[Media-watch] FW: Inferno

[david Miller]

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From: Medialens Media Alerts <alerts at medialens.org>
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 21:00:45 +1000
To: Friend <david.miller at stir.ac.uk>
Subject: Inferno

MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media


March 28, 2003

MEDIA ALERT: INFERNO

Civilian Casualties, Censorship and Patriotism


Niche Killing

It’s hard to believe that a little more than one week ago, the Iraqi regime,
facing imminent attack, was meekly dismantling its al-Samoud missiles,
presenting scientists for interview, and allowing hundreds of air strikes to
deplete its forces without reply. US oil, ‘defence’ and other
state-corporate interests had of course long since chosen war. Or, rather,
they had chosen a “cake walk” – a parade of the best firepower money can
buy, a travelling arms fair ensuring that the latest killing machines would
be suitably ‘combat tested’. US generals talked of “flexibility and
responsiveness”, British generals of “niche combat roles”. This sounded
disturbingly like the Total Quality jargon of management consultancy.

And now a giant snake of military equipment lies caked in dust, bruised and
battered, its body wallowing in the blood of innocents. Suddenly Stalingrad
feels like something that happened only sixty years ago. There is a palpable
sense of the ghosts of ancient wars looking down grimly on a humbled
leviathan. It’s an old story: supply lines overstretched by overconfidence,
state of the art power shaken by ‘little people’ who weren’t supposed to
matter, people who haven’t read the script. Suddenly war seems about blood
and courage again, not computers.

But there is no glory here – US and UK troops have been lead into a
nightmare, they are dying for a cause that no one should be asked to die
for. Can you imagine dying for Bush and Blair? Can you imagine killing for
them? Michelle Waters, the sister of a Marine who died soon after the war
began, says of her family:

“It’s all for nothing. That war could have been prevented. Now, we’re out of
a brother. Bush is not out of a brother. We are.” (Quoted, ‘Media War:
Obsessed With Tactics And Technology’, Norman Solomon, ZNet, March 27, 2003)

And the people of Iraq – their soldiers, often conscripts, are people too -
are being slaughtered in their thousands. Hell, we now know, is a bombed
market place under an orange sky in a war fought for oil and power. Hell is
an impoverished, speechless market trader trembling amid the body parts.
“Alas”, cried Shantideva a thousand years ago, “our sorrows fall in endless
streams!”


Restraining Hands

In some spiritual traditions compassion is described as the “invisible
protector” of living beings. If this sounds like mere sentiment, consider
that compassion is protecting the civilian population of Iraq in a very real
way, right now. The millions of ordinary people who felt like insignificant
ants marching in giant crowds in February and March have had this very real
effect: they have placed an invisible restraining hand on the shoulders of
the people throwing the Tomahawks, the MOABs and the JDAMs. The US military
does not feel able to shed the blood of thousands of civilians by bringing
its giant, fiery hammers down on urban areas – they know the world is
watching, they know the world will not tolerate it. They know this because
you and we filled small areas of space with our bodies on the streets of our
cities. It didn’t feel like much at the time.

Be in no doubt, if this had been Stalin or Churchill, if it had been Nixon
or Reagan, Basra and Baghdad would now be rubble. This could well be
changing – when mighty armies start taking casualties the gloves tend to be
mislaid – and optimism must not stray into naivety, but we must be clear
about one important point: the protests, the concern, the dissent, are
absolutely vital. They have made a difference.

The media is, of course, busy sanitising the horrors that are taking place
in our names. Indeed the ability to overlook horrors committed by the West
and its allies is a key job requirement for mainstream journalists. A Nexis
database search showed that between 1990-1999 the Los Angeles Times, New
York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek and Time used the word ‘genocide’ 132
times to describe the actions of Iraq against Kurds. Over the same period
the same word was used 14 times to describe the actions of Turkey against
Kurds. We all know what Iraq is alleged to have done to the Kurds at Halabja
and elsewhere, but how many people know about the 50,000 Kurdish dead and 3
million refugees, victims of Turkish military assault? Who knows that 80% of
the arms were supplied by the US, including M-60 tanks, F-16
fighter-bombers, Cobra gunships, and Blackhawk 'slick' helicopters? As
Turkish commandos slip now across the border into Northern Iraq, the BBC’s
John Simpson comments: “Of co!
urse the Kurds are very nervous about the whole thing.” (BBC1, March 22) If
an enemy and not a NATO ally had been involved, we might perhaps have been
given a little information on the detail behind the jitters.

Hiding the “good guy” horrors of course becomes seriously problematic in
time of war. On March 21 the whole world watched wide-eyed as 320 cruise
missiles erupted in the heart of Baghdad, an impoverished city of 5 million
people. “In over 30 years of covering these stories I have never seen
anything of this magnitude,” said CNN veteran Wolf Blitzer (Quoted, Kathryn
Flett, ‘Horror show of explosive footage’, The Observer, March 23, 2003).
The intensity of the bombardment was genuinely shocking to behold - there
was the same sense of ordinary life being overwhelmed by hellish violence
that characterised September 11. Despite everything we had seen, BBC anchor
Maxine Mawhinney felt able to declare the following day:

“It’s difficult to verify who’s been hit, if anyone.” (BBC1, March 22)

Taking a look inside a hospital was one option to explore. When the BBC’s
Hywel Jones managed it he commented on one small, wailing boy with head
injuries: “It’s impossible to verify how he received his injuries.”  (Ibid)
In fact doctors with the International Red Cross were quickly able to verify
that patients’ injuries had been sustained from blast and shrapnel – the
Iraqi regime claimed three deaths and 207 hospitalised civilian casualties.

If the reality of the horror can’t be challenged, it can at least be kept
well out of sight. Steve Anderson, controller of ITV News, responded to
complaints that the horrors of war are being sanitised:

"I have seen some of the images on Al-Jazeera television. I would never put
them on screen." The BBC’s head of news, Richard Sambrook, agrees that such
pictures are not suitable for a British audience.

The images in question were indeed horrific - a young Iraqi boy with the top
of his skull blown off with only torn flaps of scalp remaining – too much
for the British public to bear, we are told. Instead we are trained to
admire the Jeremy Clarkson side of war: the muscular curves of Tornado
bombers, the cruise missiles ripping at the sky: “This is seriously hardcore
machinery going in” (BBC1, March 22), as one BBC ‘military expert’ drooled.

At the extreme end of the spectrum, even honest debate is being censored.
Sir Ray Tindle, chairman and Editor in Chief of Tindle Newspapers Ltd, owner
of 130 weekly titles, relayed his orders to editors on the eve of war:

“When British troops come under fire, however, as now seems probable, I ask
you to ensure that nothing appears in the columns of your newspapers which
attacks the decision to conduct the war.” (Andy Rowell, ‘Anti-war reporting
banned in UK papers’, PR Watch, March 23)

Normal ‘free press’ service will be resumed, it seems, immediately a
"ceasefire" is agreed “when any withheld letters or reports may be
published”. Tindle’s papers, in other words, will be ‘liberated’ at the same
time that Iraq is ‘liberated’. Then, if Baghdad lies in ruins, the deserts
drenched in blood, it will be good to know we are free to discuss whether
somebody should have tried to stop it.


On Patrotism

Virtually all politicians and almost all the media are demanding that we now
support our armed forces in their action. BBC and ITN reporters, for
example, have taken to repeatedly asking protestors: “Is there any point in
protesting now that the democratic decision has been taken to go to war?”

The answer is provided by a top secret US Defense Department memorandum from
March 1968, which warned that increased force levels in Vietnam ran "great
risks of provoking a domestic crisis of unprecedented proportions" (The
Pentagon Papers, Vol. IV, p. 564, Senator Gravel Edition, Beacon, 1972).
Fears of “increased defiance of the draft and growing unrest in the cities”
were very much on the minds of military planners as they decided whether to
massively escalate the assault on Vietnam, or back off, after the Tet
offensive. They backed off.

While we feel sympathy for the plight of our troops – we grieve for all who
die in this war - we agree with the respected political commentator, George
W. Bush, who said recently of military responsibility:

“It will be no defence to say, ‘I was just following orders’." (The
Scotsman, ‘Bush orders Saddam to flee’, March 18, 2003)

We also note the view of Justice Robert Jackson, chief prosecutor at the
Nuremberg trials in 1946, who said:

"The very essence of the Nuremberg charter is that individuals have
international duties which transcend national obligations of obedience
imposed by the state." (John Pilger, Disobey, March 13, 2003)

We are all human beings – no one is granted special exemption from moral
responsibility, least of all people engaged in killing. Our TVs have been
full of soldiers and airmen declaring innocently: “I’m just here to do a job
and to do it to the best of my ability.”

But killing and mutilating people in a cynical and illegal war are about far
more than just doing a job. Why do we imagine that signing a contract and
agreeing to abide by certain rules in exchange for money means we are
relieved of our responsibility as moral actors? What does our promise to do
as we are ordered mean when we are ordered to incinerate innocent men, women
and child? Which is more important – our agreement, or the burning to death
of innocents? 

Where does the argument for unconditional support for our troops lead?
Consider the words of the dissident Spanish chronicler, Las Casas, recording
the actions of Spanish troops on the island of Hispaniola in the 16th
century:

“There were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so
that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war,
slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I
myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it.”
(Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, Harper Perennial,
1990, p.7)

By the media’s logic if we had been Spanish in 1508 we should have supported
‘our’ Spanish troops. British troops are not Spanish conquistadors, but the
point is that the issue is not black and white - we can’t just be told to
shut up and stop thinking the moment the shooting starts. Because it’s not
black and white, it needs to be discussed. Tolstoy described well the
reality of the call to mindless patriotism:

“Patriotism in its simplest, clearest, and most indubitable signification is
nothing else but a means of obtaining for the rulers their ambitions and
covetous desires, and for the ruled the abdication of human dignity, reason,
and conscience, and a slavish enthralment to those in power. And as such it
is recommended wherever it is preached. Patriotism is slavery.” (Tolstoy,
Writings On Civil Disobedience and Non-Violence, New Society, 1987, p.103)

Beyond all the facts, evidence, arguments and counter-arguments, there is a
simple truth that conflicts with the primitive idea that mass violence is
either necessary or effective as a solution to anything. It was elegantly
outlined by the 12th century philosopher Je Gampopa:

“It is not anger and hatred but loving kindness and compassion that
vouchsafe the welfare of others.”

If we took this idea seriously and acted upon it, the swamp of hatred that
breeds the mosquitoes of terror would soon dry up. Anger and hatred are
powerless in the face of authentic human kindness. Much of the world now
understands that violence and hatred are not good answers to violence and
hatred, that the fog of war is not a good antidote to the ignorance of
arrogance and greed. Alas, there remain centres of ruthless power which
understand what war is good for – it’s good for business, for frightening
and controlling people into submission, for getting what you want that other
people have.

But a bloody US/UK ‘victory’ means disaster for the Iraqi people and an
explosion of hatred around the world. At home, war means the further
entrenchment of the fossil fuel fundamentalists, military elites and other
greed-driven cynics leading the world to social and environmental ruination.
A continuation of the current global protests means something else – it
means the possibility that we might at last wake up from the nightmare of
history to a world dominated by human concern for others rather than human
suffering.


(A shorter version of this Media Alert appears in this week’s New Statesman
magazine)

SUGGESTED ACTION:

The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for
others. In writing letters to journalists, we strongly urge readers to
maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.

Write to the heads of BBC news and ITN expressing your views:

Richard Sambrook, BBC director of news.
Email: richard.sambrook at bbc.co.uk

Roger Mosey, Head of BBC Television News:
roger.mosey at bbc.co.uk

ITN News Viewer Liaison:
viewer.liaison at itn.co.uk

Write to the editors of The Guardian and The Observer:
Alan Rusbridger, Guardian editor
Email: alan.rusbridger at guardian.co.uk

Roger Alton, Observer editor
Email: roger.alton at observer.co.uk

Simon Kelner, Independent editor
Email: s.kelner at independent.co.uk

Feel free to respond to Media Lens alerts: editor at medialens.org

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