BY JOSHUA M. MYERS
For a moment in 2021, the national media seemed to care about the Afghan people. But the recent discourse surrounding the US withdrawal from a twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan has revealed once again that the American corporate media is anything but an honest critic of the idea of American empire. We bore witness to what amounts to American political theater: the browbeating over the timing and method of the withdrawal, the ignoble comparisons to other moments of national shame (including the endless comparisons to “Saigon”), and the largely liberal fears of having made things worse for women and children. The immediate aftermath and cycle of new terrorist attacks and at least one drone strike resulting in civilian deaths, “a tragic mistake,” now garner debates about whether this was the true price of withdrawal. It is as if there was a belief that the whole enterprise of war was somehow benevolent. And now all of that good work on behalf of the Afghan people has been wasted. One rarely hears from these media sources terms like “colonialism,” “state violence,” or “violent occupation” as the actions of Americans. Even “torture” was controversial. And when there are moments of critique, it is almost a question of how “American interests” are served and never what those “interests” are and if they should be “interests” at all. These are impolite questions. Terrorism menaces us, after all.
My Journal of Academic Freedom article, “A Mosquito on an Elephant’s Behind: The Third World News Review and Cedric and Elizabeth Robinson’s Community Media,” looks at a relatively unexamined aspect of Robinson’s life as a political commentator. With his wife, Elizabeth, and many others, he helped create a media space that directly countered what increasingly became an industry in hock to both the state and the corporate world. Utilizing international contacts, alternative news sources, and a healthy desire to uncover what was concealed, the Third World News Review utilized the university radio station (University of California, Santa Barbara’s KCSB, 91.9 FM) to confront the regimes that justified war and genocide in an era when the general public’s knowledge of those conditions declined as the war machine intensified and grew to what it is today. To do so meant to go against the grain not only of the regents of the University of California, where the Robinsons were employed, but also against many of experts in the fields of political science and international relations—Cedric’s academic training. To do so was to risk not only unpopularity and condemnation, but so much more.
To a public so threatened by the specter of waking up to another 9/11, the media has mixed those apprehensions with an appeal to expertise—saying, in effect, “we will interpret these events for you.” Their complicity with the state, however, contributes to what Cedric J. Robinson in 2003 called “The Comedy of Terror.” In the wake of the attacks two years earlier, he argues that it took almost no time for the media to develop a strategy that translated fear into consent for dangerous foreign policy. He writes:
A raw, collectively experienced event was deliberately and cynically reconfigured into an absurd abomination of propaganda, public manipulation, and the counterfeiture of human rights. Licensed by these machinations, everything that preceded September 11 was obliterated. And in lieu of an explanatory back story, a history, the public was lured into a sycophantic chorus on “evil.”
So the experts tell us that force is necessary, but the history leading up that moment is minimized, reimagined to fit a narrative of American goodness. The media bears no responsibility for educating us about the US history of state terrorism.
Just as it is no mistake that the war in Afghanistan was preceded by the spectacle of American violence as media event, so too was the recent news cycle covering its end. Months before the pullout, the media rendered US foreign policy as a nonfactor in the various crises facing the world. The logics of the War on Terror that justified American aid to Israel were mostly muted in the coverage of the latest Israeli campaign of state terrorism against Palestinians. Only Israel’s excesses seem to matter. And we only got the occasional news article, and almost no television coverage, of ongoing campaigns of American state terrorism in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa. These are sites of “natural disaster” only. Their plight cannot be seen as vestiges of coloniality.
To make such connections is “too woke.” The idea that these sorts of knowledges are impolite has instead suffused the mainstream media’s obsession with critical race theory and schools, recalling an earlier moment: the so-called “culture wars.” Writing on the links between the media, foreign policy, and “the discourse,” as it were, Robinson, in 1994, argued that the “real world of political correctness, the creeds stabilised around the official mantras evoking democracy, national security, anti-communism, antiterrorism, etc., have generally served to centre nationalist works while marginalising alternative interpretive discourses (e.g., imperialism, racialism, anti-capitalism, etc.).” Those who demonized challenges to racism, sexism, and imperialism were a part of the same apparatus: “a stratified and militarised universe dominated by an imperial state and its publicists, [that] sponsors killings in the tens of thousands and masquerades as a social contract.” The “centering of nationalist” creeds about how to proceed are not really threatened by what right-wing activists have labeled “critical race theory.” But no matter, part of the viciousness of this program—one shared by the imperatives of the national media—is to prevent even a hint of an “alternative interpretative discourse.” So even the defenses of critical race theory have to conform to American civility, or else.
The war machine will use any tactic it needs to survive, including events that genuinely create fear. In a moment where even veteran leftists felt that “doing something” was justified in Afghanistan, the Robinsons noticed a pattern and were able to offer an alternative view. If we are to ever get out of this mess, such courage is necessary. And it must be protected by anyone who is concerned with truth—a concept that Cedric J. Robinson once asserted was “inexhaustible.”
Guest blogger Joshua M. Myers is an associate professor of Africana studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University.
Read the complete volume of the 2021 Journal of Academic Freedom at https://www.aaup.org/JAF12.
