War and shopping - an extremism that never speaks its name
John Pilger
John Pilger
Looking for a bookshop that was no longer there, I walked
instead into a labyrinth designed as a trap. Leaving became an allusion, rather
like Alice once she had stepped through the Looking Glass. Walls of glass
curved into concentric circles as one "store" merged into another:
Armani Exchange with Dinki Di Pies. Exits led to gauntlets of more
"offers" and "exciting options". Seeking a guide, I bought
a lousy pair of sunglasses: anything to get out. It was a vision of hell. It
was a Westfield mega mall.
This happened in Sydney - where the Westfield empire began -
in a "mall" not half as mega as the one that opened in Stratford,
east London on 13 September 2011. "Everything" is here, reported the
architectural critic Jonathan Glancey: from Apple to Primark, McDonalds's to
KFC and Krispy Kreme. There is a cinema with 17 screens and "luxurious VIP
seats", and a mega "luxury" bowling alley. Tracey Emin and Mary
Portas lead the Westfield "cultural team". The biggest casino in the
land will overlook a "24-hour lifestyle street" called The Arcade.
This will be the only way into the 2012 Olympic Games for 10m people attending
the athletics. The simple, grotesque message of "buy me, buy me" will
be London's welcome to the world.
"If you've seen the Disney film Wall-E," wrote
Glancey in 2008, "you'll certainly recognise Westfield and malls like it.
In the film, humans who long ago abandoned the Earth they messed up through
greed, live a supremely sedentary life shopping and eating. They are very tubby
and have lost the use of their legs. Is this how we'll end up? Or will we
plunge into the depths of some mammoth recession... with nothing and nowhere to
spend?" In the less apocalyptic short term, Westfield is "a step
towards our collective desire to undermine the life and culture of the
traditional city, along with its architecture, and to shop and shop some
more."
The original development plan for Stratford City evoked Barcelona: a grid of defined streets of shops and places to live. Modern, civilised. Then the Olympics loomed and so did Westfield, a major corporate sponsor. The mega mall, the biggest in Europe, is built in the midst of grey tower blocks not far from where the recent riots occurred, its "designer" products, made mostly with cheap, regimented labour, beckon the indebted. That it stands on a site where London workers made trains - thousands of locomotives, carriages and goods wagons -in what was once called manufacturing is of melancholy interest. The mega mall's jobs produce nothing and are mostly low-paid. It is an emblem of extreme times.
The co-founder of Westfield is Frank Lowy, an
Australian-Israeli billionaire who is to shopping what Rupert Murdoch is to
media. Westfield owns or has an interest in more than 120 malls worldwide. The
Sydney Tower, the city's most visible structure, is emblazoned
"Westfield". Lowy, a former Israeli commando, gives millions to
Israel, and in 2003 set up the "independent" Lowy Institute for
International Affairs which promotes Israel and US foreign policy.
On the day after the Stratford mega mall opened, Unicef
researchers reported that British children were caught in a "materialistic
trap" in which they were bought off with "branded goods".
Low-income parents felt "tremendous pressure from society" to buy
"branded clothes, trainers, technology" for their children. TV
advertising and other seductions of the "consumer culture", together
with low pay and long working hours, were responsible. Children told the
researchers they preferred to spend time with their families and to have
"plenty to do outdoors", but this was often no longer possible. As
"welfare" has become a dirty word, basic facilities for the young
such as youth clubs are being eliminated by local authorities.
Four years ago, Unicef published a league table of children's
wellbeing across 21 industrialised nations. The UK was bottom. A fifth of
British children live in poverty: a figure forecast to rise in this Olympic
year. The priority of Britain's political class, regardless of party, is the
repayment by ordinary people of "the deficit", a specious and cynical
term for the epic handouts to crooked banks, and the simultaneous waging of
squalid colonial wars for the theft of other countries' resources. This is
extremism that never speaks its name.
It is an extremism that has emasculated the social
democracies that were Europe's redemption following the second world war. The
forced impoverishment of Greece with exorbitant returns demanded by German and
French central bankers is likely to produce another fascist military coup. The
forced impoverishment of millions of Britons by the ancien regime of David
Cameron, with its growing police state and compliant bourgeoisie, especially in
the media, will produce more riots: nothing is surer. One can count upon the
extremism of apartheid in any form to trigger such a result, no matter its
consumerist gloss hermetically sealed in a mega mall. The prospect is democracy
for the rich and totalitarianism not only for the poor; and "liberal
intervention", as the Guardian calls it approvingly, for those useful
foreign parts too weak to resist our "precision" Brimstone missiles.
I went to Parliament Square the other day. The graphic
display of state crimes mounted by peace and justice campaigner Brian Haw had
been finally removed by the Metropolitan Police, knowing that Brian could no
longer stand up to them, bodily and in the courts, as he did for a decade.
Brian died in June. Visiting him one freezing Christmas, I was moved by the way
he persuaded so many passers-by and the power of his courage. We now need
millions like him. Urgently.
John Pilger
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