War, Media and Democracy

[azov]

http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=4484&sectionID=4

[azov]

To start the ball rolling so you lazy bast - uh, fellow posters - can have some meat to sink your teeth into . . .

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War, Social Justice, Media and Democracy

by Norman Solomon; November 10, 2003

Prepared text of speech at the Brazilian Social Forum November 8, 2003 Belo Horizonte, Brazil

I am very glad to be here to participate in the Brazilian Social Forum.

For me and the grassroots activists who I work with every day in the United States, many events have caused us to feel discouraged during the last few years. But I have often remembered words that I heard in early 2001 at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre. Speaking there, Eduardo Galeano mentioned a statement that he saw written on a wall on a street in a South American city. The statement said: "Let's save pessimism for better times."

To people on this planet who are striving to overcome the destructive priorities of neoliberalism, the transition that has occurred in Brazil this year offers hope. We see in the present day that the struggles of millions of people, for years and decades, can bring uplifting changes that once seemed very unlikely or even impossible.

But in the United States - and for the people elsewhere in the world who have been in the main line of fire of U.S. policies - the times have gotten worse in recent years.

I live in California, a state where a bad actor can become governor. And I live in a country where the presidents are bad actors.

In Washington, the job description for presidents is to act like humanitarians while functioning as world-class exploiters and thugs.

Ten months ago, I visited Baghdad while accompanying Denis Halliday, the former United Nations assistant secretary general who had been director of the UN's "oil for food" program in Iraq. I felt in January that I was at the scene of a crime against humanity - a crime that had not yet occurred, but that was being proudly proclaimed on the agenda of the leaders of the U.S. and British governments.

Before the launching of cruise missiles and two-thousand pound bombs against Baghdad and other heavily populated urban areas, before the "cluster munitions" that would be scattered across cities and towns in Iraq, before the depleted uranium shells that would be fired with the subsidies of U.S. taxpayers - before the all-out unleashing of the Pentagon's lucrative firepower - there were the weapons of mass deception.

In the cross-hairs of these weapons of mass deception were any people who could perhaps be persuaded to be gullible. The propaganda armaments were endless phony claims about seeking diplomatic solutions. The propaganda armaments were speeches at the United Nations where President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell fervently presented false claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda. But most of all, the arsenals of propaganda - enabling the war on Iraq to proceed - were the news media.

And in many ways, the most powerful technique of deception continues to be silence about truth.

In the United States, very few prominent journalists are willing to mention that President Bush has the blood of many Iraqi children on his hands after launching an aggressive war in violation of the U.N. Charter and the Nuremberg principles established more than half a century ago.

Anti-democratic news media are hostile to history. And so, the same propaganda machinery says little about the suffering that results from the class war constantly waged by the wealthy - and avoids telling much about the human consequences of militarism.

The writer Mark Twain once said that "None but the dead are permitted to speak truth."