by Peter Millar
Orwell may not have got it exactly right – the power blocs of today may not be absolutely identical in number or geography – but he came a lot closer than is comfortable. His concept of Britain redesignated ‘Airstrip One’, an unsinkable aircraft carrier and unquestioning ally of an American-based power bloc, appeared horribly near the knuckle during the uncomfortable unequal alliance entered into by former prime minister Tony Blair with US president George Bush. For decades we were told that the Cold War was a standoff that threatened humanity, that the clock stood at five minutes to midnight. Life seemed perpetually under threat. Having grown up in Northern Ireland and used to the perennial IRA threat, to being forever on the lookout for suspect packages, to being searched going into shops, the respite after the Good Friday agreement seemed wonderful. Yet no sooner had both decades-old threats been lifted than along came the ‘clash of civilisations’ and the ‘war on terror’ to take their place. Our politicians abhor a vacuum of terror. A climate of fear gives them a greater mandate over the lives of their citizens.
What could be more Orwellian an example of doublethink and newspeak than the daily announcement on the London Underground that it is ‘important to be watchful at all times during this period of heightened security’? What they mean is ‘heightened insecurity’, but to say so would be to reduce the impression that ‘they’ are in control, especially when – as the shooting of innocent Brazilian electrician Jean-Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Tube station showed – they often are not. At the very least, ‘they’ are not as in control as they would like to be. But living as we do in a nation-state with more security cameras per head of population than any other on earth (London alone has more than many whole countries) – compare any German, or even Russian, airport; their experience of Big Brother is too recent – the ‘security situation’ is a convenient excuse for almost every organ of government, from Whitehall to your local council refuse collection department, to ‘collect evidence’ about ‘miscreant behaviour’. To those who say ‘if you have done nothing, you have nothing to fear’, I would ask only who defines ‘nothing’, and how do you know when – or why – that definition may change?
I am not saying there are no terrorists or no threat. The attacks on New York and the London Underground proved that. What lacks proof is that the risks always inherent in a free society justify curtailing that freedom: measures such as locking up citizens for three months without trial or even charge, investigating the contents of rubbish bins or keeping a database of every phone call made, email sent or website looked at, all of which have in recent years been proposed by the government of a country that likes to boast of its people’s freedom and democracy. Recent press exposés of the corruption endemic in the British parliament have only proved how important it is for the press to be free, for journalists to be able to report what they see, for the public to have the power to censure governments, rather than governments have the power to censor what the public may see, or do.
I would not have thought, in East Germany in 1989 as we rejoiced at the crumbling of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of corrupt governments who thought their power over their populations was total, backed up by policemen – secret or otherwise – who considered themselves unanswerable to the public, that twenty years later, Britain would be a country where politicians tried to use the law to prevent revelation of how they twisted the rules to their own profit, or where policemen would wear masks and illegally cover up their identifying numbers to lash out at legitimate demonstrators. No, we are not a worse country today than East Germany was before the Wall came down. But we are not always so very much better as we like to imagine.
The lesson of ‘1989 and all that’ is that history is not something that happens around us. It is something we are part of. For richer, for poorer, for better or worse.
French sector (abandoned piece of wall), 1981
View from the West near our flat, 1981
Der Führer(schein) – passing my driving test, 1981
Portrait of the artist as a young hack
Helga the honeypot
Erdmute the fusspot
Crosses (in West) commemorating those killed crossing the Wall at this spot
The Wall with contemporary English graffiti – not exactly political (Hitler’s bunker underneath the no-man’s-land)
Manne Schulz on his first trip West looks back towards home
Not quite the best hotel in town, 1981
Our back yard (entry to Volker’s flat), 1981
Dresden Frauenkirche ruins – scene of demo, February 1982
Swords to Ploughshares symbol of protest movement, 1982
‘You too could win this luxury car!’ Berlin, 1982
Getting the coal delivered Berlin, 1982
East German guards in the ‘death strip’ (taken from the West), 1981
Keeping an eye out for his fellow citizens (death strip), 1981
Mayday 1984 in Red Square 1989
MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY Big Brother is watching you! Moscow, 1984
Changing the Guard, 1987
Manne and Hannelore at Fasching (carnival) party in Metzer Eck
Tired and emotional on ‘lovely Rita’s’ leather sofa. Sign says: out of order
Metzer Eck: Alex at the bar, your correspondent on the wrong side of it
With the Bear (Uwe) German Unification Day, October 3rd, 1990
Knocking down the walls (Jackie, with Oscar, 2, and Patrick, 5, one week after the Fall of the Wall, 1989)
I spy with my little eye. The next generation finds the cracks in communism
1989 Leipzig protesters on steps of Stasi offices!
Protesters march in Leipzig, September 1989
‘Free Elections – Unified Germany’ Berlin, 1990: The move towards unity!
On the frontier (far West Berlin), 1981
Abandoned watchtower, 1990
Wall, what wall? On the outskirts of West Berlin, 1990
About the Author
PETER MILLAR is a British journalist, critic and author, named Foreign Correspondent of the Year 1989 for his reporting of the later days of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall for The Sunday Times. He is the author of All Gone to Look for America, and the translator of several German-language books into English including the best-selling White Masai by Corinne Hofmann, and Deal With the Devil by Martin Suter.
Copyright
First published in 2009
by Arcadia Books Books, 15-16 Nassau Street, London, W1W 7AB
This ebook edition first published in 2011
All rights reserved
© Peter Millar, 2009
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ISBN 978–1–908129–11–6