[R-G] Pilger: How Truth Slips Down the Memory Hole

[Anthony Fenton]

July 25, 2007

How Truth Slips Down the Memory Hole

By John Pilger

http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-07/25pilger.cfm

One of the leaders of demonstrations in Gaza calling for the release  
of the BBC reporter Alan Johnston was a Palestinian news cameraman,  
Imad Ghanem. On 5 July, he was shot by Israeli soldiers as he filmed  
them invading Gaza. A Reuters video shows bullets hitting his body as  
he lay on the ground. An ambulance trying to reach him was also  
attacked. The Israelis described him as a "legitimate target". The  
International Federation of Journalists called the shooting "a  
vicious and brutal example of deliberate targeting of a journalist".  
At the age of 21, he has had both legs amputated. Dr David Halpin, a  
British trauma surgeon who works with Palestinian children, emailed  
the BBC's Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen. "The BBC should report  
the alleged details about the shooting," he wrote. "It should honour  
Alan [Johnston] as a journalist by reporting the facts, uncomfortable  
as they might be to Israel." He received no reply. The atrocity was  
reported in two sentences on the BBC online. Along with 11  
Palestinian civilians killed by the Israelis on the same day, Alan  
Johnston's now legless champion slipped into what George Orwell in  
Nineteen Eighty-Four called the memory hole. (It was Winston Smith's  
job at the Ministry of Truth to make disappear all facts embarrassing  
to Big Brother.)

While Alan Johnston was being held, I was asked by the BBC World  
Service if I would say a few words of support for him. I readily  
agreed, and suggested I also mention the thousands of Palestinians  
abducted and held hostage. The answer was a polite no; and all the  
other hostages remained in the memory hole. Or, as Harold Pinter  
wrote of such unmentionables: "It never happened. Nothing ever  
happened . . . It didn't matter. It was of no interest." The media  
wailing over the BBC's royal photo-shoot fiasco and assorted  
misdemeanours provide the perfect straw man. They complement a self- 
serving BBC internal inquiry into news bias, which dutifully supplied  
the right-wing Daily Mail with hoary grist that the corporation is a  
left-wing plot. Such shenanigans would be funny were it not for the  
true story behind the facade of elite propaganda that presents  
humanity as useful or expendable, worthy or unworthy, and the Middle  
East as the Anglo-American crime that never happened, didn't matter,  
was of no interest.

The other day, I turned on the BBC's Radio 4 and heard a cut-glass  
voice announce a programme about Iraqi interpreters working for "the  
British coalition forces" and warning that "listeners might find  
certain descriptions of violence disturbing". Not a word referred to  
those of "us" directly and ultimately responsible for the violence.  
The programme was called Face the Facts. Is satire that dead? Not  
yet. The Murdoch columnist David Aaronovitch, a warmonger, is to  
interview Blair in the BBC's "major retrospective" of the sociopath's  
rule.

Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four lexicon of opposites pervades almost  
everything we see, hear and read now. The invaders and destroyers are  
"the British coalition forces", surely as benign as that British  
institution, St John Ambulance, who are "bringing democracy" to Iraq.  
BBC television describes Israel as having "two hostile Palestinian  
entities on its borders", neatly inverting the truth that Israel is  
actually inside Palestinian borders. A study by Glasgow University  
says that young British viewers of TV news believe Israelis illegally  
colonising Palestinian land are Palestinians: the victims are the  
invaders.

"The great crimes against most of humanity", wrote the American  
cultural critic James Petras, "are justified by a corrosive  
debasement of language and thought . . . [that] have fabricated a  
linguistic world of terror, of demons and saviours, of axes of good  
and evil, of euphemisms" designed to disguise a state terror that is  
"a gross perversion" of democracy, liberation, reform, justice. In  
his reinauguration speech, George Bush mentioned all these words,  
whose meaning, for him, is the dictionary opposite. It is 80 years  
since Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, predicted a  
pervasive "invisible government" of corporate spin, suppression and  
silence as the true ruling power in the United States. That is true  
today on both sides of the Atlantic. How else could America and  
Britain go on such a spree of death and mayhem on the basis of  
stupendous lies about non-existent weapons of mass destruction, even  
a "mushroom cloud over New York"? When the BBC radio reporter Andrew  
Gilligan reported the truth, he was pilloried and sacked along with  
the BBC's director general, while Blair, the proven liar, was  
protected by the liberal wing of the media and given a standing  
ovation in parliament. The same is happening again over Iran,  
distracted, it is hoped, by spin that the new Foreign Secretary David  
Miliband is a "sceptic" about the crime in Iraq when, in fact, he has  
been an accomplice, and by unctuous Kennedy-quoting Foreign Office  
propaganda about Miliband's "new world order".

"What do you think of Iran's complicity in attacks on British  
soldiers in Basra?" Miliband was asked by the Financial Times.  
Miliband: "Well, I think that any evidence of Iranian engagement  
there is to be deplored. I think that we need regional players to be  
supporting stability, not fomenting discord, never mind death . . ."

FT: "Just to be clear, there is evidence?"

Miliband: "Well no, I chose my words carefully . . ."

The coming war on Iran, including the possibility of a nuclear  
attack, has already begun as a war by journalism. Count the number of  
times "nuclear weapons programme" and "nuclear threat" are spoken and  
written, yet neither exists, says the International Atomic Energy  
Agency. On 21 June, the New York Times went further and advertised an  
"urgent" poll, headed: "Should we bomb Iran?" The questions beneath  
referred to Iran being "a greater threat than Saddam Hussein" and  
asked: "Who should undertake military action against Iran  
first . . . ?" The choice was "US. Israel. Neither country". So tick  
your favourite bombers.

The last British war to be fought without censorship and "embedded"  
journalists was the Crimea a century and a half ago. The bloodbath of  
the First World War and the Cold War might never have happened  
without their unpaid (and paid) propagandists. Today's invisible  
government is no less served, especially by those who censor by  
omission. The craven liberal campaign against the first real hope for  
the poor of Venezuela is a striking example.

However, there are major differences. Official disinformation now is  
often aimed at a critical public intelligence, a growing awareness in  
spite of the media. This "threat" from a public often held in  
contempt has been met by the insidious transfer of much of journalism  
to public relations. Some years ago, PR Week estimated that the  
amount of "PR-generated material" in the media is "50 per cent in a  
broadsheet newspaper in every section apart from sport. In the local  
press and the mid-market and tabloid nationals, the figure would  
undoubtedly be higher. Music and fashion journalists and PRs work  
hand in hand in the editorial process . . . PRs provide fodder, but  
the clever high-powered ones do a lot of the journalists' thinking  
for them."

This is known today as "perception management". The most powerful are  
not the Max Cliffords but huge corporations such as Hill & Knowlton,  
which "sold" the slaughter known as the first Gulf war, and the  
Sawyer Miller Group, which sold hated, pro-Washington regimes in  
Colombia and Bolivia and whose operatives included Mark Malloch  
Brown, the new Foreign Office minister, currently being spun as anti- 
Washington. Hundreds of millions of dollars go to corporations  
spinning the carnage in Iraq as a sectarian war and covering up the  
truth: that an atrocious invasion is pinned down by a successful  
resistance while the oil is looted.

The other major difference today is the abdication of cultural forces  
that once provided dissent outside journalism. Their silence has been  
devastating. "For almost the first time in two centuries," wrote the  
literary and cultural critic Terry Eagleton, "there is no eminent  
British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the  
foundations of the western way of life." The lone, honourable  
exception is Harold Pinter. Eagleton listed writers and playwrights  
who once promised dissent and satire and instead became rich  
celebrities, ending the legacy of Shelley and Blake, Carlyle and  
Ruskin, Morris and Wilde, Wells and Shaw.

He singled out Martin Amis, a writer given tombstones of column  
inches in which to air his pretensions, along with his attacks on  
Muslims. The following is from a recent article by Amis:

Tony strolled over [to me] and said, "What have you been up to  
today?" "I've been feeling protective of my prime minister, since you  
ask."

For some reason our acquaintanceship, at least on my part, is  
becoming mildly but deplorably flirtatious. What these elite,  
embedded voices share is their participation in an essentially class  
war, the long war of the rich against the poor. That they play their  
part in a broadcasting studio or in the clubbable pages of the review  
sections and that they think of themselves as liberals or  
conservatives is neither here nor there. They belong to the same  
crusade, waging the same battle for their enduring privilege.

In The Serpent, Marc Karlin's dreamlike film about Rupert Murdoch,  
the narrator describes how easily Murdochism came to dominate the  
media and coerce the industry's liberal elite. There are clips from a  
keynote address that Murdoch gave at the Edinburgh Television  
Festival. The camera pans across the audience of TV executives, who  
listen in respectful silence as Murdoch flagellates them for  
suppressing the true voice of the people. They then applaud him.  
"This is the silence of the democrats," says the voice-over, "and the  
Dark Prince could bath in their silence."