Aside from devil-like fundamentalists, terrorists, and dictators, the primary images of the other-world outside the United States and Europe are of victims. Victims of butchery, of starvation, of disease, of death squads, and even of genocide.

Between the two, the "victim" propaganda is more pernicious than the "devils. " After all, millions of Americans already see through the "terrorist" propaganda and actually identify with the Irish, the Palestinians, the Zapatista Indians of Mexico, and even with Cuba.

Far more dangerous--no less so for their truth--are the pictures of bloated-belly children dying in Africa or northern Korea, of bulldozed mass graves in Yugoslavia, of unimaginable butchery in Rwanda, and of the bullet-riddled bodies of women and children in Acteal, Mexico.

These images are especially pernicious for their astoundingly-cynical manipulation of common human decency. For just like the charities show photos of big-eyed hungry children to enlist you in their cause, so does the Imperial media show photos to enlist you in backing the Empire.

After all, confronted with images of genocide, butchery and starvation, decent-minded people are naturally moved to demand that the government take action. Why, the rulers can actually raise a public clamor, a groundswell of popular opinion, for foreign intervention by the Imperial military forces. (In fact, during the Rwandan genocide--and for months after--some folks charged that the U. S. government was racist . . . because it invaded Yugoslavia and didn't invade Rwanda too!)

What's NOT in the pictures, of course, is that Imperial forces themselves are inevitably responsible for the suffering you see on your screen. Rwanda's mass murders were twice installed in office by French troops . . . and then, after they were heroically overthrown by their victims, were fed and watered by the Western Empires in the border camps they regrouped in.

And guess who engineered the break-up of socialist Yugoslavia, and aided "ethnic cleansing" at every step? And who trains the troops and supplies the weapons for the killings in Chiapas, Mexico?

Actually most human suffering in the Third World--the deprivation of food, clean water and medical care which fells over 3,000 children an hour--is never shown at all. And forget the 700,000 Iraqi kids killed by the U.S. embargo.

Yet when a dictatorship which had just signed billion-dollar agreements with U. S. oil companies was overthrown in Somalia, for instance, suddenly starving children were on every front page. And Texas oilman George Bush sent in the troops . . . . for kids' sake, of course.

But even worse than how "victim" propaganda provides cover for imperialist operations, is its de-humanizing of people who live in the Third World. Surely any notion of globally organizing workers--likely the only hope for embattled First World trade unions--melts before images of women weeping amidst mass graves, or of children staring with fly-encrusted eyes.

Compelling as these images are (and awful as the truth behind them), people who live beyond the borders of the "advanced industrial democracies" are not human versions of big-eyed baby seals cringing before the butcher's club.

People in the Third World constantly rise against repression and inhuman living conditions--circumstances imposed on them by Western bankers and their governments. And they constantly meet Imperial intervention to crush their efforts.

They don't need "rescuing"--they just need Imperial troops, and weapons, and advisers to stop coming.

Now there's something Westerners moved by images of suffering can do: organize to oppose the operations of their own governments.

But they should not only make common cause with their fellows on the rest of the planet, they should also get to know them.

Who knows what they might learn. After all, the recent protest by 100,000 angry Kosovo Albanians against the murders of 85 people by the Serbian military--boldly marching against a police-state with a record of genocide--could surely teach our timid union, civil rights and feminist organizations a thing a two. (Of course the mass media didn't show the march--it showed the mourners crying at the funerals. )

And while the courage and numbers of those marchers spoke volumes, it was their three-word chant that said it all: "Justice, not mercy!"

_____________

    home     |     subscribe     |     talk     |     help-about     |     back issues     |     resources