Marching to the Fault Line

Politicisation is rarely a process with a clean line. Any easy narrative to explain where we find ourselves on the Nolan Chart is usually a false construct. Why we think what we do is almost always messy.

Our views on liberty, the role of the state and how to make the world a better place come from a hoodoo brew of parental influence, cultural DNA, education and events. Other factors apply as well. I have more than one friend who owes their current political orientation in part to falling for pretty face. Where hormones lead, philosophies on the best way to order an economy can often follow and grow deep roots.

The stuttering route to my current weltanschauung takes in everything from the deep poverty my family experienced when I was a child to dystopian novels and the Dead Kennedys. Individual acts of kindness and pointless bureaucratic obstruction. The power cuts of the three-day week and police brutality at Wapping. A raft of writers from John Pilger to Sébastien Faure. Images from the 1970s nightly news acid-etched in my memory as important to my development as the words of Karl Popper or Moh Kohn.

One element from my teenhood that helped shaped how I think and feel politically was the 1984-1985 miners’ strike. The events of the period spiralled so far beyond industrial action the dispute became a rift in the fabric of the country. It divided. Placed you on a side whether you wanted to be on one or not. You knew at some intestinal level that the gears of history were shifting. After the strike, whoever won, everything was going to be different.

Today, on the 25th anniversary of one of the arbitrary, but most commonly accepted, start dates for the strike, I feel the need to mark it. To ignore, turn my face away from the collisions of history would be a denial of my own narrative. However, London is not coal mining territory. My options for communal remembrance and discussion of the strike are somewhat limited.

It seems the only apposite action I can take is to attend the launch of Marching to the Fault Line – Francis Beckett and David Hencke’s account of the strike. Therefore I leave Millbank and head towards Bloomsbury. Dusk is slow in coming tonight and I enjoy the last gulps of sun before the crowed sodium blare of traffic and advertising begins.

Hitting Whitehall, I walk into a wall of sound. The political artery is lined along the whole length of one side by hundreds of Tamils and supporters of the Tamil Tigers. They are arm-linked in a human chain that simultaneously chants for mercy and shouts for justice. Signs are pinned to their clothing proclaiming ‘Genocide’, ‘Don’t commit a sin, let food and medicine in’ and that old classic ‘We need bread not bombs’.

The high number of protestors wearing Tamil Tiger scarves gives the crowd something of the football terrace mob. For a moment I imagine some parallel dimension where Yam Yam Army hooligans have adopted both Wolverhampton Wanderers and Tamil independence as causes worthy of militant support. This mind’s eye chimera quickly banished by the fact that chants are neither racist, homophobic or related to anyone going home in an ambulance.

Groups of police officers sit in riot vans waiting to be called into action while increasing numbers of their colleagues patrol the crowd’s perimeter. I cross the road, walk crablike along the central reservation. Take in the protestors’ placards and the way their cries remix the sound of Gabriel Fauré playing on my iPod.

The launch is somewhat dispiriting. The red wine is good, the bookshop redolent of the time when Thatcher was the enemy. However, hearing members of the Left still fighting battles lost decades ago rubs with an exasperated tiredness. The dreamed revolutions of then are corroded. Lost in a now which has forgotten so much more than just the names of the past.

Amid and on top of this scrummage for blame and dominant analysis, Beckett and Hencke’s are on fine form. Anecdotes roll, questions volleyed back with grace and humour. Marching to the Fault Line is a grand example of good journalism. It is also the perfect model of how FoI requests can further the recording and understanding of events already receding into the fuzzy horizon of history. It exposes secrets, helps capture the hidden factors that at times seemed to be pushing towards undeclared civil war. I am glad to get my copy signed.

I drift home. Try to take in a country where the spirit of resistance is found more easily in expat Tamils than my own generation. The strike really did change things. Later, canalside, I drink tea and enjoy a supper of beans on toast. Simple pleasures, resonant of the year I have spent so much time remembering today. The television adaptation of David Peace’s Red Riding plays. Channel 4 might have missed a trick. Tonight of all nights, they should have been broadcasting GB84.

The War On Democracy

John Pilger has always been one of my heroes. He has always been brave, always told ‘the filthy truth’. However, I am not deaf to all the criticism directed towards him. His books have often been stronger than his documentaries. Some of his films overwhelm with a sense that the gravity of their conclusion has warped everything he tells and shows you. That is fine for polemical pieces, but sometimes partiality ends up being a barrier. I have a knee-jerk reaction against believing anything that smacks of propaganda – even if it is cheerleading for a cause I believe in.

Yet the best of Pilger’s work – books such as Hidden Agendas and documentaries like Quiet Mutiny, Year Zero or Death Of A Nation – offer up a perspective once revealed you cannot dismiss. Pilger might use shock to get you to look at the truth, but it stays with you because he backs it up with unchallengeable fact. Taken as a whole, his body of work is amongst that which helps give the field of journalism nobility.

Therefore I was quite excited when Surreal Girl announced she had got us tickets for the world première of his new film The War On Democracy at the NFT. The best bit of the news was Pilger was going to attend and introduce it. Given it is his first feature-length documentary, I was expecting great things of both the film and the chance to hear him speak again.

To say John Pilger’s introduction was disappointing would be like announcing ingesting Polonium-210 is bad for your health. We expected a 20-minute lecture and then a Q&A. He spoke for less than three minutes; dropped his notes and forgot that for people to hear you, holding the microphone towards you is actually useful. At points, he held forth with all the rambling coherence of a gin-soaked tramp or Gwyneth Paltrow accepting an Oscar. However, he did manage to get out a killer line on his aim for the film: “To challenge the tsunami of propaganda lulling us into passivity.”

It is a grand aim. One I wholeheartedly support. I am just fairly certain the best way of confronting the forces thriving on people’s passivity is not by producing a paean of praise to Hugo Chavez. At it’s worst, that it what The War On Democracy feels like. The popular movements behind Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia are important, yet they sometimes seemed secondary to the Chavez cult of personality as over-exposed in the documentary.

At it’s best, The War On Democracy works as neat dissection of US foreign policy and quick a flash through some of the dirtier elements of CIA action in its ‘backyard’. It astonishes with footage revealing the truth behind the Venezuelan coup of 2002 and panoramic shots of revealing the scope of favelas. It brings tears to eye when Pilger talks to Sara de Witt who survived one of General Pinochet’s torture houses and the American nun, Dianna Ortiz, who was tortured and gang-raped by the Guatemalan secret police and one of their US handlers.

For all of emotional punches it managed to land, I found The War On Democracy annoying at times. I could not understand why a journalist as bloody good as Pilger failed to ask E. Howard Hunt and Duanne Clarridge any truly difficult questions. Instead he did the Michael Moore trick of making the clever and dangerous look foolish. Whatever else they are, Hunt and Clarridge are not clowns.

When the credits rolled and the applause started, Surreal Girl leaned over and said: “Oh this will change the world won’t it? A bunch of trendy, middle class left-wingers clapping at the NFT.” This made me chuckle a lot more than any of Pilger’s failed stabs at Moore-like wit had. As Surreal Girl also pointed out, Pilger does seem to have something of a humour deficit.

Afterwards, drinking Guinness in NFT bar with acquaintances of Surreal Girl, my disappointment with The War On Democracy softened somewhat. It is easy for me to forget not everyone knows as much about CIA dirty wars as I do, not everyone has at least a glancing knowledge of the last 50 years of worth of coups in South America. If Pilger wanted to help people in the West peer behind the propaganda cloak, to make people think about role of United States in subverting democracy, then he will probably achieve that with this film. However, I am not sure The War On Democracy is going to reach out much beyond the usual ‘trendy, middle class left-wingers’.

As we left the bar and wandered down to the Wagamamas on the South Bank, three things echoed through my mind. First, the film’s tagline – ‘Never believe anything until it is officially denied’ – was something I wish I had thought of for Secrets & Lies. Second, Pilger had wasted a massive opportunity with Hunt as it was one of his last ever interviews (he did not even mention Hunt’s possible role in killing JFK). Thirdly, it is a good thing to see your heroes in the type of shambolic and bumbling light you know shines on you all of the time. After tonight, I can now at least allow myself the possibility I handle a microphone better than one of journalism’s all-time greats.