You Surge If You Want To

This from our friend at the brilliant Fanonite is good as we are awash with US propaganda on the surge:

Charity, vertical, humiliates. Solidarity, horizontal, helps. [1]

"In 1937 George Steer’s report on Guernica in the Times (London) turned what would have otherwise been a footnote in history into a metaphor for naked aggression against a defenceless civilian population. While Guernica was not the worst of the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis assisting Franco’s Fascists during the Spanish Civil War, the vivid account of the savagery conjured up in Steer’s descriptive reportage brought home for many horrors of a conflict hitherto deemed distant and insular. A comparable role was played by Seymour Hersh in 1969 exposing the massacre and subsequent cover up at My Lai, turning public opinion at home decisively against the war. In 2004, an account of a similar tragedy, albeit on a much larger scale, was dispatched to the Inter Press Service from the ruins of Fallujah by Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist of exceptional courage, except no publication in the mainstream picked up the story as nationalist (or perhaps commercial) imperatives trumped journalistic responsibilities. The news however percolated in the farther reaches of cyberspace for a year; meanwhile several other Fallujah-scale catastrophes were inflicted on the people of Iraq with a similar media reaction. Only when a documentary on the Italian RAI TV corroborated the reports of the use of chemical weapons with footage and soldiers’ testimony, could the story no longer be suppressed and newspapers in Britain finally had to publish it.

Fallujah is but one in the stream of episodes recounted in Dahr Jamail’s exceptional new book, Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq. Had these reports been published in a timely fashion a very different reaction could have been expected possibly generating a public outcry."

(1) Alberto Cruz, “El grito de la calle árabe, sin justicia no hay paz” http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=36850