This week saw the end of an exhibition I helped put on at the
Barbican in London, devoted to photo-journalism that makes sense of
terrible events.
Brilliant, subversive pictures from Vietnam show the systematic rape
of a country with weapons designed to spread terror. The exhibition
ranged from Hiroshima to two final, haunting images of sisters, aged 10
and 12, their bodies engraved in the rubble of the Iraqi city of Basra,
where American missiles destroyed their street two years ago: part of a
current Anglo-American bombing campaign that is almost never reported.
Since the outrages in America on September 11, the exhibition has
been packed, mostly with young people. Many accused the media and
politicians of misrepresenting public opinion and of obscuring the
reasons behind the fanaticism of the attackers. For them, the most
telling pictures are of “unworthy victims”. Let me explain. The 6,000
people who died in America on September 11 are worthy victims: that is,
they are worthy of our honour and a relentless pursuit of justice, which
is right. In contrast, the 6,000 people who die every month in Iraq,
the victims of a medieval siege devised and imposed by Washington and
Whitehall, are, like the little sisters bombed to death in their sleep
in Basra, unworthy victims – unworthy of even acknowledgement in the
“civilised” west.
Ten years ago, when 200,000 Iraqis died during and immediately after
the slaughter known as the Gulf war, the scale of this massacre was
never allowed to enter public consciousness in the west. Many were
buried alive at night by armoured American snowploughs and murdered
while retreating. Colin Powell, then US military chief, who 22 years
earlier was assigned to cover up the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and is
currently being elevated to hero status in the western media, said:
“It’s really not numbers I’m terribly interested in.”
An American letter writer to the Guardian last week, in admonishing
the writer Arundhati Roy for producing a “laundry list” of American
terror around the world, revealed how the blinkered think. The lives of
millions of people extinguished as a consequence of American policies,
be they Iraqis or Palestinians, Timorese or Congolese, belong not in our
living memory, but on a “list”. Apply that dismissive abstraction to
the Holocaust, and imagine the profanity.
The job of disassociating the September 11 atrocities from the source
of half a century of American crusades, economic wars and homicidal
adventures, is understandably urgent. For Bush and Blair to “wage war
against terrorism”, assaulting countries, killing innocents and creating
famine, international law must be set aside and a monomania must take
over politics and the “free” media. Fortunately public opinion is not
yet fully Murdochised and is already uneasy and suspicious; 60% oppose
massive bombing, says an Observer poll. And the more Blair, our little
Lord Palmerston, opens his mouth on the subject the more suspicions will
grow and the crusaders’ contortions of intellect and morality will
show. When Blair tells David Frost that his war plans are aimed at “the
people who gave [the terrorists] the weapons”, can he mean we are about
to attack America? For it was mostly America that destroyed a moderate
regime in Afghanistan and created a fanatical one.
On the day of the twin towers attack, an arms fair, selling weapons
of terror to assorted tyrants and human rights abusers, opened in
London’s Docklands with the backing of the Blair government. Now Bush
and Blair have created what the UN calls “the world’s worst humanitarian
crisis”, with up to 7m people facing starvation. The initial American
reaction was to demand that Pakistan stop supplying food to the starving
who, of course, fail to qualify as worthy victims.
The bombing intelligentsia (the New Humanitarians, as Edward Herman
calls them) are doing their bit, blaming September 11 on “an evil hatred
of modernity” and something called “apocalyptic nihilism”. There are no
reasons why; the Barbican pictures are fake. Aside from a few “errors”,
Anglo-American actions are redeemed, and those who produce the “laundry
list” of a blood-soaked historical record are “anti American”, which
apparently is similar to the “anti-semitism” of those who dare to point
out the atrocious activities of the Israeli state.
Phyllis and Orlando Rodriguez lost their son Greg in the World Trade
Centre. They said this: “We read enough of the news to sense that our
government is heading in the direction of violent revenge, with the
prospect of sons, daughters, parents, friends in distant lands dying,
suffering, and nursing further grievances against us. It is not the way
to go… not in our son’s name.”
