By John Pilger
Orwell's chilling vision of the future in '1984' is happening today in the form of media manipulation and unnecessary wars.
July 11, 2014
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The other night, I saw George Orwells’s 1984 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 the young woman, lighting up her phone.
As
advanced societies are de-politicized, the changes are both subtle and
spectacular. In everyday discourse, political language is turned on its
head, as Orwell prophesied 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 Theater, a new play, Great Britain, satirizes
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 apologized 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 agonize 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 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’s, had pride of place in the Guardian’s advertisement.
The former US 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 US 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 colonized 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 epitomizes 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 militarization 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 US
mounted one of its “color” 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 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 US
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 traumatized women and children.
Like
Iraq’s embargoed infants, and Afghanistan’s “liberated” women and
girls, terrorized by the CIA’s warlords, these ethnic people of Ukraine
are media unpeople in the west, their suffering and the atrocities
committed against them minimized, 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 theManchester 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 modernize 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 mesmerized 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.”
John Pilger, renowned
investigative journalist and documentary film-maker, is one of only two
to have twice won British journalism's top award; his documentaries have
won academy awards in both the U.K. and the U.S. Pilger’s new film, "
Utopia," about Australia, was released in Australia in January.
www.johnpilger.com
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