September 11, 2001, 11:31 p.m.
Have you been watching the news? All of the
"tricks" outlined by Herman below are being mobilized. I suggest keeping
these in mind while monitoring the media in the next few days or weeks.
It really is quite frightening.
As stunned as we are about the loss of so many
lives (it still feels surreal), Mark and I couldn't take anymore
posturing from various administration officials calling for
immediate military reprisals (which would no doubt involve civilian
casualities on "the other side" which would be classified as "collatoral
damage") and invoking a binaristic world-view of good versus evil, of
swift, devastating, Old Testament vengeance. The U.S. adminstration
will pursue their program of retaliation and no doubt the results
will be almost as spectacular as today's events.
We couldn't take anymore talking heads and looped video footage, so we watched
Serpico and Carrie instead.
1:48 p.m.
Because the Bush administration promises to "hunt down
and punish" those responsible for the destruction of the World Trade
Center (NYC), the damage to the Pentagon (WDC), and the attack on "freedom
itself" as imaginatively embodied by the United States of America, and
because there is an increasing mainstream media interest and (so
far unfounded) speculation about the possible involvement of a variety
of Middle Eastern extra-national organizations, I wanted to post this
extensive excerpt from Edward Herman's essay "Terrorisms:
Misrepresentations of Power" (1992).
I'm frankly worried about the will to
retribution; the indistinct (but politically expedient) line between
terrorism and acts of war or "reprisal;" the hypocrisy of the expression
of outrage on behalf of "innocent life" in light of the history of
U.S. foreign policy; the figure of the "Arab terrorist" being summarily
inscribed on all bodies even vaguely resembling an "Arab" countenance;
et cetera. Clearly the loss of human life is tragic. However, there are
all kinds of political machinations and ideological imperatives being
mobilized in this historical moment (not the least of them by the
administration and the media) and it bears attending to some of these
closely.
This excerpt, from Violent Persuasions: The
Politics and Imagery of Terrorism, edited by David J. Brown and
Robert Merill and published in 1992, follows below.
______________________________
How can the country that organized and funded
the Nicaraguan contras and supplied them with a terrorism handbook,
called Psychological Operations in Guerilla Warfare, and that
for many years financed and trained the Salvadoran and Guatemalan armies
that engaged in large-scale civilian murder get itself represented as a
victim of terrorism and deeply concerned with the struggle against
terrorism? This obviously demands a potent system of images and
semantics, but it also depends upon the existence of a cooperative and
powerful base of institutions that will put the images and semantics
across the the general public.
Basically, what is required for suitably biased
representation is that the cultural apparatus centering in the mass
media accept and transmit a system of patriot premises, semantics, and
filtered information that always puts us in a good light and villainizes
our enemies. A main premise in regular use has been that we are always
well intended, trying to foster democracy and responding only to
"threats." If we are always benevolent, then we can only be victims,
never terrorists or sponsors of terrorists. This was swallowed by the
press even as regards Nicaragua, where we supposed Somoza family rule
for forty-five years and became allegedly interested in democracy only
when a non-elite and independent government took power in 1979.
In the semantics of terrorism, four major devices
have been employed. One is to define terrorism so as to exclude states,
allowing a focus on the terrorism of dissidents and rebels. This
deflects attention from the kind of terrorism perpetrated on a large
scale by our clients, like Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, and
Guatemala....[But] state terrorism is excluded from the terrorism
category in Western usage and propaganda because it is politically
inconvenient.
Once you start talking about state terrorism,
you are talking about really large numbers and therefore our government
has decided not to call this terrorism. They insist that terrorism
refers only to the actions of someone such as Abu Nidal or a group
such as the Red Brigades. If any name at all is given to the policies of
murder, disappearance, torture, illegal arrest or imprisonment, police
brutality, bombing, and more that are practiced by the governments of
friendly nations like El Salvador, Israel, South Africa, Brazil, and
many more, it is "counterterrorism." These policies are allegedly
carried out in response to the terrorism of some other individual or
group.
Thus, the second semantic trick is
differentiating terrorism from retaliation. Suppose you say that
everything you do is "retaliation" against something someone else has
done, whereas anything done to you is autonomous terrorism based on no
genuine grievance or true provocation. You are always retaliating for
someone else's violence, and they are always attacking you for no good
reason, This also makes your actions a matter of "self-defense," and
self-defense is accepted generally as an unassailable excuse.
[This
can also take the form of so-called "pre-emptive" strikes. --M.]
A third semantic device has been to use the
concept of "international terrorism," i.e., cross-border attacks by
non-state terrorists. This allows the selective inclusion of states as
terrorists, as they can be labeled "sponsors" of "international
terrorists." Thus Qaddafi can be brought in as a "sponsor" of Abu Nidal.
Of course, South Africa sponsors Renamo in Mozambique and Israel sponsors
the South Lebanese Army, and the United States sponsored the contras in
Nicaragua and the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan, but I have never seen a
mainstream publication describe these last cases as sponsorship of
international terrorism.
This brings us to the fourth and pivotal trick:
selective attention and indignation. Great attention and much
indignation is given to Qaddafi's sponsorship of terrorism across
borders, but U.S. Israeli, and South African sponsorship is treated in a
low key or ignored altogether by the cultural institutions, as if such
actions don't fit the category.
[Thus the millions of civilians
classified as legitimate military targets in Nagasaki and Hiroshima are
not usually counted as innocent victims of "terrorism," and U.S.
covert operations and support for, say, the Pinochet regime in Chile,
which murdered and "disappeared" thousands, are not seen as sponsorship
of international terrorism. --M.]
11:03 a.m.
Callers to a C-SPAN call-in show are warning, "Anyone who looks different, better watch out," voicing veiled and obvious, blatant threats. Someone else reports calls to expel or "beat to
death" all Arabs (and those who look vaguely Arabic, no
doubt). In conversations on the bus, a friend overheard people
calling for "another Hiroshima" against the Palestinians (presumably the
massacre of certain
civilian populations is permissible in
her world-view), although there is as yet no
clear evidence to support the belief that the PLO or any other Middle Eastern
organization or government is responsible. And once again the major network media are assuming that the attacks are of Arabic or Islamic origin. Oklahoma City is being referenced without any mention of McVeigh, domestic terrorist groups or U.S. rightwing militias. There is much talk about "freedom and democracy under fire," and no mention of the regular bombing attacks (currently in Iraq) perpetrated by the U.S. military nor its own dense history of invasions and covert operations in other nations.