Can We Trust the Nightingale Not To Sing
When I was living in East Germany many years ago, one of the things that struck me was that people didn’t believe what their government was telling them. It was not what I had expected. We had been brought up to fear all the Reds who lurked behind the Iron Curtain. Plus, on the whole, we in Britain were far less cynical about our rulers.
But, despite the constant propaganda, the red banners strung across the streets telling those who actually bothered to look that they stood in solidarity with their Russian brothers, despite the state-run newspaper constantly pumping out the Party line, most East Germans, it seemed to me, were deaf and blind to these entreaties. That’s what they quietly told us. They had long since stopped believing anything until it actually happened.
Three years after my East German experience, I spent the summer in the USA. That was the year of riots on the streets and in the parks, the year of the Democratic Convention in Chicago. I was a student at the time, swept up in a mood that I was aware of but did not fully understand, finding myself in Chicago when the riot police charged only because it had felt as though the whole world was going to the city. When I returned to university in England, I wrote an account of my experiences for the university newspaper and included in it the little parable I had heard on the streets of Chicago – the one about the king in his palace who hears a nightingale singing sweetly on a tree outside and, wanting to make sure he can hear this song to order, asks his courtiers to capture the bird, put it in a cage, and bring it into his palace. The courtiers obey the king’s wishes. The punchline is that the caged bird then sang more sweetly than ever.
So what is the connection between the two experiences, that of the German Democratic Republic and the USA? I left the USA recalling my friends in the GDR and thinking that, although they may not agree with me, they were more liberated than most Americans who seemed to have a blind faith in their leaders, a certainty that their way was right and all others were wrong. What the story of the little bird had said to me was that awareness of propaganda and manipulation, as in East Germany where the bird most definitely did not sing, was a form of internal liberation. East Germans could not at that time do much about their circumstances but they had an awareness. The lack of questioning by the majority of citizens of the USA, on the other hand, made them seem more indoctrinated than those living in a socialist society.
We have just had our general election with the governing party, the Conservatives, being roundly rejected by the voters. One of the reasons being put forward is that we, the people, have stopped believing. We have stopped trusting our politicians. Commentators say that it is the job of the new government, the Labour Party, to rebuild that trust.
That would be a good thing. There is trouble ahead when trust between people and rulers is broken. On the other hand, though, blind faith is for religions, not politics.
Trust is good but in politics asking the question is even better. When we obligingly sing to the ordained tune, believe the lies we are told, then we are truly captured.