MB Civic

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1231-30.htm

Great piece by John Collins, Associate Professor of Global Studies at St. Lawrence University. Some highlights…

In his enormously useful book States of Denial (Polity Press, 2001), Stanley Cohen argues that most denial can be divided into three categories: literal denial (“it did not happen”), interpretive denial (“it happened, but it’s not what it looks like”), and implicatory denial (“it happened, and it is what it looks like, but there’s nothing wrong with it”). In other words, we tend to deny either the facts, the interpretation of the facts, and/or the moral implications of the facts.

In the rush to celebrate the death of the “butcher of Baghdad,” we are up to our necks in all three types of denial. The failure to provide a full account of this horrifying chapter of Iraqi and American history is, to be sure, an act of literal denial. If two leaders shake hands, but the photo is not shown on CNN, did they really shake hands? One is reminded of the oft-quoted statement by an anonymous New York Times staff member: “If the Times wasn’t there, it didn’t happen.”

Of course, the facts about the U.S. role in Saddam’s brutality are not always literally denied, and this is where the second and third types of denial come into play. No doubt in the coming days we will hear numerous commentators attempt to “spin” the facts, as has often happened in discussions of U.S. ambassador April Glaspie’s famous “green light” to Saddam just before Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. It wasn’t really a green light, we’ll be told. Yes, it was a handshake, but that doesn’t mean it was an endorsement of Saddam’s policies.

The boldest (and, one must add, the most honest) defenders of U.S. policy will employ the language of implicatory denial, insisting, when pressed, that U.S. support for Saddam was justified under the circumstances. We’ll be told that the realities of the Cold War, or the struggle against the threat posted by the Iranian revolution, or the need for maintaining U.S. access to cheap fossil fuels, created a context in which the U.S. had no choice but to get its hands dirty.

In this light, it seems that the initial coverage of Saddam’s execution has served as a collective ritual hand-washing designed to reassure Americans that they really are the blameless leaders of a cosmic struggle against “evil.” And so the answer to the existential question comes into view. Today’s mainstream journalism, even “live” TV, is a far cry from the first draft of history. Instead, it functions largely as a transmission of selective history that has been drafted–and airbrushed, and sanitized, and rearranged, and distorted–long before it ever reaches our eyes and ears.

For those creeped out by the blatant propagandizing of the Saddam coverage (in his underwear..checking for lice..dental exams…Pahleeeeze!), this is good therapy.
– MAB