The International Imperative

February 18th, 2002 - by: danny

*PRESIDENTS DAY*

*OLYMPIC PATRIOTISM*

*CHOMSKY WRITES AGAIN*

It is Presidents Day in the US of A, and most of us have the day off although this holiday is known more for the sales in the stores than any larger event or meaning. When I was kid, we celebrated Abe Lincoln’s Birthday and George Washington’s separately but, then, they were fused together in a move to promote productivity and pay tribute to them all. As readers of this weblog can see I have not abandoned you. I am here every day out of sense of duty–and perhaps obsession–so I can only nod in the direction of Presidents past, remembering that my first history lesson involved memorizing their names and their order of succession.

We are a country which dumped a king to end up worshipping Presidents. That is, until we dump them, dump on them, or something untowards happens to them. I have always preferred the first option.

NEWS IN THE MORNING

As for the present dubiously elected Prez, he is on the road today. He was greeted with protests in Japan where feathers have been ruffled by his threatening designation of North Korea as part of the “Axis of Evil” at the very moment that efforts were underway by South Korea to engage the isolated Pasha of Pyonyang in some constructive manner, and move towards uniting the too long divided peninsula. I noticed that whenever North Korea is mentioned on TV, the networks dip into their archives for stock pictures of menacing soldiers who are always armed to the teeth. We rarely see that country’s starving people, or any images that do not stereotype them as robots or worse.

Those images always reinforce the ‘us versus them’ duality that seems to be at the heart of Bush’s policy.

The FBI is out with yet a new alert this morning. See their website for who they are looking for now. It turns out that the last Alert of an impending attack named Arab suspects who were already in prison in Yemen. Yemen says it will turn them over, but also warned Washington that an attack on Iraq is a no-no in their eyes and will end any Arab coalition supporting the terror war.

Saudia Arabia meanwhile says it will ship back three top Afghan leaders who the new government wants returned to face charges that they conspired to kill the late Minister or Tourism and Aviation. (That title caught my attention. A tourism minister? In Afghanistan? Has Afghanistan become a tourist destination now? I don’t think so.)â€¦I heard this news on CNN which seems to be experimenting more and more with the kind of Happy Talk formats common in local news. The anchors chatter away, trade personal opinions while looking, alternatively, earnest and chipper. This morning, Paula Zahn’s chat mate was on their 6 AM “show,” as they call it, to promo his three hour program bloc to come. Did I hear him right? I could swear he called his own “news program” a “three hour telethon without a disease.” Come again?

PBS SINGS THE INTERNATIONALE

Arise ye viewers starving for better fare. Last night, I found myself flipping around between stations and networks. There was Janet Jackson in concert on HBO with rare footage of her changing costumes back stage. Ooo La La. CSPAN had the bearded Al Gore from last Tuesday telling a joke or two at the Council on Foreign Relations. 60 Minutes reran Ed Bradley’s interview with writer Jack Abbot, the brilliant prison author who died last week behind bars. Many people, Norman Mailer among them, years ago had petitioned for his release as you will recall. When he got out, he soon got into a tiff and with well honed prison reflexes killed a waiter in the East Village. The story had, in its time, been used to discredit prison reform and Mailer’s reputation. With his death, this piece was trotted out again, and not to honor his still insightful if chilling book.

It was punditry and programming as usual across the board, on the news shows and the Sunday talk except for the Olympic coverage which is still mostly scandal obsessed. That was, until 10 PM, when Channel 13, our uneven but occasionally daring local public television station rebroadcast Peter Miller’s brilliant documentary on a song that once unified people in many lands: The Internationale. It started life as a labor song and became the anthem of the international communist movement, with a melody and meaning that also inspired the students who rose against the heavy hand of the China’s Communist Party in Tiananman Square. It seemed, at first, an odd program offering in these times, if only because images of the what’s left of the left seem in such short supply on US TV. But there it was, with reflective comments, from those who no longer sing it without a sense of loss and tragedy, and others who still do with gusto.

THE MANY INTERNATIONALISMS

It got me thinking about internationalism which to many Americans seems like such a foreign idea. And yet, the Internationale was an American song, and at a time when the international Olympics was drawing big ratings on a commercial channel, perhaps it is an idea that may soon be back in vogue, if it ever left. There are many internationalisms in the many worlds in our world.

There is the internationalism of nations as represented by the international community with the UN as its expression. There’s the internationalism of business, the driving force behind Globalization with its WTO and IMF and World Bank.. Many nations are becoming globalized themselves. Foreign Policy Magazine has a chart on the Global Top 20 listing the nations have are the most global. I was surprised to find Ireland at the top, with Switzerland and Singapore next.. The US is twelfth.

Then there is the internationalism of the Islamic world very much on display in the haj in Mecca this week. In a sense, it too projects an internationalist vision–of Muslim unity. It was this ideal that Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda appeals too as well, a vision of an internationale of mullahs on a mission to jihad and Islamacize the world. Only they don’t sing. They fly planes into buildings.

A secular and divic internationalism is represented by the NGOs and the global justice movement organized into service brigades and collectives or affinity groups in every land battling for a fairer economic dispensation. The Bush Administration pursues internationalism too, in its own image, promoting an imperium for those that side with it in its view of the light, and war, its own jihad, for those on the dark side, the “evil doers.”

So Internationalism speaks with many tongues, and sings different songs these days. English musician Billy Bragg has written a new version of the Internationale which speaks of the international “ideal” and not just the workers of the world.

In many ways, the media channel and the web itself promote that, as does the very name of our company Globalvision. Maybe what we need is a new anthem. For the moment, it is a song called “We Are Family.” More on that later

HAS THE OLYMPCS ABANDONED INTERNATIONALISM?

I cited the Olympics as an expression of internationalism, which is what it is supposed to be. But is it? Not according to Douglas McKay of the Guardian who finds the snows of Utah stained with the ooze of red, white and blue: “The wave of American jingoism and intense security that has marked the first week of the Winter Olympics here has led to senior officials of theInternational Olympic Committee privately expressing concerns about whether the US can ever stage another Olympic event,” he writes.

“The games have already been dubbed the “red, white and blue Olympics” because almost every event has patriotic overtones in the wake of the terroristattacks on September 11. Nationalism has always been a part of the Olympicsbut IOC officials here feel the event is being used simply as propaganda forthe US war effort.

“This is a show designed to send a message to Osama bin Laden,” said one IOCmember. “President Bush is saying: ‘Look at us: you bombed us but you can’tstop us going about our normal lives.’ But that is not what the OlympicGames are supposed to be about.” Many news outlets in other countries are echoing this mantra.

INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY: NOAM CHOMSKY ON TURKEY

The spirit of international solidarity is embodied in ever pore of Noam Chomsky’s work. Last week, a Mediachannel reader Adam McConnel did a great job of reporting on the MIT linguist and social critic’s visit to Turkey to support his publisher who was being prosecuted for publishing one of Chomsky’s essays which supported the rights of the Kurds. (The charges were droppd!) Now Chomsky is back in the US, and ready to speak for himself about his trip which was being monitored by human rights groups worldwide. In response to my request for an update on how the trip went, he responded in great detail for readers of our Media Channel:

“Was very glad to see the Mediachannel coverage. As you know, the publisher’s case turned out fine. The prosecutor immediately withdrew the indictment, and the Court refused to accept my request to be a co-defendant. The Freedom of Speech Initiative was also evaded. We had a pleasant talk with several prosecutors, who made it clear that it would be dropped — and seemed rather apologetic about their duties, hoping that the new legislation when it comes into effect would improve matters. I’ll send separately the statement of the Freedom of Speech Initiative, which gives their reaction at least.

“But I wonder. The problem — pretty evident even on a superficial look — is that it all goes on without change, as soon as international attention disappears. As we left the State Security Court, a journalist was brought in charged on grounds of something said by someone she had interviewed. Later I met a radio journalist going to Ankara on charges that his station had played some Kurdish music. Just after I got back, I saw a Reuters dispatch saying that as soon as I’d left, the Security Court opened an investigation charging me (and, I fear, local people) with “fomenting separatism” in a talk in Diyarbakir, and I guess they’ll be smarter next time, and run prosecutions there, expecting that the media won’t show up. There was quite a crush in Istanbul — but not a single person, as far as I could see, for the journalist who followed us.

“The people are really impressive, and Diyarbakir was beyond description. I’ve had very warm welcomes before, but nothing like that one. Thousands of people showed up for a talk, same reaction in the slums outside the walls where the “immigrants” (i.e., million or so people driven there from the devastated countryside) are housed (if that’s the right word), and astonishing willingness to talk, given that everyone knew that there were police agents all over the place. Just the fact that someone from outside was willing to come to make such profound statements as that people have a right to use their own language seemed to be a really exhilarating experience for them. I only hope that they don’t suffer for it. I had checked carefully with local human rights activists in Istanbul and Diyarbakir, and with the Human Rights Watch Turkey specialist, who’s really marvellous and who was with me all the time, and kept closely to their advice. But it’s hard not to be worried. Quite apart from what has happened in the past years, the place feels like a prison camp.

“It was a really remarkable experience. Even on the plane back many people came up to thank me (sign language, a few words of broken French, that sort of thing). Got the same impression from editors, journalists, and others I met in Istanbul. There was a lot of coverage, all of it I was told ranging from factual to sympathetic, apart from Hurriyet, apparently very nationalist. The talks I gave at the universities were broadcast live and then rebroadcast, I was told. The Turkish journalists in TV interviews and those who followed us around seemed very sympathetic and pleased to have a chance to air something they can’t say. The US journalists were a different story. The guy from the Washington Post seemed OK, also the guy from Time as far as I could tell. But the one from Newsweek I wouldn’t trust for a moment. No one from the Times, of course. Turkish repression doesn’t exist in their pages.

“Don’t like to draw conclusions from superficial experience, but it certainly seemed as if there is a genuine and widespread desire to free themselves from the military-run system and its capricious and often cruel constraints. But it’s far from over. That’s clear.”

FROM INSTANBUL: A BRIEFING ON MEDIA IN TURKEY

Dateline Istanbul: Adam McConnel has also sent us some background on the Turkish media which I want to share as well. â€˜In Turkey, most every station other than the music-video stations has a satisfyingly comprehensive evening news report running for one hour; in Istanbul that means one can watch such news reports on on at least 11 different public stations, which reflect a variety of viewpoints: independent, Turkish-owned (Channel D, Ulusal, BRT, ATV); American media-affiliated channels (NTV, CNN Turk); Turkish government (TRT1); religious (Channel 7, TGRT, Meltem, STV). There are others as well Ë† I get 16 different public channels on my TV and there are a number of others in Istanbul, including something like five other government stations, that I cannot get reception of because of where I live.

“Those stations do a reasonably good job of covering a wide range of daily national and international news, according to their particular bias. An example of this is the coverage of Afghanistan. Most of the stations in Turkey had no qualms (except to warn people to shield their children) about showing scenes of dead people in Afghanistan. It will be a long time before I forget the scenes shown on TV here of crumpled, disfigured, and dismembered bodies covering the ground the day after the massacre in the Cenk Fortress in Mazar-i-Sharif. I imagine that those scenes were completely sanitized from American TVs. A number of stations in Turkey routinely use footage from Al-Jazeera as well.

“The problem arises only when certain specific topics are encountered, such as cultural and linguistic rights for ethnic minorities in Turkey, religion and politics, and Turkish family values, that the Turkish government cracks down and creates the bad reputation for itself that it has.

“Even when it comes to those certain topics, however, there is an aspect of schizophrenia to enforcement. Kurdish TV and radio broadcasts are an example. Long officially illegal, Kurdish radio stations have been tolerated for a number of years (Foreign Minister Ismail Cem likes to roll this out as an example of Turkeyâ€šs newfound openessâ€š). But last weekâ€šs change of the Turkish penal code to officially allow radio and TV broadcasts in Kurdish didnâ€št stop the RTUK (the Turkish govermentâ€šs media advisory board) from giving a year-long broadcast ban to a Kurdish radio station in Diyarbakir this week; the station was accused of broadcasting songs with Å’ideologicalâ€š content.

“Part of this schizophrenia stems from the fact that these laws are up to the interpretation of the judges in the Turkish justice system. Also, government prosecutors are the ones who start these sort of cases, so particularly rabid prosecutors will be more aggressive on these laws. It is also thought that the government (in this case probably also meaning the Turkish military) has a hand in whether or not government prosecutors pursue these laws.

“These stations do also carry a lot of fluff in magazine and human interest segments, but the human interest segments often have an implicit criticism of the Turkish governmentâ€šs performance or policies.

TWO PRESS REPORTS DEALING WITH M-O-N-E-Y

About the Enron Corporation:

“There are absolutely no problems that had anything to do with (Former CEO Jeff Skilling’s) departure. There are no accounting issues, no trading issues, no reserve issues, no previously unknown problem issues. The company is probably in the strongest and best shape that it has ever been in.

“”There are no surprises. We did file our 10-Q [with the Securities & Exchange Commission] a few days ago [Aug. 14]. And, if there were any serious problems, they would be in there. If there’s anything material and we’re not reporting it, we’d be breaking the law. We don’t break the law.” â€“ Kenneth Lay Interview in Business Week, Aug. 24, 2001

“”Our 26 percent increase in [profits] shows the very strong results of our core wholesale and retail energy businesses and our natural gas pipelines.” — Press release, Oct. 16, 2001. (Three weeks later, Enron admitted that it had overstated earnings by $586 million since 1997.)

From the Pacifica Radio Network:

“â€¦in the year before the settlement was reached, (the now displaced) network executives went on a spending spree never before seen in network history – hiring the most expensive professional servicefirms in the country and handing out huge pay raises to loyalists. As a result, Pacifica went from a $600,000 surplus in September 2000 to a working capital deficit of almost $5 million by December 2001, a decline of $6 million in 15 months. The squandering of listener resources was punctuated by a series of golden parachute severance packages handed out by the previous leadership, costing the network some $500,000.”(Press release, February 16, 2002)

Thanks again to Noam Chomsky for choosing to give us a first hand view of his trip to Turkey. Chomsky is back in New York City for a Harpers Magazine panel on Israel on February 21 at the New School. Call (212) 229-5488 for tix… Save Feb 27 for a Mediachannel.org co-sponsored forum on civil liberties… And save some time and energy to share your thoughts and reports with us by writing: dissector@mediachannel.org

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