I wonder if Peter Hitchens of the Mail on Sunday considers it a liberal plot that the Polish film Katyn (2007) has not yet received the level of attention gained by Ashes and Diamonds (1958)? Hitchens tends to elide the whole liberal to left spectrum, the earlier film was made under Communism, so it is not complete facetiousness to put across this suggestion.
The two war films share a director in Andrzej Wajda, but the perpetrators and victims of military action are reversed. Katyn details the massacre of 22,000 Poles by Soviet troops in 1940, while Ashes and Diamonds concerns the assassination of a Communist in 1945. Hitchens came close to suggesting something sinister in the delayed UK release of Katyn when he first mentioned it last January, though Wajda’s eminence would make its eventual distribution in the UK very likely, and the general release of foreign language films often takes time. Anything to fill space in suggesting something dubious perhaps or maybe Hitchens was pulling a conscious fast one. Alas, a tabloid journalist like Hitchens can safely assume his readers will be unfamiliar with the name of Andrzej Wajda.
Hitchens two references to Katyn have been in passing, but it is remarkable the film is referred to at all in the Mail on Sunday; it is unlikely to appeal to “middle England.” When there is a need to maximise newspaper circulation or the number of viewers in order to maintain profits, the newspaper industry is in decline and satellite stations are ever increasing in number, pluralism in content is likely to be an exception, difference cannot be communicated or known about.
A comparison of the delay between the domestic premiere and its release outside Poland of Katyn with Ashes and Diamonds though, does not suggest the validity of a putative Hitchens’ conspiracy theory. More seriously, the attack by Paul Dacre, editor-in-chief of the two Mail titles, on the "metropolitan" values of the London media in his Cudlipp lecture in January 2007 was also an attack on the more internationalist culture Londoners enjoy, and Katyn is likely to be seen by a higher proportion of Londoners, still depressingly small, than the population of any other part of the UK. As Hitchens attacks any audio-visual technology later than the film projector, one wonders if he has realised the audience ("the liberal elite") who will see Katyn in his preferred context are the people he most detests?
For those unable to see Katyn in a cinema, the DVD player will be an enabler, but Hitchens has no time for information technology, except when he can promote his appearances on YouTube. As subtitled films, and he refers to them from time to time, are now virtually extinct on terrestrial television channels and scarce on satellite, as television has become a wasteland, the DVD is the main way for many to view something they hope will be of value to them. Years ago, foreign language films were not infrequently screened on BBC2 and Channel 4, and because those channels are "free at the point of use", Katyn would have received a much larger audience than it will today. Yet Hitchens regrets the introduction of television, and evidently thinks it should have been stopped (The Abolition of Britain, 2000 ed., p135-36). In fairness it is the habit of watching television which he finds objectionable, and the habit may legitimize programming of questionable value, but Hitchens sees the quality of programming as no defence. He wrote of Katyn on June 21,2009: “if it is showing near you, I recommend you make the effort to see it”, but Hitchens can suggest no solution if it is not.
Hitchens, the devout anglican, shares the prejudices of his other ultimate boss, and the references to 'Cultural Marxism' in Dacre’s Cudlipp lecture might seem familiar enough to Hitchens’ critical readers to ponder whether he had a hand in it. The provincial populism associated with such Conservative ‘anti-elitists‘ as Dacre and Hitchens does not exactly encourage cultural internationalism, modern “little Englanders” can scarcely be expected to consider it desirable, but the anglocentrism of the liberal Mark Lawson at The Guardian is no better.
The rise of Hollywood relative to the cinema of the rest of the world is much commented upon, and the economic liberalism which has allowed it to do so is in conflict with other liberal values. If 'liberal' can be defined as the limitation of restraint, economic liberalism can become positively illiberal because it restricts people’s openness to new experiences. Of cause, the inverse can also be true: following the liberation of France in 1944, the adolescents who later became the nouvelle vague film makers were inspired by the American movies they had been denied.
Blaming ‘the system’, or less crudely the ‘mainstream media’ for the lack of pluralism, a practice of the editors of the medialens website in their coverage of contemporary events, risks defending or advocating something much worse; they use the Manufacturing Consent model associated with Noam Chomsky which is notably singular, and medialens recent piece criticising the British media’s coverage of North Korea demonstrates its capacity for the perverse.
The objective observer might well conclude that what one defends might bear a remarkable similarity to the policies one would follow given the opportunity. For this reason, it is unsurprising the ‘socialism in one country’ form of economic autarky (leave the EU, antipathy to immigration) still advocated by Bob Crow of the RMT union, which turns into a particularly repugnant form of nationalism on the blog of Neil Clark, received such a derisive level of support in the European Parliamentary elections on June 4.
