Musings, articles and sundry postings of a Geordie class warrior, adhering to the Orwellian maxim: "During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
This entry starts with a wee story. I once took part in an election hustings with the local MP (re-standing) and the other candidates and organised by Churches Together of South Tyneside. There was a fair sized audience and they asked a lot of questions. I was the only one to give a full and considered answer to every single question. Several times the local MP and the other candidates refused to answer, or reiterated the statements made by the previous speaker. Some of the answers I gave were so opposed to the spiel imparted by the other mainstream candidates that the audience literally gasped in belief – you could see the shock on their faces.When I openly criticised the arguments of my opponents, and the chair of the meeting asked if they wanted to reply, they declined to comment.
At the end of the evening - each speaker being asked to present their case to the audience, which they did from their seated position - I got up and walked to the front of the platform. I told them I’m making no promises, that I could do nothing for them that they were not capable of doing for themselves if they decided to organise, that they asked the wrong questions, and how they had hypocritically, as good Christians (these were South Tyneside’s god-bothering elite), found my humane line, that promoted global equality and an end to waste and want and war, offensive. My parting shot was to inform the congregation that there was more truth in one page of the Communist Manifesto than in the whole Bible.
The press were there that night and whilst this wasa newsworthy event – hustings here being exceptionally rare–not one word of it was published in the local press , in spite of the fact that I had also imparted info about myself they could easily have sensationalised; for instance telling the audience, while answering questions about the decriminalisation of cannabis (with my opponents were dead against) that I smoked it, along with many friends, and that it was not the devil narcotic its enemies claimed it to be.Not one word appeared in the local paper about that event!
And if there is one thing I’ve learned about talking to the media, and I have done countless times over the years, as an active socialist and a community campaigner, it is that they don’t really give a shit for what you want to say, for what you want them to say. Invariably, you will give them a decent interview, imparting some first class info, only to find that the info they have gleaned in that interview, rather than forming the basis of a brilliant piece, is defused, so to speak, the juicy stuff ignored and the piece filled with utter trivia and insignificance that will hold the reader’s interest as much as a piece on a kid whose Christmas present bicycle has been stolen.
There’s been times I’ve sent journalists in the local press first classnews items, following up items they have had published in their respective papers, giving them first hand accounts, real facts, corrections to untruths they had previously published, stories that days earlier they would have bent over backwards for, and written in a style far surpassing anything that paper produces, and they’ve totally ignored, not even acknowledged. Not one journalist has ever replied and not one paper has used that info
And it’s been like that a while now with my articles to the local paper’s letters pages. You send in a first class analysis of some current event – containing more truth than you will find in that paper in a week – and it’s either rejected or totally edited, defused! I once sent in a 500 word article attacking the democratic process in Britain and all they published was the second last paragraph and made the writer of the piece appear an imbecile. In the run up to the invasion if Iraq, I bombarded the local press with letters on a daily basis, screaming my indignation, exposing the hypocrisy and the real reasons behind the coming bloodbath. Only one letter got through, and that was heavily edited, defused!
Newspapers, or rather those who own them, simply hate the truth. This is because these people are members of the capitalist class, with interests to defend, so their editor’s remit, if he he/she values his/her job, is to sit on anything that might arouse the indignation of the readership, anything that might rouse them to activity, anything that might wake them from that media-induced coma. And why? Capitalism depends for its survival on the mass production of zombies, created by the media and the state’s official brainwashing mechanisms (ie., schools, colleges, family, religion).
Let’s step back in time. William Howard Russell was the Times correspondent who sensationally exposed the Charge of the Light Brigade (1854) as the wholly hopeless bloody blunder that it was. As a reward, he and his editor, John Delane, were accused of treason.
John Swinton, a then famous New York journalist, was at a bash held in his name by leaders of his craft - this was sometime in the late 1880s When someone proposed a toast to the independent press, Swinton said:
"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone.
"The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
Whilst Swinton’s statement is true enough, it does not go far enough. Check-mate could have been delivered by a lengthy statement on just why the corporate media – or rather the ‘independent press’ in this case – needs to suppress the truth.
Exactly 120 years later, John Pilger would comments in a lecture given here how, on March 16, 1968, the day of the infamous My Lai massacre (when US troops slaughtered almost 500 mainly women, old men and children in cold blood) there were 649 reporters in Vietnam. Not one of them reported it.
Pilger further comments how during the run up to the invasion of Iraq, the BBC was right alongside Tony Blair in promoting the arguments for that bloody offensive. This was an issue that aroused the general public every bit as much as your died-in-the wool activists. Despite the many hundreds of meetings, rallies and demonstrations across the country, including a march on London by an estimated 2 million – the biggest protest march in British history – only 2% of the BBC’s coverage of the coming conflict coveredthe anti-war movement!
Pilger, again, does not go far enough. We get closer to the truth in a quote fromMemoirs of a Media Maverick, by Boyce Richardson , a journalist for decades in New Zealand and Canada and with an 8 year stint in the UK as the Montreal Star's foreign:
"...in my view the so called objectivity of journalists is really just a set up to disguise the fact, well known to them in their hearts, that they can only work within the limits established by their bosses.
“None of this prevents journalists from bleating ad infinitum about the need to present all sides of an issue and to maintain the objectivity to ensure they can do that. I have always found such arguments particularly offensive. No one gets into a position of authority in a capitalist newspaper who does not accept the basic premise that its central purpose - apart from making money - is to propagate the values of capitalism...."
Chomsky takes the argument a step further in the video above when he says:
“Its long been understood for hundreds of years, that unless people are controlled they are going to challenge power. They will not simply willingly accept subordination, domination, hunger and so on.It is therefore important for those in control of decision making, who monopolise wealth…to keep the population from their throats…That can either be done by force… or control of opinion – there is no other method…”
The safest option is control of public onion. Because people are misinformed, they are oblivious as to the real nature of the system that exploits them. This further makes it easy for the media to confuse the workers by hiding real power from view. The result is – and this is intentional – they blame governments, their allegiance to political parties often switching overnight because of a newspaper’s slanted coverage of certain policies and social conditions. A newspaper like The Sun can make all the difference to a political party’s electoral chances – Hence Tony Blair’s visit to Australia to prostrate himself in front of Rupert Murdoch in 1997, fully aware that the Sun can run post election headlines such as “It was the Sun that won it” (which followed one Tory election victory)” The fact that it is the capitalist system that is seriously faltering, creating problems governments just can’t cope with (because it is the system controlling them, not vice versa) would be too dangerous to print or report.
With the arrival and popularity of the internet and the consequent boom in computer use, opportunities for access to real information are now at an unprecedented high, giving anyone interested a chance to find out for themselves the real story behind news that the media otherwise would have us believe is inconsequential. There are literally terns of thousands of independent websites out there, as well as blogsites exposing the lies, the deceit, the fraud that goes on every day. The ‘information revolution’ has placed a wonderful tool at the disposal of the working class. But a tool is only useful if used correctly. If we fail to use this tool to help us pursue our own class interests, then this ‘information revolution’ becomes just so much mind-numbing entertainment the masses will get addicted to and which the ‘powers that be’ will eventually use to steer our thoughts away from the pressing matters of the day. Maybe there was more to Tony Blair’s plans to get a computer in every home by 2005 than we think! Would he really promote computer use if he thought the masses would be accessing informative websites in their spare time, websites that might expose the truth, which might reveal the true nature of the beast?
Tonight, George W Bush delivers his annual State of the Union Address. Amongst the topics he will no doubt dwell at length upon, will be the problem of China. For the US, China really is becoming a problem.
Based on statistics for 1993-2002, during which time China’s exports increased at an annual rate of just over 17%, the country will exceed US exports by 2010. You can bet your bottom dollar the panic button was pressed in the US some time ago.
“…the Chinese are doing a pretty remarkable job of growing their way to American affluence. But it’s not sustainable. For their 1.3 billion citizens to live like the average North American would require the carrying capacity of about four more planets.”
I was reminded of this poignant quote when reading a lengthy piece tucked away inside The Guardian’s Society supplement last week. Lester R Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute examined the consequences of China’s population devouring at the rate of their American counterparts.
Lester Brown writes: “China has now overtaken America as the world's leading resource consumer. Among the basic commodities - grain and meat in the food sector, oil and coal in the energy sector and steel in the industrial sector - China now consumes more of each of these than the US except for oil. It consumes nearly twice as much meat - 67m tonnes compared with 39m tonnes in the US; and more than twice as much steel - 258m tonnes to 104m.”
China also, incidentally consumed 31% per cent of the world’s coal in 2003, and accounted for a 40 per cent increase in world oil demand in 2004. In the past 10 year’s its consumption of aluminium, copper and nickel has doubled to 20 per cent of the world total.
It is reckoned that China will have the same oil demands as the US within 20 years and India will not be far behind.
Lester Brown notes: “If China were to have three cars for every four people – as in the US – it would use 99 million barrels a day. The world currently produces only 84 million Barrel’s a day.” Lester Brown further sees the important questions as “…what if China's consumption per person of these resources reaches the current US level, and how long will it take for China's income per person to reach the US level?”
Indeed, Lester, a mega-problem of global sustainability to boot; but consider also that China’s foreign exchange reserves last year were in excess of $750 billion and are estimated to hit the $1 trillion mark by mid 2006. What is preventing the collapse of the US dollar and the rise in US interest rates is China’s purchase of US treasury bonds.
Chomsky notes: "China is already establishing relations with Iran -- and even with Saudi Arabia, both military and economic. There is an Asian energy security grid, based on China and Russia, but probably bringing in India, Korea and others. If Iran moves in that direction, it can become the lynchpin of that power grid."
There is another important question – just how long will the US tolerate such a powerful economic competitor threatening the profits of corporate America, a competitor who could collapse the US dollar and a competitor on real cosy terms with the anti-American leadership in Iran and Venezuela?
Over the years, Noam Chomsky has been described in various ways: as ‘the medic trying to cure a national endemic of selective amnesia’; as ‘the most dangerous man in the US’; as ‘the little boy who told the emperor he was naked’ and, more recently by the New York Times, as ‘an exploder of received truths.’ In his latest book, Rogue States, we find Chomsky very much living up to this time-honoured reputation.
It is often aid that if you’ve read one Chomsky book, you’ve read them all, which is perhaps true in so far as Chomsky is a relentless critic of US foreign and domestic policy, sinking his teeth deeper into the same old foe like a vengeful rottweiler with each new publication. Rogue States is no departure from the norm – it’s Chomsky doing what he does best.
Through skilful analysis of internal documents combined with historical context, a meticulous scrutiny of the activities of the US State Dept and a thorough gleaning of the quality broadsheets both sides of the pond, Chomsky again sets himself the task of gauging the US and its allies by the Standards they use as justification for the interference in the lives of others.
The Balkans, East Timor and Colombia come in for close scrutiny in separate Chapters which reveal the extent of US collusion in the ongoing misery there. In Kosovo, observes Chomsky, the US “has chosen a course of action that, as it explicitly recognises, escalates atrocities and violence…a course of action that undermines – perhaps destroys – promising democratic development”(p.47). The Clinton regime’s praise for Colombia as ‘a leading democracy’ is stringently challenged by Chomsky. Citing Colombia’s human right’s record as one of the worst in the world, Chomsky provides ample proof that the Clinton/Blair doctrine of ‘new humanism – “the historic mission of bringing justice and freedom to the suffering people of the world” (p.84) – is a total sham. Colombia, notorious for its state terror, produces 300,000 refugees and 3,000 deaths per year at the hands of its security forces, yet is presently the biggest recipient of US military aid in Latin America. The same favoured nation status is reserved for Turkey, whose security forces, in their persecution of the Kurdish people, have destroyed 3,500 villages and created 3 million refugees. Meanwhile, the US is keen to promote the redeeming qualities of mineral rich Indonesia ahead of the political fate of East Timor at the hands of the former.
Chomsky further reveals the US to be wholly contemptuous and dismissal of UN resolutions and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights it helped to bring into existence and to be severely lacking in any credible justification for its policies beyond its own borders. In this regard, Chomsky further highlights the US passion for free trade, pointing to the developing countries compelled not only to accept US cigarettes and other drugs and commodities, but also to advertise them under threat of trade sanctions.
Sanctions and indeed debt “is a very powerful weapon of control” says Chomsky, with half the world subject to US unilateral sanctions – a cruel form of economic coercion condemned repeatedly by the UN. In a chapter on the paranoiac US relationship with Cuba, Chomsky reminds us that Cuba has suffered 40 years of embargoes – the longest in history, and in spite of two thirds of the US population opposing the sanctions and in breach of WTO rules, all of which is dismissed with the defence that Cuba is a threat to US national security.
Though this can at times be a hard going book for the uninitiated, the mountains of information make it an indispensable reference work and guide to the methods the powerful use to further their own interests to the detriment of so many. It is moreover an invaluable tool for deciphering the rhetoric the powerful use to rationalise their excesses.
