Letters to the Editor
-
Pants on fire
This is an excellent, detailed and well-argued article summarizing the failure of the US media from a number of angles.
Just before the Iraq war started I was participating in discussions about the upcoming war in a newsgroup loosely concerned with George Orwell, his works, and how his ideas play out in contemporary society.
In a thread that discussed a Salon article, on March 8th 2003, I asked the question:
OK, so the main argument here is that the regime in Iraq has already used poison gas against its own people, and that a dictator who massacres his own people should not be allowed.
Fair enough, but the argument for war being put forward by George Bush is that this is a war of self defence and that the US has no alternative but to attack Iraq preemptively before Iraq arms Al Quaida and the US comes under attack with these self same weapons.
So what is the real reason for the upcoming war?
Another poster responded:
The multiplicity of justifications for this war is one of its most suspicious traits. In previous interventions of the last twenty years or so, where the Western powers have been acting reactively - the Falklands, Gulf I, Kosovo, even Afghanistan in 2001 - the motive has generally been pretty straight forward: are we going to let these bastards get away with this, ornot? ("This" usually being some kind of unprovoked military attack). With Iraq, there's a new casus bellum every week. We're doing this because Saddam supports bin Laden. No, wait, it's because of WMDs. Scratch that: it's the Kurds. No - it's to create democracy in the Middle East. When Einstein was presented with a book called _100 Scientists Against Einstein_, he said: "If they were right, one would be enough." The same applies here.
So these things were being discussed at the time, but just not in the commercial media.
The question the media are now ducking regards Bin Laden. It seems that the media is determined to keep him alive. In Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four Emmanuel Goldstein is the perpetual public enemy number one, and every disaster that occurs is attributed to him and his agents, even though it is not even clear that he really exists at all.
Right now we have Bin Laden fulfilling this scapegoat role, supposedly hiding out in the mountains of the north west frontier along with his kidney dialysis team, but give it a few more years and we will probably have him marching up one of those mountains, ascending into the clouds and directing terrorist operations from a perch on the shoulder of Allah.
Would we believe that George W. Bush was still alive if he only communicated with cassette tapes?