| Wednesday, April 9, 2003 |
09:28 - Faces
|
(top)  |
Drop your masks, everybody; take a bow. The show is over.
  
International ANSWER responds:
On Saturday, April 12, join the tens of thousands of people of conscience who will surround the White House. The whole world is watching to see if the people of the United States can intensify the power of the anti-war movement at the moment that the Bush Administration is intending to slaughter tens of thousands of Iraqi people and occupy their country.
We urge every anti-war organizer and concerned person to bring your friends, neighbors and family members to this all-important mobilization on April 12.
...Baghdad has been bombed relentlessly, terrorizing the occupants of that city and of the entire country. ... U.S. and British forces have laid siege to Basra, bombing and destroying the electrical supply to the main water plant and blocking the Iraqi food distribution system...
  
Arab world incredulous at Saddam's fall
The overwhelming emotion for many was one of disbelief, tinged for some with disappointment after weeks of hearing Saddam's government pledge a "great victory" or fight to the death against "infidel invaders."
"We expected resistance, not what happened," said Ghadah Shebah, a business administration student at the American University in Cairo.
   
"You won't be seeing footage like this on al-Jazeera", the Fox anchor said.
And dozens of Syrians, Jordanians, Egyptians, Saudis, and others continue to pour into Iraq to defend their poor helpless Iraqi brothers against the horror of genocide at the hands of the Americans.
I wonder if they'll listen to the liberated Iraqis they meet when it's explained to them what has really happened-- or if they'll just slaughter them.
Realization dawns
A captured Iraqi colonel being held in one of the hangars listened in astonishment as his information minister praised Republican Guard soldiers for recapturing the airport.
He looked at his captors and, as he realised that what he had heard was palpably untrue, his eye filled with tears. Turning to a translator, he asked: "How long have they been lying like this?"
The "minders" have all vaporized. Minister of Information al-Sahhaf is gone. And suddenly, al-Jazeera has no more propaganda to broadcast; we in the West have been expecting this victory and these scenes of celebration for days now, but for those who get all their information from al-Jazeera and who take al-Sahhaf's words at face value, their world has suddenly gone from a promise of total victory over the infidels to the crushing reality of absolute, near-effortless defeat, in less than 24 hours.
"The whole world isn't like the US"; I've always known that, but I may not have really felt it until now. I may not have had a context in which to understand just what it means to have to face the reality, one day, that everything you've been told, all your life, from your most trusted information source, the most benevolent and compassionate and authoritative father figure(s) in the world, has been a lie.
I'm trying to figure out how it is that an entire swath of people can be trained so deeply and effectively to shut out reality, to believe in the most transparent and insane of propaganda, when there is so much counterevidence immediately available to anyone who chooses to look. What we're seeing here is the same state of mind that allows people to listen to imams who shriek for Allah to freeze the blood in the Americans' veins and believe that that represents the best and only positive future for the world.
"Freedom" is one of those words that has been tinged with cynicism, more so every time we put it in the name of some food or sexual device, or every time we talk to a contemptuous European. But we never really do get a sense here of just how much we take that simple concept for granted, and what it means to the people in these pictures, and how alien it is to those glued to their TVs waiting vainly for the next reassurance from the Information Minister. A simple concept, but really not all that common in the world today. The freedom to know.
Many seem not only to not know of other viewpoints, but not to want to know of other viewpoints. It's a bizarre kind of creation of reality through selectively allowing only certain bits of information in through the eyes and ears. It seems a whole lot of people, in fact, like it that way.
What is it that has driven so many people into this mindset? Is it their religion, their culture, their countries' political systems-- what? What common element is there? What culprit is there that we can identify without seeming racist, or bigoted, or ethnocentric, or intolerant, or (worst of all) generalistic?
How do we call a spade a spade, without being denounced by the Union of Differently-Shaped Shovels?
I'm sure the historians will be able to come up with something to explain the situation the world is in, the thorough rejection of reality throughout the Middle East and the desire to die in waves for an illusion.
I'm sure it will turn out to be the Americans' fault-- and Israel's.
UPDATE: AP and Reuters report on the incredulous reaction among Arabs in the region. Disappointment, disgust, the dawning understanding of a world turning upside down.
"We discovered that all what the (Iraqi) information minister was saying was all lies," said Ali Hassan, a government employee in Cairo. "Now no one believes (Arab satellite TV channel) al-Jazeera anymore."
Really? If that's true, that's a big first step.
UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds says that watching the footage of the celebrations and the statues toppling is "better than blogging". I agree; 'scuse me.
UPDATE: Balloon Juice has a much better photo-fisking than this post.
|
|
