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Brand
Loyalty and the Absence of Remorse
by
Norman Solomon
October
16, 2003
Midway
through this month, a Wall Street Journal headline captured the flimflam spirit
that infuses so much of what passes for mass communications these days:
“Despite Slump, Students Flock to Ad Schools.” Many young people can recognize
a growth industry, and the business of large-scale deception is booming.
But
if Madison Avenue makes us think of subliminal twists and brazen lies, then
Pennsylvania Avenue should bring to mind a similar process of creating and
perpetuating brand loyalty.
“The Defense Department” is far from truth in
labeling. But no player in Washington would suggest renaming it “the War
Department,” any more than execs in charge of marketing Camels, Salems and
Marlboros would advocate re-branding them with names like Cancer Sticks, Coffin
Nails and Killer Leaf.
As
the department head, Donald Rumsfeld has gone through media ups and downs. Two
years ago, he was riding high. Lately, his stock has dropped. Like every
person, he’s expendable. Individuals are the easiest brand names to retire.
For
wars, brand loyalty is crucial. By the time most people think critically,
tragedies are history. And unlike a defective product (or a California
governor), wars are not subject to recall.
A
successful branding operation preceded the launch of war on Iraq seven months
ago. Despite what we might call extensive consumer resistance in the United States,
the Bush administration pulled out all
the
stops to persuade the U.S. public. The war sold politically because enough
people failed to see through the mendacity. They bought a bogus story line as
truth.
Now,
long after the Bush team’s pre-war lies served their purposes, the dead are
dead. While no recall can retroactively cancel the war, no remorse can be heard
from the perpetrators of the lies and the carnage. And vehicles for war keep gunning
their engines without a single repentant glance into rearview mirrors from
those in the driver seats.
It
would be unduly charitable to describe U.S. foreign policy -- and the prevalent American media coverage of
it -- as hit and run. Some events do occur by chance or happenstance, but the
baseline of governmental policy and media spin is far from accidental.
Washington’s
policies toward the Middle East may or may not be inept, but overall they’re
purposeful. American control over Iraq’s massive oil reserves is one key goal;
others include geopolitical leverage and military domination of the region.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration’s rhetoric about human rights is akin to an
upbeat photo for a full-page cigarette ad.
The
tasks of news media ought to include demanding moral accountability in every
direction. We should want that from all journalists -- American or Arab or any
other -- in connection with the slaughter of innocents, whether by Hamas or the
Israeli government, whether by Al Qaeda or “the Defense Department.”
Appropriate
scrutiny would extend to matters of cultural arrogance, which inevitably takes
the form of grievous assault. On this score, the United States is terribly
culpable.
Consider
this report that the British daily newspaper The Independent published in mid-October:
“U.S. soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have
uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central
Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not
give
information about guerrillas attacking U.S. troops.” Now, suddenly, “the stumps
of palm trees, some 70 years old, protrude from the brown earth scoured by the
bulldozers beside the road at Dhuluaya, a small town 50 miles north of
Baghdad.”
Even
the finest and fattest U.S. papers seem to have scant room for remorse about
the human toll of Washington’s foreign policy. Along the way, the chronic
“brand loyalty” that has endlessly reinforced support for Israel continues to
blur coverage.
As
a matter of routine, Israel destroys precious olive trees and homes that belong
to Palestinians in the occupied territories. On Oct. 13, Amnesty International
issued a statement saying that it “condemns in the strongest terms the
large-scale destruction by the Israeli army of Palestinian homes in a refugee
camp in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah, which made homeless hundreds of
people, including many children and elderly people.”
There
was nothing ambiguous about Amnesty International’s assessment: “The repeated
practice by the Israeli army of deliberate and wanton destruction of homes and
civilian property is a grave violation of international human rights and
humanitarian law, notably of Articles 33 and 53 of the Fourth Geneva
Convention, and constitutes a war crime.”
Such
war crimes are integral to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Now,
collective punishment and other war crimes are also integral to the U.S.
occupation of Iraq. But in the United States -- where taxpayers subsidize those methodical crimes -- brand
loyalties are still too strong, and remorse is still too weak.
Norman Solomon is Executive
Director of the Institute for Public Accuracy (www.accuracy.org) and a syndicated
columnist. His latest book is Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell
You (Context Books, 2003) with Reese Erlich. For an excerpt and other
information, go to: www.contextbooks.com/new.html#target. Email: mediabeat@igc.org
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