When government holds the people in contempt
Since the time of Thatcher, Tory politicians — and the corporate gods they serve — have looked to the US for inspiration. Whether it be military adventure and a resurgence of imperial feeling or something so venal as the evisceration of the welfare state and, especially, the jewel in its crown that is the National Health Service, it is to the neoliberal capitalist leadership of the US that our right wing politicians turn.
Even the advent of the Trump appears not to have diminished their taste for greed and the destruction of the planet, let alone the welfare of the British people. And the UK media plays along. Our mainstream press may be having some fun at the Trump’s expense but it refuses to call out any actions by our own corporate-run government that indicate ever further shifts to the right.
Two things I read today seem apposite.
First, from an interview with Roger Errera in 1974 and published in The New York Review of Books October 1978, Hannah Arendt says:
What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.
It goes without saying that lies and a deliberate withholding of information are the playbook of much mainstream media. Think Daily Mail in the UK.
And, possibly more apt for the times, both here — think Brexit — and in the US — think Trump:
Totalitarianism begins in contempt for what you have.
Much has been made of the oxygen the Trump was afforded by the media in the US during the election. It is worth remembering how Sanders was treated, especially by the so-called liberal media.
The media specialises in delivering contempt. Contempt for those who seek to make things better and for those who invest their hope in positive change.
In the UK, we have our own Sanders figure routinely mocked, ignored, and vilified: Jeremy Corbyn. Which brings me to the other thing I read today.
The Media Lens guys, who continue to speak truth to the press that fails in speaking truth to power, report on the most recent examples of this behaviour.
The answer is clear enough: the corporate media system is ideologically aligned against an authentically left-wing Labour leader, is working to undermine his reputation, and to protect the reputation of the Conservative government. It is equally clear that the corporate media’s outrage at Milne and its supposed compassion for the Syrian people are manufactured, fake.
Democracy is not compatible with mass media that systematically headline and highlight angry criticism of left-wing politicians while excluding criticism of the right-wing politicians opposing them. The truth is that the UK corporate press is working relentlessly to crush democratic freedom of choice threatening elite interests. Forget ‘fake news’, the corporate media system is itself fake. It is primarily a conduit, not for news and views, but for control.
It would appear that our mainstream media is also looking to the US for lessons in how best to lay the groundwork for a corporate coup and the final destruction of democracy.
