[R-G] Fwd: Pilger / Class Is Still Critical / Sep 07

[Anthony Fenton]

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Today's commentary:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-09/06pilger.cfm

==================================

ZNet Commentary
Class Is Still Critical September 07, 2007
By John Pilger

A state of parallel worlds determines almost everything we do and how  
we do it, everything we know and how we know it. The word that once  
described it, class, is unmentionable, just as imperialism used to  
be. Thanks to George W Bush, the latter is back in the lexicon in  
Britain, if not at the BBC.

Class is different. It runs too deep; it allows us to connect the  
present with the past and to understand the malignancies of a modern  
economic system based on inequity and fear. So it is seldom spoken  
about publicly, lest a Goldman Sachs chief executive on multimillions  
in pay or bonuses, or whatever they call their legalised heists, be  
asked how it feels to walk past office cleaners struggling on the  
minimum wage.

Just as elite power seeks to order other countries according to the  
demands of its privilege, so class remains at the root of our own  
society's mutations and sorrows. In recent weeks, the killing of an  
11-year-old Liverpool boy and other tragedies involving children have  
been thoroughly tabloided. Interviewing Keith Vaz, chairman of the  
House of Commons home affairs select committee, one journalist  
wondered if "we" should go out and deal personally with our vile,  
mugging, stabbing, shooting youth. To this, the nodding Vaz replied  
that the problem was "values".

The main "value" is ruthless exclusion, such as the exile of millions  
of young people on vast human landfills (rubbish dumps) called  
housing estates, where they are forearmed with the knowledge that  
they are different and schools are not for them. A rigid curriculum,  
a system devoted to testing child-ren beyond all reason, ensures  
their alienation. "From the age of seven," says Shirley Franklin of  
the Institute of Education, "20 per cent of the nation's children are  
seen, and see themselves,  as failures . . . Violence is an  
expression of hatred towards oneself and others." With the all- 
digital world of promise and rewards denied them, let alone a sense  
of belonging and esteem, they move logically to the streets and crime.

And yet, since 1995, actual crime in England and Wales has fallen by  
42 per cent and violent crime by 41 per cent. No matter. The  
"violence of youth" is the accredited hysteria. A government led for  
a decade by a man whose lawless deceit helped cause the violent  
deaths of perhaps a million people in Iraq invented an acronym - Asbo  
- for a campaign against British youth, whose prospects and energy  
and hope were replaced by the "values" expressed by Keith Vaz and  
exemplified by Goldman Sachs and the current imperial adventures in  
Iraq and Afghanistan.

Take Afghanistan, where the irony is searing. In less than seven  
years, the Anglo-American slaughter of countless "Taliban" (people)  
has succeeded in spectacularly reviving an almost extinct poppy  
trade, so that it now supplies the demand for heroin on Britain's  
poorest streets, where enlightened drug rehabilitation is not  
considered a government "value". Parallel worlds require other elite  
forms of exclusion. At the Edinburgh Television Festival on 24  
August, the famous BBC presenter Jeremy Paxman made a much-hyped  
speech "attacking" television for "betray[ing] the people we ought to  
be serving". What was revealing about the speech was the attitude  
towards ordinary viewers it betrayed. According to Paxman, "while the  
media and politicians feel free to criticise each other, neither has  
the guts to criticise the public, who are presumed never to be  
wrong". In fact, ordinary people are treated in much of the media as  
invisible or with contempt, or they are patronised. Two honourable  
exceptions were the GMTV presenters cited and mocked by Paxman for  
their humanity in standing up for an ex-soldier denied proper  
treatment by the National Health Service. Paxman called for a more  
"sophisticated" and "honest" approach that accepted the public's  
approval of low taxes -- taxes that are not rationed when it comes to  
propping up hugely profitable private finance initiatives in the  
Health Service or squandered on waging war, regardless of the  
public's objections.

Not once in his speech did Paxman refer to Iraq, nor did he tell us  
why Blair was never seriously challenged on that bloodbath in a  
broadcast interview. That the BBC had played a critical role in  
amplifying and echoing Blair's and Bush's lies was apparently  
unmentionable. The coming attack on Iran, led again by propaganda  
filtered through broadcasting, is from the same parallel world, also  
unmentionable.