The yawning gap between media portrayal and actual reality is best understood at the outset of war, that precise moment when they finally arrive to take what is yours. In the Third World, when you first experienced the Orwellian reality of your own country, what did you hear?
“Well. All the usual noises at first – unsubstantiated rumour and unsubstantiated media. The next noise was a bomb, the first of numerous air attack sorties from US planes based in our neighbouring country. Traitors. Oh well, here comes the Third World for us too.
“When I heard the bomb, it brought back to mind an Imperialist invasion strategy that I’d read many years ago. I didn’t read it in the newspaper – some street urchin was handing out leaflets. They say you can only see it coming once it’s happened to you.
“So, like that leaflet said, the next noise I would hear would be a Jet followed by the burning sound of napalm. The sound of distant ground bombings and the rolling of tanks. Closer and louder by degrees. Then shells and grenades. Closer now. Finally the missing sound – I could hear screaming. The door was kicked in. I didn’t hear the bullet.”
At the end of the Second World War, the United States didn’t come to liberate anyone from Hitler. They came to tell your government who the new boss was and to beware Satan.
Much the same group of fascists ran Europe after World War 2 as before, apart from the ones that the US exported to Latin America to train the Death Squads for the ongoing war against the local population over there. It was the anti-fascists who were rounded up by the British then the Americans and put in concentration camps. Post War elections in France and Italy were rigged by the Americans and undermined the sovereignty of these countries – the imposed rule from the Americans excluded not fascists from the elections but the anti-Nazi resistance, or communists as they prefer to call them.
Also Greece in 1947… “Fuck your parliament and your constitution. America is an elephant, Cyprus is a flea. Greece is a flea…” etc – Lyndon Johnson speaking to the Greek Foreign Minister who was trying to warn of the unpopularity of the imposed American decision to divide Cyprus between Greece and Turkey.
A similar conversation would have taken place in Dayton, Ohio with the decision to divide Bosnia. But in the true spirit of Orwell’s Double-Speak, it would be called “Mediation”.
The reality that we are presented with is a fiction – the bastard child of Public Relations and News Management. A lie dressed up as the truth.
And instead, Orwell writes a fiction – the truth dressed up as a lie.