Media Beat

A senior adviser to the huge lending institution offered this explanation: “We decided that you can't have a meeting of ideas behind a cordon of police officers.” Presumably, the meeting of ideas will flourish behind a cordon of passwords, bytes, and pixels.

The World Bank's retreat behind virtual walls may keep the “riffraff” away, with online discourse going smoothly, but vital issues remain—such as policies that undercut essential government services in poor countries, while promoting privatization and user fees for access to health care and education.

“The objectives of the World Bank with this failed conference were simply an image-washing operation,” said a statement from a Barcelona-based campaign that had worked on planning the demonstrations. Now, the World Bank is depicting itself as the injured party.

Protest organizers are derisive about the Bank's media spin: “The representatives of globalized capitalism feel threatened by the popular movements against globalization. They, who meet in towers surrounded by walls and soldiers in order to stay apart from the people whom they oppress, wish to appear as victims. They, who have at their disposal the resources of the planet, complain that those who have nothing wanted to have their voice heard.”

The World Bank's gambit of seeking refuge in cyberspace should be a wake-up call to activists who dream that websites and email are paradigm-shattering tools of the people. Some who take it for granted that “the revolution will not be televised” seem to hope that their revolution will be digitized.

There's nothing inherently democratizing about the Internet. In fact, it has developed into a prodigious conduit of political and cultural propaganda, distributed via centrally edited mega-networks. America Online has 27 million subscribers, the New Internationalist magazine noted recently. “They spend an incredible 84 percent of their Internet time on AOL alone, which provides a regulated leisure and shopping environment dominated by in-house brands—from Time magazine to Madonna's latest album.”

At the same time that creative advocates for social change are routinely putting the Internet to great use, powerful elite bodies like the World Bank are touting online innovations as democratic models—while striving to elude the reach of progressive grassroots activism.

If, in 1968, the Democratic National Convention had been held in cyberspace instead of in Chicago, on what streets would the antiwar protests have converged? If, on Inauguration Day this year, the swearing-in ceremony for George W. Bush had taken place virtually rather than at one end of Pennsylvania Avenue, where would people have gathered to hold up their signs saying, “Hail to the Thief?”

Top officials of the World Bank are onto something. In a managerial world, disruption must be kept to an absolute minimum. If global corpor- atization is to achieve its transnational potential, the discourse among power brokers and their favorite thinkers can happen everywhere at once—and nowhere in particular. Let the troublemakers try to interfere by doing civil disobedience in cyberspace.

In any struggle that concentrates on a battlefield of high-tech communications, the long-term advantages are heavily weighted toward institutions with billions of dollars behind them. Whatever our hopes, no technology can make up for a lack of democracy.

Media and Vietnam

Media commentators are split about Bob Kerrey and what happened 32 years ago in the Vietnamese village of Thanh Phong. Some journalists seem eager to exonerate the former senator. Others appear inclined to turn him into a lightning rod for national guilt.

Syndicated columnists have been a bit unpredictable. “This is a murder story that lacks the basic underpinnings high standards should require,” liberal Thomas Oliphant wrote. Conservative John Leo was less evasive: “The village was a ‘free-fire' zone, meaning that all who lived there were regarded as enemies who could be fired on at will. Did that policy amount to a blank check for American troops to commit atrocities? Even at this late date, we need to know the answer.”

In some media quarters, fury erupted after a New York Times editorial declared: “It is a story that—with its conflicting evidence, undeniable carnage and tragic aftermath—sums up the American experience in Vietnam and the madness of a war that then, as now, seemed to lack any rationale except the wrecking of as many lives as possible on both sides.”

The punditry duo on the “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” condemned the Times as terribly unfair to Kerrey. The editorial was “an act of moral arrogance rarely seen,” Mark Shields charged. Paul Gigot chimed in: “Mark stole my thunder beating up the New York Times.” Similar noises, on “Fox News Sunday,” came from the host of NPR's “Talk of the Nation,” Juan Williams, who claimed that reporters were giving Kerrey shabby treatment.

Striving to encourage such sentiments, Kerrey has resorted to the kind of media-as-traitors bombast that Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon found so irresistible as commanders in chief. “It's disgraceful,” Kerrey complained during an Associated Press interview in late April. “The Vietnamese government likes to routinely say how terrible Americans were. The Times and CBS are now collaborating in that effort.”

New York Times columnist William Safire is also sounding familiar themes these days. While not bothering to note his own specialized war-making services as a top speechwriter in the Nixon administration, Safire rushed to the defense of Kerrey—and the war on Vietnam. In a column that decried a “humiliating accusation of national arrogance,” Safire urged us to “recall a noble motive.”

But when motives were based on lies and illusions, how could they have been “noble?”

Commonly, in the U.S. media frame, the vast majority of the war's victims—including a few million dead people in their home countries of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—are rendered as little more than props for the anguish of Americans. How much we have suffered as a result of killing those people. Their importance grows only to the extent that they underscore our own.

A year ago, Kerrey wrote a Washington Post op-ed piece that concluded: “Was the war worth the effort and sacrifice or was it a mistake? Everyone touched by it must answer that question for himself. When I came home in 1969 and for many years afterward, I did not believe it was worth it. Today, with the passage of time and the experience of seeing both the benefits of freedom won by our sacrifice and the human destruction done by dictatorships, I believe the cause was just and the sacrifice not in vain.”

Only our own national narcissism, mendacity, and denial can preserve the binary myth that the war was either “worth the effort” or “a mistake.” The war was wrong not because it proved to be unwinnable but because it was, fundamentally, mass murder from the start. Propaganda aside, U.S. forces invaded Vietnam—welcomed by a succession of Saigon regimes that Washington installed and propped up.

Kerrey did his deadly work in the Mekong Delta in early 1969. So did Brian Willson, a first lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force. As a ground security officer, he saw bombing operations up close and witnessed effects on the ground, in villages. “The only difference between Kerrey and me is that I was never in a position to personally kill while in Vietnam,” Willson says. “But I was part of a killing machine, even being complicit in the bombing campaigns, and I saw dozens and dozens of the bodies of women and children.”

Willson went on to become an Air Force captain. Later, he studied the Pentagon Papers and other official documents clearly showing that—from the outset—U.S. leaders knew the overwhelming majority of Vietnamese wanted the U.S. out of their country. “It was true that we could not determine friend from foe,” Willson remembers. “Most, at least secretly, were foe.” Vietnamese people “were defending their integrity and sovereignty from us invaders.” The entire war was “immoral and illegal.”

One day in 1987, Willson lost his legs when he joined with other peace activists for civil disobedience on some train tracks in California. A train—carrying munitions on the way to Central America—ran him over. At the time, Willson was trying to impede the shipment of weaponry destined for use in warfare largely aimed at civilians.

Since the early 1990s, the bombing and ongoing embargo of Iraq has killed at least several hundred thousand children. A current billion-dollar military aid package from the United States, under the guise of a “war on drugs,” is boosting the death toll in Colombia. Just foreign-policy business as usual. Rest assured, we have no blood on our hands.

“They have destroyed and are destroying...and do not know it and do not want to know it,” James Baldwin wrote a few decades ago. He added: “But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”                                Z

Norman Solomon's latest book is The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media. His syndicated column focuses on media and politics.