WAR’S NOT TO LIKE?

Browsing through the pages of a journal, ‘learned’ of course, I came across the well known phrase or saying ‘The first casualty of war is truth’.

Apparently there is even a war of sorts surrounding the question of who first used this phrase, my favourite being Aeschylus,an ancient Greek dramatist, but this only because he has a cooler name that Hiram Johnson, the American contender, not to mention that the term ‘to Johnson’, will shortly become a synonym for ‘to tell a lie’.

Reading it made me – more or less immediately - ask myself what war is it that we are fighting now? After all, the truth is lying bloodied, battered and as good as expired in the mire of our press, radio, television and the House of Commons right now implying that we are in the throes of a major conflict.

True, there are and have been more or less continuous actual wars since the end of WW2. Not that we would know too much about this, especially when our own country is supplying the weapons and support that allows the indiscriminate killing of children and other civilians, even breaking the law to do so.

This form of ‘if we don’t report it, it doesn’t exist’ non-journalism plays a big part in the chronic death of truth and applies across the board from killing to healthcare and the NHS, anything that looks bad for Government and Chums.

But, it’s clearly not a military war for us – unless one breaks out near Brixham soon – or a 1950s to 1980s style cold war. Nor is it the run of the mill inter-party wrangling of political parties. (This barely exists these days anyway with the current absence of an official opposition, now with a paid up member of the ‘Chums’ bit of Government and Chums as their leader.)

Since a reasonable argument can be made that Aeschylus first used the phrase about 2500 years ago, its seems safe to say that the truth has been in danger of demise for a very long time, almost to the point that one wonders if it ever existed except in the form of the actual experiences of soldiers, slaves and all those unfortunate enough not to be rich and powerful. That is to say, for most of that 2500 years, those people with no voice, history has been written by, or for, kings and emperors not their serfs.

Every emperor and tyrant has had their equivalent of Robert Peston, Laura Kuenssberg and, especially, Rupert Murdoch providing their own brand versions of the BBC’s ‘Inform(tell you only what we want you to know), Educate(as long as it’s not anti-capitalist) and Entertain( soft porn or gossip) mission statement product.

The BBC's actual branded product is, of course, in a class of its own in terms of a deceit wolf in honest lamb’s clothing. None can match, amongst other things, its hypocrisy, bias hiding behind impartiality, former editors in the right wing press of flagship news programmes and Radio 4 documentaries providing a cover for (future) austerity. A commentary on this latest deception by design item is available.

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I thought that Tony Benn had summed up this situation, with special reference to the media rather more pithily than I have managed, when he said:

‘I don't think people realise how the establishment became established. They simply stole land and property from the poor, surrounded themselves with weak minded sycophants for protection, gave themselves titles and have been wielding power ever since.’

Even here there is doubt! I have discovered that he only ‘reportedly’ said or wrote this and they may not be his words at all. In this case, the evident truth of the statement overrides the uncertainty of its origin.

So, there are – at least - two wars that have probably not ceased since humans formed some sort of society and they are, that suitably old fashioned that’s rightly still fashiononable, ‘leftie’ idea of a ‘class’ war and a war against truth itself and those that try to find it.

Bob, Your Uncle