By Michael F. Duggan
There [are] no good guys in war… War is primarily about the total failure of the human spirit. It is about death and the inflation of death. And if you don’t realize that, you will die in a war.
-Robert Fisk
You see this terrible suffering, these monumental crimes against humanity—let’s speak frankly, that’s what we are talking about—we have all committed them, not just al-Qaeda. We [have] all committed crimes against humanity, and if you don’t report it, people won’t know. I always say… we can tell you what’s happening, don’t ever say no one told you. Don’t say you didn’t know.
-Robert Fisk
It seems to me that [the role of war correspondents] at the moment is to be out there on the street, in the battlefield with soldiers, with civilians in hospitals particularly and record the suffering of ordinary people and talk to them.
-Robert Fisk1
Another important independent voice is gone, another casualty of 2020. As a foreign correspondent, Robert Fisk was the best at what he did: covering wars from the front lines and in front of the front lines when the lines existed at all. Except perhaps for the job of combat photographer, it is, when done right, the most dangerous calling in journalism. In a career that spanned almost 50 years, he covered conflicts in the massive expanse between Afghanistan and the Balkans as well as in Northern Ireland and North Africa. He appears to have died of natural causes.
There are other reporters who have matched Fisk’s doggedness and physical courage.2 But few if any equal his depth and breadth of understanding. He had an intimate knowledge of the regions he covered—saw the big picture and saw through the stated reasons of those who waged wars and was able to adumbrate the likely outcomes of those wars. With a doctorate from Dublin’s Trinity College, he also had academic credentials and was a journalists with a greater depth of the historical understanding of war than most scholars and area specialists. When it came to writing about the Middle East, Fisk wrote with passion and presented the “hot” analysis relative to Patrick Cockburn’s “cool.” At 1109 pages, his The Great War for Civilisation, The Conquest of the Middle East, is magisterial, readable, and endlessly rich in its insights.
Fisk presented the bottom-up view of conflicts, a perspective missing or glossed over in much of the reporting by the corporate media (we can hardly be surprised if most Americans are unaware that millions of people have died in the Middle East since the beginning of the U.S. war in Afghanistan in 2001). He always named the names of perpetrators regardless of what side they were on. His frequent criticism of American and Israeli polices made him enemies both powerful and ordinary. In 2002 he was famously threatened by the actor, John Malkovich.3
Fisk was one of those legendary on-the-ground correspondents—“a historian of the present”4—who immersed himself in the Middle East and seemed to be everywhere in that troubled region from the 1970s until 2020. He was fluent in Arabic and lived in Beirut. He was also fluent with the region and its cultures as well as its conflicts. He wrote well and often with good humor (it was from him that I learned the slangy codswallop).
He covered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, the Iranian Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, the Balkan wars of the 1990s, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and both U.S. campaigns in Iraq to name but a few. He covered the civil wars in Lebanon, Algeria, Syria, and Libya. He was at the massacre of Sabra and Chatila while the killing was still in progress.5 He knew that one must leave the pack in order to get to the real story, ignoring official dog-and-pony shows and prejudicial stunts like embedding. He loathed and lamented “grad school journalism” and the “safe” “fifty-fifty journalism” of “obedient reporters” who he saw as willing and uncritical spokespeople for governmental agencies. He despised the “parasitic, osmotic relationship between journalists and power.”6 He covered five Israeli invasions and interviewed Bin Laden three times (the fame from which he called his “albatross”). It is striking that in spite of his experiences he never lost his humanity—his belief in human potential—and his capacity to be shocked by the degradation of war.
Given the dangerous places and situations Fisk was frequently in, it is noteworthy that he carried a weapon only once, when a Kalashnikov was thrust into his hands before an expected ambush in the early days of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Of this experience he wrote: “I have never since held a weapon in wartime and I hope that I shall never again. I have always cursed the journalists who wear military costumes and don helmets and play soldiers with a gun on their hip, greying over the line between reporter and combatant, making our lives ever more dangerous as armies and militias come to regard us as an extension of their enemies, a potential combatant, a military target. But I had not volunteered to travel with the Soviet army. I was not—as that repulsive expression would have it in later wars—’embedded.’ I was as much their prisoner as guest.”7
The swaggering foreign correspondents of the Big Three and cable television can at times match Fisk’s physical courage, often while dramatically inserting themselves into stories. But there has to be more to being what Hemingway dramatically calls a journalistic “carnivore” than just being on the ground and in the shit. As with the historian, the job of the journalist is to get the story right, to tell the truth. While we cannot doubt the conspicuous courage of big network reporters, their broader perspectives are conventional and homogenized—uninteresting—and more often than not, identical to the official line. The striking footage brought to you in living color by network valor and careerism cannot touch Fisk’s insight, depth of knowledge, and moral courage to tell the truth.
It is ironic that the correspondent who saw more of war than most soldiers would die of natural causes far from the battlefields he covered. It apparently was a stroke at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin on October 30.8 He was 74.
This blurb in no way does justice to Robert Fisk and only hints at his accomplishments and integrity. I did not know him. I only knew of him. I hope that this minimalist treatment of a great journalist will inspire others to read the remembrances and tributes by those who did know him. Above all, they should investigate his articles and books.9 We need his brand of driven honesty now more than ever.
Notes
- All prefatory quotes are from Harry Kreisler’s interview with Fisk on University of California TV’s Conversations with History: Robert Fisk, February, 2007.
- For example other reporters interviewed Bin Laden on his own territory and the number of journalist and media support workers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001 is more than three times the number killed in the Second World War. The tally of reporters killed in Afghanistan between 2001 and the middle of 2014 is given at 28, while the number of journalists killed in Iraq between March 2003 and June 2012 is 150 along with 54 media support workers. By contrast 68 journalists were killed during World War Two. Sixty-six were killed in Vietnam between 1955 and 1975. One reason given for the large number of journalists lost in recent wars is that they were the victims of targeted killings rather than combat casualties. https://cpj.org/2013/03/iraq-war-and-news-media-a-look-inside-the-death-to/ https://globaljournalist.org/2014/06/timeline-press-casualties-afghanistan/
- https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-why-does-john-malkovich-want-kill-me-9204117.html
- https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/robert-fisk-iraq-2003-patrick-cockburn-the-troubles-b1539514.html
- https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/forgotten-massacre-8139930.html
- Address to the Georgetown University Center for International and Regional Studies, State of Denial: Western Journalism and the Middle East, April 10. 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6ASJA7fbcE&t=1646s
- The Great War for Civilisation, 68.
- Reading that Fisk died of a stroke made me think of the head injuries he sustained on December 12, 2001 in a small Afghan village when his jeep broke down. A crowd gather and quickly turned hostile; they were enraged over the Mazar-i-Sharif massacres and by B-52 strikes and severely beat and stoned Fish and fellow journalist, Justin Huggler. Fisk was lucky to to have escaped at all (with the help of an elder Muslim cleric, who took his arm and walked him away from the mob). See The Great War for Civilisation, 871-876. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/my-beating-refugees-symbol-hatred-and-fury-filthy-war-9179496.html
- https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/17/robert-fisk-had-true-independence-of-mind-which-is-why-he-angered-governments-and-parts-of-the-media/ https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/09/the-life-of-robert-fisk/