Johann Hari

Johann Hari (born 21 January 1979) is a British journalist and writer. He was a columnist for The Independent, but left the paper in 2011 after admitting multiple charges of plagiarism and making malicious edits of several of his critics' Wikipedia pages using a pseudonym. He has also been a columnist for the Evening Standard and a regular arts critic on the BBC's Newsnight Review. He is a self-described "European social democrat". Hari won the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2008, but the award was revoked in 2011 after his plagiarism was revealed.

Johann Hari in 2003

Quotes

• The truth emerging from this scattered picture of nuclear proliferation is simple: there is a stronger chance of a nuclear bomb being used now than at almost any point in the Cold War.
  • "Will we wake from our nuclear coma?", The Independent (20 October 2004)

• The climate-change deniers are rapidly ending up with as much intellectual credibility as creationists and Flat Earthers... They are denying the reality of a force that — unless we change the way we live pretty fast — will kill millions.
  • "The shame of the climate change deniers", The Independent (24 April 2005)

• We are entering a world of rapidly multiplying nuclear stand-offs like this. India vs Pakistan. Iran vs Israel. America vs. China. Within decades, North Korea vs Japan and South Korea. Not one Cold War, but many - and the risk is doubled each time.
  • "From hot spots to Cold Wars", The Independent (27 July 2005)

• There is an emerging scientific consensus that global warming is making hurricanes more intense and more destructive. It turns out that Katrina fits into a pattern that scientists and greens have been trying to warn us about for a long time.
  • "New Orleans is a frightening glimpse of the future", The Independent (3 September 2005)

• My feeling about the war was — given a choice between these two things — obviously I want to see a world with much better choices than that — but given that was the choice we were confronted with, the best way through it was to try to find out what Iraqis prefer.
  • Interviewed by Matt Kennard, as cited in "Interview from the Leeds Student: Part One: About Chomsky, Hitchens and more", JohannHari.com (27 November 2005)

• The bombs held in current nuclear arsenals are seventy times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. If we don’t begin opposing the drift towards more and more of them, we will live in the shadow of the mushroom cloud for the rest of our lives — and millions may die there.
  • "And the solution to the Iran crisis is...a return to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty", JohannHari.com (The Independent, 22 January 2006)

• For all the chatter that Britain has moved beyond class, recent studies have found that it determines the life chances of British people more today than at any point since the Second World War... A child born into a rich family in Britain will almost certainly live and die rich, while a child born into a poor family will almost certainly live and die poor.
  • "Class still rules in Britain - as the Lib Dems should remember when choosing their leader", The Independent (30 January 2006)

• The greatest trick the rich — and their cheerleaders on the right — ever pulled was convincing the world that class didn’t exist. Out here in the real world, it is more real and more rigid than it has been for a century.
  • "Class still rules in Britain - as the Lib Dems should remember when choosing their leader", The Independent (30 January 2006)

• The lamest defence I could offer - one used by many supporters of the war as they slam into reverse gear - is that I still support the principle of invasion, it's just the Bush administration screwed it up. ... The evidence should have been clear to me all along: the Bush administration would produce disaster.
  • "I was wrong, terribly wrong - and the evidence should have been clear all along", The Independent (20 March 2006)

• We have been living in an ideological bubble — one of market fundamentalism.

  From the trauma of the Great Depression to 1973, there was a broad consensus across the democratic world that markets were absolutely essential to generate wealth, but they will also cause all sorts of problems if they are left unregulated. Economists like JM Keynes and JK Galbraith taught us that if you abolish markets, you get starvation; but if you abolish all the democratic checks and balances on markets, you get a system that eats itself. Unregulated businesses will cause unsustainable levels of pollution and inequality, and ultimately start pursuing unhinged business models that cause the whole system to collapse.

  • "Has market fundamentalism had its day?", The Independent (20 March 2008)

• We now have a global business system that is virtually unregulated, with trade unions crippled and politicians largely bought by the super-rich to serve their interests. And what is the result? Inequality has returned to 1920s levels, and movement between the classes has collapsed. We have bank runs unseen in a century. And now even senior Wall Street figures mutter — with only a hint of hyperbole — about a looming Depression and "the worst crisis since 1929." All we need now is rising unemployment and Zelda and F Scott Fitzgerald boozily waltzing through Wall Street, and we are back where this story began.
  • "Has Market Fundamentalism Had Its Day?", The Independent (20 March 2008).

• The outbreak of cholera in Zimbabwe became a symbol of that country's collapse — but who noticed the spread of cholera across Iraq? The McCainiacs chorused that "the surge worked" — but a study by the journal Environment and Planning found the truth. Between 2003 and 2007, Iraq was ripped by a massive ethnic cleansing. The mixed Sunni-Shia areas were destroyed. By the time the surge started, there was nobody left to purge: the country was carved into ethnically homogeneous neighbourhoods. All the surge did was build vast concrete walls between the collapsing hoods, cementing the cleansing. That's success?
  • "What did we misjudge in 2008?", The Independent (18 December 2008).

About Hari

• Oddly, the person I feel sorriest for isn't Brand himself – although he certainly comes across as a rather pitiable figure, projecting his own brokenness on to the world around him – but Johann Hari. Drummed out of Fleet Street for plagiarism, the former Independent columnist has washed up as "my mate Johann, who's been doing research for this book". For a genuinely talented polemicist, it would have been a humbling experience to have to treat this sub-undergraduate dross as the scintillating wisdom of a philosopher-king.
  • Robert Colville "Revolution by Russell Brand, review: 'sub-undergraduate dross'", The Telegraph (23 October 2014)
  • From a review of Revolution by Russell Brand which had recently been published.

External links

• the official website
• Johann Hari's columns in The Independent