Friday, August 24, 2018

The Truth Comes Out

24th August 2018

"In a time of universal deceit, " wrote George Orwell, "telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

I have changed my mind on the role of politics in literature, though it is a razor thin path to tread and the razor in question runs along the issue of propaganda. The truth has to be spoken not by design but because it comes gushing out of the collective consciousness. The artist is the valve.

It is precisely the pressure-cooker times in which we live that has shifted my opinion on this. As I watch Donald Trump try to shut down the avenues of free speech, as I bear witness to the lack of any independent voice in the Scottish newspapers and TV,  I see that it is up to the artists to take up the cause. They are the last hope in the face of universal deceit. Donald Trump recently tried to convince his base that they should rely on no news outlets but himself, that they should not believe what their eyes and ears are telling them; and Trump's right-hand man, Rudy Giuliani, tried to make the case this last week that the truth is not the truth.
It was a 1918 US senator who said famously that the first casualty of war is truth. These days, wars have gone cyber on us. They are the wars of hacking and misinformation.  Truth in the Trump era is already on the ground and gasping;  truth was put on hold, too, when British prime minister met with Sony CEO in the run-up to the Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014 to ask him not to run the series Outlander in Scotland until after  the referendum, even though it would be available everywhere else.


The good news is, that suppression only works for so long. As Shakespeare famously suggested, "The truth will out." Freud had a thing or two to say on this issue, too.
In eras when the truth has been successfully sat upon, when even the valves of art have been stopped, you eventually get revolution. So let's all be revolutionaries. In this era of untruth, let us speak it. As writers and visual and vocal artists, let us not shirk in our responsibility to what is so.

No comments:

Post a Comment