Tag Archives: iraq

The other bombs…

Posted on by
Reply

The media has been constantly picking over the terrible scenes from Boston yesterday- in particular some footage taken on a mobile telephone of the bombs going off- each time in slow motion. There is something fetishistic about it all, despite the utter horror.

At the same time we have had endless speculation about who did it, why they did it, and heard the eye witness testimony of anyone and everyone who was there and prepared to discuss what they saw, and how horrible it was.

Three people dead, over a hundred injured, all reduced to endless infotainment.

iraq-car-bomb

It may come as a surprise to hear that these were not the only bombs that exploded in the middle of packed innocent humanity yesterday. In a wave of bombing across Iraq, at least 27 people were killed and over a hundred injured.

The news told us next to nothing about these other bombs. They were not newsworthy. People in Iraq die all the time, and are not like ‘us’ – there is no shock value, no sense of righteous outrage therefore no airtime required.

Please do not misread what I am saying. The death of an 8 year old boy on the streets of Boston is appalling, despicable, dreadful. But so is the death of an 8 year old boy on the streets of Iraq.

The news has never been just a provider of neutral, bald factual information- it has always been a cultural construct. There was a discussion on the radio this morning about how in the past the news could be regarded as a unifying force- we gathered round the wireless at set times, and (for good or ill) the news collectified our sense of being- it told is who we were.

Those days are gone. Now we can not escape the news- it comes at us full speed from a thousand different sources. It is spewed out so fast and the media machine is so hungry, that content now is increasingly instant, but somehow entirely predictable and repetitive. Stories are slotted into grooves dependent on what we are thought to expect- what will hold our attention, and cause us to retweet items, and share them on facebook.

Is this a problem? When it supports western centric colour blind prejudice it certainly is. Perhaps there are other issues too. Check out this article. Here are a couple of extracts;

In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. That’s why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognise how toxic news can be.

News misleads. Take the following event (borrowed from Nassim Taleb). A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? The car. The person in the car. Where he came from. Where he planned to go. How he experienced the crash (if he survived). But that is all irrelevant. What’s relevant? The structural stability of the bridge. That’s the underlying risk that has been lurking, and could lurk in other bridges. But the car is flashy, it’s dramatic, it’s a person (non-abstract), and it’s news that’s cheap to produce. News leads us to walk around with the completely wrong risk map in our heads. So terrorism is over-rated. Chronic stress is under-rated. The collapse of Lehman Brothers is overrated. Fiscal irresponsibility is under-rated. Astronauts are over-rated. Nurses are under-rated.

…

News kills creativity. Finally, things we already know limit our creativity. This is one reason that mathematicians, novelists, composers and entrepreneurs often produce their most creative works at a young age. Their brains enjoy a wide, uninhabited space that emboldens them to come up with and pursue novel ideas. I don’t know a single truly creative mind who is a news junkie – not a writer, not a composer, mathematician, physician, scientist, musician, designer, architect or painter. On the other hand, I know a bunch of viciously uncreative minds who consume news like drugs. If you want to come up with old solutions, read news. If you are looking for new solutions, don’t.

Society needs journalism – but in a different way. Investigative journalism is always relevant. We need reporting that polices our institutions and uncovers truth. But important findings don’t have to arrive in the form of news. Long journal articles and in-depth books are good, too.

Losing small wars, but not learning lessons…

Posted on by
2

Britain has been engaged in some small war or other for much of the last couple of decades. Small that is as they are not here- the public are not particularly involved, and most of the time are not even very interested.

The last couple- Iraq and Afghanistan- will probably come to define our age- along with the ‘credit crisis’, and the death of Princess Di.

When these wars are spoken about at all in the media, a strange kind of mythological language is used. We start from a position of ‘our brave boys’ (no argument there- mostly we send boys, and they are incredibly brave) who are part of the most professional, humane and most highly respected army in the whole world.

Criticism of the war is possible- in terms of the political decisions that have been made- but criticism of the actual way the war is being waged by our Generals is not countenanced.

If you are interested in an alternative perspective, then I would recommend listening to Start the Week on the i-player, here.

Frank Ledwidge was devastating in his analysis. He described how we lost the war in Iraq- including the humiliation in Basra, where our forces were rescued by an exasperated US army. We then went on the lose the war in Afghanistan, where we sent our troops to a place where they were only ever going to be seen as an invading unwelcome army- given our history in the region.

The scary thing about this is how little we are prepared to hear these critical voices. We have been brought up to view our own military misadventures as essentially good versus bad- the plucky resourceful Brit against the Hun/Jap/Red. We always triumph in the end- true character always does.

This ignores all the evidence to the contrary- the mounting body bags, the torture of prisoners, the resounding “NO!” echoing from the population of all these countries that we are supposedly liberating.

Them there is the stench of post imperialist self-interest, and the feeling of being manipulated by murky spinners of media messages- all of that gung ho ‘smart’ bombing and ‘shock and awe’-ing.

The discussion mentioned above identified some key myths that we really should watch out for (along with a few of my own suggestions)-

  • “Failure is not an option”- we will win. We. Will. Win. Or at least give it the appearance of victory.
  • “This year is the pivotal year”- as each one seems to be.
  • More money will win ‘hearts and minds’.
  • You can’t trust the locals.
  • The hero myth- glorious death. Dulce et decorum est.
  • War will solve our problems.
  • You can fight a war on terrorists by terrorising their communities in return.
There is a different path of course- to see these things from the perspective of the individual. This is a luxury that governments, particular superpowers, appear not to have. The voices that emerge from war that are the most powerful in retrospect are ALWAYS the stories of individuals faced with the awfulness of war.
.
Our TV’s are full of the soldiers stories- amputees and medal winners, returners to family. We have so few stories of ordinary Afghans.
.
Let us create space for honest debate, and for the sharing of stories of small ordinary people in extra ordinary situations.