MANUFACTURE OF SOCIAL, POLITICAL AND HISTORICAL DENIAL

[Yervant1]

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.