Over the years, I’ve often had dealings with Gerry Jackson and his group at the The New Australian, a group notable, even by blogosphere standards, for a vitriolic style and casual disregard for the facts. At one time, I was even willing to respond to their attacks on me, and wrote responses, which, to Jackson’s credit, he published on his site. I also sparred with Aaron Oakley in the pages of Margo Kingston’s Webdiary. More recently, I concluded that it was a waste of time talking to them, and decided to ignore future attacks
My position has hardened since the publication of my recent post explaining why, among the many dictators that infest the world, I personally loathe Augusto Pinochet and the late Leonid Brezhnev more than others. This elicited a stream of attacks from the New Australian group, and led me to this sickening link, where Jackson defends the terrorist assassination (the US State Department’s assessment, not mine) of exiled Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier in Washington DC in 1976.
In some sense, all murders are equally evil, but there’s something particularly repugnant about a government pursuing its enemies into foreign countries and murdering them. The first to do this on a big scale was Stalin, and Jackson’s justification for the murder is straight out of the Stalin school of falsification – Letelier, he says, was a KGB agent. Even if true, this would not of course justify murder, but as far as I can determine, Jackson’s only source for this accusation is one William F. Jasper a writer for a journal called The New American (even loonier than The New Australian), who, among other things, accuses Bill Clinton and most of his administration of being terrorist sympathisers.
In an unsolicited (but apparently widely distributed) email, Jackson claims his position is justified because I “adamantly refused to condemn Castro”. Given that this fight started with my post condemning Castro’s patron and paymaster Brezhnev, this is bizarre (did Jackson expect me to list all the dictators of the last century and condemn them individually?), but, for the record, I condemn all dictators, Communist and otherwise, including Castro.
As I said in the original post, I have a visceral loathing for Pinochet and those who seek to justify his murderous regime. Jackson will no doubt have his say on his own site, but I will have no further dealings with him or those associated with him.