7. Balancing misery

Of course I was proud when my first newspaper piece appeared in the News Chronicle in December 1955,  two days after my 19^th birthday. It was a good paper, left of centre and widely read, midway between broadsheet and red-top tabloids like the Mirror, Express and Sketch (in those days, before the Sun led its race for the bottom, the Mirror too could have something sensible to say).

But now I look again at the content of my piece, it makes me cringe. I cant blame James Cameron or Tom Hopkinson, the features editor who took the piece. My words were left pretty much as I sent them in, with title, captions and some more or less apposite pictures to back them up.

My unease now begins with the first paragraph  about the expression “la misere”being widely used in Algeria 'though many who use it don't know what it means.' I'm happy with the shortened don't, but not with the implication that I know better or see more clearly than others what misery may mean.

A bit further on I say that the daily wage of a labourer will buy 'three inadequate meals at a cheap Arab restaurant.'  Except that poverty-stricken workers dont spend most of their earnings in restaurants, and Arab food is not mostly inadequate.

What follows has some good graphic description and a few useful statistics, but then, in the last paragraph I remind myself of the BBC at its bland worst, falling back on 'balance' where honesty and judgement are required. Sitting on the fence is not what's needed between victim and oppressor, the many and the few.

In my assumed wisdom, I assert 'This is La Misere, and the machine guns are answering it. Who is responsible for it, government, colonists or the Arabs themselves, is disputed. What matters is that such conditions exist. Such conditions breed misunderstanding, despair and hate. Thence violence.'

But isn't government by definition responsible, and wasn't this government the voice and agent of a conquering minority? Were the Arabs were in control over their own destiny?  My dire conclusion : 'La Misere gives terrifying force to Nationalist and Communist arguments in Algeria. La Misere can warp a man until he believes in terrorism and...has nothing to lose by violence.'

How true... But wasn't the Battle of Britain also a nationalist struggle? Were the pilots of Bomber Command warped by misery when they decimated civilian populations in Dresden and Hiroshima? And didn't these brothers in arms, like all good Communists, draw courage and commitment from All-for-one and One-for-all?

When I wrote my piece, I must have already half-known some of these things. My workmates Mustafa and Jeannine were neither warped nor poverty-stricken. So why did I parrot t platitudes? At worst, I courted respectability. At best I adopted the presumed stance of my audience the better to convince them of the obvious: that poverty and deprivation are unacceptable, not just bad for the poor themselves but dangerous to all.