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From: "Emilija Kiehl" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <Undisclosed-Recipient:@mx3.dircon.net;>
Subject: Fw: ZNet Commentary
"Leaders of the New World Order" / John Pilger / Liberal Elites / Sept 4
Date: Wed, Sep 5, 2001, 9:45 am
Liberal elites have always disguised their innate conservatism
>By John Pilger
>
>At the Hay-on-Wye literary festival in May, leading members of the media
>and cultural elite assembled in the fine gardens of a Regency house to
>await the arrival of the great man (Clinton). They included broadsheet
>editors, deputy editors, literary editors, ex-editors, novelists, actors and
>John Birt. Afterwards, there would be a "lecture about world affairs" for
>which a second division had paid �100 a ticket. Whispered jokes about
>Monica and cigars quickly turned to full-throttle obseqiousness when the
>great man ambled in. According to John Walsh of the Independent, "the
>whole garden party became a queue to shake Bill's hand, to be
>photographed and to rejoin their friends and discuss the experience".
>
>Clinton told them how he had brought peace to Kosovo, Northern Ireland,
>et cetera. The fact that he had bombed and killed innocent people across
>the world, dispatched tens of thousands of Iraqi children and eroded the
>last of Roosevelt's New Deal cover for the poorest Americans was not at
>issue. Only sanitized questions were allowed; they touched on none of
>these crimes. The reward for this complicity was Clinton trousering
>$100,000.
>
>It was a vivid snapshot of the age of new Labour elites: a gathering of
>Blair's winners. There have been many such events since May 1997,
>celebrating fame, fortune and illusion. The latter included those staged
>at the Foreign Office at which, with the help of media celebrities,
>Robin Cook announced an "ethical dimension" to foreign policy and "the
>pursuit of human rights in the new century". Like at Hay, the gallery
>was from the liberal establishment: Amnesty, the voluntary
>organisations, editors, news readers. They remained silent or bowled
>lemons. That it was all an elaborate hoax, as they now know, was not an
>issue.
>
>A few weeks back, Michael Jackson, Channel 4's departing chief
>executive, told Observer readers that he had, no less, helped bring
>about "the profound social changes that have occurred in British society
>. . ." He cited Big Brother as representing "a melting pot for a
>broader, more understanding and inclusive society . . . an optimistic
>glimpse at the ease of presence between a group of people with different
>ethnicity, sexuality, religion, class and education". He related this to
>Blair's promised "classless society" and declared, Tony-like, that "we
>have a more prosperous economy than at any time in our past".
>
>The clear implication was that Channel 4, under Jackson, was the
>television equivalent of new Labour. One can appreciate his argument.
>The threadbare liberalism of the new Labour elite, its tame columnists,
>lords and terrified MPs, is said to be based on tolerance for the new
>era's sexual and racial diversity. After all, look at all those black
>and gay ministers and female MPs. This is a con, of course. All it
>proves is that gays and blacks and females can be as reactionary and
>unprincipled as anybody.
>
>Recall the lemming-line of female Labour MPs who voted for a cut in
>benefits to single parents, mostly mothers, and the apologetics of the
>black minister Paul Boateng at the most regressive Home Office in living
>memory, and the machinations of the gay Peter Mandelson in playing court
>to some of the most ruthless capitalists on earth, including the
>purveyors of death in the British arms industry.
>
>That gays and females, blacks and Asians are capable of moronic
>behaviour in Big Brother is not "an optimistic glimpse" of anything.
>Like the pathetic cast of Jerry Springer, they merely provide a glimpse
>of the media elite's vicarious flirtation with low life for the sake of
>a buck and high ratings. No one denies that Channel 4 transmits some
>quite brilliant programmes, as it should, given its extraordinary remit
>and resources and the film-making talent in Britain; but these are
>fragments of its potential.
>
>Liberal elites have always disguised their innate conservatism and fixed
>the boundaries of public debate, and those currently in charge of
>Britain are no different. As Jackson says, the drugs debate is
>important, as is the issue of race. But neither will progress unless
>public resources are made available for care and rehabilitation, and for
>proper jobs and public services in places like Oldham and Bradford: in
>other words, unless the economics of social democracy, at the very
>least, drives them.
>
>"We have more young people in higher education than [ever] before",
>wrote Jackson. In fact, there are more indebted and despairing students
>than ever before. The proportion of working-class students has actually
>dropped since new Labour made so many of them pay. In his great work
>Equality, R H Tawney pointed out that the English educational system
>"will never be one worthy of a civilised society until the children of
>all classes in the nation attend the same schools . . . The idea that
>differences of educational opportunities among children should depend
>upon differences of wealth represents a barbarity."
>
>That is the situation today, with the divisions within state education
>reinforced by new Labour's veiled class conflict. As for "a more
>prosperous economy than at any time in our past", well, I suppose you
>have to admire the sheer nerve of TV executives on half a million quid a
>year.
>
>The truth is that Thatcher and her heir, Blair, have created a society
>that allows, among the top third, a gloss of prosperity, mostly on
>credit, while the majority either cope with mounting insecurity or
>vanish into poverty. Almost half the families of Britain live on this
>precipice of poverty. Nearly half the children in London are brought up
>in poverty. According to recent research at Cambridge University,
>roughly 250,000 children in the poorest households are worse off since
>new Labour came to office. Indeed, child poverty is 50 per cent higher
>than when Thatcher was elected.
>
>None of this is represented, in any sustained form, on television, and
>certainly not on the BBC, where the circus and propaganda of a
>single-ideology state dominate. It is only in recent weeks, since the
>events in Genoa, that the nation's dumbed-down news services have
>interrupted their chorus about the protesters' "violence" and begun to
>recognise the ferocity of state violence aimed at the anti- capitalism
>movement. Blair's defence of the Italian police and his gross lack of
>respect for the loss of a young life ought to have seen him grilled by
>those journalists who have access to him. But there was nothing: just
>gloating over Jeffrey Archer.
>
>Study the fine photograph in the Guardian on 20 July. There are the
>Blairs and the Bushes greeting each other. The wives are waltzing
>towards their unctuous embrace; the little Texan has a hand on the
>effete Blair's shoulder. Bush, whom the BBC still calls "the leader of
>the free world", is the unelected ruler of a dangerous, rapacious,
>essentially undemocratic plutocracy. Blair's leadership of this country,
>approved by one-quarter of the electorate, is barely legitimate. Both
>are extremists in the literal sense, prepared to use military violence
>against civilians. Blair pushes unpopular and violent domestic policies,
>commodifying almost everything that is ours, from healthcare to schools,
>policies designed to make winners and losers - with those who earn half
>a million a year the winners, and the children imprisoned behind a wall
>of economic hardship, far from the voyeuristic eye of Big Brother, the
>losers.
>
>The "optimistic glimpse" is not at Channel 4, but at the courage and
>intelligence and sheer strength of character of the young men and women,
>black and white and brown, gay and heterosexual, who faced the organised
>violence of the state in Genoa and Seattle and Prague, and will do it
>again and again. They represent a genuine "profound social change".
>Recently, the Asia vice-president of the financiers Goldman Sachs said:
>"This is an uprising as big as the revolution that shook the world
>between 1890 and 1920. Beware."
>
>Beware indeed.
>
>Information on John Pilger's written and filmic work can be found at
>www.johnpilger.com
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