|
April 13, 2002
Anne Winkler-Morey
Why
I Didn't Organize
a Passover Seder This Year
April 12, 2002
Nancy Stohlman
Live from East Jerusalem:
International Nonviolence
Brian
J. Foley
Defeating
Evil
Olivier Audeoud
Did the US Break
the Laws of War?
Rep. Ron
Paul
The
Middle East Quagmire
Michael Colby
Republican Porn:
Oiling Up the Caribou
John Chuckman
Tom
Friedman's Fabrications
April 11, 2002
Patrick Cockburn
Battle of St. Petersburg Zoo
Jeff Halper
After
the Invasion:
Now What?
Falk / Krieger
Taming the Nuclear Monster
Steve
Perry
The
Good Life of
Nellie Stone Johnson
Nick Ring
Efficiency and Occupation:
Terrorism vs. Taylorism
Alexander
Cockburn
From
the West Bank to BBQ
to Old Sparky, And Beyond
April 10, 2002
M. Junaid Alam
Blaming the Victims:
Hating the Palestinians
George
Monbiot
World
Bank to West Bank
Fran Schor
US-Sponsored State Terror
David
Vest
Political
Color Schemes
Jack McCarthy
Florida State Radicals:
The Berkeley of the South
Rises Again
Doreen
Miller
A
Tale of Two Warring Tribes
Michael Neumann
Israelis and Indians
April 9, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
Colin
Powell's Table Talk
Matt Vidal
Thomas Friedman,
Another Wasted Pulitzer
Ron Jacobs
Buyer
Beware
Robert Jensen
I Helped Kill a Palestinian
Vijay
Prashad
Memories
of Barbarity:
Sharonism and September
Wayne Madsen
Anthrax and the Agency:
Thinking the Unthinkable
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
INSIDE
EXCLUSIVE
TO
COUNTERPUNCH
SUBSCRIBERS
Published March 15, 2002
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
April 13, 2002
A Good Old-Fashioned Incursion
by David Vest
"This
is not an invasion of Cambodia,"
explained Richard Nixon in 1970. Clearly. An invasion would
have been unpopular, not to mention illegal. No, it was an
"incursion," and staffers were ordered to call it such.
The term was openly mocked by media commentators
as a gross example of Orwellian doublespeak, on the order of
"Vietnamization," "pacification" and "terminate
with extreme prejudice." Our government and those who spoke
for it were deliberately using language to lie. Society was
divided between those who could see that and those who wouldn't.
Several students protesting the "incursion"
were shot to death by National Guard troops performing their
own "incursion" of Kent State University.
More than thirty years later, we read
daily of the Israeli "incursion." Journalists in print
and on the air use the term with no apparent sense of either
irony or history. It seems to roll right off the networked tongue.
It is by far the "easiest"
word to use. Almost any other that comes to mind would seem
"harsh" and "judgmental." What could you
call it that wouldn't seem critical of Israel?
On the one hand, we have "suicide
bombings" and "terrorist attacks." On the other,
where we might have "ethnic cleansing" or "juggernaut
rolling over the bones of children" we have "incursion,"
a word that suggests a quiet, off-the-books transaction involving
our solicitors, who certainly have no emotional stake in the
outcome. It lends an air of reasonableness, a suggestion that
whatever might be going on, it is necessary and justified.
"Pay no attention to the man behind
that curtain," it seems to say.
If it is problematic for journalists
to substitute another term for "incursion," it is
finishing the sentence that makes real trouble for them. Nixon
ordered an incursion into Cambodia. At least we know who or
what he "incurred."
But to write, "Sharon ordered an
incursion into ..." is to plunge immediately into the big
thicket. An incursion into Palestine? Try getting that past
the copy editors at the New York Times. Most writers who bother
to finish the sentence wind up giving us a long, awkward construction
such as "territories under control of the Palestinian Authority,"
but alas, the Israeli tanks bulldozing homes and hospitals
lend a certain je ne sais quoi to the words "under control
of," don't they?
So, most often, it is simply "the
Israeli incursion" and never mind "of what."
In other words, to speak of an "incursion"
is to mention what is happening without naming it truthfully,
describing it forthrightly or invoking the reality of it.
The phrase "discusses and settles
these matters without mentioning them," as a critic once
said of a Wallace Stevens poem.
Having deplored the incursion, we now
call for a "pullback." Compare this euphemism with
demands that Arafat "stop the terrorist attacks" and
"publicly denounce, in Arabic, the suicide bombings"
which of course "justify" and "provoke"
the incursion.
Will General Powell demand that Sharon
"publicly denounce, in Hebrew, the destruction of Palestinian
homes and killing of civilians"? Or will the Middle East
be digging its way out of a blizzard before that happens?
Back in the time of Nixon's original
incursion, Walter Cronkite was once informed on the air by a
NASA spokesperson that a moonwalking astronaut who had dropped
a monkey wrench had "re-established visual contact with
the object."
"Are you telling me he's found it?"
asked Cronkite, in a tone of voice that explained more than
a hundred deep backgrounders.
It's always good to ask what they are
really telling us. When someone tells us there is an incursion
going on, they are telling us not to look too closely at who
is doing what to whom, and where. They are telling us that nothing
in particular is happening to no one in particular, and what
is not happening is happening nowhere, really.
David Vest
writes the Rebel Angel column for CounterPunch. He is a poet
and piano-player for the Pacific Northwest's hottest blues band,
The Cannonballs.
He can be reached at: davidvest@springmail.com
Visit his website at http://www.rebelangel.com
|