27 Sep. - 3 Oct. 2001
Issue No.553
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 27 Sep. - 3 Oct. 2001 Issue No.553 |
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What's in a headline?
It used to be something of a perk, working in a newspaper office that belonged to an organisation that exercises more or less a monopoly over distribution to newsstands. Not for you, of course -- without a monopoly on distribution, so the argument runs, you might be able to buy your foreign papers for several piastres less. (A not very convincing argument, it has always seemed to me. Who cares tuppence if yesterday's Independent is LE6.50 or LE6.25. What with the devaluation of the Egyptian pound, and the things you can buy -- maids, cooks, chauffeurs -- for a tiny fraction of an expatriate salary.) But an advantage for me, perhaps, since yesterday's British press is readily available, only 24 hours later, in the office, and for free.
An advantage, that is, until quite recently. For now every paper I read has the same banner declaring the same thing, sometimes in enormous lettering, occasionally in less bold a typeface. They all, whatever the size, spell one thing. And the thing they spell is war.
It comes in many guises, of course. On Sunday The Observer led with "British set for key role in Afghan onslaught." The Sunday Times managed "US airborne units on Afghan frontier preparing to strike." Both managed to stretch their euphemisms over two lines. But onslaught or strike, it's all the same.
Why not use the easier word. War -- its just three letters, more or less arranged phonetically. A simple message, in two inch high type face, and supposedly self explanatory.
Read the inside pages (and remember, for a Western Sunday paper you have almost a football pitch of newsprint to fill, once the supplements are dismembered) and the simple message becomes much less self-explanatory. War against whom? And why?
Page after page of commentary will follow, with precious little journalism, if at all. War against whom? Osama Bin Laden, of course. Afghanistan, of course. And the evidence? Well, the FBI has it. The CIA has it. President Bush has it. Tony Blair has it. Colin Powell might have it. Jacques Chirac might have it. But you or me, despite rainforests being depleted to provide us with so much coverage, no one is willing to confide exactly what it is that confirms the most obvious suspicion.
I'm going to do the required thing, the manoeuvre that is now a demanded part of the obscene choreography. Burning 6,000 and more people to a cinder, crushing them beneath 110 storeys, leaving families in trauma, fatherless, motherless, sonless, brotherless, without hope and without explanation, is an unspeakable crime. And I'll go one step further. Burning one person to a cinder, crushing him or her beneath 110 storeys, or two storeys, or one -- leaving a single family fatherless, sonless, motherless, without hope and without explanation, is an unspeakable crime. It is a crime that must be punished, and must be explained, that is if anything we might cling onto, and dignify with the name civilisation, can continue.
And truth be told, to read about defending civilisation -- for that has been the tenor of much of the commentary in the British press -- to read about attacks on our values, cannot help but leave anyone but the pathologically insensate feeling sick to the core, as sick as pondering the horror of those burned to death, or crushed beneath rubble, or leaping from a burning building. Repugnance at one death, at one person killed for no reason, is the same repugnance felt when thousands of innocent people are killed, or should be.
Yet in our fabulous global village -- though it is by now less fabled than anyone ever thought possible -- we know only of death. We know of a child being shot repeatedly in "crossfire" (was there ever a less innocent term coined for murder) because he happened to be in the wrong place, at the wrong time, on the wrong day, having been to the wrong spare car part market. It was not a secret death. You can watch it on film. And there are other deaths, a mountain of deaths, not as graphically replayable, not filmed, not replayed endlessly on CNN, but of victims just as innocent, just as hapless, just as tragically caught in the wrong place, at the wrong time, on the wrong day. And none of these are secret deaths, whatever the euphemism beneath which they are buried. It is not difficult to excavate the corpses, the bodies of the innocent, from beneath a term such as collateral damage. It is easy to drag yet more corpses from beneath unavoidable civilian casualties. You do not need a particularly vivid imagination to be able to exhume yet more corpses from beneath the banner headlines, the talk of onslaught, and of strikes. And you do not need incredible insight to know that many of those corpses will belong to the innocent.
No one knows how many people were killed when America bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, in response to Bin Laden's involvement in the bombing of US embassies. The US, as Noam Chomsky pointed out in this newspaper last week, blocked a UN inquiry into the incident. The US subsequently paid compensation to the owner of the factory, which it turned out was manufacturing medicines after all, and not bombs. And reports in the American press suggested that even Washington concedes one, no doubt unavoidable, civilian casualty in this exploit. A nameless guard. History gives him no mention. We can assume, too, his family received no compensation.
There are vast tracts of this planet where no money means no food. There are vast tracks of the planet where no breadwinner means indescribable poverty. There are vast tracks where a refrigerator, let alone a dishwasher, let alone a swimming pool, let alone a bottle of mineral water, cannot exist. And because people do not own these things makes them no less innocent. But they, too, must be remembered, if we want to appropriate the term civilised for ourselves.
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