A little Orwell in the morning
by digby
It’s now become a cliche to quote Orwell (a comment on our times in itself) but sometimes you just have to do it anyway. My brother and I were talking about newspapers the other day and he reminded me of this:
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.
Watch the press this coming week about the Middle East, terrorism, government spying, Ukraine and Russia etc and see if that comment doesn’t come to mind.
ht RLP