Distant Voices (13 page)

Not surprisingly, the series has borne the brunt of the
Thatcher/Wyatt wrath. This has come lately from the ‘Media Monitoring Unit'. Last March the MMU was exposed by the
Independent on Sunday
as little more than a propaganda shopfront following a series of well-publicised attacks on Radio 4's
Today
programme for its ‘anti-government bias'.
³⁰
The MMU's founder is Lord Chalfont, a pal of Thatcher, who appointed him IBA deputy chairman. Chalfont is also a pal of Wyatt, whom he supported in the Lords debate.

Factual programmes are expensive, particularly investigations that require time and patience. Under the new bill, how many companies will now risk controversy if it means having to make two or more ‘balancing' programmes? What happened to Ken Loach's
Questions of Leadership
in 1983, to be shown this week at the NFT, is salutary. Loach's four films demonstrated how the trade union leadership often collaborated with government against the interests of millions of working people. After months of circuitous delay and decisions taken in secret, the IBA decided that each of the four films would need ‘balancing' and that another longer programme would be made to ‘balance' that which had already been balanced. Arguing against this absurdity, Loach maintained that because his films provided a view of trade unions rarely seen on television, they themselves ‘were the balance'. They were never shown.
³¹

In 1983, David Munro and I made
The Truth Game
, which sought to decode the language of nuclear inevitability and to illuminate the history of nuclear weapons as an exercise in keeping information from the people the weapons were meant to ‘defend'. The IBA decided that
The Truth Game
could not be shown until a ‘balancing programme' was made. Central Television approached several ‘pro-bomb' names but they refused. Finally, Max Hastings agreed to make a separate programme but not to do as the IBA wanted: to rebut our film virtually frame by frame.
The Truth Game
was made when television reflected the bellicose establishment view of the ‘Russian threat'; this was a time when Washington's ‘first strike' strategy included the possibility of a ‘limited' nuclear war. Thus, like
Questions of Leadership
, our film provided
modest ‘balance' to an overriding ‘imbalance' in the coverage of the nuclear arms race. Under the new amendment, it probably would not have been made.
³²

That Britain already has television censorship ought to be enough to alert us to the nature of the demands of Wyatt and Co. This is known as ‘prior restraint', a nod-and-wink system instituted in the name of Lord Reith, founder of the BBC. In 1937 Reith boasted that he had ‘fixed up a contract between Broadcasting House and the Home Office', and had ‘made it clear that we must be told ahead of things that might cause trouble'.
³³
When in 1988 Home Secretary Douglas Hurd decided to make criminals of TV and radio journalists who interviewed members of certain Irish organisations, including those elected to Parliament, he first informed the BBC as was customary. ‘Impartiality' is spoken about at the BBC as a ‘Reithian principle'. The irony is usually unintended.

Anti-bill lobbyists have argued that British television is among the best in the world. Yes, but this reputation derives, in great part, from those very ‘dissenters' who are the amendment's target. Wyatt and Co. would certainly have wanted to ‘balance' John Grierson, Denis Mitchell and Norman Swallow. And great journalists like Ed Murrow and James Cameron would have been seen off, along with the likes of Cobbett, Swift and Dickens.

The Thatcher Government is not ‘misguided', as some have suggested. Its assault on free journalism has got this far because Thatcher and her acolytes have encountered only polite and confused opposition. The politeness should end. If broadcasters and the public do not defend the public's right to know, who will?

October 8, 1990

AT A TIME
when modern imperialism is producing a new obfuscating vocabulary, and the narrative of recent history is being murdered, I am grateful to Edward Said, Noam Chomsky and Susan George for their new books.

In
Culture and Imperialism
³⁴
Edward Said provides a rich historical guide to imperialism in its most insidious form: that is, western culture from Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
to present-day, ubiquitous ‘media culture'. Said shows how the perceptions of colonisers and colonised are entwined by the assumptions that drove imperialism 100 years ago and drive it today. He connects William Blake (‘The Foundation of Empire is Art and Science . . .') with Walter Lippmann, who devoted his writings to preparing Americans for the ‘reality' of their imperial role, to George Kennan, a principal author of the theory of ‘containing communism' and the cold war, who believed his country to be ‘the guardian of civilisation'.

Edward Said is especially telling when he describes the effects of modern ‘media culture' on American attitudes towards the rest of the world. There is, he says, ‘an almost perfect correspondence between prevailing government policy and the ideology ruling news presentation and selection [which] keeps the United States' imperial perspective towards the non-western world consistent.' This reinforces American support for dictatorial regimes and for ‘a scale of violence out of all proportion to the violence of native insurgency'. It also fits exactly a contemptuous media ‘world view' that regards ‘the history of other cultures [as]
non-existent until it erupts in confrontation with the United States', and believes that ‘most of what counts about foreign societies [can be] compressed into 30-second items, “sound bites”, and into the question of whether they are pro- or anti-America . . .'

As Said points out, the essential difference between cultural indoctrination in the nineteenth century and during the American imperium is ‘the epic scale of United States global power and the corresponding power of the national domestic consensus created by the electronic media'. Thus, in
Heart of Darkness
, Conrad saw his central character ‘as a European in the African jungle and Gould as an enlightened westerner in the South American mountains, capable of both civilising and obliterating the natives'. Said also invites us to imagine the same power, on a world scale, which ‘is true of the United States today'.

The point is made constantly by Hollywood, which produces the great majority of films shown in this and many other countries. Francis Ford Coppola's movie
Apocalypse Now
was the Hollywood version of
Heart of Darkness.
Seen by millions in the cinema and on television and video, it has been called ‘a classic, definitive portrayal' of the Vietnam war. That Coppola reduced the Vietnamese and Montenard peoples to stereotypes of Oriental viciousness was generally passed over by the admiring critics. The film claimed that Vietcong soldiers hacked off the arms of children to discourage a vaccination programme, implying this was one of the reasons why the United States had invaded Vietnam. When an American journalist wrote to the screenwriter, John Milius, asking where the severed arms story had originated, Milius returned her letter with a US Special Forces' death's head drawing on it, together with the words:

In its crude way, this said a great deal about Hollywood's treatment of the longest colonial war this century, a war that left more than two million people dead and Indochina in ruins. Films like
Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Platoon
, and even the
Rambo
series became the popular historical and cultural reference points. In all of them, self-pity, the angst of the American invader, is celebrated while the Vietnamese flit across the screen as stick figures of no consequence, or as monsters, or as noble savages, or as child-like objects of patronising sentiment. Truth was not just turned on its head, but all irony was lost. Far from being vanquished in South East Asia, the United States devastated, blockaded and isolated Vietnam and its ‘communist virus', while subordinating to American interests almost every regime in the region.

Noam Chomsky returns to this theme in
Year 501: The Conquest Continues
.
³⁶
Chomsky uses the 500th anniversary of Columbus's ‘discovery' of America to follow the unerring line of western domination from the earliest conquests of the American indigenous peoples to the slaughters in Vietnam and the Gulf. Like Edward Said, he compares the role played by imperial elites through the centuries.

The similarities are striking. While eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberals often expressed anti-colonial views, they were not against imperialism, arguing for its more humane application and thus legitimising and reinforcing it. This is true of contemporary liberal moralists, who frequently see themselves as striking a ‘decent, sensible balance' between oppressed and oppressor. They, too, are not against imperialism; indeed, their support for colonial wars can be counted upon.

Chomsky compares the weight of historical importance given to the ‘politically correct' fiftieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the ‘day of infamy', with other days of infamy declared unfit for public commemoration. For example, on October 11, 1961, President Kennedy ordered the escalation
of the Vietnam conflict ‘from large-scale international terrorism to outright aggression'. Thirty years later, almost to the day, President Bush blocked the admission of Vietnam to the world community. And yet, writes Chomsky: ‘It is a staple of the media, and the culture generally, that we were the injured party in Vietnam.'

Although the Nazis remain the twentieth century's arch demons, it was, as Chomsky points out, Nazi models that determined United States ‘counter-insurgency' doctrine in Indo-China and around the world. This was never reported in the ‘mainstream' media, and ignored by Hollywood and other historical and cultural managers, just as genocidal atrocities were never reported. In neighbouring Laos, on which the Americans dropped the greatest tonnage of bombs in the history of war, there is no commemorative date at all, although it is thought that up to a million people may have perished.

Imperial history has many such silences, as Hugh Cudlipp reminded us in 1989, on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of Chamberlain's declaration of war, when he wrote, ‘There will not be nostalgic features in the
Times
, the
Observer
, the
Daily Mail
and the
Daily Express
recalling “What we said in the six years that led to the second world war”.'
³⁷
What they had said, of course, amounted to a cover-up and apology for Hitler and his ambitions.

Will we look back with comparable insight, and perhaps even shame, on the ‘coverage' of the Cold War? In 1987, the celebrated establishment historian, Michael Howard, wrote, ‘Few historians now believe that Stalin ever intended to advance his frontiers beyond the territories occupied by his forces in 1945.'
³⁸
Two generations in the west were instructed to believe that the opposite was true, that the ‘Russians were coming', that communism was taking over the world, that God and Coca-Cola were in danger. As a result, millions of innocent people, in most poor societies, were killed, maimed, dislocated and isolated in the ‘noble cause' (Reagan) of ‘stopping communism in its tracks' (Bush).
³⁹

Yet the attitudes of the Cold War still dictate the way we
live now and in the next century. Following the collapse of the European tyranny known as ‘communism', monopoly capitalism declared itself the victor. Once again, truth was turned inside out. The ‘victory' was marked by irrefutable evidence of capitalism's failure even in its own terms, and of its most enduring disaster since the Second World War. A quarter of Europe's poor now live in Britain; bankruptcies occur every few minutes. In the developing world, the gap between rich and poor is greater than at any time since records were kept.

In her book,
The Debt Boomerang
,
⁴⁰
Susan George asks why all this should be regarded as the ‘natural order of things', and why ‘free-market' dogmas like privatisation have gained such momentum. ‘You fund people', she explained, ‘to create an ideological climate which becomes the life-support system for the doctrine. It becomes the water for the fish – the fish doesn't even know he's swimming. You put enough people with the “correct” ideas in universities. You create the institutes and the foundations. All these people come together in the colloquia and symposia, open to the press, that you sponsor. And they all write in the journals that you also fund, and from there they get on the editorial pages and on the air. Pretty soon, you have those three-man (they almost always are men) pseudo debates on television between the raving radical right, the extreme-right and the right of centre. Anyone who thinks differently soon begins to seem a pariah, or someone who at the very least must make apologies for his or her beliefs.'

Much of this pseudo debate, which equates imperial aims with democracy and the ‘free market' with freedom, is to stifle dissent. This is true of the current ‘debate' about ‘free trade', following President Clinton's announcement that US trade and foreign policies are to be linked. They always were, of course. To the great powers, especially the US, ‘free trade' is the freedom to control commodities that are the staples of poor, non-industrial countries, along with their resources of services, tourism, finance and intellectual property rights. This is, and always has been, the essence of imperialism.
And, like debt, ‘free trade' is much more effective than a gunboat or a Rockeye cluster bomb.