Facts are Subversive

Political Writing from a Decade without a Name

Timothy Garton Ash

• Éditeur: Atlantic Books
• Année: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857899101
• Sujet: Histoire
• Sous-sujet: Histoire du monde

For more than thirty years, Timothy Garton Ash has traveled among truth tellers and political charlatans to record, with scalpel-sharp precision, what he has found. Facts are Subversive, which collects his writings since the millennium, addresses some of the crucial questions of our time: what happens to people who have endured long dictatorships when they try to found a democratic state? How can freedom from tyranny be won? How are free expression, equality before the law and equal rights for men and women sustained in a society of different faiths and ethnicities?

This is history of the present on a scale by turns panoramic and human: urgent, exhilarating and necessary.

Contents

Map

Preface

1. Velvet Revolutions, continued . . .

The Strange Toppling of Slobodan Milošević

‘The country summoned me’

Orange Revolution in Ukraine

The Revolution That Wasn’t

1968 and 1989

2. Europe and Other Headaches

Ghosts in the Machine

Is Britain European?

Are There Moral Foundations of European Power?

The Twins’ New Poland

Exchange of Empires

Why Britain is in Europe

Europe’s New Story

National Anthems

‘O Chink, where is thy Wall?’

The Perfect EU Member

3. Islam, Terror and Freedom

Is There a Good Terrorist?

La Alhambra

Islam in Europe

The Invisible Front Line

Against Taboos

Respect?

Secularism or Atheism?

No Ifs and No Buts

4. USA! USA!

Mr President

9/11

Anti-Europeanism in America

In Defence of the Fence

Zorba the Bush

The World’s Election

Warsaw, Missouri

Dancing with History

Liberalism

5. Beyond the West

Beauty and the Beast in Burma

Soldiers of the Hidden Imam

East Meets West

The Brotherhood against Pharaoh

Cities of No God

Beyond Race

6. Writers and Facts

The Brown Grass of Memory

The Stasi on Our Minds

Orwell in Our Time

Orwell’s List

Is ‘British Intellectual’ an Oxymoron?

‘Ich bin ein Berliner’

The Literature of Fact

7. Envoi

Elephant, Feet of Clay

Decivilization

The Mice in the Organ

Notes

Acknowledgements

Index

Preface

Facts are subversive. Subversive of the claims made by democratically elected leaders as well as dictators, by biographers and autobiographers, spies and heroes, torturers and post-modernists. Subversive of lies, half-truths, myths; of all those ‘easy speeches that comfort cruel men’.

If we had known the facts about Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, or merely how thin the intelligence on them was, the British Parliament might not have voted to go to war in Iraq. Even the United States might have hesitated. The history of this decade could have been different. According to the official record of a top-level meeting with the prime minister at 10 Downing Street on 23 July 2002, the head of Britain’s secret intelligence service, identified only by his traditional moniker ‘C’, summarized ‘his recent talks in Washington’ thus: ‘Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.’ The facts were being fixed.

The first job of the historian and of the journalist is to find facts. Not the only job, perhaps not the most important, but the first. Facts are the cobblestones from which we build roads of analysis, mosaic tiles that we fit together to compose pictures of past and present. There will be disagreement about where the road leads and what reality or truth is revealed by the mosaic picture. The facts themselves must be checked against all the available evidence. But some are round and hard – and the most powerful leaders in the world can trip over them. So can writers, dissidents and saints.

There have been worse times for facts. In the 1930s, faced with a massive totalitarian apparatus of organized lying, an individual German or Russian had fewer alternative sources of information than today’s Chinese or Iranian, with access to a computer and mobile phone. Farther back, even bigger lies were told and apparently believed. After the death in 1651 of the founding spiritual-political leader of Bhutan, his ministers pretended for no less than fifty-four years that the great Shabdrung was still alive, though on a silent retreat, and went on issuing orders in his name.

In our time, the sources of fact-fixing are mainly to be found at the frontier between politics and the media. Politicians have developed increasingly sophisticated methods to impose a dominant narrative through the media. In the work of spinmasters in London and Washington, and even more in that of Russia’s ‘political technologists’, the line between reality and virtual reality is systematically blurred. If enough of the people believe it enough of the time, you will stay in power. What else matters?

Simultaneously, the media are being transformed by new technologies of information and communications, and their commercial consequences. I work both in universities and in newspapers. In ten years’ time, universities will still be universities. Who knows what newspapers will be? For fact-seekers, this brings both risks and opportunities.

‘Comment is free, but facts are sacred’ is the most famous line of a legendary Guardian editor, C. P. Scott. In the news business today, that is varied to ‘Comment is free, but facts are expensive’. As the economics of newsgathering change, new revenue models are found for many areas of journalism – sports, business, entertainment, special interests of all kinds – but editors are still trying to work out how to sustain the expensive business of reporting foreign news and doing serious investigative journalism. In the meantime, the foreign bureaus of well-known newspapers are closing like office lights being switched off on a janitor’s night round.

On the bright side, video cameras, satellite as well as mobile phones, voice recorders and document scanners, combined with the technical ease of uploading their output to the world wide web, create new possibilities for recording, sharing and debating current history – not to mention archiving it for posterity. Imagine that we had digital video footage of the Battle of Austerlitz; a YouTube clip of Charles I being beheaded outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall (‘he nothing common did or mean / upon that memorable scene’ ... or did he?); mobile phone snaps of Abraham Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address; and, best of all, an audiovisual sampler of the lives of those so-called ‘ordinary’ people that history so often forgets. (Still almost entirely lost to history is the smell of different places and times, although that is a salient part of the experience when you are there.)

In Burma, one of the most closed and repressive states on earth, the peaceful protests of 2007, led by Buddhist monks, were revealed to the world through photos taken on mobile phones, texted to friends and uploaded to the web. American politicians can no longer get away with saying outrageous things on remote campaign platforms. As the Republican senator George Allen found to his cost, a single video clip posted on YouTube may terminate your presidential aspirations. (The clip showed him dismissing a coloured activist from a rival party as a ‘macacca’, hence the phrase ‘macacca moment’.) In the past, it took decades, if not centuries, before secret documents were revealed. Today, many can be found in facsimile on the world wide web within days, along with court and parliamentary hearings, transcripts of witness testimony, the original police report on the arrest of a drunken Mel Gibson, with the actor’s anti-semitic outburst documented in a Californian policeman’s laboured hand – and millions more.

Quantity is not always matched by quality. Behind the recording apparatus there is still an individual human being, pointing it this way or that. A camera’s viewpoint also expresses a point of view. Visual lying has become child’s play, now that any digital photo can be falsified at the tap of a keyboard, with a refinement of which Stalinist airbrushers could only dream. As we trawl the web, we have to be careful that what looks like a fact does not turn out to be a factoid. Distinguishing fact from factoid becomes more difficult when – as those foreign bureaus close down – you don’t have a trained reporter on the spot, checking out the story by well-tried methods. Yet, taken all in all, these are promising times for capturing the history of the present.

‘History of the present’ is a term coined by George Kennan to describe the mongrel craft that I have practised for thirty years, combining scholarship and journalism. Thus, for example, producing the essays in analytical reportage that form a significant part of this book is typically a three-stage process. In the initial research stage, I draw on the resources of two wonderful universities, Oxford and Stanford: their extraordinary libraries, specialists in every field, and students from every corner of the globe. So before I go anywhere, I have a sheaf of notes, annotated materials and introductions.

In a second stage, I travel to the place I wish to write about, be it Iran under the ayatollahs, Burma to meet Aung San Suu Kyi, Macedonia on the brink of civil war, Serbia for the fall of Slobodan Milošević, Ukraine during the Orange Revolution, or the breakaway para-state of Transnistria. For all the new technologies of record, there is still nothing to compare with being there. Usually I give a lecture or two, and learn from meetings with academic colleagues and students, but for much of the time I work very much like a reporter, observing and talking to all kinds of people from early morning to late at night. ‘Reporter’, sometimes deemed to be the lowest form of journalistic life, seems to me in truth the highest. It is a badge I would wear with pride.

To be there – in the very place, at the very time, with your notebook open – is an unattainable dream for most historians. If only the historian could be a reporter from the distant past. Imagine being able to see, hear, touch and smell things as they were in Paris in July 1789. If I have an advantage over the regular newspaper correspondents, whose work I greatly admire, it is that I may have more time to gather evidence on just one story or question. (Long-form magazine writers enjoy the same luxury.) In Serbia, for example, I was able to cross-examine numerous witnesses of the fall of Milošević, starting within a few hours of the denouement. During the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, I was a witness to the drama as it unfolded.

The final stage is reflection and writing, back in my Oxford or Stanford study: emotion recollected in tranquillity. I also discuss and refine my findings at the seminar table, and in exchanges with colleagues. Ideally, this whole process is iterative, with the cycle of research, reporting and reflection repeated several times. I have written more about this mongrel craft in the introduction to my last collection of essays, which was called History of the Present, and – in this volume – in an essay on ‘The Literature of Fact’.

Most of the longer pieces of analytical reportage that you find between these covers appeared first in the New York Review of Books, as did the review essays on writers such as Günter Grass, George Orwell and Isaiah Berlin. Several chapters began life as lectures, including my investigations of Britain’s convoluted relationship to Europe and of the (real or alleged) moral foundations of European power. Most of the shorter pieces were originally columns in the Guardian. I conceive these mini-essays as an English version of the journalistic genre known in central Europe as a feuilleton: a discursive, personal exploration of a theme, often light-spirited and spun around a single detail, like the piece of grit that turns oyster to pearl. Or so the feuilletonist fondly hopes.

Many of my regular weekly commentaries in the Guardian, by contrast, look to the future, urging readers, governments or international organizations to do something, or, especially in the case of governments, not to do something bad or stupid that they are currently doing or proposing to do. ‘We must ...’ or ‘they must not ...’ cry these columns, usually to no effect. Such op-ed pieces have their place, but suffer from built-in obsolescence. They are not reprinted here. Prediction and prescription are both recipes for the dustbin. Description and analysis may last a little longer.

Throughout, I argue from and for a position that I believe can accurately be described as liberal. Particularly in the United States, what is meant by that much abused word requires spelling out (see ‘Liberalism’). I write as a European who thinks that the European Union is the worst possible Europe – apart from all the other Europes that have been tried from time to time. And I write as an Englishman with a deep if often frustrated affection for our curious, mixed-up country, at once England and Britain.

The heart of my work remains in Europe. In this decade, however, I have gone beyond Europe to report from and analyse other parts of what we used to call the West, and especially the United States, where I now spend three months every year. And I have gone beyond the West, especially to some corners of what we too sweepingly call ‘Asia’ and ‘the Muslim world’. (The endpaper map plots essays on to places, taking some artistic licence around the edges.)

The bigg...