Faction Storytelling Hour
Ordinary, predictable, tedious
What’s happening right now in Ottawa is that a group of people who are very transphobic have traveled by truck to the Canadian capital city for the purpose of stealing food from homeless people and being haters. I mean, obviously.
If the protest by the mean people has some other purpose or meaning, it’s very obscure — almost impossible to discern beneath the wafting clouds of transphobia and racist flag-flying activity. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation certainly can’t discern any of the underlying purpose, and simply reports that real Canadians, decent people, are tired of the Very Bad Thing that has no apparent meaning or direction, and just want it to stop being pointlessly bad:
So.
Traveling to Spain in 1936 to join the fight against fascism, the young writer Eric Blair — who wrote under a more-familiar pen name — was thrilled by the social world he discovered on the front lines. In the militia of the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), privates and generals received the same pay, and addressed one another as social equals. Blair had found the world without privilege or hierarchy that he dreamed of finding. Officers gave orders, but that was their tactical role as comrades in the struggle rather than a reflection of their status as superiors. You’ll be shocked to hear that this part didn’t last very long.
Blair also discovered another thing at the front: the reality of ideological schisms in the war against fascism. While Blair’s anti-Stalin communist social levelers held one portion of the line, anarchists held another part, and pro-Stalin political centralizers held another — all aligned with different labor organizations and political factions outside the military operation, an internal war of alphabet soup.
In the spring of 1937, Blair — let’s just go ahead and start calling him Orwell, ‘cause that’s what he did — traveled to Barcelona on leave, grateful for a chance to rest and get away from the war for a few days. It didn’t work. In the first days of May, PSUC-aligned police moved to seize the telephone exchange from the CNT-aligned anarchists who had taken control of it, and the resulting gunfight spread through the city. Rushing to the POUM offices, Orwell was handed a rifle, and was no longer on leave. In a famous passage, he spent several days on a rooftop with other POUM militiamen, calling out to another rooftop full of pro-PSUC armed police (“civil guards”), as all of them talked about being workers and brothers and anti-fascists and let’s not shoot each other — and as they all waited for the other side to change their minds about it and start shooting.
The alphabet-soupiness of the Spanish resistance to fascism, and so of the street fighting in Barcelona, is hard to exaggerate, and Orwell’s description of the battle is full of passages like this: “The Libertarian Youth was the youth league of the Anarchists, corresponding to the JSU of the PSUC, etc. The Friends of Durruti was a small organization within the FAI, and in general bitterly hostile to the POUM.” Got it?
After the street battles ended, Orwell picked up all of the newspapers to see what had happened. What he read in each party-aligned newspaper — brace yourself for this one, because it’ll blow your mind — corresponded to the political line of each party. He read in the pro-Stalin communist press that his anti-Stalin communist militia was secretly pro-fascist and had suddenly attacked the city’s decent anti-fascist communists to undermine the war against fascism. (Trostky and Hitler, sittin’ in a tree, k-i-ss-i-n-g!) Descriptions from journalists covering street fighting in Barcelona from their desks in London and Moscow and New York had, among examples of factual muddle, the faction that controlled the telephone exchange attacking the telephone exchange. Orwell, in the middle of the fighting, had discovered that his own communist militia, the POUM, had a poor stockpile of arms in Barcelona, amounting to a few-dozen rifles; in print, the POUM had poured into the streets with artillery and machine guns. You might as well speak German, you Nazi sons-of-bitches.
“It is impossible to read through the reports in the Communist press,” Orwell concluded, “without realizing that they are consciously aimed at a public ignorant of the facts and have no other purpose than to work up prejudice.” You probably just gasped out loud.
In short, nothing Orwell read in the newspapers had much to do with anything that, as a participant, he had seen happening. It was all perception-shaping and narrative-making, political performance dressed up in description’s borrowed clothing.
This is normal stuff. I’ve spent hundreds of hours reading early American newspapers in the archives, a thing that I’m willing to go on doing if anyone has some grant money laying around and feels like shipping it to my house. The Federalist newspapers of the early republic responded often and indignantly to the foul lies of the Jacobin den of vipers at the cross-town Democratic-Republican newspapers, while the Democratic-Republican newspapers boldly revealed the evil lies of the would-be Tory aristocrats at the Federalist newspapers, who all secretly wore powdered wigs while they sneered at the decent and respectable patriot-farmer, and can’t a man even by-God love his country anymore without being attacked by a filthy nest of pompous tea-sippers!?!?
The idea of the press as objective reporters of fact is a historically recent invention, and it’s — at best — paper thin in practice. We’re reverting to a factional press, dressed up as mainstream describers of truth. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is a Liberal Party newsletter, and is pretty nakedly so at this point.
Mercifully, factional narrative-making becomes harder in the Internet age, but don’t kid yourself. Ignore most of it. It’s shit. Maybe ignore the CBC the hardest.
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Love “Homage to Catalonia”! And yes, Orwell’s exposé of the fraudulent newspaper narratives was one of the most important lessons I took away from that brilliant work.