MANUFACTURE OF SOCIAL, POLITICAL AND HISTORICAL DENIAL
Belfast Telegraph
November 2, 2009 Monday
Amira Hass was spot on when she said last week that her lifetime
women’s award was an award for failure. The West Bank correspondent of
the Israeli paper Haaretz eloquently explained herself on al-Jazeera’s
English channel.
She received an award for failure, she said, because despite all the
facts that she and her journalistic colleagues had explained about
Israeli occupation in Palestine, the world still did not understand
what occupation meant and still used words like "terror" and "war
on terror".
Amira was absolutely correct. Most of our Western press and television
are as gutless as ever when they have to participate in what Noam
Chomsky described as "the manufacture of consent". Once government
and editors and television management have decided on the "story",
you can be sure that an Israeli "wall" will become a "security barrier"
or a "fence", a pro-Western Arab dictator a "strongman" and "occupied"
Israeli territory will become "disputed"; the unjustly treated will
thus become generically violent, brutality softened and occupation
legalised.
Fred Halliday of the London School of Economics is coming out next
June with a book called Shocked and Awed about the artillery and
minefields used in the battlefield of language.
The "War on Terror" — yes, let’s give this trash the capital letters
it deserves, as in "South Sea Bubble" — has given us "Gitmo" and
"extraordinary rendition" ("extraordinary" indeed!) and imported,
as Halliday observes, perversions of imported words such as "jihad".
But I think the problem goes further than this. It’s not just a White
House-State Department-Pentagon-CNN-Downing Street-Defence Ministry
BBC-military-political-journalistic complex. Our masters prefer us
not to tangle with the bad guys as well as good guys. Years ago,
a Time magazine reporter in Cairo packed his note-book with facts
about the routine Egyptian police torture of prisoners. But the US
ambassador in Cairo persuaded the bureau chief to hold off because he
understood that Mubarak was going to "crack down" on such abuses. Time
didn’t run the story and the abuses got worse. Shortly afterwards,
jail guards were forcing Egyptian prisoners to rape each other.
And nothing has changed. The big Western news agencies which have
headquartered their Middle East offices in Cairo are as loath to
touch these stories today as they were more than a decade ago. It’s
just the same in that other friendly Muslim ally of ours, Turkey.
Now we all know that the Armenian genocide of 1915 was a fact of
history, that one and a half million Armenian men, women and children
were raped, knifed, burned and shot to death by the Ottoman Turks.
So how do our defenders of the Western press refer to the Armenian
genocide? Here is Reuters on October 13 this year, referring to
"hostility stemming from the First World War mass killings of
Armenians by Ottoman Turks. Armenia says it was genocide, a term
Turkey rejects". And here’s the Associated Press next day: "Armenia
and many historians say Ottoman Turks committed genocide against
Armenians early in the last century, a charge that Turkey denies." Can
you imagine the uproar if Reuters referred to the "mass killing" of
Jews by Germans with the words: "Jews say it was a genocide, a term
right-wing Germans and neo-Nazis reject." Or if AP were to report
that "Israel and many historians say German Nazis committed genocide
against Jews in the Second World War, a charge German right-wingers,
etc, deny". It would be an outrage. But no one, of course, is going
to close the Reuters or AP bureaux in Berlin. In Ankara and Istanbul
bureaux, however, it’s clearly another matter.
No, Chomsky was wrong. It’s not about consent. It’s about the
manufacture of social, political and historical denial. The motto is
familiar and simple: always give in to the bully.