The Secret Shame of Jon Ungoed-Thomas

-When moral midgets pretend to understand men of substance, they need telling to go fuck themselves.

Driven by insecurities....

Jon Ungoed-Thomas’s daddy didn’t love him and he has insecurity issues about it. He was also unpopular in high-school and, some speculate, suffered from terrible acne and premature ejaculation.

This is why he smears great men like the imprisoned whistleblower Private First Class Bradley Manning, who is facing decades in prison for acting on his conscience. It’s all projection of his own issues and his burning desire to seem to have relevant opinions on world issues.

He claims his journalistic ambition comes from an intellectual disposition and a naturally curious nature, but it’s really because he’s got a little dick.

How, having never met the man, do I know this?

Of course I don’t know it. I’m just saying it to hurt his credibility. Because that’s what Mr Ungoed-Thomas did to Pvt Manning for today’s edition of The Australian (the editor of which, Chris Mitchell, only published it because he’s got abandonment issues).

Manning, a young soldier who (allegedly) chose conscience over obedience, outsmarted the greatest war machine the world has ever known and brought to light countless human rights abuses, is reduced to an “angry misfit kid”.

As ammunition for this failed attempt at a character assassination, he manages to find some people to say he did it because he was “lonely, lacked attention as a child and wanted to make an impact.”

To start with, these two motives, are not actually contradictory, George Orwell in his essay “Why I Write” acknowledges the primary drive behind his achievements as:

Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc.

Would Mr Ungoed-Thomas like, on this basis, to attack Orwell’s work as empty of real political significance? Or perhaps we should examine Mandela’s childhood, look there for the clues as to why he was such an attention seeker? I can hear his balls shrivelling at the thought from here. He wouldn’t dare.

Orwell’s greatness, like Mandela’s has already been established. If personal pain was part of what drove them, we celebrate their ability to make world class lemonade out of rather common lemons. So it shall be for Manning, eventually.

Right now he is an acceptable target for even the cheapest of attacks. If we were consistent, of how many newsworthy people could some equivalent speculation be made?

I would say pretty much all of them.

One of the two supporting sources quoted in the article is Adrian Lamo. Lamo says, in a section where poor sad sick little Bradley is being depicted as led astray by the charismatic wikileaks founder, that Jullian Assange “made Bradley feel involved”.

I can’t imagine that was very difficult, if I was stealing top secret information from the worlds most powerful government, I would feel pretty involved in it.

And who is Adrian Lamo? A hacker Manning foolishly bragged to about his exploits, and who ratted him out. Hardly a disinterested source – if Manning is a hero, what does that make him?

There are lots of words for such informants, but the one that sticks out for me is what we would have called him in high school: “dog”. The term, with it’s associations of mindless cowering loyalty to authority seems appropriate.

The other source is a girl who went to school with him, and who says of Manning, in a line that echoes comedian Bill Hick’s classic “What you reading for” bit: “”He acted differently. He acted smart”. Poor kid.

She goes on to say she thinks maybe he did it,

because he wanted to get attention that he felt he didn’t get when he was young. I don’t think he realised all the pain and trouble he has caused.

I think Manning had a much better understanding of the pain and trouble he has caused, and who he has caused it for, and over what, than this, *cough*, young woman.

The scariest thing about the whole article is the unstated premise that it rests on: Pvt Manning’s convictions, his actions, are the symptoms of a dysfunctional individual. If he had just shut up, joined the sports team and showed a little more school spirit, the whole messy affair would be avoided and he’d be another happy, well adjusted US soldier – Like the thousands who, each year, upon returning from active duty, get stuck back into being productive members of the American community by, you know, engaging in substance abuse, developing chronic depression, blowing their brains out, and all that good shit.

You Jon Ungoed-Thomas, are a poor journalist, an idiot and a moral midget.

Bradley Manning, the man you attack, is a Hero.

People talk about him. People will remember him after he is dead. So they should.