The return of George Orwell and Big Brother’s war on the truth
As George Orwell forewarned, writes John Pilger, advanced societies are being gradually depoliticised and political language is being turned on its head.
THE OTHER NIGHT, I saw George Orwells’s Nineteen Eighty-Four performed on the London stage.
Although crying out for a contemporary interpretation, Orwell’s
warning about the future was presented as a period piece — remote,
unthreatening, almost reassuring. It was as if Edward Snowden had revealed nothing, Big Brother was not now a digital eavesdropper and Orwell himself had never said:
'... to be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.'
Acclaimed by critics, the skilful production was a measure of our
cultural and political times. When the lights came up, people were
already on their way out. They seemed unmoved, or perhaps other
distractions beckoned.
“What a mindfuck,” said a young woman, lighting up her phone.
As advanced societies are de-politicised, the changes are both subtle and spectacular.
In everyday discourse, political language is turned on its head, as Orwell prophesised in 1984.
'Democracy' is now a rhetorical device. Peace is 'perpetual war'.
'Global' is imperial. The once hopeful concept of 'reform' now means
regression, even destruction. 'Austerity' is the imposition of extreme
capitalism on the poor and the gift of socialism for the rich — an
ingenious system under which the majority service the debts of the few.
In the arts, hostility to political truth-telling is an article of bourgeois faith.
'Picasso’s red period,' says an Observer headline, 'and why politics don’t make good art'.
Consider this in a newspaper that promoted the bloodbath in Iraq as a
liberal crusade. Picasso’s lifelong opposition to fascism is a footnote,
just as Orwell’s radicalism has faded from the prize that appropriated
his name.
A few years ago, Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at Manchester University, reckoned that
'... for the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent
British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the
foundations of the western way of life.'
No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron damns the corruption of the ruling class, no Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin reveal the moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw have no equivalents today. Harold Pinter was the last to raise his voice.
Among the insistent voices of consumer- feminism, none echoes Virginia Woolf, who described
'... the arts of dominating other people … of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital.'
At the National Theatre, a new play, Great Britain, satirises the phone hacking scandal that has seen journalists tried and convicted, including a former editor of Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World. Described as a 'farce with fangs [that] puts the whole incestuous [media] culture in the dock and subjects it to merciless ridicule', the play’s targets are the 'blessedly funny' characters in Britain’s tabloid press.
That is well and good, and so familiar.
What of the non-tabloid media that regards itself as reputable and
credible, yet serves a parallel role as an arm of state and corporate
power, as in the promotion of illegal war?
The Leveson Inquiry
into phone hacking glimpsed this unmentionable. Tony Blair was giving
evidence, complaining to His Lordship about the tabloids’ harassment of
his wife, when he was interrupted by a voice from the public gallery. David Lawley-Wakelin, a film-maker, demanded Blair’s arrest and prosecution for war crimes.
There was a long pause: the shock of truth.
Lord Leveson
leapt to his feet and ordered the truth-teller thrown out and apologised
to the war criminal. Lawley-Wakelin was prosecuted; Blair went free.
Blair’s enduring accomplices are more respectable than the phone hackers.
When the BBC arts presenter, Kirsty Wark, interviewed him on the tenth anniversary of his invasion of Iraq, she gifted him a moment he could only dream of; she allowed him to agonise over his “difficult” decision on Iraq, rather than call him to account for his epic crime.
This evoked the procession of BBC journalists who in 2003 declared
that Blair could feel “vindicated” and the subsequent, “seminal” BBC
series, The Blair Years, for which David Aaronovitch
was chosen as the writer, presenter and interviewer. A Murdoch retainer
who campaigned for military attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria,
Aaronovitch fawned expertly.
Since the invasion of Iraq – the exemplar of an act of unprovoked aggression the Nuremberg prosecutor Robert H. Jackson called “the
supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in
that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” – Blair and his mouthpiece and principal accomplice, Alastair Campbell, have been afforded generous space in the Guardian to rehabilitate their reputations.
Described as a Labour Party “star”, Campbell has sought the sympathy
of readers for his depression and displayed his interests, though not his current assignment as advisor, with Blair, to the Egyptian military tyranny.
As Iraq is dismembered as a consequence of the Blair/Bush invasion, a Guardian headline declares:
'Toppling Saddam was right, but we pulled out too soon'.
This ran across a prominent article on 13 June by a former Blair functionary, John McTernan, who also served Iraq’s CIA installed dictator Iyad Allawi. In calling for a repeat invasion of a country his former master helped destroy, he made no reference to the deaths of at least 700,000 people, the flight of four million refugees and sectarian turmoil in a nation once proud of its communal tolerance.
'Blair embodies corruption and war,' wrote the radical Guardian columnist Seumas Milne in a spirited piece on 3 July.
This is known in the trade as “balance”.
The following day, the paper published a full-page advertisement for an American Stealth bomber.
On a menacing image of the bomber were the words:
'The F-35. GREAT For Britain'.
This other embodiment of “corruption and war” will cost British
taxpayers £1.3 billion, its F-model predecessors having slaughtered
people across the developing world.
In a village in Afghanistan, inhabited by the poorest of the poor, I
filmed Orifa, kneeling at the graves of her husband, Gul Ahmed, a carpet
weaver, seven other members of her family, including six children, and
two children who were killed in the adjacent house. A “precision”
500-pound bomb fell directly on their small mud, stone and straw house,
leaving a crater 50 feet wide.
Lockheed Martin, the plane’s manufacturer, had pride of place in the Guardian’s advertisement.
The former U.S. secretary of state and aspiring president of the United States, Hillary Clinton, was recently on the BBC’s Women’s Hour, the quintessence of media respectability.
The presenter, Jenni Murray,
presented Clinton as a beacon of female achievement. She did not remind
her listeners about Clinton’s profanity that Afghanistan was invaded to “liberate” women
like Orifa. She asked Clinton nothing about her administration’s
terror campaign using drones to kill women, men and children. There was
no mention of Clinton’s idle threat, while campaigning to be the first
female president, to “eliminate” Iran, and nothing about her support for illegal mass surveillance and the pursuit of whistle-blowers.
Murray did ask one finger-to-the-lips question.
Had Clinton forgiven Monica Lewinsky for having an affair with husband? “Forgiveness is a choice,” said Clinton, “for me, it was absolutely the right choice.”
This recalled the 1990s and the years consumed by the Lewinsky “scandal”. President Bill Clinton was then invading Haiti, and bombing the Balkans, Africa and Iraq. He was also destroying the lives of Iraqi children; UNICEF reported the deaths of half a million Iraqi infants under the age of five as a result of an embargo led by the U.S. and Britain.
The children were media unpeople, just as Hillary Clinton’s victims in the invasions she supported and promoted – Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia – are media unpeople. Murray made no reference to them. A photograph of her and her distinguished guest, beaming, appears on the BBC website.
In politics, as in journalism and the arts, it seems that dissent
once tolerated in the “mainstream” has regressed to a dissidence — a
metaphoric underground.
When I began a career in Britain’s Fleet Street in the 1960s, it was
acceptable to critique western power as a rapacious force. Read James Cameron’s celebrated reports of the explosion of the Hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll, the barbaric war in Korea and the American bombing of North Vietnam.
Today’s grand illusion is of an information age when, in truth, we
live in a media age in which incessant corporate propaganda is
insidious, contagious, effective and liberal.
In his 1859 essay On Liberty, to which modern liberals pay homage, John Stuart Mill wrote:
'Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with
barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means
justified by actually effecting that end.'
The 'barbarians' were large sections of humanity of whom 'implicit obedience' was required.
'It’s a nice and convenient myth that liberals are peacemakers and conservatives the warmongers,' wrote the historian Hywel Williams in 2001, 'but
the imperialism of the liberal way may be more dangerous because of its
open-ended nature: its conviction that it represents a superior form of
life.'
He had in mind a speech by Blair in which the then prime minister promised to 'reorder the world around us' according to his 'moral values'.
Richard Falk, the respected authority on international law and the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine, once described a
'... a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen [with]
positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as
threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political violence.'
It is
'... so widely accepted as to be virtually unchallengeable.'
Tenure and patronage reward the guardians.
On BBC Radio 4, Razia Iqbal interviewed Toni Morrison, the African-American Nobel Laureate. Morrison wondered why people were “so angry” with Barack Obama, who was “cool” and wished to build a “strong economy and health care”.
Morrison was proud to have talked on the phone with her hero, who had
read one of her books and invited her to his inauguration.
Neither she nor her interviewer mentioned Obama’s seven wars, including his terror campaign by drone, in which whole families, their rescuers and mourners have been murdered. What seemed to matter was that a “finely spoken” man of colour had risen to the commanding heights of power.
In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon wrote that the 'historic mission' of the colonised was to serve as a 'transmission line'
to those who ruled and oppressed. In the modern era, the employment of
ethnic difference in western power and propaganda systems is now seen as
essential. Obama epitomises this, though the cabinet of George W. Bush – his warmongering clique – was the most multiracial in presidential history.
As the Iraqi city of Mosul fell to the jihadists of ISIS, Obama said:
“The American people made huge investments and sacrifices in order to give Iraqis the opportunity to chart a better destiny.”
How “cool” is that lie?
How “finely spoken” was Obama’s speech at the West Point military academy on 28 May.
Delivering his “state of the world” address at the graduation ceremony of those who “will take American leadership” across the world, Obama said:
“The United States will use military force, unilaterally if
necessary, when our core interests demand it. International opinion
matters, but America will never ask permission …”
In repudiating international law and the rights of independent
nations, the American president claims a divinity based on the might of
his “indispensable nation”.
It is a familiar message of imperial impunity, though always bracing to hear.
Evoking the rise of fascism in the 1930s, Obama said:
“I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being.”
Historian Norman Pollack wrote:
'For goose-steppers, substitute the seemingly more innocuous
militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we
have the reformer manqué, blithely at work, planning and executing
assassination, smiling all the while.'
In February, the U.S. mounted one of its “colour” coups against the elected government in Ukraine, exploiting genuine protests against corruption in Kiev. Obama’s national security adviser Victoria Nuland personally selected the leader of an “interim government”. She nicknamed him “Yats”. Vice President Joe Biden Joe Biden came to Kiev, as did CIA Director John Brennan. The shock troops of their putsch were Ukrainian fascists.
For the first time since 1945, a neo-Nazi, openly anti-Semitic party controls key areas of state power in a European capital.
No Western European leader has condemned this revival of fascism in
the borderland through which Hitler’s invading Nazis took millions of
Russian lives. They were supported by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), responsible for the massacre of Jews and Russians they called “vermin”.
The UPA is the historical inspiration of the present-day Svoboda Party and its fellow-travelling Right Sector. Svoboda leader Oleh Tyahnybok has called for a purge of the “Moscow-Jewish mafia” and “other scum”, including gays, feminists and those on the political left.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has ringed
Russia with military bases, nuclear warplanes and missiles as part of
its NATO Enlargement Project. Reneging on a promise made to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would not expand “one inch to the east”,
NATO has, in effect, militarily occupied eastern Europe. In the former
Soviet Caucasus, NATO’s expansion is the biggest military build-up since
the Second World War.
A Nato Membership Action Plan is Washington’s gift to the coup-regime in Kiev.
In August, 'Operation Rapid Trident' will put American and British troops on Ukraine’s Russian border and 'Sea Breeze'
will send U.S. warships within sight of Russian ports. Imagine the
response if these acts of provocation, or intimidation, were carried out
on America’s borders.
In reclaiming Crimea – which Nikita Kruschev
illegally detached from Russia in 1954 – the Russians defended
themselves as they have done for almost a century. More than 90 per cent
of the population of Crimea voted to return the territory to Russia.
Crimea is the home of the Black Sea Fleet and its loss would mean life
or death for the Russian Navy and a prize for NATO. Confounding the war
parties in Washington and Kiev, Vladimir Putin withdrew troops from the
Ukrainian border and urged ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine to abandon
separatism.
In Orwellian fashion, this has been inverted in the west to the “Russian threat”.
Hillary Clinton likened Putin to Hitler.
Without irony, right-wing German commentators said as much. In the
media, the Ukrainian neo-Nazis are sanitised as “nationalists” or “ultra
nationalists”. What they fear is that Putin is skilfully seeking a
diplomatic solution, and may succeed.
On 27 June, responding to Putin’s latest accommodation – his request
to the Russian Parliament to rescind legislation that gave him the power
to intervene on behalf of Ukraine’s ethnic Russians – Secretary of
State John Kerry issued another of his ultimatums. Russia must “act within the next few hours, literally” to end the revolt in eastern Ukraine.
Notwithstanding that Kerry is widely recognised as a buffoon, the
serious purpose of these “warnings” is to confer pariah status on Russia
and suppress news of the Kiev regime’s war on its own people.
A third of the population of Ukraine
are Russian-speaking and bilingual. They have long sought a democratic
federation that reflects Ukraine’s ethnic diversity and is both
autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most are neither “separatists” nor
“rebels” but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland.
Separatism is a reaction to the Kiev junta’s attacks on them, causing as
many as 110,000 (UN estimate) to flee across the border into Russia. Typically, they are traumatised women and children.
Like Iraq’s embargoed infants, and Afghanistan’s “liberated” women
and girls, terrorised by the CIA’s warlords, these ethnic people of
Ukraine are media unpeople in the west, their suffering and the
atrocities committed against them minimised, or suppressed. No sense of
the scale of the regime’s assault is reported in the mainstream western
media.
This is not unprecedented.
Reading again Phillip Knightley’s masterly The First Casualty: the war correspondent as hero, propagandist and mythmaker, I renewed my admiration for the Manchester Guardian’s Morgan Philips Price, the only western reporter to remain in Russia during the 1917 revolution
and report the truth of a disastrous invasion by the western allies.
Fair-minded and courageous, Philips Price alone disturbed what Knightley
calls an anti-Russian 'dark silence' in the west.
On 2 May, in Odessa, 41 ethnic Russians were burned alive in the trade union headquarters with police standing by. There is horrifying video evidence.
The Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh hailed the massacre as “... another bright day in our national history”.
In the American and British media, this was reported as a 'murky
tragedy' resulting from 'clashes' between 'nationalists' (neo-Nazis) and
'separatists' (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a
federal Ukraine).
The New York Times buried it, having dismissed as Russian
propaganda warnings about the fascist and anti-Semitic policies of
Washington’s new clients. The Wall Street Journal damned the victims: 'Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says'. Obama congratulated the junta for its "restraint”. On 28 June, the Guardian devoted most of a page to declarations by the Kiev regime’s “president”, the oligarch Petro Poroshenko.
Again, Orwell’s rule of inversion applied. There was no putsch; no
war against Ukraine’s minority; the Russians were to blame for
everything.
“We want to modernise my country,” said Poroshenko.
“We want to introduce freedom, democracy and European values. Somebody doesn’t like that. Somebody doesn’t like us for that.”
According to his report, the Guardian’s
reporter, Luke Harding, did not challenge these assertions, or mention
the Odessa atrocity, the regime’s air and artillery attacks on
residential areas, the killing and kidnapping of journalists, the
firebombing of an opposition newspaper and his threat to “free Ukraine from dirt and parasites”. The enemy are 'rebels', 'militants', 'insurgents', 'terrorists' and stooges of the Kremlin.
Summon from history the ghosts of Vietnam, Chile, East Timor, southern Africa, Iraq; note the same tags.
Palestine is the lodestone of this unchanging deceit. On 11 July,
following the latest Israeli, American equipped slaughter in Gaza – 80
people including six children in one family – an Israeli general writes
in the Guardian under the headline, 'A necessary show of force'.
In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl
and asked her about her films that glorified the Nazis. Using
revolutionary camera and lighting techniques, she produced a documentary
form that mesmerised Germans; it was her Triumph of the Will that reputedly cast Hitler’s spell. I asked her about propaganda in societies that imagined themselves superior.
She replied that the “messages” in her films were dependent not on “orders from above” but on a “submissive void” in the German population.
“Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?” I asked.
"Everyone,” she replied, “and of course the intelligentsia.”
Follow John Pilger on twitter@johnpilger. (This story is copyright John Pilger and is not covered by our usual Creative Commons policy.)
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