Distant Voices Read online

  Anti-bill lobbyists have argued that British television is among the best in the world. Yes, but this reputation derives, in great part, from those very ‘dissenters’ who are the amendment’s target. Wyatt and Co. would certainly have wanted to ‘balance’ John Grierson, Denis Mitchell and Norman Swallow. And great journalists like Ed Murrow and James Cameron would have been seen off, along with the likes of Cobbett, Swift and Dickens.

  The Thatcher Government is not ‘misguided’, as some have suggested. Its assault on free journalism has got this far because Thatcher and her acolytes have encountered only polite and confused opposition. The politeness should end. If broadcasters and the public do not defend the public’s right to know, who will?

  October 8, 1990

  THE CORRECT IDEAS

  AT A TIME when modern imperialism is producing a new obfuscating vocabulary, and the narrative of recent history is being murdered, I am grateful to Edward Said, Noam Chomsky and Susan George for their new books.

  In Culture and Imperialism34 Edward Said provides a rich historical guide to imperialism in its most insidious form: that is, western culture from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to present-day, ubiquitous ‘media culture’. Said shows how the perceptions of colonisers and colonised are entwined by the assumptions that drove imperialism 100 years ago and drive it today. He connects William Blake (‘The Foundation of Empire is Art and Science . . .’) with Walter Lippmann, who devoted his writings to preparing Americans for the ‘reality’ of their imperial role, to George Kennan, a principal author of the theory of ‘containing communism’ and the cold war, who believed his country to be ‘the guardian of civilisation’.

  Edward Said is especially telling when he describes the effects of modern ‘media culture’ on American attitudes towards the rest of the world. There is, he says, ‘an almost perfect correspondence between prevailing government policy and the ideology ruling news presentation and selection [which] keeps the United States’ imperial perspective towards the non-western world consistent.’ This reinforces American support for dictatorial regimes and for ‘a scale of violence out of all proportion to the violence of native insurgency’. It also fits exactly a contemptuous media ‘world view’ that regards ‘the history of other cultures [as] non-existent until it erupts in confrontation with the United States’, and believes that ‘most of what counts about foreign societies [can be] compressed into 30-second items, “sound bites”, and into the question of whether they are pro- or anti-America . . .’

  As Said points out, the essential difference between cultural indoctrination in the nineteenth century and during the American imperium is ‘the epic scale of United States global power and the corresponding power of the national domestic consensus created by the electronic media’. Thus, in Heart of Darkness, Conrad saw his central character ‘as a European in the African jungle and Gould as an enlightened westerner in the South American mountains, capable of both civilising and obliterating the natives’. Said also invites us to imagine the same power, on a world scale, which ‘is true of the United States today’.

  The point is made constantly by Hollywood, which produces the great majority of films shown in this and many other countries. Francis Ford Coppola’s movie Apocalypse Now was the Hollywood version of Heart of Darkness. Seen by millions in the cinema and on television and video, it has been called ‘a classic, definitive portrayal’ of the Vietnam war. That Coppola reduced the Vietnamese and Montenard peoples to stereotypes of Oriental viciousness was generally passed over by the admiring critics. The film claimed that Vietcong soldiers hacked off the arms of children to discourage a vaccination programme, implying this was one of the reasons why the United States had invaded Vietnam. When an American journalist wrote to the screenwriter, John Milius, asking where the severed arms story had originated, Milius returned her letter with a US Special Forces’ death’s head drawing on it, together with the words:

  We must burn them,

  We must incinerate them,

  Press after press,

  Pen after pen,

  Pencil after pencil,

  No dialogue with communist criminals.35

  In its crude way, this said a great deal about Hollywood’s treatment of the longest colonial war this century, a war that left more than two million people dead and Indochina in ruins. Films like Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Platoon, and even the Rambo series became the popular historical and cultural reference points. In all of them, self-pity, the angst of the American invader, is celebrated while the Vietnamese flit across the screen as stick figures of no consequence, or as monsters, or as noble savages, or as child-like objects of patronising sentiment. Truth was not just turned on its head, but all irony was lost. Far from being vanquished in South East Asia, the United States devastated, blockaded and isolated Vietnam and its ‘communist virus’, while subordinating to American interests almost every regime in the region.

  Noam Chomsky returns to this theme in Year 501: The Conquest Continues.36 Chomsky uses the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of America to follow the unerring line of western domination from the earliest conquests of the American indigenous peoples to the slaughters in Vietnam and the Gulf. Like Edward Said, he compares the role played by imperial elites through the centuries.

  The similarities are striking. While eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberals often expressed anti-colonial views, they were not against imperialism, arguing for its more humane application and thus legitimising and reinforcing it. This is true of contemporary liberal moralists, who frequently see themselves as striking a ‘decent, sensible balance’ between oppressed and oppressor. They, too, are not against imperialism; indeed, their support for colonial wars can be counted upon.

  Chomsky compares the weight of historical importance given to the ‘politically correct’ fiftieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the ‘day of infamy’, with other days of infamy declared unfit for public commemoration. For example, on October 11, 1961, President Kennedy ordered the escalation of the Vietnam conflict ‘from large-scale international terrorism to outright aggression’. Thirty years later, almost to the day, President Bush blocked the admission of Vietnam to the world community. And yet, writes Chomsky: ‘It is a staple of the media, and the culture generally, that we were the injured party in Vietnam.’

  Although the Nazis remain the twentieth century’s arch demons, it was, as Chomsky points out, Nazi models that determined United States ‘counter-insurgency’ doctrine in Indo-China and around the world. This was never reported in the ‘mainstream’ media, and ignored by Hollywood and other historical and cultural managers, just as genocidal atrocities were never reported. In neighbouring Laos, on which the Americans dropped the greatest tonnage of bombs in the history of war, there is no commemorative date at all, although it is thought that up to a million people may have perished.

  Imperial history has many such silences, as Hugh Cudlipp reminded us in 1989, on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of Chamberlain’s declaration of war, when he wrote, ‘There will not be nostalgic features in the Times, the Observer, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express recalling “What we said in the six years that led to the second world war”.’37 What they had said, of course, amounted to a cover-up and apology for Hitler and his ambitions.

  Will we look back with comparable insight, and perhaps even shame, on the ‘coverage’ of the Cold War? In 1987, the celebrated establishment historian, Michael Howard, wrote, ‘Few historians now believe that Stalin ever intended to advance his frontiers beyond the territories occupied by his forces in 1945.’38 Two generations in the west were instructed to believe that the opposite was true, that the ‘Russians were coming’, that communism was taking over the world, that God and Coca-Cola were in danger. As a result, millions of innocent people, in most poor societies, were killed, maimed, dislocated and isolated in the ‘noble cause’ (Reagan) of ‘stopping communism in its tracks’ (Bush).39

  Yet the attitudes of the Cold War still
dictate the way we live now and in the next century. Following the collapse of the European tyranny known as ‘communism’, monopoly capitalism declared itself the victor. Once again, truth was turned inside out. The ‘victory’ was marked by irrefutable evidence of capitalism’s failure even in its own terms, and of its most enduring disaster since the Second World War. A quarter of Europe’s poor now live in Britain; bankruptcies occur every few minutes. In the developing world, the gap between rich and poor is greater than at any time since records were kept.

  In her book, The Debt Boomerang,40 Susan George asks why all this should be regarded as the ‘natural order of things’, and why ‘free-market’ dogmas like privatisation have gained such momentum. ‘You fund people’, she explained, ‘to create an ideological climate which becomes the life-support system for the doctrine. It becomes the water for the fish – the fish doesn’t even know he’s swimming. You put enough people with the “correct” ideas in universities. You create the institutes and the foundations. All these people come together in the colloquia and symposia, open to the press, that you sponsor. And they all write in the journals that you also fund, and from there they get on the editorial pages and on the air. Pretty soon, you have those three-man (they almost always are men) pseudo debates on television between the raving radical right, the extreme-right and the right of centre. Anyone who thinks differently soon begins to seem a pariah, or someone who at the very least must make apologies for his or her beliefs.’

  Much of this pseudo debate, which equates imperial aims with democracy and the ‘free market’ with freedom, is to stifle dissent. This is true of the current ‘debate’ about ‘free trade’, following President Clinton’s announcement that US trade and foreign policies are to be linked. They always were, of course. To the great powers, especially the US, ‘free trade’ is the freedom to control commodities that are the staples of poor, non-industrial countries, along with their resources of services, tourism, finance and intellectual property rights. This is, and always has been, the essence of imperialism. And, like debt, ‘free trade’ is much more effective than a gunboat or a Rockeye cluster bomb.

  Simply being aware of this can be almost as effective as opposing it. For once awareness spreads, it becomes an antidote to propaganda that seeks to make invisible the lives and culture, and fate, of millions. Without awareness, there can be no understanding, and no resistance. Some things never change.

  March 12, 1993

  III

  THE QUIET DEATH OF THE LABOUR PARTY

  A PALER SHADE OF BLUE

  THERE IS TALK in the press, following the Labour Party’s defeat in a general election it ought to have won, about a ‘struggle’ for the party leadership. Candidates are said to be ‘embittered’ at a ‘stitch-up’ and one of them, Bryan Gould, is reported to have ‘unleashed his pent-up fury’. Such passion between those whose political differences are about as wide as this page provides the final post-election Mogadon.

  Some people apparently believe this is ‘politics’. Swathes of newspaper are devoted to it and to similar institutional games, whose rules insist that journalists, politicians and assorted ‘experts’ promote each other’s agendas. This is known as the ‘mainstream’.

  Anything that intrudes from outside this ‘mainstream’ is likely to be blocked or suppressed. Take the sacred cow of ‘defence’. To my knowledge, only one newspaper commentator (Ian Aitken) pointed out that John Smith’s tax proposals could have been funded from Britain’s annual military budget of £24 billion, without dismantling the country’s defences or frightening away voters. Aitken’s revelation was published after the election.

  The election ‘image’ over which Labour’s general secretary agonised last week was, in fact, just right. The party looked and sounded conservative in every way. The language was right, too. ‘Modernising’ and ‘choice’ and other Tory euphemisms so limited the national political debate that the perversity of their impact was minimal. Moreover, during the election campaign, it was widely agreed that ‘convergence’ had taken place between the principal policies of the parties. These policies reaffirmed the elevation of profit above people in almost all areas of life and derided the notion of common obligation as heresy. Labour differed from the official Conservatives only in tone. There was no suggestion that a Labour government would take away from the politicised bureaucracy its incentives to undermine the premises upon which a modest civilisation is based.

  For example, it was made clear that pay beds in National Health Service hospitals were no longer a Labour concern; and there was no commitment to repeal the NHS and Community Care Act (1990) whose ‘reforms’ are privatisation by another name. Labour’s manifesto referred to ‘incentives to improve performance’, which is the language of the Tories. In education, Labour said it would ‘modernise’, not throw out, the hated national curriculum and that schools would be ‘free to manage their day to day budgets’, which the government has already decreed and which had driven out teachers and brought schools close to bankruptcy.

  The success of Labour’s emergence as a conservative party has been much lauded. To date, this success has been expressed not at the polls, but in stirring victories over dissenters within the party. Something called ‘electability’, which Labour’s leading conservatives maintained would be the party’s reward for its conversion, has not materialised. Not surprisingly, the voters prefer the original, true blue to a paler shade.

  Those who still mourn Labour’s defeat might consider their degree of disillusionment had Labour won. I recommend they cast an eye over the experience of the ‘modernised’ Australian Labor Party, which, in many ways, provides a model. Within days of taking office in 1983, Labor embraced a version of the City, known locally as ‘the big end of town’. Its complete conversion took about six months. Thereafter the Hawke Government oversaw the most dramatic redistribution of wealth in the nation’s history (from the wage-earning majority to a new group of rich spivs), the highest unemployment since 1930, the greatest number of bankruptcies since records were kept and the establishment of the most monopolised press in the democratic world.

  Because Labour in this country has abandoned the policies that distinguished it, good political sense dictates that it, too, should be abandoned by those who last April gave it ‘one last chance’. This is not negativism. It is Labour that is negative. It is Labour that has given up trying to persuade, while moulding itself to what the opinion polls tell it. It is Labour that declares in effect that society is static and people’s consciousness cannot be raised. The party’s claim on many people’s loyalty is no longer tenable; for it is no longer a great mass movement, but a force of reaction that muffles any tentative suggestion of mass resistance. It is almost as if, by its very institutional aspirations, Labour exists to blunt people’s radical instincts.

  There is a striking parallel with America in the 1950s. The great unspoken among the Labour leadership is its terror of the media. For all its sport with the Windsor family and the ‘morals’ of Tory ministers, the media lie in wait for Labour to deviate from its role as a reconstituted SDP. In America forty years ago, the media’s reaction to Franklin Roosevelt’s limited social reforms – which introduced measures hitherto unheard of in a capitalist society: graduated income tax, wealth tax, public housing and a welfare state – was almost uniform. The equivalent reforms in Britain – those of the Attlee Government – produced a more delayed, though similar, reaction, in the 1980s and today.

  Both the Roosevelt and Attlee ‘new deals’ were at the core of an historic contract that allowed the powerless to consent to be governed. Of course, the deception that radical change was on the way was smothered in what became known in Britain as ‘consensus’, and which made genuine, popular democracy seem possible. In America in the 1950s, those who supported the legacy of the Roosevelt reforms were ostracised as dogmatists, sometimes as ‘communists’. Civil servants, teachers, broadcasters, trade unionists and others were cast aside. The media – news
papers and radio – became the means of hijacking ‘freedom’ on behalf of those who would suppress it.

  This is broadly the pattern of events in Britain today. T. S. Eliot’s truth, that ‘the historical truth involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence’, has no place among the ‘modernists’ of the Labour Party. For them, there is no struggle to continue, no gains to be defended. Like Henry Ford, they believe history is ‘bunk’.

  Fortunately, Henry Ford was wrong. And by letting Labour go its conservative way, and by ending the ambivalence and guilt that ties many to Labour, the great constituency of political activism in Britain is released to build upon the historic successes it has already achieved outside Parliament.

  The point is people should not lose heart, or be defensive. It was the peace movement in Britain and Germany that made universal the principle that the nuclear arms race could be stopped only by bold unilateral acts. Mikhail Gorbachev embraced the principle. That Labour should lack the political and moral imagination to make capital of such an achievement, even to disavow it, says much about its new values. As we are entering a period of re-armament, the same movement is needed urgently.

  Another popular force outside Parliament and the Labour Party was that which defeated the poll tax. In the field of criminal justice, a small, informed, vociferous coalition exposed a corrupt system. Some 800 miscarriages of justice have been brought to the surface. Independent journalists and lawyers, MPs and tenacious public committees have done this. The state honoured Terry Waite and the Beirut hostages for their undoubted courage in captivity, while the resistance of Mark Braithwaite, Engin Raghip, the Maguires and the Birmingham Six – victims closer to home – went unrecognised. They, and those who fought for them, ought to be among our heroes.