NEVER FORGET, NEVER LOOK AWAY
Why creativity must engage with the harsh realities of our cruel world.
I am not made happy about what I know of history. I am not satisfied about what I have been able to contribute to the limited dialogue attempting to bring about consciousness regarding this awful world the Neoliberal establishment has created over the last 42 years. I am appalled by the so-called pushback from the left, with their inability to take principled positions and to transform them into a populist politics that most people could embrace.
John McWhorter, associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University, said that perhaps only 1 in 20 people are progressives, concerned with power differentials between groups and classes. He describes how passive intellectual mechanisms undermine peoples need for truth, freedom and action. Passivity, he said, is built into the deep structure of the intellectual messages of the (Neoliberal) status quo and its cultural messaging.
There are two commanding elements of this. The first is that what we now have and live within is presented as the only choice, so resistance is futile. Second is that to resist, to object, is to self-immolate one’s reputation, one’s future prospects and security; this is a mild form of Stalinist control which now dominates Anglo-American relations between private citizens and their associates, their bosses and with the state and its bureaucracies.
There are axioms on the right and tendencies on the left for the need in a ‘rational’ society towards oneness, sameness and authoritarianism. Restrictive manners, political correctness and self-preoccupation are each a consequence of these processes. A part of this is seen in the delivery of the news and the popular culture where those three tendencies are continually pounded into us as they implant a uniformity of thought, ideas and attitudes. This is why the media’s expression of elections is not covered, argued, fought on the basis of differing ideas but on tittle-tattle. This is why one rarely hears real arguments in long form about policy and power, fairness and democracy, because the very life blood of democracy: a plurality of ideas in a marketplace of thoughts is almost totally suppressed.
When we look closely at the beliefs of the Democrats in the US and the Labour party in the UK, we can understand that whilst some of the politicians may be socially liberal, their economic beliefs and cultural outlook is often identical to the Neoliberal belief in an unregulated ‘free market’ with the underlying acceptance that endless exploitation of other’s lives and labour and of the earth’s resources is acceptable if not to say, ideal. For me, this is where the line in the sand is: between those who accept the ‘rational’ dominance of these modes of exploitation, and those who seek to create the wellbeing, education, cultural engagement and democratic participation of everyone in the governance of their own lives and in caring for the earth.
Given all the above, how does a lower middle-class kid from the American Midwest, coming from a culturally devoid, a-political ‘keep-your-head-down and mouth shut’ home, wind up in perpetual opposition? Two ways. The first is that my generation was taught to develop critical thinking while at the same time were indoctrinated in the patriotic notions that Americans were the good guys, the white hats who won World War 2, who were trying to civilise the unruly and threatening world of Communism, and to make the world safe for democracy. They taught us that we were for equality, justice, peace and opportunity. But, by the time we reached the age of 15 or 16 many of us looked around and said, “hey, wait a minute, why are black Americans not allowed to vote, why are they treated so badly and why are we killing apparently innocent peasants somewhere across the world from us?” They made a big mistake in teaching us to think and to care.
Hence the picture above and the following story.
In the winter 1969 – 70, I lived for 6 months in Ibiza, then an impoverished Spanish island in the Mediterranean, which, unknown to me before I arrived, was also Franco’s last remaining open prison. There I met (mostly) men who had put up the final resistance to defend the Republic against the fascists in 1939. One day I exited a little bar at the top of the town near the church. One of the old men saw me, took me by my arm and led me to an 8 foot high wall down from the church. After 35 years, it was still riddled with bullet holes. He explained to me that just before the end of the civil war this was where his friends and family, including their children, were lined up and assassinated by local Franco supporters.
When all the killings of the day were finished, the priests streamed out of the church and helped the fascists throw the bodies over a lower part of the wall, where they tumbled down the cliffs to the small beach below. The priests insisted that the bodies stayed there, unburied, picked at by the insects, birds, dogs and fishes, because, as communists and anti-Christs, they had no right of burial in sanctified soil.
The next day I found a path down to the beach and sat amongst the ghosts, photographing. Perhaps this and other photographs I’ve made are only conversations with myself, but they have been conversations that affirm for me people’s tragic sacrifices for freedom may live on in some of us and that this little essay is a gesture of sharing those lost dreams with you, the reader.