As far as the Western media is concerned, the relevance and importance of abuse or violence-caused death is not determined by the mere fact that there is apparent abuse or violation of human rights.
Rather, it is determined by the political perception of the Western elites; whether or not they think the victim is politically correct to be regarded as a victim of human rights abuse. In most cases it is the political correctness of the human rights violator that determines the fate of his victim inasfar as Western media attention is concerned.
The Herald
By Reason Wafawarova
THE Western propaganda system will consistently portray the rag tag thuggish rebels from eastern Libya and all other pro-West rabble rousers as worthy thugs, otherwise colourfully coded as freedom fighters or fighters for democracy.
This is a tradition that has guided media structures and foreign policy in the West for centuries.
In fact, there is neither shame nor irony when we are told that the Western-armed Benghazi rebels are "innocent civilians" at the mercy of the heartless Muammar Gaddafi.
We are told Gaddafi is a mad man so we can dismiss his side of the story as just the ranting of a lunatic.
This is why his otherwise provable claims that the rebels are Wahhabist Al-Qaeda affiliated extremists fighting Gaddafi for his secular and liberal approach to Islam are not given the attention they deserve by way of investigation or debate.
When there is abuse to report about it, it is always those people abused in enemy states or by opponents of Western hegemony that are treated by mainstream Western media as worthy victims. In the case of Libya, it is always the rag tag Benghazi rebels that are worthy victims - always portrayed as representative of the entire Libyan population, much as there is no evidence whatsoever to support such an assertion. As far as the Western media is concerned, the relevance and importance of abuse or violence-caused death is not determined by the mere fact that there is apparent abuse or violation of human rights.
Rather, it is determined by the political perception of the Western elites; whether or not they think the victim is politically correct to be regarded as a victim of human rights abuse. In most cases it is the political correctness of the human rights violator that determines the fate of his victim inasfar as Western media attention is concerned. This is why the thousands of people that die during each Nigerian election never attract the attention given to a handful of victims of political violence in a country like Zimbabwe.
Perceived Mugabe victims are front page material by definition, while victims of political violence associated with the likes of Goodluck Jonathan can receive fringe attention if they must - otherwise they are unworthy victims from a client state that allows its oil to flow westwards.
Those victims treated with equal or greater severity by Western governments or by clients states will always be treated as unworthy victims - not deserving any meaningful coverage in the mainstream Western media.
This is why we must accept that Afghan and Iraqi civilians ruthlessly murdered by Western invading forces in the past ten years are just part of a war against terrorists -collateral damage as they are called. The dead Bahraini civilian pro-democracy activists do not exactly deserve much media attention in the West. Sympathy is reserved for the armed "civilian rebels" of Libya, or those protesters killed at the hands of such "tyrannical governments" as that of Syria.
And, Saudi Arabia can freely join hands with Bahraini dynastic authorities in stopping the tide towards democracy in that tiny kingdom, and the people they kill in the process do not matter at all in the West's mainstream media. Zimbabwe as a country is today battling to persuade Westerners to lift the ruinous illegal sanctions that have been in place for the last ten years simply because there are thousands and thousands of Zimbabwean exiles and economic refugees that were forced to tell drama stories of gross human rights abuses.
The largely unverified claims made very good politics for Western elites and their immigration authorities were under strict political instructions to speed up the processing of Zimbabwe asylum seekers. Even known Mugabe and Zanu-PF supporters benefitted from this windfall of a chance - telling their new host exactly what they wanted to hear.
Any horror story one could concoct against President Robert Mugabe in particular would earn one the right to stay in most of the Western countries, particularly in Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and to a limited extent in Australia. All that was needed was to masquerade as a victim of Mugabe's unparalleled brutality and one would be treated as a worthy victim deserving to be allowed entry and stay in the West.
Zanu-PF and its own propaganda machine labelled the Zimbabweans who did this a breed of unthinking traitors and sell-outs, but these people largely regard themselves as patriotic Zimbabweans who simply took advantage of the enemy's gullibility to escape the ruthless effect of Western sanctions at home.
It is interesting to see how the MDC-T political activists enjoy the worthy thug tag from the West, when they are not showered with sympathies as worthy victims of the "violent Mugabe regime".
Violence from the MDC-T militias has never really been condemned in Western media, much as that violence is quite apparent and provable.
The evidence of worth may be read from the extent and character of attention and indignation as reported by the media.
There is neither attention nor reporting of the indignation of victims of political violence by the MDC-T, be these victims members of the MDC-T itself or perceived political opponents from the other MDC factions or from Zanu-PF.
Britain's The Guardian must be credited for reporting the near severe assault of Trudy Stevenson at the hands of machete wielding Tsvangirai militias. But, apart from that report, the Western mainstream media did not really want to highlight that Tsvangirai was at the command of machete wielding goons who were on a mission to annihilate the MDC leader's political rivals.
One very sure way of hitting the headlines with the BBC is to beat up someone in the name of Zanu-PF and Robert Mugabe, or more precisely to make a claim that one has been assaulted by a Mugabe agent or by a Zanu- PF supporter. The West's mass media's practical definitions of worth are political in the extreme and fit well the expectations of a propaganda model.
One can imagine the British Foreign Secretary, William Hague declaring that the assassination of Gaddafi's son and his three under 12 grandchildren was a "legitimate attack on a control and command centre". Killing three under 12 children on the basis of them allegedly running a "control and command centre" is just unimaginably horrific and inhumane. Hague must know that.
But the grandchildren of mad man Gaddafi are just little Gaddafis and not really children as would be those of George W Bush or some other real person from the West.
The expectation of the propaganda model is to legitimise the actions of assassination expert Barack Obama. Now he has got the blood of Seif Al-Arab Gaddafi on his hands, as that of the three under 12 grandchildren of Gaddafi, plus reportedly that of Osama bin Laden. What is left is to finish off Gaddafi and his remaining sons and the campaigning for a second presidential term can begin in earnest. This time Obama will simply sign off his campaign speeches by saying "Yes I did."
From the scenes of jingoistic flag-waving and "USA"-chanting Americans we have seen recently, Obama can actually expect some cheering for his assassination skills.
While this differential treatment of victims of abuse occurs on a large scale, the media, intellectuals, and the public are able to remain unconscious of the fact and maintain a high moral and self-righteous tone.
We are told that Col Gaddafi is a heartless dictator who made Libya's peoples the richest on the continent of Africa, transforming a desert into green land, and who invested so much into African resources. This is the man who must be ousted from power by Western drones and other lethal hyper-tech aerial weapons.
Yes, he is a ruthless dictator guilty of providing free health and education for his people, just like that other mindless Cuban dictator by the name Fidel Castro. Or that heartless Zimbabwean dictator by the name Robert Mugabe, so guilty of redistributing colonially stolen lands back to his people.
The AU is dead silent and probably watching in extreme fear of who is next. Jacob Zuma and his team were effectively told to get lost by the Benghazi rebels after they proposed a ceasefire and negotiations between the waring Libyan parties. And the West strongly supported this sentiment with Nato adding its voice in opposition to the AU's proposals, arguing for more firepower and more bloodshed until Gaddafi relinquishes power. That is the kind of peace the West is bringing to Libya.
And all we are told daily by the Western media is that Gaddafi is shelling the city of Misrata and that his forces are shooting at the Benghazi rebels, that they are attacking hospitals and other infrastructure. It is only Nato that has a right to demolish the hard earned infrastructure of Libya as it wishes, and this is understandable because the Salvationist Nato is there to protect hapless Libyan civilians from their monstrous leader. How stupid and gullible we must all be!
The imaginary civilians that we are told Gaddafi is massacring are the worthy victims that must occupy media space in the West, and his murdered three grandchildren are the typical unworthy victims who should be forgotten about as quickly as possible.
As already indicated, the MDC-T has a remarkably terrible culture of internal violence and they recently attacked mourners at a cemetery after mistaking them for Zanu-PF supporters, leaving one of their victims for dead. Morgan Tsvangirai, his deputy Thokozani Khupe and Secretary General Tendai Biti watched, reportedly with one of them chanting cheers at the murderous thugs.
This violence did not attract the attention of Western media, and even that of the pro-MDC private media within Zimbabwe.
In fact it was the MDC-T's Information Department that quickly claimed that their supporters had been attacked by "Zanu-PF militias" and "riot police".
This was a clear fabrication that was dismissed by eye-witnesses and pro-MDC journalists who had covered the event. But there was next to nothing by way of condemning the MDC-T for fabricating falsehoods after engaging in despicable violence.
Those that were attacked by the MDC-T thugs were merely unworthy victims suffering at the hands of worthy thugs, otherwise affectionately known in the West as fighters for democracy.
The provincial elections that preceded the recently held MDC-T Congress were largely no more than fierce battlefields pitting violent rival supporters of various faction leaders within the party.
The Matebeleland provinces were the worst affected, leading to Tsvangirai having to go and quell the murderous violence just before the Congress.
Those that were injured were merely unworthy victims - collateral damage in the noble cause of fighting for democracy and bringing "a new Zimbabwe" - fully decorated with a culture of Western condoned violence. Even the Taliban of Afghanistan enjoyed this kind of support from Westerners when they first came to power. When Jerzy Popieluszko was murdered by Polish police October 1984, the Western media went hysteric.
This was a murder committed in an enemy state, a communist state. The coverage was pitted against 100 religious victims that were similarly murdered in the US client states in Latin America.
Comparisons of these murders were done by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. In the model they provided, Popieluszko was the worthy victim murdered in an enemy state, whereas priests murdered in the US client states in Latin America were the unworthy victims. The trend is that the former will always elicit a propaganda outrage from the Western mass media, while the later will hardly generate any coverage.
The New York Times, Time, Newsweek and CBS News were used as sample media units in this study. The coverage of Popieluszko's murder was compared to that of religious personnel murdered in Latin America by agents of US client states, and also to seventy two individuals in a list of Latin American religious "martyrs" named by Penny Lernoux in her book Cry of the People.
The comparisons extended to the coverage given to twenty three priests, missionaries, and other religious workers murdered in Guatemala between January 1980 and February 1985.
It also included the coverage of the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero of El-Salvador, shot by an assassin in March 1980, together with that of four US women religious workers, murdered in El-Salvador in December 1980.
While the American public never came to know who all these other victims were and what had happened to them, the coverage of the Popieluszko murder not only dwarfed that of these unworthy victims; it also constituted a major episode of news management and Western propaganda.
The New York Times featured the Popieluszko murder on its front page on ten different occasions, and the intensity of coverage assured that its readers would know who Popieluszko was, that he had been murdered, and that this sordid violence had occurred in a Communist state.
By contrast, the public saw no mention of the likes of Father Augusto Ramirez Monasterio, murdered in Guatemala in November 1983, or Father Miguel Angel Montufar, a Guatemalan priest who disappeared in the same month that Popieluszko was killed in Poland, or literally dozens of other religious murder victims in Latin America, sometimes given prominent coverage in the local press of the countries in which their murders took place.
Herman and Chomsky wrote, "While the coverage of the worthy victim was generous with gory details and quoted expressions of outrage and demands for justice, the coverage of the unworthy victims was always low-keyed, designed to keep the lid on emotions and evoking regretful and philosophical generalities on the omnipresence of violence and the inherent tragedy of human life."
Added to the ten news reports on the Popieluszko murder by The New York Times were three editorials - all denouncing the Poles, and there was no single editorial denunciation for the murders of the unworthy victims from Latin America.
The conclusion made by Chomsky and Herman was that the coverage of the Popieluszko murder exceeded that of the entire set of one hundred unworthy victims taken together.
In fact the coverage of the Popieluszko murder exceeded that of all the many hundreds of religious victims murdered in Latin America since World War 11.
The study concluded that a priest murdered in Latin America was worth less than a hundredth of a priest murdered in Poland, despite that Poland is way farther away from the US than Latin America.
This tradition of injustice and bias by mainstream Western media is not going to go away for as long as the sabre-rattling Western foreign policy is not discredited, resisted and discontinued.
We are likely to see more as the imperial authority shows determination to fight for the control of African resources in the wake of the BRIC and IndoChina influence.
Africa we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!
Reason Wafawarova is a political writer and can be contacted on reason@rwafawarova.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or wafawarova@ yahoo.co.uk or visit www.rwafawarova.com
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