As the
Socialist Standard
went to press, it was confirmed that the two bodies found in a Suffolk field
on the weekend of 17 August were those of the missing ten-year-olds Holly Wells
and Jessica Chapman. If this was a normal newspaper or journal, you would now
expect us to condemn the outrage, and describe in emotive language how sickened
we feel about the death of two innocent children; children who might so easily
have been our own. We might even pass judgment on the murderer/s: surely evil
bastards, for whom a painful death would be far too kind and humane a
punishment. We would, in conclusion, denounce the murders as a crime against
humanity, and demand that something be done.
But as the antidote to the capitalist press, we don’t need to state piously
what is obvious to absolutely everyone who has even a shred of human feeling
left in their bodies. Nor do we need to pretend to have all the answers when no
one yet even knows exactly what happened, and therefore what the questions
raised actually are. What we can do is say how sickened we feel, not just by
their deaths, but by the conditions in which their deaths occurred – the
barbaric and violent society we analyse in these pages every month – and the
way in which the deaths were covered by the media.
Because the deaths weren’t all bad news. For newspaper editors and their
proprietors, for example, they were a godsend. Against the background of the
economic crisis where they have been losing advertising revenue, and in the
midst of their silly season, here at last was a paper-selling story to fill
those pages. And pages and pages. As an added bonus, it was a story that had
all the ingredients of a good soap opera. They were just waiting for Morse or
Inspector Jack Frost to arrive and clean up the loose ends. Through their
repetition of stereotyped plots (the tearful press conference, going live to a
reporter standing outside a church where prayers were being said for the
families, etc) and its characterisation of villains and victims, the media
could organise mass sympathies. It was just like when Diana died – or when
Deirdre from Coronation Street was sent to prison.
But the circus was not just for fun and for profit. It served a useful
propaganda function too. It helped to work up scapegoats for the fear and
anxiety that is part of everyday life for the working class and to make us all
paranoid and suspicious of each other. It helped, in other words, to justify
those same newspapers’ previously stated attitudes on how to deal with child
abuse and crime in general, and to exploit our emotions and fears for their own
ends. In the two weeks that the media were devoting page after page to what we
should think and how we should feel about this individual tragedy, 40,000
children died of diarrhoea for want of clean water. Add to that those, child or
adult, who have died of starvation, say, or in capitalism’s wars, and we can
begin to put the media’s concern for children in some sort of perspective.
The tabloid and so-called quality press linked hands to weep their crocodile
tears, and offered their analysis and opinion, but this amounted to nothing but
an apologia for the murders. After all, they are constantly telling us that
brutality and violence are an intrinsic part of the human condition and that
there is nothing to be done but more of the same (more prison, more punishment,
more death, more violence). Their concern and their eulogies are not touching
but revolting. They are not the expression of genuine human warmth and concern,
but commodities to be sold for the profit of parasites. As scientific Marxists,
we offer only this brief outline of our views for the simple reason that no one
yet knows what happened beyond the vaguest details. Most people, of course,
from the man on the Clapham omnibus to the hacks of the bourgeois press are
already experts on the matter. It should therefore come as no surprise that
these commentators, for all their froth and anger, have nothing to offer but
their pious hopes, prayers and pathetic demands for a bit more legislation
here, a bit more violence there.
The hope is gone. Now anger wells in its place, said the
Observer
. A similar sentiment was to be found in most of the papers on the weekend that
those bodies were found. Actually, we hope that anger does surge in its place.
But that anger must be directed where it belongs: against our exploiters, and
those who cheat us of the truth with their propaganda lie machine. What
outrages us as socialists is the systemic whole of barbarity, of one kind or
another, are but an integral part. Others may rightly be angered by these
individual acts of murder but, stripped of a proper grasp of their real
context, they are left, with former prime minister John Major, condemning a
little more and understanding a little less.
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