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June 29, 2005
The Parting of Ways
So, the jury has released a statement, and much remains to be discussed and shared with UtSS readers about this remarkable event.
For now, though, I want to remark on something that was fairly striking to all of us who had arrived from the U.S.: pervasive the press coverage. Granted, a good chunk of it was driven by Arundhati Roy's presence, but it was way more than that. Every major paper ran stories about the proceedings, everyday. And is it not like the the press here is particularly good. In fact, except for Acik Radyo, an independent radio station, it is particularly bad.
What we are witnessing, I think, is more a disjunction between the United States and the rest of the world. In most places I visited last year, there is nothing remarkable about chatting about U.S. aggression in Iraq, torture, war crimes, all those things the press in the United States cannot and will not discuss as legitimate issues. While U.S. foreign policy and U.S. imperialism were always relatively unpopular, it seems that it has become almost impossible to find politicians or pundits openly defending what U.S. is doing in Iraq. In some sense, this Tribunal was mainstream in its topic, even if most of the participants and the organizers were prominent dissidents.
This was not always so. One would always encounter, especially among the elite, people who defended U.S. foreign policy at least as inevitable choices for a bad world. No more, it seems. It all seems so obvious to everyone.
Perhaps that is one of the most important tasks facing us: to reverse this process which is placing more and more distance between the American people and the global citizenry which had reached a closeness not seen in a long time on February 15, 2003.
Here are some pictures of the press coverage that were posted around the WTI café. Everday, a 6 by 2 foot board would be covered with photocopies of articles for that day.
Posted by zeynep at June 29, 2005 04:50 PM