THIS BOOK SETS out to offer a different way of seeing events of our day. I have tried to rescue from media oblivion uncomfortable facts which may serve as antidotes to the official truth; and in so doing, I hope to have given support to those ‘distant voices’ who understand how vital, yet fragile is the link between the right of people to know and to be heard, and the exercise of liberty and political democracy. This book is a tribute to them.
Written originally as essays for the New Statesman and Society, and the Guardian and the Independent, the collection draws on my previous books, notably Heroes,1 Indeed, in some respects it is an extension of Heroes. I have rewritten and combined many of the pieces, adding new material as the dates at the end of each chapter indicate. This is especially true of the four long Cambodia chapters, which grew out of work published over a dozen years. Indeed, in this completely revised edition there is a great deal that is new, notably the chapters on East Timor, which formed the basis for my documentary film, Death of a Nation, broadcast in 1994.
I have used a range of styles, which I hope readers will regard as a strength. There are pieces written in response to unfolding events, as in the Gulf War, which have a contemporary feel rather than a linear narrative, and more reflective chapters such as those on East Timor, Cambodia and Australia. And there are pieces simply about people, which I enjoy writing, as in the opening chapters of ‘Invisible Britain’ and later, in ‘Terminator in Bifocals’. There is also a shamelessly sentimental tribute to my typewriter, ‘Baby Hermes’, still going after 30 years and numerous close calls.
The title Distant Voices is taken from an essay I wrote in the wake of the disintegration of communist power in Eastern Europe and which argued that Western triumphalism and the ‘new world order’ had brought a renewed threat to many freedoms, such as diversity of expression.2 The media, the arena in which I work, has been both a major victim of and a collaborator in the narrowing of information and ideas, although it is misrepresented as the very opposite. That’s why the majority of these essays are about or touch upon the role of the media in controlling the way we see and in confining and isolating us in the present. This new power is perhaps best demonstrated in the section ‘Mythmakers of the Gulf War’.
Long after the Gulf War, I remember vividly two surreal moments from television. The first was on the BBC’s arts programme The Late Show, which devoted an edition to foreign correspondents talking about their adventures in the Gulf.3 As each one spoke, the background filled with images from the war itself, mostly tanks and artillery and missiles flashing in the night. Then suddenly the scene changed to bulldozers at work; and the reporter’s monologue was overwhelmed by shocking pictures behind him. Driven by Allied soldiers, the bulldozers were pushing thousands of bodies into mass graves. Many of the bodies were crushed, as if they had been run over. The memory reached back to similar scenes at Belsen, Dachau and Auschwitz where newsreel cameras recorded bulldozers pushing thousands of bodies into open pits.
To my knowledge the BBC’s subversive blink was the only time the British public was allowed to see the extent of the slaughter in the Gulf. Certainly there were news reports of the ‘turkey shoot’ on the Basra road; and the famous Observer photograph of a man burnt to a skeletal monster, upright in the cabin of his truck.4 But the dead generally were represented as looters, and the pathetic objects they had taken from Kuwait – toys, electric fans – were highlighted as evidence of their guilt. The crime of slaughtering people who were fleeing was passed off as an ‘unfortunate’ and ‘tragic’ postscript to a necessary war – a war in which precious few Allied lives were lost and Western technology had entertained the viewers at home. It had been both a good war and a clean war. That was the official truth.
The second memorable moment was Clive James reviewing 1991, again on BBC Television. In awarding Saddam Hussein the ‘BBC’s Gardener’s World Award’ as ‘the person who’s done most to transform the appearance of our planet in 1991’, James made the war the joke of the year.5 No bulldozers were shown, no bodies piled in open pits.
When these events next entered public consciousness, the process was complete: the unthinkable had been normalised. In May 1992 a coroner in Oxford handed down an ‘unlawful killing’ verdict on the deaths of nine British soldiers killed by American ‘friendly fire’. Newspapers which had supported sending the troops to the Gulf and had colluded with the Ministry of Defence in obscuring the true nature of the war now attacked the government for ‘covering up the truth’ about the soldiers’ deaths.
No irony was noted. Not a single reference was made to what the American writer Michael Albert has called ‘one of the more wanton, cowardly massacres in modern military history’, and which resulted in the deaths of as many as 200,000 men, women and children, none of them the subject of a British inquest or an international enquiry convened by the United Nations in whose name the slaughter was initiated. Most were almost certainly killed unlawfully: either by ‘anti-personnel’ weapons and ‘weapons of mass destruction’, whose legality has yet to be tested under the Geneva Convention; or by attacks on civilian centres, such as the RAF attack on the town of al-Nasiriyah; or while retreating and surrendering. Countless defenceless men were buried alive in the night beneath advancing American bulldozers, the same machines which were later used unlawfully to dump the dead in pits without respect for human identity and for the rights of their families to know the truth and to mourn.
The fact that the war continues today against the children of Iraq is of no interest to the Western media. Iraq is no longer ‘a story’. There are more dramatic, more ‘relevant’ pictures to be had elsewhere. Thanks to a few – the voluntary aid agencies, the Harvard medical teams, Dr Eric Hoskins of the Gulf Peace Team, Victoria Brittain of the Guardian – careful readers will know that, as a direct result of American and British-led sanctions against Iraq, more than a million Iraqi children are seriously malnourished and more than 100,000 are seriously ill, and many of those are likely to die.6 Iraqi doctors are struggling with a disease not seen for many years, pica, which babies contract by eating dirt.7 In its latest study, the Harvard team describes Iraqi infants as ‘the most traumatised children of war ever described’.8 Like the slaughter that preceded it, the ‘unthinkable has been normalised’, as Edward S. Herman wrote in his fine essay, ‘The Banality of Evil’.
Understanding this concept, in war and peace, is one of the aims of this book. As Herman pointed out: ‘Doing terrible things in an organised and systematic way rests on “normalisation” . . . There is usually a division of labor in doing and rationalising the unthinkable, with the direct brutalising and killing done by one set of individuals . . . others working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive Napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of the experts, and the mainstream media, to normalise the unthinkable for the general public.’9
Of course, ‘normalising’ can only be successful once ‘distance’ has been established. General Schwarzkopf’s video game show during the Gulf War, which television dutifully transmitted at peak viewing times, was an outstanding example of this. Like the pilots who dropped the ‘smart’ bombs, politicians, journalists, bureaucrats and the public, all of us, were kept at a distance. In East Timor, the Suharto regime’s murder of two television crews, its sealing of the country, and the collusive silence of Western governments, kept us all at a distance. What we could not see did not happen.
My own experience as a journalist, much of it spent in wartime and at places of upheaval, has taught me rudely about this process. The first time I saw and touched a victim of Napalm – her smouldering skin came away and stuck to my hand – I also saw the aircraft that had dropped the Napalm bomb on a village path. When, a few days later, I stood up at a press conference and asked an American briefer, a pleasant man just doing his job, if he had ever seen a victim of Napalm, he stared blankly at me, a beacon of incredulity. Earlier he had used the term ‘collateral damage’. I asked him what this meant. He stared some more. Surely, I knew my ‘ABC’. He finally asked me to ‘rephrase’ the question. I repeated it, twice, until he said the word ‘people’. When I asked him if this meant ‘civilian people’, his affirmation was barely audible.
No doubt because I was young, this and other encounters of striking similarity left an impression upon me. I formed the view that journalism ought not to be a process that separated people from their actions, or itself an act of complicity. I became especially interested in the decision-making of those of apparently impeccable respectability, whose measured demeanour and ‘greyness’ contained not a hint of totalitarianism and yet who, at great remove in physical and cultural distance, executed and maimed people, destroying and dislocating their communities on a scale comparable with the accredited monsters of our time.
In the Cambodia and East Timor chapters I have described this synthesis – in Cambodia, between Nixon and Kissinger on the one hand and Pol Pot and his gang on the other. What the former began from afar, the latter completed. Only the method varied. To understand that is to begin to understand the true nature of the crime perpetrated in Cambodia and where the responsibility for it lies. And it helps to explain why every conceivable moral and intellectual contortion is currently being attempted to protect those who, in the ‘division of labour’, share the culpability either as accessories or apologists.
In the East Timor section I have drawn together my own experience as a reporter going undercover, with interviews conducted around the world with those who played a part in the cataclysmic events that have consumed that country beyond the reach of the TV camera and the satellite dish. In this way, with hillsides of crosses and faces of unsmiling, courageous people fresh in our memory, David Munro and I were able to reconstruct a largely forgotten history and lay before its culpable participants the enduring evidence of their work. For me, the brutal death of 200,000 East Timorese, a third of the population, says much about how the modern world is ordered and how most of us are pressed to believe otherwise.
The long ‘silence’ over the genocide in East Timor is indicative of how much of the modern media is ordered. In recent years a new version of an old ethos has arisen in the so-called ‘free’ media in the west. It was expressed succinctly in May 1992 by the director of programmes of the new British network television company, Carlton, which replaced Thames following the infamous auction of commercial franchises instigated by former prime minister Thatcher. Current affairs programmes ‘that don’t deliver’, he said, ‘will not survive in the new ITV’. To ‘earn their way’, they have to attract viewing audiences of at least six to eight million people, regardless of the subject matter. ‘We have to be hard-headed and realistic,’ he said.10
The departing editor of Thames’s This Week series – which died with Thames – analysed this ‘hard-headedness’ and apparent failure to ‘deliver’. He pointed out that the two ITV current affairs flag carriers, This Week and World in Action, represented ‘the only area in commercial television that had not only maintained its popular audience, but improved it’; that current affairs audiences had increased by 60 per cent; and that World in Action with its thirty-five-year tradition of controversial, award-winning broadcast journalism, was set to average eight million viewers per programme. Moreover, current affairs drew larger audiences than even some ‘light entertainment’.11 Following the late-night screening of Death of a Nation, my film on East Timor, British Telecom reported calls to the advertised ITV ‘helpline’ number running at 4,000 a minute.
None of this ought to be surprising. What the public wants is so often not what the editor of the Daily Beast says they want. Year after year surveys of television trends demonstrate people’s preference for strong, hard-hitting factual programmes. This and quality drama remain the strengths of British television while its listings show more and more anodyne sitcoms, the worst of Hollywood and soaps. In April 1994 Granada Television announced that it was dropping World in Action for two months to make way for a ‘bumper episode’ of Coronation Street. This will be the series’ longest absence from the screen in its history.
Official truths are often powerful illusions, such as that of ‘choice’ in the media society. One of the principal arbiters of this is Rupert Murdoch. Having swallowed Times Newspapers and British Satellite Broadcasting with the help of his friend, Margaret Thatcher, Murdoch in 1992 added the television coverage of Britain’s most popular game, football. In secret collusion with the BBC, Murdoch’s BSkyB bought the rights to live coverage of all premier league games. As its cut of the deal, the BBC shows the highlights. Even those who already own a Murdoch satellite dish will almost certainly have to pay a monthly football charge, or be excluded from what millions regard as the high point of their week.
This is ‘choice’ at its most Orwellian, denying people not only programmes that are politically unpalatable but also their time-honoured pleasures. Murdoch’s next ‘buys’ are reported to be the television coverage of the Grand National and the rugby union final. One wonders what the purpose is of such voracity. Profit, of course; and power of an explicit kind.
In an article entitled ‘Britain’s class war in a satellite dish’, the London correspondent of Murdoch’s Australian, Nicholas Rothwell, described Murdoch as a free-market Karl Marx. ‘Murdoch’s empire has always shared one thing with the Marxist enterprise,’ he wrote, ‘it turns ideas into social and economic experiments . . . If BSkyB’s swoop to seize control of televised soccer marks the climax of News Corporation’s long-term plan for a self-reinforcing media system, it is also the culminating event in a social . . . and even ideological . . . transformation of Britain in the image of a radical philosophy: one which places the media corporation, as a promoter of information to the ordinary consumer, in direct opposition to the established elites’.12
This is presumably what Murdoch himself believes. As a principal backer of Thatcherism’s ‘radical philosophy’, he can claim to have shaken the old order, helping to abolish the humanist wing of the Tory Party and to damage the royal family. As his London man implies, he intends to replace this with a Murdoch-approved elite which ‘places the media corporation . . . in direct competition to the established elites’. In other words, so powerful are Murdoch and his fellow media corporatists that they hardly need governments any more.
For many people, this struggle between the elites means an accelerated erosion of real freedom. Under the old system the bias of the state operated through a ‘consensus’ that was broadly acceptable to the established order. Controversial television programmes could be kept off the air, or watered down, merely by applying arbitrary ‘guidelines’ that were accompanied by ritualistic nods and winks. In this way, The War Game, a brilliant dramatisation of the effects of a nuclear attack on Britain, was suppressed by the BBC for twenty years;13 and during the same period more than fifty programmes critical of the war in Ireland were banned, delayed or doctored.14
As the influence of television has surpassed that of the press, perhaps in no other country has broadcasting held such a privileged position as an opinion leader. Possessing highly professional talent, and the illusion of impartiality (a venerable official truth, with its lexicon of ‘balance’, etc.), as well as occasionally dissenting programmes, ‘public service broadcasting’ developed into a finely crafted instrument of state propaganda. Witness the BBC’s coverage of the Cold War, the wars in the Falklands and the Gulf, and the 1984–5 miners’ strike.
One wonders why Thatcher wanted to change it. Of course paternalism and false consensus were not her way, neither was dissent in any effective form, albeit token. Thus, she never forgave Thames Television for showing Death on the Rock and exposing the activities of an SAS death squad in Gibraltar.
As for the BBC, most of its voices of dissent have long fallen silent. They are the broadcasters and producers who opposed the slaughter in the Gulf and the way it was represented to the British people, but who remained anonymous. Even before the last British election campaign had got under way, the BBC’s principal current affairs programme, Panorama, felt the need to suppress a report that had made a few mildly critical observations of seasonal Tory back-stabbing over economic policy.15
Today BBC current affairs is seldom controversial as it is secured within a pyramid of ‘directorates’ that have little to do with free journalism and are designed to control: to shore up assumptions, not to challenge them. In any case, silence is no longer optional in the increasingly centralised, undemocratic state that is the other side of the media society. As the market has been ‘freed’ from state controls (i.e. nineteenth-century laissez-faire nostrums have been re-imposed), so information has been subjected to draconian new controls.
I have touched upon these restrictions in several chapters, believing that many people may be unaware that, behind the supermarket façade, certain state controls are now reminiscent of those in the old Soviet Union. As you drive south across Vauxhall Bridge in London you pass the most striking new building in the capital; it houses the domestic secret intelligence service, MI5, now expanding its role as a police and domestic surveillance force, its anonymity and unaccountability guaranteed by Parliament. How ironic that is, now that the KGB is no more. While John Major professes ‘open government’ and theatrically names Stella Rimington as the head of MI5, the secret state grows more powerful than ever.
As Tim Gopsill has pointed out, Britain is the only country in the world with a statutory bar on an elected member of Parliament addressing his constituents through the broadcast media.16 There are now more than 100 laws in Britain that make disclosure of information a crime. Under the ‘reformed’ Official Secrets Act – ‘reformed’ being officialspeak for even more restriction – all the major revelations of official lying and venality in the 1980s would now be illegal. The Sunday Telegraph once likened investigative journalism to an offence against the state; it has become just that.17
Two examples: the 1981 Contempt of Court Act empowers judges and magistrates to ban the reporting of trials. Thus, hundreds of trials take place in secret every year, some of them deeply sensitive to the state. Under the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act, broadcasters and journalists must surrender film and source material to the police; and an order against one media organisation automatically applies to the others.
In 1991 Central Television and I encountered the full sanction of government secrecy and intervention in the courts in a libel action brought against my film Cambodia: The Betrayal. ‘Public Interest Immunity Certificates’ – gagging orders – were used successfully against us before they were exposed in the Matrix Churchill trial. I have described this in the chapter ‘Through the Looking Glass’. Britain has the most restrictive libel laws in the democratic world – a fact which Robert Maxwell exploited until the day he drowned.
The Director of Public Prosecutions has used the Prevention of Terrorism Act to force Channel 4 and an independent programme maker to reveal the identity of an informant whose life could be at risk. The case concerned a documentary film, The Committee, which alleged widespread collusion between members of the British security services, Loyalist paramilitaries and senior members of Northern Ireland’s business community in a secret terrorist campaign dedicated to sectarian and political assassination.18
This, and similar cases, receive scant attention compared with the sex lives of establishment politicians, and the marriage difficulties of the royal family. There are the perennial calls for protection of privacy legislation, but this has little to do with protecting the rights of ordinary people, and everything to do with protecting the reputations of establishment figures. There is no real desire to intervene in ‘tabloid scandal-mongering’ – which is duly reported in depth by the ‘quality’ press. The scandal mongers, after all, are important people. They can witchhunt dissenters when required; and every five years most of them can be relied upon to help elect a Tory government. For this, the Queen is instructed to honour their editors: a fine irony. The lost issue is the need to protect the public from the state, not the press.
I have devoted the final chapters to Australia, which in many ways offers a model for the future. In the 1960s Australians could boast the most equitable spread of personal income in the world. Since then the redistribution of wealth has been spectacular as the world’s first Thatcherite Labor government has ‘reformed’ the fragile Australian economy and given it over to the world ‘free market’. Bob Hawke’s ‘big mates’ – the likes of Murdoch, Kerry Packer and Alan Bond – were able to borrow what they liked and pay minimal income tax.19 In 1989 Bond’s borrowing accounted for 10 per cent of the Australian national debt.20 Today, Bond’s empire has collapsed, Bond himself has been in and out of prison; unemployment is as high as 15 per cent and the rate of child poverty is the second highest in the developed world.21 And Australia can now claim the most monopolised press in the Western world.
Of twelve metropolitan dailies, Murdoch controls seven and the Canadian Conrad Black three. Of ten Sunday papers Murdoch has seven, Black two. In Adelaide Murdoch has a complete monopoly. He owns all the daily, Sunday and local papers, and all the printing presses and printing premises. In Brisbane he owns all but a few suburban papers. He controls more than 66 per cent of daily newspapers in the capital cities, where the great majority of the population lives. He owns almost 75 per cent of all Sunday papers. And Black controls most of the rest.22
Both are conservative ideologues. Another arch conservative, Kerry Packer, owns most of the magazines Australians read and the only truly national commercial TV network. None of this could have happened without government collusion: the bending of regulations and legislation advantageous to a few ‘big mates’.23 In the East Timor section I have documented how the interests of the Keating government and its principal media ‘mate’ converge in the promotion of the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia as ‘stable’ and ‘moderate’ while the truth of the regime’s genocide in East Timor is suppressed and obfuscated.
This presents good journalists in Australia and all over the world with an increasingly familiar dilemma. How can they pursue their craft without serving such concentrated power? And once having enlisted and taken on the day-to-day constraints of career and mortgage, how do they remain true to a distant notion of an ‘independent’ press?
Some journalists try their hardest, maintaining high standards in mostly uncontroversial fields. Others believe they can change the system from within, and are forced out. Others are unaware of their own malleability (I was), or they become profoundly cynical about their craft. Echoing the fellow travellers of Stalin’s communist party, they insist, as one Murdoch editor once told me, ‘I can honestly say I have never been told what to put in the paper and what to take out of it’.24 The point was that no one had to tell him, and his paper reflected the unshakeable set of assumptions that underpin Western power and prejudice, including those that would lead us, to quote Nicholas Rothwell, into ‘a social and even ideological transformation . . . in the image of a radical philosophy’.
I have attempted throughout the book, to show how closely censorship in the old communist world compares with that in the West today and that only the methods of enforcement differ. I am reminded of a story recounted by the writer Simon Louvish. A group of Russians touring the United States before the age of glasnost were astonished to find, after reading the newspapers and watching television, that all the opinions on the vital issues were the same. ‘In our country’, they said, ‘to get that result we have a dictatorship, we imprison people, we tear out their fingernails. Here you have none of that. So what’s your secret – how do you do it?’25
In the section ‘Tributes’ I express my admiration for Noam Chomsky, whose formidable analysis has helped many of us to identify how they do it. It was Chomsky who understood the nature of the ‘delusional system’ of one-doctrine democracy and the sophisticated manipulation of public opinion, using the ‘free’ media.
The results of this manipulation are often historic. When President Kennedy declared in the early 1960s that there was a ‘missile gap’ with the Soviet Union, his message was carried without question by the Western media, and the nuclear arms race accelerated. In fact, the opposite was true: America was well ahead in missile development.26 When President Johnson unleashed American bombers on North Vietnam in 1964, he did so after the media had helped him sell to Congress a story that communist gunboats had ‘attacked’ US warships in the ‘Gulf of Tonkin Incident’. There was no attack, no ‘incident’. ‘Hell,’ Johnson is reported to have said in private, ‘those dumb stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish.’27 Thereafter the American invasion was legitimised, millions of people were killed and a once bountiful land was petrified.
In manipulation on such a scale, a vital part is played by an Orwellian abuse of conceptual thought, logic and language. In Vietnam, the indigenous forces resisting a foreign invasion were guilty of ‘internal aggression’.28 In the Gulf the slaughter was described as one in which ‘a miraculously small number of casualties’ was sustained.29 In Russia today, anti-Yeltsin democrats opposing ‘free market reforms’ – ‘reforms’ that are likely to reduce some 60 million pensioners to near starvation – are dismissed as ‘hardliners’ and ‘crypto communists’.30
The unerring message is that there is only one way now. It booms out to all of humanity, growing louder and more insistent in the media echo chamber. Those who challenge this sectarianism, and believe in real choice in public life and the media, are likely to be given the treatment. They are ‘outside the mainstream’. They are ‘committed’ and ‘lacking balance’. If the criticism is aimed at American power, the critics are ‘anti-American’ – a revealing charge for it evokes the ‘un-German’ abuse used effectively by the Nazis and the ‘anti-Soviet’ provisions of the old Soviet criminal code.
These attacks come not only from the Murdoch camp, but also from a liberal elite which sees itself as the fulcrum of society, striking a ‘sensible balance’ between opposing extremes. This is often translated into evenhandedness between oppressor and oppressed. Faithful to the deity of ‘impartiality’, it rejects the passion and moral imagination that discern and define the nature of criminality and make honest the writing of narrative history.
In Britain and the United States members of this liberal group can be relied upon to guard the conservative flame during difficult times, such as when established forces go to war, or feel themselves threatened by civil disturbance or a surfeit of political activity and discussion outside the confines of Parliament. This is especially true of the ‘modernised’ Labour Opposition which, in moulding itself to what ‘market research’ tells it, serves to muffle any suggestion of mass resistance. What it says, in effect, is that society is static and people’s consciousness cannot be raised. Of course this is a role that goes back a long way, perhaps as far as the reaction to the seventeenth-century revolution when John Locke thought that ordinary people should not even be allowed to discuss affairs of state.
In the BBC Locke’s views have also been modernised; people are allowed to discuss the affairs of state, though within a certain framework, as represented by Question Time on television and the Today programme on radio, where ‘politics’ is defined as that which takes place inside, or within a short cab journey of, the Palace of Westminster. In this way journalists, politicians and other establishment representatives promote each other’s agendas and set the limits of political ‘debate’. This is known as ‘the mainstream’.
In Distant Voices I have set out to identify some of the principal agendas. The most important is that of the ‘new world order’, which is promoted as having been approved by the United Nations and the ‘world community’. In his State of the Union address following the ‘victory’ in the Gulf, President Bush spoke of his ‘big idea, a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause [but] only the United States has both the moral standing and the means to back it’.31
In the chapter ‘How the world was won over’, I have set out how ‘diverse nations’ were given the biggest bribes in history to join the ‘common cause’ – bribes based upon their indebtedness to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, many of them funded by the oil sheikhs. Far from upholding international law, the ‘new world order’ (a term used by Benito Mussolini) ordains American military and economic power and law breaking.
We used to be reminded constantly of the illegal Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. We are not reminded of the illegal American invasions, such as the assault on Panama, when thousands of civilians were killed on the pretext of arresting a drug dealer, the former American client, General Noriega. (The real reason was US control over the Panama Canal.) Today Panama is forgotten, occupied and ruined. Neither are we reminded of the genocidal violence of Washington-sponsored regimes, such as that of the ‘moderate’ regime in Indonesia. As the Guatemalan journalist Julio Godoy has pointed out, Europeans under the Soviet heel were ‘in a way luckier than Central Americans . . . while the Moscow-imposed government in Prague would degrade and humiliate reformers, the Washington-made government in Guatemala would kill them. It still does [and] has taken more than 150,000 victims’.32 Under the ‘liberal’ presidency of Bill Clinton, nothing in essence has changed.
Since the birth of the ‘new world order’, power at the United Nations has shifted from that of peacemaker to war-maker: from the General Assembly to the US-dominated Security Council. Instead of a ‘peace dividend’ there is rearmament; in the year of the collapse of the Soviet ‘enemy’, US arms sales rose by 64 per cent, the greatest increase ever; and there are serious proposals for a Nuclear Expeditionary Force ‘primarily for use against Third World targets’.33 By 1994 the British arms industry controlled 20 per cent of the world market, much of it linked to ‘aid’ sweeteners, notably in Malaysia and Indonesia.
The agenda of the ‘free market’ ruled the 1980s, allowing millions to break the bonds of the state, so it was said. In fact, the 1980s was the decade of global impoverishment, producing the greatest division between rich and poor in the history of humankind. In the section ‘War by other means’, I have described how unrepayable interest has become the means of controlling much of humanity, its natural resources, commodities and labour, without sending in a single marine. In many countries, an era of social Darwinism has begun, imposed and policed by the financial institutions of the rich world. According to the United Nations’ State of the World’s Children, more than half a million children die every year as a direct result of the burdens of debt repayment.34 Debt has normalised the unthinkable.
‘A prolonged and ferocious class war is under way’, writes the author of a UN Development Programme study, adding, ‘You cannot hide the poorest behind national boundaries’.35 Indeed, in developed countries, this war is heard now as distant gunfire. It will grow louder as social Darwinism is applied at home, ensuring that Los Angeles and London become extensions of the Third World. Britain now has a quarter of Europe’s poor; one British child in four now lives in poverty.36
The political prescriptions agreed by elites in the developed countries offer no solutions. In Britain there is ‘convergence’ between the policies of the main political parties – policies that declare people expendable and the notion of common obligation heresy, eroding the premises upon which a modest civilisation rested. In a new section, ‘The Quiet Death of the Labour Party’, I have described how Britain has become a ‘democratic’ one-party state where power is exercised by an increasing number of unaccountable ‘quangos’ and access to power depends on connections to an ideological elite unchallenged by a ‘modernised’, supine Labour Party.
Elsewhere voices remain muted. In the West almost no writers of renown have emerged to make literature of the struggles of ordinary people. In America there is no Upton Sinclair; no The Jungle and It Can’t Happen Here, no Steinbeck, just the flatulence of Mailer. In Europe there is no Orwell, no Tressell, no Kafka. In his Guardian essay ‘While the pen sleeps’, D. J. Taylor invited us to ‘read the review pages of a Sunday newspaper or one of the right-wing weeklies and note their languid air of complacency, the unspoken assumption that a book should consist of drawing room twitter, gentle mockery, “fine writing” . . . Given the radical agenda of the last nine years, given the Falklands, Ireland, the Bomb, could any age be more political than our own? [and yet] writers have lost the ability to describe and define the society of which they are a part.’37 Taylor’s piece was as memorable for its rarity as its insights.
We are left with publications not unlike samidzat. In America there is a group of them, like Z Magazine and Covert Action, that publish documented unofficial truth. The enduring popularity of the great journalist Studs Terkel, incorrigible behind his microphone in Chicago, provides a glimpse.
‘I hate to use the word yuppie’, he said recently, ‘because yuppie is not what most of the young are. Most are bewildered and lost . . . but I’m waiting for a bus where I live in uptown and I bump into this couple who really are yuppies, the ones you see in the suds-sex-beer commercials. So I talk while we’re waiting for the bus. It’s a few days before Labor Day, so I say Labor Day is coming up, a celebration of American trade unions. Unions! they say. God, we despise unions! I ask: “How many hours a day do you work?” Eight hours. “Why don’t you work 18 hours like your grandparents or your great-grandparents did?” They don’t know. I say: “You know why? Because four guys hanged so you could work eight hours a day [the Haymarket Martyrs in 1886]. Don’t you know that people got their heads busted in the 1930s fighting for the 40-hour week?” They just don’t know. The point is that we have no sense of history. There’s just the sound bite.’38
In Britain there are outstanding independent journalists who are published in the ‘mainstream’ and those, like Jeremy Seabrook, who are not. In commercial television there is still a clutch of fine broadcasters and directors, the products of a British documentary tradition which began with John Grierson, Norman Swallow and Denis Mitchell and owes nothing to bogus ‘balance’. They were film makers – film journalists – who presented people and places as they saw them; and their work was rich and moving. They understood broadcasting as a medium in which experience could be shared. They illuminated those areas in society which had long remained in shadow. Today they would be called ‘campaigning’ and ‘committed’, and perhaps they were. They dared to put microphones and cameras in front of ordinary people and let them talk. And what they revealed was the blood, sweat and tears of another nation.
Their heirs are not yet ‘distant voices’, though their future depends on the strength of their backing against specious ‘realism’. They are part of a great constituency of public resistance, which has little to do with ‘mainstream’ political forces and whose achievements are remarkable: the exposure of a deeply corrupt criminal justice system and a mobilised popular revolt against a vicious tax. It was the British peace movement that made universal the principle that the nuclear arms race could be stopped only by bold unilateral acts – a principle embraced by Gorbachev and eventually by others.
The most courageous ‘distant voices’ are in the Third World, and this book pays special tribute to them. They produce literature and journalism that have no equivalent in the developed world (like the analyses in Third World Resurgence, published in Malaysia), and often in conditions of great personal danger. Every year hundreds of journalists pay for their outspokenness with their health and their lives. The wider resistance they represent, much of it underground, is barely acknowledged in the West. In the section ‘Under the Volcano’ I have described the stamina and sophistication of the ‘popular organisations’ in the Philippines, a country so often reported as a place of disasters and freaks.
The millennium may have to end before, like Milton’s Satan, they ‘soon rise up and resume their defiance’. But rise up they will, as people did in this century and others. For although ‘normalised’ to the foreign eye, they are never still. ‘Half of humanity’, says Susan George, author of A Fate Worse Than Debt, ‘are young, frustrated and angry, and they are going to become more so.’39 The uprising of the Zapatistas in Mexico against unemployment, debt and trade deals that enrich the powerful is just a beginning. All over Latin America, and elsewhere, other Zapatistas are stirring. We should watch them.
‘I sometimes feel’, wrote the Uruguayan poet Eduardo Galeano in 1990, ‘as if they have stolen even our words. The term “socialist” is applied in the West as the false face of injustice; in the West, it evokes purgatory or perhaps hell. The word “imperialism” is no longer to be found in the dominant lexicon, even though imperialism is present and does pillage and kill. In a few months we have witnessed the turbulent shipwreck of a system that usurped socialism. Now we must begin all over again. Step by step, with no shields but those born of our own bodies. It is necessary to discover, create, imagine. And today, more than ever, it is necessary to dream. To dream, together . . .’40