Class
Is Still The Issue
By John Pilger
07 September, 2007
Johnpilger.com
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 legalized
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
percent 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 percent 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 criticize 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 patronized. Two honorable 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.
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