Hijacking India's History
While some of us lament the repetition of history, the men who run India are busy rewriting it. Their efforts, regrettably, will only be bolstered by the landslide victory earlier this month of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the Western India state of Gujarat.
The B.J.P. has led this country's coalition government since 1999. But India's Hindu nationalists have long had a quarrel with history. They are unhappy with the notion that the most ancient texts of Hinduism are associated with the arrival of the Vedic "Aryan" peoples from the Northwest. They don't like the dates of 1500 to 1000 B.C. ascribed by historians to the advent of the Vedic peoples, the forebears of Hinduism, or the idea that the Indus Valley civilization predates Vedic civilization. And they certainly can't stand the implication that Hinduism, like the other religious traditions of India, evolved through a mingling of cultures and peoples from different lands.
Last month the National Council of Educational Research and Training, the central government body that sets the national curriculum and oversees education for students up to the 12th grade, released the first of its new school textbooks for social sciences and history. Teachers and academics protested loudly. The schoolbooks are notable for their elision of many awkward facts, like the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by a Hindu nationalist in 1948.
The authors of the textbook have promised to make revisions to the chapter about Gandhi. But what is more remarkable is how they have added several novel chapters to Indian history.
Thus we have a new civilization, the "Indus-Saraswati civilization" in place of the well-known Indus Valley civilization, which is generally agreed to have appeared around 4600 B.C. and to have lasted for about 2,000 years. (The all-important addition of "Saraswati," an ancient river central to Hindu myth, is meant to show that Indus Valley civilization was actually part of Vedic civilization.) We have a chapter on "Vedic civilization" — the earliest recognizable "Hindu culture" in India and generally acknowledged not to have appeared before about 1700 B.C. — that appears without a single date.
The council has also promised to test the "S.Q.," or "Spiritual Quotient," of gifted students in addition to their I.Q. Details of this plan are not elaborated upon; the council's National Curriculum Framework for School Education says only that "a suitable mechanism for locating the talented and the gifted will have to be devised."
More recent history, of course, is not covered in school textbooks. So we will have to wait to see how such books might treat this month's elections in Gujarat. They were held in the wake of the brutal pogrom of last February and March, in which more than 1,000 Muslims were murdered and at least 100,000 more lost their homes and property. The chief minister of Gujarat, who is among the leading lights of the B.J.P., justified this atrocity as a "natural reaction" to an act of arson on a train in the Gujarati town of Godhra, in which 59 Hindu pilgrims lost their lives.
The ruling party's subsequent election campaign was conducted against the rather literal backdrop of the Godhra incident: painted billboards of the burning railway carriage. The murdered Muslims were not accorded the same tragic status, although their pleas for justice created a backlash that played neatly into the campaign theme of Hindu Pride. It was, of course, a great success.
The carefully nurtured sense of Hindu grievance has been nursed rather than sated by acts of mob violence: the destruction of the 15th-century mosque in Ayodhya, for instance, or the persecution of Christians in earlier pogroms in Gujarat's Dangs district. The B.J.P., along with its Hindu-supremacist cohorts, the R.S.S. (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) and the V.H.P. (Vishwa Hindu Parishad), has a seemingly irresistible will to power. (The R.S.S. and the V.H.P. are not political parties but "social service organizations" that have served as springboards to power for B.J.P. leaders like Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat.)
In vanguard states like Gujarat, thousands of students follow the uncompromisingly chauvinistic R.S.S. textbooks. They will learn that "Aryan culture is the nucleus of Indian culture, and the Aryans were an indigenous race . . . and creators of the Vedas" and that "India itself was the original home of the Aryans." They will learn that Indian Christians and Muslims are "foreigners."
But they still have much to learn. I once visited the bookshop at the R.S.S. headquarters in Nagpur. On sale were books that show humankind originated in the upper reaches of that mythical Indian river, the Saraswati, and pamphlets that explain the mysterious Indus Valley seals, with their indecipherable Harrapan script: they are of Vedic origin.
After I visited the bookshop I stopped to talk to a group of young boys who live together in an R.S.S. hostel. They were a sweet bunch of kids, between 8 and 11 years old. They all wanted to grow up to be either doctors or pilots. Very good, I said. And what did they learn in school? Did they learn about religion? About Hinduism, Christianity?
They were silent for a few seconds — until their teacher nodded. A bespectacled kid spoke up. "Christians burst into houses and make converts of Hindus by bribing them or beating them."
He said it without malice, just a breathless eagerness, as if it were something he had learned in social science class. Perhaps it was.
posted by Muhammad at 1:21 AM
Lies n Lies
John MacArthur, publisher of Harper's Magazine and author of "Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War," says that considering the number of senior officials shared by both Bush administrations, the American public should bear in mind the lessons of Gulf War propaganda.
"These are all the same people who were running it more than 10 years ago," Mr. MacArthur says. "They'll make up just about anything ... to get their way."
US Rep. Lee Hamilton (D) of Indiana, a 34-year veteran lawmaker until 1999, who served on numerous foreign affairs and intelligence committees, and is now director of the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in Washington. The Bush team "understands it has not yet carried the burden of persuasion [about an imminent Iraqi threat], so they will look for any kind of evidence to support their premise," Mr. Hamilton says. "I think we have to be sceptical about it."
"This administration is capable of any lie ... in order to advance its war goal in Iraq," says a US government source in Washington with some two decades of experience in intelligence, who would not be further identified. "It is one of the reasons it didn't want to have UN weapons inspectors go back in, because they might actually show that the probability of Iraq having [threatening illicit weapons] is much lower than they want us to believe."
Propaganda is an effective tool in any war campaign. The US in particular have been responsible for some of the most imposing spin manoeuvres and disinformation campaigns, no more so than that which occurred during the Gulf War in 1991, the lessons of which are especially significant today as the US again gears up to attack the Muslims of Iraq in another attempt to impose its hegemony upon the region.
Most notorious was the work of PR giant Hill & Knowlton (H&K) for whom current Pentagon spokesperson Torie Clarke worked, after she was an aide to John McCain and Bush's dad. Subsidized by the Kuwaiti royal family at the tune of $10 million, H&K dedicated 119 executives in 12 offices across the country to the job of drumming up support within the United States for the 1991 war. Tens of thousands of "Free Kuwait" T-shirts and bumper stickers were distributed at colleges across the US and setting up observances such as National Kuwait Day and National Student Information Day. H&K also mailed 200,000 copies of a book titled "The Rape of Kuwait" to American troops stationed in the Middle East. The firm also manipulated reporters, arranging interviews with handpicked Kuwaiti emissaries and dispatching reams of footage of burning wells and oil-slicked birds washed ashore.
After convening a number of focus groups in 1990 to try to figure out which buttons to press to make the public respond, H&K determined that presentations involving the mistreatment of infants would be the most effective. As a result they hatched the "baby atrocities" campaign.
So on October 10, 1990, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus held a hearing on Capitol Hill at which H&K, in coordination with California Democrat Tom Lantos and Illinois Republican John Porter, introduced a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl named Nayirah. (Purportedly to safeguard against Iraqi reprisals, Nayirah's full name was not disclosed.) Weeping and shaking, the girl described a horrifying scene in Kuwait City. "I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital," she testified. "While I was there I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns and go into the room where babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die." Allegedly, 312 infants were removed.
The tale got wide circulation, even winding up on the floor of the United Nations Security Council. Before Congress gave the green light to go to war, seven of the main pro-war senators brought up the baby-incubator allegations as a major component of their argument for passing the resolution to unleash the bombers. Ultimately the motion for war passed by a narrow five-vote margin.
Only later was it discovered that the testimony was untrue. H&K had failed to reveal that Nayirah was not only a member of the Kuwaiti royal family, but also that her father, Saud Nasir al-Sabah, was Kuwait's ambassador to the US. H&K had prepped Nayirah in her presentation, according to Harper's publisher John R MacArthur, in his book Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War. Of the seven other witnesses who stepped to the podium that day, five had been prepped by H&K and had used false names. When independent organizations investigated later, they could not find that Nayirah had any connection to the hospital. Amnesty International, among those originally duped, eventually issued an embarrassing retraction.
Most U.S. news outlets uncritically accepted the story that 300 premature babies died when Iraqi soldiers removed them from incubators, which were sent to Iraq as loot. Alexander Cockburn (The Nation, 2/4/91), an exception, cited Kuwaiti medical personnel who went into exile after the invasion, who said that babies were still in incubators at Kuwait's Maternity Hospital in September, and that empty incubators had not been taken.
After the end of Iraqi occupation, the New York Times (2/28/91) offered this two-sentence retraction, buried five-sixths of the way through an article: "Some of the atrocities that had been reported, such as the killing of infants in the main hospitals shortly after the invasion, are untrue or have been exaggerated, Kuwaitis said. Hospital officials, for instance, said that stories circulated about the killing of 300 children were incorrect."
Years later, Scowcroft, the national security adviser at the time, concluded that the tale was surely "useful in mobilizing public opinion".
Another major example of fabrication used in the propaganda war occurred when the Pentagon flooded the major media outlets with reports of a top-secret satellite image that allegedly showed 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks amassed at the Iraqi-Saudi border.
When the US military refused to hand the satellite image over to the press, several investigative journalists opted to purchase commercially available, but equally detailed, satellite images on the open market. Shots of the exact same region, during the same time frame, revealed no Iraqi soldiers, no tanks just desert and a lot of US jet fighters sitting wing-tip to wing-tip at nearby Saudi bases. But this time the damage had already been done.
Many other instances occurred of propaganda which the mainstream media were only to happy to report without performing any verification as to the facts.
A "Captain Karim," supposedly a former bodyguard of Saddam Hussein, was featured on 60 Minutes (1/20/91), as well as prominent TV outlets in Europe, making sensational charges about Saddam, e.g., "He becomes very happy when he sees anyone in the acid bath." But a subsequent investigation by French intelligence could find no evidence that Karim ever worked for Saddam, and labeled him a "mythomaniac" who had frequent contacts in Paris with Saudi military and intelligence officers.
In an absurd example of propaganda The Time's "Grapevine" page (2/11/91) asked "Is Saddam Cracking Up?" The piece claimed that Saddam was blinking very rapidly during his CNN interview the previous week: 40 times a minute, vs. 20-25 during an interview in June. Time consulted John Molloy, who trains salespeople to handle stress, who said, "When salesmen start blinking, they're usually in trouble. The guy looks like he's falling apart."
To put Saddam's blinking in perspective, Greenpeace's Peter Dykstra did a little research of his own: George Bush's eyes, he found, flickered at a Saddam-like 34 to 38 blinks per minute, while Michael Dukakis' showed a positively psychotic 74 b.p.m.
The New York Times' editorial page (1/14/91) reported that "Baghdad Betty," an Iraqi government propaganda broadcaster, had told U.S. troops: "G.I., you should be home.... While you're away, movie stars are taking your women. Robert Redford is dating your girlfriend. Tom Selleck is kissing your lady.... Bart Simpson is making love to your wife."
When George Bush called Iraqi radio "ridiculous," the editorial said, "he couldn't know how right he was." But the joke was on the Times: The story it gleefully reported as fact was actually a joke Johnny Carson told on the Tonight Show (8/22/90). On Jan. 31 1990, Carson said that his joke had been "reported as a fact on CNN, Entertainment Tonight, Garrick Utley's Year-End Wrap-Up [on NBC], and in this issue of Time magazine [1/21/91]." In Carson's original joke, it's dad Homer Simpson instead of Bart -- a slightly more plausible scenario, since Bart is eight years old.
The mass media outlets were also responsible for providing little coverage of the violence inflicted on the Iraqi people by the U.S. government but instead concentrated on the violence being inflicted on the Iraqi people by the Iraqi government -- somehow a more appealing subject.
Americans are appalled by the spectacle of Iraqi forces slaughtering Kurds and Shiites," wrote New York Times columnist Leslie Gelb (3/31/91). Although it appeared that the greater death toll inflicted by U.S. bombing was less appalling.
Reporting on atrocities by Iraq was specific and graphic, whilst accounts of damage caused by the U.S. were vague and misleading. The embargo, which has to date resulted in the death of over a million Iraqis was described by the New York Times (3/22/91) as a policy of "making life uncomfortable for the Iraqi people," in order to "encourage them to remove" Saddam from power.
A chart titled "Re-examining the Toll" (New York Times, 3/25/91) included detailed breakdowns on Iraqi losses of tanks, artillery and armoured personnel carriers -- but no mention of human life. The Iraqi war casualties (at least 100,000 military deaths alone and a combined total of 250,000 Iraqi human loss ) also disappeared in a Washington Post chart listing U.S. casualties (Americans killed, wounded, missing or taken prisoner) along with "Iraqi losses" (2,085 tanks, 962 armoured vehicles, 1,005 artillery pieces, 103 aircraft destroyed).
Thus it is clear that the world was subjected to a significant amount of propaganda in order to support the Gulf War in 1991.
It remains to be seen this time after the dusts of war have settled how much of what we are currently reading and hearing is fact or fiction. If any of the above is to go by, rest assured that a considerable amount will be fiction.
posted by Muhammad at 10:28 PM 