SYNDICATED COLUMN: Down the Haiti Memory Hole
Haiti News Coverage Turns Sublimely Ridiculous
Ah, "1984." As the cartoonist Matt Bors says, it's "the dystopian novel that keeps on giving."
Orwell's main character worked for a government ministry that controlled the future by changing the past. Its most effective tool: the Memory Hole. Pieces of history went in—poof!—never to be heard from again. Afterward, it was as if those particular events had never happened:
"The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia."
American news producers and editors have long been masters of the Memory Hole, purposefully omitting the most relevant information stories that would otherwise make the whatever the current regime is look bad. "President Hugo Chávez," reported The Washington Post in a typical example of spin from 2005, "has recently accused President Bush of plotting to assassinate him." Going on to slam Chávez's supposed "bluster and anti-American showmanship," the Post left something out: Chávez's accusation was true.
Still, no one could have anticipated the soaring brazenness or the cynical linguistic savagery U.S. state-controlled media would deploy while "covering" the invasion of Haiti.
[Given that it took at least four days after the earthquake before the U.S. military permitted relief supplies to land at the Port-au-Prince airport, turned away planes from such NGOs as Doctors Without Borders, and that Defense Secretary Robert Gates refused to release aid until a full week had passed, one can hardly call the deployment of 10,000 troops a relief operation.]
Vanished from news accounts of Operation Haitian Freedom—poof!—was the United States' century-long raping and pillaging of the country, including several CIA-backed coups that installed vicious dictators and a brutal occupation by U.S. Marines that lasted several decades.
There were hundreds of candidates to choose from in awarding this week's Haiti Memory Hole Prize, but the winner is The Oregonian, the daily newspaper in Portland, Oregon. On January 15th the paper published an editorial titled "A muscular paternalism for Haiti" with an incredible thesis:
"If the nations of the world had devoted to Haiti only a fraction of the diplomatic and military energy they have spent over the past five decades on nearby Cuba, the country would be far more advanced and able to aid in its own recovery today."
In other words, Haiti's problem isn't that the U.S. expropriated 40 percent of its GDP from 1915 to 1947. Or that the U.S. installed the father-and-son Duvalier team of "anti-Communist" dictators, who looted the Haitian treasury of more than $1 billion. Or that the CIA deposed Haiti's popular, and only democratically-elected president, not once, but twice—because he had the gall to push through an increase in the minimum wage for Haitians who work in sweatshops owned by U.S. companies.
Those events couldn't be responsible for Haiti's plight. Not even a little bit. Because, if you rely on The Oregonian for your news, you'd never know that that stuff happened.
"Perhaps the scope of the current disaster will at last shock these countries, including the United States, to conduct a muscular intervention into Haitian affairs," editorialized The Oregonian.
"At last"? What do they call a 20-year-long military occupation? Half a dozen military coups?
Like most of the world, Haiti would have been better off if we really had "neglected" them. How much of our "help" can these poor people stand?
At least The New York Times acknowledged "Haiti's long history of foreign intervention, including an American occupation" in its coverage. But like other papers that ran sickening—and treacly cartoons falsely depicting a friendly (white) Uncle Sam patronizingly deigning to assist clueless dark-skinned Haitians in their time of need—the most pertinent details had disappeared into the Memory Hole.
Here's an unexpurgated section of the Times' background coverage:
"President Woodrow Wilson sent American Marines to Haiti in 1915 to restore public order after six different leaders ruled the country in quick succession, each killed or forced into exile. Opposition was intense, but it would be nearly two decades before the Marines would leave, in 1934.
"When President Bill Clinton ordered troops into the country in 1994 to restore Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was ousted as president by a group of former soldiers, Haitian critics raised that earlier intervention.
"A decade later, Mr. Aristide was forced out of office, and he accused the United States of orchestrating his ouster."
Wilson said he invaded Haiti to restore public order. The real reason, historians widely acknowledge, was to transform the country into an economic vassal state, a Caribbean colony.
It's true that Clinton brought Aristide back to power. But his predecessor, George Herbert Walker Bush, had ordered a CIA coup that removed him in the first place.
Finally, Aristide wasn't "forced out of office" by some mysterious random power. The Times' editors knew that. After all, their own newspaper ran a page-one story on March 1, 2004 titled: "Aristide Flees After a Shove From the U.S." So when Aristide "accused the United States of orchestrating his ouster," he was "accusing" the U.S. of doing what The New York Times reported that it did.
True, this information is available to anyone who cares to spend a few minutes Googling it. The point is, few people have the time, energy or inclination to second-guess everything they read. Like Winston Smith in "1984," they start to wonder whether they misremembered events as they were originally reported. Maybe we really have always been at war with Eurasia. Maybe we really did invade Haiti in 1915 merely to "restore order." Or maybe, if you live in Portland, this is the first time the U.S. or any other country has ever bothered to pay attention to Haiti. Who knows?
What I want to know is: Why do editors and producers do it? Why do they leave out the basic facts? It's not like they get a call from Big Brother ordering them to spin or delete historical facts from their coverage. They do it voluntarily.
What are they afraid of?
(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the new graphic memoir "The Year of Loving Dangerously." He is also the author of the Gen X manifesto "Revenge of the Latchkey Kids." His website is tedrall.com.)
Ah, "1984." As the cartoonist Matt Bors says, it's "the dystopian novel that keeps on giving."
Orwell's main character worked for a government ministry that controlled the future by changing the past. Its most effective tool: the Memory Hole. Pieces of history went in—poof!—never to be heard from again. Afterward, it was as if those particular events had never happened:
"The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia."
American news producers and editors have long been masters of the Memory Hole, purposefully omitting the most relevant information stories that would otherwise make the whatever the current regime is look bad. "President Hugo Chávez," reported The Washington Post in a typical example of spin from 2005, "has recently accused President Bush of plotting to assassinate him." Going on to slam Chávez's supposed "bluster and anti-American showmanship," the Post left something out: Chávez's accusation was true.
Still, no one could have anticipated the soaring brazenness or the cynical linguistic savagery U.S. state-controlled media would deploy while "covering" the invasion of Haiti.
[Given that it took at least four days after the earthquake before the U.S. military permitted relief supplies to land at the Port-au-Prince airport, turned away planes from such NGOs as Doctors Without Borders, and that Defense Secretary Robert Gates refused to release aid until a full week had passed, one can hardly call the deployment of 10,000 troops a relief operation.]
Vanished from news accounts of Operation Haitian Freedom—poof!—was the United States' century-long raping and pillaging of the country, including several CIA-backed coups that installed vicious dictators and a brutal occupation by U.S. Marines that lasted several decades.
There were hundreds of candidates to choose from in awarding this week's Haiti Memory Hole Prize, but the winner is The Oregonian, the daily newspaper in Portland, Oregon. On January 15th the paper published an editorial titled "A muscular paternalism for Haiti" with an incredible thesis:
"If the nations of the world had devoted to Haiti only a fraction of the diplomatic and military energy they have spent over the past five decades on nearby Cuba, the country would be far more advanced and able to aid in its own recovery today."
In other words, Haiti's problem isn't that the U.S. expropriated 40 percent of its GDP from 1915 to 1947. Or that the U.S. installed the father-and-son Duvalier team of "anti-Communist" dictators, who looted the Haitian treasury of more than $1 billion. Or that the CIA deposed Haiti's popular, and only democratically-elected president, not once, but twice—because he had the gall to push through an increase in the minimum wage for Haitians who work in sweatshops owned by U.S. companies.
Those events couldn't be responsible for Haiti's plight. Not even a little bit. Because, if you rely on The Oregonian for your news, you'd never know that that stuff happened.
"Perhaps the scope of the current disaster will at last shock these countries, including the United States, to conduct a muscular intervention into Haitian affairs," editorialized The Oregonian.
"At last"? What do they call a 20-year-long military occupation? Half a dozen military coups?
Like most of the world, Haiti would have been better off if we really had "neglected" them. How much of our "help" can these poor people stand?
At least The New York Times acknowledged "Haiti's long history of foreign intervention, including an American occupation" in its coverage. But like other papers that ran sickening—and treacly cartoons falsely depicting a friendly (white) Uncle Sam patronizingly deigning to assist clueless dark-skinned Haitians in their time of need—the most pertinent details had disappeared into the Memory Hole.
Here's an unexpurgated section of the Times' background coverage:
"President Woodrow Wilson sent American Marines to Haiti in 1915 to restore public order after six different leaders ruled the country in quick succession, each killed or forced into exile. Opposition was intense, but it would be nearly two decades before the Marines would leave, in 1934.
"When President Bill Clinton ordered troops into the country in 1994 to restore Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was ousted as president by a group of former soldiers, Haitian critics raised that earlier intervention.
"A decade later, Mr. Aristide was forced out of office, and he accused the United States of orchestrating his ouster."
Wilson said he invaded Haiti to restore public order. The real reason, historians widely acknowledge, was to transform the country into an economic vassal state, a Caribbean colony.
It's true that Clinton brought Aristide back to power. But his predecessor, George Herbert Walker Bush, had ordered a CIA coup that removed him in the first place.
Finally, Aristide wasn't "forced out of office" by some mysterious random power. The Times' editors knew that. After all, their own newspaper ran a page-one story on March 1, 2004 titled: "Aristide Flees After a Shove From the U.S." So when Aristide "accused the United States of orchestrating his ouster," he was "accusing" the U.S. of doing what The New York Times reported that it did.
True, this information is available to anyone who cares to spend a few minutes Googling it. The point is, few people have the time, energy or inclination to second-guess everything they read. Like Winston Smith in "1984," they start to wonder whether they misremembered events as they were originally reported. Maybe we really have always been at war with Eurasia. Maybe we really did invade Haiti in 1915 merely to "restore order." Or maybe, if you live in Portland, this is the first time the U.S. or any other country has ever bothered to pay attention to Haiti. Who knows?
What I want to know is: Why do editors and producers do it? Why do they leave out the basic facts? It's not like they get a call from Big Brother ordering them to spin or delete historical facts from their coverage. They do it voluntarily.
What are they afraid of?
(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the new graphic memoir "The Year of Loving Dangerously." He is also the author of the Gen X manifesto "Revenge of the Latchkey Kids." His website is tedrall.com.)
posted by Ted Rall at
10:54 AM
23 Comments:
What are they afraid of? My theory is these people, these editors, slept through every history class they ever attended, not unlike our former (p)Resident, George W. "Send Your Cash" Bush, the biggest embarrassment in the entire history of the USA that Bush's supporters and apologists are still succeeding at covering up (the Bush Memory Hole).
Let me head off the trolls before they arrive: Orwell was critical of Stalin's horrible government, but he was an avowed socialist. So much so that he went to fight for the cause in Spain.
I wanted to slide that in before the ring-wingers who don't know anything about Orwell try to claim him (again)...
I tend to agree with the first commenter: I tend to believe that, rather than being guided by big brother, these people are just stupid.
I recall around 2003, when I was working on a degree in illustration, I took a class in political cartooning and a professional political cartoonist came and shared his work with the class. One of his cartoons pushed forth the common misperception that Saddam Hussein had "kicked out" UN weapons inspectors.
I pointed out that Saddam Hussein hadn't kicked out the inspectors, but rather Clinton had ordered them to evacuate in advance of his attack on Iraq near the end of his second term.
The professional political cartoonist, a man in his forties or fifties who had been cartooning for many years, was confused. "Clinton never attacked Iraq," he explained, "I think you must be thinking of Bosnia."
"Uh... it was called Operation Desert Fox. It happened."
Now, I had only just turned 16 when Clinton bombed Iraq. At that age, I was typically apolitical and mostly just concerned about my silly high school problems, and yet, I still remember watching the news when Bill Clinton launched his attack (randomly launched without warning, and suspiciously timed during his impeachment proceedings).
Meanwhile, this man was a full-grown adult who, even then, WAS WORKING AS A PROFESSIONAL POLITICAL CARTOONIST. Yet, he honestly did not remember the attack and insisted that I was wrong.
I tend to think, for all of Orwell's brilliance, that Huxley and Bradbury were more prophetic. We don't need torture chambers or secret police or vast conspiracies to bury history (not in our own country, anyway). Instead, replace books with increasingly vapid television, replace thoughtful silences with earbuds, and replace water with sugar water; soon, people will be too stupid, distracted, and sluggish to bother learning history (even recent history) in the first place.
'What are they afraid of?'
Being accused of being 'anti-American' or 'anti-Haitian' or even 'hindering the effort.' It ruins the narrative of American exceptionalism ('We freed ourselves from colonialism, but then we tried to crush the first sucessful slave revolt in this Hemisphere; are we no better than the British Empire?') and casts a dark pall over the reporting. It also complicates the story a little, and probably makes 500 word stories into 800 word 'behemoths.' For TV/web it means that the news editors would have to dig through old tapes to find shots of the Duvalliers, people's heads on poles, and the grisly 'burning tires' method FRAPH used against Lavalas members when Aristede was kicked out in the 1990s. That reminds me; the 'journalists' would have to talk about how W. sent some CIA goons to the island in 2004 to hustle Aristede out because he was giving the sweatshop owners hell over the crappy pay and backbreaking hours Haitians were pulling in those hellhole garment factories. So the angle that wins is 'disaster/human interest story.'
- mr. mike
Heh, I see Orwell's been mentioned already. His preface written for 'Animal Farm' should be compulsory reading: http://www.orwell.ru/library/novels/Animal_Farm/english/efp_go
"Any fairminded person with journalistic experience will admit that during this war official censorship has not been particularly irksome. We have not been subjected to the kind of totalitarian ‘co-ordination’ that it might have been reasonable to expect. The press has some justified grievances, but on the whole the Government has behaved well and has been surprisingly tolerant of minority opinions. The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary.Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines-being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals."
They fear, more than anything else, the loss of their personal sense of security and superiority. Like anyone else in an entrenched position of power and influence, they want to stay there, even if it leads to them slipping up when previously irrelevant data is later dug up to contradict them.
They know we're too stupid and apathetic to look this stuff up, let alone question them when the only reader mail ever seen on TV is some form of praise or arguments that fit whatever reporter's personal agenda.
It's not that we don't want to remember. It's that we don't care enough to.
@Henry, I agree.
"2024" was my worst-selling book but my most prescient.
you almost had a great article that I could email to all my conservative friends, but then you added so much commentary that they'd stop reading in the first few paragraphs. I know its editorial, but this is pandering to the left so hard that nobody on the right would give it te time of day.
Yes, I agree that Huxley and Bradbury were more prophetic. We're living in Brave New World.
Orwell died shortly after writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, so we should cut him some slack--at the time, Stalin probably seemed the most dire threat as the Allies beat down the right-wing totalitarian forces. Stalin seemed the greatest threat to socialism, anyway, and, as I've said, Orwell was a socialist. I'm pretty sure that had he lived, his next novel would have turned his attention to the US's war crimes in Japan.
I still think that Orwell ranks above Huxley, Bradbury, Zamyatin and the other 20th century dystopian novelists in terms of dramatic power. Nineteen Eighty-Four is incredibly powerful. It transcends its historical context and touches the universal human condition...
"They fear, more than anything else, the loss of their personal sense of security and superiority. Like anyone else in an entrenched position of power and influence, they want to stay there..."
I'd go a step further, and say that like anyone else in an entrenched position of power and influence, they would never have GOTTEN there in the first place if they weren't able to conform to the program.
It's not a matter of conforming in a dramatic, cinematic, Heil Hitler!, I Love Big Brother! sort of way. Most of the time, the conformists probably don't even realize that they're conforming, or don't realize the extent to which they are conforming, or why.
But to "get ahead" in this culture and secure positions of power and influence, you have to be a conformist, not a trouble-maker. Not being a troublemaker means accepting the status quo. Starting in elementary school, all the way through grad school, you have to be the kind of person who's willing to jump through meaningless credential hoops, compete against your fellows without questioning competition or zero-sum games, believe that success is measured the way consumer-capitalist society says its measured, not ask too many annoying questions, parrot nonsense, and tell people what they want to hear. Those who excel at this sort of thing in school will be invited to join The Establishment, where they will continue to succeed by doing the exact same thing, on a larger scale.
The Establishment has reached tacit agreement that talking about the US's dirty behavior is a no-win situation. It doesn't sell advertising, it's sure to piss someone off, and the right-wing noise machine is sure to crank up accusations of anti-American bias before you can say "Who knew?". You probably won't get fired tomorrow if you do that sort of thing (and your employer may even put on a short-term show of "standing by" you), but in the long run, you don't want to keep attracting that sort of attention, do you? It's hardly good for your career. You'll wind up as some low-rent fringe writer if you keep it up (and probably on a no-fly list to boot). Who needs that? Not the people who've been self-selecting all their lives to avoid such unpleasantry.
Nobody has to "tell" them or coerce them to be that way, because they all just ARE that way, or they wouldn't BE there in the first place. Sure, some of them may know deep down that it's a bit of a racket, and will speak to you privately about this knowledge - but if they were willing to do more than that, they wouldn't be there. They know how the game is played, and they're the type who play the game.
(I say this as someone who went to fancy schools, and saw which of her classmates have "made it" big time. It wasn't the independent thinkers, trust me. The kids who asked the wrong questions, pointed out unpleasant facts, noticed contradictions, connected the dots and said "this is bull" haven't been invited into the halls of power.)
they fear "ultra-patriots" who'll say there anti-american
Grouchy, you can certainly do better than that. Granted, just like Bertrand Russell, Orwell was a utopian socialist of an independent bent. "Avowed" brings to mind pledges by party operatives, something Orwell never was. You have to bear in mind, also, that in Orwell's time the alternative to so-called "Stalinism" wasn't his more hardcore brand of Fabianism, but rather "Trotskyism", the flip-side to the rotten Bolshevik coin.
Be that as it may be, his precise critic of the archetypal totalitarian regime, to wit, the Soviet one, didn't make him very much loved by most of his contemporary socialists, so there.
Interesting post, Ellie.
I've noticed that there are pockets in the system that will tolerate court jesters--provided they don't seriously rock the boat or have any real power. (Ted is one example. He's often the most prominent commentator stating the obvious, and look at how marginalized he is. When he's trotted out on Fox News, he's billed as a side-show act.)
There are little niches for subversives, and I often suspect that they are there by design to keep the black sheep from really causing problems. As I enter middle-age, I find myself with increasing more enticements to mellow out. (Also, the American system is ingenious in the way that it has destroyed class-conscious and de-politicized its population with a farcical "two party" system. If you narrow your perception of the "big picture," you'll often be able to thrive by being a limited rebel within non-political realms.)
Anyway, back on point: if we had nothing to lose, if the system didn't offer some flexibility at its edges, we'd be staging a REAL revolt, rather than just running our mouths...
Yes, you could call Bertrand Russell that. He visited Stalinist Russia and was one of the first socialists to criticize it, along with Orwell.
Both were independent thinkers AND self-described socialists, which, after decades of cold-war propaganda, might be hard for some to understand.
But the point here is to head off the right's claiming of Orwell. I don't think we have to worry about the right wanting anything to do with Russell...
"In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia."
--Eric Blair
Wow... It must be nice making a living bashing the country you call home. I still don't understand why, after all these years of hating America, liberals just don't choose to leave the nation to those who really love it. Go away.
Wow... It must be nice making a living bashing the country you call home. I still don't understand why, after all these years of hating America, liberals just don't choose to leave the nation to those who really love it. Go away.
Funny! This is a parody, right?
No Grouchy, it's a legitimate question. Why don't you AmeriKKKA haters move to Cuba?
Why don't you AmeriKKKA haters move to Cuba?
I love it! Stay in character!
I still don't understand why, after all these years of hating America, liberals just don't choose to leave the nation to those who really love it.
Hey buddy, if you don't like Obama, you can leave. Har har.
Hey buddy, if you don't like Obama, you can leave. Har har.
I'll tell you the difference. Most of you have a hatred towards all things America. You think we are imperialist. Those of us on the other side love our country. We are not having it changed by an Alinskite like Obama.
Most of you have a hatred towards all things America.
I love American music (folk, jazz and rock and roll), American literature, America's incredible natural beauty, America's revolutionary 20th century visual art and the politics of Henry David Thoreau* and Martin Luther King. I love America's First Amendment; I regularly use it, and I'd champion any individual's right to free speech. I'm actively engaged in my neighborhood to advance the welfare of my local community.
You must not be talking about me, because I'm practically a piece of apple pie.
----------------
Henry David Thoreau embodies everything good in the American character.
Yeah yeah you love everything about America, except everybody in it who's not white, or who live in big cities, or who think they're smarter than you (they are) or who like things you don't like, like each other.
What are you doing here? Asshole.
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