60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

is there a south perspective on genocide? 287
That is a line of thinking you will not see in the mainstream press.
It is too subversive – what is worse, the media is heavily responsible
for the confused thinking. You can’t really accuse journalists of being
misinformed; the problem my have more to do with corporate power
and the old saying that it is diffi cult to understand a problem if your
salary depends on not understanding it.
Mamdami goes on to remind us of some important facts about journalism:
Journalism gives us a simple moral world, where a group of perpetrators
face a group of victims, but where neither history nor motivation
is thinkable because both are outside history and context.
Even when newspapers highlight violence as a social phenomenon,
they fail to understand the forces that shape the agency of the
perpetrator. Instead, they look for a clear and uncomplicated moral
that describes the victim as untainted and the perpetrator as simply
evil. Where yesterday’s victims are today’s perpetrators, where
victims have turned perpetrators, this attempt to fi nd an African
replay of the Holocaust not only does not work but also has perverse
consequences. Whatever its analytical weaknesses, the depolitisation
of violence has given its proponents distinct political
advantages. 9
One of the oldest clichés of war is that truth is the fi rst casualty. No
it’s not, says Pilger: journalism is the fi rst casualty. He argues that
in Iraq the Pentagon invented the embedded journalist because it
believed that critical reporting had lost Vietnam. This is what Saul
Landau calls ‘the mind-altering glue inherent in imperial memory’.
We choose not to speak the unspeakable. It never happened! Harold
Pinter’s subversive truth, I believe, was that he made the connection
between imperialism and fascism, and described a battle for history that
is almost never reported. This is the great silence of the media age.
We see the same phenomenon with the scale of civilian casualties in
Afghanistan. And the enduring tragedy of Palestine is due in great
part to the silence and compliance of the so-called liberal left. Hamas
is described repeatedly as being intent on the destruction of Israel.
The New York Times, the Associated Press, and the Boston Globe all use
this line as a standard disclaimer, and it is false. That Hamas has called
for a 10-year ceasefi re is almost never reported. Even more important,
that Hamas has undergone a historic ideological shift in the last few
9 Ibid.