Joseph Goebbels, head propagandist of Nazi Germany, opened his diary a frustrated homunculus on the evening of April 26 1942. His German mouthpieces were failing to understand their duty to convey the Führer’s truth with suitable zeal and, not without irritation, Goebbels had dispatched a handful of ”robust journalists” to occupied France to get the official story — and, more importantly, the official tone — right.
”Our reporting … has been too dry and therefore could not compete with the flowery reports of Reuters,” wrote Goebbels that night. ”To impress the English you must present an undertaking … as though it were a sports event. You must not limit yourself to a mere rehearsal of the facts, but must fill out the data with details to which the English, and especially the Americans, are known to be susceptible.”
To read Goebbels’s diaries is to be reminded that lunatics can be start- lingly intelligent: his insights into the sentimental tastes of American media consumers were 20 years ahead of their time. But, for every moment of cunning and pragmatism, there are two of profound short-sightedness. For all his sophistication and focus, Goebbels constantly fails to see what cliché calls a bigger picture.
It is remarkable to note how a master of the visual and verbal landmine should be so incapable of seeing the whole theatre of war; that the mind behind so much distortion should apparently be enslaved by the idea that seeing is believing.
This week’s naive show-and-tell sessions in Iran and Myanmar suggest that Goebbels’s mistakes have taught his ideological descendants nothing. Just months after China painted a strip-mined mountainside lurid green to try to disguise environmental catastrophe from prying Western eyes, both regimes have confirmed once again one’s suspicions that those nations who claim the right to brutal pragmatism — Iran most notably against homosexuals, Myanmar against most of its citizenry — seem utterly unable also to distinguish the seen from the real.
The goose-stepping banana-wranglers of the Myanmarese junta who unveiled their new capital last week can perhaps be forgiven their simplicity. It is, after all, not unreasonable to assume that if you build a collection of glass skyscrapers in the jungle people will be impressed, even if you do name it Pyinmana, which sounds like a cocktail with a small razor-toothed fish thrashing about in it.
Had we not read Mosquito Coast or seen Fitzcarraldo we might have thought the colonels were a pretty happening bunch of guys. That we have, and therefore suspect they are nuts, is merely an accident of literary and cinematic taste.
The Iranians, on the other hand, should have known better.
Iran has produced some beautiful films and must presumably understand the merits of having actors memorise their lines. Tele-prompters and cue-cards make for rotten cinéma-vérité; and this week’s hammy cameos by a troupe of British sailors, reciting their parts like the chorus from HMS Pinafore, have set Persian film back a decade.
It is easy for the visually sophisticated West to mock these gurgling babes in the propagandistic wood.
It is comforting to distance ourselves from these two-bit conjurers groping at their threadbare props. It would be easy to raise an eyebrow, but for a large bonbon in New York City.
The story of the passion of the chocolate Christ was a simple, but grand, one when it hit the headlines this week. The immaculate confection had appeared in a small hotel gallery, presumably having found no room at the Holiday Inn. It was accused of blasphemy and its fate left to the gallery owner to decide. He washed his hands of it and turned it over to the will of the mob, after which its body was returned to its creator and we are told that it might return at some later date.
It was always going to elicit outrage, but the intensity of that reaction has been startling, not least because it suggested that some New Yorkers believe that 2 000 years of scholarship, and the faith of a billion people, can be shaken to their core by a mutated Kit-Kat.
But the real surprise has been the total silence from Western commentators about the irony of the source of the outcry. A year ago New York was the intellectual and ideological epicentre of the liberal condemnation of Islam’s response to the Danish cartoon fiasco. It was from here that sagely humanists decried the primitivism and literal world view of those who call for beheadings because they can’t tell the difference between a picture and the thing that it represents. But now, a year later, there is silence.
Which is not to say that the chorus of liberal disapproval was misguided last year; and certainly demands for a sculpture to be removed are not the same as incitements to murder. But it does seem odd that that disapproval has not been trained with equal vigour on another case of religious intolerance targeting the great traditions of visual literacy that our species has refined. The same issues that were debated last year are in play again. Nothing has changed, except a crescent has become a cross; but that seems to make all the difference.
Of course the sculpture is offensive: everything is offensive to somebody. If those Christians who called it an attack on their faith feared a blurring of the line between Calvary and calories, or found its penis alarming (having no Pope or patron handy to order a chocolate fig leaf to be grafted on), or simply didn’t want their children to see it, fine. They don’t have to see it. But do not arrange it so that I can’t.
By all means, cover your children’s eyes and paint your mountainside green, but do not try to dictate terms for me.
If you do, you are (like those who demanded death to cartoonists) implying that you and I live only in a state of truce, in which you will tolerate me if I tolerate you — until the important stuff happens.
Then our truce means nothing, because you have your faith and I have only my intellect. Once you claim immunity for your beliefs and declare open season on mine, you are nothing more than a sniper shooting out of the window of the embassy in which you have found asylum.