Bagaimanakah kawalan pemikiran berfungsi dalam masyarakat yang menyebut diri mereka bebas? Mengapa wartawan terkenal begitu bersemangat, hampir sebagai refleks, untuk meminimumkan kesalahan pemimpin politik seperti Bush dan Blair yang berkongsi tanggungjawab untuk serangan tanpa provokasi ke atas orang yang tidak berdaya, kerana membuang tanah mereka dan membunuh sekurang-kurangnya 100,000 orang, kebanyakan mereka orang awam, telah berusaha untuk membenarkan jenayah epik ini dengan pembohongan yang boleh dibuktikan? Apakah yang diterangkan oleh wartawan BBC tentang pencerobohan Iraq sebagai "pembenaran untuk Blair"?
Why have broadcasters never associated the British or American state with terrorism? Why have such privileged communicators, with unlimited access to the facts, lined up to describe an unobserved, unverified, illegitimate, cynically manipulated election, held under a brutal occupation, as “democratic” with the pristine aim of being “free and fair”? Do they not read history? Or is the history they know, or choose to know, subject to such amnesia and omission that it produces a world view as seen only through a one-way moral mirror? There is no suggestion of conspiracy. This one-way mirror ensures that most of humanity is regarded in terms of its usefulness to “us”, its desirability or expendability, its worthiness or unworthiness: for example, the notion of “good” Kurds in Iraq and “bad” Kurds in Turkey. The unerring assumption is that “we” in the dominant west have moral standards superior to “them”.
One of “their” dictators (often a former client of ours, like Saddam Hussein) kills thousands of people and he is declared a monster, a second Hitler. When one of our leaders does the same, he is viewed, at worst like Blair, in Shakespearean terms. Those who kill people with car bombs are “terrorists”; those who kill far more people with cluster bombs are the noble occupants of a “quagmire”. Historical amnesia can spread quickly. Only ten years after the Vietnam war, which I reported, an opinion poll in the United States found that a third of Americans could not remember which side their government had supported. This demonstrated the insidious power of the dominant propaganda, that the war was essentially a conflict of “good” Vietnamese against “bad” Vietnamese, in which the Americans became “involved”, bringing democracy to the people of southern Vietnam faced with a “communist threat”.
Andaian palsu dan tidak jujur seperti itu meresap ke dalam liputan media, dengan pengecualian yang mulia. Sebenarnya perang paling lama pada abad ke-20 ialah perang yang dilancarkan terhadap Vietnam, utara dan selatan, komunis dan bukan komunis, oleh Amerika. Ia adalah pencerobohan tanpa provokasi terhadap tanah air dan kehidupan mereka, sama seperti pencerobohan Iraq. Amnesia memastikan bahawa, sementara kematian penceroboh yang agak sedikit sentiasa diakui, kematian sehingga lima juta rakyat Vietnam dibiarkan dilupakan. Apakah punca ini? Sudah tentu, "budaya popular", terutamanya filem Hollywood, boleh menentukan apa dan betapa sedikit yang kita ingat. Pendidikan terpilih pada usia muda melaksanakan tugas yang sama. Saya telah dihantar panduan semakan yang digunakan secara meluas untuk pelajar sejarah dunia moden, mengenai Vietnam dan perang dingin. Ini dipelajari oleh pelajar berusia 14 hingga 16 tahun di sekolah British, menduduki peperiksaan GCSE kritikal. Ia memberitahu pemahaman mereka tentang tempoh sejarah yang penting, yang mesti mempengaruhi cara mereka memahami berita hari ini dari Iraq dan tempat lain. Memang mengejutkan. Ia mengatakan bahawa di bawah perjanjian Geneva 1954: "Vietnam telah dibahagikan kepada utara komunis dan selatan demokratik." Dalam satu ayat, kebenaran dihantar. Pengisytiharan akhir persidangan Geneva membahagikan Vietnam "sementara" sehingga pilihan raya kebangsaan bebas diadakan pada 26 Julai 1956. Terdapat sedikit keraguan bahawa Ho Chi Minh akan menang dan membentuk kerajaan pertama Vietnam yang dipilih secara demokrasi. Sudah tentu, Presiden Eisenhower tidak meragui perkara ini. “I have never talked with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs,” he wrote, “who did not agree that… 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader.” Not only did the United States refuse to allow the UN to administer the agreed elections two years later, but the “democratic” regime in the south was an invention. Salah seorang pencipta, pegawai CIA Ralph McGehee, menerangkan dalam buku mahirnya Deadly Deceits bagaimana mandarin ekspatriat yang kejam, Ngo Dinh Diem, diimport dari New Jersey untuk menjadi "presiden" dan kerajaan palsu telah diletakkan. “The CIA”, he wrote, “was ordered to sustain that illusion through propaganda [placed in the media].” Phoney elections were arranged, hailed in the west as “free and fair”, with American officials fabricating “an 83 per cent turnout despite Vietcong terror”. Panduan itu tidak merujuk kepada semua ini, mahupun bahawa "pengganas", yang oleh Amerika dipanggil Vietcong, juga adalah orang Vietnam selatan yang mempertahankan tanah air mereka daripada pencerobohan Amerika dan penentangannya popular. Untuk Vietnam, baca Iraq. Nada risalah ini adalah dari sudut pandangan "kita".
This proceeds quickly to the Tet Offensive in 1968, which “ended in the loss of thousands of American lives – 14,000 in 1969 – most were young men”. There is no mention of the millions of Vietnamese lives also lost in the offensive. And America merely began “a bombing campaign”: there is no mention of the greatest tonnage of bombs dropped in the history of warfare, of a military strategy that was deliberately designed to force millions of people to abandon their homes, and of chemicals used in a manner that profoundly changed the environment and the genetic order, leaving a once-bounty ful land all but ruined. This revision guide reflects the bias and distortions reflect of the official syllabuses, such as the prestiugous syllabus from Oxford and Cambridge, used all over the world as a model. Its cold war section refers to Soviet “expansionism” and the “spread” of communism; there is not a word about the “spread” of rapacious America. One of its “key questions” is: “How effectively did the USA contain the spread of communism?” Good versus evil for untutored minds. “Phew, loads for you to learn here…” say the authors of the revision guide, “so get it learned right now.” Phew, the British empire did not happen; there is nothing about the atrocious colonial wars that were models for the successor power, America, in Indonesia, Vietnam, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, to name but a few along modern history’s imperial trail of blood, of which Iraq is the latest. And now Iran? The drumbeat has already begun. How many more innocent people have to die before those who filter the past and the present wake up to their moral responsibility to protect our memory and the lives of human beings?