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NEWS June 23 2001
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| SILENT DEMOCRACY By David Cromwell and David Edwards ‘It’s sociologically interesting, though scary’, said the actor Anthony Sher in an interview, ‘that you can be inside an evil system and be somehow unaware of it.’ South African by birth, Sher was talking about the former systemof apartheid. But what if the same could be said of our ‘liberal-democratic’ western society? During 1999’s 78-day NATO bombing campaign of the Former Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland wrote, ‘Future historians will spend long hours and write fat books working out this phenomenon. Why have the Serbs not risen in outrage at the unspeakable horrors committed in their name?’ Future historians, in fact, have already examined Freedland’s ‘unspeakable horrors’ and found them to be pure fantasy,the product of the overheated imagination of NATO warmongers and credulous journalists. It is now clear that in the twelve months prior to the bombing, between 1,000 and 2,000 people were killed on both sides of the conflict, with deaths running at an average of one per day in the weeks running up to the attack - appalling, but hardly genocidal. In its examination of 30 mass grave sites the FBI unearthed a total of some 200 bodies. In Ljubenic, a mass grave alleged to contain some 350 bodies was found to contain just seven. In town after town, alleged mass graves were found to be empty or contained only one or two bodies. The head of a Spanish forensic team attached to the International Criminal tribunal, Emilio Perez Pujol, denounced the way his time had become part of ‘a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines, because we did notfind one - not one - mass grave.’The timing of the famed flood of refugees has also been of interest to future historians. Prior to the bombing, and for two days following its onset, the United Nations Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported no data on refugees. On March 27, three days into the bombing, UNHCR reported that 4,000 had fled Kosovo to Albania and Macedonia. By April 5, the New York Times reported ‘more than 350,000 have left Kosovo since March 24’. Long after this had all become clear, Lord Robertson, Secretary General of NATO, did his best to exploit public(media-assisted) ignorance of these matters in an ITV interview in June 2000: ‘We were faced with a situation where there was this killing going on, this cleansing going on; the kind of ethnic cleansing we thought had disappeared after the Second World War. You were seeing people there coming in trains, the cattle trains, with refugees once again. Were we supposed to stand back? Were we supposed tostand back and watch people being murdered, butchered, tortured, raped, expelled from their country, simply to do nothing?’ To prevent what, in fact, was low-level killing and a tide of refugees that barely existed (until after the bombing had begun), NATO sent bombs crashing through 33 medical clinicsand hospitals, 344 schools, a mosque in Djakovica, a Basilica in Nis, a church in Prokuplje, trains, tractors, power stations, and the rest. It polluted the land with depleted uranium shells and unexploded cluster bomblets which continue to kill children and adults. Also, in June 2000, Amnesty International reported how ‘NATO forces...committed serious violations of the laws of war leading in a number of cases to the unlawful killings of civilians.’ Amnesty focused in particular on the April 23, 1999 bombing of the headquarters of Serbian state radio and television, which left 16 civilians dead, describing it as ‘a deliberate attack on a civilian object’ which therefore ‘constitutes a war crime.’ The report noted that the requirement that NATO aircraft fly above 15,000 feet to provide maximum protection for aircraft and pilots ‘made full adherence to international humanitarian law virtually impossible’. The real question, not just for future historians, but for all thinking people, is how so many respected journalists, like Jonathan Freedland, could yet again be so readily taken in by the deceptions of power? Spokespeople for state power have always insisted that they are acting for the good of all humanity, and respected commentators have always accepted their words at face value as though they were born, if not yesterday, then since the previous set of lies had been exposed as utterly fraudulent. This happens with such consistency that there is clearly something more than random chance at work. Noam Chomsky explains how the selection process can best be understood: ‘In any society, the respectable intellectuals, those who will be recognised as serious intellectuals, will overwhelmingly tend to be those who are subordinated to power. Those who are not subordinated to power are not recognised as intellectuals, or are marginalised as dissidents, maybe ‘ideological’. The tendency is just as obvious as the fact that corporate media serve corporate interests.’ The notion of a Western-led ‘moral crusade’ becomes even more extraordinary when we consider that millions of people have died, and many millions more have been condemned to lives of misery and torture, as a result of Western interventions in Iran, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Guatemala, Chile, Brazil, Nicaragua, Iraq and elsewhere. The leading academic scholar on human rights in Latin America, Lars Schoultz, found, for example, that US aid ‘has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens... to the hemisphere’s relatively egregious violators of fundamental human rights’. The rationale is not hard to divine: exploitative conditions - ‘good investment climates’ benefiting local elites and Western corporations (the real power) – require violence to pacify the discontent of impoverished majorities. Britain and the US actively supported Suharto’s bloody coup in Indonesia in 1965-66 at the cost of one million lives. Some 90% of the bullets used in Indonesia’s subsequent invasion of East Timor in 1975 were US-supplied. Around 200,000 people died in a slaughter for which Suharto ’’as given the green light’ by the US, according to former CIA operations officer in Jakarta, Philip Liechty: ‘We sent the Indonesian generals everything that you need to fight a major war against somebody who doesn’t have any guns. We sent them rifles, ammunition, mortars, grenades, food, helicopters. You name it; they got it. And they got it direct,’ Liechty adds. Pragmatic need is more than sufficient to ensure that these facts are either unknown or dismissed out of hand. Corporations are naturally not keen to discuss the role of terror and murder in imposing ‘development’ on the Third World; nor are their allies in government; and nor is the ‘free press’ - itself made up of corporations, owned by parent corporations, and dependent on corporate advertisers. It is not that they think the above facts are not true: they can’t be true, and so they are ignored, or dismissed as delusions. The familiar notion of the essential benignity of Western power, by contrast, must be true - it is a ‘necessary illusion’ - and so it is true: we are proud supporters of ‘democracy’, ‘fair play’ and ‘respect for law and order’ in a world that somehow comes to be filled with violent thugs supported by Western states and businesses which coincidentally profit immensely from their violence. The first casualty of the war for profit is the capacity to make elementary rational connections. The United States, after all, is massively rich and powerful. Central and South America are weak and afflicted with terrible poverty. The United States is an ardent supporter of democracy and freedom. Central and South America are eternally plagued by authoritarian governments and outright dictators. US corporations profit massively from the vulnerability of Central and South American human and natural resources. A secondary school child could work it out, and yet such connections are totally alien, indeed unknown, to our corporate press. Take another example of our silent ‘democracy’. Climate change. According to the London-based Global Commons Institute, there will be more than two million deaths from climate change-related disasters worldwide in the next ten years. Damage to property will amount to hundreds of billions of dollars. But where are the in-depth media debates exposing the chasm between the magnitude of the climate threat and the pitiful political response to it? No wonder that Ross Gelbspan, the Pultizer Prize-winning journalist, once wrote that ‘news stories about the warming of the planet generally evoke an eerie silence’. There are exceptions. Last year travellers in the Arctic discovered that the legendary Northwest Passage has at last been opened by climate change. Peter Conradi noted in The Sunday Times, ‘The benefits are considerable: up to 2,500 miles will be cut from journeys from one coast of America to the other, and as much as double that from Europe to Asia.’ A marvellous boost to global trade, in other words, particularly if oil drilling in the Alaskan wildlife refuge goes ahead as Bush plans... ‘Not all experts share the euphoria’, however, as there remains a depressing, if slight, risk that local temperatures might actually fall slightly over the next few years, threatening the passage. The academic community is, by and large, complicit in this mixture of silence and absurdity. When one of this article’s authors, an oceanographer, attends meetings on the politics of climate change, he is commonly asked by management whether he is attending ‘as an individual or as a representative of the organisation’. But what does such a question actually mean? Where and how can the line be drawn between the professional self and the personal self? The disjunction is profoundly unhealthy, echoing R.D Laing’s concept of ‘the divided self’ - a division that is characteristic of the truly insane mind. The renowned German psychologist Erich Fromm analysed the psychology of obedience in modern corporate society. The ‘organization man’, Fromm wrote, ‘is not aware that he obeys; he believes that he only conforms with what is rational and practical’. In academia, to be ‘rational and practical’ means to conform to a system that rewards obedience to power: elite interests – transnational corporations and international investors - which benefit from ‘free trade’ and deregulated capital flows. Meanwhile, their political allies in government trip over themselves to cut public services to boost ‘international competitiveness’. Sober academics are not ‘supposed’ to step outside their specialised field of knowledge to criticise the private interests which pollute precious ecosystems, destroy communities, abuse human rights and threaten the global climate system. They are ‘supposed’ to restrict their public utterances to safe topics that do not reflect badly on their institutions or upset funding sources. Such ‘neutrality’ ensures that today’s headlong rush to environmental devastation and social injustice proceeds apace. In truth ‘neutrality’ is impossible: to do nothing is to vote for disaster. When Chomsky was challenged to explain what qualified him as a commentator on US domestic and foreign policy, he replied simply, ‘I’m a human being’. How many times have scientists told us informally, ‘Get me down the pub over a pint and I’ll tell you what I really think about climate change and oil companies’? What kind of professional ‘objectivity’ is that? It is the kind that acquiesces in research and teaching moulded to a corporate-shaped economy; that does not challenge our political paymasters about the deaths of 5000 young Iraqi children every month as a direct result of Western-imposed economic sanctions; and that allows one in six British children to live in poverty with barely a murmur in the press or academia. How can we reconcile these facts with the widespread belief in the essential goodness of our ‘liberal-democratic’society? We cannot. ‘Our boasted civilisation’, said Jack London, ‘is based upon blood, soaked in blood,and neither you nor I nor any of us can escape the scarlet stains.’ Far from living in a benign, democratic society, we are living under a system that promotes power and profit above concern for justice and life. By now the deluding power of institutionalised greed for profit and personal compromise are at a level where society can work remorselessly to ensure its own destruction by undermining even trivial moves to control greenhouse gas emissions. Witness the response of big business to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change: obstructionism all the way. And what about us? How much do we really care? How much does it really matter to us so long as we get on with playing safe, with getting paid and climbing the promotional ladder? If some kind of stand needs to be made, then it is surely someone else who will have to make it. And if some kind of price needs to be paid, then it is surely someone else whowill have to pay it. As historian and activist Howard Zinn has noted, we are kidding ourselves if we think we have no choice, or that no choice needs to be made: ‘In a situation where one’s job is within someone else’s power to grant or to withhold, still there is the possibility of choice. The choice is between teaching and acting according to our most deeply felt values, whether or not it meets approval from those with power over us - or being dishonest with ourselves, censoring ourselves, in order to be safe.’ |