Over-mediation and the pitfalls of personalising the popular interest.

Precisely because the illegal regime change campaign and the illegal sanctions it invoked and used had to be based on lies, Zimbabwe and President Mugabe have outlasted the campaign, retained their pride and dignity, and emerged even more coherent and dynamic than they were before the campaign of vilification.
As for PM Tsvangirai, it is enough to read his speech on October 7 2010 to realise that all that white-sponsored promotion and glorification at best came to naught; at worst it actually set Mr Tsvangirai up for moral and ideological collapse. 

The Sunday Mail

AFRICAN FOCUS  By Tafataona Mahoso Accumulating revelations about Zimbabwe’s so-called “diaspora” — especially in the UK — are exposing the real evil of Anglo-Saxon efforts to effect illegal regime change in Zimbabwe by using illegal sanctions and other forms of destabilisation. Since the object was to destroy the liberation movement in government and to replace it with a sponsored stooge regime, the challenge for the Rhodies, the British and their Anglo-Saxon cousins was how to personalise the alleged evil of the liberation movement in government, by giving it an individual face, and how to personalise the chosen stooges and pawns by giving them victim faces which would invite Anglo-Saxon pity, sponsorship, patronage and media promotion. Zimbabweans are now faced with a glaring paradox emerging from the 15 years of Anglo-Saxon demonisation of their country and its liberation movement.  The persons who were used as temporary angels and innocent victims of tyrannical rule in Zimbabwe are coming out as less dignified, less respectable than the movement and the leaders they helped to vilify and demonise. Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai is one of those individuals the anti-Zimbabwe media have spent the last 11 years trying to glorify and glamorise. President Robert Mugabe is the one individual from the whole liberation movement in government whom the same anti-Zimbabwe propaganda industry has spent the last 15 years vilifying and demonising. But the results are amazing. Precisely because the illegal regime change campaign and the illegal sanctions it invoked and used had to be based on lies, Zimbabwe and President Mugabe have outlasted the campaign, retained their pride and dignity, and emerged even more coherent and dynamic than they were before the campaign of vilification. As for PM Tsvangirai, it is enough to read his speech on October 7 2010 to realise that all that white-sponsored promotion and glorification at best came to naught; at worst it actually set Mr Tsvangirai up for moral and ideological collapse. In the same way, the so-called victims of terror and asylum seekers now being exposed and disowned for eventual deportation from the UK must also feel that they co-operated with evil forces who were setting them up for the ultimate moral, ideological and political collapse and insult. For instance, in his struggle to justify his provocative choice of former Rhodesian Selous Scout Roy Bennett as Deputy Minister of Agriculture, the Prime Minister had to make the following argument in his October 7 speech at Harvest House: “The MDC utterly rejects any suggestion that power is an entitlement through historical legacy . . . (and) no actions of the past translate into a right to wield power in the present . . . None of us own that Constitution and none of us own this country.”  So, how do voters evaluate leaders and their parties except in terms of living history and a proven track record called legacy?  Why would 50 000 Zimbabweans die if Zimbabwe belongs to no one?  Now, what is the problem? Those who have been presented as saints and angels in the anti-Zimbabwe crusade of the last 15 years have come to mistake their sponsored and mediated prominence for sterling leadership and competence. They have understood neither the Anglo-Saxon propaganda machinery nor the Anglo-Saxon mindset behind that machinery. In The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch warned us decades ago: “The Western mass media, with their cult of celebrity and their attempt to surround (celebrity) with glamour and excitement, have made Americans a nation of fans . . . The media give substance to and thus intensify narcissistic dreams of fame and glory, encourage the common (mediocre) man to identify himself with the (rare) stars and therefore to hate the “herd” (meaning the povo), and therefore make it more and more difficult for him to accept the banality of everyday existence.” Indeed, 15 years of sponsored media exposure now makes our Prime Minister pose as a global leader of inter-galactic proportions. Listen to this: “As Executive Prime Minister of the Republic of Zimbabwe, I will today be advising the countries to whom these ambassadors (reassigned by President Mugabe) have “been posted that these appointments (which were in fact reassignments) are illegal and therefore null and void. I will be advising the Chief Justice of the improper appointment of the judges concerned, and that they are therefore null and void. I will be advising the President of the Senate . . . I will be advising the joint Ministers of Home Affairs and the National Security Council . . .” Apart from failure to nullify his own position of Prime Minister to which he was appointed or assigned by the very same President, the Prime Minister also failed to put a boundary between the crisis or confusion in his own head on one hand and the tranquil world outside Harvest House. As Lasch wrote, there is a dramatic failure to distinguish “between images of the self and the objects outside the self. These images fuse to form a defence against bad representations of the self . . .” So, Mr Tsvangirai failed to see his own utter failure to lead. Instead, he saw that failure as a national constitutional crisis reaching as far as the UN Security Council! Surely, if the “constitutional crisis” the Prime Minister was announcing had been a real-world situation experienced on the streets and in most institutions in Zimbabwe, the people who are directly charged with upholding the constitutional order of the land would be the first to know. Why was it necessary for the Prime Minister to inform the President, the Chief Justice, the Ministers of Home Affairs and the National Security Council that there was now a constitutional crisis in Zimbabwe? This was necessary because to this Prime Minister, Zimbabwe is Harvest House, Morgan Tsvangirai and the MDC-T. What are we seeing? After all the 10 years of globe-trotting in which the MDC formations and their leaders were assisting the Anglo-Saxon powers to wage a media and economic war on Zimbabwe, it is Zimbabwe’s patriotic and Pan-Africanist leadership which has emerged truly global with pride and dignity. Those who merely agreed to be used have reached the end of their utility. But the war is not over. At the turn of the century the world was presented with two opposed promises for humanity using the media in a digital age. One view was based on the media as mere technology and represented by former US vice-president Al Gore. According to Mark Slouka, the revolution of the new millennium was launched at the White House in Washington DC by the then vice-president of the United States of America, Al Gore, who is one of the leading digerati (the elite of the computer industry and online communities) of the world, in January 1994. (The vice-president) traded his politician’s shovel for a modem and symbolically broke ground on the new data highway: he held the first interactive computer news conference . . . The glitches were minor, the VP was able to “preach the techno gospel” to “the electronic supplicants trooping into the White House,” as Peter Lewis of the New York Times put it. Significantly, Slouka recognises the same link between linear technology today and the religion of the one jealous god who does not tolerate other gods but requires all his followers to walk the straight and narrow path to salvation. Digital technology was going to lead humanity to its deliverance. Slouka also points out in the same book that US vice-president A1 Gore has advanced further from his own father who was a builder of superhighways (autobahns) on actual ground and across the continental US. The son now builds his highway in cyberspace. But what is even more significant is Slouka’s paraphrase of Al Gore’s speech which echoed the mood of the cyberati at the time, who were saying that universal access to information would empower the weak and hamstring the tyrants of the world; that, thanks to the wonders of digital communication, the meek would finally inherit the earth.  “Blessed are the poor in data, for they shall have universal service . . .” The data highway, we were told, marked the dawn of a new day for humankind; it was a wonder, “a miracle”) sure to “elevate the human spirit and lead to the solution of social problems”. “It would promote economic growth, foster democracy,” and “link the people of the world,” bathing us all, wily nilly, in the warm milk of human kindness.  One world, one love.  After the January speech in Washington DC, the US vice-president took his message to Buenos Aires, Argentina, in March 1994, where he repeated a similar theme, saying: “. . . We now have at hand the technological breakthroughs and economic means to bring all the communities of the world together. We now can at last create a planetary information network that transmits messages and images with the speed of light from the largest city to the smallest village on every continent. Coming to Zimbabwe, Mr Tsvangirai’s advisors followed the Gore model and sent his October 7 speech all over the world via the internet. The other view was based on the media as a social institution in a world where the old slave-built empire now faced a new challenge called “emerging economies” of the South and the East, a new threat which has since forced a retreat by the North Atlantic powers from the G7 to the G8, and from the G8 to the G20 and beyond. This view of the media as an institution in an empire under threat explains the ferocious propaganda war from which Zimbabwe is emerging scathed but triumphant. George Gerbner described that war in his chapter called “Violence in and by the media”, in a book called Crisis and Democracy: Mass Communication and the Disruption of Social Order: “A never-to-be-declared state of symbolic emergency is pitting white heterosexual ‘prime of life’ power against the majorities of humankind living in the ghettos of America and in what used to be called the Third World . . . The Cold War may be winding down; the war on poverty (of the 1960s) has turned into a war on the poor.  “The cultural props for imperial policy are shifting from their anti-communist rationalisations to a sharp and selective offensive against real and concocted (faked) terrorists, narco-terrorists, petro-terrorists and other dark demons. An overkill of violent imagery helps to mobilise support for taking charge of the unruly at home (in the North) and abroad.” This is the essence of what the imperialists now call “soft power”. But it has serious limitations, as Slouka observed. Therefore, instead of the love, milk and honey of global harmony promised by Al Gore, Gerbner projected that the age of the digital image will be characterised by “the resurgence of chauvinism, clericalism and neo-fascism . . .” That is exactly how the Anglo-Saxon media have treated Zimbabwe in the last 15 years. But the more lasting casualties will be those who offered to be used. They will go the same way as Moise Tshombe, Jonas Savimbi, Afonso Dhlakama and all the notorious clans of Judas. The lesson is that the Anglo-Saxon racism and evil which MDC-T and its allies thought they could direct toward “Mugabe and his cronies” are capable of being directed against Morgan Tsvangirai and his followers in the same way the illegal sanctions have also devastated the lives of MDC-T’s followers.

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