The Whole Hog: The Hot 900

Thanks to George Orwell, the year 1984 has a real cachet, so it was little surprise that – as it approached – lots of commentators and forecasters discussed how the world was shaping up to his vision and what it would all be like at the millennium.

It’s fair to say that they tended to foresee an increasingly ordered world – one that continued the perceived progress that had begun with the agricultural and industrial revolutions. Broadly speaking, they envisioned a better place, thanks largely to the progressive thrust of reason, technology, science and planning.
There was mention of nuclear fusion, flying cars, integrated computerised cities, robots and artificial intelligence, as well as strange new crops and fabrics, cancer cures and new forms of synthetic music. But, you know, nobody mentioned mobile phones, at least not as we know them. In fact, they didn’t really foresee the web or the digital world we now live within; nor did they envisage the advent of social media. And nobody properly foresaw either the modern cult of celebrity or the extraordinary levels of surveillance revealed by Wikileaks – both of which take our present world very close to Orwell’s own original dystopia.
It’s curious indeed just how little we did get right: nobody seriously predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall; nor even remotely hinted at the pandemic of jihadism; nor did anyone give much thought to the likelihood of the rampant culture of greed in financial institutions that led to the latest global financial crash.
Predicting the future is tricky. Looking back through 900 editions of Hot Press we can see that, as Burns put it, the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley. They always do.
But we have lived through interesting times. Who, after all, could have forecast planes flying into the Twin Towers or the scale of the tsunamis that have swept all in front of them?
Things ebb and flow: they get better, they get worse. Some parts of the world were no-go in the 1980s, like Peru during the Shining Path terror campaign, but are now open. Others, like northern Pakistan or the Middle East, where western tourists and visitors once travelled freely, are now largely off limits. Peace came to northern Ireland, to Lebanon, to Cambodia; and war came to the Balkans, to Ukraine, to the Arab Mediterranean countries, and to most of Africa…
There were giants among us. Some, like Nelson Mandela, proved to be truly great and remarkable people. His long walk to freedom was something Hot Press had campaigned for and supported, alongside the Irish Anti Apartheid Movement and as part of a much wider movement all over the civilised world. To be a living witness to his release, and to the end of the apartheid regime, when that day finally came, was truly a wonderful feeling. Sometimes the good guys do win – in the end…
In certain respects, the balance in world affairs has shifted for ‘people of colour’. But only so far. In Barack Obama we have had the first African-American president of USA, but – as has become clear over the past 12 months in particular – racism is still a huge factor in the way in which the law operates in the home of the brave.
Feminism has made remarkable strides in Ireland. We had two women presidents here in Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese. Back in 1977, who would have foreseen that? We are on a good run: the Áras is now graced by the presence of President Michael D Higgins – who of course was a Hot Press columnist back in 1984. But elsewhere, there were dangerous buffoons who claimed high office and hogged the headlines for all the wrong reasons: check Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, George W Bush in the US and lately Vladimir Putin in Russia. And there were out and out monsters, who clawed their way to global prominence like Pol Pot, Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic…
Indeed they’re far too numerous to try naming them all, outnumbering as they do those that we might class as giants. Which begs a different question about where we currently stand: are the monsters of ISIS that much worse than the various armies that caused such carnage in, say, Rwanda? Or the thugs that the Balkan war unleashed on the world? If nothing else, humanity’s capacity for evil deeds seems permanent…

There is, of course, a bigger question with which we will have to grapple, as a matter of urgency. And the answer, if indeed there is one, will decide the future of the earth itself. It is only over the past 37 years that we have begun to recognise the extent to which we have been playing Russian roulette – with the gun pointed at Mother Nature’s head.
Back in 1977, our understanding of the potential for the destruction of the planet was limited to a fear of nuclear power and the forces that it might unleash. On that score, the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 confirmed many people’s worst fears: its impact is still being deeply felt in Belarus.
Looking back over the intervening years, however, it has become increasingly clear that we are at the mercy of deep tectonic forces that we rarely see and little understand – but which have the power to overwhelm all our defences. Some are born of the earth, like the earthquakes that triggered the tsunami of 2004, which took hundreds of thousands of lives and swept away entire villages and towns; and likewise its successor that swept across Japan’s defences and flooded the Fukushima nuclear reactor with disastrous consequences. But natural threats also come from above, like the Chelyabinsk meteor, a fireball caused by a near-Earth asteroid entering Earth’s atmosphere over Russia in February 2013. If it had struck a city like Dublin, tens of thousands would have died.
The concept of climate change wasn’t yet on anyone’s radar in 1977. Now, it is the single biggest issue facing mankind, even if far too few people – and more importantly governments – seem to realise it. There have always been storms, floods, droughts and freezes – but they are becoming more common, and more destructive as the earth warms and the icecaps and glaciers melt. The bottom line is that our emissions are driving climate change. Another 900 issues of Hot Press will see the waters rise by two metres, with devastating consequences for coastal regions in various parts of the world.
It’s also become clear, in a way that few of us could have known, that things really are connected, in ways and to an extent that we can still barely understand. Make no mistake: actions and events ramify through generations and across vast distances. Seeds sown decades ago bear fruit years later. In the international arena, a crass combination of imperial stupidity and commercial interests has gradually, over time, led the world into what increasingly has the appearance of intractable chaos.
Think of how the British followed through on Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour’s 1916 declaration of support for an Israeli homeland. In that rash moment, Arab allies of the UK were betrayed. Palestine was eventually divided and colonised. War supplanted politics in the Middle East. Meanwhile, not far away, the American CIA was centrally involved in the 1953 overthrow of the Iranian government led by Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had upset American interests by nationalising the oil industry. They replaced him with a regime led by the King of Persia, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, aka the Shah of Iran, who was in turn overthrown by the Iranian revolution of 1979. Boil it down and, in pursuit of its own agenda, the US got rid of Mosaddegh, a secularist democrat, and gave us Ayatollah Khomeini.
It was all about oil, of course. When Balfour yielded to the Zionists, in order to court the US, the Saudis mostly lived in tents. But the oil crisis of the 1970s pumped indescribable amounts of money into their coffers – and they began to fund fundamentalist and medievalist schools and movements across the Islamic world.
It wasn’t just the US and the UK that gave life to these grim, but increasingly influential anti-crusades. The USSR invaded Afghanistan. In response, the US armed and trained Afghani tribesmen. Cue the mujahideen, and the Taliban and the rise of Osama bin Laden, who spent quite a bit of time there – as indeed did others who have come to haunt the West in a growing number of theatres of war, and in successive terrorist outrages – committed often against innocent people.
Who wouldn’t go back and scrub all of that out? If there were such a thing as choice in these matters, most of us would. But genies do not fit back into bottles…

That Western imperialist propensity to intervene in places, and disputes, has a few honourable precedents. Like World War II. Like (shamefully belatedly) in the Balkans against Milosevic. And like the Vietnamese invasion that ended the reign of the grisly dictator Pol Pot in Cambodia. Remember? But more often than not, lofty goals like freedom, human rights and democracy are invoked as a cloak for commercial gain, as when Presidents George Bush senior and junior took the US into two separate Gulf Wars in the interests of the oil industry.
It is impossible to escape the conclusion that cynicism is the dominant force in world affairs. Looking around now, in 2015, at the mess left after the West supported Arab uprisings in recent years (fooled by the propaganda of social media, perhaps?) well, it looks like democracy isn’t exactly about to flourish in the Middle East. Maybe they should have been let get on with it themselves.
And don’t start me on the ‘War on Drugs’, a catch-phrase dreamed up in the era of the first Bush presidency. It was then, and it is now, a completely misguided and dangerous idea which has exacerbated rather than alleviated the fallout from the use and the misuse of drugs. Not only have narcotics not been controlled, they’re in wider and cheaper circulation now than ever before. Meanwhile, the ‘war on drugs’ has effectively seen huge parts of Mexico surrendered to cartel gangsters, whose rule is not at all dissimilar to that of IS in Iraq and Syria.
The prohibitionist agenda has ravaged large parts of Latin America. It has resulted in a vast increase in the numbers in jails all over the world, not least in Ireland. And it has been the focal point for a huge level of systemic abuse of the African-American population in the US. Black Americans amount to 13.6% of the total population, but in 2009 represented 39.4% of the prison population. A report by Human Rights Watch in 2014 said that the “tough on crime” laws adopted since the 1980s have filled US prisons with mostly non-violent offenders. In total, an astonishing 6,997,700 adults were under “correctional supervision” in the US in 2011, amounting to almost 3% of all adults. The United States has the second highest per-capita prison population in the world, after the Seychelles (don’t ask!).
There may be a small glimmer of light at the end of this particular tunnel. Increasingly, cannabis is being legalised for medical and recreational use in states in the US, with Colorado successfully pioneering a completely different approach following the legalisation of the drug for personal use last year. Similar approaches have been taken in parts of Latin America and also in Portugal. Ireland, however, stuck as we are in the grip of a neo-puritan panic in relation to alcohol, has been typically slow to respond…

When Hot Press first hit the streets, the Iron Curtain was still a major factor in world politics. Thus, when the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989, there was a palpable sense that everything was changing. And it was, but not to the extent that some of the wilder capitalist ideologues presumed. In their minds, the sundering of the USSR meant the permanent victory of western capitalist democracy. Francis Fukuyama wrote of ‘the end of history’. Alas, perhaps as a corollary, we entered the era of light touch regulation. Greed was good. Make the shareholders rich and you’ll get rich too. Bankers were loosed upon the world as never before.
Well, we know where all that ended. Meanwhile, out of the ashes of the old USSR has emerged a strong, troublesome, deeply prejudiced and even menacing Russia. So history didn’t end after all.
That said, we in Ireland have good reason to beg to differ on a couple of counts at least. Early on in our 900 issues, the Pope came to Ireland. With its vast set pieces, his 1979 visit was intended as the starting point for a new millennium of Catholic hegemony here in the auld sod. And a lot of people knelt in subjection. In a massive display of papist triumphalism, yellow flags were everywhere.
But in retrospect, in truth, it was the beginning of the end. Emboldened by the bizarre post-papal euphoria, right-wing Catholic groups agitated for the 1983 amendment to the constitution which gave permanence to the ban on abortion in Ireland. Or so they thought. But in many ways, the experience of that campaign gave new courage and resolve to the growing number of Irish liberals. A few years later we had the Ann Lovett case, when the tragic 15-year-old died in childbirth in a grotto in Granard, Co. Longford; the Kerry Babies case followed later in 1984; and on the runaway train rolled to the X case; to the unmasking of Fr. Michael Cleary and Bishop Eamon Casey and revelations that they were fathers in fact as well as in name; to the growing revelations of the sexual abuse of children, the predations of monsters like Brendan Smyth and the craven cover-ups by the church authorities, not just of clerical abuse but also of the horrific truth of what was going on in the name of Jesus in the Magdalene laundries, the mother and baby homes and all the rest…
In Hot Press, we began with a determination that all of this would have to change. And we campaigned on that platform, again and again, fighting against religious obscurantism and for a liberal, tolerant society that would value personal and sexual freedom. The battle for access to contraception was won. Homesexuality was, belatedly, and as a result of a decision in the European Court of Human Rights, legalised. And as the scandals unfolded, and attitudes went through a seismic shift, attendance at Catholic churches and recruitment to the ministry declined catastrophically. If it weren’t for immigrants, that decline would be all the more obvious.
In parallel, we had the peace process in Northern Ireland. 900 issues ago, who’d have thought it? For the record, Hot Press interviews played no small part in the debates that paved the way, with the peace process being sparked into life when John Hume read an interview with Gerry Adams, in which he declared that ‘there can never be a military solution; there can only be a political solution’. It transpires that peace actually is worth the effort – but you have to talk to your enemies and swallow no small amounts of pride and prejudice.
One upshot has been the electoral mandate gained by Sinn Fein, which is now in Government in northern Ireland and bidding to achieve the same elevated status in Ireland. Yes, there are still skeletons in the closet, especially to do with the Disappeared, and there will be many more twists and turns as history unfolds. But when you look at where we were now, compared to where we were when the bomb and the bullet reigned, then surely we must acknowledge that things have got a whole lot better on this small patch of land on the edge of Europe.
Of course, as Albert Reynolds – who was Taoiseach for much of the 1990s – once put it, it’s the little things that trip you up. Like, Ben Dunne’s coke trauma in Florida got his family looking into his finances and led to the discovery of payments to Charlie Haughey (‘thanks a million, Big Fella’). And as a consequence, we had all those tribunals and learned and absorbed – and then forgot – so much about planning and corruption and construction…
We’re gas. You could say that we still have a rather exalted view of our importance on the world stage. In 1898 the Skibbereen Eagle famously published an editorial warning that it would “keep its eye on the Emperor of Russia and all such despotic enemies – whether at home or abroad – of human progression and man’s natural rights.” But it and its counterparts around the country might have served their own constituents better in the long run by keeping an eye on local councillors, bankers and builders. And so it goes…

Where it started, no-one knows. Now, of course, the internet and social media and the globalism and immediacy of communications mean that everyone can have an opinion on anything, anywhere, anytime, and in the blink of an eye too. But as with everything else, we’re discovering that there are downsides to all of that. Yes, knowledge liberates – but knowledge is power and a commodity, so knowledge also oppresses. The accumulation of vast pools of data in the knowledge society has facilitated quite extraordinary levels of surveillance of people in their personal lives and spaces. Some of this is security-driven, some of it is commercial – but none, it’s fair to say, is in our own interest. And that’s before we even get to the malign influence of trolls and below the line commentary.
Nine hundred issues ago we didn’t envisage Skype and Facebook to keep in touch with our globally mobile families and friends. Technological progress brings the most amazing benefits in communications, entertainment, medicine and commerce, but it also ushers in huge drawbacks. Neuroimaging lets us see our brains at work. But we can’t yet cure the common cold or obesity, not to mention cancer, arthritis or heart disease.
And we are more and more managed all the time. It’s not just at work, with all the plans and strategies and goals. No, lots of people – or perhaps we should say lots of corporations – want to know about and if possible control our movements, thoughts and our behaviours. I don’t like it, nor should you.
Ah yes. Time wreaks havoc in unexpected ways. What it means to be young has changed enormously. Our wild years used to be pretty cut and dried, but now we stay in college, or in dependency if you like, till our mid-20s and beyond. Youth has stretched out in both directions. Reference points have gone. It’s all much messier than 900 issues ago, with the effect that independence is much harder for young people to establish – and that’s not a good thing at all.
You don’t have to be a pessimist to see that we are hounded and surrounded by forces of darkness. But let’s not forget that there’s greatness and generosity out there in abundance too. In the end, all that can be asked of any of us individually is that we do the best we can for others as well as for ourselves – and most of us do.
There are parts of the world right now in which no sane man or woman would really want to live. But what we’ve learned over the years is that for all the great odds we have to fight against, here in Ireland at least, we mostly get by. As we nervously peer over the parapet in 2015, our concern should focus more than ever on those who don’t; and especially on those who can’t.
There is still so much to be done…
The Hog