West’s Media Objectivity A Myth: Brooking No Nonsense About Who Owns Zimbabwe

3 December 2009

By Reason Wafawarova

THERE is this illusion that says Western media are the leading example of media objectivity, independence and openness and that the mainstream media in "lesser democracies" are largely a pernicious lot that are either scared of criticising the establishment or are outright apologists for the politicians in power.

This is precisely why Iden Wetherell, the self-styled Muckraker of The Independent, can confidently make such declamatory ululations for "journalists Down Under" for having the enviable prowess to have the likes of this writer "for breakfast" whenever they so wish.

Iden gets hysterically furious when The Herald takes Roy Bennett for breakfast, or when MDC-T politicians are criticised, and he quacks about hate speech like he himself was son to Mother Teresa. Sometimes this rank hypocrisy makes one look like a fringe lunatic.

The Western media adopts what Noam Chomsky called the "fight it better" kind of criticism and that is often mistaken for criticising the Western ruling elites. The illusion considers it to be anti-war for a journalist to say, "we are not fighting well enough". Criticising stupid mistakes by the army generals in hindsight is seen is vicious criticism of the Iraq war or the Afghan war.

So a journalist that points out that the Afghan war has been lost considers himself "anti-war" and is counted as a critic of the war. All the Western media practitioners listed as "strong critics of the Vietnam war", for example, were pretty much criticising the government for failing to "fight it better" in an otherwise "noble cause".

When this writer criticises the implementation policies of the otherwise "best thing ever to happen to Zimbabwe", quoting President Mugabe’s comments on the land reform programme — daggers are often drawn to say no measure of implementation was ever going to be successful with this "lawless and unsound policy".

So, it is wrong for Zimbabwean media to limit their criticism of the land reform programme to the poor implementation of a noble cause but Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan can be considered foregone noble causes in the West. This is how it all works.

To Westerners the acceptable criticism for Zimbabwe is that the land reform programme is a racist and draconian policy that targeted hardworking white commercial farmers; that President Mugabe is the equivalent of the West’s Hitler, that Zanu-PF is the equivalent of the West’s Nazis, and whoever is Zimbabwean and does not support Tsvangirai is fighting "democratic forces".

For them, the criterion is distinctively different. A good Westerner criticises how things are being implemented but never why they are being done.

When researching for the book "Manufacturing Consent" Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky spent about 150 pages reviewing mostly the New York Times on the Vietnam war from 1950 to 2002. They established that the Times was never really critical of the war and has never been critical of it even in the post-war period. They concluded that the paper consciously suppressed US government actions.

They looked at reporters like David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, the ones that were considered "hard-core critics". They discovered that what these reporters were criticising was the failure to win the war. They were arguing that the war was "a noble cause" but the government needed to fight it better and not screw it up the way they were doing.

This is exactly what mainstream Western media critics on the Iraq and Afghan wars are saying today. They complain that it has taken too long to win the wars, that the wars are unwinnable, and that the US-led Western alliance is screwing it up.

These critics cannot stand real critics like Steven Gowans, the Canadian writer. In fact, this writer had a leftwing-arranged seminar where he was going to be one of the two main speakers with a South African writer and university lecturer cancelled just because this writer’s paper had heavily quoted Steven Gowans.

So in reality you even have part of the Western left pretty much falling in line with acceptable criticism, agreeing with the principles of Western foreign policy and just screaming at how badly it is implemented.

As if it was going to make a better excuse the organisers of this seminar advertised the cancellation citing this writer’s "apologetics for Mugabe". One would expect the real left in the West to be hunting for a pro-Mugabe person to at least hear the other side of the story.

In his best-selling book, "A Bright Shining Lie" Sheehan dwells entirely on how the US intelligence experts were saying all these things that were happening on the ground in Vietnam and how these things never reached Washington, for one reason or the other. That is the nature of Sheehan’s criticism of the war, and his book is considered an outright anti-war classic in the mainstream West. That is the recommendation you get when you ask for books that oppose the US war effort in Vietnam.

Sheehan considers John Paul Vann as his hero in the Vietnam war. This is because he once told reporters that things were not going on exactly as what Washington was telling the world they were. He leaked some confidential memoranda in 1965 and these were totally ignored by the mainstream media, although Chomsky and others in the peace movement published them.

Sheehan omitted these memos in his book as well. It is because they said that South Vietnam’s National Liberation Front had won the population over to their side and that because they had very good and appealing political programmes.

They clearly said the peasants supported them because they were the right people to support. The memos acknowledged that there was a social revolution in South Vietnam and that NFL was organising it, and that was why they had peasant support.

This is quite similar to Zimbabwe’s revolutionary land reform programme of 2000. It was clear but never acknowledged in the West that there was a real popular social revolution unveiling and Zanu-PF had organised it. The revolution was being pushed by peasant support and that was so because it was the right programme to support. There was nothing that could be done about it, just like there was nothing the US could do with the NFL-organised Vietnamese social revolution.

So what was the conclusion? For Vietnam it was decided escalation of the war was the answer, the NFL had to be wiped out. For Zimbabwe it was decided to impose a severe economic strangulation programme in place and that is how the US came up with ZDERA and the EU with their severe economic sanctions, while the rest of the Western alliance circles like Australia and Canada also weighed in with various forms of illegal economic sanctions. Zanu-PF had to be annihilated and the game plan is still on.

Essentially the thinking is exactly the same as what Walter Lippmann and the rest of the West’s "democratic thinkers" have traditionally put across — that democracy requires a class of elites to manage decision-making — making and manufacturing the general population’s consent for policies that are seen as beyond their capacity to comprehend and decide for themselves.

The thinking for Vietnam was that the ‘‘stupid’’ Vietnamese peasants were making a mistake — it was the ‘‘smart’’ guys from America who had to run the revolution for them. They thought the NFL could run it, these ‘‘stupid’’ guerrillas that were running around the villages organising peasants. Clearly only the ‘‘smart’’ Americans were the only ones who could run such a programme for the Vietnamese.

It was out of the duty of the West as the "international community" to make sure that these poor peasants of the world should not be allowed to have their own way, because their way is always all just stupid error on the part of the unthinking peasants.

So what had to be done was wipe out the NFL, win the war, smash up Vietnam, and then run for the Vietnamese a proper social revolution, like America has always done in history — United States of America — the archangel of freedom.

It is today the duty of the West as "the international community" to stop the ‘‘stupid’’ peasants of Zimbabwe from supporting an equally ‘‘stupid’’ band of war veterans that organised the reclamation of the country’s stolen farm lands. These peasants think Zanu-PF and the ‘‘clueless’’ war veterans can run an agrarian revolution, those ageing ‘‘lunatics’’ and their supporting "green bomber" youths.

No, it is only the most ‘‘intelligent’’ Westerners who can meaningfully organise the peasants of Zimbabwe. So what has to be done is to wipe out Zanu-PF and prop up the Western creation called MDC-T.

What is needed is to win the sanctions war, smash up Zimbabwe, and then the West can through their Zimbabwean clients run the agrarian revolution well for the peasants. This is why we hear so much noise about an "internationally monitored" land audit and election.

We are told the Afghans badly need rescuing by the West. They need to be liberated from their primitive selves, from the most stupid and unthinking Taliban, from their most fundamentalist religion, from their hopeless poverty and from the extreme bondage of their women.

The fact that the Taliban have tremendous support from the generality of Afghanistan is just because these stupid peasants have very little of brains. They always make the most stupid of mistakes and to rescue them the Taliban must be wiped out entirely, the war must be won, then Afghanistan must be smashed up and the West can start civilising the Afghans as they have always done in history.

That basically is the line in Neil Sheehan’s book, borrowed from his hero John Paul Vann. It is the line in British political circles, the line espoused by Barack Obama when telling the world that the women and mothers of Zimbabwe are represented by Jenny Williams and one Magodonga Mahlangu. These two characters are dutiful clients in carrying out the Zimbabwean revolution the Western way and they assume super status over all of us Zimbabweans for their efforts.

Obama preached vigorously that these two illustrious women needed all the support from his America in the noble cause of liberating them from their own police force, from their tyrannical leadership, and from the whole undemocratic culture of their most primitive country.

The MDC-T makes no secret of their convictions that Zimbabwe can only progress under the leadership of Western powers. They aspire to be the most supported country by Western aid, they aspire for replica media freedoms to the West, replica election patterns, replica media content and outline, and replica democratic tenets.

Surely, there is nothing wrong with this unless one was born to Zanu-PF parents or to war veterans. This is the thinking and we are all supposed to support it in the march to "a new Zimbabwe".

This writer brooks no nonsense about who owns Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is for Zimbabweans and will be ruled by Zimbabweans the Zimbabwean way. We cannot fall into traps that others have fallen into in the past and that is why we must be vigilant as a people.

 

 

©  EsinIslam.Com

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