The Indian Express, 28 June 1975, after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s declaration of a state of emergency and the imposition of wide-ranging censorship. This empty space became one of the most powerful editorials ever published in India.
Those who hold power often go to considerable lengths to prevent certain truths being heard. Equally, those who care about truth take extraordinary risks to ensure that truth will out.
Sometimes it’s a matter of smuggling things past the censor – or publishing a giant white space to remind people of what the authorities don’t want you to read. In the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century, cartoonists would seek the censor’s approval for one cartoon, then erase it and substitute another – a trick that was partly repeated in Burma a century later.
Sometimes it’s a question of ensuring difficult truths are spoken aloud – about climate change (when world leaders don’t wish to listen), corporate arm-twisting (when the company itself tries to silence truth-tellers) or a murderous group (when criticism is so dangerous). Sometimes it’s simply a case of ensuring that crimes are remembered, so that we learn lessons for the future. In all cases, truth matters.
The Indian Express, 28 June 1975, after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s declaration of a state of emergency and the imposition of wide-ranging censorship. This empty space became one of the most powerful editorials ever published in India.
COLOUR IT IN
In 1962, the military seized power in Burma and ruled the country – later renamed as Myanmar – with an iron grip for the next half-century. Thousands were killed in pro-democracy protests in 1988. The party of Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of Burma’s national hero Aung San, gained electoral victory in 1990. Her reward was to be held under house arrest for most of the next twenty years.
These were dark times, but the Burmese did not give up hope for a different future. In 2007, Buddhist monks led huge street protests in what came to be known as the ‘Saffron Revolution’. The junta – which called itself the State Peace and Development Council, despite offering neither peace nor development – repressed the protests violently.
Things had to change. In 2010, Aung San Suu Kyi was released. This was the most dramatic turnaround in Myanmar for many years, and was front-page news all around the world. But the government was reluctant to admit the momentousness of the event, which had implications for the future of the junta itself. Newspapers were ordered to bury the story of the release on the inside pages, as if it were mere routine.
A Burmese sports paper sidestepped the prohibition with creative deceit. First Eleven carried what appeared to be a series of headlines about English football results. The censor’s office received a black and white faxed copy of the proposed front page, and approved it without changes. Surely – the censor presumably reasoned – nothing could be controversial in a front-page headline that merely summarized the weekend’s soccer games: ‘Sunderland Freeze Chelsea, United Stunned by Villa, & Arsenal Advance to Grab Their Hope.’
News-stands the next day, however, revealed a different story. Printed in full colour, some of the letters could be seen to spell out a different message: ‘Su [Aung San Suu Kyi] … Free … Unite … & … Advance … to Grab the … Hope.’ Which was exactly what many Burmese proceeded to do.
The generals were furious; ordinary Burmese were delighted. Publication of the paper was suspended, but it was too late. The damage was done. All copies of the paper were sold out. The impertinent headline, reinforced by countless other protests all across Myanmar, helped pave the way for further moves towards democracy.
In parliamentary elections in 2015, Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, long banned from politics, gained a majority. In 2016, Aung San Suu Kyi’s friend and supporter Htin Kyaw became the country’s president, thus ending more than half a century of military rule.
A Burmese sports paper used creative deceit to get round the ban on highlighting Aung San Suu Kyi’s release.
Myanmar, 13 November 2010. Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi is released after almost twenty years of house arrest.
WATER PRESSURE
Man-made climate change is the greatest danger to our planet today. If left unchecked, the effects will – in the words of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – be ‘severe, pervasive and irreversible’. These facts are well known. Despite this, however, politicians have been reluctant to act or have energetically sought to pass the responsibility on to others.
Those who will be most drastically affected by climate change include the populations of many of the world’s small islands. The Maldives, in the Indian Ocean, lie just a few feet above sea level. The islands risk being obliterated if oceans rise.
Mohammed Nasheed, environmental and human rights activist, became president after the country’s first multi-party elections in 2008. He wanted to confront the refusal by world leaders to address the issues. Nasheed decided to hold a government cabinet meeting underwater in full scuba gear. The ministers spent half an hour on the seabed, after first practising slow breathing. They communicated with whiteboards and hand signals. When the cabinet meeting was over, Nasheed gave an underwater press conference, another presidential first. ‘If the Maldives cannot be saved today,’ he told journalists, ‘we do not feel that there is much of a chance for the rest of the world.’
Today, Nasheed is no longer his country’s president. In 2012, he was forced out of office – at gunpoint, according to his own account. In 2015, he was convicted of ‘terrorism’ and jailed after a trial that was widely condemned. (In 2016, he was granted political asylum in the UK.)
But Nasheed’s underwater wake-up call – reinforced by many other protest actions, worldwide – has begun to have the impact he dreamed of. A petition of two million signatures was delivered to the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon. In 2015, world leaders in Paris finally agreed on action. Kumi Naidoo, director of the environmental group Greenpeace, said, ‘The wheel of climate change turns slowly, but in Paris it has turned.’
Those with deep pockets and access to expensive lawyers tend to believe that, if you throw enough money at a problem, critics can always be silenced. But sometimes it doesn’t work that way, as Dole, the world’s largest fruit company, discovered in recent years.
In 2009, Swedish film-maker Fredrik Gertten and his colleagues released Bananas!*, a film that told the story of twelve Nicaraguan fruit workers and a lawyer working on their behalf. The banana workers were suing Dole in connection with alleged damage to their health from pesticide use. The film was selected for competition at the Los Angeles Film Festival. But then, strange things started to happen. Dole demanded that the film should be withdrawn because of its ‘glaringly false’ statements. (Dole had not seen the film at that point.)
The Los Angeles Business Journal published a front-page article, ‘The Big Slip-Up’, accusing the film-makers of failing to check their facts. (The reporter had not watched Bananas!*, nor had she spoken to the film-makers before writing her story.) Festival organizers bowed to the pressure and removed the film from competition.
It seemed the film-makers had lost before legal action even started. Dole executive vice-president Michael Carter told a Swedish newspaper, ‘Let [Gertten] fight. He will definitely lose.’ But the film-makers’ powerlessness became a kind of power when Gertten continued to film the entire process – lawsuits, bullying, PR spin – in the weeks and months that followed.
Dole’s PR company quoted Nietzsche: ‘It is easier to cope with a bad conscience than a bad reputation.’ But Dole’s trashing of Gertten’s reputation backfired. Dole wrote to members of the Swedish parliament, warning them against the ‘false, defamatory and irresponsible’ film. The Swedes were unimpressed. A parliamentary showing of the film was packed out, and the two MPs who had organized the showing – one Social Democrat, one Conservative – wrote to inform Dole that the company had a ‘poor understanding’ of Sweden’s two-hundred-year tradition of free speech. Engaging in debate, they suggested, would have been more appropriate. Finally, Dole began to back down. The company offered to drop its lawsuit if Gertten would merely agree to cut parts of the film. Gertten did not agree. In November 2010, eighteen months after the action began, a Los Angeles court found that ‘careful review’ of Bananas!* ‘did not support’ Dole’s assertions. Dole was ordered to pay $200,000 in legal costs.
Bananas!* was shown in eighty countries, and won awards around the world. In Sweden, disgust at Dole’s behaviour contributed to a sixfold rise in the sales of fair-trade bananas. Meanwhile, Gertten’s footage of the pressures on him to stay silent became the subject of a follow-up documentary, Big Boys Gone Bananas!*, released in 2012. One review of the film concluded, ‘Corporate PR has seldom looked so sinister, or daft.’
Cropdusting a plantation in Nicaragua – as seen in the documentary Bananas!*, about pesticides and health.
SITTING IT OUT
‘Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.’
ELIE WIESEL
The war in Bosnia lasted for three years from 1992 to 1995. The Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, was besieged for most of that time. Across the country, tens of thousands of civilians were killed. The country suffered ethnic cleansing, rape and genocide.
Interviewing Serb leaders at that time could be a strange experience. When I asked Slobodan Milošević, Serb leader and chief instigator of the conflict, if he might one day find himself before a war crimes tribunal, he sounded surprised and explained that he was ‘for peace’. Radovan Karadžić, leader of the Bosnian Serbs, assured me there were no snipers surrounding the capital – cheerfully denying the lethal reality that Sarajevo experienced every day.
Too often, basic facts get lost. Humanity can get lost, too. But Sarajevo was determined to ensure that humanity and truth were not forgotten. In 2012, on the twentieth anniversary of the outbreak of the war, 11,541 empty red chairs were laid out in eight hundred rows for half a mile along the main street of the city, representing all Sarajevans who had died in the war. They included 643 smaller chairs. Those represented the children who died.
During and after the conflict, it seemed that Milošević and Karadžić were right to be complacent. There appeared to be little prospect that they would ever be held to account. But justice can be patient. In 2001, six years after the conflict ended, Milošević was sent to The Hague, and died behind bars. Karadžić, who lived for years under cover as an alternative healer and expert on ‘human quantum energy’, was arrested in 2008. In 2016, he was found guilty of crimes against humanity and genocide, and jailed for forty years.
Sarajevo, Bosnia, 6 April 2012. Each of the 11,541 red chairs commemorated one of the victims of the city’s three-year siege that began twenty years earlier.
In Algeria’s war of independence, which lasted from 1954 to 1962, torture by French forces was routine. A French paratrooper, who himself committed torture, remembered later, ‘All day, through the floorboards we heard their hoarse cries, like those of animals being slowly put to death. Sometimes, I think I can still hear them.’ Suspects were frequently tortured to death. General Jacques Massu said, ‘In answer to the question: “Was there really torture?” I can only reply in the affirmative … I am not frightened of the word.’
This was all done in order, allegedly, to improve the security situation – the same arguments that would be heard in the twenty-first century when US officials also argued that basic rules no longer applied. In the words of the CIA Director of Counterterrorism, Cofer Black, ‘After 9/11, the gloves came off.’ That was the context surrounding US torture in Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad and elsewhere.
In Algeria, one man broke what he called ‘the sordid conspiracy of silence’. Jacques Pâris de Bollardière was France’s youngest general, highly decorated for his courage in the Second World War. He was sickened by what he had seen, and by the fact that his colleagues were so eager to defend torture. In 1957, he asked to be released from his command. He warned publicly of the ‘terrible danger if we were to lose sight, under the fallacious pretext of immediate effectiveness, of moral values’. That wasn’t what the government wanted to hear. De Bollardière was jailed in a military fortress for sixty days. By contrast, General Massu was promoted.
Twenty years after de Bollardière’s death, France finally began to honour his stance. A square in Paris is named after him. He is officially praised for his moral courage – the same courage for which he was rebuked and punished at the time. In the US, meanwhile, those who maintained their integrity in dark times – like General Alberto Mora, who spoke out against the greenlighting of torture at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere – have still not received the official recognition they deserve.
Algeria, 1957. A suspect is questioned in Algeria’s long and bloody war of independence (officially, ‘pacification’).
General Jacques Pâris de Bollardière spoke out against torture, and suffered the consequences. Today, his moral courage in defying his superiors is honoured.
‘The authority of government, even such as I am willing to submit to . . . is still an impure one: to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the governed.’
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Nothing in Edward Snowden’s background suggested anything radical. His grandfather was a rear admiral, his father a coastguard. Snowden tried to enlist for Iraq before joining the CIA as a systems analyst, where he was an acknowledged IT wizard.
In 2013, he became arguably the most important whistleblower in history. He risked everything to reveal blanket surveillance by the US government, helped by the UK. He showed the world how electronic eavesdropping had spiralled out of all control.
For Snowden, a tipping point was watching James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, lie under oath to Congress. Asked whether the government collected data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans, Clapper replied, ‘No, sir. Not wittingly.’ The truthful answer would have been, ‘Yes, sir. Wittingly.’ Clapper’s lies were, said Snowden, ‘evidence of a subverted democracy’. With a nod to Thoreau, whose Civil Disobedience was published in 1849, Snowden concluded, ‘The consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed.’
Snowden’s revelations were published in the Guardian in London and around the world. He received a string of awards for his courage. The European Parliament praised him as a whistleblower and human rights defender. But those who wanted the trampling of citizens’ privacy to remain a secret did not see it that way. Snowden tried to fly from Hong Kong to Latin America. His passport was cancelled mid-air, leaving him stranded in transit in Moscow. He was charged in absentia with espionage.
In the meantime, the British government demanded that the Guardian destroy all its copies of the Snowden files. Intelligence officials supervised a three-hour orgy of computer destruction in the Guardian basement, with the help of angle grinders and electric drills. As the Guardian’s editors had already pointed out, the paper still could (and would) access and publish material in the United States. But the British authorities were determined to follow through with their ritual, almost as if the internet had never been invented. The ceremonial destruction of the hard drive was, as one columnist noted, ‘the most bizarre act of state censorship in the internet age’.
The US government has been equally inflexible. The New York Times suggested that President Obama should ‘tell his aides to start finding a way to end Mr Snowden’s vilification and give him an incentive to return home’. That didn’t happen.
Snowden has no regrets: ‘I don’t lose sleep because I’ve done what I felt I needed to do; it was the right thing to do and I’m not going to be afraid.’
