Families of nine Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan were shown on the news yesterday visiting Kandahar and the memorial to the Canadians who have fallen in that conflict. It was a touching moment. Emotions played on the faces of the family members as they stood before the stone etchings of their son or daughter. The media followed by interviews with a couple of the pilgrims who unanimously support the mission and support extending it if necessary.
What did the media expect them to say? What else can they believe but that the mission is important and necessary in order to justify the sacrifice and the grief they have suffered? The sudden loss of a loved one in a conflict half way around the world must stand for something or their grief would destroy them completely. All families of fallen soldiers must believe the sacrifice had noble purpose or go mad.
This pilgrimage was a personal journey and should have remained so. What purpose was served by the media presence? To the families no purpose whatsoever. But for the media and for the government the purpose is clear and as petty and self-serving as the reasons that drew us into this conflict in the first place. Each group, media and government, are attempting to assuage their own guilt by maintaining the myth. But we don’t need our government giving us myth we need the truth and we need the media to question that truth incessantly. That is the role of the media. I can almost forgive the government for lying to us. In a poll in the United States a couple of years ago the American public admitted they preferred their government to lie to them. A lie is often easier to deal with than the truth. Besides governments are by nature secretive little entities. So it is the media that bears the greatest guilt because it is their job to wake up the public to the truth before it is too late.
The evidence has been there from the beginning concerning our real purpose for deploying to Afghanistan. Our neighbour, our closest ally and our friend the United States asked us to go so they could free up assets to deploy to their upcoming Iraq invasion. We said yes because they are our neighbour, friend and ally and because we were in negotiations with them over a number of cross border issues at the time. The two most important were softwood lumber and border access following 9/11. The United States has its own reasons for being there. Chief among those are access to Kazakh oil and gas without having to ship through Russian territory. There is also evidence of resources in some of the other Central Asian states as well. Nothing about this mission has been about human rights or democracy or any of the other catch-phrases that allow us to sleep at night while murdering people half a world away.
But removing the Burka, routing out terrorists, building a modern society (aka. American society) and creating democracy raises pride to console the tears and makes the whole thing a little more bearable. This war was never about that. The Soviet backed government of Afghanistan that we worked so hard to topple, which led us to create the Taliban and Al Qaeda was a secular government that had outlawed the burka and encouraged women to engage fully as equals in society. It was an American tactic to encourage Islamic fundamentalism among the mujaheddin as a way to gain popular support among village elders and traditionalists. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union the United States and its western allies supported various groups in power in Kabul including the Taliban. The Taliban were in close negotiations for a pipeline with the U.S. government and private firms such as Haliburton whose envoy to the Taliban was Dick Cheney.
Realpolitik is messy but it, not the spirit of humanity, motivates state actions. No war has ever been fought for humanitarian reasons and none ever will be under our current international system. Without a compelling selfish interest no state will risk its assets. But without a higher moral purpose no democracy will sanction a foreign war. Hence the lie. We are manipulated to support something we really don’t understand. We make it about nationalism just like the Nazis, the ultimate nationalists. We, like them, take pride in the delusion that we are creating a better world; we, like them, believe we know the mind of god and it is consumerism.
The media knows this. Instead it pretends as if it is too stupid to be able to assemble diverse evidence into a meaningful package and present a comprehensive report to the public. That is news and the job of the news organization. So we don’t have to research raw government documents and expert data on our own; or interview public figures and experts to tease out meaning; the news media is to bring all this information together, plot its interactions and present us with understandable meaning . Instead our newsrooms more resemble the Reichsministrie of Propoganda than the movie All the President’s Men. Much of what is reported is lifted directly from press releases and the rest is assured not to ruffle the feathers of advertisers or their close buddies in government.
It is not just the loss that we experience in the Afghan debacle but where such complicity could lead that is of most concern. We are already experiencing a powerful move toward authoritarianism in our domestic society. The anti-terrorism laws are only the prominent tip of the iceberg. Whether police in Ontario charge people with a law that doesn’t exist in the statutes, shoot an innocent man (Dudley George) and then perjure themselves rather than take responsibility or the RCMP taser Robert Dziekanski in British Columbia and again lie in court or resource companies invade and pollute your land in Alberta without allowing you recourse to protect it, the breakdown in trust between the agents of authority and the citizen continues apace. Yet the media keeps its silence filling our minds with pleasant snippets and diversions rather than attacking the issues that will impact us most profoundly, if often without our notice until it is too late. We ourselves must shoulder some of the blame for this. Where are the crowds outside the major publishers and broadcasters demanding their right to know.
Individual reporters take shelter in their jobs. They can only report what their editors, publishers and news directors allow. It is there job. That was the defence the Nazis used at Nuremburg as well. We were just following orders. We had our families to think of. If not us someone else would have done it. All true as far as it goes. But it still boils down to one of two things. Either they don’t stand up because they agree with maintaining the lie in which case they are complicit. Or they fear the consequences of standing up and speaking their mind in which case they are cowards. Those who are complicit I have no words of comfort for you. May you soon be together in hell with your mentor Josef Goebbels. To those who shrink from fear I have greater understanding. But while you might be able to lie to the country you can’t lie to yourself. You know the truth and you know your neighbours rely on you to make decisions. Sometimes decisions concerning the life and death of those closest to them.
Each journalist must make their self assessment and decide whether they are collaborators complicit in undermining the ethic of our society or cowards who to save their own skin let their neighbours suffer. But shame on both for victimizing the families again to use them as a prop in your deceit.
. And from recent events stage three seems to be warming up in the bull pen. 
Inside the imps of imperialism plotted their next move. With illusion worthy of the great Harry Houdini they declared they had pulled a diamond out of the dung. With a trillion dollars to developing economies and a vague promise of greater regulation they announced that they would avert a depression. Translation: they can keep the system they so love, which benefits they and their friends greatly. By so doing they also avert what might be the greatest political upheavals since the Great Depression and the revolutions of 1848. At least they hope they will. The trillion dollars is to be dispensed through the IMF and the other usual suspects. It will come with a heavy dose of liberal laissez-faire political doctrine as is the wont of these agencies of the imperial powers. These institutions all operate on weighted voting so that the major economic powers can control the show. Bye-Bye any concept of justice. States will be told to reduce spending in areas such as education, health care and social services. These things are all under attack in our own societies so it is necessary to keep THOSE people even worse off. 
Outside people cried for real change. Shouted to have their voices heard. The were corraled into small areas by police, a procedure called kettling. They were not allowed to leave the area. Parents who had to pick up their children at school were refused. And by extension, frightened children waited, many probably terrified when parents who were always on time were hours late. But the British courts had approved the practice. There were no washrooms. People were forced to find privacy where they could. Ostensibly this was done to prevent property damage. After all property is far more important in our society than people. But even this formal response to the media, when questioned, was a lie. Each individual in each area had to submit to be photographed and give particulars before they could leave at end of day. This violates British law but as we know in Canada the “Law” is above the law. 
