There are some things you read that you can never forget. Among my favorites: George Orwell’s essay on “Politics and the English Language.” For another, George Orwell’s essay “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War.”
I think what he wrote in that essay casts a fresh light on what appears to be the new phenomenon of Fake News. It comes to us via the Internet, which did not exist when Orwell wrote this essay. It comes in the same typography as the news that has been carefully fact-checked. It seeks to discredit the mainstream media. It seeks to discredit the views of everyone because of their suspected motives. I am not suggesting that we should be credulous of everything we read. To the contrary. I am not suggesting that we should abandon critical thinking. To the contrary. I am suggesting that we weigh carefully which sources are credible, which can be trusted, and be wary of attempts to discredit them.
In section 4, he writes about how totalitarians war on the very concept of objective truth. They undermine public confidence in everyone but the Maximum Leader. Don’t believe what you read or see or hear. Only believe the Party line and the Leader.
Orwell wrote this:
I remember saying once to Arthur Koestler, ‘History stopped in 1936’, at which he nodded in immediate understanding. We were both thinking of totalitarianism in general, but more particularly of the Spanish civil war. Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’. Yet in a way, horrible as all this was, it was unimportant. It concerned secondary issues — namely, the struggle for power between the Comintern and the Spanish left-wing parties, and the efforts of the Russian Government to prevent revolution in Spain. But the broad picture of the war which the Spanish Government presented to the world was not untruthful. The main issues were what it said they were. But as for the Fascists and their backers, how could they come even as near to the truth as that? How could they possibly mention their real aims? Their version of the war was pure fantasy, and in the circumstances it could not have been otherwise.
The only propaganda line open to the Nazis and Fascists was to represent themselves as Christian patriots saving Spain from a Russian dictatorship. This involved pretending that life in Government Spain was just one long massacre (vide the Catholic Herald or the Daily Mail — but these were child’s play compared with the Continental Fascist press), and it involved immensely exaggerating the scale of Russian intervention. Out of the huge pyramid of lies which the Catholic and reactionary press all over the world built up, let me take just one point — the presence in Spain of a Russian army. Devout Franco partisans all believed in this; estimates of its strength went as high as half a million. Now, there was no Russian army in Spain. There may have been a handful of airmen and other technicians, a few hundred at the most, but an army there was not. Some thousands of foreigners who fought in Spain, not to mention millions of Spaniards, were witnesses of this. Well, their testimony made no impression at all upon the Franco propagandists, not one of whom had set foot in Government Spain. Simultaneously these people refused utterly to admit the fact of German or Italian intervention at the same time as the Germany and Italian press were openly boasting about the exploits of their’ legionaries’. I have chosen to mention only one point, but in fact the whole of Fascist propaganda about the war was on this level.
This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history. How will the history of the Spanish war be written? If Franco remains in power his nominees will write the history books, and (to stick to my chosen point) that Russian army which never existed will become historical fact, and schoolchildren will learn about it generations hence. But suppose Fascism is finally defeated and some kind of democratic government restored in Spain in the fairly near future; even then, how is the history of the war to be written? What kind of records will Franco have left behind him? Suppose even that the records kept on the Government side are recoverable — even so, how is a true history of the war to be written? For, as I have pointed out already, the Government, also dealt extensively in lies. From the anti-Fascist angle one could write a broadly truthful history of the war, but it would be a partisan history, unreliable on every minor point. Yet, after all, some kind of history will be written, and after those who actually remember the war are dead, it will be universally accepted. So for all practical purposes the lie will have become truth.
I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, you will find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘Science’. There is only ‘German Science’, ‘Jewish Science’, etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ — well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five — well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs — and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.
But is it perhaps childish or morbid to terrify oneself with visions of a totalitarian future? Before writing off the totalitarian world as a nightmare that can’t come true, just remember that in 1925 the world of today would have seemed a nightmare that couldn’t come true. Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive. Let Fascism, or possibly even a combination of several Fascisms, conquer the whole world, and those two conditions no longer exist. We in England underrate the danger of this kind of thing, because our traditions and our past security have given us a sentimental belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing you most fear never really happens. Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run. Pacifism, for instance, is founded largely on this belief. Don’t resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What evidence is there that it does? And what instance is there of a modern industrialized state collapsing unless conquered from the outside by military force?
Consider for instance the re-institution of slavery. Who could have imagined twenty years ago that slavery would return to Europe? Well, slavery has been restored under our noses. The forced-labour camps all over Europe and North Africa where Poles, Russians, Jews and political prisoners of every race toil at road-making or swamp-draining for their bare rations, are simple chattle slavery. The most one can say is that the buying and selling of slaves by individuals is not yet permitted. In other ways — the breaking-up of families, for instance — the conditions are probably worse than they were on the American cotton plantations. There is no reason for thinking that this state of affairs will change while any totalitarian domination endures. We don’t grasp its full implications, because in our mystical way we feel that a regime founded on slavery must collapse. But it is worth comparing the duration of the slave empires of antiquity with that of any modern state. Civilizations founded on slavery have lasted for such periods as four thousand years.
When I think of antiquity, the detail that frightens me is that those hundreds of millions of slaves on whose backs civilization rested generation after generation have left behind them no record whatever. We do not even know their names. In the whole of Greek and Roman history, how many slaves’ names are known to you? I can think of two, or possibly three. One is Spartacus and the other is Epictetus. Also, in the Roman room at the British Museum there is a glass jar with the maker’s name inscribed on the bottom, ‘Felix fecit’. I have a mental picture of poor Felix (a Gaul with red hair and a metal collar round his neck), but in fact he may not have been a slave; so there are only two slaves whose names I definitely know, and probably few people can remember more. The rest have gone down into utter silence.
This is outstanding.
What you said.
😎
A good and useful Press and Media, just like a healthy immune system must act to keep the “body” healthy. It must be independent and not beholden – if it is there will be an amount of trouble. Our press in USA is beholden to profit – not exclusively to strengthening / enlightening the “body” – ratings = monies and and news that is disturbing or the cause of turning the channel is shunned – weakening the “body” and the “disease” festers. Germany’s “öffentlicher rechtlicher” or public lawful media is watched by over 50% and is financed in part by a TV tax so it is not dependent on profit. far from perfect, it is better than what we have – even with our news babes and all. Our public broadcasting is watched by very few and may be equally commercialized through grants, etc. in my opinion. Further, our “news stars” are WAY overpaid for reading off a teleprompter. A stable of news readers rather than one “star” as was with BBC is more fair – after all the news should be the “star”. There are others behind the scenes – camera, audio, video engineers, writers, etc. that are equally or more valuable than the news reader earning millions.
Will Trump and his gang of thugs go after PBS and NPR? I wouldn’t be surprised.
Going after PBS when the GOP gets power is as regular as the swallows returning to Capistrano. It acts as convenient cover to distract from much more consequential destruction and profiteering of public resources.
I have recently started watching “Vice News” on HBO. They cover more international issues, and their slant seems to be more progressive. It’s a half hour long and has no commercials.
Helmut Schmidt, the former chancellor of West Germany who died earlier this year, once observed that cable television was “more dangerous than nuclear power.” I think Orwell would have agreed.
GregB – I find you quote of Schmidt very interesting. When I worked in Germany, in the 80s there were 3 TV channels – then shortly after cable took hold as well as many private broadcasters. Still, and rather amazingly, the majority watch the publicly funded ones.
Speaking of former German chancellors: BERLIN, Dec. 9 [2005] — Former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder landed a job Friday as board chairman for a Russian-German gas pipeline that he championed while in office, a post that deepens his already close relationship with the Russian government and President Vladimir Putin. [snip] Opposition politicians denounced the appointment as a conflict of interest. “It stinks,” said Reinhard Buetikofer, co-chairman of Germany’s Greens, who were a coalition partner in Schroeder’s Social Democrat-led government, the Associated Press reported.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/09/AR2005120901755.html
Talk about conflicts of interest and political whores.
“There are others behind the scenes – camera, audio, video engineers, writers, etc. that are equally or more valuable than the news reader earning millions.”
And those others, not the newsreaders, perhaps the modern day equivalent of the slaves to which Orwell refers, those whose names and lives have been obliterated by time as are the names of those others of whom no one knows and will soon be forgotten also.
When does Trump renounce Alex Jones and all that he represents? Trump promoted fake news and conspiracy theories, e.g., the whole birther nuttiness and more recently Trump’s baseless assertion that there was massive voter fraud. Trump doesn’t need facts, he just throws the pasta against the wall and sees what sticks.
Off topic: but speaking of fascists, William F. Buckley was a big fan of Franco (and Pinochet) because Franco was supposedly a bulwark against communism. Franco was portrayed as some kind of benign dictator but he was a bloody tyrant who had hundreds of thousands of Spanish citizens jailed or slaughtered for even being suspected of being leftist, never mind actually communist.
Never. I think Trump is a secret Nazi. He knows what he’s doing.
Trump has learned the lessons of history –fascist history. He will cynically –and successfully –use Twitter, lies, slander of reputable information sources and distracting publicity stunts to keep the public in the dark.
Prescient indeed: “it involved immensely exaggerating the scale of Russian intervention.” Those who would blame Russian intervention now also make the same mistake.
This part perfectly expresses the foolishness of Amercans’ default optimism:
“We in England underrate the danger of this kind of thing, because our traditions and our past security have given us a sentimental belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing you most fear never really happens. Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run. Pacifism, for instance, is founded largely on this belief. Don’t resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What evidence is there that it does? And what instance is there of a modern industrialized state collapsing unless conquered from the outside by military force?”
I agree with Orwell that pacifism is foolish. If good people won’t fight, horrible things can happen and keep happening for a very long time.
Oops –not meant as a response to Pollard.
And those nameless slaves still exist today and are forgotten and ignored by most of the world. The UN estimates that roughly 27 to 30 million individuals are current caught in the salve trade industry, an industry that generates up to $35 billion annually. Most of them are women and children in the illegal sex industry that reaches even to the United States. I’ve read that the FBI estimates about 17,000 are trafficked into the Untied States annually and most of them are trafficked through Houston, Texas.
The Washington Post ran a piece on this in 2013 with a info graphic map that shows where most of these slaves are in the world.
“We think of slavery as a practice of the past, an image from Roman colonies or 18th-century American plantations, but the practice of enslaving human beings as property still exists. There are 29.8 million people living as slaves right now, according to a comprehensive new report issued by the Australia-based Walk Free Foundation.”
The U.S. has an estimated 60,000 salves right here in America.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/10/17/this-map-shows-where-the-worlds-30-million-slaves-live-there-are-60000-in-the-u-s/?utm_term=.6bde789414a1
And now we have a president-elect who clearly values women as only sex objects, while Hillary Clinton, regardless of her alleged scandals over, for instance, e-mails, has/had a long history of fighting for women and children.
It is obvious that with Trump the world will become a darker more dangerous place for everyone but him and his inner circle.
“totalitarians war on the very concept of objective truth.” Those who wish America to become a “Kingdom of God” like DeVos have been undermining the objectivity of the enlightenment that our democracy was based upon. Maybe it’s time to undermine the falseness of the religion they are using to dumb down the masses.
Have you seen the first part of the Zeitgeist movie that reveals that about 2/3rds of the Jesus’s story is actually copied from the God of Horus story out of Egypt thousands of years older?
I haven’t seen that film, but I’m not surprised. After all, Christmas is promoted as a Christian holiday when in fact it has its roots in pagan religions just like Halloween.
http://www.livescience.com/25779-christmas-traditions-history-paganism.html
Nationalism and nativism are spreading to Europe as well. We see it in the Brexit vote, and even in The Netherlands where they are poised to choose a nationalist. I am afraid we are at even greater risk than some other countries because we have greater income disparity and an army of narrow minded billionaires minding the store. All you need for fascism to take hold is a stagnant economy, scapegoats like foreigners and teachers, a compliant and ineffective press and a charismatic leader to take charge of the minions. Sadly, we have many of these elements already in place.
Yes, teachers are scapegoats, official punching bags, sacrificial lambs and guilty as charged of whatever the billionaire boys’ club can hang around teachers’ necks. No trial, no due process necessary, just hang the teacher from the tallest tree.
“All you need for fascism to take hold. . .”
I contend that we are currently at least a proto-fascist state as the melding of corporate with the state has been going on for pretty much all of my lifetime.
Excellent post, Diane! Thanks.
Also from “Looking back. . . “:
“One of the essential experiences of war is never being able to escape from disgusting smells of human origin. Latrines are an overworked subject in war literature, and I would not mention them if it were not that the latrine in our barracks did its necessary bit towards puncturing my own illusions about the Spanish civil war. The Latin type of latrine, at which you have to squat, is bad enough at its best, but these were made of some kind of polished stone so slippery that it was all you could do to keep on your feet. In addition they were always blocked. Now I have plenty of other disgusting things in my memory, but I believe it was these latrines that first brought home to me the thought, so often to recur: ‘Here we are, soldiers of a revolutionary army, defending Democracy against Fascism, fighting a war which is about something, and the detail of our lives is just as sordid and degrading as it could be in prison, let alone in a bourgeois army.’ Many other things reinforced this impression later; for instance, the boredom and animal hunger of trench life, the squalid intrigues over scraps of food, the mean, nagging quarrels which people exhausted by lack of sleep indulge in.
The essential horror of army life (whoever has been a soldier will know what I mean by the essential horror of army life) is barely affected by the nature of the war you happen to be fighting in. Discipline, for instance, is ultimately the same in all armies. Orders have to be obeyed and enforced by punishment if necessary, the relationship of officer and man has to be the relationship of superior and inferior. The picture of war set forth in books like All Quiet on the Western Front is substantially true. Bullets hurt, corpses stink, men under fire are often so frightened that they wet their trousers. It is true that the social background from which an army springs will colour its training, tactics and general efficiency, and also that the consciousness of being in the right can bolster up morale, though this affects the civilian population more than the troops. (People forget that a soldier anywhere near the front line is usually too hungry, or frightened, or cold, or, above all, too tired to bother about the political origins of the war.) But the laws of nature are not suspended for a ‘red’ army any more than for a ‘white’ one. A louse is a louse and a bomb is a bomb, even though the cause you are fighting for happens to be just.”
The American military has cleaned up it’s act, has sanitized what war is all about which is pure death and destruction. And we, the USA, continue sending many people, military personnel and civilians to ignominious and dirty early deaths
“The American military has cleaned up it’s act, has sanitized what war is all about which is pure death and destruction. And we, the USA, continue sending many people, military personnel and civilians to ignominious and dirty early deaths”
The American media has done that. Aleppo and Mousil will remind us anew what war is all about. . As I read a while back the only Britons who were not affected by the bombing . Were those not being bombed. The American military has cleaned up its act by making a smaller and smaller part of our population fight our wars. Their broken minds and bodies are out of the sight of most Americans.
Time to heed the lesson of Martin Niemöller the only way to stop fascism is not to let it put its foot in the door . To do that requires a unified effort from the start .
“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
I will be in Washington on January 21st weather permitting if not a little closer to home in NEW YORK.
Where will you be? The media will use new speak to normalize him the plutocrats are in heaven. We can never allow the child rapist criminal fraudster demagogue to be normalized.
“When one thinks of all the people who support or have supported SCHOOL REFORM, one stands amazed at their diversity. What a crew! . . . But the clue is really very simple. They are all people with something to lose, or people who long for a hierarchical society and dread the prospect of a world of free and equal human beings. Behind all the ballyhoo that is talked about THE CIVIL RIGHTS ISSUE OF OUR TIME and the ‘LACK OF RIGOR’ of the URBAN POOR lies the simple intention of those with money or privileges to cling to them. Ditto, though it contains a partial truth, with all the talk about the worthlessness of social reconstruction not accompanied by a ‘change of heart’. The pious ones, from the GATES to the DEVOS of MICHIGAN, are great on the ’change of heart’, much more reassuring from their point of view than a change in the economic system.
A few changes and what Orwell said then applies now, eh!
Spectacularly frightening!!!!
Thank you, Diane.
What’s going on in this country us indeed Orwellian.
The truth of the old adage is that “you are what you eat”. This concept can be re-phrased as “you are what you learn and believe in” in terms of consumption of foods and thoughts.
The fake news, fake degrees and fake credentials are NOT created by commoners, BUT by certain amoral academe. Whenever education system offers a whole child education concept as per Dr. Ravitch’s suggestion, learners at the beginning of learning with humanity and civility will lead to create outstanding citizens whether they are in position of leaders or followers.
IMHO, there will never be hopeless to start over = to hold onto our vision of what is right and just. And to never lose hope. This is the lesson of the civil rights movement: courage, persistence, faith, and determination to stand up for justice, truth, and progress according to our beloved Dr. Ravitch’s expression. Back2basic
Well said, May!!
If I may add a little to one of your thoughts: “. . . citizens whether they are in position of leaders or followers OR NEITHER.
“And this kid, this sibling, is just like the one who came before him…. ”
No fan of the Trumpster or the Trumplandia team but this Russia did it requres Proof please! Just because they say it’s so?
https://theintercept.com/2016/12/14/heres-the-public-evidence-russia-hacked-the-dnc-its-not-enough/
Clarity,
I wish you had heard Steve Coll, a foreign policy expert, and Gary Kasparov, a Russian dissident, on Rachel Maddow’s show.
The people defending Russia are defending a brutal dictator, not a sympathetic Communist.
“that shifting phantasmagoric world in which …yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree”
–Orwell
“There is no drought”
–Trump in May 2016, to Californians, who have experienced the obvious effects of a few consecutive years of drought.