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.
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