Spiked (magazine)
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Type of site
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Politics |
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| Owner | Brendan O'Neill |
| Created by | Mick Hume |
| Website | spiked-online.com |
| Alexa rank |
 70,140 (January 2016[update]) |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | No |
| Launched | 2000 |
Spiked (also written as sp!ked) is a British Internet magazine focusing on politics, culture and society from the tradition of humanism and the "anti-Stalinist left".
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, Tom Slater, Joanna Williams and Frank Furedi.
The magazine was founded in 2000 after the bankruptcy of its predecessor, Living Marxism (LM).
LM closed after losing a libel case brought against it by the broadcasting corporation ITN. The case centred around ITN coverage of Fikret Alić and other Bosnian Muslims standing behind a barbed-wire fence at the Trnopolje camp during the Yugoslav war. LM opposed Western intervention on traditional anti-imperialist grounds, and thus warned against the tendency to moralise the conflict – with Muslims portrayed as the victims and Serbs as the villains – which was fuelling the clamour for military action. LM published an article titled "The Picture that Fooled the World" which claimed that ITN's coverage was deceptive, the barbed-wire did not enclose the camp and the Muslims were in fact "refugees, many of whom went there seeking safety and could leave again if they wished." During the court case, evidence given by the camp doctor led LM to abandon its defence. ITN was awarded damages and costs, estimated to be around £1 million.
The case resulted in significant controversy over the relationship between British libel laws and press freedom; it also stimulated some discussion over the use of the word "genocide" in relation to the murders at Srebrenica. The MIT Professor Noam Chomsky insisted in an interview with The Guardian that "LM was probably correct", and that "there was a hysterical fanaticism about Bosnia in western culture which was very much like a passionate religious conviction. It was like old-fashioned Stalinism: if you depart a couple of millimetres from the party line, you're a traitor, you're destroyed. It's totally irrational. And in the case of Living Marxism, for a big corporation to put a small newspaper out of business because they think something they reported was false, is outrageous."
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Wikipedia