And so to New Delhi – to interview Indian journalists hoping to join a British Council-sponsored programme we are running at the University of Lincoln next term. The visit gives me the opportunity to catch up on India’s flourishing leftist print media.
For instance, Frontline, edited by N. Ram, has maintained a consistently rigorous critique of US/UK militarism for many years and is always worth a read. In the current issue, John Cherian examines the Bush administration’s recent military adventures in Africa, highlighting the announcement in February of the creation of a US military command for Africa, “Africacom”.
This comes soon after the American-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia. As Cherian reports: “There are credible reports of US troops participating in special operations inside Somalia after a gap of more than a decade. The Americans provided the Ethiopian army with satellite pictures of Somali militia positions, and American planes bombed parts of southern Somalia. Seventy civilians were killed and more than a hundred wounded. More than 1,500 American troops have been based in nearby Djibouti since 2002. They played a key role in the planning and execution of the invasion of Somalia.” And significantly last year, Bush announced plans to expand the Camp Lemonier base in Djibouti from 88 acres to over 600 acres.
Also according to Cherian, the US is backing the secessionist movements in southern Sudan. “The subterfuge of ‘humanitarian intervention’ could be resorted to in the ongoing bid for regime change. The American preoccupation with Darfur is a case in point. Darfur, which is the size of France, is known to have vast oil and gas reserves…Neighbouring Chad is already exporting huge quantities of oil to the West. The US is also unhappy that the oil from southern Sudan is flowing to China, India and other emerging nations.”
The future importance of West African oil reserves to the US cannot be under-estimated. As Cherian reports: “Senior American officials have expressed the hope that the Gulf of Guinea on the West African coast would be able to meet a quarter of the US’s oil needs within a decade.”
America already supplies more than $1 billion worth of military equipment to Egypt every year. US troops help train anti-terrorism forces in Algeria, Chad, Kenya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda while the US has spent over $500 million on the Trans-Sahel Counter-Terrorism Initiative. And as the US expands its ring of permanent military bases on the continent, plans are being developed to set up a naval base on the small West African island state of Sao Tome. Cherian comments: “Sao Tome, along with Nigeria, controls huge off-shore oil reserves. Washington installed a friendly ruler in Sao Tome after a stage-managed coup in 2002.”
Elsewhere in the same edition, Aijad Ahmad examines the mass revolts against imperialism and neo-liberalism in Latin America and argues that “for the first time since its rise as a superpower the US is facing a serious threat to its hegemony”. And Vladimir Radyudin, in Moscow, argues that Russia’s geopolitical resurgence is causing major shifts in the international balance of power. He reports on the formation of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum in Doha, Qatar, on April 9 uniting Russia, Iran and Qatar. “The idea of a gas OPEC has rattled the US and Europe as it would shift the alignment of forces in the energy markets and leave them out in the cold.”
It’s hard to find such well-researched, incisive reporting of American militarism in the UK print market. So why not check out Frontline at www.frontline.in?
Saturday, 14 April 2007
Thursday, 11 January 2007
France wages war in Chad – away from the glare of the media
While US jets pound villages in Somalia, away from the glare of the international media, French aircraft are attacking towns in Chad and north-eastern Central African Republic bordering Sudan’s Darfur region.
Even in France, the war has gone largely unnoticed. The headline in the current Politis, the radical left weekly, is blunt: La France en guerre (France at war). But elsewhere the mainstream media (Le Monde, Libération, Figaro and the television channels) are silent on the conflict.
The French Mirage F1 jets are intervening in support of two beleaguered dictators. Idriss Déby, of Chad, was installed by a French-led coup in 1990. His predecessor, Hissène Habré, is now to be tried in Senegal for crimes against humanity during his rule from 1982 to 1990. Déby’s rule has proven equally oppressive – but while rebels increase their hold over large parts of the impoverished country and threaten the capital N’Djamena, the French government of Dominique de Villepin remains loyal to Déby. Chad, after all, is strategically crucial lying just south of Libya and to the west of Sudan while its oil reserves are likely to become increasingly important in the US-led “war on terror”.
In the Central African Republic, French operations are aimed at repelling rebels which the government of François Bozizé claims are backed by the Sudanese. But the rebels of the Union des Forces Démocratiques pour le Rassemblement (UFDR) deny any links with Sudan and claim Bozizé, whom the French helped into power in a 2003 coup, is ruling the country along ethnic lines.
The French backed Bozizé on the understanding he would introduce reforms – but while these have never been introduced the support continues. In the Politis article, Dante Sanjurjo highlights the way in which the war is being waged without any debate in either parliament or the media. Roland Marchal, an African specialist at the Centre d’études et de recherches internationales (Ceri), claims that French society reacts more to humanitarian than political crises. “Why do the French need to intervene like this? And what will it achieve? No one asks these questions.”
See www.politis.fr
Even in France, the war has gone largely unnoticed. The headline in the current Politis, the radical left weekly, is blunt: La France en guerre (France at war). But elsewhere the mainstream media (Le Monde, Libération, Figaro and the television channels) are silent on the conflict.
The French Mirage F1 jets are intervening in support of two beleaguered dictators. Idriss Déby, of Chad, was installed by a French-led coup in 1990. His predecessor, Hissène Habré, is now to be tried in Senegal for crimes against humanity during his rule from 1982 to 1990. Déby’s rule has proven equally oppressive – but while rebels increase their hold over large parts of the impoverished country and threaten the capital N’Djamena, the French government of Dominique de Villepin remains loyal to Déby. Chad, after all, is strategically crucial lying just south of Libya and to the west of Sudan while its oil reserves are likely to become increasingly important in the US-led “war on terror”.
In the Central African Republic, French operations are aimed at repelling rebels which the government of François Bozizé claims are backed by the Sudanese. But the rebels of the Union des Forces Démocratiques pour le Rassemblement (UFDR) deny any links with Sudan and claim Bozizé, whom the French helped into power in a 2003 coup, is ruling the country along ethnic lines.
The French backed Bozizé on the understanding he would introduce reforms – but while these have never been introduced the support continues. In the Politis article, Dante Sanjurjo highlights the way in which the war is being waged without any debate in either parliament or the media. Roland Marchal, an African specialist at the Centre d’études et de recherches internationales (Ceri), claims that French society reacts more to humanitarian than political crises. “Why do the French need to intervene like this? And what will it achieve? No one asks these questions.”
See www.politis.fr
Thursday, 7 December 2006
Newspeak, nukespeak and Fleet Street’s silencing of the real Trident debate
Richard Keeble explores the links between George Orwell’s concept of newspeak, Paul Chilton’s notion of nukespeak and Fleet Street’s current coverage of the Trident debate
The personal and the political
I’ve always been interested in silence. The first pamphlet I wrote was for the
Peace Pledge Union back in May 1983 and I called it A language of silence. I looked at the way in which our culture, individual thought processes and language were dominated by militarism. Militarism had become a core defining reality of our society. And our language, in preparing us for the possibility of the ultimate horror – the destruction of the globe in a nuclear confrontation – was moving in a process of self destruction towards silence. Or so I argued.
Significantly, I called my book on the coverage of the 1991 Gulf conflict in the US and UK press Secret State, Silent Press: New militarism, the Gulf and the Modern Image of Warfare. Why silent press? I liked the alliteration with secret state to be frank. But my essential thesis was that the mainstream press had silenced what in reality was a series of US-led massacres beneath the fiction of heroic warfare. US military chief Colin Powell, in his 1995 account of the conflict, estimated that 250,000 Iraqi soldiers had perished. The reality of that horrific explosion of hi-tech barbarism was silenced in the British and American press which represented the conflict as largely bloodless: a triumph of clean, precise, surgical weaponry. In the book I call the US/UK military media system – with its pools and self censoring journalists – along with the complex workings of ideology the apparatus of silence.
Newspeak and the destruction of language
Significantly, George Orwell was preoccupied with the potential shift of language towards silence. In his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell described a Big Brother state in which the authorities controlled thought and language by inventing a new one – newspeak. In the Appendix titled “The principles of newspeak” he wrote: “The purpose of newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc but to make all other modes of thought impossible.” In other words, the dominant language served above all to silence all dissident modes of thought. And newspeak was inherently moving towards silence. Syme, Winston Smith’s colleague, admonishes him like this: “You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?”
Newspeak’s clone: nukespeak
During the Cold War, Paul Chilton coined the term nukespeak. The seminal text (of 1985) he edited was titled Language and the Nuclear Arms Debate: Nukespeak Today. He had earlier provided a chapter “Nukespeak: nuclear language and propaganda” to a text Nukespeak: The Media and the Bomb (edited by Crispin Aubrey 1982).
In coining the term nukespeak, Chilton was making three main claims. Firstly there existed a specialised vocabulary for talking about nuclear weapons together with habitual metaphors. Secondly that this variety of English was neither neutral nor purely descriptive but ideologically loaded in favour of the nuclear culture. And finally that nukespeak was massively important since it affected how people thought about the subject and largely determined the ideas they exchanged about it.
But there was no massive conspiracy to inject this vocabulary into the culture: there were no Orwellian grammarians munching their sandwiches at the Ministry of Truth and rewriting the English language. The atomic bombs which fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 were, indeed, weapons of mass destruction. Their deployment represented according to Chilton a revolutionary jump in military strategy. And inevitably it heralded a new order of experience in science, politics and the everyday. Chilton commented: “The language used to talk about the new weapons of mass extermination was partly an attempt to slot the new reality into the old paradigms of our culture. It was also no doubt a language that served the purpose of those who were concerned to perpetuate nuclear weapons development and deployment.”
Nukespeak then, as a specific linguistic register, drew on deep patterns of symbolic thought, on myths, religious beliefs, symbols, stereotypes and metaphors which we use to organise and normalise our everyday experiences. In August 1945 politicians together with the mainstream press spoke of the bomb mainly in terms of religious awe. For instance while Truman was meeting Churchill and Stalin at Potsdam an official report on the Hiroshima explosion was rushed to him. It said: “It was the beauty the great poets dream about….Then came the strong, sustained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare to tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to the Almighty.” The Times reported eye-witnesses: “The whole thing was tremendous and awe-inspiring,” said a Captain Parsons of the US Navy.
The names given to these horrific bombs are also very telling. They are strangely humanised. They become familiar parts of our normal everyday lives. The Hiroshima bomb was called “Little Boy”, the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki “Fat Man”. Edward Teller is known as the father of the H-Bomb.
Brian Easlea in his seminal, feminist history Fathering the Unthinkable (1983) highlights the creation of nuclear weapons in the context of the masculinity of science. He sees the development of science as a process of domination over both nature and women. According to Easlea, men create science and weapons to compensate for their lack of the “magical power” of mothering. In other words, the distorted psyche at the heart of masculinity and the “technical, phallic rationality” it promotes gives birth not to life but death. Easlea quotes a note slipped to Truman at the Potsdam conference on 17 July 1945 after a successful test of the plutonium bomb that said simply: “Babies successfully born”. And the President knew precisely what it meant.
The Trident debate and the language of silence
This context helps explain some of Fleet Street’s current coverage of the Blair government’s moves to replace the Trident nuclear missile system. The Cold War, pro-nuclear consensus in Fleet Street may have fractured but still the “humanising” language of nukespeak (with its emphasis on everyday domesticity and consumerism) persists – amongst both supporters and opponents of the bomb. For nukespeak has become such a “natural”, unproblematic feature of our “civilised” society.
Thus Mary Riddell, in the Observer of 3 December, while rightly calling for Britain to renounce the bomb, still slips effortlessly into the jargon of nukespeak. Upgrades of Trident are humanised and dubbed “the new generation”; US missiles are “souped up” while, on the global proliferation of nuclear weapons technology, she comments: “In this nuclear Wal-Mart, every aspiring dirty bomber can hope for crumbs.”
In the Observer of 3 December, former home secretary Charles Clarke is said to be raising doubts about the need to replace the country’s “ageing” weapons system. And in the Independent on 5 December, Blair is reported to be backing a submarine-based “son of Trident” system. Max Hastings, in a Daily Mail commentary on 5 December, backs the case for replacing Trident “when it reaches the end of its useful life”. In the Sun of 5 December, George Pascoe-Watson and Tom Newton Dunn manage to compare the obscene cost of Trident (“around £1 billion for 15 years”) with a child’s pocket money! They report: “Officials say that [the cost of Trident] is less than the £1.5 billion British kids get in pocket money a year.”
In the Guardian of 4 December, Labour Ministers are said to have “embraced the insurance policy” argument in favour of the “deterrent” since it is impossible to predict the shape of the threats over the next 20 years. And the religious “awe” expressed by the early commentators on the Hiroshima/Nagasaki explosions is echoed in the Guardian’s description on 4 December of Sir Michael Quinlan, former top official at the Ministry of Defence, as the “high priest of nuclear deterrence”.
Perhaps the most predictable aspect of Fleet Street’s coverage is the silencing or marginalising of the views of the massive, global peace movement. So often the debate is confined to the narrow parameters of party politics. In the face of the unthinkable horror of nuclear holocaust, the banal chatter of political banter emerges. Thus, in the Independent of 4 December, Ben Russell previews Blair’s White Paper on Trident “replacement” but quotes only Labour MPs (both pro and anti) and a Nottingham University professor, described as the “leading analyst of backbench rebellions” on Trident.
Ned Temko, in the Observer of 3 December, highlights the views of Blair, Labour opponents, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. No reference to the scores of peace groups campaigning against the bomb. Mention of the Campaign Against Nuclear Disarmament’s protest comes only in the last paragraph of the Guardian’s front page, lead story (“Blair opts to cut 20% of warheads”) of 4 December; on the same day, the Independent’s Ben Russell confines his reporting of the protests of anti-nuclear campaigners to a 13-word final paragraph. And on 5 December, the Independent’s Andrew Grice and Colin Brown devote just the last of their 14 paragraphs on Blair’s White Paper statement to the views of CND. Chair Kate Hudson is allowed a jibe (she was “very, very disappointed” with the PM) but no room to develop a coherent argument.
Significantly, the views of the “high priest” Sir Michael Quinlan appear in a vox pop in the Guardian: all ten “experts” are male; only three speak at all critically of the move to replace Trident. Representatives of the scores of peace groups in the country are clearly not considered “expert” enough to qualify for inclusion.
Coverage on Fleet Street is never one-dimensional; significant variations from the norm can appear. Thus, on 5 December, the Guardian highlighted the opposition of the various Christian churches to nuclear weapons. But, in general, the major function of the mainstream media – to silence (or marginalise) dissident views – can be seen to have operated in the recent Trident reporting.
• Richard Keeble is Professor of Journalism at the University of Lincoln
The personal and the political
I’ve always been interested in silence. The first pamphlet I wrote was for the
Peace Pledge Union back in May 1983 and I called it A language of silence. I looked at the way in which our culture, individual thought processes and language were dominated by militarism. Militarism had become a core defining reality of our society. And our language, in preparing us for the possibility of the ultimate horror – the destruction of the globe in a nuclear confrontation – was moving in a process of self destruction towards silence. Or so I argued.
Significantly, I called my book on the coverage of the 1991 Gulf conflict in the US and UK press Secret State, Silent Press: New militarism, the Gulf and the Modern Image of Warfare. Why silent press? I liked the alliteration with secret state to be frank. But my essential thesis was that the mainstream press had silenced what in reality was a series of US-led massacres beneath the fiction of heroic warfare. US military chief Colin Powell, in his 1995 account of the conflict, estimated that 250,000 Iraqi soldiers had perished. The reality of that horrific explosion of hi-tech barbarism was silenced in the British and American press which represented the conflict as largely bloodless: a triumph of clean, precise, surgical weaponry. In the book I call the US/UK military media system – with its pools and self censoring journalists – along with the complex workings of ideology the apparatus of silence.
Newspeak and the destruction of language
Significantly, George Orwell was preoccupied with the potential shift of language towards silence. In his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell described a Big Brother state in which the authorities controlled thought and language by inventing a new one – newspeak. In the Appendix titled “The principles of newspeak” he wrote: “The purpose of newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc but to make all other modes of thought impossible.” In other words, the dominant language served above all to silence all dissident modes of thought. And newspeak was inherently moving towards silence. Syme, Winston Smith’s colleague, admonishes him like this: “You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?”
Newspeak’s clone: nukespeak
During the Cold War, Paul Chilton coined the term nukespeak. The seminal text (of 1985) he edited was titled Language and the Nuclear Arms Debate: Nukespeak Today. He had earlier provided a chapter “Nukespeak: nuclear language and propaganda” to a text Nukespeak: The Media and the Bomb (edited by Crispin Aubrey 1982).
In coining the term nukespeak, Chilton was making three main claims. Firstly there existed a specialised vocabulary for talking about nuclear weapons together with habitual metaphors. Secondly that this variety of English was neither neutral nor purely descriptive but ideologically loaded in favour of the nuclear culture. And finally that nukespeak was massively important since it affected how people thought about the subject and largely determined the ideas they exchanged about it.
But there was no massive conspiracy to inject this vocabulary into the culture: there were no Orwellian grammarians munching their sandwiches at the Ministry of Truth and rewriting the English language. The atomic bombs which fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 were, indeed, weapons of mass destruction. Their deployment represented according to Chilton a revolutionary jump in military strategy. And inevitably it heralded a new order of experience in science, politics and the everyday. Chilton commented: “The language used to talk about the new weapons of mass extermination was partly an attempt to slot the new reality into the old paradigms of our culture. It was also no doubt a language that served the purpose of those who were concerned to perpetuate nuclear weapons development and deployment.”
Nukespeak then, as a specific linguistic register, drew on deep patterns of symbolic thought, on myths, religious beliefs, symbols, stereotypes and metaphors which we use to organise and normalise our everyday experiences. In August 1945 politicians together with the mainstream press spoke of the bomb mainly in terms of religious awe. For instance while Truman was meeting Churchill and Stalin at Potsdam an official report on the Hiroshima explosion was rushed to him. It said: “It was the beauty the great poets dream about….Then came the strong, sustained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare to tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to the Almighty.” The Times reported eye-witnesses: “The whole thing was tremendous and awe-inspiring,” said a Captain Parsons of the US Navy.
The names given to these horrific bombs are also very telling. They are strangely humanised. They become familiar parts of our normal everyday lives. The Hiroshima bomb was called “Little Boy”, the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki “Fat Man”. Edward Teller is known as the father of the H-Bomb.
Brian Easlea in his seminal, feminist history Fathering the Unthinkable (1983) highlights the creation of nuclear weapons in the context of the masculinity of science. He sees the development of science as a process of domination over both nature and women. According to Easlea, men create science and weapons to compensate for their lack of the “magical power” of mothering. In other words, the distorted psyche at the heart of masculinity and the “technical, phallic rationality” it promotes gives birth not to life but death. Easlea quotes a note slipped to Truman at the Potsdam conference on 17 July 1945 after a successful test of the plutonium bomb that said simply: “Babies successfully born”. And the President knew precisely what it meant.
The Trident debate and the language of silence
This context helps explain some of Fleet Street’s current coverage of the Blair government’s moves to replace the Trident nuclear missile system. The Cold War, pro-nuclear consensus in Fleet Street may have fractured but still the “humanising” language of nukespeak (with its emphasis on everyday domesticity and consumerism) persists – amongst both supporters and opponents of the bomb. For nukespeak has become such a “natural”, unproblematic feature of our “civilised” society.
Thus Mary Riddell, in the Observer of 3 December, while rightly calling for Britain to renounce the bomb, still slips effortlessly into the jargon of nukespeak. Upgrades of Trident are humanised and dubbed “the new generation”; US missiles are “souped up” while, on the global proliferation of nuclear weapons technology, she comments: “In this nuclear Wal-Mart, every aspiring dirty bomber can hope for crumbs.”
In the Observer of 3 December, former home secretary Charles Clarke is said to be raising doubts about the need to replace the country’s “ageing” weapons system. And in the Independent on 5 December, Blair is reported to be backing a submarine-based “son of Trident” system. Max Hastings, in a Daily Mail commentary on 5 December, backs the case for replacing Trident “when it reaches the end of its useful life”. In the Sun of 5 December, George Pascoe-Watson and Tom Newton Dunn manage to compare the obscene cost of Trident (“around £1 billion for 15 years”) with a child’s pocket money! They report: “Officials say that [the cost of Trident] is less than the £1.5 billion British kids get in pocket money a year.”
In the Guardian of 4 December, Labour Ministers are said to have “embraced the insurance policy” argument in favour of the “deterrent” since it is impossible to predict the shape of the threats over the next 20 years. And the religious “awe” expressed by the early commentators on the Hiroshima/Nagasaki explosions is echoed in the Guardian’s description on 4 December of Sir Michael Quinlan, former top official at the Ministry of Defence, as the “high priest of nuclear deterrence”.
Perhaps the most predictable aspect of Fleet Street’s coverage is the silencing or marginalising of the views of the massive, global peace movement. So often the debate is confined to the narrow parameters of party politics. In the face of the unthinkable horror of nuclear holocaust, the banal chatter of political banter emerges. Thus, in the Independent of 4 December, Ben Russell previews Blair’s White Paper on Trident “replacement” but quotes only Labour MPs (both pro and anti) and a Nottingham University professor, described as the “leading analyst of backbench rebellions” on Trident.
Ned Temko, in the Observer of 3 December, highlights the views of Blair, Labour opponents, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. No reference to the scores of peace groups campaigning against the bomb. Mention of the Campaign Against Nuclear Disarmament’s protest comes only in the last paragraph of the Guardian’s front page, lead story (“Blair opts to cut 20% of warheads”) of 4 December; on the same day, the Independent’s Ben Russell confines his reporting of the protests of anti-nuclear campaigners to a 13-word final paragraph. And on 5 December, the Independent’s Andrew Grice and Colin Brown devote just the last of their 14 paragraphs on Blair’s White Paper statement to the views of CND. Chair Kate Hudson is allowed a jibe (she was “very, very disappointed” with the PM) but no room to develop a coherent argument.
Significantly, the views of the “high priest” Sir Michael Quinlan appear in a vox pop in the Guardian: all ten “experts” are male; only three speak at all critically of the move to replace Trident. Representatives of the scores of peace groups in the country are clearly not considered “expert” enough to qualify for inclusion.
Coverage on Fleet Street is never one-dimensional; significant variations from the norm can appear. Thus, on 5 December, the Guardian highlighted the opposition of the various Christian churches to nuclear weapons. But, in general, the major function of the mainstream media – to silence (or marginalise) dissident views – can be seen to have operated in the recent Trident reporting.
• Richard Keeble is Professor of Journalism at the University of Lincoln
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