Pilger

"In the arts, hostility to political truth-telling is an article of bourgeois faith. 'Picasso’s red period,' says an Observer headline, 'and why politics don’t make good art.'  Consider this in a newspaper that promoted the bloodbath in Iraq as a liberal crusade. Picasso’s lifelong opposition to fascism is a footnote, just as Orwell’s radicalism has faded from the prize that appropriated his name.

"A few years ago, Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at Manchester University, reckoned that “for the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life”. No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron damns the corruption of the ruling class, no Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin reveal the moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw have no equivalents today. Harold Pinter was the last to raise his voice. Among the insistent voices of consumer- feminism, none echoes Virginia Woolf, who described 'the arts of dominating other people … of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital'”.

The indomitable John Pilger telling it like it is.

However, in defense of talented but unknown and struggling artists everywhere--and every culture has them--who may indeed possess radical-humanistic worldviews that attack the status quo and corrupt power--it is not true that they do not exist.  Like the poor, because they are often one and the same, they simply have nothing to offer the stakeholders.  All they lack is eminence.  But that is a deliberate and planned construct of obliterating power.


TS