Escape from Manus Prison by Jaivet Ealom

Author:Jaivet Ealom [Ealom, Jaivet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: 2022-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

EIGHTEEN

‘One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.’

Voltaire

Discovering the facts was one thing. Doing something about them was another. Any satisfaction we might gain from knowing and uncovering the truth of our condition was poor consolation for the fact that we might end up taking our insights and experiences with us to the grave, as we waited for a fair process, or divine intervention that was never to materialise.

The reality of our condition needed to be shared. But there was much standing in the way of that taking place: a double ring of high fences, a wide-open sea, and a media and government spin machine that filled the atmosphere with its chilling distortions.

This effort to shroud reality in a giant invisibility cloak was familiar to me. Back in Burma, the truth was considered the private domain of the ruling regime. Even the language we used was carefully managed by the junta, who at one point banned the word ‘poverty’ from the media and official discourse, as it had done with the word ‘Rohingya’ – and had removed us from the list of ethnic groups acknowledged by the notorious 1982 Citizenship Law.

(The Burmese, and not just the Rohingyas, got around these strictures through a clever linguistic strategy that included using metaphors and reverse talk – using a term to convey its opposite – to make our criticisms known.)

In the Burmese education system, subjects that encouraged any sort of critical thought – like politics, history and the rest of the humanities – simply weren’t offered. Instead, the curriculum favoured the sciences, mathematics and technology: practical topics that were governed by clear rules and required logical thinking.

The aim was to keep the population compliant, and it largely worked. There was little liberal-minded resistance to government policies, no matter how wicked or corrupt they happened to be, because our ability to question the status quo had been schooled out of existence. The regime didn’t bother with spin. It did not need to sugar-coat the truth, or twist its words to trick the public or control how people thought, because it controlled the words themselves.

It was an approach quite unlike that of the double-dealing Australian politicians, who dressed up the most appalling policies in a lot of virtuous talk of moral and legal principles. ‘This democratically elected government’ was a phrase often repeated on the news, to defend its latest shady manoeuvre. Whereas any look back at history – at South Africa under apartheid, the US under Jim Crow laws, or Nazi Germany – would show that ‘democratically elected’ and ‘legal’ in no way equalled ‘right’ or ‘fair’.

There had been a time when I had considered Australia, as much as I thought about it at all, as a civilised country, with egalitarian principles that gave me hope for the future. Now I knew the Antipodean utopia was a myth. From where I stood, this first-world democracy served up the same shit as back home, just in different colours.

The government spent billions – billions

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