| June 29, 2007 | Friday | Jamadi-us-Sani 13, 1428 |
The change of guard at 10 Downing Street
THERE was a time when you could believe the evidence of your senses, when seeing really was believing. This may not be such a smart move any more, for television blurs the distinction between reality and the simulation of reality. People tend to believe what they see on their screens because, after all, the camera can’t lie. But as any person who works in television will tell you, yes it can, otherwise Jurassic Park would have us convinced that dinosaurs roam free.
By virtue of the power to select, manipulate and edit images, television can tell you the biggest of whoppers. This becomes particularly significant in terms of news coverage, such as the president’s Islamabad rally on May 12. Televised footage of the earlier part of the evening was filmed in long-shot with the camera panning over the area to capture the crowds. By the time night fell, the camera had settled into tight, focussed shots of the audience since the edges of the crowds had started melting away and the number of people had been greatly reduced. Islamabad residents reported that buses full of General Musharraf’s supporters were raiding the city’s fast food joints at the very moment he was congratulating himself on what he called an unprecedented turn-out.
That television can twist reality became a controversial debate after the first Gulf war when French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote three essays translated and published under the provocative title, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Unlike what many horrified readers assumed, he was not arguing for the literal interpretation of the title. His thesis was mainly that what is considered real is actually the image of the real, possibly distorted and assigned a new meaning, and that the Gulf war existed in popular imagination only as a series of televised radar and night-vision camera images.
Another point was that television has given new meaning to the term “theatre of war.” Sitting comfortably in his armchair, armed with popcorn, the average viewer today has a ring-side seat from which to watch his pick of disaster. Tiring of Baghdad, Kandahar, the West Bank or Darfur, he can switch to the war against terror (a simulated hyper-reality if there ever was one), the floods in South Asia and from there to Star Wars, Independence Day or Twister. As a result, the viewer’s ability to draw a clear distinction between the facts of one crisis and the fiction of another is numbed. Tragedy becomes a spectator sport.
In Pakistan, however, the opposite seems to be the case, at least if viewer responses to incidents such as the May 12 Karachi violence or the effects of Yemyin are taken as indicators. People across the country watched events unfold on their TV screens and were drawn into the crises. They are not spectators at the sidelines but standing with the fishermen in Ormara and the homeless in Kech. Whether the visual image is powerful enough to spark civic action as it did in October 2005, remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, TV screens also resound with lofty government claims, such as these three gems reported on June 27: Balochistan chief minister Jam Mohammad Yousuf stated that no human loss had been reported from any part of Balochistan, while Sindh governor Dr Ishratul Ibad commented that the situation has resumed normality in 95 per cent of Karachi and city nazim Mustafa Kamal said magnanimously that the hoardings installed within the city government’s jurisdiction posed no threat to lives or property but the city government was nevertheless ready to make Karachi a hoarding-free city.
Malcolm X once observed that whether one is perceived as a monster or a freedom fighter is largely in the hands of who controls the image.
Post script: The 1999 film The Matrix, which raised issues of the dark side of virtual reality, paid homage to Baudrillard by having hero Neo hide contraband software in a hollowed-out copy of one of the philosopher’s books, while rebel chief Morpheus quoted the writer’s most famous formula: “Welcome to the desert of the real.” Baudrillard later protested that the Wachowski brothers had got him wrong: “The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.”
IT went off almost like a non-affair. Cheers that greeted Prime Minister Gordon Brown at 10 Downing sounded a lot less eager than the ovation the departing Mr Tony Blair received from his supporters both at the party meeting as well as in the Parliament. A ‘good riddance’ gesture? Well, not all of it. The people here seem to have locked themselves in the ‘wait-and-see’ mould for the time being on the question of the new prime minister.
The former chancellor though he had by early this year given as many as 10 annual budgets and that too mostly popular, yet for most of his countrymen he is still largely an unknown entity. He certainly lacks Mr Blair’s flamboyance and his mastery of spin doctoring. In fact he appears largely reticent and on the face of it media shy.
Ambitious, he certainly is. Otherwise he would not have fought it out so openly and so publicly for the job over the last one year. He, however, appeared to have won the war of succession more by default rather than because of any sterling political quality. It is still not known if he has what it takes to play on the world stage, especially the games that are being played across the Atlantic, in the Middle East, in Europe and at the UN.
There is not much he can do on Iraq in the two years he has before the next general election to recover the ground his predecessor lost on the foreign policy front. Not only the time is too short for reviving the party’s image among its voters many of whom have since the last election jumped back on the fence thanks to Mr Blair’s image of being a puddle of Mr Bush, but in Mr Cameron, the Tory leader, he has a young and charismatic challenger. In fact Mr Cameron appears to be in the process of building what is being seen here as the New-Tory to fight against what has now become the old New Labour.
While the incoming man is still largely an enigma for the supporters as well as opponents of Labour, the outgoing prime minister’s new assignment has puzzled many of the Middle East watchers the world over. Tony Blair is now the special envoy of the quartet (US, UN, Europe and Russia) on Palestine. But what can he do in his new capacity which he could not have done as the prime minister of the UK? Like his friend President Bush, Blair would go poetic while talking about the pet subject — the two-state solution. But Blair along with Bush never missed an opportunity to make it impossible for this solution to become a reality. Blair watched along with all world leaders who had in their power to stop it, as Israel forcibly confined Yasser Arafat into a small room like a hunted animal then they all witnessed the grand old man’s murder in slow motion at the hands of Israeli besiegers.
And then when Hamas appeared on the scene, Mr Blair went along with the US and Israel when the two decided to put a debilitating financial squeeze on the new government by withholding aid and retaining the taxes collected in West Bank and Gaza. When Hamas refused to budge Fateh fighters recruited and armed presumably by Egypt were sent into the Palestinian Authority to dislodge the elected government.
And once again, Mr Blair watched the bloodshed without a protest. Even during last year’s invasion of Southern Lebanon by the Israelis, Mr Blair instead of moving quickly to stop the fighting waited in vain like his other colleagues in rich countries to see Hizbullah routed. So, his appointment as an envoy of the quartet appears to have been motivated more by a desire on the part of the friends of Israel to continue the process of decimating those who pose a serious threat to Tel Aviv than by any altruistic reasons. By this appointment the US, Europe and UK appear to have made it clear that they were interested only in an Israeli approved plan for the peaceful resolution of the Middle East conflict. And as long as that does not come about they would like the continuation of the conflict so as to keep the oil fields of the Middle East under their perpetual control which also ensured that the petro-dollars would be continued to be recycled back into West’s armament industry which serves as the backbone of the economies of the producer countries.
Tailpiece: I loathe religious pomposity. And I am bitterly opposed to the idea of judging human beings on the altar of race, religion, ethnicity and nationality. But despite my best efforts to treat the Rushdie affair as something not worth taking any serious notice of I could not ignore the fact that three of the five members of the Arts and Media Committee that proposed Rushdie for knighthood were Jews ( Lord Rothschild, Jenny Abramsky and John Gross). Ben Okri, the fourth member, is from the north of Nigeria where a long-running conflict is going on between Muslims of South and Christians of North. The fifth member Andreas Whittam Smith is the son of a pastor.
The Rothschild family is known for its support for Israel. Baron Edmond James de Rothschild was a patron (read financier) of the first settlement in Palestine at Rishon-LeZion. In 1917 Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild, was the addressee of the Balfour Declaration, which committed the British government to the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.
And do you remember all that sentimental pouring inside Britain and in India (and rightly too) when Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty was subjected to racial slurs by some unknown Briton in a TV show? Well, it was taken so seriously by Mr Blair that he chose to tender an apology to the Indians on the floor of the parliament and Mr Brown went all the way to India to tender his. It was the right thing to do by the right people at the right time. But compared to this the response of the British government to the protests of the Muslims the world over on Rushdie’s knighthood was to say the least, simply insensitive.