http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12798.htm
The Real First Casualty of War
By John Pilger
04/20/06 -- -- During the 1970s, I filmed secretly in Czechoslovakia, then a
Stalinist dictatorship. The dissident novelist Zdenek Urbánek told me, "In
one respect, we are more fortunate than you in the west. We believe nothing
of what we read in the newspapers and watch on television, nothing of the
official truth. Unlike you, we have learned to read between the lines,
because real truth is always subversive."
This acute skepticism, this skill of reading between the lines, is urgently
needed in supposedly free societies today. Take the reporting of
state-sponsored war. The oldest cliché is that truth is the first casualty
of war. I disagree. Journalism is the first casualty. Not only that: it has
become a weapon of war, a virulent censorship that goes unrecognized in the
United States, Britain, and other democracies; censorship by omission, whose
power is such that, in war, it can mean the difference between life and
death for people in faraway countries, such as Iraq.
As a journalist for more than 40 years, I have tried to understand how this
works. In the aftermath of the U.S. war in Vietnam, which I reported, the
policy in Washington was revenge, a word frequently used in private but
never publicly. A medieval embargo was imposed on Vietnam and Cambodia; the
Thatcher government cut off supplies of milk to the children of Vietnam.
This assault on the very fabric of life in two of the world's most stricken
societies was rarely reported; the consequence was mass suffering.
It was during this time that I made a series of documentaries about
Cambodia. The first, in 1979, Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia,
described the American bombing that had provided a catalyst for the rise of
Pol Pot, and showed the shocking human effects of the embargo. Year Zero was
broadcast in some 60 countries, but never in the United States. When I flew
to Washington and offered it to the national public broadcaster, PBS, I
received a curious reaction. PBS executives were shocked by the film, and
spoke admiringly of it, even as they collectively shook their heads. One of
them said: "John, we are disturbed that your film says the United States
played such a destructive role, so we have decided to call in a journalistic
adjudicator."
The term "journalistic adjudicator" was out of Orwell. PBS appointed one
Richard Dudman, a reporter on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and one of the
few Westerners to have been invited by Pol Pot to visit Cambodia. His
dispatches reflected none of the savagery then enveloping that country; he
even praised his hosts. Not surprisingly, he gave my film the thumbs-down.
One of the PBS executives confided to me: "These are difficult days under
Ronald Reagan. Your film would have given us problems."
The lack of truth about what had really happened in southeast Asia - the
media-promoted myth of a "blunder" and the suppression of the true scale of
civilian casualties and of routine mass murder, even the word "invasion" -
allowed Reagan to launch a second "noble cause" in central America. The
target was another impoverished nation without resources: Nicaragua, whose
"threat," like Vietnam's, was in trying to establish a model of development
different from that of the colonial dictatorships backed by Washington.
Nicaragua was crushed, thanks in no small part to leading American
journalists, conservative and liberal, who suppressed the triumphs of the
Sandinistas and encouraged a specious debate about a "threat."
The tragedy in Iraq is different, but, for journalists, there are haunting
similarities. On Aug. 24 last year, a New York Times editorial declared: "If
we had all known then what we know now, the invasion [of Iraq] would have
been stopped by a popular outcry." This amazing admission was saying, in
effect, that the invasion would never have happened if journalists had not
betrayed the public by accepting and amplifying and echoing the lies of Bush
and Blair, instead of challenging and exposing them.
We now know that the BBC and other British media were used by MI6, the
secret intelligence service. In what was called "Operation Mass Appeal," MI6
agents planted stories about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction -
such as weapons hidden in his palaces and in secret underground bunkers. All
these stories were fake. But this is not the point. The point is that the
dark deeds of MI6 were quite unnecessary. Recently, the BBC's director of
news, Helen Boaden, was asked to explain how one of her "embedded" reporters
in Iraq, having accepted U.S. denials of the use of chemical weapons against
civilians, could possibly describe the aim of the Anglo-American invasion as
to "bring democracy and human rights" to Iraq. She replied with quotations
from Blair that this was indeed the aim, as if Blair's utterances and the
truth were in any way related. On the third anniversary of the invasion, a
BBC newsreader described this illegal, unprovoked act, based on lies, as a
"miscalculation." Thus, to use Edward Herman's memorable phrase, the
unthinkable was normalized.
Such servility to state power is hotly denied, yet routine. Almost the
entire British media has omitted the true figure of Iraqi civilian
casualties, willfully ignoring or attempting to discredit respectable
studies. "Making conservative assumptions," wrote the researchers from the
eminent Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, working with Iraqi
scholars, "we think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more, have happened
since the 2003 invasion of Iraq . which were primarily the result of
military actions by coalition forces. Most of those killed by coalition
forces were women and children.." That was Oct. 29, 2004. Today, the figure
has doubled.
Language is perhaps the most crucial battleground. Noble words such as
"democracy," "liberation," "freedom," and "reform" have been emptied of
their true meaning and refilled by the enemies of those concepts. The
counterfeits dominate the news, along with dishonest political labels, such
as "left of center," a favorite given to warlords such as Blair and Bill
Clinton; it means the opposite. "War on terror" is a fake metaphor that
insults our intelligence. We are not at war. Instead, our troops are
fighting insurrections in countries where our invasions have caused mayhem
and grief, the evidence and images of which are suppressed. How many people
know that, in revenge for 3,000 innocent lives taken on Sept. 11, 2001, up
to 20,000 innocent people died in Afghanistan?
In reclaiming the honor of our craft, not to mention the truth, we
journalists at least need to understand the historic task to which we are
assigned - that is, to report the rest of humanity in terms of its
usefulness, or otherwise, to "us," and to soften up the public for rapacious
attacks on countries that are no threat to us. We soften them up by
dehumanizing them, by writing about "regime change" in Iran as if that
country were an abstraction, not a human society. Hugo Chávez's Venezuela is
currently being softened up on both sides of the Atlantic. A few weeks ago,
Channel 4 news carried a major item that might have been broadcast by the
U.S. State Department. The reporter, Jonathan Rugman, the program's
Washington correspondent, presented Chávez as a cartoon character, a
sinister buffoon whose folksy Latin ways disguised a man "in danger of
joining a rogues' gallery of dictators and despots - Washington's latest
Latin nightmare." In contrast, Condoleezza Rice was given gravitas and
Donald Rumsfeld was allowed to compare Chávez to Hitler.
Indeed, almost everything in this travesty of journalism was viewed from
Washington, and only fragments of it from the barrios of Venezuela, where
Chávez enjoys 80 percent popularity. That he had won nine democratic
elections and referendums - a world record - was omitted. In crude Soviet
flick style, he was shown with the likes of Saddam Hussein and Muammar
Gaddafi, though these brief encounters had to do with OPEC and oil only.
According to Rugman, Venezuela under Chávez is helping Iran develop nuclear
weapons. No evidence was given for this absurdity. People watching would
have no idea that Venezuela was the only oil-producing country in the world
to use its oil revenue for the benefit of poor people. They would have no
idea of spectacular developments in health, education, literacy; no idea
that Venezuela has no political jails - unlike the United States.
So if the Bush administration moves to implement "Operation Bilbao," a
contingency plan to overthrow the democratic government of Venezuela, who
will care, because who will know? For we shall have only the media version;
another demon will get what is coming to him. The poor of Venezuela, like
the poor of Nicaragua, and the poor of Vietnam and countless other faraway
places, whose dreams and lives are of no interest, will be invisible in
their grief: a triumph of censorship by journalism.
It is said that the Internet offers an alternative, and what is wonderful
about the rebellious spirits on the World Wide Web is that they often report
as many journalists should. They are mavericks in the tradition of
muckrakers such as Claud Cockburn, who said: "Never believe anything until
it has been officially denied." But the Internet is still a kind of
samizdat, an underground, and most of humanity does not log on, just as most
of humanity does not own a mobile phone. And the right to know ought to be
universal. That other great muckraker, Tom Paine, warned that if the
majority of the people were being denied the truth and ideas of truth, it
was time to storm what he called the "Bastille of words." That time is now.
This is an abridged version of an address, "Reporting War and Empire," by
John Pilger at Columbia University, New York, in company with Seymour Hersh,
Robert Fisk, and Charles Glass.
***
**Join Cindy Sheehan & Marcy Winograd**
36th District Congressional Candidate
for an
Out of Iraq Rally & Precinct Walk
Tues., April 25th 3:30 PM
Mar Vista Park - Picnic Area #2
McLaughlin & Palms (directions below)
Bring peace signs, tennis shoes, & friends
Get Out the Word on Winograd
Join With PDA Notables
Tim Carpenter
Jodie Evans
Lila Garrett
Tom Hayden
Mimi Kennedy
Rev. Lennox Yearwood (Pres. of Hip Hop Caucus)
Meet Cindy Sheehan & Marcy Winograd
Walk the Neighborhood & Take Back Congress
With a Commitment to Peace
Directions from West LA
Take Sawtelle to Palms, turn right on Palms,
Go a block until you hit the parking lot. Our rally will be
held near Picnic Area #2, next to the parking lot
Please circulate this email to 10 friends who want to support
an "Out of Iraq" candidate.
Vote Winograd for Congress June 6th!
winogradforcongress.com
310-305-1953
Marcy Winograd is challenging pro-war incumbent Jane Harman in
the 36th congressional district, a 30-mile area that stretches from
San Pedro up through Wilmington, Torrance, Lennox, beach cities,
Venice, Mar Vista and West LA.
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