They Just Never Meant Very Much To Us

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Mon, 25 Jul 2005 17:53:12 UT

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They Just Never Meant Very Much To Us

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

July 25, 2005

 

 

MEDIA LENS COGITATION: THEY JUST NEVER MEANT VERY MUCH TO US

 

By David Edwards

 

 

Samples From An Ocean Of Suffering

 

In 1992 a group of neuroscientists travelled to India to research the

effects of meditation. In the mountains above Dharamsala, the scientists

spent time with a young monk who had been meditating intensively for

six years. Richard Davidson, a psychobiologist from the University of

Wisconsin, had done pioneering work correlating minute shifts in facial

expression with emotions. He explained to the monk that he would be shown

a video of Tibetan demonstrators being beaten by Chinese security

forces. His face would simultaneously be videoed to record any reactions.

Writer Alan Wallace described the result:

 

" As the monk watched the video, we didn't detect any change of

expression in his face at all, no grimace, no shudder, no expression of

sadness. " (Wallace, Buddhism With An Attitude, Snow Lion Publications,

2001,

p.176)

 

The monk was asked to describe his experience while watching the video.

He replied:

 

" I didn't see anything that I didn't already know goes on all the time,

not only in Tibet but throughout the world. I am aware of this

constantly. "

 

It was not that the monk failed to experience compassion while watching

these brutal scenes, Wallace explains: " He was aware that he was simply

being shown a video - patterns of light - representing events that took

place long ago. But this suffering was simply one episode in the

overall suffering of samsara [existence], of which he was constantly

aware.

Hence, while looking out over the ocean of suffering, he didn't feel

anything extraordinary when he was shown a picture of a glass of water " .

(Email to author, July 15, 2005)

 

This account came to mind when I saw the response to the July 7

terrorist atrocities in London. In the video experiment, the monk's

mind was

so steeped in compassion that his expression did not change at all even

when he saw images of his own people being brutalised. So what does it

tell us that so many British people were so deeply shaken by the

suffering of their fellow citizens?

After all, have we not been reading and watching endless accounts and

footage of near-identical horrors in Iraq and Palestine on mainstream

and internet-based media over the last few years? The suffering of the

Iraqi people, for example, is almost beyond belief. When the West again

blitzed Baghdad in March 2003, this followed years of war and sanctions

that had shattered the country's infrastructure. The population again

being bombed had already had to endure the deaths of literally hundreds

of thousands of children from malnutrition, water-borne diseases and

other horrors caused by US-UK sanctions. This truly was suffering heaped

on suffering.

 

Howard Zinn made the point after the September 11 attacks:

 

" One of the things that occurred to me, after I had gotten over my

initial reaction of shock and horror at what had been done, was that

other

scenes of horror have taken place in other parts of the world and they

just never meant very much to us. " (Zinn, Terror And War, Open Media

Book, 2002, p.90)

 

 

One Second Per Death

 

I don't believe this comparative indifference is hard-wired into human

nature. The truth is that we are trained to value the lives of our

countrymen more highly by a socio-political system that has much to gain

from a restricted, patriotic version of compassion, and much to lose from

an excess of popular concern for suffering inflicted on 'foreigners' by

our governments and corporations.

 

It was a very real disaster for American elites when ordinary Americans

became outraged by the catastrophe inflicted by US power on the people

of Vietnam. This concern seriously obstructed US realpolitik, stirring

previously slumbering democratic forces and threatening elite control

of society (see Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove, Voices of a People's

History). Famously, the champion boxer Muhammad Ali refused to fight in

Vietnam, saying:

 

" No, I am not going ten thousand miles from home to help murder and

burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave

masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such

evils must come to an end. " (Ali, 1966. Quoted, Howard Zinn and Anthony

Arnove, Voices of a People's History, Seven Stories, 2004, p.431)

 

At time of writing, the death toll from the London bombings stands at

56 dead. In the early evening of March 28, 2003, the media reported the

killing of 55 Iraqi civilians (the final toll was 62) by an American

missile in the al-Shula district of Baghdad. Hours later, David Sells of

the BBC's Newsnight programme devoted 45 seconds to the atrocity 16

minutes into the programme - less than one second per death.

 

These 45 seconds presented the slaughter as an Anglo-American public

relations problem, and a predictable one at that: " It is a war, after

all " , Sells observed blandly over footage of Iraqi women wailing in

grief,

adding: " But the coalition aim is to unseat Saddam Hussein by winning

hearts and minds. "

 

Imagine if Sells had commented on the London bombings that people +had+

died, " It is a terrorist campaign, after all " , but the bombers' aim was

" to win hearts and minds " .

 

I asked George Entwistle, then Newsnight editor, how he justified just

45 seconds of coverage. He replied: " As a current affairs programme we

lead on a news story where we think we can add analytical value; i.e.,

can we take it on? We didn't feel we could add anything. " (Interview

with the author, March 31, 2003)

 

Something of " analytical value " would certainly have been found if the

victims had been British or American. We can make all the excuses we

like, but the fact is that tragedies of this kind just don't mean as much

to us.

 

Last week, the Independent noted that an October 2004 report in The

Lancet had estimated Iraqi civilian deaths at nearly 100,000, but that

the

methodology " was subsequently criticised " . (Terry Kirby and Elizabeth

Davies, `Iraq conflict claims 34 civilians lives each day as " anarchy "

beckons,' The Independent, July 20, 2005)

 

But the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which

conducted the survey, is one of the world's most prestigious research

organisations. And The Lancet is one of the world`s leading science

journals. I

asked Terry Kirby, co-author of the Independent article, which

criticisms he had in mind. Kirby replied: " So far as I am aware, the

Lancet's

report was criticised by the Foreign Office. " (Email to the author, July

22, 2005)

 

You couldn't make it up!

 

On the same day, an Independent leader added that the Lancet findings

had been reached " by extrapolating from a small sample... While never

completely discredited, those figures were widely doubted. " (Leader, `The

true measure of the US and British failure,' The Independent, July 20,

2005)

 

Lead author Gilbert Burnham from the Johns Hopkins School told me the

sample size was entirely standard:

 

" Our data have been back and forth between many reviewers at the Lancet

and here in the school (chair of Biostatistics Dept), so we have the

scientific strength to say what we have said with great certainty. I

doubt any Lancet paper has gotten as much close inspection in recent

years

as this one has! " (Dr. Gilbert Burnham, email to the author, October

30, 2004)

 

By contrast, an independent website, Iraq Body Count, last week

published a report estimating that nearly 25,000 Iraqi civilians have

died

since the invasion and occupation began. The report was not conducted

by a

leading research body, it was not peer reviewed, and yet it was broadly

accepted and granted headline status by the BBC, ITV News, the Guardian

and many other media. Even senior government figures were happy to

mention the website's results.

 

This is a perfect example of how the establishment tends to see only

what it wants to see. That would be fine, except that the public is

therefore unable to understand or address the real problems our

governments

have created. That means more suffering for everyone.

 

Repeated endlessly, and contrasted with mass coverage of Western

victims of terror, such entrenched bias inevitably trains us to value

Western

lives above non-Western lives. Like the air we breathe, this parochial

compassion comes to seem normal and natural to the extent that we

barely even notice when our armies are killing Third World people in vast

numbers. Noam Chomsky is a rare voice willing to discuss this reality:

 

" If they do something to us, the world is coming to an end. But if we

do it to them, it's so normal, why should we even talk about it? "

(Chomsky, Power and Terror, Seven Stories Press, 2003, p.20)

 

 

We Cry! We Live!

 

I've sometimes had discussions with people on the subject of altruism,

love and compassion where someone has indicated, say, their wife and

children, and declared: " I'd sacrifice my life to protect them. "

 

Alan Wallace invites us to consider whether this kind of commitment is

necessarily rooted in compassion and altruism, or whether it might

involve an extension of selfishness. Are we in fact defending what we see

as part of " me " and " mine " , extensions of ourselves?

 

The media praise public outpourings of compassion and grief for the

victims of London, New York and Madrid as signs of a nation's humanity.

And surely they are. But how much of this concern is also rooted in a

sense that we - our people, our security, our way of life - are under

attack? How much is our reaction actually an expression of self-concern?

 

It is vital that we aspire to broaden and equalise our compassion for

suffering. Not because it's " nice " , not because we should " teach the

world to sing " . It is vital because otherwise there is a real danger

that,

in caring deeply for real and important 'us', and ignoring irrelevant

`them', we become utterly blind to the misery we are causing, and

entirely ruthless in crushing those who cause us harm.

 

Even as the media were asking how on earth human beings could kill

innocent commuters in London, Christopher Hitchens wrote in the Daily

Mirror: " We shall track down those responsible. States that shelter them

will know no peace. " (Hitchens, `07/07: War on Britain,' The Mirror, July

8, 2005)

 

In the New York Times last week, leading columnist Thomas Friedman

wrote:

 

" We need to shine a spotlight on hate speech wherever it appears. The

State Department produces an annual human rights report. Henceforth, it

should also produce a quarterly War of Ideas Report, which would focus

on those religious leaders and writers who are inciting violence

against others. I would compile it in a nondiscriminatory way. "

(Friedman,

'Giving the hatemongers no place to hide,' New York Times, July 22, 2005)

 

And yet this is the same Thomas Friedman who had himself written at the

height of the NATO bombing of Serbia in April 1999:

 

" Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs

certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you

ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by

pulverising you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can

do 1389

too. " (Friedman, 'Stop the music,' New York Times, April 23, 1999)

 

Many people believe there is a deep divide between ethics and politics.

But a patriotic version of compassion is often the most potent weapon

of realpolitik. It is used to persuade us to ignore our own crimes and

to turn against " evildoers " , official enemies often selected on the

basis of carefully hidden agendas.

 

Compassion can also, however, be the most potent tool of liberation,

breaking the links of greed, hatred and ignorance from which our

political chains are formed. Power needs compassion to be partial,

patriotic,

rooted in self-concern. Humanity needs compassion to be universal,

unconditional and equal.

 

The basis for this equalised concern is straight forward enough:

everyone is identical in yearning from the depths of their hearts for

an end

to suffering and for lasting happiness. Recognising that this is so -

that others truly are just like us in this respect - provides a basis

for universal compassion. Or are we seriously to believe that suffering

is somehow deeper and more important 'here' than `there'? Suffering is

simply suffering.

 

Every time our media present Third World people as anonymous crowds, as

inconsequential extras in grand Western dramas, we might remind

ourselves of the deeply humane words spoken by the cousin of a

Palestinian man

shot dead by the Israeli army in Nablus refugee camp. The man spoke of

his shock at the events of September 11, but continued:

 

" I know what they feel. But I want them to know what I feel. I think

many of them don't want to know about us, don't want to know what we

feel. They think we are from another country, or from another star. We

also, like them, we cry! We live! We feel sad! We feel happy! And we have

minds, also! I want them to use their minds and to understand what

happened here. " (Through Muslim Eyes, Channel 4, September 6, 2002)

 

 

 

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