Comment

On Danish Cartoons - a brief comment

John Theobald

Early February 2006, and the European, indeed much of the world's mass media are full of polemic and brow-furrowing soul-searching. It is over the endlessly repetitive debate on freedom of expression. A few obscure and irrelevant cartoons are being used as a pretext for an inundation of babble. The Western media are ever so predictably blowing their pompous trumpets with self-satisfied and self-serving statements of high principle.

But freedom of expression is not the main issue. It is a distraction from it.

At issue are the facts that:

1. The Western media have created an explosive issue and inflated it to such a vast extent that it is provoking violent global reactions. They are thereby further polarising already abysmal and propaganda-ridden relations between 'the West' and 'Islam'.
2. The affair is being appropriated and exploited in the media by 'clash of civilisation' proponents to reinforce prejudices about Western superiority and tolerance and Islamic backwardness and violence in a refuelling of Orientalist prejudice.

Unlike the tired rhetoric and abstract principles of the 'freedom of expression' debate, and its obvious outcome that the exercise of freedom needs to be matched by the exercise of responsibility and respect, these two points sharply indicate two concrete cultural issues.

The first is the fact that the mass media are - once again - not functioning as reporters of events and authors of the 'first draft of history'. They are creating events and changing their course. They are making history. They, unelected and plutocratically determined, are using their vast power to provoke and fan a world-wide conflagration, while blaming it on its angered victims.

This is yet another example of the mass media having much, much more to answer for than is habitually presumed. It is a further reminder that the benign image they constantly present of being reliable sources of important information and ethically sound reflections of public debate and taste are dangerously false.

In fact they are acting on the agendas of the world's economic and political power elites of which they form an indispensable and integral part. This, as part of elite geopolitical ambitions and push for control of global resources, involves constantly manipulating the thought patterns, and stoking the fears and prejudices of mere citizens/consumers. Most of these believe themselves to be receiving information and freely making up their minds about issues and appropriate courses of action, while in fact they are being distracted and misled.

This leads to the second point. The central plank of the elite agenda is now what it presents to the world as the 'war on terror'. This is the key propaganda phrase which distracts media consumers from the underlying strategy of gaining hegemonic control over strategically placed and resource rich regions (which, conveniently for the propagandists, mostly happen to be Islamic) before they assert their independence or come under the influence of other emerging world powers. The 'war on terror' serves to strike fear, and thus conformism and thought-paralysis, into the minds of Western publics and to provide them with false justifications for the imperialist purpose. The 'clash of civilisations' is the mendacious cultural underpinning of the 'war on terror', dehumanising Islam, demonstrating its inferiority and justifying its humiliation. The dialectic Islamist reaction against this, reinforcing the polarisation, is built into the intent of the original provocation and is no surprise.

This is why the ridiculous Danish cartoons have 'amazingly' been transformed into a world issue and why, more significantly, an artificial but escalating furore has been blown up around them five months after they were originally published. They are this week's dose of Orwellian enemy creation against the barely noticed background noise of corporate mass media cash registers.