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News :: Miscellaneous |
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The Media and It's Hierarchy Of Violence |
Current rating: 0 |
by Sam Smith, The Progressive Review
(No verified email address) |
31 Aug 2001
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The dominant media has a very strange and hypocritical view of violence. |
THE MEDIA HAS STARTED BLEATING about violence again, which would be all well and good if were not so selective in defining the term. Most would agree that a Palestinian strapping a bomb to himself and blowing up a night club or a demonstrator throwing a rock at cop is engaged in a violent act. But what about a country that locks up nearly ten percent of its twenty-something black men, many for doing nothing worse than choosing to use a milder drug than vodka? Or killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis while enforcing a futile embargo? Or shooting people because some policeman thought he saw a gun? And who has killed more of whom in the recent Middle East conflict, albeit with government-supplied arms rather than home-made explosives?
In such cases, talk of violence rapidly disappears, replaced by, at best, discussion of "issues," the difference being - in the media's view - that violence perpetrated by the state is merely policy. Smashing the window of a Gap store is violence, damaging a country's whole water system is hardly worth mentioning.
We are, for example, hearing a lot of talk of anarchists these days. In fact, as violent people go, anarchists aren't that much. David Brown, who catalogs significant events with a particular interest in anarchy, says maybe they've killed a couple of hundred people over the past few centuries. Compare that with nation states, which managed to off over a hundred million during the 20th century alone.
In the end, it makes little difference to the victim whether the bomb that kills them comes from Timothy McVeigh or from a US Air Force stealth bomber. For the media to excoriate one form of violence and sanitize another is not objectivity, but propaganda of the most cynical sort.
Malcolm X noted this hypocrisy when he said, "If violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad. If it is wrong to be violent defending black women and black children and black babies and black men, then it is wrong for America to draft us, and make us violent abroad in defense of her. And if it is right for America to draft us, and teach us how to be violent in defense of her, then it is right for you and me to do whatever is necessary to defend our own people right here in this country."
One may rightfully argue as to whether violence can be fairly justified by the existence of other violence, but there is no doubt that, almost without exception, what the media attacks as political violence has its roots in a reaction to far greater state-sanctioned violence which the media rarely condemns. Thus the violence of demonstrators is loudly attacked, but that of the global gluttons is largely condoned.
The quickest route to the end of violence is neither more violence nor prissy condemnations of the inevitable reaction that comes when the weak are too long confronted with the violence of power. Rather it is to be found in the just solution of the problem that led to the violence in the first place. If Palestinians were granted true statehood, the violence in the area would cease. If America and its allies ended their covert war against Iraq, innocent Iraqis would no longer have to die due to the embargo's denial of adequate drugs and food. If the Catholics of Northern Ireland were granted the rights of others who are under the Crown, there would be no more bombs. And if we had truly fair trade, instead of a grotesquely greedy cabal of corporate conquistadors and their corrupt political flunkies, our cowardly leaders would not have to take refuge behind a nine-foot wall in what was once known as the "capital of the free world." |
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http://www.prorev.com/indexa.htm
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