. After all, it's entirely possible for a majority to regard someone as a terrorist and do a bad job of defending such a view, in that their reasons for describing him as such were inconsistent with their own conventional definition of the term. I don't know how much you know about the Gladys Hammond business which has gripped my part of the world (Midlands) recently, but hysterical reporting from what are fairly objective sources under normal circumstances has been inescapable in this case too. Of course, to go too far in highlighting the pro-Horne argument (when it was in such a minority) would be to depart from neutrality in reporting opinions, but sometimes I can't help but temper good old NPOV with a bit of rationality! But anyway, I'm rambling. These are all matters of wording and emphasis, and my overwhelming reaction to this article is that it's very factual and neutral. Thanks for writing it. — Trilobite (Talk) 05:16, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I've possibly become too wedded to that quote, because I love the drama of it, though it's complete nonsense, and so unexpected from the Guardian. All your points are well made, and I do take them. So perhaps on reflection we should move it, or use it to illustrate the media hostility and make clear that we're quoting in that context - because it really does show what the animal rights movement is up against. I'll maybe have a tweak around to see if I can improve it by putting it in context, and then if you still feel it goes too far, we can move it. I haven't kept up with Gladys Hammond (that might be worth an article, you know), but the latest I heard is that ARM claims to have buried one-sixth of her body in a place it can found, is that right? That doesn't sound to me like the animal rights movement ... maybe some disturbed people who've become involved with it. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 05:52, Apr 26, 2005 (UTC)

Well, you've convinced me that the quote belongs in the intro, since it's certainly reflective of the prevailing POV. And remember that we appear to be in agreement about just about all of this article, so we could spend time getting all the nuance and phrasing just right, then someone else could come along and decide it's all biased in one way or another and start making major changes that would render this discussion irrelevant, so I wouldn't worry about too much about getting the placement of the quote perfect. I've come round to it myself, it is a good dramatic one.

As for Gladys Hammond, the name that usually crops up in the media is the ARM, but since it isn't known who did it I don't know how much truth there is to that, and I have no more insight into it all than what I can glean from media reports. I've heard similar about the possible return of part of the remains, but there's a lot of rumour and speculation. I might do an article if, either, someone is caught and convicted, hence making available a good quantity of information about who, what, why, etc; or if the owners of the farm decide to pack it in as a result of what happened, making the incident more notable in that it had the effect of shutting down a farm. The main consequence so far appears to have been widespread public revulsion, leading to a backlash against the protestors involved with that farm, and a massive public relations disaster for the movement. I shall wait and see how it all ends up. — Trilobite (Talk) 06:48, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Yes, exactly, backlash for the movement, and there always is when ARM becomes involved, and ARM always becomes involved when the movement is succeeding at something. I'm no conspiracy theorist but I can't help but wonder whether ARM is British intelligence; though to be honest, I can't see a bunch of MI5 officers digging up bodies, but then I can't see anyone doing that. In the Barry Horne case, ARM popped up just at the point where people realized Horne might actually die, and the public mood shifted just very slightly in his favor, and then bang! 24 hours later, the top item on Newsnight is that, if Horne dies, a bunch of scientists (bravely fighting cancer) are going to be killed, and whoosh, public mood shifts straight back again. If it's not MI5, it's a bunch of activists who badly need some training in PR. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 07:14, Apr 26, 2005 (UTC)

The intro is much better now, Trilobite. Thank you. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 07:57, Apr 26, 2005 (UTC)