On Absurdities and Atrocities
In a 2018 edition of BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire show, a Jewish couple were interviewed. They spoke, vividly, of their fears about a Corbyn-led government, how they intended to leave the UK if he was elected, how they feared for other Jewish people.
This was fairly standard fare at this point, accusations and denunciations against Corbyn and the left having become a staple of the news and current affairs industry. But on this occasion, for reasons we may never fully understand, things did not go to script: Victoria Derbyshire decided to do journalism. She challenged this couple on their statements, she produced counter-evidence of actions taken by Corbyn, she confronted them with the other side of the debate.
It was a momentary and unrepeated incident, an anomaly. Nothing like it has happened before or since, not anywhere, certainly not on BBC, and Derbyshire’s show was shortly afterwards cancelled in a ‘review’.
We all know media are not politically neutral: there is always some element of partisanship on one side or another. We, as adults, understand this and learn to ‘decode’ messages accordingly (or we don’t, and get conned).
But what if we found out that our media, both state and commercial, ‘left’ and ‘centre’ and ‘right’, had all colluded to present an entirely false story, one that could be demonstrated, easily, to be false? What if we found out they were simply lying, all of them lying to all of us, for years?
What if we could prove it?
What would follow from that?
To be clear about terms, this is not a question about bias, nor about seeing or hearing news you don’t like. It isn’t about framing, or partiality, or slant. It isn’t about opinions or takes or interpretations. It’s about facts being presented that are not facts, a reality being constructed that is not reality, truth being asserted that is not truth.
Consider for a moment two other recent examples in which false claims have been made — Brexit and the Iraq War. Both were occasions of the most extreme dishonesty — Johnson’s infamous side-of-a-bus claim about ‘£350m a week for the NHS’, Blair/Campbell’s ‘dodgy dossier’. In both these cases, our media reported two sides — about the ‘£350m a week for the NHS’ claim, and the WMDs claim. These issues were debated, endlessly, in parliament and in our media, as well as in the public square. Both were subjected to rigorous and detailed scrutiny. Millions marched and protested against Iraq, Robin Cook resigned and made a memorable speech, Tony Benn spoke movingly and powerfully against it in parliament. An entirely new newspaper, the New European, was launched to dispute the Brexit claims, TV had hour-long ‘Brexit debates’. Whichever side you were on, in either of these issues, your argument was presented, and it was perfectly legitimate to be in either camp. The country was divided, and both for and against made their voices heard. You might believe one side was presented more favourably than the other, but it is impossible to deny both were debated, openly and publicly. In both cases, Brexit and Iraq, there was a tennis match between two players, and both players competed, and both players were legitimate.
Now consider the ‘Labour antisemitism crisis’ story. At no point in this five-year-long saga (except for the ‘Victoria Derbyshire anomaly’ above and the courageous, solitary work of independent journalist Peter Oborne) has there been any attempt by mainstream media voices to establish ‘the other side’ of the story. Further: there simply has been no ‘other side’. To be on the ‘other side’ of the narrative was, by virtue of some viciously circular reasoning, to be the thing they accused you of being. Instead of a tennis match between two opposing players, we had both players on the same side of the net, pounding shots into the empty ‘other side’ of the court. There was no-one there to return the balls, no-one to play against.
This is a crucial distinction to make. The ‘Labour antisemitism crisis’ narrative was unique, in that no counter-narrative to it was ever presented. There was never any attempt at defence of those accused or analysis of the claims made against them. Their voices were (almost) never heard. No UK broadcaster or news outlet made even a token attempt to debate the issue. There was no ‘issue’ to ‘debate’.
There was no tennis match.
What we witnessed instead was a ‘one-sided Wimbledon’, a wholly asymmetrical information war, in which a fraudulent narrative was presented and discussed, by everyone, as if it were the only possible truth.
I’ve listed elsewhere ten of the frauds that were used — Corbyn’s wreath, the mural, ‘irony’. Not one of them stands up to even casual scrutiny. Had even the most cursory analysis of any of these claims been undertaken, the narrative would immediately have failed. The story would then have become, not ‘Is Labour antisemitic?’, but rather, ‘Who is responsible for manufacturing and propagating these outrageous frauds?’
But that never happened, nor will it, because it was our media who were responsible. Our media — all of them, without exception — colluded in a colossal conspiracy against the truth that it is essentially impossible now to expose, for the simple and obvious reason that those who would be necessary for its exposure, the media, are, precisely, those who are propagating it. Our media will never — I would say can never, in reality — admit to their deceit. The ‘other side’ will never be told.
What does any of this mean? One thing it means is that we as a nation have been trained, groomed, to accept absurdities as real. Voltaire’s nostrum, ’Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities’ is relevant here. The absurdity was the belief that a party leader with a lifetime of commitment to anti-racist activism and a track record of support for Jewish people and Jewish causes was a rabid antisemite, someone who, in Telegraph journalist Simon Heffer’s memorable phrase, ‘wants to re-open Auschwitz’: the atrocity was the character assassination war, the monstrous persecution of political opponents (many themselves Jewish) as Jew-haters, Nazis, sitting inside the further atrocity of the assault on truth, on reality itself.
Our polity is not well served by this. It is not a sign of health in our democracy that our media can commit atrocities in the name of absurdities, that there should be no challenge, that the word ‘journalist’ should have become merely an honorific. It is not a sign of health that an entirely false pseudo-reality can be put up, unanimously and without dissent or debate, as if it were genuine.
Our media are liars, our journalists are frauds, our democracy is in peril, atrocities have been and continue to be committed, and it is up to us now, just us alone, to make sure they don’t get away with it.
And it may already be too late.