Xmas bombardment

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The cominercial ideology of Xmas maintains it firmiy in a historical vacuum. According to this, the only event ever to occur at Xmas took place almost 2,000 years ago in Palestine.

Since then, the date has, of course, become overlaid with a variety of other profoundly unhistorical details-a Merrie Englande world of mufflers; post-horns, stagecoaches etc., and always, always the snows of yesteryear conferring purity to this illusory past: that of a world abstracted from, for example, the current daily round of public expenditure cuts, massive steel closures, a threatened strike, letter bomb campaigns, and other troublesome evidence that all is not right on earth, that capitalism has not met all man's worldly needs.

•In the absence of newspapers over the actual Xmas period, it falls to television to become the major medium for maintaining and promulgating this annual deception, on the paternalistic assumption that mankind, (particularly at Xmas) cannot bear too much reality.

This can be seen most clearly, perhaps, in the proliferation of the so-called "variety" programme or Xmas "spectacular", whether home-grown or imported from America.

By Dun The viewer can presumably be imagined as sitting through fairly briet-or "fast-moving"routines in a passive optimism that continually defers the decision to switch off or over, in case a more riveting one should happen to succeed it.

Kings & Queens

Another "seasonal" feature, is an almost total absence from the schedules of any programmes of serious TV journalism or of a documentary nature-as if current political and social problems had agreed conveniently to suspend themselves for the duration of the holiday.

What is noticeable, however, is that hand-in-hand with this tacit agreement to suspend contemporary history goes a compensatory emphasis on past history (often British) which is very much a matter of kings and queens and other paragons rather than of classes and relations of production.

Thus in Xmas week, on BBC TV alone, viewers could watch Mary Queen of Scots, Henry VIl! and his Six Wives and A Man for All Seasons presented as "major features"

Given this project, apparent anachronisms such as the Queen's "informal" Xmas day speech (from her "front room" to yours) and the persistent and irrelevant, but almost daily, can Bush incursion into the "national": news by various members of the Royal Family, can be put into a proper perspective: the implication is, throughout, that these people are "just like us" , their audience (and subjects) and that all is basically still right in a world of given and preordained normality.

Let по. one imagine, however, that the Royal Family are '''above politics" • as is usually claimed on their behalf: their very existence embodies key aspects of ideology central to the stable continuity of the the media-such as the Duke of Edinburgh's attack on social welfare "spongers" or union militanc,, and Prince Charles's televised speech against the IRA at Mountbatten's memorial service, are critterred with a Warfare What is equally noticeable about the television fare allotted to us for Xmas this year, however, is that despite the usual emphasis on "peace" and "goodwill" endemic and epidemic at such a time, war and warfare themselves are not, apparently, forbidden subjects.

Thus, in this same Xmas week, on BBC again, we had films such as Bridge On The River Kwai, Where Eagles Dare, The Blue Max, Five Graves to Cairo, etc.

Naturally, the programme planners yet again know. what they are doing in presenting this depoliticised "history" which projects war not as a struggle between conflicting imperialist and economic interests (in which individuals figure at all only in and because of their utter dispensability) but -to abstract the key ingredients from such films-as a matter of individual "courage" "gallantry" "ingenuity" "nerve"

Wars closer to the current interests of British imperialism, on the other hand, for example Northern Ireland, are ruthlessly censored, as the Government banning of a recent BBC. TV documentary in which members of the IRA took part, sufficiently reveals.

The complicity of the TV heads with the Government-or (what comes to the same thing in this case) with the Army of occupation-is in fact almost total, and this happens not only at Xmas.

One discovers on these various fronts the double-p: pronged but mutually supportive movement characteristic of official ideology: it works not only through the lies they actively tell us but also through the alternatives to it that they suppress.

£8 a week.

What percentage of i workforce is in the G&M?

About two-thirds.

Anne Noone, senior female steward: This question of our treatment by the dole is important. What they are really saying is "We'll give you social security if you give up your job" "Fight for your job and we'll starve you into submission"

FB: That's right, they are saying

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"DUSTRIAL NEMIS

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unequal society, and their occas- lonal. bursts"-always headlined by