Covering
Up US War Crimes
By James Petras
01 December, 2004
Green
Left Weekly
I
am reading William Shirer's Berlin Diary, a journalist's account of
Nazi political propaganda during the 1930s, as I watch the US news
reports of the violent assault on Fallujah.
The US mass media
reports, the style, content and especially the language,
echo their Nazi predecessors of 70 years ago to an uncanny degree. Coincidence?
Of course! In both instances we have imperialist armies conquering countries,
levelling cities and slaughtering civilians and the mass media,
private in form, state appendages in practice, disseminate the most
outrageous lies, in defense and praise of the conquering storm
troopers call them SS or marines.
Both in Nazi Germany
and contemporary US, we are told by the mass media that the invading
armies are freeing the country of foreign fighters
and armed terrorists, who are preventing the people
from going about their everyday lives. Yet we know that of the 1000
prisoners there are only four foreigners (three Iranians and one Arab);
Iraqi hospitals report less than 10% of casualties are foreign fighters.
In other words, over 90% of the fighters are Iraqis most of whom
were born, educated and raised families in the cities in which they
are fighting.
Like the Nazi media,
the major US radio and TV networks only report what they call military
casualties failing to report the civilians killed since
the war started and the thousands of women and children killed and wounded
since the assault on Fallujah began.
Like in Nazi Germany,
the US mass media feature unconfirmed reports by the US military of
the bloody murders, beheadings and kidnappings by the foreign
terrorists. The unconditional support of Nazi/US mass media for
the killing fields is best captured in their reports of the massive
bombing of densely populated city districts. For the US network NBC,
the dropping of 500-pound bombs in the city of Fallujah is described
as targeting an insurgent tunnel network in the city. And
the houses, markets, stores the mothers and children above those
tunnels vaporised into pink mist, their existence
never acknowledged by the leading reporters and broadcasters.
Almost the entire
population of non-Kurdish Iraq is opposed to the US military and its
puppet regime yet the media refer to the patriots defending their
country from the imperial invaders as insurgents, minimising
the significance of a nationwide patriotic liberation movement. One
of the most surreal euphemisms is the constant reference to the coalition
forces meaning the US colonial conquerors and the mercenaries
and satraps that they direct and control.
The terror bombing
of homes, hospitals and religious buildings by hundreds of airplanes
and helicopter gunships is described by the media as securing
the city for free elections.
Freeing the
city of insurgents includes the systematic murder of friends,
neighbours and relatives of every Iraqi living in the city of Fallujah.
Surrounding the insurgents means cutting off water, electricity
and medical aid for 200,000 civilians in the city and putting tens of
thousands who fled under threat of a typhoid epidemic. Pacifying
the city involves turning it to absolute desolate poisoned rubble.
Why do Washington
and the mass media resort to gross, systematic lying and euphemisms?
Basically to reinforce mass support at home for mass murder in Iraq.
The mass media fabricates a web of lies to secure a gloss of legitimacy
for totalitarian methods in order that the US armed forces can continue
to destroy cities with impunity.
The technique perfected
by Goebbels in Germany and practiced in the US is to repeat lies and
euphemisms until they become accepted truths, and embedded
in everyday language. The mass media by effectively routinising a common
language implicates the listeners. The tactical concerns of the generals,
the commanders directing the slaughter (pacification), and the soldiers
murdering civilians are explained (and consumed by the millions listening
and watching) by the unchallenged authorities to the compliant journalists
and famous news anchors.
The unity of purpose
between the agents of mass murder and everyday US public is established
via news reports: The soldiers paint the names
of their wives and sweethearts on the tanks and armoured vehicles that
destroy Iraqi families and turn Fallujah into ruins. Returning soldiers
from Iraq are interviewed who want to return to be
with their platoon and wipe out the terrorists.
Not all of US combat
forces experienced the joys of shooting civilians. Medical studies report
that one out of five returning soldiers are suffering from severe psychological
trauma, no doubt from witnessing or participating in the mass killing
of civilians. The family of one returned soldier, who recently committed
suicide, reported that he constantly referred to his killing of an unarmed
child in the streets of Iraq calling himself a murderer.
Aside from these
notable exceptions, the mass propaganda media practise several techniques,
which assuage the conscience of US soldiers and civilians.
One technique is role reversal to attribute the crimes of
the invading force to the victims: It is not the soldiers who cause
destruction of cities and murder, but the Iraqi families who 'protect
the terrorists' and bring upon themselves the savage bombardment.
The second technique
is to only report US casualties from terrorist bombs
to omit any mention of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed by US bombs
and artillery. Both Nazi and US propaganda glorify the heroism,
success of their elite forces (the SS and the Marines)
in killing terrorists or insurgents every
dead civilian is counted as a suspected terrorist sympathiser.
The US and German
military have declared every civilian building a storehouse
or hiding place for terrorists'hence the absolutely
total disregard of all the Geneva laws of warfare. The US and Nazi practice
of 'total war' in which whole communities, neighbourhoods and entire
cities are collectively guilty of shielding 'wanted terrorists'is
of course the standard operating military procedure of the Israeli government.
The US publicises
the cruel and unusual punishment of Iraqi suspects (any
male between 14 and 60 years old) taken prisoner: photos appear in Time
and Newsweek of barefoot, blindfolded and bound young men led from their
homes and pushed into trucks to be taken to exploitation centres
for interrogation. For many in the US public these pictures are part
of the success story they are told these are the terrorists
who would blow up US homes.
For the majority
who voted for US President George Bush, the mass propaganda media has
taught them to believe that the extermination of scores of thousands
of Iraqi citizens is in their best interests: they can sleep sound,
as long as our boys kill them over there.
Above all the mass
propaganda media has done everything possible to deny Iraqi national
consciousness. Every day in every way the reference is to religious
loyalties, ethnic identities, past political labels, tribal
and family clans. The purpose is to divide and conquer, and to present
the world with a chaotic Iraq in which the only coherent,
stable force is the US colonial regime. The purpose of the savage colonial
assaults and the political labelling is to destroy the idea of the Iraqi
nation and in its place to substitute a series of mini-entities
run by imperial satraps obedient to Washington.
Sunday morning:
November 14. Today Fallujah is being raped and razed, captured. Wounded
prisoners are shot in the mosques. In New York, the mega-malls are crowded
with shoppers.
Sunday afternoon:
the Marines have blocked food, water and medicine from entering Fallujah.
Throughout the US millions of men sit in front of the television watching
football.
Shirer reported
that, while the Nazis invaded and ravaged Belgium and bombed Rotterdam,
in Berlin the cafes were full, the symphony played and people walked
their dogs in the park on sunny Sunday afternoons.
Yes, there are differences
between Shirer's account of Nazi propaganda in defense of the conquest
of Europe and the US media's apology for the invasion of Iraq and Israel's
slaughter of the Palestinians: One is committed in the name of the Fuehrer
and the Fatherland, the other in the name of God and Democracy. Go tell
that to the bloated corpses gnawed by dogs in the ruins of Fallujah.
[James Petras, a
former Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, owns
a 50 year membership in the class struggle, is an adviser to the landless
and jobless in Brazil and Argentina and is co-author of Globalization
Unmasked. He can be reached at: http://[email protected].]