(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Macfady was big, broad-shouldered and had a big heart, and was generous in his dealings with the many whistleblowers and journalists he helped. And they were many. He loved coming down for breakfast to see who had stayed overnight, friends or others who needed a place for the night, such as Julian Assange when he arrived in London from Sweden in 2010. Or it could be celebrities like author Arundhati Roy or activist and actor John Cusack who came to tell about his visit to Edward Snowden in Moscow.
Macfadyen established the Center for Investigative Journalism (TCIJ) at Goldsmiths University in New Cross, London in 2003 and was also its director. He was a regular at the Logan symposia on whistleblowing. In his last days, he was particularly concerned with defending Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning. Together with journalist John Pilger, he founded the Julian Assange Legal Defense Committee, but never experienced that Obama pardoned Manning, or that Judge Baraitser refused to extradite Assange to the United States. That would have pleased him greatly.
Race battle in Chicago
The MacFady was incredibly diverse. With experience from the racial struggle in Chicago in the sixties, where he met and introduced the young student Bernie Sanders to the world's revolutionary history, and later as an unloading worker at the port in New York, he became interested in class struggle. But also money to visit Britain and the political left there.
As an American-British documentarian, he produced more than fifty films over six decades, on racial oppression in the United States, child labor, the nuclear threat, war crimes, industrial pollution and the exploitation of workers. Hans traveled to, among other places, Ecuador, Guyana, South Africa, Mexico, Hong Kong, Thailand, the Soviet Union, the USA, Sweden, India and Turkey.
As a journalist he covered conflicts and wars, and as a journalist teacher he simply believed that the journalist's primary task is "to tell the truth, and always as well as you are able to". It is not the journalist's job to describe objective events, but to change society, he believed.
"If we allow ourselves to be drawn into the sphere of the authorities and business, the guilty go free," he says in the short memorial film that his grandson Tarquin Ramsay made in autumn 2016 (See https://vimeo.com/208361027), just before Macfadyen died. "The journalist's only property is our independence. If you lose it, you are no longer a journalist," MacFadyen said.
"As a journalist, you live in the tension field where the tectonic plates of ruling powers and classes collide. There is a lot of friction and a lot of heat. We have to use that heat."
