Mediatised fascism

Over a week ago the BBC announced that it would host Nick Griffin (leader of the BNP, British National Party) on its program Question Time. The reason for doing this, according to a BBC spokesman, is that:

"the BBC is obliged to treat all political parties registered with the Electoral Commission and operating within the law with due impartiality. By winning representation in the European parliament, the BNP has demonstrated evidence of electoral support at a national level. This will be reflected in the amount of coverage it receives on BBC programmes such as Question Time."

This, however, should not be accepted. The BBC has already given the BNP coverage way beyond any arguable obligations, and it started doing so long before the BNP had demonstrated any 'national support' (it should be noted that actually the number of votes they received this time went down). There is absolutely no obligation on them to host Griffin on Question Time. This is not about the law, representative coverage, free speech or anything of that kind - although if the BBC wants to cite those points, the BNP is lawless, opposed to free speech and doesn't believe in representation of any group its Nazi ideology deems fit for persecution. The legality of such a political party is actually quite debatable. It does not permit non-white people to join the party and therefore practices racial discrimination. Griffin, in a carefully coded statement evoking the famous 'fourteen words' of white supremacist ideology, has suggested that the BNP may have to adapt to the law but will still seek "to secure a future for the true children of our islands".

On the other hand, part of the BBC's normative rationale for hosting fascist propaganda is that it must be fair and impartial, and must faithfully represent all points of view. Few readers of this blog will believe for a second that the BBC is non-biased, or that it represents all points of view fairly. The BBC has an institutional bias toward power, as we have seen demonstrated in surveys concerning its coverage of Iraq and Israel-Palestine. It has a similar bias over class issues, and is instinctively hostile to strikers, protesters, environmentalists, anticapitalists, the left, etc. That hostility also extends to antifascists. Take for example the coverage of the massive Welling protest in 1993, which was brutally attacked by police. The BBC in this case sought to vilify the protesters and to imply that they were violent and disruptive.

So, to put it plainly, what the BBC is doing is offering fascism a great opportunity to advertise itself, which is certainly in agreement with its policy of being against any left-wing movement. Furthermore, I'm sure Griffin is delighted by the amount of expectation that his appearance on QT has managed to create and how he has managed to attract not only the general public's attention, but also the government's. Gordon Brown has suggested the justice secretary, Jack Straw, or the communities secretary, John Denham, to appear alongside the BNP leader on Question Time. The Conservatives have also said they will put up a senior figure for the programme and the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, said he would be likely to field its home affairs spokesman, Chris Huhne, to take part.

To conclude, this is a further example of how the media behaves in our modern society. What the BBC is doing with the BNP is done everyday on a smaller basis by other mainstream media worldwide, perhaps not so blatantly. If you look closely enough, you can notice how the press choose very carefully what they tell and how they tell it and that, in the end, is another form of mediatised fascism.

The long forgotten

Once upon a time, 27 years ago today, a terrible massacre that is rarely remembered took place. On the 16th of September 1982, the Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia entered two Beirut refugee camps called Sabra and Shatila which were inhabited by Palestinian refugees. Their mission was authorised by the IDF (Israeli Defense Force), under the command of Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, that held the territory around Beirut at that time as a result of the June 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

The Phalangists, whose Maronite Christian president, Bachir Gemayel, had just been assassinated on  the 14th of September, entered the camps on the afternoon of the 16th and carried out a 62-hour rampage of rape and murder until Saturday morning, September the 18th. They were motivated by revenge for the Gemayel killing, which they attributed to the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation). Later, information revealed that Gemayel was assassinated by the Syrians, who opposed his alliance with the Israelis, and not by the PLO. The exact number killed by the Phalangists is disputed, with estimates ranging from 328 to 3500, according to Wikipedia. 

The killing attracted international attention, especially because the gates of both refugee camps were under the control of the IDF. The Israeli government set up the Kahan Commission to investigate, which held Israel indirectly responsible for the murders of Sabra and Shatila. Amazingly, it went as far as to bear Ariel Sharon personally responsible for "ignoring the danger of bloodshed and revenge" and for "not taking appropriate measures to prevent bloodshed." The Commission even demanded Sharon's resignation as Defense Minister, which he did reluctantly, probably forced by the international outcry that had erupted. The US, of course, didn't waste the opportunity to praise the government of its mercenary state. Here is an extract of what former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said of the Kahan Commission: 

"[It was] a great tribute to Israeli democracy... There are very few governments in the world that one can imagine making such a public investigation of such a difficult and shameful episode."

What was really surprising was the media coverage of the event. Instead of investigating how the killing had come to happen, they centred their attention on the number of victims, trying to get the world to see how what had happened in Beirut wasn't really a massacre, but a standard, everyday killing...

When does a killing become an outrage? When does an atrocity become a massacre? Or, put another way, how many killings make a massacre? Thirty? A hundred? Three hundred? When is a massacre not a massacre? When the figures are too low? Or when the massacre is carried out by Israel’s friends rather than Israel's enemies? If Syrian troops had crossed into Israel, surrounded a Kibbutz and allowed their Palestinian allies to slaughter the Jewish inhabitants, no Western news agency would waste its time afterwards arguing about whether or not it should be called a massacre.

But in Beirut, the victims were Palestinians. The guilty were certainly Christian militiamen, but the Israelis were also to blame. Even though the Israelis had not directly taken part in the killings, they had certainly sent militia into the camp knowing that they were seeking revenge and that surely a bloodshed would happen. They were coldblooded enough as to sit back and watch how refugees were being slaughtered. This happened 27 years ago. Today we have a wall along the Gaza strip separating it from Egypt which, although it has been compared on several occasions with the one in Berlin, hasn't received half of the attention. The question today shouldn't be how many deaths it takes for a killing to become a massacre, but how many massacres and how many walls will it take for the world to react.

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, 
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, 
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs 
And towards our distant rest began to trudge. 
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots 
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; 
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! –  An ecstasy of fumbling, 
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; 
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling, 
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light, 
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, 
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
 
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace 
Behind the wagon that we flung him in, 
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, 
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; 
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood 
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, 
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud 
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, 
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest 
To children ardent for some desperate glory, 
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est 
Pro patria mori.

- Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

A suitable lunch

Thursday the 10th of September. COSMO'09 conference taking place at CERN about to end. I'm sitting outside restaurant 1, enjoying one of the few sunny days left in Geneva. Around my table are a collection of people from several places around the world: friends from afar that I've made along the way in the many travels that scientific research puts you through. Perhaps a bit of background about them is necessary: There's Zé, Portuguese, 24, cosmology PhD student at Portsmouth; Anastasia, 25, originally from Kazakhstan, living in Tel Aviv since she's 17 and also a cosmology PhD student; same goes for Irina. Finally there's Joan Antoni, 24, from Catalonia and working on extra dimensions and me.

Having two people from Israel or, better said, currently living there, I couldn't resist the temptation to ask them about their point of view about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how the situation is lived from inside the country. I thought their opinion would be particularly interesting since they're educated students, people that have been granted the privilege to the ability to question the world that surrounds us. I was to be proven wrong...

To start with, the question wasn't very well taken. The first answer I received from Anastasia is that such topic is not suitable to debate during lunch. Of course, what she wanted to say is that she didn't want to discuss it at all, probably because she sensed that our opinions might be divergent, and she was right. However, this was not what surprised me the most. What most startled me was the reaction of the whole table. After a few awkward minutes of tense silence (in Spain we would use the expression that an angel had passed) a sort of dialog started - much to Anastasia's distaste. Hope uplifted, I listened to what people's thoughts on the matter were... and was again disappointed. A managed to utter something like: "the Jews were there first" as if this gave them the right to bomb Gaza and exterminate the Palestinians, I thought. J would just keep repeating that the situation was more complicated than how we were depicting it - but didn't add a more profound explanation or viewpoint. Z started comparing the conflict with the Basque country in Spain... I just couldn't believe what I was hearing. After some attempts to try to refute these nonsensical ideas - the general position was clearly pro-Israel - I abandoned all hope and kept quiet.

The real problem here is not that a group of future doctors were clearly pro-Israel. What's really scandalous is the nonexistence of a profound critical reflection amongst young educated people. I'm not expecting them to read ZNet or listen to Democracy Now, but I would think it normal within such a collective of individuals that they would have informed themselves and, why not, involved themselves in what's happening in the world we live in. It's all fine to sit in a desk 8 (or more) hours a day solving impossible formulae, but, even though our imagination is free to roam through the Universe, our feet are still bound to a convoluted planet.

Morning view

This is the first time I ever write in an internet blog. The idea comes from a friend of mine with whom I argued that I wouldn't like to have my thoughts on the web available for everyone to read. To be fair, this still holds. I'm not keen on writing anything personal here, just some of my opinions about the world around us.

The title of this blog - another hard decision - comes to describe the photograph that accompanies this post. This is the view from my apartment in Saint-Genis at about 8 in the morning. On very clear days it is even possible to see the Mont-Blanc while having breakfast. This view, with CERN in the foreground (reminding me that I have to leave to work) is what I like to contemplate while thinking about the things that will probably be published here, hence the title of the blog.