Daily Nebraskan via U-Wire
University Wire
October 12, 2005 Wednesday

U.S. pundits suppress honest look at history

By Andrew Moseman, Daily Nebraskan; SOURCE: U. Nebraska

LINCOLN, Neb.

Last month, Turkey’s streets erupted in rage. With its admission into
the European Union up in the air, the nation has been under
increasing pressure to acknowledge what many people consider a
genocide against Armenians in the early 20th century.

An academic conference had been organized to discuss the issue but
was pushed back and nearly cancelled after massive protests,
including the justice minister calling the admission a “stab in the
back to the Turkish nation,” according to Al-Jazeera.

In a nation without the same codified tradition of free speech as the
United States, perhaps this shouldn’t surprise. This kind of thinking
isn’t supposed to prevail back home.

In America, the shining light of free expression, citizens should
understand the importance of open exploration of history, both
glorious and ugly, and of questioning the past in order to avoid
duplicating mistakes. Practically, we know this doesn’t always
happen, but watching the nation’s powerful pundits, those who stir
national discussion, casts serious doubts on Americans’ ability — or
even willingness — to deal with their past.

To keep up on U.S. events during my Swedish study abroad, I
occasionally break down and watch bits of American TV online. Last
week it was clips from “The O’Reilly Factor,” and what I heard last
week sounded eerily familiar to the reports out of Istanbul.

O’Reilly’s goal this particular week was to put a smear-job on Cindy
Sheehan, the now-famous woman who became an anti-war activist after
her son’s death in Iraq, and he started with a Sept. 21 interview
with Phil Donahue.

Donahue’s semi-relevance stemmed from his public stance as a Sheehan
supporter. And with his token guest in place, O’Reilly had the
opportunity to spill his own feelings about her. Sheehan is a
“radical,” O’Reilly says because she said Israel is occupying
Palestine and that the American operations in Afghanistan have been a
failure.

The most egregious sin, though, is that she “has accused Americans of
killing people ever since we stepped on this continent,” O’Reilly
said on the show. He repeated the charge three days later, when he
brought on Wesley Clark and lambasted the general for meeting
publicly with Sheehan, which “lends her credibility.” And O’Reilly
went back to the same line — repeating that Sheehan is a radical for
stating that Americans have murdered people.

I don’t know out of what context O’Reilly pulled these statements; if
Sheehan did use them as reasons to oppose the Iraq war, it’s a
juvenile argument. But on the level of fact, it’s hard to deny the
fact that Europeans behaved rather brutally since day one of their
little New World adventure.

Of course, historical denial isn’t new with O’Reilly. If you saw the
documentary “Outfoxed,” which, in all fairness, was just as much
wholesale propaganda as the Fox News it criticized, you probably
remember Jeremy Glick. After his father died in the Sept. 11, 2001,
attacks, Glick had the audacity to bring up America’s history of
financing some of the people who later became its enemies, like
Saddam Hussein. O’Reilly subjected Glick to a highlight-reel worthy
tirade, raising his blood pressure 10 or 20 points in the process.

Think what you want about Sheehan, Glick or anyone else; I’m not here
to defend them. When you enter the public sphere, you have to know
you’ll encounter criticism. The point is the dangerous rhetorical
fashion in which O’Reilly tries to marginalize those who dare to
deviate from “The Factor” line.

In the Clark segment, O’Reilly makes little, if any, effort to
discuss the actual issue of Sheehan’s activism — the war. When Clark
tries to introduce his ideas about what to do in Iraq, O’Reilly jerks
the segment right back to his line of logic for attacking Sheehan
personally — she said bad things about the country; therefore, she’s
a bad person.

So if you’re keeping score at home, anyone who brings up inglorious
facts about the country’s past is a radical, if not guilty of
outright treason. My, my, that sounds a lot like … Turkey. It’s not
terribly reassuring to know that after two centuries plus of
democracy, American public discourse gravitates to the same common
denominator as in a nation with a much younger and rockier history of
operating the “of the people, by the people, for the people” machine.

Noting that in the past, Americans have killed American Indians or
that Turks have killed Armenians doesn’t make someone a radical or a
traitor — it makes them a reasonably aware historical observer. Yet,
by making any insinuation of skeletons in America’s closet tantamount
to radicalism, O’Reilly and many others like him make reasonable
political discussion nearly impossible.

The powerful have always authored history, and personal attacks are
the lifeblood of American politics. But this game is different — not
rewriting history, but making ugly historical events untouchable. It
frees a nation from accountability and, perhaps more importantly,
impedes the nation from taking any lessons.

If anti-historical bullying dominates more of the public sphere,
American political discourse will limp to an even lower low. If
bringing up an ugly moment in American history means being labeled a
radical, people won’t do it, and that means public discourse minus
the irreplaceable perspective of the past.