Press Action ::: Free Press Provocateurs

Tuesday, April 13, 2004

Free Press Provocateurs

Inciting a Nation to Foreign Slaughters

By Mark Hand

During her 34 years in the United States, Emma Goldman was spied upon, harassed, and imprisoned on a regular basis by U.S. government authorities. A PBS-TV documentary on Goldman’s life, which aired Monday night, chronicled the abuse she faced at the hands of the ruling class, including the charge of incitement to riot against the established capitalist and militarist order.

By targeting Goldman and her fellow anarchists and socialists, the U.S. ruling elite, with the help of the nation’s press barons, was sending a message to Americans that the U.S. government had a monopoly on the right to incite the masses — toward war and repression. No one had the right to argue in a public forum against the nation’s savage and unnecessary wars abroad. No one had the right to organize Americans against the established order at home.

Among Goldman’s crimes was speaking out against the military draft during World War I, a deed that put her in violation of the Espionage Act. Eventually, U.S. authorities lost their patience with Goldman and hundreds of other free thinkers, including Goldman’s long-time friend Alexander Berkman, and shipped them off to Russia in 1919.

Almost a century later, the established order of things in America remains virtually intact. The government continues to harass, imprison and expel “radical aliens” from the United States. The U.S. press continues to incite the masses to support the imperial ambitions of the U.S. government, including its savage wars in foreign nations.

The government today can count on numerous second-tier media outlets, such as Fox News, the New York Post and the Washington Times, to propagate its brazenly vulgar lies without any worry of insubordination. Even more important to the success of the ruling elite’s ability to retain its control, however, has been the commitment by the respectable press to the established order of power. Never does the New York Times or the Washington Post question the foundation on which U.S. foreign and economic policy is based. The most critical analysis offered by these reputable press outlets is confined to reporting on internal squabbles among the ruling elite.

Regarding the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, editors at the top-tier media outlets have cheered the war effort with as much gusto as the yellow journalists. Editor & Publisher magazine reported on April 9 that a majority of the nation’s 20 largest newspapers, in editorials penned the previous week, had urged the White House to stay the course in Iraq, despite the overwhelming sentiment among Iraqis against the occupation.

“None of the top 20 (by circulation) urged a quick military withdrawal, although some call for the U.S. to share responsibility with the United Nations or NATO,” E&P said. The most “dovish of the papers,” according to E&P, was the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which still concluded, “There can be no question of cutting and running militarily.”

Among the top newspapers, the Washington Post probably has been the most militant in inciting the Bush administration to continue its slaughter in Iraq. Given their pleas for pacification of the Iraqi people, the Post and the other top U.S. papers must share responsibility, through their shaping of U.S. public opinion, for the terrible crimes that the U.S. military has committed in the city of Fallujah and other hot spots in Iraq.

The U.S. military campaign in Iraq, particularly the latest siege of Fallujah, is reminiscent of the atrocities committed in the Balkans, crimes that landed several of that region’s former political and military leaders in the dock of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. And yet, U.S. newspapers continue to urge the U.S. military to take the necessary action to pacify the population and install a U.S.-friendly regime in Baghdad by whatever means necessary. The type of military conduct that the U.S. press is endorsing in Iraq is the same action that the Western press busily portrayed as crimes against humanity in the Balkans.

The U.S. military launched an offensive against Fallujah on April 5, and more than 600 Iraqis have been killed and 1,250 wounded during the campaign. Prior to the launch of the offensive, the Washington Post published an editorial on April 2 calling for the U.S. military to use the necessary force to put down the resistance.

“It is critical that U.S. commanders respond forcefully to Fallujah and step up the counteroffensive against the Sunni insurgency,” the Post said in the editorial. “Militias operating elsewhere in the country — particularly the Shiite Mahdi Army of Moqtada Sadr — must be disbanded and disarmed before they, too, begin targeting U.S. troops and allied Iraqis.”

The Post’s use of the phrase “respond forcefully” in its editorial signaled to the Bush administration that the leading establishment press outlet in the nation’s capital would refrain from casting the military in a negative light, even if it failed to show restraint in Fallujah.

Four days after giving the U.S. military a journalistic green light to commit atrocities in Fallujah, the Washington Post responded to the uprising by Moqtada Sadr and other Shiites by urging the U.S. military to do what was necessary — “a painful but necessary battle” — to quell the growing resistance to the U.S. occupation.

“The eruption of violence between U.S. and coalition troops and a radical Shiite militia certainly marks another turn for the worse in Iraq. Sunday’s heavy toll in casualties, including eight American soldiers killed, suggests how costly it may be to repel the challenge of Moqtada Sadr, the extremist cleric who ordered attacks on the occupation forces,” the Post wrote in the April 6 editorial. “And yet there may ultimately be a benefit to this confrontation, which began just 88 days before the scheduled transfer of sovereignty from the U.S.-led occupation authority to a new Iraqi government. For months it has been evident that it will be impossible to stabilize Iraq under a transitional government, much less stage the democratic elections planned for next year, unless factional militias are disarmed and disbanded. Mr. Sadr’s Mahdi Army is the most dangerous among them. For weeks there has been a debate inside the occupation administration about whether and how to confront Mr. Sadr; by ordering attacks on coalition troops Sunday, the cleric may have ensured that a painful but necessary battle will go forward.”

This past Sunday, the Washington Post published another editorial, advocating the U.S. military embark on a new campaign in Iraq that “probably” will result in “more of the woeful casualty reports.”

“Whether or not it has managed Iraq well or was right to invade the country in the first place, the United States must not allow the country’s extremists, whether Sunni adherents of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship or Shiite followers of Islamic cleric Moqtada Sadr, to drive it from the country or hijack the political process,” the Post said in the April 11 editorial. “Such prevention will require military power and probably more of the woeful casualty reports and gruesome television footage that have been shocking the country. More troops will be needed. Yet, if possible, U.S. and coalition forces must find a way to defeat the enemy militias and restore order in Iraqi cities without prompting a more generalized uprising by Iraqis, particularly in Shiite areas.”

Given its prominence, the Washington Post’s calls for the U.S. military to engage in “painful but necessary” battles and to “respond forcefully” to Iraqi resistance to the U.S. occupation are likely having a major effect on the psyche of the Bush administration and the American public. When prominent U.S. media outlets, such as the Post, endorse such outright criminal behavior, there will be less pressure on the Bush administration to regulate the level of violence the U.S. military is committing in Iraq. When all of the major newspapers in the United States are urging the Bush administration to stay the course in Iraq, fewer Americans will be inclined to consider the alternatives to a bloody occupation of Iraq.

In the unlikely event that U.S. political and military leaders face an International Criminal Tribunal for the United States (ICTUS) for their crimes in Iraq — a court similar to the one set up to try the crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia — top executives at the Washington Post and other media outlets across the United States also should be brought up on charges of inciting public support for crimes against humanity and actively promoting the U.S. political elite’s campaign of murder and plunder in Iraq.

If this scenario were to play out at the ICTUS, it would perhaps represent both a movement against the state’s monopoly on inciting the masses to support perpetual repression and a newfound tolerance for the inherent freedom in life that Emma Goldman sought to incite among individuals.

Mark Hand is editor of Press Action and Arlington Reporter.

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