In fact, ordinary people are treated in much of the media as invisible or with contempt, or they are patronised. Two honourable exceptions were the GMTV presenters cited and mocked by Paxman for their humanity in standing up for an ex-soldier denied proper treatment by the National Health Service. Paxman called for a more ‘sophisticated’ and ‘honest’ approach that accepted the public’s approval of low taxes – taxes that are not rationed when it comes to propping up hugely profitable private finance initiatives in the Health Service or squandered on waging war, regardless of the public’s objections.
Not once in his speech did Paxman refer to Iraq, nor did he tell us why Blair was never seriously challenged on that bloodbath in a broadcast interview. That the BBC had played a critical role in amplifying and echoing Blair’s and Bush’s lies was apparently unmentionable. The coming attack on Iran, led again by propaganda filtered through broadcasting, is from the same parallel world, also unmentionable. John Pilger, article September 2007, ‘Life is Still the Issue’
Class gap has opened up. People power is being taken over by a black elite. An extension of the black middle class created by the apartheid regime as a buffer to real change. John Pilger, Apartheid Did Not Die, ITV 1998
Barack Obama is the embodiment of this ‘ism’. Since Obama was elected, leading liberals have talked about America returning to its true status as a ‘nation of moral ideals’ – the words of Paul Krugman in The New York Times. In the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford wrote that ‘spiritually advanced people regard the new president as ‘a Lightworker’ ... who can help usher in a new way of being on the planet’.
Tell that to an Afghan child whose family has been blown away by Obama’s bombs, or a Pakistani child whose family are among the 700 civilians killed by Obama’s drones. Or tell it to a child in the carnage of Gaza caused by American smart weapons which, disclosed Seymour Hersh, were re-supplied to Israel for use in the slaughter ‘only after the Obama team let it be known it would not object’. The man who stayed silent on Gaza is the man who now condemns Iran.
Obama’s is the myth that is America’s last taboo. His most consistent theme was never change – it was power. ‘The United States,’ he said, ‘leads the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good … We must lead by building a 21st century military to ensure the security of our people and advance the security of all people.’ And there is this remarkable statement: ‘At moments of great peril in the past century our leaders ensured that America, by deed and by example, led and lifted the world, that we stood and fought for the freedom sought by billions of people beyond their borders.’ At the National Archives on May 21, he said: ‘From Europe to the Pacific, we’ve been the nation that has shut down torture chambers and replaced tyranny with the rule of law.’
Since 1945, ‘by deed and by example’, the United States has overthrown fifty governments, including democracies, and crushed some 30 liberation movements, and supported tyrannies and set up torture chambers from Egypt to Guatemala. Countless men, women and children have been bombed to death. Bombing is apple pie. And yet here is the 44th President of the United States, having stacked his government with warmongers and corporate fraudsters and polluters from the Bush and Clinton eras, teasing us while promising more of the same.
Within three days of his inauguration, Obama was ordering the death of people in faraway countries – Pakistan and Afghanistan. And yet the peace movement it seems is prepared to look the other way and believe that the cool Obama will restore, as Krugman wrote, ‘The nation of moral ideals’. John Pilger, lecture Socialism Chicago 2009, ‘Power, Illusion & America’s Last Taboo’; viz also website
The clever young man who recently made it to the White House is a very fine hypnotist, partly because it is indeed extraordinary to see an African American at the pinnacle of power in the land of slavery. However, this is the twenty-first century, and Race together with Gender and even Class can be very seductive tools of propaganda. For what is so often overlooked and what matters I believe above all is the class one serves. ibid.
What matter above all, I believe, is the class one serves. John Pilger, Press conference August 2009
The National Health Service was not a gift from above. It was conceived in the blood, sweat and tears of ordinary people who had built the imperial might and wealth of Britain and yet often lived in abject poverty. John Pilger, The Dirty War on the National Health Service, ITV 2019
Britain’s deadly disease was class. ibid.
On July 5th 1948 the most momentous social change of all was announced by this leaflet delivered to every household: Your NEW Health Service! ibid.
But it was the new Labour government of Tony Blair that accelerated the sell-off. Blair used an accountancy trick called Private Finance Initiative or PFI. New hospitals were effectively owned by the companies that built them under disastrous pay-later terms. ibid.
... England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly. But in any calculation about it one has got to take into account its emotional unity, the tendency of nearly all its inhabitants to feel alike and act together in moments of supreme crisis. It is the only great country in Europe that is not obliged to drive hundreds of thousands of its nationals into exile or the concentration camp. George Orwell, England Your England III
... The underlying fact was that the whole position of the moneyed class had long ceased to be justifiable. There they sat, at the centre of a vast empire and a world-wide financial network, drawing interest and profits and spending them – on what? It was fair to say that life within the British Empire was in many ways better than life outside it. Still, the Empire was underdeveloped, India slept in the Middle Ages, the Dominions lay empty, with foreigners jealously barred out, and even England was full of slums and unemployment. Only half a million people, the people in the country houses, definitely benefited from the existing system. Moreover, the tendency of small businesses to merge together into large ones robbed more and more of the moneyed class of their function and turned them into mere owners, their work being done for them by salaried managers and technicians. For long past there had been in England an entirely functionless class, living on money that was invested they hardly knew where, the ‘idle rich’, the people whose photographs you can look at in the Tatler and the Bystander, always supposing that you want to. The existence of these people was by any standard unjustifiable. They were simply parasites, less useful to society than his fleas are to a dog. ibid. IV
But much more important than this is the spread of middle-class ideas and habits among the working class. The British working class are now better off in almost all ways than they were thirty years ago. This is partly due to the efforts of the trade unions, but partly to the mere advance of physical science. It is not always realized that within rather narrow limits the standard of life of a country can rise without a corresponding rise in real wages. Up to a point, civilization can lift itself up by its boot-tags. However unjustly society is organized, certain technical advances are bound to benefit the whole community, because certain kinds of goods are necessarily held in common. A millionaire cannot, for example, light the streets for himself while darkening them for other people. ibid. IV
The essential point about the English class-system is that it is not entirely explicable in terms of money. Roughly speaking it is a money-stratification, but is also interpenetrated by a sort of shadowy caste system. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
Every middle-class person has a dormant class-prejudice which needs only a small thing to arouse it; and if he is over forty he probably has a firm conviction that his own class has been sacrificed to the class below. ibid.
England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly. George Orwell, Why I Write
I will venture to say, that upon the one great class of subjects, the largest and most weighty of them all, where the leading and determining considerations that ought to lead to a conclusion are truth, justice, and humanity – upon these, gentlemen, all the world over, I will back the masses against the classes. W E Gladstone, speech 29th June 1886
Inequality and oppression were part of the natural order ordained by God. This was a class of staggering extremes. Robert Bartlett, Inside the Medieval Mind IV: Power, BBC 2008
A noble’s life was worth six times a peasant’s. ibid.
Serfs had to work on their lord’s lands ... For most serfs there was no escape. ibid.
Inequality was enforced by law. ibid.
There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning. Warren Buffett
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas. Karl Marx, The German Ideology, 1845
This revolution is necessary not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overturning it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew. ibid.
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
What I did was to prove … that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Karl Marx