Dopey Fiend

 

 

 

Stephanie Hegarty…just what is she good for?  What does she bring to the BBC other than trite, anodyne, derivative worthiness that we expect from Anglican priests?…somewhat ironic, as you’ll see….she’s not a fan of Christians.

DB on this site and Is the BBC biased? ( Yes it is whatever Cardiff Uni tells us) have been giving Stephanie the old one two for her ever increasingly partisan tweets…. such as this latest example which seems to suggest that the US jury are ‘extremists’ for imposing a death sentence on a mass murderer…

The extremists are winning.. 🙁 Death sentence for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev http://t.co/ftD7Q5IrUi

— Steph Hegarty (@stephhegarty) May 15, 2015

The Tweets unavoidably drew my attention and I thought she was worthy of a closer look…and when you see what she is interested in you can understand why the BBC snapped her up from the New Statesman as they did….she is a budding Paul Mason if ever there was one.

However there is one article that deserves a deal of attention, one which underlines her world view….or maybe she was high on dope or was it just uncut self-righteousness which fired her up and gave strength to her arm as she aimed her censorious brickbats at numerous targets….all the usual suspects for the Left?  It looks like she was working for the BBC when she wrote this tract in April 2012….yep, here she is in February and then in November 2012 on FOOC.

Here she defends the BBC World Service against the depredations of the Coalition government…

‘If the World Service is to survive it will only do so by becoming a tool of corporate colonialism exporting the ideals and propaganda of those with money on those without.

The coallition government will continue to thump about quashing every public institution it can, tearing apart the welfare state, selling schools, forests and anything they can feasibly attach a price tag to. The World Service is just another casualty in what is already an old but painful story.’

 

Anyway, back to her tract…

There is an organisation called ‘Invisible Children’ that was set up in 2004 to help the children caught up in the war in Central Africa involving the Lord’s Resistance Army, and to encourage governments to get involved to stop the war.

Part of that campaign was a film released in 2012 called ‘Kony 2012’ which set out their case and their desire for the leader of the LRA, Joseph Kony, to be captured and put on trial at the International Criminal Court.

 

The film was highly successful and generated huge support that influenced US politicians to agree to help defeat the LRA.

Stephanie Hegarty thinks the film maker, Jason Russell, is close kin to the Devil and quite possibly the love child of Hitler and Goebbels…..in 2012 she starts off a vitriolic and bizarre attack on him and the film like this…

‘Last week a video launched on to the internet with the aim of making a psychotic megalomaniac famous.’

Well, Russell did have a mental breakdown some time after the release of the film and was hospitalised for that…nice that Hegarty thinks his mental breakdown is grounds to attack him….an attack which she continues later on.

As for making him famous?  Does she have no idea of just what the film and the organisation actually achieved?

She goes on to launch an unrestrained and outlandish attack on Russell’s young (4 years old?) son…

Most of this particular film seems to be taken up by a very blonde and camera-friendly child purportedly of Jason’s own making. This puzzling creature seems to be as adept at using a smart phone as monitoring an arsenal of nuclear weapons. In the video he subtly demonstrates his skills with both.

For a second it seems this could be an infomercial for a new breed of toy soldier – a robot child made out of coltan maybe. Only the genius of Jason Russell could fathom making a small human out of the stuff – a precious Congolese mineral usually used for making mobile phone and missiles – and employing him like a small and loveable, sexless fembot.

Watch the film to see just how weird Hegarty’s interpretation is…..absolutely nowhere near what appears on screen.

Then we get to her own politics as she slips into Lefty speak…

‘These people are no longer in the jungle they are not invisible and most of them are not children anymore. They need all the things we need, jobs to get up for in the morning, schools to send their children to, family, respect, stability and peace. Not wristbands, posters and glitzy, irrelevant films or a raging neo-colonial war.’

Well if they need to go to school, need jobs, need stabiltiy and peace….that’s pretty hard to achieve when there’s an armed band roaming the country killing, mutilating, raping and kidnapping the children.  As for neo-colonial war….it was being waged by almost purely African troops.

Hegarty then criticises Russell for ‘supporting’ the Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni whom she denounces as homophobic, a trait she then links to a Christian group in the US.  But is Russell supporting Museveni or just trying to stop the war?  Hegarty thinks the war should continue as that’s better than having an unpleasant homophobe in power in Uganda…

‘The real triumph here for activism and the power of youth.. and the internet. After all can motivating people to care about their fellow man be a bad thing, no matter how veiled, misguided, manipulative and  potentially corrupt the cause? Yes, I think it can.

Jason Russell and his army of internet-savvy minions and masters of the YouTube generation are a more hideous force than a clapped up, demented warlord hiding in a bush will ever be.’

Note that she thinks Russell is more dangerous than Kony and his band of murderous thugs….who have killed over 100,000, displaced nearly 2 million and abducted around 30,000 children to be used as child soldiers or sex slaves….the World Bank estimated as many as 66,000 children had been abducted.

Curiously she is quite enamoured of the ‘army’ of youngsters who rioted across the UK in 2011….

‘Whether it’s to do with anger against the police, a sense of general alienation or simply consumerist greed, this week’s rioters in Britain had a message, however incoherent, for their society.’

And not too bothered about denouncing Muslim homophobia in such declamatory, strident tones.

 

Hegarty finishes off with this ripe diatribe which lays out the real ‘enemy’ of civilisation….

Generally, when celebrities and movie stars, the entire US political right wing – along with most of the mainstream church and Fox News – launch upon an idea you can vouch for the fact that it’s not a very good one – experience in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam seems to be pretty solid on this one, but fuck experience.

The moral of this story is that its ok to peddle untruths, wreak war and masturbate in public, so long as you make nice films full of condescending bullshit about helpless Africans, are a Christian and preferably not gay.

 

White, Christian, Republican, Straight, work for Fox News…..all sound rather familiar as targets for abuse from the BBC…no wonder they gave Hegarty a job…she’s ‘one of them’.

In fact it was Obama who actually signed off on sending troops to Uganda and the campaign had cross party support in the US from both Democrats and Republicans.  So a black president, a Democrat, waded into the racist neo-colonial wars…..how did it go so wrong?

 

Hegarty, so full of remorse for being white, so full of guilt for living in a society that allows her to make a good living from writing nonsense, so full of bile towards those who would help others because she thinks they aren’t Left wing enough, or black enough, or gay enough…perhaps she should consider as she types away that others are not so lucky….such as this victim of the Lord’s Resistance Army, Oryem Kenneth, 42, who was abducted by the LRA for two days in 2003. They cut off his lips and ears with a knife and his fingers with an axe….

 

He’s lucky, he had someone to tell his tale and seek to put an end to the conflict that resulted in his mutilation.

If Hegarty had her way there would be endless people such as Oryem Kenneth.