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Class Is
Still The Issue
By John Pilger
09/06/07 "ICH"
-- - 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 legalised 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 per cent 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 per cent 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
criticise 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 patronised. Two
honourable 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.
This article was first published by the New Statesman
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