Propaganda, Iran, and the next war - a child's perspective
by herman meester
In the Netherlands we have had, for a few decades now, something called the Jeugdjournaal, which is a daily news program for young people, everyone up to the age they start watching the adult news -- or stop watching the news altogether.
This program was already there in the 1980's when I was a kid. Now children often remember things not the way they really were, but the way they felt it. And occasionally, you think back about things that happened when you were a kid, and see it in a different perspective.
All through the nineteen eighties, as far as I remember, there was news on this Jeugdjournaal now and then about the proceedings in the Iran-Iraq war. This so-called First Gulf War was a dreadful, very dirty business, that was started by Iraq.
It was started by Iraq, but I don't remember having been told that by the Jeugdjournaal. Maybe it was told, maybe it was not. In any case the profound and lasting impression I got as a kid, watching the coverage of the first Gulf War, was that obviously, Iraq must be the good guys, and Iran must be the bad guys. That was the main feeling I remember having, when I think back of something I hope most kids do not remember at all from watching the Jeugdjournaal, the first Gulf War.
Of course there are bad guys and good guys in wars. It actually makes a lot of sense to claim that anyone that starts wars, is the bad guy. There are no wars without massive death, torture, and mutilation. There are no wars without children, babies, women, men, old people, being ripped to pieces, or if at all possible, even worse. Despite what we'd like to believe in our peaceful democratic little countries, there is no clean war.
Saddam Hussein was the aggressor, but at the time, and to this day, we did not like the Iranian regime, and in the 1980's it was still painfully recent that the pro-US/UK Shah regime was sacked by the Ayatollah, the Mullahs, the zealots and fanatics. We didn't like them, because the West had been busy controlling Iran/Persia for decades, and that failed since 1979, when the Shah's cruel oppression of the Persian people ended in an "Islamic revolution".
That's why, obviously, the West backed the Iraqi regime in this aggression against Iran. It is remarkable that in spite of certain conventions in journalism, such as the idea that the journalist ought to try to take a "neutral" position, the Dutch Jeugdjournaal managed to inject the propaganda very nicely in at least this youthful spectator.
The historian Bernard Lewis claims, in his book The Middle East, that neither Iraq's nor Iran's regimes were very popular with the "Great Powers". That was, according to Lewis, why this war could be dragged along for so long. Nobody who could do anything about it, he claims, was very much interested in ending this war, for example by means of sanctions or otherwise. Less than one page later, however, Lewis seems to have forgotten what he just wrote, and mentions that after Iran's initial successes in the war, Iraq was backed with ample logistical support and intelligence from the United States.
Apparently, not only did he US have little interest in "ending the fights", it actually had some hope that Iraq would defeat the Khomeini regime, and bet on the horse it bet on. That is not exactly the same thing, professor Lewis.
Ever since the 1950's and possibly before, Iran has been perceived as hostile to the West unless it was ruled by Western-controlled puppet regimes. The last democratically elected leader of Persia before the Ayatollahs took over, Mohammed Mosaddeq (or Mosaddegh), was removed by the American and British intelligence in an illegal operation against the democratic rights to self-determination of the Persian people. This is well-documented, not a secret; a fact -- for what it's worth -- but what is worth a fact that we are not taught?
Mosaddeq's sin was that he wanted to nationalise the Persian oil fields, so that their produce would be beneficial to Persia, instead of to foreign multinational corporations. This was his mistake. After all, democracy and self-determination are not desirable when they are contrary to Western corporate interests; the people that have those interests are, ultimately, the owners of governments. The Americans and the British staged a coup and installed the Shah, who oppressed the Iranian people, and had a CIA-trained intelligence apparatus that was notorious for its methods of torture.
Now even the CIA, so successful at removing Mosaddeq and setting up one of the most cynical secret services of the Middle East, is not infallible. The US could not prevent Iran/Persia from liberating itself from the Shah. Unfortunately for the Iranians, the Khomeini regime proved to be no less oppressive -- in the first years of its rule, political opponents were executed en masse, and to this day Iran is far from a beacon of human rights, executing women suspected of adultery, youngsters suspected of homosexual behaviour, and the like.
This is no secret, human rights organisations report on it. But does this oppressive state pose a threat to any of its neighbours? The campaign against Iran is well underway. There is no doubt the neoconservatives in the White House and Pentagon, and Israel, want to wage another war, this time against Iran.
This war against Iran would be waged by the same extremists that lied the most outrageous lies in order to give some sort of minimal credibility for their war against Iraq. Therefore, we might expect that the media, the press, our incredibly sharp and intelligent community of journalists and intellectuals, would warn us about Washington's dangerous plans, given the fact that they continue to spread the exact same propaganda against Iran. Iran wants to destroy Israel. Iran sponsors terrorism. Iran wants to acquire dangerous weapons and do bad things to us. Iran is secretly behind Hizbullah in Lebanon. Iran is bad.
Iran is not a threat, because Israel has dozens of nuclear warheads, obviously ready to launch. So does, of course, the United States. Everybody knows this, so one has to do something about it. Therefore the image of Iran and its leaders is crucial. Given the fact that Iran has no military power at any stretch to be of any threat to any of its neighbours, the propaganda machine has to give as mad a picture of its leaders as possible. Any attack of Iran on, for instance, Israel, wold be suicide. So you create an image of Iran's leaders as madmen, people that might well be prepared to destroy their own country and all its citizens along with it, just to take that one chance to obliterate Israel. Obviously, Iran's leaders are antisemites, Ahmadinejad being the worst one, he's the new Hitler himself.
It's always the Holocaust. Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler, Saddam used to be the new Hitler. They're antisemites, they're diabolically evil, they're madmen. You have no idea what they'll do.
Given the proven, undeniable, irreparable fact that Washington has, in the parlance of our times, lied its ass off in order to be able to commit war crimes in Iraq (and Afghanistan, lest we forget), the greatest war crime of all -- an unjustified, illegal, needless war, one might think that form now on, all the "news" about Iran would be seen in a different kind of light by the press.
After all, it is the regime in Washington, or perhaps, Jerusalem, that is usually the source of press releases about Iran's supposed sponsoring of Shiite revolts in Iraq, and of course any press conference where Iran is once again demonised is happily covered by the reporting serfs. An independent, intelligent, critical journalist would add to all these "reports" the fact that the people that are at the source of them have an interest in painting Iran as black as it can. What genetic defect or brain malfunction, then, leads our media to forgive and forget, as if it never happened, every single instant of Washington blatantly lying in our face? We raise our kids to the effect that if they lie too many times, people won't believe them anymore, even when they tell the truth. But apparently, once you have power beyond what's imaginable for most mortals, these simple wisdoms don't apply to you.
This very simple fact, out there for all of us to see, that Washington lies as a rule, not as an exception, should make the critical, intelligent community of journalists go out and wonder. Go out and wonder if there is perhaps not a chance that those diabolically evil antisemites in Tehran might in fact be Realpolitiker like most politicians around the globe? Their hands may not be clean, but neither are those of the ruling elites in Moscow, Beijing, Washington, you name it. How about pursuing that question and giving the public some kind of idea what this evil, diabolically antisemitic Ahmadinejad is really after? That kind of journalistic activity might thwart Washington's and Jerusalem's murderous plans with Iran, and the propaganda that makes it go smoothly. That kind of journalistic activity might, if applied consistently and if it acquires enough momentum save lives, no kidding. Iranian lives. Babies' lives. Women's lives. People's lives. American cannon fodder's lives. Because we all know how much Washington respects their own.
But that would be called "activism", wouldn't it? And activism is a taboo for the press. It's an absolute no-no to speak out as a "modern" journalist in favour of humanity, in favour of peace and truth, against the agressors and greedy. That's not "objective". Because the truth is always somewhere "in the middle".
In the middle between the butcher and the victim. Between the bomber war plane and the village of mutilated bodies. Between the fosfor grenade and the burned skin of babies, women and children. Between the depleted uranium bombshells and decades of mutilated foetuses. That's right, the truth is always somewhere in the middle. So you have to give the aggressors their stage. And their victims, well you don't. Because you cannot possibly actually go there. It's too dangerous there, they might start bombing any moment.
That's why the liars and aggressors always keep their stage: they, in the cynical conventions of the mass media, have to be heard. After all, it's still news what they have to say. On their conditions, of course. You don't want to be not welcome for the next war. That's why even after prominent people in powerful positions admitted that the war in Iraq was about the oil, the media is silent. The American Republican presidential candidate John McCain admitted as much. He said that, as a president, he would take care of alternative energy, to not be so dependent on oil, so "we" wouldn't have to go out invade other people's countries anymore.
Former Federal Reserve System chief Alan Greenspan was even more open about it. He said it was too bad that the fact the invasion of Iraq was about oil couldn't be just said out in the open. Did they tell you about that in the press? Headlines might have been appropriate, after all the phony "debates" on the coming war up to 2003, where this idea that the war was all about the oil was dismissed as some kind of biased, anti-American, leftist illusion. There was so much more nuance to this war than any opponent of it could ever understand, so that you really had to be a neoconservative intellectual to fully appreciate the noble ideals behind this destruction.
Those people mentioned, however, especially the latter, know what they are talking about when it comes to the cynical aspects of power and corporate greed. Greenspan has served that greed for years.
This war against Iran that the war criminals, the neocons and the extremists want will be about the oil again. About power, greed, cynicism. Lots of it. Desperately trying to prevent the collapse of a fake democratic system corrupted to the bone, the propaganda machine will do the job, as it's done multiple times. It's doing it right now.
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