Farage meets Assange in a shameless illiberal alliance
Nick Cohen
The
old rules about probity in public life are being shredded at both
ends of the political spectrum
Nigel
Farage’s social call on Julian Assange’s hideaway in the
Ecuadorian embassy was a clarifying moment that ought to have flooded
light on a dark world. To those who are willing to see, it revealed
that far left and far right are now one movement.
Saturday
11 March 2017 18.00 GMT
“All isms are
wasms,” quipped a Foreign Office wag as fascism and communism
united in the Hitler-Stalin pact. That wasn’t true in 1939, when
Berlin and Moscow found their shared belief in the “ism” of
totalitarianism was greater than the difference between left and
right, and isn’t true now. There is an “ism” – illiberalism –
an ideology that has been growing for years. Do not underestimate its
force. Illiberals now control the White House and the Kremlin. You
can track their influence in the Brexit right’s contempt for
education and expertise and the Labour left’s alliances with the
counter-Enlightenment.
The old division
between left and right makes as little sense now as it did in 1939.
To realise its futility consider that in conventional terms Farage is
a politician who manoeuvres in the grey zone before the right and the
far right. He exploits chauvinism and plays on racial fears but is
always careful not to incite violence directly. Assange is a man of
what I once called the Chomskyan left and what modern critics call
the regressive left. He is against the west, often for good reasons.
Like so many of his kind, however, he will then ally with any force,
however reactionary, which opposes the west as well.
The supposed
political differences between the closet racist and alleged rapist in
no way prevented them becoming chums. Why would they? Farage is an
inspiration to and friend of Donald Trump. He admires Putin’s
contempt for human rights and his hatred of the EU. If Wikileaks were
dedicated to exposing injustice wherever it occurred, I would have no
difficulties with it. But in characteristic regressive style Assange
provides support services to the gangster capitalists of the new
Russian empire. He proved his loyalty when he published hacked emails
from the Clinton campaign, thus helping Putin and Farage’s
preferred candidate win the US presidency.
Extremes merge. Red
bleeds into black. Everywhere, the institutions of liberal society
are denounced as a lying conspiracy, the better for illiberal
movements to propagandise their own vast lies.
You catch the
futility of the old labels if you can manage to sit through All
Governments Lie , which had its London premiere last week. It is an
unintentionally fascinating piece of propaganda because any one of at
least three dictatorial or otherwise illiberal movements might have
made it. The camera pans over the offices of the New York Times, CNN
and the Washington Post, making sure that the viewer knows that
liberal organisations rather than Fox News or Breitbart are the
liars’ accomplices. The work of a Donald Trump supporter, perhaps,
determined to expose liberal globalists? But then the producers try
to persuade the audience that there is a monolith called “the
media”. This idea made little sense in the 20th century, for what
did journalists at the New Yorker or Financial Times have in common
with journalists on the National Enquirer or Sun? Nothing that anyone
could see. It is a blatant falsehood now that the web allows billions
to produce their own media.
Nevertheless, the
fantasy of “the media” is popular with Russian propagandists.
They want to say that the “Russophobic” and monolithic western
media are biased against them because they hate Russians, rather than
because of the policies and practices of the Putin tsarocracy.
“News outlets are
more propagandistic than journalistic,” a lugubrious voice
explains, before the camera cuts to a distinguished-looking gentleman
who opines that the elite in Britain and the US maintain power by
controlling “attitudes and opinions”. The distinguished-looking
gentleman is Noam Chomsky expounding on an old theme: his propaganda
model of journalism. Rather than looking at why revolutionary
socialism failed, Chomsky and his many adherents on the defeated
radical left say the masses are brainwashed into voting against their
interests by journalists, who are under the control of rich
proprietors and advertisers.
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All journalists,
that is. Not this or that news organisation but the media as a malign
totality. I have many objections to the view that democratic consent
is “manufactured”. The strongest was provided by the supposedly
brainwashed US electorate last November. Trump received just two
endorsements from the editorial boards of America’s 100 largest
newspapers. He still won. Needless to add, Chomsky has now joined
Assange, Farage and Trump’s march on Moscow and makes a mockery of
his supposed opposition to propaganda by appearing on Putin’s
propaganda networks.
Trump’s victory
has not only disproved the conspiracy theories of the defeated of the
20th century, it has shown how useful they can be to victors of the
21st. Putin and Trump want to cast themselves as victims, the better
to justify their aggression. The fantasy of a monolithic media
manufacturing falsehoods serves a dual purpose: it blackens truthful
accounts of their crimes and corruptions and justifies their lies.
Supporters who are primed to believe fact-checking is an illusion and
all objective evidence is contaminated will happily believe that
Russian-backed rebels in Ukraine did not shoot down a Malaysian jet
or that Obama ordered taps on Trump’s phone.
If I had been
writing a year ago, I would have concluded with wet words on the need
for liberal societies to examine their faults. We must, I would have
said with a pious air, understand why we have gone so badly wrong
that men like these can come to power. And of course we should.
But concerned
platitudes about the need to redress liberal failures miss that
Putin, Trump, Farage, Assange and their many imitators are not always
brainwashing their followers in a Chomskyan fashion. Their admirers
positively welcome their tearing up of the old rules on honesty in
public discourse, their contempt for facts, for human rights, for
foreigners and all others who can be defamed by a demagogue on the
make. They want a strongman who can pummel his enemies. They are
entertained by his brags and impressed by how well he cheats. Many of
the men among them revel in a leader who can boast about grabbing
pussy or will pass a law allowing them to beat their wives. Many of
the women want a real man in charge.
As I keep saying,
the problem is not the liars, it is the millions who want to be lied
to.
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