Today’s “This Day in History” was about Tokyo Rose. I found myself asking for the nth time when we as a society will ever learn the lessons of the past. I still remember the 1st gulf war and the reporting that essentially made CNN. They covered “smart” weapons as if they were computer games, or fx in cool sci-fi. Four-five years later there was a spate of news stories in print and on TV about “the failure of the media in covering the gulf war”. These were stories in which reporters lamented the failure of the media to do proper investigative reporting and their willing gullibility viz a viz government accounts of the war.
Skip ahead 14 years and we witness the media defining new standards of “sheep”-ishness as they swallow government accounts not only of the causes of a follow-up war (the mythical WMD’s) but also of the conduct and outcomes of the war and the new colonialist mandate! In the post-9/11 world it is probably going to take considerably longer before we witness another orgy of useless self-flagellation by the media.
Keyword here being useless. The ink hasn’t dried on the revelations of governmental decption with respect to the infamous WMD’s, or on the stories exposing the colossal military failure that is Iraq, and we’re already seeing the media set aside any thought of questioning or (gasp) investigative reporting when it comes to the raids in Somalia. Unquestioningly and with a straight face we are told that the strikes target al-Qaeda militants in Somalia. Neither is a thought given nor a voice raised to question the credibility of an administration that had no compunction to lie outright about a relationship between Iraq and the crimes of 9/11. Knowing full well that we have in our country a President and a military junta that are perfectly willing to cry Qaeda whenever they want to bomb somebody, we the people are still willing to go along with it. Until when?
It seems that we are doomed not to learn from the lessons of history and therefore to continually repeat it. Injustice and aggression have very real consequences, not only for their victims, but upon us as a people and a society. Iva Toguri D’Aquino was a patriot who coped as best she could in troubled times. For her struggles and sacrifice she was forcibly separated from her husband, endured the loss of her child, and spent over six years in prison with the spectre of treason hanging over her name. It took over thirty years after her ordeal for a lame-duck president to pardon her on his last day in office! And then we collectively swept her memory under the carpet (had you heard her name before today?) and proceeded to inflict the same injustices (or in some cases considerably worse) upon each other YET AGAIN! Do we honestly imagine that we can survive unscathed as a society that periodically repeats its worst excesses in a new guise? I wonder . . .
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