And so we struggle to understand the brave new world we are entering. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who, along with the appalling Donald Rumsfeld of the US of A, has become the new front man for the New World Order, tells the world’s press that what the ‘alliance” intends for Iraq is a democratic order, and elaborates that this is an order that the alliance will ‘encourage” rather than dictate.
Well, excuse me if my command of the English language is beginning to slip. It would seem to me that the unilateral action of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the obscure Pacific Ocean colony of Australia to overthrow Iraq’s Saddam Hussein by force would indicate an inclination to dictate rather than encourage. The latest turn in this bizarre drama is the decision to hold ‘peace talks” in the southern Iraqi city of Nassiriyah.
Once again, I fail to understand the New Labour/Texan cowboy spin on the English language.
Peace talks are usually entered into by two opposing sides in a conflict. In this case, the one side in the unequal battle has simply been eliminated, and the victors have shipped in a motley collection of rag-heads who are pliant to their world view to map the way forward into darkness.
And, as far as I can see, the leaders of the victorious army are not even present to carry their side of the argument, leaving it to a bunch of less than eloquent military officers to oversee the process instead.
As I say, I am baffled. But I guess that’s the point. As long as we’re baffled, we have no idea how to stimulate our brains and our bodies to action. And action, it would seem to me, is what is urgently required at this moment in time.
The alliance has ushered in a new era of smart bombs and dumb words. And the world’s press, including the South African branch of the Fourth Estate, has swallowed the whole thing — hook, line and sinker.
The Star’s cover page on Tuesday this week was emblazoned with the word VICTORY in thick black letters. Accompanying it was a large picture of a rosy-cheeked British lance corporal called Tammy Wickett patrolling the streets of Al Amarah — the ultimate symbol of wholesome European womanhood smilingly taking control of the savage east.
It was like VE Day, D-Day and the Falklands War rolled into one. One had to wonder what it was we were celebrating. Was this leading icon of the South African press suggesting that the alliance’s unsurprising military walkover in Iraq was somehow our own victory as well? How?
At a poorly attended anti-war meeting at the Johannesburg City Hall the previous week, deputy foreign minister Aziz Pahad had posed the question of how the media was going to justify its passive support for this illegal and devastating operation. ‘One day,” he said, ‘those embedded journalists will have to answer the question: what was their philosophical framework in the coverage of this war?”
Good question. The more one watched and read about this primitive mission, the more one was appalled at the way in which the media seemed to be relishing the destructive power of it all.
On television, embedded journalists wearing combat jackets and tin hats grew more and more jubilant about their part in the campaign, as if they themselves were pulling the trigger each time another civilian target was hit. And the tame press of the world (including our own, as I have said) simply relayed the same excited emotions in their own pages.
OK, that’s not quite fair. There has been passionate criticism as well in various media. But the main point is, what now? What role will the media, in particular, play in next stage of the game?
Will the media, now that it has been embedded, be further seduced by the nonsensical language of the victors, and join in the chorus about ‘peace talks” and ‘reconstruction”, when there is no peace to talk about, and no possibility of reconstruction of the ancient Mesopotamian civilisation, as represented in the looted Baghdad Museum?
This was a direct consequence of the US/UK/Australian invasion, and was as useful in humanity’s stride towards civilisation as the Taliban’s destruction of ancient relics in Afghanistan. Remember what that war was about? Nobody does anymore. And the Fourth Estate has even stopped talking about it. It’s just another of those 20th century faits accomplis. And so we soldier on.
The big question is what all this is going to mean for the people of the Third World—the bulk of humanity? In particular, for us, sitting where we sit, what is it going to mean for the much-heralded African Century announced by President Thabo Mbeki at the dawn of the new millennium?
Already the US administration is openly talking about the New American Century. The language of the oppressed has been casually appropriated once again, just as the lands, the cultures and the bodies of the oppressed were appropriated in earlier times.
And this raises the question: did those bad old days actually ever end? Have we simply lived through a brief interlude where we were allowed to believe that we had won our freedom? What freedom?
The British and American governments have ushered in a new imperial era. As Pallo Jordan said at the same poorly attended protest meeting in central Johannesburg, they have brought about a regime change ‘not to create a democratic Iraq, but a compliant Iraq”. He did not need to add that the implication of this was that they also intend to create a compliant world, by whatever means necessary.
So where are we headed? And what are we doing about it? And how are those of us who have mouths to speak articulating the dangerous times we are suddenly living through once more?
John Matshikiza is a fellow of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza