A Warning From Auschwitz

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Wed, 16 Mar 2005 11:16:54 UT

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A Warning From Auschwitz

 

 

 

MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media

 

March 16, 2005

 

MEDIA ALERT: A WARNING FROM AUSCHWITZ

 

 

How Do You Shoot Babies?

 

Facing execution for his role in the murder of more than 1 million

people, many of them children, Auschwitz commandant, Rudolf Hoess,

reflected on his life and works:

 

" Today, I deeply regret that I did not spend more time with my family. "

(Hoess, `Auschwitz, The Nazis and the Final Solution,' BBC2, February

15, 2005)

 

Hoess of course lies at the extreme end of the spectrum, but his

inability to recognise the extraordinary horror of what he had done is

by no

means exceptional. Mike Wallace of CBS News interviewed a participant

in the American massacre of Vietnamese women and children at My Lai.

 

" Q. You're married?

A. Right

Q. Children?

A. Two.

Q. How old?

A. The boy is two and a half, and the little girl is a year and a half.

Q. Obviously, the question comes to my mind... the father of two little

kids like that... how can he shoot babies?

A. I didn't have the little girl. I just had the little boy at the

time.

Q. Uh-huh... How do you shoot babies?

A. I don't know. It's just one of those things. " (Quoted, Stanley

Milgram, Obedience to Authority, Pinter & Martin, 1974, p.202)

 

One of the delusions promoted by our society is the idea that great

destructiveness is most often rooted in great cruelty and hatred. In

reality, evil is not merely banal, it is often free of any sense of

+being+

evil - there may be no sense of moral responsibility for suffering at

all.

 

We are all familiar with the words that typically accompany the shrug

of the shoulders when someone is asked: " How could you do it? " Time and

again during the war on Iraq we have heard obviously well-meaning US

and British military personnel insisting that they were just doing their

jobs. A typical response is: " I'm just doing what I`m paid to do. "

 

Repeated often enough, these responses can even come to seem

reasonable. But consider, by contrast, these comments made by US

soldier Camilo

Mejia who refused to return to his unit in Iraq after taking leave in

October 2003:

 

" People would ask me about my war experiences and answering them took

me back to all the horrors — the firefights, the ambushes, the time I

saw a young Iraqi dragged by his shoulders through a pool of his own

blood or an innocent man was decapitated by our machine gun fire. The

time

I saw a soldier broken down inside because he killed a child, or an old

man on his knees, crying with his arms raised to the sky, perhaps

asking God why we had taken the lifeless body of his son. I thought of

the

suffering of a people whose country was in ruins and who were further

humiliated by the raids, patrols and curfews of an occupying army.

 

" And I realized that none of the reasons we were told about why we were

in Iraq turned out to be true... I realized that I was part of a war

that I believed was immoral and criminal, a war of aggression, a war of

imperial domination. I realized that acting upon my principles became

incompatible with my role in the military, and I decided that I could not

return to Iraq. " (Mejia, `Regaining My Humanity,'

http://www.codepink4peace.org/National_Actions_Camilo.shtml)

 

Normally, the implicit assumption is that signing a contract and being

paid to do a job absolves us of all further moral responsibility. We

have signed an agreement to do as we are told - an ostensibly innocuous

act. If the people with whom we made this agreement then choose to send

us to incinerate and dismember civilians, that is +their+ moral

responsibility, not ours.

 

The psychologist Stanley Milgram noted that this is a classic evasion

used by people unwilling to accept responsibility for their own actions:

 

" The key to the behaviour of subjects [willing to torture and kill on

command] lies not in pent-up anger or aggression but in the nature of

their relationship to authority. They have given themselves to the

authority; they see themselves as instruments for the execution of his

wishes; once so defined, they are unable to break free. " (Milgram,

op., cit,

p.185)

 

Other studies, on the psychology of torturers, have come to similar

conclusions. Lindsey Williams, a Clinical Psychologist, notes:

 

" ...apart from traits of authoritarianism and obedience, and

ideological sympathy for the government, there is little evidence that

torturers

are markedly different from their peers - at least, until the point

where they are recruited and trained as torturers. " (Williams, Amnesty,

May/June 1995, p.10)

 

The +fundamentally+ immoral act, then - the disaster that clears the

way to vast horrors in the complete absence of a sense of responsibility

- is the simple one of accepting that we are obliged to `do as we are

told`.

 

But in our society exactly this self-surrender is promoted and affirmed

by the fact that it is demanded of us by every corporation that

`employs' us (like a tool), requiring us to sign our agreement to

strict terms

and conditions, and by the fact that massive costs are imposed on those

of us unwilling to be `team-players'. In 1937, Rudolf Rocker wrote:

 

" It is certainly dangerous for a state when its citizens have a

conscience; what it needs is men without conscience, or, better still,

men

whose conscience is quite in conformity with reasons of state, men in

whom

the feeling of personal responsibility has been replaced by the

automatic impulse to act in the interests of the state. " (Rocker,

Culture and

Nationalism, Michael E. Coughlan, 1978, p.197)

 

 

The " Gushing " Phenomenon

 

Like military personnel, corporate journalists also sign themselves

over to authority. Individuals may come and go but, year after year,

in an

all but unvarying pattern, reporters end up demonising official enemies

and prettifying their own government's crimes. Like military personnel,

they view what happens next as someone else's moral responsibility.

 

In January 2003, Media Lens wrote to BBC presenter Fiona Bruce asking

her why she had described the build-up of troops in Kuwait as being " to

deal with the continuing threat posed by Iraq " . Bruce replied simply:

" I'll forward your point to the news editor - thank you. " (BBC 18:00

News, January 7, 2003. Bruce, email to Media Lens, January 7, 2003)

 

But if we refuse to accept responsibility for the very words that come

out of our mouths, have we not lost our humanity? The result, very

often, is that other people lose their lives.

 

ITN's John Irvine recently reported on " the hermit state " of North

Korea where people celebrated the birth of the country's leader in a

" display of people in perfect unison - cynics might call it Come

Dancing, or

else! " (Irvine, ITV 22:30 News, February 16, 2005)

 

The North Korean people, it seems, had been " treated to hours of

gushing television " in honour of the leader. " When it comes to

propaganda " ,

Irvine concluded, this is a broadcaster beyond comparison. "

 

There are ugly ironies here. The first, of course, is that British TV

viewers are also familiar with the " gushing " phenomenon. When Baghdad

fell to US tanks on April 9, 2003, British journalists gushed

uncontrollably. The BBC's Rageh Omaar, for example, reported his first

sight of

the invading army:

 

" In my mind's eye, I often asked myself: what would it be like when I

saw the first British or American soldiers, after six years of reporting

Iraq? And nothing, nothing, came close to the actual, staggering

reaction to seeing American soldiers - young men from Nevada and

California -

just rolling down in tanks. And they're here with us now in the hotel,

in the lifts and the lobbies. It was a moment I'd never, ever prepared

myself for. " (BBC News At Six, April 9, 2003)

 

It was to these same young men that ex-Marine Staff Sergeant Jimmy

Massey was referring when he said:

 

" It sickened me so that I had actually brought it up to my lieutenant,

and I told him, I said, `You know, sir, we're not going to have to

worry about Iraq - you know, we're basically committing genocide over

here,

mass extermination of thousands of Iraqis...' "

(http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/24/148212)

 

An hour after Omaar's report, the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, told

Channel 4 news presenter Jon Snow that he had met with the French

foreign minister that day: " Did he look chastened? " Snow asked, wryly.

(Channel 4, April 9, 2003)

 

On the same programme, Washington correspondent David Smith pointedly

ended his `piece to camera' on the fall of Baghdad by quoting " a leading

Republican senator " :

 

" I'm just glad we had a commander-in-chief who didn't listen to

Hollywood, or the New York Times, or the French. "

 

John Irvine, himself, declared: " A war of three weeks has brought an

end to decades of Iraqi misery. " (Irvine, ITN, 18:30 News, April 9, 2003)

 

This at the height of an illegal invasion based on a set of outrageous

lies in which literally tens of thousands of Iraqis were being killed.

 

The deeper irony is that Irvine's comments on North Korea were made

from the heart of the West's own propaganda system - a system that

consistently demonises official enemies in exactly this way. In April

1950, a

US National Security Council Directive stated:

 

" The citizens of the United States stand in their deepest peril, " being

threatened with the " destruction not only of this Republic but of

civilisation itself " by " international Communism " . (Quoted, Mark

Curtis, The

Ambiguities of Power, Zed Books, 1995, p.43)

 

The threat was a fraud. Privately, former Under-Secretary of State and

future Deputy Secretary of Defence Robert Lovett pointed out (March

1950): " If we can sell every useless article known to man in large

quantities, we should be able to sell our very fine story [regarding the

communist 'threat'] in larger quantities. " (Ibid, p.44)

 

In May 1985, Ronald Reagan declared a " national emergency " to deal with

the " unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and

foreign policy of the United States " posed by " the policies and

actions of

the Government of Nicaragua " . (World Court Digest,

http://www.virtual-institute.de/en/wcd/wcd.cfm?107090400100.cfm)

 

Nobody laughed!

 

In September 2002, Tony Blair declared in his foreword to " the British

dossier assessing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq " :

 

" It is unprecedented for the Government to publish this kind of

document. But in light of the debate about Iraq and Weapons of Mass

Destruction (WMD), I wanted to share with the British public the

reasons why I

believe this issue to be a current and serious threat to the UK national

interest. " (`Full text of Tony Blair's foreword to the dossier on

Iraq,' The Guardian, September 24, 2002)

 

John Morrison, an adviser to the parliamentary intelligence and

security committee and a former deputy chief of defence intelligence,

told the

BBC: " When I heard him using those words, I could almost hear the

collective raspberry going up around Whitehall. " (`Official sacked

over TV

remarks on Iraq,' Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian, July 26, 2004)

 

Morrison was sacked for his honesty. A year later, Blair is up for

re-election, while his `retired' spinmeister Alastair Campbell recently

appeared on the quiz show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Campbell has

also

been quietly `welcomed back' into the New Labour fold.

 

Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh, Panama's Noriega, Nicaragua's Ortega, Cuba's

Castro, Haiti's Aristide, indeed any leader or movement obstructing

Western corporate or strategic interests, have all been reflexively

demonised

by journalists who are always happy to rally to their leaders call

without a second thought.

 

The companion to media demonisation is the hagiolatry of Western

leaders and apologetics for their crimes. Thus Simon Tisdall writes in

the

Guardian:

 

" Groundbreaking elections in Afghanistan, Ukraine, Palestine and Iraq,

extolled in President Bush's `dawn of freedom' inaugural address, have

encouraged western hopes that democratic values are gaining universal

acceptance. " (Tisdall, `Bush's democratic bandwagon hits a roadblock in

Harare,' The Guardian, February 16, 2005)

 

On the BBC's main news, Clive Myrie describes America as " the champion

of democracy " , referring to " a role call of newly-minted democracies. "

(Myrie, BBC1, 13:00 News, February 23, 2005)

 

 

A Warning To The Curious

 

We need to be clear that the commandant of Auschwitz did not for one

moment see himself as evil or destructive. Nor did the troopers at My

Lai. And nor, of course, do our well-heeled, well-educated, Oxbridge

journalists. They may have tempers and egos - they are surely not mass

murderers.

 

But journalists who reflexively reinforce an authorised, Manichean view

of the world - a world made up of " humanitarian interventionists "

(`Us') and " Monster States " {'Them') - +are+ utterly vital cogs in the

machinery of industrial killing. It makes not one jot of difference

that no

actual blood is visible on their hands.

 

The 2nd century sage, Nagarjuna, made the points that matter:

 

" Not doing harm to others,

Not bowing down to the ignoble,

Not abandoning the path of virtue –

These are small points, but of great

Importance. "

 

 

SUGGESTED ACTION

 

The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and

respect for others. In writing letters to journalists, we strongly urge

readers to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.

 

Write to Simon Tisdall

Email: simon.tisdall

 

Write to John Irvine

Email: john.irvine

 

Please also send all emails to us at Media Lens:

Email: editor

 

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