Distant Voices (4 page)

In the BBC Locke's views have also been modernised; people
are
allowed to discuss the affairs of state, though within a certain framework, as represented by
Question Time
on television and the
Today
programme on radio, where
‘politics' is defined as that which takes place inside, or within a short cab journey of, the Palace of Westminster. In this way journalists, politicians and other establishment representatives promote each other's agendas and set the limits of political ‘debate'. This is known as ‘the mainstream'.

In
Distant Voices
I have set out to identify some of the principal agendas. The most important is that of the ‘new world order', which is promoted as having been approved by the United Nations and the ‘world community'. In his State of the Union address following the ‘victory' in the Gulf, President Bush spoke of his ‘big idea, a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause [but] only the United States has both the moral standing and the means to back it'.
³¹

In the chapter ‘How the world was won over', I have set out how ‘diverse nations' were given the biggest bribes in history to join the ‘common cause' – bribes based upon their indebtedness to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, many of them funded by the oil sheikhs. Far from upholding international law, the ‘new world order' (a term used by Benito Mussolini) ordains American military and economic power and law breaking.

We used to be reminded constantly of the illegal Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. We are not reminded of the illegal American invasions, such as the assault on Panama, when thousands of civilians were killed on the pretext of arresting a drug dealer, the former American client, General Noriega. (The real reason was US control over the Panama Canal.) Today Panama is forgotten, occupied and ruined. Neither are we reminded of the genocidal violence of Washington-sponsored regimes, such as that of the ‘moderate' regime in Indonesia. As the Guatemalan journalist Julio Godoy has pointed out, Europeans under the Soviet heel were ‘in a way luckier than Central Americans . . . while the Moscow-imposed government in Prague would degrade and humiliate reformers, the Washington-made government in Guatemala would kill them. It still does [and] has taken more
than 150,000 victims'.
³²
Under the ‘liberal' presidency of Bill Clinton, nothing in essence has changed.

Since the birth of the ‘new world order', power at the United Nations has shifted from that of peacemaker to war-maker: from the General Assembly to the US-dominated Security Council. Instead of a ‘peace dividend' there is rearmament; in the year of the collapse of the Soviet ‘enemy', US arms sales rose by 64 per cent, the greatest increase ever; and there are serious proposals for a Nuclear Expeditionary Force ‘primarily for use against Third World targets'.
³³
By 1994 the British arms industry controlled 20 per cent of the world market, much of it linked to ‘aid' sweeteners, notably in Malaysia and Indonesia.

The agenda of the ‘free market' ruled the 1980s, allowing millions to break the bonds of the state, so it was said. In fact, the 1980s was the decade of global impoverishment, producing the greatest division between rich and poor in the history of humankind. In the section ‘War by other means', I have described how unrepayable interest has become the means of controlling much of humanity, its natural resources, commodities and labour, without sending in a single marine. In many countries, an era of social Darwinism has begun, imposed and policed by the financial institutions of the rich world. According to the United Nations'
State of the World's Children
, more than half a million children die every year as a direct result of the burdens of debt repayment.
³⁴
Debt has normalised the unthinkable.

‘A prolonged and ferocious class war is under way', writes the author of a UN Development Programme study, adding, ‘You cannot hide the poorest behind national boundaries'.
³⁵
Indeed, in developed countries, this war is heard now as distant gunfire. It will grow louder as social Darwinism is applied at home, ensuring that Los Angeles and London become extensions of the Third World. Britain now has a quarter of Europe's poor; one British child in four now lives in poverty.
³⁶

The political prescriptions agreed by elites in the developed countries offer no solutions. In Britain there is ‘convergence'
between the policies of the main political parties – policies that declare people expendable and the notion of common obligation heresy, eroding the premises upon which a modest civilisation rested. In a new section, ‘The Quiet Death of the Labour Party', I have described how Britain has become a ‘democratic' one-party state where power is exercised by an increasing number of unaccountable ‘quangos' and access to power depends on connections to an ideological elite unchallenged by a ‘modernised', supine Labour Party.

Elsewhere voices remain muted. In the West almost no writers of renown have emerged to make literature of the struggles of ordinary people. In America there is no Upton Sinclair; no
The Jungle
and
It Can't Happen Here
, no Steinbeck, just the flatulence of Mailer. In Europe there is no Orwell, no Tressell, no Kafka. In his
Guardian
essay ‘While the pen sleeps', D. J. Taylor invited us to ‘read the review pages of a Sunday newspaper or one of the right-wing weeklies and note their languid air of complacency, the unspoken assumption that a book should consist of drawing room twitter, gentle mockery, “fine writing” . . . Given the radical agenda of the last nine years, given the Falklands, Ireland, the Bomb, could any age be more political than our own? [and yet] writers have lost the ability to describe and define the society of which they are a part.'
³⁷
Taylor's piece was as memorable for its rarity as its insights.

We are left with publications not unlike
samidzat.
In America there is a group of them, like
Z Magazine
and
Covert Action
, that publish documented unofficial truth. The enduring popularity of the great journalist Studs Terkel, incorrigible behind his microphone in Chicago, provides a glimpse.

‘I hate to use the word yuppie', he said recently, ‘because yuppie is not what most of the young are. Most are bewildered and lost . . . but I'm waiting for a bus where I live in uptown and I bump into this couple who really are yuppies, the ones you see in the suds-sex-beer commercials. So I talk while we're waiting for the bus. It's a few days before Labor Day, so I say Labor Day is coming up, a celebration of
American trade unions. Unions! they say. God, we despise unions! I ask: “How many hours a day do you work?” Eight hours. “Why don't you work 18 hours like your grandparents or your great-grandparents did?” They don't know. I say: “You know why? Because four guys hanged so you could work eight hours a day [the Haymarket Martyrs in 1886]. Don't you know that people got their heads busted in the 1930s fighting for the 40-hour week?” They just don't know. The point is that we have no sense of history. There's just the sound bite.'
³⁸

In Britain there are outstanding independent journalists who are published in the ‘mainstream' and those, like Jeremy Seabrook, who are not. In commercial television there is still a clutch of fine broadcasters and directors, the products of a British documentary tradition which began with John Grierson, Norman Swallow and Denis Mitchell and owes nothing to bogus ‘balance'. They were film makers – film
journalists
– who presented people and places as they saw them; and their work was rich and moving. They understood broadcasting as a medium in which experience could be shared. They illuminated those areas in society which had long remained in shadow. Today they would be called ‘campaigning' and ‘committed', and perhaps they were. They dared to put microphones and cameras in front of ordinary people and let them talk. And what they revealed was the blood, sweat and tears of another nation.

Their heirs are not yet ‘distant voices', though their future depends on the strength of their backing against specious ‘realism'. They are part of a great constituency of public resistance, which has little to do with ‘mainstream' political forces and whose achievements are remarkable: the exposure of a deeply corrupt criminal justice system and a mobilised popular revolt against a vicious tax. It was the British peace movement that made universal the principle that the nuclear arms race could be stopped only by bold unilateral acts – a principle embraced by Gorbachev and eventually by others.

The most courageous ‘distant voices' are in the Third World, and this book pays special tribute to them. They
produce literature and journalism that have no equivalent in the developed world (like the analyses in
Third World Resurgence,
published in Malaysia), and often in conditions of great personal danger. Every year hundreds of journalists pay for their outspokenness with their health and their lives. The wider resistance they represent, much of it underground, is barely acknowledged in the West. In the section ‘Under the Volcano' I have described the stamina and sophistication of the ‘popular organisations' in the Philippines, a country so often reported as a place of disasters and freaks.

The millennium may have to end before, like Milton's Satan, they ‘soon rise up and resume their defiance'. But rise up they will, as people did in this century and others. For although ‘normalised' to the foreign eye, they are never still. ‘Half of humanity', says Susan George, author of
A Fate Worse Than Debt,
‘are young, frustrated and angry, and they are going to become more so.'
³⁹
The uprising of the Zapatistas in Mexico against unemployment, debt and trade deals that enrich the powerful is just a beginning. All over Latin America, and elsewhere, other Zapatistas are stirring. We should watch them.

‘I sometimes feel', wrote the Uruguayan poet Eduardo Galeano in 1990, ‘as if they have stolen even our words. The term “socialist” is applied in the West as the false face of injustice; in the West, it evokes purgatory or perhaps hell. The word “imperialism” is no longer to be found in the dominant lexicon, even though imperialism is present and does pillage and kill. In a few months we have witnessed the turbulent shipwreck of a system that usurped socialism. Now we must begin all over again. Step by step, with no shields but those born of our own bodies. It is necessary to discover, create, imagine. And today, more than ever, it is necessary to dream. To dream, together . . .'
⁴⁰

London, May 1994

WHEN IT WAS
raining hard the other day, a familiar silhouette appeared at my front door. I knew it was him, because, having rung the bell, he retreated to the gate: a defensive habit gained on the streets. ‘It's the man', said my young daughter, ‘with no name.'

He had on his usual tie and tweed jacket and was leaning against the hedge, though he said he hadn't had a drink. ‘Just passing through,' he said as usual, and money passed between us with the customary clumsy handshake. ‘I'd better give that a trim,' he said, as he always did, pointing at the hedge, and again I thanked him and said no; he was too unsteady for that. Collar up, he turned back into the rain.

I have known him for about three years. He comes to my door at least every week, and I see him out on the common in all weathers, asleep or reading or looking at the traffic. I see him nodding as if in silent discussion with himself on a weighty matter; or waving and smiling at a procession of women with small children in buggies. Understandably, women hurry away from him; others look through him.

He has no home, though he once told me he lived ‘just around the corner'. That turned out to be a hostel. From what I can gather, he sleeps rough most of the time, often on a bench in front of a small powerboats clubhouse, or in a clump of large trees where sick and alcoholic men go and where there was a murder some years back. In winter, he has newspapers tucked inside his jacket. Perhaps he is fifty, or more; it's difficult to tell.

He vanishes from time to time, as the homeless tend to do;
and when I last asked him about this, he said he went to ‘visit my sister'. I very much doubted this; I know he goes to one of several seaside towns for a few weeks at a time. There he scans the local newspaper small ads for ‘unemployed guests wanted'. These are inserted by the owners of bed-and-breakfast hotels and hostels, where homeless people are sent by local authorities and by the Department of Health and Social Security.

I can imagine a little of what it must be like for him. As a reporter I once ended up in one of these ‘hotels'. When I couldn't produce the Social Security form that would allow the owner to collect every penny of his ‘guest's' state benefit, I was thrown out. This wholesale diversion of public money is acknowledged as one of the fastest ways of getting rich in Britain since the Thatcher Government stopped councils spending on housing more than ten years ago. Hotel owners are said to make about £120 million a year. In the Enterprise Society, homelessness, like drinking water, has been ‘privatised'; or is it ‘restructured'?

My friend is one of 80,000 people who are officially homeless in London. This is the equivalent of the population of Stevenage, in Hertfordshire; the true figure is greater, of course. The national figure for homeless households is 169,000, ten times higher than a decade ago. The homeless are now a nation within a nation, whose suffering makes a good television story at Christmas or when there is snow and ice.