Up to my retirement several years ago I taught spoken English at an agricultural university in North-East China. The routine was relieved by an assignment to deliver an elective course that I called ‘Western Art and Culture’. I was given carte blanche to draw up a curriculum to fill the ten weeks allotted.
From my experience of teaching at this and two other Chinese universities I was aware that young students have only a patchy knowledge of visual arts, theatre and music. At middle school they study Dynastic nature poetry, and read some of China’s classic novels including the sixteenth century Ming masterpiece Journey to the West.
I once glanced at a middle school textbook, in Chinese, on ‘Western Culture’. It carried black and white photos of Greek temple, ceramic pots, an armless Venus de Milo, the Roman forum and Colosseum, and Leonardo’s rendering of Mona Lisa. Musical and artistic instruction is only offered in a serious way on curricula of select urban fee-paying schools. Middle class parents in the booming cities often pay for their sons and daughters to be privately tutored in piano or violin, or traditional string instruments like the erhu or the guzheng.
Guzheng practice.
Sweatshop Art Reproduction
I discovered that few third level Chinese students have ever visited a city art museum. One reason is the high cost of admission relative to most students’ disposable pocket money. A lucky few have visited the Summer Palace and Forbidden City in Beijing, or lit incense sticks ‘for good luck’, at a Buddhist temple during the annual spring festival. Downloading free movies on their laptops in student dormitories is the most common cultural experience.
Female students in China are particularly draw to romantic B-movies, churned out in South Korea, with Chinese subtitles attached. Japanese Manga comic books, infamous for lurid depictions, cater to lowbrow reading taste.
Around China you might see replica Mona Lisas in cafes, restaurants and hotel rooms. Van Gogh’s expressionist studies of ‘Starry Night’ and ‘Twelve Sunflowers in a Vase’ are other common wall-fillers. Renoir’s charming portraits of the late 19th-century French bourgeoisie are also to be found.
There are two or three factories in South China where teams of skilled painters churn out reproductions of these and other Western classic. One week they might have to recreate a Constable, the following a Rubens. It is sweatshop reproduction art.
In other sections of the factories workers on assembly lines fit the canvases into gilt frames. Every six months business people from all over the world attend the trade exhibition held in the southern boom town of Guangzhou (formerly Canton). There they buy up large quantities of these as well as mock-period furniture for export. The next time you see Monet’s sunset-red grain stacks at Giverney on a European café wall, pause and reflect that it might have been made to order by a Chinese sweatshop painter.
The Origins of Western Civilisation
For my course I chose to begin with Leonardo and Michelangelo, moving on to Johannes Vermeer, Goya, the French impressionists, Vincent Van Gogh, Wassily Kandinsky, and finally Picasso, whose political work is officially praised in China; though his erotic material is never reproduced in schoolbooks, and shocks the curious who seek out more online.
The Ancient Greeks and Romans form a composite myth about the origins of western civilization, succinctly laid out in the approved middle school textbooks of Communist China. Chinese school-leavers are at least familiar with photos of the Parthenon in Athens and Roman Colloseum.
I happened to have a DVD of the film ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’. which fictionally recreates the household circumstances in which Vermeer painted a work that has appeared on everything from chocolate boxes to 1500-piece jigsaw puzzles. I emphasised that the Girl is often called the Mona Lisa of Northern Europe. My students empathised with her simple peasant garb and down-to-earth prettiness. They were aware that the pearl earring had been supplied for the portrait.
Shyness and lack of of art observation practice made it difficult for me to elicit comments on selected screened paintings. I persisted and let every student in class take his or her turn.
Admiring Leonardo’s Guts
Knowing that Chinese secondary school students only learn about Leonardo da Vinci through the Mona Lisa and her enigmatic smile, I took the trouble to show several of his anatomical and engineering drawings. Communist leaders are constantly exhorting young citizens to cultivate a serious ‘scientific outlook’ on life.
I made it clear to my students that Leonardo first trained as an engineer before discovering his gift for drawing and painting. I revealed how he had been given permission to dissect and draw bodies in a hospital mortuary, amid the smell of summer putrefaction, and that reproductions of muscles, veins, organs and skeletons drawn by Leonardo were scrutinised by European medical students for hundreds of years; until the publication of Gray’s Anatomy in 1858 with its stunning illustrations by Henry Vandyke Carter.
Some of my Chinese undergraduates admired Leonardo’s guts; others squirmed audibly when confronted with graphic details of skulls and skeletons and a dead baby in the womb, as most students would.
In another push to get beyond the Mona Lisa stereotype I also showed reproductions of his other portraits and explored religious themes. ‘The Woman with an Ermine’ impressed students with her natural beauty, carefully groomed fawn hair and colourful dress. La Belle Ferroniere moved them similarly. I hoped this would give Chinese students a more rounded understanding of Leonardo’s stature in western art history.
In one class I showed a selection of traditional Chinese landscapes from various dynasties and juxtaposed them with selected Dutch landscapes of the 17th and 18th centuries. I noted that Chinese and Renaissance painting styles were different but not unequal in merit; artists in different cultural milieus attempting to achieve varying social-aesthetic objectives.
Students performing dance moves to pop music.
Final Grades
Music was an additional focus of my courses. I prepared a series of pictures of orchestral instruments, moving on to American popular music in Britain and America.
Finally, I assigned short writing pieces about the painters and a final paper was written on the subject of ‘art and music in my life’.
I was generally underwhelmed by the manuscripts. Many students wrote about listening in their dormitories late at night to popular music; none listened to Classical or jazz. Only a few wrote about paintings and sculptures. I hope my students have taken something with them about Western art, music and cultural norms. Maybe a few will drop into an art museum on their travels, assuming they are earning enough money to purchase the admission..
Garreth Byrne lives in retirement in Leitrim, Ireland after teaching English at universities and other institutions in five different cities in China, where he spent twelve years.
The year began darkly in Brazil. On January 1st, 2019, Jair Messias Bolsonaro was sworn in as President of the largest and richest nation in South America. In his inauguration speech, Bolsonaro stressed his commitment to liberate Brazil, ‘from socialism, inverted values, the bloated state and political correctness’, and called for ‘Brazil above everything, and God above everyone.’[i]
This far-right authoritarian presidency represents a new era for the nation, featuring unrestricted attacks on environmental protection, human rights movements and social inclusion. Dismissing democratic ideals, his neo-liberal philosophy envisions opening protected reserves to the agribusiness and extractive sectors; reducing crime through liberalising gun possession; and recovering the Judeo-Christian tradition, by marginalising vulnerable groups.
This new era threatens not only the rainforest and minorities but also democracy, and the world´s fragile climate.
(c) Fellipe Lopes
The effect of polarising discourses on an impressionable population
Bolsonaro was elected in October 2018, vowing to fight corruption and reduce criminality, using an iron fist. Almost fifty-eight million electors supported his messianic message, elevating him to power.
Removed from any understanding of the complexity of social justice and inclusion, the former army captain promises oppressive power, with armed force on the streets.
At first sight, his election was a response to a growing disillusionment with the political system. Countless politico-financial scandals and institutional corruption have brought many Brazilians to a stage of hopelessness. People were angry and disenchanted by previous administrations. Voters looked to a saviour, and demanded change, in the shape of this warlike army captain.
Bolsonaro’s polarising and polemical rhetoric spoke to the fear and dissatisfaction of millions. His campaign manipulated these sentiments, attacking opponents, and promising economic prosperity alongside ultra-conservative Christianity. This formula gained traction through social media and WhatsApp groups that relentlessly spread his message, as well as disseminating fake news about opponents.
In the past, as a member of the Congress he has openly approved of torture[ii], offending women, indigenous populations, black people and the LGBTQ community. He has made homophobic, xenophobic, racist and misogynist remarks his hallmark.
‘‘The Brazilian cavalry was too incompetent. The American cavalry showed competence in exterminating their Indian populations in the past, nowadays they don’t have this problem anymore.’[iv]
‘I had four sons, but then I had a moment of weakness, and the fifth was a girl.’[v]
‘I would not be capable of loving a homosexual son … I would prefer to see him die in a car accident.’[vi]
‘You can be sure that if I get there [the presidency], there will be no money for NGOs. If it is up to me, every citizen will have a gun at home.’
‘The scum of the world [referring to refugees] is arriving in Brazil as if we didn’t have enough problems to solve’[vii]
Trying to invade the West and subject us to this aberration.’ – caption of a video posted on his official Facebook page.[viii]
His well-publicised hate speeches did not discourage people of all economic classes and social groups from voting for him. On the contrary, the lack of political correctness brought comfort and emboldened those in step with such a tone.
Many of his supporters interpret the aggressive messages embedded in his speeches as speaking truth to power, or as bringing down the hypocrisy of political correctness. They dismiss the dangerous violence in his words and gestures, including the celebrated simulation of firing a gun with his fingers. This reveals the submerged prejudices of many Brazilians. As a society we must recognise these, and transform in order to move forward.
This is a period in which the language of political leaders, such as Bolsonaro and Trump, paves the way for the dehumanisation of certain social groups, including indigenous populations, women, black people, LGBTQ community and refugees. These groups are confined to zones of social and political exclusion, in landscapes of abandonment and forgetfulness; dispossessing their lives of intrinsic value and meaning.
With Bolsonaro’s signature of presidential decrees, his worldview expands into attacks on environmental reserves and wild animals, leading to ecological death.
(c) Fellipe Lopes
The disastrous first thirty days
Only a month in office,[ix] and the new head of the Brazilian state has already signed numerous problematic presidential decrees into law, sided with fascist regimes such as Israel, Italy, Hungary and America, and nominated untrustworthy ministers.
Among the most alarming is the transfer of powers over indigenous territory to the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Agriculture. Brazil is already the most dangerous country in the world for environmental activists.[x] This move, alongside the demonization of activists amidst a culture of impunity, is likely to foment further violence, and expand deforestation.
The agribusiness lobby has also managed to reduce bureaucratic oversight in obtaining environmental licenses, with the objective of further deforestation and expansion of agricultural plantation and mining in the Amazon.
Amazon River (c) Bartholomew Ryan.
In 2018, the country registered a 13.7% increase in deforestation, the heaviest annual toll for a decade[xi]. With the eradication of NGOs, this is likely to break further records over the coming years.
After lifting controls on deforestation in the Amazon region, in response to lobbying by the agribusiness and extraction industry, the administration has been hit with its first major humanitarian and ecological crisis.
On January 25th a dam, constructed to facilitate mining, collapsed[xii] in Brumadinho, south-eastern Brazil, releasing a toxic wave of mud which swamped human lives, houses and surrounding rivers. So far at least thirty-four people are known to have died, with nearly three hundred missing. This is not the first mining dam to have collapsed in the region. Three years ago, the city of Mariana and the Sweet River was engulfed by a similarly deadly tide, containing waste from a nearby iron-ore mine. This was the worst ecological crime in Brazilian history.[xiii] Vale, the company responsible for both disasters, has not been held to account for the Mariana disaster, and continues its activities, without regard to environmental laws.
A day prior to being hospitalised to remove a colostomy bag, the consequence of a stabbing at a presidential campaign rally in September 2018, Bolsonaro flew over the disaster zone with his Environmental Minister, and mining lobbyist, Ricardo Salles. Despite creating a crisis management office and deploying the armed forces in support of rescue missions in the area, the president referred to the disaster as an ‘accident’. He refuses to commit to prosecuting Vale for its crimes against people and natures. This is in stark contrast to the iron fist he vows to wield against organised crime and corruption.
The president´s environmental discourses and measures are a deadly combination whose impacts will have global repercussions. The Amazon forest plays a key role in maintaining the world’s fragile climate. Its complex ecosystems is vital to sustaining life, including human life, on our planet. Accelerating its destruction is catastrophic for us all.
Yet the reality of climate change is deemed an ideology and ‘Marxist plot’[xiv] by the incoming Minister for Foreign Affairs, Ernesto Araújo.
The first thirty days also included withdrawal from the UN Migration Pact, signed in December 2018; a decree simplifying restriction on gun possession; and an award to Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Brazil’s most prestigious medal for foreign dignitaries, among other disastrous measures.
Now a financial scandal has erupted involving Bolsonaro’s eldest son and recently elected senator, Flavio Bolsonaro. This political dynasty won the trust of the electorates with a high moral tone, guaranteeing to sweep corruption away. This revelation, however, of suspicious payments and cash flows, involving Flavio Bolsonaro, his former bodyguard and driver, and Bolsonaro’s wife, is pointing to money laundering, and staining their reputation. The Supreme Court Justice suspended the investigation at the request of Flavio Bolsonaro, but it may resume in February.
(c) Fellipe Lopes
A ray of hope
We are yet to comprehend fully what the social impacts of the 2018 election will be. Already, it is widening existing fissures within Brazilian society, and distancing people on opposing sides of a political chasm. There is conflict and separation, blaming and shaming. Nevertheless, all of us are permeated by the same toxic atmosphere.
Whatever we agree or disagree on, Brazilians share a common future. We are tied together, with each other, and with the whole planet. The destruction of our forests and pollution of our waters is the erosion of our social fabric and the pollution of our bodies.
An exploitative economic and political system which disdains to acknowledge the inter-connectedness between all life is destined to collapse eventually. But this failure has a human cost, and brings untold suffering.
To avoid our social and ecological death, we must view the world with awakened eyes, re-humanising our vision to see nature and people as one. Then we will revere the intrinsic value of all life.
We need real leaders to invest our trust in to guide us through these dark times. It is time for politicians to unite us under a common vision of justice, sustainability and inclusion. Let us hold hands and bring to life an understanding of our humaneness.
The feature image by Vitor Schietti was awarded first place in the national contest Como somar num mundo em conflito in 2016. It was taken in Jericoacoara, in the state of Ceará, in 2013. The other images were kindly provided by Felipe Lopes and Bartholomew Ryan.
[ii] Fernanda Trisotta, ‘”dia que Bolsonaro quis matar FHC, sonegar impostos e declarar guerra civil”
Leia mais em: https://www.gazetadopovo.com.br/politica/republica/o-dia-que-bolsonaro-quis-matar-fhc-sonegar-impostos-e-declarar-guerra-civil-8mtm0u0so6pk88kqnqo0n1l69/
[iv] Chico Mares, ‘#Verificamos: É verdade que Bolsonaro elogiou cavalaria norte-americana por dizimar índios’, December 6th, 2018, Lupa, https://piaui.folha.uol.com.br/lupa/2018/12/06/verificamos-bolsonaro-cavalaria/ accessed 18/1/19.
[v] Bolsonaro: “Eu tenho 5 filhos. Foram 4 homens, a quinta eu dei uma fraquejada e veio uma mulher”, April 6th, 2017, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cp1GdBx32CM.
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle.
(‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, Karl Marx, 1852)
One might add a third instance to Hegel’s comment via Marx—a phase where it all devolves into a lesser sequel to Dumb and Dumber. On a fundamental level, the Fox and Friends-fueled ‘crisis’ over what is clearly a profoundly bad and ruinously expensive idea — a massive wall (or steel palisade, or whatever) across a massive and often inhospitable border is gratuitously unnecessary, the product of dimwitted hubris and incipient dementia coupled with an antiquated political system.
But this is America, and unlike a shitty sequel, we cannot simply decide to give the film a miss and… ride a bike or binge-watch on PornHub or something. Or maybe enjoy that glass of Kendall Jackson Chardonnay in peace without having to wonder how the dolt of a president will force you to pay attention to politics (or even that AOC retweet from one’s Bernie Bro nephew).
Image (c) Contantino Idini
Aside from the hardcore Trump supporter, and angry racist Fox News Grandpa, it isn’t as if anyone thought it was a good idea. Okay, by the most generous polls, 43% of the population believe the wall might be a good idea, which is to say that the country may be slightly less racist than one was afraid it was.
Still, though, this is the opposite of overwhelming support, and while the approval for the shutdown hovered at around 22%, we had a president from the less popular of the two major parties who lost the popular vote causing and overwhelmingly unpopular shutdown over an in-your-face-racist wall that most people don’t want, and he can get away with it due to this country’s antiquated political system — and because while the wall is unpopular, it’s still polling at 87% among Republicans, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell doesn’t want to get primaried by a more drooling-prone version of himself. And this is democracy. Apparently.
So how can this kind of situation be avoided? Within the framework of the U.S. Constitution the repeated House votes under Democratic control have about as much effect as all those votes to repeal Obamacare did when Republicans controlled the House and the Democrats held the presidency.
Grassroots? Again, the population as a whole isn’t the demographic Mitch McConnell (or Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter) serves — it’s the elderly white suburbanites who’ve never actually been on the receiving end of a crime by a person of color, but who saw a meme on Facebook that was really scary, and whose notion of God is, if Protestant, informed by megachurch Prosperity Gospel and if Catholic, same as the Protestants, but with an Ave Maria and child-buggery chucked in.
A considerable if not commanding majority rightly views such people with suspicion and contempt and tells such members of said demographic who are blood relatives to shut the fuck up when they opine that ‘black people didn’t used to mind being called the n-word’ at the Thanksgiving dinner table. But these people vote, and they are the make-or-break demographic in the Republican primaries.
Meanwhile, on the ‘left,’ aside from the welcome continued growth of the socialist-and anarchist Real Deal, the #Resistance spent the shutdown tearing itself up over whether it was better for the Women’s March to cheer for Louis Farrakhan or an Israeli strafe run on a Palestinian village, while continuing to take no real steps to open up the movement into something where marchers can do anything other than make up the numbers.
Cries of ‘Russiarussiarussia’ continue to abound, particularly at those who have the temerity to criticize the media-favored Democratic Party candidate du jour (at the moment of this writing, former prosecutor Kamala Harris, whose website has no policies laid out but does have merch. for sale).
We’re almost two years away from the 2020 general election, yet the rancor and brain rot of the American presidential campaign season has set in. And being Americans in a neo-liberal hellscape of a job market, the overwhelming majority of federal employees didn’t quit despite not being paid for a month.
However, the mere threat of airport and airline workers actually walking off the job was what actually broke the shutdown (contra #Resistance Twitter, which has begun to operate on the mistaken assumption that Nancy Pelosi is a brain-genius), indicating that the potential power of the working class in strategic industries shouldn’t be dismissed as something for the second verse of a Pete Seeger song.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calls for the electoral college to be abolished.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was absolutely right to call for the abolition of the antiquated Electoral College system that keeps giving us presidents who decisively lost the popular vote, but it’s not enough. As a whole mass of American historiography has amply demonstrated, the American Constitutional system was designed to limit the power of what Alexander Hamilton called ‘the great beast,’ by which he meant the voting public.
Many of the problems in American politics are not reducible to governmental structures — the dictatorship of capital and associated rampant inequality and looming ecological catastrophe have no obvious technocratic solution (sorry, Elizabeth Warren) — but the Constitutional fetishism of both major American parties makes serious discussions about significantly changing an effectively anti-democratic and deliberately unwieldy basic structure of government radically difficult.
So, apparently, Trump’s magic eight-ball told him to change course, and we’re no longer stuck with the stupid fucking shutdown and uninspected meat and vegetables and vandalism in the national parks, but we still have the MAGA-hatted Republicans and #Resistance Democrats… and more of this. And very little impetus to force our rulers to change the system that makes things like this happen again and again
As a freshly UK-embedded Irish barrister I am adjusting from confronting Ireland’s problems to addressing those of my new home. Worlds’apart, in a global village. In terms of Brexit, as far as the Irish media is concerned the Backstop, and a recrudescence of the ‘Irish Question’, is the only story, but from my perspective the border issue pales by comparison with the precarious position of Irish nationals resident on the UK mainland. All bets are off. In the Westminster extradition courts there is a growing apprehension among all non-nationals, amidst a descent into political farce. Eastern Europeans in particular are on red alert.
I recently immersed myself in the Brexit literature (word used advisedly), a choice not unlike Christopher Hitchens consenting to undergo waterboarding. Most offer blow-by-blow accounts, and are an utter waste of time.
By far the most useful and simultaneously useless book to emerge has been from that august man of letters, Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole. His Heroic Failure Brexit and The Politics of Pain (London, Apollo, 2018) suffers from a cultural myopia bordering on xenophobia. This account by an Irish-resident journalist is useless at providing any insight into the English character, but serves, nonetheless, as a useful vantage on the general superficiality of Irish political discourse.
O’Toole rightly inveighs against neo-liberalism throughout his text, but fails to recognise the extent to which the Brexit vote was in certain respects a reaction to the rampages of this pernicious ideology of free market free-for-all. For some, Brexit embodies an attempt to preserve an innate decency in the English character, rather than selling-out to multinational or Eurocractic control.
There endures a residue of decency in ‘old’ England – informed by secular and Christian socialist or liberal values – which are dying out rather faster in Ireland. Moreover, many argue that the UK should run a mile from the imposition of the austerity policies that liquidated the social structures of Ireland and Greece.
O’Toole’s argument that Jacob Rees-Mogg, and others, are seeking detachment for the sake of further wealth accumulation is valid, but the denunciation of Brexit as economic folly and a lapse towards an unrealistic autarky is less persuasive. Seeing Brexit as simply a manifestation of national self-pity, combining grievance and superiority, or a racist attempt to curb immigration, neglects to consider the rising indignation that many British justifiably feel at the encroachment of faceless bureaucrats intent on imposing austerity. This is coupled with a rising contempt for a New Labour-led political correctness that never confronted the downsides, in terms of labour protection and integration, of mass migration.
It is not simply a product of racism, a label O’Toole is too fond of flinging. Quoting Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech is the sort of simplification favoured by those who reach for the Hitler label at student debates.
Lazy Stereotypes
Neo-liberalism favours immigration in order to drive down labour costs. O’Toole is thus passively endorsing that which he purports to condemn when he decries how lazy the UK workforce has become. He ought to acknowledge that the Irish workforce has not always been renowned for its commitment, which protected some of us from a premature death through exhaustion. Indeed the flâneur is a fabled specimen in Irish literature.
As the jokes runs (in a droll Dublin accent): an Irish professor of literature was asked by his Spanish host at a conference in Spain whether there was a Gaelic word similar to the Spanish mañana. ‘Sure’ said the professor, ‘we have five words similar to mañana, but none convey quite the same sense of urgency.’
Like O’Toole, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar favours a productive, early-rising population, shoehorned into unthinking and robotic work, leading to death on the instalment plan; zero hour contracts; meaningless corporate jobs; and the siphoning off of wealth to vulture funds controlled by off-shore multi-nationals.
I vote for more leisure time. Who knows, it might lead the charmless O’Toole, and Varadkar his intellectual consort, to greater depths of analysis and cultural refinement.
Fintan O’Toole fails to comprehend that Ireland is the perfect little neo-liberal shit storm, which has prompted the aforementioned Rees-Mogg to invest in our little meltdown, after the double-whammy of liquidation by the ECB and American transitional corporations.
Britain, in its post-Brexit phase, cannot be described, as O’Toole purports to, in a reductive way. Yes, it is a society in existential crisis, but with many cross-currents. One cannot reduce this to a superiority complex, or colonial hangover. The pantomime villain qualities ascribed by O’Toole to the UK’s political caste are increasingly evident in politicians the world over.
Boris Johnson may be an opportunistic clown, but he rarely put a foot wrong as Mayor of London. His books are even sometimes well written. If he is a clown he is a more civilised prankster than our gang of horribles: the tasteless Varadkar, gombeen Kenny, blathering drunk Cowen, and the good ol’ boys of the Law Library.
Boris Johnson: a superior clown to our own vaudeville acts..
O’Toole commits the common Irish error of confusing speaking seriously on serious issues, which he does not understand, with being serious. Gravitas should be leavened with wit, not outright hysterical or self-righteous condemnation. The clownish but observant Johnson actually realises the necessity for laughter in the darkness, in common with the more sinister congeniality of the arch-Machiavellian Michael Gove. They are smarter than O’Toole allows.
Turning the lens
The unvarying narrative in the mainstream Irish media is that Brexit is a disaster, not just for Ireland but also the UK. About this I am not so sure. Cultural imperialism and splendid isolationism are distasteful aspects of the British character, but Europe was always an uncomfortable fit for other reasons too. Snap judgments are misleading.
Irish commentaries inevitably turn to what is in it for ‘us’, whether Europe, Brexit or anything else. Grubby calculation is an increasingly odious national characteristic, which clouds any assessment of whether it is the right path from a British perspective.
Let us recall that the Irish brand of disaster capitalism involves the state providing tax breaks for multi-nationals, and appeasing Canadian and American vulture funds; the destruction of not just the working class but increasingly the middle. According to Social Justice Ireland, last year 790,000 people were living in poverty, of whom 250,000 were children.[i] How is this possible when GDP per capita is at almost seventy-five thousand euro?
Though he condemns neo-liberalism, and indeed endorses legitimate outrage against European excesses, O’Toole is incapable of turning his lens on Ireland’s failings; or the receding possibility of reforming an EU increasingly beholden to corporate lobbyists.
Superiority and self-pity are characteristic of Irish attitudes too: the no longer purring Celtic Tiger is a Paper Tiger. For generations we endured the lachrymose nationalism of a failing state, now we talk ourselves up as the best little country in the world. As Flann O’ Brians put it: ‘Moderation we find is a difficult thing to get in this country.’[ii]
This sentimental patriotism fed into a grotesque over-estimate of our exceptionalism, which now permits the Mussolini-lite fascism, embodied by the grandstanding Varadkar, to go unchecked. Give me the incrementalism and resistance to the grandiosity of grand ideals that are a hallmark of historic British decency – tempering other aspects of the national character – any day.
The English Sausage
On a more mundane level, over breakfast in Bloomsbury, I reflected on the humble English sausage which helps gives an appreciation of the national character. Reading O’Toole’s overblown account of the British objection to EU bureaucratic regulation I found it a pity that he failed to mention the British sausage.
The sausage is a geopolitical signifier. Its fate a precursor to Brexit, the fons et origo of all that has gone horribly wrong.
Cast minds back to a kerfuffle at the inception of the EU, regarding the standardisation of the British sausage, and how incensed people became. With hindsight we see what could have gone wrong, and now has.
As an Irishman, albeit one who is partly Austrian, and an internationalist – effectively now a mongrel warrior – I recall how we derided the British for being so small-minded about their precious sausage. Hindsight is of course twenty-twenty vision. The British were perhaps right, then and now. They were outraged, and continue to be, by a foreign order of bean counters telling them what to do, and preaching to them about standards. And what role models and standards emanate from the EU exactly?
Then the story descended into silly season farce, but I think it remains emblematic and prescient of the tensions that have always existed between Britain and the EU.
If they regulate a sausage then who is next among the pantheon of eccentrics that populate English public life, excoriated by O’Toole. People are increasingly standardised, like sausages, in modern Ireland. As an unapologetic eccentric, I am dismissive of technocratic robots and muppets. If the political consensus leads to neo-liberalism then give me the oddness O’Toole attacks, any day.
The reclamation by O’Toole of British decency towards the end of the book, citing Orwell and parts of the Bloomsbury set, does not atone for the cack-handedness of his analysis of the English character.
Face it Fintan there is something rotten in the state of Brussels
Let us focus on what has been wrong with the EU from the outset, and which O’Toole unsatisfactorily broaches. Foremost has been the appointment of faceless bureaucrats at levels removed from local concerns, who impose a levelling conformity – here I am providing a clear distinction between standards and standardisation. Technocrats are invariably drawn from a privileged elite, selected through education for conformity, political-correctness and reliability. Then they are insulated in their silo bubble of privilege from the experiences of the common person.
The salaries, junkets and gravy trains engender a bland sub-Americana esperenta by degrees; an Orwellian doublespeak that passes for education, breeding compliance and homogeneous uniformity.
The idea that breaking down trade barriers and permitting the free movement of labour (including myself), capital and goods would promote tolerance, and enable cultural exchanges, amid the fiction of economic growth-without-end, made superficial sense at the outset. The very simple idea of Erasmus programmes and scholarly exchange has been a boon. The benefits are considerable, but the downside is increasingly apparent.
Let us face it Fintan, the EU has become an instrument of international global capitalism, encouraging the mass migration of workers who are willing to work for less, and harder, than their domestic counterparts. Nothing wrong with hard graft and thrift, but what if indigenous jobs are threatened, and employment rights done away with? Why should people feel compelled to work themselves to an early grave, as in Japan? Unrestricted labour mobility suits the corporate agenda, but not workers. The British are entitled to be lazier or less hard-working than their European counterparts.
Brexit is certainly in part an objection to mass migration. The moral evil of racism has been at work, but that should not be used as an excuse to suspend all judgment on the desirability of mass migration. A sovereign country ought to have some control over who enters, and on what terms; while those who settle in a new land should expect to make reasonable cultural accommodations. If unrestrained, multiculturalism can generate extremism among indigenous and new arrivals.
The other major downside of a German-led EU has been the imposition of austerity policies, generating social fragmentation and breakdown, in Greece and Ireland in particular. Austerity, as all the best evidence indicates, rips societies apart and delays economic recovery. It represents the triumph of what Naomi Klein termed the corporatocracy,[iii] bringing control of the world to the mega-rich, who inflict poverty-by-degrees on the rest. Thus the transnational law firms and multinational corporations lobby the EU for TTIP, which would permit them to sue local governments for any diminution in their clients’ profits.
Our increasingly neo-liberalist EU promotes the boom and bust cycle of the shock doctrine, pioneered when Milton Friedman visited Pinochet in Chile in the 1970’s to unleash his brainwashed Chicago graduates on the local population; just as Ireland was treated after the Bailout.
Growth and development is achieved not by austerity but by the mixed social democratic economy, which provides incentives, but allows individuals to recover if there businesses fail.
A Sovereign Nation
Let us turn now to the vexed question of sovereignty, or domestic jurisdiction, not simply policing borders, but the internal assertion of national protectionism. Brexit, at one level, is no different from the Boston Tea Party, a nationalist assertion, insisting enough is enough, particularly if a foreign power is draining, not contributing to, the well-being of the local population.
The protection of small and local business is crucial, even ‘Forthright Grantham grocer’s girl’, Margaret Thatcher, another devotee of Milton Freedman, conceded as much. Now, seemingly inexorably, the local bookstore is giving way to the chain shop, while the bakers, butchers and greengrocers are superseded by the supermarket. European standardisation has facilitated this baleful transition. Communities, being torn apart in Ireland, are built from the bottom up. Small is beautiful. There are as many antiquarian bookstores in the small town of Dorking as there are now in Dublin.
Theresa May has proceeded with caution, amidst mounting opposition, towards a smooth exit. She and her more moderate cohorts must know that a deal has to be struck in the national interest, now that the path of risk has been chosen. Britain being Britain it has, in a cri de coeur, insisted on its rights being respected. It still has values and pride, unlike Ireland, which meekly accepted the role of a vassal state during the Bailout.
Fintan, this is a difficult but unpalatable truth: the British people may have been right in thinking that there is no future for the EU. Could it be time to consider an Irexit? For just as the medieval Hanseatic League collapsed, so will the EU. A rising fascist triumphalism has already attained power in Hungary, Poland and Italy. It may be time to circle the wagons of democracy and the Rule of Law, for a spell at least.
If our contemporary Hanseatic league is collapsing, a negotiated departure of our own may have a salutary outcome, giving way to looser affiliations, and a greater degree of national autonomy to protect indigenous populations against the rampages of global capitalism. Perhaps the British have grasped we are facing a gathering storm, and are muddling through. It might of course end in disaster, but their difficulties in many respects compare favourably to our Irish dependence on footloose multinational corporations, and an EU-subsidised agri-food industry.
Like Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, whose portrait ages while he is blessed with a seemingly eternal youth, in his account of Brexit, Fintan O’Toole shies away from reflecting on failings in his own land. His book demonizes the assertive neighbour, along the well-trodden path of lachrymose patriots, and ignores what is staring him in the face.
Following an account of a New York banquet in a recent biography of Leo Varadkar[i], we submitted a Freedom of Information Request (FOI) to the Department of the Taoiseach. We are seriously concerned at the close proximity between the Taoiseach and leading Irish journalists, including one of the authors of Leo: A Very Modern Taoiseach, Phillip Ryan, who is deputy political editor across the titles of the generally pro-government Independent Newspaper group.
That book revealed that the ‘Taoiseach has made a virtue out of wining and dining journalists who accompany him on international trade missions’, believing, ‘it is important to spend time with them socially’. Perhaps most troubling is that the authors seem entirely unashamed about spilling the beans on one of these junkets.
On one New York jolly, ‘More than twenty guests, who included journalists from print and broadcast media, joined the Taoiseach and foreign affairs officials for a five-course, three-hour-long meal’. The authors, at least one of whom seems to have been present, recall the guests devouring ‘French onion soup, foie gras, filet mignon and mushroom ravioli dusted with black truffles’, followed by further drinks in Fitzpatrick’s Manhattan Hotel in Midtown.[ii] Yum yum yum.
Our FOI sought, ‘records of department expenditures from an Taoiseach’s visit to America this year in Boucherie Restaurant and FitzPatrick’s Manhattan Hotel, both in New York on March 16th and 17th, 2018.’ We were intrigued to know who paid the bill in a restaurant where the ‘Butcher’s Block’ of 16oz filet mignon, 16oz, ‘hang steak’ and 16oz ‘bone in New York strip’ costs an eye-watering $205, and that’s leaving aside its environmental impact.[iii]
According to the officer, the department holds no record of any such expenditures. But it is hard to believe that the Taoiseach stumped up, or that journalists were asked to put their hands in their pockets, a notoriously rare occurrence. We are now flummoxed, and invite any journalist or government official present to let us know who paid the bill by emailing admin@cassandravoices.com.
‘Tubs’ entertains Varadkar on the ‘Late Late’
Fresh from selling as many toys as possible on the Late Late Toy Show, amid paeans ‘to those less fortunate this Christmas’, Ryan Tubridy interviewed Leo Varadkar on the ‘Late Late Show’ on December 11th. At the recent Fine Gael Ardfheis Varadkar pledged to reduce income tax cuts if he is re-elected Taoiseach[iv], which will presumably increase toy sales next Christmas.
To date, we have enjoyed no success with any of our FOI enquiries into Tubridy’s third party dealings. RTÉ’s solution to the problematic situation of employees and contractors receiving payments from third parties has been to introduce a Catch-22 rule whereby potentially damaging material is withheld if it is commercial sensitive.[v]
Tubridy previously offered this plug of the Varadkar biography, enthusing that it, ‘offers the reader and voter a fascinating insight into an intriguing and public figure that none of us really know. With incisive background detail coupled with up-to-date analysis, this is a very welcome account of a private man in the most public role in Ireland.’
On his light entertainment show, Tubridy went through the motions of grilling the Taoiseach, demanding whether the HSE is fit for purpose, to which Varadkar replied: ‘Not as the organisation it is now,’ intimating ‘structural change’, a move to ‘slim down’ the organisation and bring ‘a lot more autonomy’, which sounds suspiciously like an impending privatisation. But it was all soon sweetness and light between RTE’s leading man and the top of the political class,
In a departure from the Irish Times’s usual Varadkar veneration, especially the use of cutesy images obviously supplied by government press office, Peter Crawley offered this assessment:
If, like any number of its international guests, you had no idea what kind of a programme The Late Late Show is, last night’s broadcast was as good an introduction as any.
What kind of talk show, for instance, would interview the leader of the country as its first guest, as a warm-up act for two crooners and a comedian?[vi]
‘Murph’ shows up for the team
Meanwhile, Varadkar’s loyal fixer, and founding member of the legendary Five-A-Side Club of Young Fine Gael Turks, Eoghan Murphy was before the Dáil, opposing the Solidarity-People Before Profit Anti-Eviction Bill, which includes a ban on renovating a property as grounds for ending a lease.
Murphy maintained that the government is showing a clear commitment to social housing, but his sympathies clearly lie with embattled ‘small’ landlords, bemoaning, ‘We are losing landlords in this country, it is a fact.’
He cited the statistic that eighty-five percent of landlords own one or two properties, but this tells us nothing about the proportion of the rental sector held in those circumstances. Moreover, a single property could be a four-bedroom house in his Dublin Bay South constituency costing €6,000 per month;[vii] lies, damn lies and statistics, as Mark Twain put it.
Murphy’s claim that it is ‘wrong to demonise these people because they are providing homes for other people’ is a subtle abuse of the English language. A landlord does not ‘provide’ for a tenant, providing for someone implies generosity, not offering a property in exchange for a rent, which in Dublin, for too long, has been left to ‘market forces’, and the gumption of gouging landlords.
The rhetoric about protecting the small guy – beloved of neo-liberals the world over – affords protection to owners of multiple properties, who are increasing their assets, as Murphy’s speech concedes. His political colours are revealed in this passage which will anger anyone caught in an impossible rental situation:
We have to be very careful in interfering more than we are at the moment. We have to make sure that we are not placing extra burdens on these small landlords. And we have to make sure that we are not prohibiting someone from selling a property that they own when they might need to sell that property for perfectly legitimate reasons in their own lives. They may not have the money to re-compensate the person living in the property at that point.[viii]
God help anyone renting in Dublin at this time, because this government’s sympathies (and Eoghan Murphy’s it would appear) lie with the wealthiest five percent in the country, who own over forty percent of its wealth, with eighty-five per cent of that held in property and land. We suggest a more important priority: to make sure everyone has a roof over their head. Unfortunately many of the leading journalists in this country, who should be pursuing this injustice, are themselves dining at the top table.
Did you know that Cassandra Voices has just published a print annual containing our best articles, stories, poems and photography from 2018? It’s a big book! To find out where you can purchase it, or order it, email admin@cassandravoices.com
[i] Frank Armstrong, ‘Leo-Liberal’, Cassandra Voices, October 5th, 2018.
[ii] Phillip Ryan and Niall O’Connor, Leo: Leo Varadkar – A Very Modern Taoiseach, London, Biteback Publishing, 2018, p.321-322
I raise myself into the UNHCR’s prefrabricated 10×20 ft unit; directly in front of me is the 5×4 latrine I was looking for. Occupied. I’ll have to wait, glad, in fact, just to be cool.
I turn my attention left to the man whose workplace is this metal container, a stocky Afghan, with thick, combed, black hair. I’ve seen him before, here and around the camp. There is a warmth about his demeanour – he has a smile that makes you want to smile – offset however by an expression alluding to something more cerebral about his character. His deep set eyes haven’t escaped my notice, and ever suggest his mind is attending to thoughts which, evidently, prompt less than a continuously cheerful disposition.
I’m a little bit nervous, I suppose. So I lean against the cool interior, the idea being that a casual comportment will mask any anxiety I feel, now that I’m in this man’s space. Its thirty-five degrees outside – ‘hot’, I gasp, and raise my eyebrows. He nods in jovial agreement.
Now more comfortable, I look around the room. A shaded white room, with laminate flooring, the equidistance of the wall-to-wall-to-ceiling dimensions induce feelings of claustrophobia, though he seems comfortable. He stands to one side, elbow on the sill of the window, two dainty tables and an equally dainty chair to his other side.
On one of the tables I spot something about which in the past I’ve been curious; so I now take the opportunity to query the small packages stacked on the collapsible tables to his left. He gives them a glance, and then his eyes revert to me, once more. Fifty food packages, I now understand, for the fifty unaccompanied children, currently residing in Camp Skaramangas – the parentless refugee children ten kilometres north-east of central Athens.
I look at the packages and I look back at him again, alert and no longer leaning. ‘What’s … the story?’ I nervously query, the idiomatic expression revelatory of more than mere linguistic dissonance. He is himself a refugee and it is experiences such as these that remind us that this does indeed warrant its own respect. He paces a little and tells me of the children whose parents may not have made the journey – they could be dead, back home. Silence.
‘It’s very sad,’ he quickly concludes, in that way you would hope someone in charge of dispensing such basic essentials to parentless children, in a refugee camp, would, before moving on. He sits down onto the chair. ‘That’s awful,’ I concur trivially. Contrasted with my own, now no longer casual, attempt to compose myself, his expression, his tone and his body language exhibit a capacity to appreciate the gravity of what has prompted, for me, little else than a compulsion to muster an appropriate response, unsuccessfully, and in lieu of it arising naturally.
Contemplating such human horror can of course be difficult for the onlooker, such difficulty being only amplified when it relates to utterly innocent children. One is witness to a human experience of which a claim to understanding would amount to no less than impertinence – our empathic powers curtailed given those experiences which cannot be graphed in the thin air of speculation.
But despite this, perhaps even in spite of it, one also feels constrained to recognise no mere accident – innocent children, recall. A symptom of an injustice, a failing, a signature of what is wrong with the world; and in its symptomatic nature what is at once intangible, becomes oddly tangible.
A human experience so far removed from my own becomes that which I feel compelled to pronounce should not be. Momentarily unhinged, a witness to the unspeakable, sense making becomes the urgent prerogative of our sociality. Yet the process in which this encounter with horror gives way to the attempt to determine it as an injustice, brings with it the unsettling self-consciousness of the futility of one’s reaction to so unspeakable an experience, even hypocrisy, as injustice is decried from the comfortable position of distance. Some moments later I am finished with the facilities and nodding a goodbye to the UNHCR man, before exiting back out to the midday sun.
I remember first entering Camp Skaramangas following a brief induction in a petrol station café, outside the camp. A smoking area, on the platform and amongst the petrol pumps created an atmosphere that rules were, here, suspended. In the café we introduced ourselves before discussing the details of what we would be doing as volunteers in the refugee camp, nearby.
Through a gate guarded by the Greek navy security services we walked onto the port and into the camp, gravel crunching below our feet. Few people could be seen, although it was an area wherein over two thousand people resided, in the many white steel units we could now see before us – a truly cosmopolitan setting with people from countries including Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Iran, Sudan and more. I was of course quickly on good terms with a fellow volunteer from Coventry. We walked into the camp and we were guided through the areas in which we would be working, and shown the facilities we would be occupying. A few early risers could be seen dispersed walking to and fro.
Young men, the likes I had previously visualised in the images of refugees ‘marching’ along European railway tracks (the connotations of an invasion framed with such percipience) strolled casually by; women and men pushing trolleys of watermelon, appeared busy, as children, similar in appearance to the young Alan Kourdi whose body appeared on our screens in what seems now like a moment in history, either aided their elders or ran around guilelessly in the early morning hours, as children do.
Nervously, we tentatively followed the coordinator’s lead, meeting a few volunteers on the way – a mix of Spanish, English, Norwegian and Dutch accents filled the air.
Then could be heard the tones ringing out from the residents, an altogether more foreign sound. Suddenly the nervousness I was feeling, given these new surroundings, began, as we paced through, to transmute into something else. Amid what I superficially took to be more and more foreignness, I felt myself becoming quite self-conscious. And in fact, I now felt foreign.
An uneasiness began to settle, as I became conscious not only of the colour of my skin but my attire, my sunburn, my lanyard which felt all the more pathetic an officiation of my presence. I was entering a space wherein I found faces, half-familiar, having seen them on television and in the news, looking back at me, and I was aware of this.
I suddenly felt like an imposition. There was a feeling I could not shake. Although I was there to help, my being, my presence, felt as though it was imbued additionally with something less benign; taking time away from the everyday goings on of European living to offer my aid to an ‘otherworldly’ situation. Basically I began to feel anxious that people might be looking at me with some bitterness, as a Westerner.
Of course, I quickly met residents who expressed such a welcome that thoughts of their being bitter, or resentful, were not only quashed but gave way to an understanding of their having a diametrically opposite disposition; additionally for anyone who may have viewed my presence with bitterness, albeit in silence, I am inclined to suspend judgement given an understanding of the as good as warrant such bitterness has at its disposal, in view of the both historical and current catastrophes for which the West is deeply responsible, and in accordance with which the lives of many have been coerced.
In any case the feeling was there. Introduced to the impoverished conditions of those on the Athenian port (all of whom have a story of struggle, if not travesty, and such uncertain futures, that their capacity to endure, nevertheless, is nothing short of remarkable), I was conscious of how I represented a life which they did not enjoy.
That subtle feeling of anxiety, embarrassment, shame, which in the coming days I would be able to suppress (given the very flattering gratitude of the residents, not to mention the self-congratulation to be enjoyed in the company of my fellow volunteers), seemed to allude to some tacit recognition that my presence truly was less than benign. And, there was a feeling that despite appearances, despite the fact that in volunteering I may have appeared to care, I represented a way of life the hypocrisy of which was more typically manifest in the choices I made to more often than not, not so much as give them a second thought. It quickly felt a bit superficial.
The fifty children, parentless, and who spend much of their day roaming around what is little more than a barren car park on what was once an Athenian shipping port and whose vulnerability can be all the more sickeningly contemplated should one consider the likelihood of the near presence of human trafficker’s, may indeed prompt one to conjecture that the world is bereft of justice.
But in the absence of provisions, recognition of such injustice seems as pertinent as an acquaintance with the same may be brief. Of course there is the work of the Afghan of the UNHCR, for example, with the unaccompanied children, providing for their desperately needed conditions of growth, the food packages of course being the most basic instance of initiative, in this regard. But my volunteering hardly compares, and truth of the matter is that following the feel good experience I of course did just look away.
I spent the morning and early afternoon of my last day volunteering in Camp Skaramangas with the children before having lunch with a number of the volunteers and residents. Volunteers come and go so you do not say goodbye to the children.
So many goodbyes would be cruel, never-mind the psychological impact. So I just said goodbye to friends in the early afternoon, and then left the camp and its over two thousand residents. A number of hours later I was standing on a runway having just landed in Sofia airport, slightly dazed amid unfamiliar voices, and struck by the attire, but particularly the moustaches, of a number of my fellow eastern European passengers.
It was roughly 9 pm and I was at this point keen to get to my hostel sooner rather later. From the runway we were guided into the airport, through the glass doors and into a large square room which led to a number of steps at the top of which was Bulgarian Passport control. We shuffled into the room, fatigued couples not speaking, children re-energised now they were finally off the plane.
Airports and the security therewith have a way of making us all feel suspect. But being a young Irish man, and landing in Sofia, from Athens, any nerves were on this occasion eclipsed by a rather indulgent self-confidence, my being a man on the road. I stood upright, passport in hand and shifted determinately amongst my fellow travellers toward the security personnel above.
But five minutes, then ten minutes, then twenty minutes went by, and as the man fashioning the perm came to lose what was at first his amusing quality, and as retaining posture became tiresome, the experience as a whole quickly enough became all the more frustrating. It appeared as though very little progress was being made and I came to question the old fashioned border checking that I had not been accustomed to in Western Europe.
Had it not been for the language barrier I might have made more of an effort to engage in the mutterings of those in my company. Increasingly frustrated, I started to observe the minutes go by on my watch, arm rigid. Perspiring ever so slightly now with the frustration, and with my passport in hand, waiting freely to access Bulgaria, what an utterly ludicrous image I was.
Craving my counterfeit cigarettes, purchased only that morning from an entrepreneurial resident of Camp Skaramangas there I was, shamelessly agitated at what was a forty minute wait for my rightful access to a country, a right so shamefully taken for granted.
People wait years to get through European borders, and not for a holiday; good people who I had only that day had lunch with, and who had only a few hours previously expressed gratitude for my efforts in the camp, efforts the sincerity of which I could not now help but think was void.
Given the mere hours that passed, the dictum ‘Out of sight out of mind’ came to mind, as my supposed concern for the horror of such vulnerability encountered only that morning rather belatedly reminded me of what is worthy of our frustration. Failing to uphold, satisfactorily or efficiently, my right to free travel through borders, I found myself naturally irritated – as a European citizen, I expected better. Not so for those without that birth-right. They can continue to wait.
When I tell people this story they offer consolations: at least I volunteered – apparently enough to neutralise the fact that even should such an effort imply that I view the residents of Camp Skaramangas as equals, my behaviour suggests otherwise.
Of course, I can hardly be expected to live frustration-free, given the comparative triviality of whatever situations may arise. Nevertheless, the alarming rate at which one can forget, immersed, once more, in those comparatively trivial struggles, intimates what little hope there might be for those who most need the attention of others.
For the issue is all the more unsettling given the effectiveness of nullifying any concern we might have for those who must wait, through their being removed from our field of vision, as people close by.
In a political atmosphere in which it is often suggested that it is migrants who pose a threat to ‘our’ way of life – Hillary Clinton being amongst the most hypocritical of recent voices for this sentiment – efforts to cast our eyes away from those on the shores of Europe and to the concerns of those individuals, who through the fortune of birth are entitled to expect better in life, portends the upholding of human inequality as an increasingly more likely and well-sustained global state of affairs. For of course, should we not look, we need not be concerned: out of sight, out of mind.
Did you know that Cassandra Voices has just published a print annual containing our best articles, stories, poems and photography from 2018? It’s a big book! To find out where you can purchase it, or order it, email admin@cassandravoices.com
THE LONG READ: In the last edition ‘How Irish Propaganda Operates’ explored how political and media duopolies uphold a dominant consensus of steady economic growth and rising rents, to the benefit of a shrinking, propertied elite. The Irish media sector is commented upon in a 2018 survey of press freedoms by Reporters Without Borders which found that the ‘highly concentrated nature of media ownership in Ireland continues to pose a major threat to press freedom, and contributed to Ireland’s two-place fall in the 2018 World Press Freedom Index.’ They also pointed to the chilling effect of high awards in defamation actions.[i] Curiously, however, that report neglected to mention the 2018 acquisition by the Irish Times of the Cork-based Landmark Media group, which includes the Irish Examiner, to create the current print duopoly.
As regards the ‘crucial constituency’ of farmers supporting the political duopoly, and concomitant failure of the government to compel reductions in GHG emissions – of which the agricultural sector produces over one third of the national total[ii] – a recent report found Ireland was the worst-performing state at tackling climate change in the EU.[iii]
This sequel explores how the Internet, especially social media, is shaping the future of Irish politics. The wider global context is a rise in support for the Far Right, a tendency to which Ireland is not immune. This resurgence is prompted by deepening inequality, and the political, moral and economic failure of the Russian Communist model, but also disorientation in the wake of technological change;and a fundamental failure at the heart of liberalism to identify universal values. We may be on the brink of a new age of barbarism, but cannot afford to give up hope of reforming state and supranational institutions.
I –Changing Politics
To my surprise a few months ago I received email correspondence from Leo Varadkar: ‘Blooming hell’, I thought to myself, ‘His Early-Riserliness, contacting me!’. ‘Perhaps he’s ready to commit to decarbonisation, public housing and basic income, and is looking to this hitherto unheralded journalist for advice. Now where did I leave my singlet…’
My ego crumpled on discovering it was political spam with a sender address of finegael@fiinegael.ie. There would, alas, be no warm breakfast awaiting on Merrion Square after we had buddied-up at the gym.
Then I got annoyed. I had never given my email address to anyone from that organisation, let alone consented to receive Mr Varadkar’s grimacing impressions of a vlogger. I decided, however, against channelling subsequent missives straight into the ‘junk’ folder – where I would consign other unsolicited mail – to see how the story unfolded.
The emails are an intermittent reminder of just who is in charge of this country, and what he and his party pals are up to. There is little sophistication or depth to the presentations – boil-in-the-bag corporate fare – but they leach into my consciousness like the jingle on an annoying commercial, or ear worm. I may yet complain to the Data Protection Commissioner, but will settle for writing this article, for the time being at least.
With its ample resources, Fine Gael has been fastest out of the new technology blocks among Irish political parties. We may assume the rest are catching up, or will go the way of the Progressive Democrats.
The din from online chatter is rising, and parties are steeling themselves for a long digital ground war. Politics has travelled a great distance since Alexis de Tocqueville in his seminal account of Democracy in America (1830) declared that ‘nothing but a newspaper can drop the same thought into a thousand minds at the same moment.’[iv]
Now we are confronted with a barrage of information from multiple sources on a digital screen. It is early days, in historical terms, in our relationship with a new technology, but our neural pathways are already being reconfigured in ways we do not yet comprehend. Just as the invention of writing altered how the brain processes and retains information, so it has been with the Internet.
As the character Mark Renton puts it in the original Trainspotting: ‘Diane was right. The world is changing. Music is changing. Drugs are changing. Even men and women are changing. One thousand years from now, there will be no guys and no girls, just wankers. Sounds great to me.’ Politics is changing too, and the calibre of some of those in power is an indictment on the failure of more of us to get involved: as Micheal O’Siadhail warned: ‘the thieves of power / Come noiselessly in nights of apathy.’[v]
Political parties have been using focus groups, analogous to those used in the advertising industry, to test the popularity of policies for decades. Analysis of Internet browsing offers far greater and wider insights. A graphic presentation produced by Eoin Tierney for a previous article in Cassandra Voices illustrates the extent of our data leakage.[vi] Unless we take various precautions, records of our online movements are available to the highest- – or best-connected – bidder.
Some years ago I attended a conference at which one of the speakers was said to be, in hushed tones, ‘Obama’s scientific advisor’. He described how the former president’s second campaign team had made use of extensive data mining – tapping into data from Amazon purchases in particular as I recall – but warned the other side ‘would catch up in time for the next election’.
Pandora’s box had been prised open, and various troll armies have since crawled out, now led by an aging commander-in-chief with disconcertingly bright hair, while in the background another short, middle-aged man – who looks suspiciously like a trophy hunter clad in combat apparel – is whipping the troops into a frenzy. But it is important to recognise that the supposed good guys actually began this particular arms race.
Anarchic social media offers rich bounties for these excavations. In particular Facebook has an addictive quality built around the narcissistic pleasure of external validation. Its dystopian possibilities are powerfully conveyed in ‘Nosedive’ (2016), an episode of Netflix’s Dark Mirror, in which individuals rate each other from one to five stars based on social interactions. High aggregate scores are a passage to wealth and privilege, while low ratings spell poverty and exclusion. The main character ‘Lacie’ sees her attempts at social climbing implode spectacularly, ending in despair, poverty and isolation. It is as bleak a prophecy as you could find on the damage social media could wreak if we are not very careful.
Since a whistleblower revealed the sinister machinations of Cambridge Analytica on Facebook the fear that our political preferences are being conditioned by artificial intelligence tools has risen to panic in some quarters. Their trick appears to involve outspoken contributors taking ‘ownership’ of subtly positioned political messages, which confirm, amplify and ultimately modify opinions.
The commentariat links this to a quarter of Europeans now voting for Far Right parties[vii], and there is some truth to this contention. But mainstream media may be overstating Facebook’s role for their own purposes. Discrediting social media is part of ongoing attempts to salvage the sunset technology of the newspaper, which makes the case for regulation and taxation of the former. But the Internet is a multi-headed hydra, and the trolls are usually ahead of the game. Insulated and seemingly innocent WhatsApp groups are the next target, as was the case during the recent Brazilian election[viii]. We need better, transparent social media not rid of it altogether.
Twitter, unlike Facebook’s ‘secret sauce’ algorithm deciding what we see on our feeds, has kept its own feed mainly organic, although advertising is increasingly apparent, and relative anonymity seems to bring out the worst qualities in keyboard warriors. Donald Trump’s brand of hectoring nonsense seems to be ideally suited to that medium, at least to his fifty million followers. He won the presidential election with most major newspapers bitterly ranged against his Nativist agenda.
Twitter permits direct access to those who specialise in this attenuated form of speech – its one hundred and forty characters the social media equivalent of a haiku. The interactivity is key, with famous figures accessible as never before. This can even have geopolitical ramifications. At an EU summit last year British Prime Minister Theresa May offered to mediate between Europe and the U.S., to which Dalia Grybauskaitė, the president of Lithuania replied there was ‘no necessity for a bridge’, when they could all communicate with the American president via Twitter.[ix]
Irish politicians have not transitioned entirely into new media – the state broadcaster and print duopoly remain the main political battleground, or talking shop – but Twitter is an increasingly powerful vehicle for individual campaigns, and the intimacy of the Facebook environment suits it to subtle messaging.
Until we go about fixing the Internet, including social media platforms, a level of paranoia is justifiable. If Varadkar and his advisors are willing to harvest email accounts, what else are they willing to do? We know he has already floated the idea of creating anonymous accounts to make positive comments under online stories on popular news websites.[x] We have no way of knowing what conversations go on when Varadkar meets Mark Zuckerberg. Ultimately ‘we the people’ must eventually assert control over the social media we use, and integrate it into the fabric of democracy.
II – Inequality
The disorientation of technological change is only one aspect of the profound changes occurring in societies around the world. The era of the Internet coincides with, and is partly generating, unprecedented inequality – to the extent that just eight billionaires control half the human planet’s financial wealth.[xi]
As elsewhere, in Ireland we see disturbing concentrations, especially expressed in property, insulated by our political and print media duopoly from significant taxation. Thus, the wealthiest top five percent in the country own over forty percent of its wealth, with eighty-five per cent of that held in property and land. In the last financial year a mere €500 million (or just 1%) out of total tax receipts of over €50 billion, derived from land or property.[xii]
Indicatively, between 1996 and 2012 the number of qualified accountants in the state grew by a staggering eight-three percent to number 27,112. A sign of the times is that there were just 6,729 Catholic priests and nuns at that point[xiii], indicating we have moved from worship of God to Mammon.
The accountancy profession assists individuals and companies in financial consolidation. This can lapse into unethical forms of tax avoidance as was revealed in the Paradise Papers, where ‘top five’ accountancy firms channelled assets or income through countries with low taxation regimes.
High professional fees make accountants vested interests in asset preservation, and in the process many are stakeholders in the political and media duopoly. The wider influence can be seen in an obsession with imaginary money as a measure of value. In a previous article for Cassandra Voices Diarmuid Lyng identifies a ‘reducing eye – the Súil Mildeagach’ at work in contemporary Ireland which sees only uses and benefits; where ‘a cow is looked on as pounds of beef, and a tree is assessed for the length of its timber.’[xiv]
The decline of the Irish left, especially if the Labour party is counted as such, is part of a global social democratic downward spiral, seen vividly in the precipitous fall in support for the German SPD. This can partly be traced to the economic, political, and moral failure – and ultimate demise – of the Soviet Union at the end of the last century. In response, Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ in the U.K., and Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party in the U.S. moved into the centre- or even the centre-right ground, and pursued latter-day colonialism.
The rightward drift of traditionally left-wing parties has brought an ideological vacuum now being filled by the Populist Right, which appropriate Marxist analysis, decrying capital flight and corrupt state institutions. Ironically, it is generally the New Labour old guard and Clinton Democrats that are to the fore in defending free trade arrangements, including the European Union, which is increasingly beholden to corporate lobbyists, and NAFTA. Previously free trade had been one of the major planks of conservative parties around the world, but these (including the Republican Party and the Tories in the UK), are increasingly in thrall to Far Right factions.
The ‘old’ Left is not entirely dead. The success of Jeremy Corbyn and his allies in the U.K. Labour Party in building the largest socialist party in Europe in the face of unstinting media opposition, including in the apparently left-wing Guardian, has been highly impressive.[xv] In the last election, Corbyn’s supporters bypassed mainstream media and used memes and vlogs to powerful effect online, besides grass roots activism through the Momentum organisation.
Spain’s Podemos is also bucking the trend in the face of a hostile mainstream media. It shows that social media, in concert with grass roots organisation, remains a conduit for left-wing agendas. The fear is, however, that that space is increasingly dominated by the highest bidders, who generally do not advocate that their wealth should be subject to greater taxation.
What differentiates the New Right or what used to be called the Far Right – or just plain fascists – from the Left is a marked rejection of universal values applying to all of humankind. The appeal is always to ‘our’ people, ‘our’ families, and ‘ourselves’, certainly not, ‘them’, ‘that lot’, or ‘those’ foreigners who are amassing on ‘our’ frontiers.
Fascism plays to selfish self-interest, and individual striving for status as part of an identity seen in opposition to others. Left-wing arguments are a weapon to be deployed against pampered ‘elites’, but leaders like Trump aspire to the same pampering once they have ‘drained the swamp’. Many of his supporters also aspire to climb the greasy pole that leads to a notional Trump Tower.
A comparatively generous social welfare system – in part a legacy of Labour’s period in office between 2011 and 2016 – is one reason Ireland is largely bucking the trend in terms of developing a rebranded fascism. Also, historically, our over-bearing near neighbour has been the target of nationalist ire, and we do not carry the same racist colonial baggage afflicting relations between indigenous and migrants seen elsewhere. Moreover, for all its faults, Catholicism does not distinguish between people on the basis of ethnicity or race. But the universalism of the Old Left and Catholicism are fading away and, as in the 1930s, Ireland is not immune from continental movements, especially as the Housing Crisis and evictions ensue.
Ascendant neo-liberalism does not encourage xenophobia. It is bad for business. Migration keeps down labour costs, and ethnic variety generates economic dynamism. The late Peter Sutherland, neo-liberal high priest, was one prominent supporter of tolerance.[xvi] But free movement of people is only an addendum – almost a good will gesture – to the core principal of neo-liberalism: the free movement of capital and individual enrichment. Contemporary fascism pitilessly highlights any policy failings relating to integration policies, while only superficially addressing capital flight, as unscrupulous politicians like Trump (and others) are often self-interested players themselves.
III – Wasted Lives
The late Zygmunt Bauman argued that economic migrants become scapegoats as long as the real powerbrokers of a neo-liberal Globalisation are untouchable. In his book Wasted Lives (2010) he contends:
Refugees and immigrants coming from ‘far away’ yet making a bid to settle in the neighbourhood, are uniquely suitable for the role of the effigy to be burnt as the spectre of ‘global forces’, feared and resented for doing their job without consulting those whom its outcome is bound to affect. After all, asylum-seekers and ‘economic migrants’ are collective replicas (an alter ego? fellow traveller? mirror images? caricatures?) of the new power elite of the globalised world, widely (and with reason) suspected to be the true villain of the piece.
Like that elite, he considers:
they are untied to any place, shifty, unpredictable. Like that elite, they epitomise the unfathomable ‘space of flows’ where the roots of the present-day precariousness of the human condition are sunk. Seeking in vain for other, more adequate outlets, fears and anxieties rub off on targets close to hand and re-emerge as popular resentment and fear of the ‘aliens nearby’. Uncertainty cannot be defused or dispersed in a direct confrontation with the other embodiment of extraterritoriality: the global elite drifting beyond the reach of human control. That elite is much too powerful to be confronted and challenged point-blank, even if its exact location was known (which it is not). Refugees on the other hand, are a clearly visible, and sitting, target for the surplus anguish.[xvii]
This kind of scapegoating is beginning to be seen in Ireland. A small online publication www.theliberal.ie offers a news carousel, previously plagiarized[xviii], alongside vindictive comments about migrants. One headline from November 12th read: ‘Uproar from locals as Wicklow hotel set to become direct provision centre’, the ‘report’ by James Brennan went on to say:
‘Locals are said to be “very concerned” over the proposed centre with one social media telling The Liberal: “Locals have held meetings about it and have both privately and publicly stated that they’re very concerned about the new centre. There will be uproar if this goes through”.
More disgraceful even than this ‘post-truth’ abandonment of evidential standards, is a headline to another ‘report’ written by James Brennan, which read: ‘As more migrant Direct Provision centres pop up, a 48-yr-old homeless Irish man DIES on the street in Waterford’. The message is clear: it is a zero sum game between homeless Irish dying on the streets, and migrants who are being provided for. The publication was also vocal in its support of Peter Casey’s Presidential candidacy. He made incendiary comments about members of the minority Traveller community – a traditional Irish scapegoat.
Interestingly, the editor and owner of the magazine, Leo Sherlock, is the brother of Cora Sherlock, deputy chairperson of the Pro-Life Campaign. Well accustomed to the emotive language of protecting ‘our own’, it could be that the Pro-Life campaign will provide the resources and know-how for a new campaign against immigrants, just as in America the Far Right has moved from anti-abortion to anti-migrant.
In a disturbing turn of events, investigative journalist Gemma O’Doherty has adopted anti-migrant slogans from the Far Right playbook, especially attacking George Soros.[xix] She recently tweeted that his ‘twisted Open Society Foundation … seeks to destroy nation states’.[xx] Also, her Youtube channel recently featured an interview with John Waters in which both interviewer and interviewee conveyed the idea of a migrant tide overwhelming Ireland[xxi], a country more sparsely populated today than in the mid-nineteenth century.
As wealth inequality rises, and homelessness increases, in this small open economy a desperation sets in that is easily manipulated. The Celtic Tiger has become a Paper Tiger, where most of the population does not enjoy the fruits of extravagant economic growth. For most rising gross domestic product leads to rent hikes and unaffordable property. As Bauman explains, in circumstances where the global elite are untouchable, outrage against vulnerable outsiders is likely to follow.
IV – The Mediated People
Technology is leaving a profound impression on all our minds. The smart phone is altering homo sapiens at a profound level of consciousness. We are now, as Bill McKibben puts it, a ‘mediated species’:
Everyone I know seems a little ashamed of the compulsive phone-checking, but it is, circa 2017, our species-specific calling card, as surely as the bobbing head-thrust identifies the pigeon. No one much likes spending half the workday on e-mail, but that’s what work is for many of us. Our accelerating disappearance into the digital ether now defines us—we are the mediated people, whose contact with one another and the world around us is now mostly veiled by a screen. We threaten to rebel, just as we threaten to move to Canada after an election. But we don’t; the current is too fierce to swim to shore.[xxii]
The compulsive checking is attritional and ultimately lonesome, as we avoid direct contact with one another. George Steiner attributes these habits to a ‘dread of solitude, an incapacity to experience it productively’[xxiii], which afflicts the young, but this extends well into old age.
Linked to the advance of the smart phone is a declining opportunity for book reading. The Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye identifies the properties of the book with the preservation of democracy itself. It is he says the:
by-product of the art of writing, and the technological instrument that makes democracy a working possibility – avoiding all rhetorical tricks designed to induce hypnosis in an audience, relying on nothing but the inner force and continuity of the argument … Behind the book is the larger social context of a body of written documents to which there is public access, the guarantee of the fairness of that internal debate on which democracy rests.
The book is non-linear, he says, allowing us to flick back and forth: ‘we follow a line while we are reading but the book itself is a stationary visual focus of a community.’
He distinguishes this from:
the electronic media that increases the amount of linear experience, of things seen and heard that are quickly forgotten. One sees the effects on students: a superficial alertness combined with increased difficulty preserving the intellectual continuity that is the chief characteristic of education.[xxiv]
Frye was writing in the 1970s when electronic media meant television. He might despair at contemporary attention spans, with kids unhinged and transfixed by a Snapchat that brings the inbuilt obsolescence of a social media posting to the next level. But he might also encounter knowledge and insights far exceeding those he found in his own less technology-addled students.
We have developed remarkable specialisms through advances in book-learning, but these are increasingly remote from one another. The Internet brings more generalised understandings – new horizons of knowledge – which could de-mystify formerly esoteric fields and inaugurate Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (d.1832) vision of weltliteratur, ‘world literature’, and perhaps more clearly, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s (d. 1716) dream of a bibliotheca universalis, a ‘universal library’, where expert insight could be available to all, everywhere. It could really lead us into thinking more globally. But this beast needs considerable taming.
The raging digital torrent is inherently unstable, as the content on any screen (including this article) can easily be tampered with. This makes it easy to develop superficial arguments that shift with circumstances. But latter-day fascists are arguably less ominous a presence in the absence of complex ideological statements, conventionally expressed in books, such as Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, or even Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. As the dissident Soviet writer Aleksander Solzhenitsyn put it: ‘Shakespeare’s villains stopped short at ten or so cadavers. Because they had no ideology.’[xxv] Thus, even the book, which performs an important role in preserving democracy, can, paradoxically, be used to undermine it. Similarly, the Internet can have positive and negative effects on our politics.
The online contributor may exert an influence on the outcome of elections and referenda but there is a sedentarism to his political participation. How many people attended Donald Trump’s inauguration? Historically, any political credo lacking a clearly outlined ideology tends to lack durability. What will remain of Trumpism after Trump? This recalls Percy Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’: ‘Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.’
Similarly, the incipient Irish Far Right lacks a convincing ideologue. John Waters has an intellect to be reckoned with, but it is difficult to see how he can reconcile the universal values of the Catholic faith he espouses with the xenophobia evident in Far Right movements. Moreover, Ireland is an increasingly liberal society – even decriminalisation of marijuana cannot be far off – where Catholicism is commonly disparaged, but the policies of the duopoly which brought the rise in rents, and a Housing Crisis, threatens a new form of serfdom, or rage on the streets.
V – A New Age of Barbarism
Apart from technological shifts, and the moral and political vacuum brought by the demise of the Soviet Union, which permitted a corporate takeover of societies, the value system of a dominant neo-liberalism rests on decidedly shaky foundations. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre identified a ruling ‘Emotivism’: ‘the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character.’[xxvi]
In other words we operate at a time when justice, including economic justice, is seen as an expression of arbitrary norms. MacIntyre traces this to the Enlightenment, when David Hume and later Fredrich Nietzsche led the attack on the universal values which the Aristotelian philosophical tradition had laid down. Thus, Aristotle’s The Nicomachean Ethics begins: ‘Every art and every scientific inquiry and similarly every action and purpose, may be said to aim for some good.’[xxvii] In contrast liberalism, or Emotivism, identifies no “good”, only self-interest.
In what is a remarkable passage MacIntyre despairs at the onset of a new age of barbarism:
It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead – often not recognizing fully what they were doing – was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our present predicament. We are waiting not for Godot, but for another – doubtless very different – St. Benedict.[xxviii]
So what are Irish “men and women of good will” to do in these times? Retreat from the Dublin metropolis and carve out cooperative self-sufficient communities? This is one alternative. But the European imperium has not been lost entirely, and the pressing environmental problems of our time require world governance. Moreover, multilateralism is the only way to preserve peace in the nuclear age.
The institutions of the Irish state and European Union at present do not serve the interests of the people, but this could change if a broad Left-Green alliance, espousing universal values, is forged. In this respect, Irish progressives should get behind a new group, led by the economist Thomas Piketty, offering prescriptions for a fairer and more sustainable Europe.[xxix]
Irish Democracy is in for a long bumpy ride as we struggle to contain our online urges and the challenge of grotesque inequalities. To counteract a slide into barbarism, we must think globally and act locally, doing what we can in our own way, and never succumbing to despair. In these times we also need artists to sustain us.
Did you know that Cassandra Voices has just published a print annual containing our best articles, stories, poems and photography from 2018? It’s a big book! To find out where you can purchase it, or order it, email admin@cassandravoices.com
[i] Reporters Without Borders, ‘Ireland: Unhealthy Concenrtation’, World Press Freedom Index 2018, https://rsf.org/en/ireland, accessed 12/12/18.
[ii] Ciaran Moran, ‘Emissions from agriculture increase by almost 3pc in 2017 due to dairy expansion’, Irish Independent, December 8th, 2018.
[iii] Jeo Leogue, ‘Ireland worst performing European country at tackling climate change’ Irish Examiner, December 10th, 2018.
[iv] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, translated by Henry Reeve, Hertfordshire, Wordworth Editors Ltd, 1998, p.220.
[v] Micheal O’Siadhail, The Five Quintets, Waco, Baylor University Press, 2018, p.149
[vi] Eoin Tierney, ‘A Guide to Preventing Data Leakage’, Cassandra Voices, June 1st, 2018.
[vii] Paul Lewis, Seán Clarke, Caelainn Barr, Josh Holder and Niko Kommenda, ‘Revealed: one in four Europeans vote populist’, The Guardian, 20th of November, 2018.
[viii] Tom Phillips, ‘Bolsonaro business backers accused of illegal Whatsapp fake news campaign’, The Guardian, 18th of October, 2018.
[ix] Andrew Rawnsley, ‘Mrs May discovers you can’t be a bridge builder and a bridge burner’, The Guardian, 5th of February, 2017.
[x] Diarmaid Ferriter, ‘‘Leo Varadkar: A Very Modern Taoiseach’ is shallow, flimsy and exaggerated’, Irish Times, September 8th, 2018.
[xi] Melanie Curtin, ‘These 8 Men Control Half the Wealth on Earth’, Inc., undated.
[xii] David McWilliams, ‘Why do we tax income instead of wealth?’, October 9th, 2018, http://www.davidmcwilliams.ie/why-do-we-tax-income-instead-of-wealth/, accessed 10/12/18.
[xiii] Tony Farmar, The History of Irish Book Publishing, Stroud, The History Press, 2018, p.12
[xiv] Diarmuid Lyng, ‘A Hurler’s Silver Branch Perception’, Cassandra Voices, June 1st, 2018.
[xvi] Ruadhán Mac Cormaic ‘Selfishness on refugees has brought EU ‘to its knees’, Irish Times, December 26th, 2015.
[xvii] Zygmunt Baumann, Wasted Lives, Modernity and its Outcasts, Oxford, Polity Press, 2004.
[xviii] Joe Leogue, ‘TheLiberal.ie goes offline amid plagiarism row’, Irish Examiner, January 10th, 2017.
[xix] Jon Henley, ‘Enemy of nationalists: George Soros and his liberal campaigns’, The Guardian, 29th of May, 2018.
[xx] Gemma O’Doherty, ‘George Soros names 5 Irish MEPs @MarianHarkin @LNBDublin @MaireadMcGMEP @SeanKellyMEP @brianhayesMEP as proven or potential allies of his twisted Open Society Foundation which seeks to destroy nation states. Which of them will deny this?’, December 1st, 2018, 12:32pm. https://twitter.com/gemmaod1/status/1068965965940043777, accessed 11/12/18.
I am sitting on a Frontier flight, a low-cost U.S. airline – basically the American Ryanair – my girlfriend beside me and Tiziano Terzani’s book, Lettere contro la guerra (Letters against the war, 2002) in my hands. We are flying to Seattle. I capture her attention by nudging her with my elbow to read and translate a passage in which Terzani describes, very accurately, what we nowadays refer to as ISIS. The letter I am reading is dated September 14th 2001, just three days after the Twin Towers attack on 9/11.
I suddenly realise how one just needs to travel in order to know different cultures and realities; to understand the inefficiency of anti-immigration policies now regulating the movements of mankind. Something is just not working. Terzani understood this after a life spent in Asia, where he was a war correspondent for several European press agencies. He interacted and talked with politicians, philosophers, soldiers and even Afghan jihadists, trying to understand perspectives unknown, misunderstood or veiled in mystery.
People put in charge of handling and regulating immigration often treat travellers with unprovoked skepticism. Is it that they have never left their native countries and experienced life abroad?
The week before our flight to Seattle, I was detained for three long hours in Denver International Airport. They brought me to one of those small rooms that make you feel guilty even if you have done absolutely nothing wrong.
I was subjected to an intimidating interrogation by American Immigration, and after document and visa checks, fingerprints and a retinal scan, I was told that I could not pass through because I had not booked a return ticket to Europe.
I had not booked a return flight because I did not yet know the duration of my stay, but I assured them I was aware of the three month limit. The guards informed me that my ESTA visa requires a return flight.
Though I have never travelled inter-continentally before, I was made aware of these types of issues. Many friends had told me of their experiences, so I carefully checked online and asked around to be sure I had everything needed for travel into the U.S..
How could I have forgotten to check these important details? Tired and stunned by the long flight, I gently asked the officer where it was indicated that I must have a return flight. She only reiterated that it was ‘mandatory’, though I could not find it written anywhere.
Was I being bullied? Was an Italian musician not their ideal tourist? Perhaps it was my lack of cash in hand that appeared suspicious. Whatever the reason, if a return flight is mandatory to enter the country, should it be tucked away in obscure small print?
I next attempted to text my girlfriend so she should know I had been detained by immigration, and was running late. The guard accused me of lying and promptly confiscated my phone, arguing that I was not allowed to text while in their custody.
They demanded I purchase a return ticket, as my backpack was meticulously inspected. The agent, half-smilingly, asked me why I had a backpack full of music gear. I explained I was a musician carrying a portable studio in order to record an album. He suggested I might attempt to work as a D.J..
They proceeded to ask me a plethora of questions about my girlfriend, and any additional contacts I had in the U.S.. Eventually, they found me a return flight to Europe for $3,000. They insisted that I purchase it immediately in order to be given leave to enter the country. But I refused to buy a flight at that price, so they found me a $300 flight to London, which I agreed to purchase.
Once I received my return flight confirmation, they completely changed their tune, wishing me an amazing holiday in the USA!
Denver’s airport is located in a clearing east of the city. From the big windows, through the summer mist, you can lose yourself for miles in the outline of the Rocky Mountains. Ironically, the sound of Native American flute and drum music hums through the corridor. I find that strange, for obvious reasons of cultural and actual genocide. My contemplation of the vastness and beauty of the country I had just landed in was being spoiled by the long wait in a small cold, sad interrogation room.
After such a welcome, I expected to find a heavily-guarded country; some sort of gigantic Switzerland, but the reality is far more chaotic.
Areas of Denver around Capitol Hill and Broadway are full of homeless people, completely abandoned to their own destiny. There are so many of them. This is a city within a city, where people protect themselves from the burning June sun in the shade of trees. I understand even more the enormity of this country.
Dublin, where I live, is now sadly notorious for having a homeless emergency, and this problem is evident all over Europe. But beside what I met in the U.S., it is nothing.
Walking around town, I met various strange souls and colourful characters, which just seems to be the norm. It is as though the ‘American Dream’ shoots out in all directions, with no clear destination. There is obviously the ‘freedom’ of becoming a high level manager, or a careless financial broker with limitless riches, but then there is also the ‘freedom’ of living with empty pockets.
The homeless pitch their tents pretty much everywhere in the big cities. In Seattle, for example, all along the coast, tents surround every column supporting the Alaskan Way Viaduct above.
We can donate to homeless charities, and those organisations still exist, so we can help them on an individual level. But the problem is more visible than ever, and it does not seem like there is a way of escaping this social pattern.
The Western Empire, that is the United States, has exerted enormous influence over the world over the last seventy years. Ultimately, however, its interests do not align with humanity, including American citizens.
Supporting the idea that there is a general disregard for people, is the great American drama of discriminatory healthcare. If you can afford to pay thousands of dollars for insurance, you can have the very best, overpriced, innovative treatment in the world. If you cannot, you risk bankruptcy by paying prohibitive fees, or suffer in silence.
Low income individuals can still apply for Medicaid, which is government-funded healthcare. They are, however, lucky to find anyone who will go ahead with it due to the excruciatingly time-consuming billing process.
There is an unacceptable lack of government-funded healthcare in a state which, only this year, under Donald Trump’s administration, invested $700 billion on ‘defence’ programs. Are new and more powerful weapons to be the highest aspiration of the richest country in the world?
To justify this level of government spending, you will always need an enemy. But throughout its history, the most powerful army in the world has always prevailed. Is immigration to be the new enemy? This would make sense when taking into account the devastating possibilities of modern warfare.
As Vladimir Putin suggested in an interview with Oliver Stone, war at this level will have no winners, conflict between nuclear powers can only end with the destruction of the planet.
Millions of people are now on the move around the world: seeking employment or just a more fulfilling life; or trying to escape the horrors of war, racial and political intimidation, or like me, simply visiting a partner.
How can the rest of the world look towards the West with hope if these are the social dynamics? How can we pretend that this so-called democratic society of America is the leading example of humanity, and not an arrogant menace?
THE LONG READ: Ireland is neither a totalitarian state, nor even a dictatorship. Nonetheless, the propaganda of an economic elite has forged a dominant consensus, in which two centre-right parties compete for power. Across a print media duopoly and national broadcaster well-honed techniques of social control divert attention and sow confusion, while subtly instilling dogmas. The education system also plays a vital role in propagating social norms and channelling aspirations. The dominant consensus is not doctrinally extreme or even illiberal, at least by international comparisons, but it insulates embedded wealth in the form of land and property from taxation, stimulates demand for mortgages among the young, and protects the farming sector from environmental oversight.
I – We have ways of making you think…
As Nazi Germany’s Minister of Propaganda, Josef Goebbels had one major difficulty: a taste for dark-haired beauties. His marriage to the perfectly-Aryan-looking Magda (with whom he would later ‘loyally’ commit suicide inside Hitler’s bunker in 1945, after they first murdered all six of their sleeping children) became a sham. Poor Josef could not help taking advantage of the brunette actresses over whom his role effectively gave dominion, controlling movie sets that were a Harvey Weinstein paradise. In particular, Goebbels conceived a passion for a Czech – untermensch – beauty Lída Baarová, which almost drove him to end the marriage in 1938. Hitler himself intervened demanding his propaganda chief remain with his wife and children. The mask concealing the hypocrisy could not be allowed to slip.
Despite occasional differences of opinion, Hitler realised that Goebbels was crucial to the smooth functioning of the Third Reich. While Leni Riefenstahl delivered innovative blockbuster effects, Goebbels genius lay in delivering subtle cues, released under a comfort blanket of light entertainment. Goebbels saw maintaining a feel-good factor as the essential role of propaganda. He did not even care to see der Fuhrer appear in cinema news reels. In a totalitarian society a subservient people should not be over-exposed to politics.
He had immersed himself in the golden era of the silver screen, expressing particular fondness for the 1937 Disney classic ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’. Overtly political films were not only useless but also counterproductive he believed. The depravity of ‘the Jew’ should be integrated into pictures which carried an audience along, such as the lively 1940 ‘historical’ drama Jud Süss, ‘Jew Suss’. This contrasted with the heavy-handed style of Der Ewige Jude (1940) ‘the Eternal Jew’, directed by Fritz Hippler that depicted Jews alongside rats inside the Warsaw Ghetto. Goebbels correctly predicted this would bomb in the box office.[i]
Light entertainment diverts, as does outright nonsense, which George Orwell referred to as ‘Duckspeak’ in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949. Its effect is to lower the intellectual level of conversation, spread confusion and allow the speaker to evade responsibility: a tactic increasingly familiar in our era of ‘post truth’. In the novel the official language of Oceania is overtly-propagandist Newspeak, but Duckspeak’s capacity to accommodate contradictions, even midway through a sentence, was much valued by the ruling regime.
There are societies such as North Korea’s, or previously Mao’s China when children informed on their parents, where freedom of expression is almost completely eradicated and replaced with Newspeak – and probably Duckspeak – to such an extent that individuality is effectively extinguished. One result is a severe lack of economic dynamism. Market economies, however, require freethinking innovators in order to thrive; a small resistance movement even survived in Nazi Germany because Newspeak had not entirely permeated that society. ‘Hard’ propaganda – or Newspeak – is thus only of limited value. Instead, the ‘soft’ propaganda of light entertainment and, increasingly, Duckspeak – including the obfuscation by politicians who ‘duck out’ of answering questions – is more generally deployed to support indispensable fictions in liberal democracies – like the canard of opportunity-for-all. Moreover, even in democratic societies educational filters screen for obedience.
Variants of these influences can be identified in Ireland, where great wealth subsists alongside grinding, long-term poverty. Irish society is generally tolerant, but growing inequality is unraveling the social fabric, and creates conditions for the scapegoating of minorities.
II – Ireland’s Two-Party System
Foreign multinationals are a transient presences on the Irish scene. Their indigenous handlers, an aging cohort of predominantly male, property-owning, car-driving, privately schooled, health-insured professionals – lawyers, accountants, doctors, financial service providers and other high-earning business people – are the enduring economic elite of the state. Its dominant consensus does not emerge from smoke-filled rooms any longer. Rather, it is an aggregate conception of what a ‘normal’, self-interested person of this class aspires to. Indeed, those upholding what is a neo-liberal orthodoxy may be unaware – like Ebenezer Scrooge – of its detrimental effect. What is an often passive propaganda is expressed through a media dependent on advertising revenue, and in the policies of the two largest political parties.
A recent poll showed seventy percent of the highest (AB) social class support one or other of the two main centre-right political parties, in particular Fine Gael (Irish Times MRBI poll, October 16th, 2018), now the ‘natural party of government’ for the dominant interest.
The ‘bricks and mortar’ of property remains, overwhelmingly, their preferred asset, with many acting as landlords. Thus, according to economist David McWilliams the wealthiest top five-percent in the country own over forty percent of its wealth, with eighty-five per cent of that held in property and land. The key objective of Irish propaganda, and we may call it that, is therefore to keep the economy on an even keel of steady growth, and rising rents, while ensuring that wealth, mostly property, is subjected to minimal taxation. The result is that in the last financial year a mere €500 million out of total tax receipts of over €50 billion, derived from land or property.[ii]
The dominant consensus also insists that it is necessary to keep a lid on government expenditure on public services (most of which the elite does not use), so as to avoid the over-heating of Bertie Ahern’s ‘boomenomics’ before the crash of 2008. Then low taxation on income and wealth went hand-in-hand with spending increases, and public sector salary ‘benchmarking’ with the private sector. The ineptitude of these policies were partly to blame for a property bubble before the crash of 2008, and has consigned Fianna Fáil to its present subaltern role, in which it now flaunts a more centrist approach.
In a clear signal to the economic elite, Minister for Finance Michael Noonan launched his Budget 2016 claiming the days of ‘boom and bust’ would be consigned to the history books.[iii] Throughout his tenure (2011-2017) no serious public housing initiatives were embarked on. In 2015, for example, by which time economic growth for the year was at 7.8%, a mere 334 social and affordable units were built.[iv] The ensuing scarcity ensured a dramatic recovery in property prices, including that held by the state bank NAMA.
Another salient feature of Irish propaganda is the essential delivery of buy-in from young adults, who continue to purchase property at inflated prices. Prior to the crash Dublin prices soared to such an extent that a residence in the city became more expensive than New York or London.[v] Dublin prices are set to reach boom-time levels this year according to Pat Davitt, head of the Institute of Professional Auctioneers and Valuers (IPAV), with an average family home costing over half a million euros.[vi] Meanwhile average Dublin rents now exceed the heights of the Celtic Tiger by thirty percent. This means those landholders, and institutions, that weathered the recession have seen huge dividends.
Source daft.ie
Any new property purchaser instantly becomes a stakeholder in the dominant consensus. The buy-in of upwardly-mobile youth not only maintains market demand, but also brings political support for the dominant consensus. Political parties threatening the ‘stability’ under the centre-right axis are subtly undermined as the ‘loony’ left and not given a platform in the mainstream media, or co-opted into governing coalitions and discredited, as was the case with Labour, the Greens and now the Independent Alliance.
Importantly, up to fifteen percent of the population are foreign-born nationals. Apart from UK nationals, they do not enjoy a right to vote in general elections, unless they take out Irish citizenship, costing almost one thousand euro. Unlike native-born Irish, who historically had among the highest rate of private home ownership in the world, peaking at 80% in 1991, (declining to 71% in 2011),[vii] many come from countries where renting for life is the norm, and may not wish to reside here long-term. Politically, this large cohort only exerts influence via multinational employers, who face demands for wage increases due to spiralling rents. At the bottom of the ladder are unskilled (or at least unqualified) non-EU migrants – gastarbeiter – many of whom are on short-term- (often student-) visas, and permitted to remain in the country only insofar as they serve an economic purpose.
III – The Crucial Constituency
The elite’s longstanding hold on power, via the two main political parties, relies on a crucial constituency of farmers and their extended families, who are evenly distributed throughout the state, apart from Dublin. Although continually declining in number, they are overwhelmingly native Irish – thus enfranchised – vociferous campaigners, and of a vintage that tends to vote. This ensures their supposed interests, more accurately those of comprador multinationals that trade their commodities, are protected by Irish propaganda.
A remarkable eighty-percent of farmers, working on almost eighty-five thousand separate farms, support either Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil according to the aforementioned poll. The former are especially reliant on their allegiance, which means the national (and global) interest in reducing GHG emissions in order to avoid up to €600 million every year in EU fines after 2020 may be overlooked.[viii] Agriculture produces almost a third of total national emissions, yet contributes a mere 1.7% of carbon taxes.[ix] The farming sector is, however, an increasingly fragile alliance, with the average annual income on dairy farms approximately €85,000, but averaging only €15,000 on the average dry cattle (beef) farm, all of which, derives from subsidies.[x]
An urban working class of unskilled, semi-skilled and unemployed, has been mollified by comparatively generous social welfare payments, but is increasingly impoverished by the scarcity and cost of property, rising rents, and a failing system of public health. Eighteen to twenty-five-year-olds are discriminated against by lower social welfare payments, but tend not to turn out for elections, and are inclined to emigrate, so can easily be ignored.
Preserving a share of working class support remains important, in terms of optics at least, for the two main political parties, especially Fianna Fáil, which preserves the charade of being a party for all classes. Unlike farmers, however, historically a working class consciousness has not been evident in Ireland, and approaches to the national question and moral or religious concerns have tended to sway this cohort. Also, while farmers have clear objectives in terms of maintaining a subsidy regime, and avoiding environmental regulation, the working class is more easily distracted from establishing fixed political aspirations.
The widespread protests over water charges in 2014 were one of the few occasions when the dam broke, and working class discontents spilled onto the streets. But this single issue could be conceded, and sustained engagement with politics avoided. Yet, according to Social Justice Ireland, last year 790,000 people were living in poverty, of whom 250,000 were children.[xi]
Similar to farmers, most civil service workers, including senior teachers, have been kept on side with generous pay and conditions. Teaching salaries averaging over $60,000 per year compare favourably with other OECD countries. As with the social welfare system, new entrants have been discriminated against, with many being forced to emigrate during the crash, but they count for less politically than their senior colleagues. The current modus vivendi between the teaching unions and the ruling parties is reflected in the terminal decline of the Labour Party, their traditional voice in the Dáil.
The new Minister for Education, Joe McHugh, recently described secondary teachers as being overburdened by ‘initiative overload’[xii], which might come as a surprise considering they enjoy more than sixteen weeks of holidays per year, and curricula that have changed little in decades. Secondary school teachers play an important role in upholding the dominant consensus.
The spiral of inequality, globally and nationally is, however, accelerating, and the coalition of interests maintaining the dominant consensus is unstable. Multinationals siphon off vast profits from a market one Tesco executive allegedly referred to as ‘Treasure Island’, with consumer prices, on average, twelve percent higher than in the UK,[xiii] while some avoid corporation taxes altogether. Meanwhile the state labours under a debt of over €200 billion after a bailout the terms of which (including the creation of NAMA) protected the interests of those members of the economic elite that did not speculate wildly prior to the crash – such as former solicitor Brian O’Donnell who was evicted from his Dalkey home in 2015 – while working to the detriment the poor, and the impressionable young who had been encouraged to take out crippling mortgages.
The Irish economy is vulnerable to global financial shocks – with just fifty large firms accounting for three-quarters of all exports[xiv] – a recrudescence of nationalism after Brexit, and the growing obsolescence of many forms of work, including our current farming model. The economic elite is intellectually rudderless, and only knows the way of economic growth-without-end, where ecological constraints are ignored, and in which the retail cartels make a mockery of the notion of a free market. The centre-right cannot hold for long, but in the meantime, the wheels of Irish propaganda keep turning.
IV – The Propaganda Model – Education
State secondary school pupils are encouraged to take subjects that will prepare them for work in multinational corporations, with an emphasis on science and technology, rather than arts, humanities or social sciences. Philosophy is unavailable as a secondary school subject, while history has been downgraded in recent years.
In the state school system, which I observed as a supply teacher, rebellious students are removed from obedient peers and housed en bloc in ‘pass’ classes, or entire schools, which are little more than advanced creches, or holding facilities. There behaviours and performances deteriorate in the absence of positive role models. Ill-equipped for work or even social life, the dole queue awaits, or worse. Importantly, this underclass is unable to articulate their grievances – one in six of the adult population is functionally illiterate.[xv]
The essential breeding ground of the economic elite is found in the paradoxically state-funded system of private education, in which the state pays the salaries of teachers – costing around €90 million per year. This ensures a private education is not prohibitively expensive, broadening the base of the elite, with over twenty-five thousand students enrolling in 2017.[xvi] In these institutions lasting ties are formed, and the best preparation for the Leaving Certificate offered, which is generally a code to be cracked. Behavioural problems among middle class students are less pronounced, in my experience, but where rebelliousness, or just a lack of conformity, is apparent authorities employ long-standing methods of control. The sport of rugby emphasises the collective in a test of manhood, with dissenters often subjected to homophobic slurs.
As far back as the 1920s, one of the leading Dublin Catholic secondary schools for boys of its time, O’Connell School on North Richmond Street, recommended its pupils in the following terms: ‘Your ‘Richmond Street’ boy makes a good official. In the first place he possess the necessary academic qualifications to place him high on the examination lists. He has, in addition, certain qualities which make him a good colleague. However clever an official he may be, he has to pull with the team.’[xvii] Little has changed in a hundred years. The abiding ambition of most all-male private schools remains not only examination results, but also to develop a cast of mind disposed to “pull with the team”, while instilling an idea of what is ‘normal’ in the dominant consensus.
Widespread single gender education keeps more troublesome and sports-obsessed male adolescents apart from females, who streak ahead academically. But when both enter the workforce, the demands of motherhood generally count against women working the long hours necessary for career advancement in most of the elite professions. ‘Early-rising’, workaholic male professionals are the praetorian guard of the dominant consensus.
Irish class boundaries are not impermeable, or based on race or creed – as Leo Varadkar’s background illustrates – but it is increasingly difficult for anyone who is not from an elevated social background to rise up through the educational ranks to become a lawyer, doctor or even a banker. For example a young barrister, after a minimum of four years full-time study, is required to work without a salary for a further two, while he ‘devils’ under a senior colleague, thereby excluding a large proportion of the population. That profession is the bulk supplier of the country’s judiciary, which goes some way towards explaining the Court’s historic deference to property interests – notably: In the matter of Article 26 of the Constitution and in the Matter of The Housing (Private Rented Dwellings) Bill, 1981.
Privileged classes, nonetheless, still produce offspring with intellectual or artistic aspirations that survive the stultifying educational system. As the economic benefits of the humanities and arts are now grudgingly recognised these pursuits are indulged with financial support available from state and private sources, albeit generally via laborious application processes. Ideally, however, the ‘creative’ is an advertising executive. Due to high rents, artists are pushed into becoming ‘art-repreneurs’, and conscripted into marketing the state as a place to do business.
Academia once offered a platform for meaningful critiques of Irish society, but little interaction with the public now occurs, as excessive specialisation has brought abstraction to most subjects. As in other countries, young academics are required to ‘publish or perish’ prolix articles addressed to their peers, leaving little time for political engagement. In 2012 Tom Garvin, Emeritus Professor of Politics decried the dismantling of prior ‘semi-democratic’ structures in University College Dublin, claiming: ‘internal representative structures and freedom of speech were closed down and replaced with Soviet-style top-down “councils” that passively received and passed on instructions from on high’. As non-academic staff began to outnumber academics Garvin found ‘an indescribable grey philistinism’ characterise the public culture of the college ‘and a hideous management-speak’ drowned out ‘coherent communication.’[xviii]
IV – The Propaganda Model – Print Media
The Irish media is subject to global trends, but also internal dynamics. The reputation of journalists as crotchety, difficult people, so often depicted on screen, belies how most now “pull with the team”, or see their careers stall. The journalist that questions dominant consensus is depicted as a conspiracy theorist, but this cautionary distrust of authority now appears to be in short supply. Print media in Ireland is on its knees as young readers, in particular, opt for online content, which has resulted in significant redundancies. Precarious freelancing is the norm for new entrants.
Denis O’Brien – who a tribunal of enquiry in 2011 concluded had handed over hundreds of thousands of pounds to a government minister, who it was ‘beyond doubt’ had given ‘substantive information to him, of significant value and assistance to him’ in securing a mobile telephone licence[xix] – controls a great swathe of Irish media, including the Irish Independent, the Sunday Independent – the widest-circulating daily and Sunday newspapers – thirteen regional publications, commercial radio channels, Newstalk (the Orwellian association seemingly lost on them) and Today FM. O’Brien’s outlets are generally pro-business, or more accurately pro-multinational, and often critical of the institutions of the state and even individual ministers, but generally support the economic elite with selective regurgitation of government Newspeak.
For example, the headline of the Irish Independent on October 18th 2018 ran: ‘Varadkar’s Government in crisis after one minister resigns, another faces fight for survival.’ The article simulates the drama of Fianna Fáil calling time on the coalition, thereby maintaining the fiction of two opposing forces – or only two options in the event of an election. The dominant consensus is woven into the piece with the reminder: ‘The instability has created a major crisis for the Government after a Budget that was well received by most sectors’. In contrast, Social Justice Ireland argued that the budget disproportionately benefited high-earners, noting: ‘Budget 2019 fails to make any notable impact on Ireland’s entrenched inequalities and fails to tackle any of the major challenges the country currently faces.’[xx]
The ‘Indo’ also ostentatiously stimulates demand among upwardly-mobile youth for property and health insurance. Thus the headline on the 19th of October 2018 read: ‘Families to save in home loan and health shake-up’. Its consumer affairs correspondent announced: ‘Families are to enjoy the benefits of a price war in health insurance, and increased competition with even more entrants into the mortgage market’. Mostly, however, it provides the mainstays of effective propaganda: light entertainment, especially blanket sport coverage, celebrity gossip and sexual titillation.
There is only one other genuinely daily national indigenous newspaper – the Irish Times – which has hoovered up the Irish Examiner and regional titles to create a duopoly. It is considered, and styles itself, ‘the paper of record’, but rarely conducts meaningful investigations, tending only to print sensitive material once it has been aired elsewhere, such as when reporting on the harassment of employees by Michael Colgan, the former director of the Gate Theatre.[xxi] The catastrophic purchase of www.myhome.ie at the height of the last boom makes it a vested interest in the property market, which is reflected in extensive property supplements. Often seen as a bastion of Irish democracy, its credibility was undermined by the hosting of unmarked advertorials of the government’s Project Ireland 2040 plan.[xxii]
The imprint of government Newspeak was also evident on October 13th, the morning before the last budget was announced, with the headline ‘Significant spending increases for housing and health’ emblazoned across the front cover. Importantly, it gave a positive spin on the budget, which could be seen from every newsstand in the country, ensuring, even if the paper itself was never read, it maintained the ambient feel-good-factor. Was the positive spin provided as a quid pro quo for the scoop, or strategic leak?
The fingerprints of the economic elite are also apparent in the opening words of an article by chief political reporter Pat Leahy on October 14th. He cautioned the following: ‘First, do no harm. Any finance minister should heed the primary precept of the Hippocratic oath, and ensure that their fiscal and economic prescriptions do not damage the Government, or the economy.’ “Doing no harm” appears to involve upholding the dominant consensus, and avoiding the issues of social exclusion and sustainability.
The ‘Old Lady of D’Olier Street’ still provides a platform for left-leaning and progressive journalists, including Fintan O’Toole, Una Mullally and David McWilliams, but this does not imply relentless focus on Ireland’s economic and social structures. Their emphasis has tended to be on identity politics, issues of individual liberty, particularly reproductive rights, gender equality, and from O’Toole the ongoing dramas of Trump and Brexit. Only McWilliams consistently nails the social structures. Ultimately, the paper cannot afford to affront AB readers or farmers with ‘shrill’ left-wing commentaries or sustained campaigns, but in keeping these writers on board it maintains the illusion of being progressive.
It has also dumbed-down considerably recently in the face of ‘commercial realities’, in other words a high salary overhang. Stodgy book reviews have been marginalised, with increasing emphasis on business, vox pop reporting –with leading articles like ‘Life on the Luas: a tale of two tracks’[xxiii] – consumer affairs and, as usual, lavish sport coverage: all of these fit with the propaganda model of distraction with light entertainment.
We have relied on UK publications to break stories such as labour abuses in the fishing industry, the substitution of horsemeat for beef, and the recent scandal of unmarked government advertorials. Serious interrogation of the role of the Gardaí has been conducted at a remove from the mainstream.
Two political magazines, The Phoenix and Village Magazine, offer satire and dissent, but the former is not available for free online and thus has limited political clout. The latter is yet to develop a viable commercial model, but at least upheld freedom of expression and Dáil privilege by publishing online (along with www.broadsheet.ie) a record of Catherine Murphy’s speech accusing Denis O’Brien of corruption, after he had taken out an injunction against RTÉ, and when the Irish Times took fright.
VI – The Propaganda Model – the State Broadcaster
The state broadcaster receives a compulsory licence fee from anyone with a television set in the country, but still depends on advertising revenue to remain financially solvent. Like the Irish Times, RTÉ is a broad church, but both TV and radio stations are awash with light entertainment, including vox pop phone-ins like Joe Duffy’s Liveline which also offers an outlet for nonsensical Duckspeakers, while Ray D’Arcy and Ryan Tubridy provide distraction throughout the day on the news and current affairs channel RTÉ Radio 1.
Tubridy is Ireland’s highest-paid broadcaster, and often its public face as host of the prime time, Friday night ‘The Late Late Show’. A scion of a well-known Fianna Fáil family, he has assumed a seemingly unassailable position, and rarely courts controversy; although he recently suggested that people who (legally) cycle two abreast should be ‘binned‘,[xxiv] and once compared breastfeeding in public to urinating on the street.[xxv] Mostly however he tugs at the heartstrings of viewers, while devoting his spare time to writing children’s books.
RTÉ mostly anesthetises the population with light entertainment, especially sport – one recent survey showed that on ‘Morning Ireland’, the highest-rating radio show in the country, environmental stories were covered for only 0.92% of the time, whereas sports news accounted for 12.41% of content.[xxvi] Elsewhere, shows such as ‘Claire Byrne Live’ offer a small screen outlet for Duckspeak. At the end of one episode last year, during which evidence for human-influenced climate change was ‘debated’, thirty-four percent of respondents did not believe this would pose a serious threat in their lifetimes, while nine-percent did not know.[xxvii] Damien O’Reilly has also provided an outlet for Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary to express the Duckspeak of climate denial,[xxviii] the farming lobby no doubt delighted by this muddying of the waters.
What passes for news and current affairs coverage generally consists of assessments of Tweedledum and Tweedledee politics, or commentaries on controversies stirred up in the print media. A case in point was in the recent presidential election when the previously unknown, and unsupported, Peter Casey made a demeaning remarks about Travellers, which was greeted with such ‘outrage’ that he became a serious candidate in the election, thereby providing plenty of fodder for Joe Duffy, and others.
Ironically, the most serious political critique is found in the weekly comedy show ‘Callan’s Kicks’, where a degree of latitude is permitted. But as Theodore Zeldin explains, comedy can actually have the effect of reinforcing conformity ‘by being its safety valve’. Zeldin points out that carnivals, such as the medieval festival of fools, ‘have throughout history made fun of authority, and turned hierarchy upside down’, but ‘did so only for a few days.’[xxix]
*******
Ireland is a free country without an oppressive secret police force systematically monitoring communications. Despite the chilling effect of current defamation law, freedom of expression is enshrined in the Constitution and European Charter of Human Rights. Nonetheless as George Orwell put it in his proposed preface to his 1945 novel Animal Farm: ‘Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.’ Orwell observed how:
At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
Irish propaganda upholds a dominant consensus: preserving low taxation on wealth, especially property; encouraging steady economic growth, including rising rents; maintaining buy-in from young property purchasers; and insulating the agricultural sector, often referred to as ‘our farmers’ on the state broadcaster, from criticism. This is achieved through straightforward manipulation of the media as well as instilling conformity through the education system, but also in the use of light entertainment, especially sport, as distraction, as well as in the peddling of plain nonsense, on RTÉ especially. With the advent of social media we are seeing new and sinister methods of achieving these objectives, which this article has not addressed, but which Ireland is not immune from.
The relatively new medium of the internet need not necessarily be feared however. It can, even through increasingly compromised social media, counter propaganda, by allowing like-minded individuals to converge and orchestrate campaigns. Propaganda can easily be exposed and alternative viewpoints expressed. But we must guard against its capacity for offering further light entertainment distraction, and platforms for madcap Duckspeakers.
The most important weapon against propaganda is education, both childhood and lifelong, which must address adult illiteracy. A priority should be reform of that sector in Ireland: first by ending subsidised private education; then placing greater emphasis on the enquiring humanities and arts, before addressing the decline of higher learning institutions.
The water charges campaign failed to generate long-term political engagement among the working class, or an increasingly squeezed middle. Representatives of the economic elite could concede on that single issue and take the rug from underneath organisers, who had seen the campaign in broader terms. Future campaigns should directly confront a taxation system which fails to alleviate rising wealth inequality. As we have seen, the top five percent in the country own over forty percent of its wealth, eighty-five per cent of which is held in property or land. A long-standing regime of minimal property taxes, along with the failure of the state to construct social housing to any extent, have severely accentuated wealth inequalities and seen property prices and rents spiral. A campaign for housing as an ‘inalienable and imprescriptible’ right enshrined in the constitution[xxx], should become the main progressive objective.
[i] ‘We Have Ways of Making You Think’, TV mini-series, BBC (1992)
[xvi] Carl O’Brien, Jenna Clarke-Molloy, ‘Private school enrolment returns to boom-time high’, Irish Times, December 28th, 2017.
[xvii] David McCullagh, The Reluctant Taoiseach: A Biography of John A. Costello, Dublin, Gill and MacMillan, 2010, p.10.
[xviii] Tom Garvin ‘The bleak future of the Irish university’, Irish Times, May 1st, 2012.
[xix] The report summaries the payments made to the then Fine Gael Minister Michael Lowry saying, ‘In aggregating the known payments from Mr Denis O Brien to Mr Michael Lowry, it is apposite to note that, between the granting of the second GSM licence to Esat Digiphone in May 1996, and the transmission of £420,000 sterling to complete the purchase of the latter of Mr Lowry’s English properties in December 1999, Mr O’Brien had made or facilitated payments to Mr. Lowry of £147,000 sterling, £300,000 sterling and a benefit equivalent to a payment in the form of Mr O’Brien’s support for a loan of £420,000 sterling.’ From: Untitled, ‘Lowry helped O’Brien get mobile licence’, Untitled, RTÉ, 22nd of March, 2011, https://www.rte.ie/news/2011/0322/298935-moriarty_background/, accessed 16/11/18.
[xxi] Laurence Mackin, Conor Gallagher, ‘Seven women allege abuse and harassment by Michael Colgan’, Irish Times, November 4th, 2017.
[xxii] Kevin Doyle, ‘Varadkar orders review of Project Ireland €1.5m publicity campaign amid controversy’, Irish Independent, March 1st, 2018.
[xxiii] Rosita Boland, ‘Life on the Luas: a tale of two tracks’, Irish Times, October 14th, 2017.
[xxiv] Untitled, Stickybottle, ‘Flood of complaints to RTE after ‘Late Late Show’ cyclists item’ 14th of March, 2018, http://www.stickybottle.com/latest-news/complaints-rte-cyclists-item/
[xxv] Denise Deighan O’Callaghan, Letter to the Editor: ‘Tubridy’s comments on breastfeeding’, Irish Times, November 8th, 2004.
[xxviii] Sasha Brady, ‘Michael O’Leary slams climate change as ‘complete and utter rubbish’’, Irish Independent, April 8th, 2017.
[xxix] Theodore Zeldin, The Hidden Pleasures of Life: A New Way of Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future, London, Maclehouse Press, 2015. p.177.
[xxx] See Eoin Tierney, ‘The key Change to Fix the Irish Constitution’ July 1st, 2001, Cassandra Voices, http://cassandravoices.com/law/the-key-change-to-fix-the-irish-constitution/, accessed 21/11/18.
Andrej Babiš is a chameleon. At one point you see him on a poster beaming out a jovial smile, or handing sweet pastries at an election rally; then you watch him giving interviews to international media full of resentful claims, while ‘representing‘ the views of our country.
So who is he and how did he get elected? Ironically, he is not originally Czech, but from Slovakia. First and foremost he is a businessman who claims to bring order to our political situation.
An average Czech person would say a lack of political experience does not matter because he is a rich already, and hence would not be dependent on the post to generate wealth for himself. Many also believe his business experience is going to prove useful.
But let us focus on his most recent activities, which caught the attention of Le Monde and The Guardian. Anyone can see that he is playing to the narrative of fear and hatred which chronically follows the refugee migrations. Unfortunately, a considerable number of Czechs share his views, at least according to polls. Most have forgotten how, even in recent history, Czechs have sought refuge from political persecution and economic stagnation.
To be honest, it is surprising that people from a country with a long history of seeing people flee political oppression can show such close-minded thinking. Mr Babiš claims, which I sincerely hope do not represent the real views of people, certainly do not help improve their understanding.
Not only are his claims manipulative, they also tend to be misleading. ‘Britain has always been an ally of the Czech Republic‘, he recently asserted; yeah well, our small country’s requests for help to our ‘ally‘ fell on deaf ears twice last century. First before World War II when the British and French conceded the Sudetenland under the Munich Agreement with the Nazis, and then again after the War when the Soviets were permitted to take over.
Funnily enough, Czech people do not actually have much to ‘fear‘. The Czech Republic is not a place where many migrants want to settle. It is merely a transition state and to this date, only tens of people actually have actually sought asylum.
From time to time, Mr Babiš does raise important issue, such as when he draws attention to the blood money that smugglers are making. But most of what he is saying is nonsensical, such as persuading potential migrants to stay in their countries of origin. The fact these people have decided to leave with little hope of returning demonstrates the severity of their predicament.
That is a predicament Czechs went through multiple times throughout our history, when many were forced to leave their homes and families behind, bribe a smuggler and hope that the bullets miss their bodies when they climbed over the barbed wire fence, and run for their life – all in the hope of a better life.
How can Mr Babiš turn a blind eye to our history and speak on the behalf of Czechs? And even if there was no historical context to rely on, do his arguments about dividing ‘our culture‘ and ‘their culture” stand up to scrutiny? I don’t think so.
I have to give him this though, he might be on to something when he says that the media fails to report on the important issues. The ‘if it bleeds it leads’ approach in reporting certainly does not invite an average person to dig deeply, and see what lies under the surface.
That is how you find yourself around a family table, listening to strong opinions (mostly based on news headlines) with people actually not knowing and/or not wanting to know any more. But before you let his complaints about the state of media impress you, I dare you to guess the name of the Slovakian businessman who owns the widest-circulating Czech newspapers?
I would love to think that the close-minded and history-oblivious views Mr. Babiš throws in do not represent the majority of people’s views, but I actually don’t know. I may myself be in a sound chamber, and do not tend to surround myself with close-minded people. So I tend to think that the situation over here is not so bad.
Then again, our feeble chauvinistic president Miloš Zeman was re-elected last year, supported by Mr. Babiš, who speaks to the international media and goes to Brussels with the kind of views I have set out. It is incredibly unfair of him to represent our country (blissfully unaware of the paradox that he is not even Czech) and offer these ideas, completely ignoring the history of Czechs and of Europe itself.
