Genocide Denial, Libel and the LM Network

In 2025, the 30th anniversary of the massacre of Srebrenica, in which more than 8,000 men and boys were killed, it's worth looking at what has happened to those who peddled lies and falsehoods about the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims in the British media.

As George Monbiot wrote in 2011 (Naming the Genocide Deniers):

"The massacre of Bosnians at Srebrenica in 1995 and the slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994 are two of the best-documented acts of genocide in history. Both cases are supported by overwhelming evidence: remains of the victims and vast dossiers of testimony from survivors and observers. The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), using DNA screening, has so far identified the corpses of 6,595 of the 7,789 Bosnians reported as missing after the siege of Srebenica. Its work suggests that the total number of victims is close to 8,100."

Yet both horrific events were denied and distorted by the group publishing Living Marxism (later just LM). This magazine was edited by Mike Hume and co-published by Claire Fox and Helene Gulberg.

The group practised a strange brand of radical libertarianism and had emerged from the Revolutionary Communist Party of the 1980s and 90s under the leadership of Frank Furedi. As Monbiot explains it's consistent outlook is that of the far-right rather than anything 'revolutionary' or Marxist:

"From 1988 until 2000, Mick Hume was editor of a magazine called Living Marxism (later shortened to LM). The title was misleading: it was a hard-right libertarian paper, which argued that those with the power to act should not be prevented from using it. It campaigned against the control of guns, tobacco advertising (Cheryl Hudson, 'Who killed the Marlboro man?' LM issue 105, November 1997) and child pornography (Andrew Calcutt, April 1994. Exposed: computer porn scandal in commons. Living Marxism issue 66). It dismissed global warming and demanded greater freedom for corporations. It denounced what it called “the cult of the victim”.

Twenty five years ago, LM magazine was closed down after losing a libel case: they had made false claims about ITN’s footage from the Trnopolje camp, in which Bosnian prisoners were held by Serb forces. They published an article claiming that ITN had fabricated its dramatic discovery in 1992 of prisoners held by the Bosnian Serbs. “The picture that fooled the world” argued that ITN’s footage, in which emaciated Bosnian Muslim men clung to barbed wire, showed not a detention centre, as ITN maintained, but a safe haven for refugees.

ITN were awarded £375,000 in libel damages.

Hume and Guldberg seemed unfazed. One year later Hume would launch Spiked! and the LM network would have a new lease of life. As we would later reveal they had friends with deep pockets (Revealed: US Oil Billionaire Charles Koch Funds UK Anti-Environment Spiked Network).

Writer Eddie Ford noticed the same: "But, as soon as the magazine folded, an extensive network of new groups with the same cast of characters (Furedi, Claire Fox, Mick Hume, Brendan O’Neill, James Heartfield, Michael Fitzpatrick, etc) sprang up to replace it. Among these many organisations were the Institute of Ideas, the Academy of Ideas, the Manifesto Club and, of course, Spiked - which had the same editor as LM (Mick Hume) and most of the same contributors. Claire Fox is a regular panellist on the BBC’s turgid Moral Maze radio show."

The LM network continues to this day in various forms, fronts and manifestations. Its Scottish contributors included Dolan Cummings, Stuart Waiton and Tiffany Jenkins.

Genocide Denial and Libel

From the distance of thirty years we can now see not just the strange coalition of the LM network into the corridors of power (including No 10 and the House of Lords) but also that the weird constellation of 'free speech' and 'libertarianism' advocates that prospers today has its roots in this network. As Bob from Brockley wrote in 2019 (The RCP’s long march from anti-imperialist outsiders to the doors of Downing Street):

"[LM] recruited the fearless investigative journalist Thomas Deichmann to tell the real story behind the Bosnian enclosures. Only it wasn’t quite like that. Deichmann was an engineer by training, not a journalist. His writing was largely confined to an obscure German magazine called Novo, which he used repeatedly to defend the Bosnian Serb leadership against charges of murder, torture, rape and ethnic cleansing. He presented himself as a witness for the defence at the trial of the Serbian war criminal Dusko Tadic."

"One of the journalists who broke the story of Trnopolje, the Serbian camp, was Ed Vulliamy, who was with the ITN team. ITN sued LM for libel, and won. Several celebrities, including Toby Young (who has kept up his association with them ever since), celebrated LM as the plucky free speech underdogs resisting the mainstream establishment. Vulliamy puts the more accurate view: “free speech” has nothing to do with what is going on. Living Marxism’s attempts to re-write the history of the camps was motivated by the fact that in their heart of hearts, these people applauded those camps and sympathised with their cause and wished to see it triumph. That was the central and – in the final hour, the only – issue. Shame, then, on those fools, supporters of the pogrom, cynics and dilettantes who supported them, gave them credence and endorsed their vile enterprise."

Mick Hume would go on to edit Spiked! - where he was replaced by Brendan O'Neill as editor in 2007 (and now Tom Slater). Hume continues to write for Spiked! where he rails against Britain's 'woke elites' and wrote a column for The Times for over a decade. He worked in communications for Nigel Farage's Brexit Party (2019) and for Reform UK in the 2024 elections. Like many of the LM network, he has now transferred his allegiances not just to the Tories, like Munira Mirza who became Boris Johnson’s head of Number 10’s policy unit, but to Farage's various political projects like the ennobled Claire Fox [Former communist standing as MEP for Farage's Brexit party].

In this time of renewed genocide denial, it's worth revisiting these movements and individuals. As Jamie Palmer wrote in 2019 (Denial and Defamation—The ITN-LM Libel Trial Revisited, Part One: The Camps):

"More than nineteen years after their humiliation in court, Hume and his supporters continue to insist that the verdict was a travesty and that LM was punished for speaking uncomfortable truths to power. Having clung to a revisionist account of the Bosnian war which destroyed their magazine, they went on to develop a revisionist account of the libel trial itself, according to which a tiny independent magazine embarrassed a large news corporation, and was then crushed by a vindictive court and the monstrous injustice of Britain’s libel laws.

None of that is true. And the truth of this now-obscure episode matters, because the trial turned on a point of recent history that a committed ideological fringe remains determined to disfigure."

As Palmer points out, while the magazine's fate would be sealed by the publication of the article by Thomas Deichmann, but it was predated by a previous piece by Frank Furedi:

"This pattern of radical genocide denial would be repeated during and after the Bosnian war in the early 1990s ... as stories of Serbian atrocities began to emerge from the former Yugoslavia. In February 1996, seven months after the murder of nearly 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica, and just two months after the Bosnian war had finally ended, a small British magazine called Living Marxism published an essay by sociologist Frank Füredi under the pseudonym “Linda Ryan,” in which he stated that, “There is no hard evidence that 3,000, let alone 8,000, Bosnian Muslims were massacred in Srebrenica.”

This phenomenon of using 'cadre' names was widespread among the RCP/LM Network. Frank Furedi went as Linda Ryan (and also Frank Richards), Michael Fitzpatrick went under Michael Freeman. Claire Fox went under Claire Foster. Mick Hume went under Eddie Veale, and so on.

What is disturbing about the continued influence of the LM network is not just its access to dark money and its use of front groups to conduct its operations, but, as Powerbase notes: "The RCP has spawned a network, here called the LM network, of political extremists who eulogise technologies like genetic engineering and reproductive cloning and are extremely hostile to their critics, whom they brand as Nazis. What is particularly disturbing is that it is a network which engages in infiltration of media organisations and science-related lobby groups in order to promote its agenda as well as establishing a string of their own organisations."

Powerbase continues: "In developing its libertarian politics Living Marxism began to publish articles by elements of the Conservative movement, including a variety of corporate funded and neoliberal think tanks. This pattern developed into financial and other sponsorship relationships. For example, by 1998 LM put on a series of 'roundtable debates' at the Edinburgh Festival. As well as being sponsored by LM network group such as Generation Youth Issues, sessions were also sponsored by the conservative Adam Smith Institute and by the tobacco industry funded front group FOREST."

This trajectory to the right may explain why the individuals engaged in genocide denial thirty years ago have been so successful: absorbed into the political and media elite and having risen into the institutions of Downing Street and the House of Lords. Today, we again face genocide denial, and learning the lessons from the past about ideologically-motivated disinformation can be a crucial lesson in media literacy and truth-telling in times of barbarism.