Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
W. H. Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"
The writer Arthur Koestler had a nose for trouble, a willingness to confront it, and an odd confidence in his own safety. In 1936, when a rebellion against the Republican goverment of Spain broke out, and frustrated in his attempts to learn exactly what was happening, he decided to go to Spain - not to the relative safety of the Republican-held regions, as many foreigners were doing, but to what was then the capitol of the rebellion in Seville. At the beginning of his book, A Spanish Testament, Koestler described the extraordinary atmosphere of July 1936. When the democratically-elected government in Spain began to move to the Left and enact reforms that threatened land ownership and the authority and freedoms enjoyed by the Roman Catholic church, an organized rebellion commited to toppling the government arose with General Francisco Franco as its leader and military and material support from fascist Germany and Italy. But coherent news from Spain was either not forthcoming or was incomplete. Koestler explains:
On July 18th, 1936, when the Franco revolt broke out, it looked at first as though the revolt had proved abortive and that the Government was master of the situation throughout Spain. Then the news grew more and more alarming. By the end of a week it was clear that there was to be a civil war of long duration, with possible European complications. We greedily devoured a preposterous number of newspapers ... The part played by the Press in the Spanish affair was from the outset a most peculiar one. The rebels refused to allow a single correspondent of any Left-wing or even liberal newspaper into their territory, while correspondents of liberal newspapers with pronouncedly Right-wing views were equally unwelcome on the Government side. Thus a state of affairs was rapidly created whereby, roughly speaking, the Right-wing newspapers had correspondents only ont he Franco side, and the Liberal and Left Press only on the Government side. The communiqués from the respective headquarters were grossly contradictory, and almost as great were the discrepancies between the telegrams sent by thec orrespondents on both sides, for whom a drastic censorship, furthermore, made it impossible to send out unbiased messages.
"The Spanish Civil War," Koestler concludes, "had, as it were, infected the Press of Europe ... In these circumstances, as a journalist of liberal convictions I was bound to be tempted by the idea of getting into rebel territory." So, with credentials supplied by a newspaper, Koestler embarked two days later from Belgium on a ship bound for Spain. He tried to infiltrate the rebel stronghold in Seville in order to get the scoop on their activities. He was informed on by a former German colleague who recognized him and he escaped, bringing with him proof that Mussollini and Hitler were supplying the rebels with arms and personnel.
We are not living in the 1930s, when there was nothing but newspapers and radio to disseminate information (or disinformation). Nor can we argue that every news service in America is either Left, Right or Center, as they were in Europe in the '30s. George Orwell told us that "history is written by the winners," simply because what happened in the Spanish civil war is still a subject of controversy because the Government version of events was supplanted by that of the fascist rebels. And as writers like Jorge Semprun, in his script for the beautiful Alain Resnais film La Guerre est finie, pointed out, the war was still being fought thirty years after it was officially over. In some ways, it is still being fought more than forty years after Franco's death because it is now a war for the truth.
Today, there is such a multitude of sources and media outlets, on television and online, that it is simply not possible to be completely ignorant. No one today would be in the same position that Arthur Koestler was in, trying so desperately to know what is happening in any particular place of conflict that the only way to find out is to go there himself. And yet, what is happening in the civil war in Syria is far from certain. Assad's greatest victory is outlasting our curiosity about his massacres of his own people. We are suffering from what is being called "conflict fatigue" - but it's really nothing more than the usual apathy.
An even worse fatigue is afflicting people today - "information fatigue." Then the problem isn't the medium, but the message. It is no longer an issue of how one is informed but by whom one is informed. Not only are we now supposed to be wary of everything our government tells us, but the political agenda of media outlets, with billionaire ownership, is putting whole swaths of the population deliberately in the dark and keeping them there. It is not the media's job to comfort us and tell us only what we want to hear - even if what we want to hear is lies. Last week, NBC reported the reaction of a woman who is an admitted Fox News viewer to the revelation that the Robert Mueller report contained information that implicated President Trump for obstruction of justice. “I was surprised to hear there was anything negative in the Mueller report at all about President Trump. I hadn’t heard that before," the woman told a reporter. "I’ve mainly listened to conservative news and I hadn’t heard anything negative about that report and President Trump has been exonerated.”(1)
While I watch CNN as my primary source of news, I also get news reports from Reuters, NPR, the BBC, and The Guardian - all liberal news sources ("liberal" in the broad sense used by Koestler, synonymous with "free"). My political leanings are Leftist, so my perspective on national news in the U.S. is, accordingly, Leftist. But the news itself is presented as politically neutral. Some people, particularly on the Right who insist there is a "liberal bias" in news reporting, will probably call this a naïve expectation. But if the mainstream media is Leftist, then so, I'm afraid, is American culture. It is Leftist because the prevailing cultural attitudes are progressive instead of reactionary. If pressed, most people will profess a belief that society can improve and is improving. The good society lies ahead of us, not behind us as reactionaries believe. We have not gone too far but not far enough.
But something akin to the political atmosphere of 1936 is upon us. The same polarization of viewpoints that Koestler encountered has been happening in the American Press for several years, and has accelerated since the election of Donald Trump in 2016. He went after support from a demographic group of Americans who felt ignored or overlooked and, because of his appeal to what most concerns them (whatever it is or the liberal media might think it is), they rallied behind him and keep on rallying, despite overwhelming evidence of his incompetence. He pulled off one of the biggest cons in history. The head of the Democatic National Committee announced last month that Fox News reporters will not be invited to upcoming debates. The 2020 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination will formally begin next February. Nine months later voters will go to the polling stations to vote for which version of history will be told. You don't need Arthur Koestler to tell you it's going to be messy.
(1) The full report is here.
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