On the Immorality of Plagiarism

First of all, there is a simple point to be cleared up before any reasonable discussion on the topic can take place. The culprit, when he/she is not citing ‘precedents’ for their crime, try to exonerate themselves by pleading that they didn’t steal, merely ‘borrowed’. “I didn’t steal m’lud, I only borrowed,” is the sort of statement that gets you laughed out of court and into jail which is why no thief with an IQ of more than three would offer it in his defence. Incredibly though, you will find respected journalists offering it up in defence of the plagiarist. The more highly regarded the thief the more they rally to their defence, pleading that ‘borrowing’ is not theft.

In literature people do borrow, often unconsciously, and cannot help themselves. But if the writer catches himself on in time he is usually quite happy to acknowledge his source or he will surrender his project instantly if the borrowing has any significance and he has enough integrity not to want to put his name to something that wasn’t his in the first place . In any case, he is likely to be honest with himself, and with you.

The plagiarist however is a different animal. He steals consciously. And because he steals consciously he will never acknowledge his source. That is the difference and it is an important one.

The plagiarist will do anything rather than acknowledge his source because he knows, once he does so, he is instantly unmasked as a thief, a liar and a fraud. He spends his days therefore ducking and diving, hiding away, in order to avoid scrutiny. When he speaks in public he recites from pre-prepared answers. If he must be asked questions he demands to know what they are beforehand and the same applies to any footage shot of him for general distribution. He never confesses his crime either. He has ALWAYS to be found out and the more people he has to help him remain under cover the more difficult that is.

In days of yore many English dungeons could boast what they proudly called an “oubliette”. It comes from the French word “oublier” meaning “to forget”. Robin Hood was supposedly held in one before he was freed by his comrades. This contraption - sprung fully formed no doubt from the inventor’s brain – was basically a hole in the ground. The pit was shaped like a bottle with just room enough for the wretched victim to stand up in. You were lowered into the hole via the neck and the lid fixed on. Your captors then pissed off and forgot that you ever existed. There you remained, in cold endless night, until you went mad with grief and terror and eventually died of starvation. People who didn’t like you would say you “deserved” it.

A ‘successful’ plagiarist does something like this to his fellow man. The differences are that the victim gets to eat and walk around, and to lead what passes for a normal life; indeed you cannot ever tell he is in a pit at all,  if you do not hear his moans, because the oubliette he has been flung into and in which he dwells is his own soul, the soul that he once believed was his and now belongs to his tormentors. Now you know. And when next you hear the word ‘plagiarism’ you may move away fromt the conception of it as a game on a par with scrabble and think of it as it really is – a crime against all of us, because it is essentially a very serious crime against human rights and human freedom.

The bravest writer, John Pilger.

John Pilger today accepted the Sydney Peace Prize 2009 at Sydney Opera House. He had some things today that has distinct relevance to this blog.

Early in his oration Pilger attacked Australian policy with regards to the “boat people”, those unfortunates who flee to the shores of the great continent only to end up in what Pilger calls concentration camps like the one at Woomera. He asked how they would all feel if the boats were filled with white people. He remarked on the hypocrisy of Rudd who declared undying sympathy for the refugees early in his office and only recently declared that ” a hard line” must be taken against them. Pilger went on to castigate the rule of silence among journalists everywhere who “seem to know what not to say” without being told. He cited his own experience as a film maker, broadcaster and journalist in support of the assertion,  which indeed requires no support.  He pointed to mind control on the part of the media in service to political ideology. (The silence surrounding Travels with Li Po is owed in large measure to just that.)

“One of my favourite plays is Harold Pinter’s  “Party Time”.  He tells of the plot … a bunch of people are at a party in an apartment like any other middle-class soiree in Sydney or elsehwere. “But something is happening outside in the street, something terrible and oppressive for which  the people at the party share responsibility.” There is a moment’s uneasiness as the chatter stops for a second and then the laughter resumes.”

Pilger uses this as a methaphor for society at large. “How many of us live in that apartment?” 

“I believe that if we begin to apply  justice and courage to human affairs we begin to make sense of our world.” 

Silence he went on to say, recalling his experience of South African Apartheid, is the effect of tyranny. The citizens of Johannesburg lived a few kilometres from a shanty town where people wasted in poverty and their children died of disease but  these repectable citizens “looked from the side and did nothing.”

Australians, he went on, have become adepts at divide -and-rule where blacks who blame their own people for their misfortunes are welcomed and applauded.  Western Australia jails indigenous people at eight times the rate of the South African Apartheid figure.  Australia is internationally shamed for its treatment of  blacks.

“We discriminate on the basis of race. That’s it in a nutshell.”

Rights to land that were granted to the indigenous population of the Northern Territory in 1970 were clawed back by John Howerd by means of bribery and bullying. The Rudd government is doing the same. Leases are bought in with threats of basic amenities and services being witheld.

“You see, there are deals to be made… Foreign companies want a piece of the action”. ( For uranium and other minerals).

“Silences can be broken if we will it.”

“Tom Paine warned long ago that if we were denied critical knowledge we should storm, what he called, The Bastille of words. We need an Autralian Glasnost, … which broadly means, awakening, transparency, diversity, justice, disobedience…”

“In every newsroom, in every media college, teachers of journalism and journalists themselves need to be challenged about the part they play in the bloodshed, inequity and silence that is so often presented as normal.”

“What terrifies the agents of power is an awakening of people, of public consciousness. This is already happening in countries in Latin America where people have discovered a confidence in themselves they didn’t know existed. We should join them before our own freedom of speech is quietly withdrawn and real dissent is outlawed as the powers of the police are expanded. The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Pilger then called for a treaty guaranteeing universal land rights and a proper sharing of the resources of  Australia. The path to self-respect he warned for Australians as for any other nation lies in demanding  justice.

We agree with every word of the above with the proviso that justice is not to be “attained” as such but is only possible with the removal of injustice. You do not create ‘justice’. You make it possible. We take leave to point out that Travels with Li Po was inherenty an indictment of society that was purposefully transformed by the status quo into a fantasy …. to make money. The war is waged in the sphere of mind as it is in the hills of Iraq. AThat is what St. Paul meant by “principalities and powers” and that too, albeit in a different way, is what John Pilger is saying and why we quote him at length.