Invisible Experience, Invisible Commentary
Seven months after the Bola Boluk and Manhattan flyover incidents, as The New York Times and other leading “liberal” media outlets joined in the celebration of Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, a young woman from Bola Boluk was heard to say, “He doesn’t deserve the award. He bombed us and left us with nothing, not even a home,” the woman added.[6]
She was heard, that is, on the Arab media outlet Al Jazeera. Her comments never made the CBS or NBC or ABC Evening News or CNN or MSNBC or the front page of the New York Times or the Washington Post, where they belonged.
Neither did the comments of a young Pashtun man who spoke to Al Jazeera on December 10, 2009 – the day that Obama was ridiculously gifted with the Nobel. ”Peace Prize? He’s a killer,” the man said. “Obama,” the man added, “has only brought war to our country.” This man spoke from the village of Armal, where a crowd of 100 gathered around the bodies of 12 people, one family from a single home. The 12 were killed, witnesses reported, by U.S. Special Forces during a late night raid. “Why are they giving Obama a peace medal?” another village resident asked. “He claims to want to bring security to us but he brings only death.”
It was a powerful observation form an angle of experience that cannot be taken seriously in dominant U.S, mass media.
“A Fog of War Moment”
Thanks in no small part to that empire’s service to state power, America’s crimes go down “the memory hole” even as they occur, Thinking about Obama’s Nobel award earlier this year, I reflected back on some remarkable comments that the British playwright Harold Pinter made while accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005. In his brilliant and courageous speech, Pinter noted that while “the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, and the ruthless suppression of independent thought” in the former Soviet Union were widely known in the West, the United States’ imperial crimes were hidden beneath “a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.” Rapacious “America” had slaughtered and crippled millions, both directly and indirectly, through wars big and small, executions, invasions, coups, the sponsorship of dictatorships, the equipping of repressive regimes, “economic sanctions,” and more, Pinter noted. “But you wouldn’t know it,” Pinter added. “It never happened,” Pinter observed.” Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it never happened….”
Still true! The systematic media disappearance and mystification of U.S. imperial criminality continues to this day. Last Monday, on the CBS Evening News that remarkable and horrific WikiLeaks video showing U.S. Apache helicopter gunners crassly murdering Arab journalists in Iraq got about 30 seconds and was the fourth or fifth story down whereas Tiger Woods’ return to golf was like two minutes and was I think the second story. That’s typical.
Last Wednesday, The New York Time way back on page nine referred to the U.S. helicopter murders as a, quote “fog of war moment…on the streets of Baghdad.” No it was a one-sided imperial murder moment, consistent with the homicidal and deeply racist military training and beliefs that the American armed forces bring to the Middle East – beliefs and training that are chillingly depicted in the antiwar documentary The Ground Truth.
Bob Herbert Still Doesn’t Hear Him (Dr. King)
Two Saturdays ago, the New York Times’ liberal black columnist Bob Herbert marked the forty-second anniversary of the assassination Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. by noting that “it took great courage for Dr. King to speak out as he did” against the Vietnam War. “His bold stand,” Herbert wrote, “seems all the more striking in today’s atmosphere, in which moral courage among the …prominent seems…to have disappeared. …More than 4,000 Americans have died in Iraq and more than 1,000 in Afghanistan,” Herbert noted, “where the Obama administration has chosen to escalate rather than to begin a careful withdrawal. Those two wars will ultimately cost us more than $3 trillion. And yet,” Herbert concluded, “the voices in search of peace, in search of an end to the ‘madness,’ in search of the nation-building so desperately needed here in the United States, are feeble indeed.” Herbert’s column was titled “We Still Don’t Hear Him,” with “him” referring to the martyred Dr. King.
As one of my Facebook friends wrote me, “[that’s] about the far extreme level of acceptable ‘dissent’ within the mainstream, of which the NYT is the best example.”
The key phrase in Herbert’s column was “cost us.” Cost us? Hello? Herbert’s eloquent column itself does NOT fully HEAR Dr. King’s antiwar stance. King wrote and spoke not only against the Vietnam War’s terrible impact on Americans but also and equally against the terrible crimes that the U.S. committed against Southeast Asians. The people of Indochina, King said in 1967, “must find Americans to be strange liberators” as we “destroy their families, villages, land” and send them “wander[ing] into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one ‘Vietcong’-inflicted injury. So far we have killed a million of them – mostly children.” Further:
“They languish” King said, “under our bombs and consider us – not their fellow Vietnamese – the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we heard them off the land of their fathers and into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they most move or be destroyed by our bombs…they watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their land. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy he precious trees….They wander into the towns and see thousands of children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our solders as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our solders, soliciting for their mothers.” [6A]
That’s the kind of serious and substantive, principled and moral criticism of U.S. foreign policy you do not hear in U.S. media today or back in the 1960s.
