Debasing the prize

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

In his bleak vision of a totalitarian future, conjured up long before the era of social media and “fake news”, George Orwell depicted with alarming prescience the way in which war could be used to debase the English language.                                               

A little girl takes shelter in war-torn Aleppo

In his dystopian novel, 1984, Orwell did not want to depict his central character, Winston Smith, as a hero, but rather an unfortunate victim who dares to question a terrible system in which language has been twisted far beyond its original meaning.

Political life in Western Europe may not have turned out exactly as Orwell predicted – those who question the authorities are generally not “vaporised” or forced to disappear from sight in 2017 – and yet he would be impressed by the 21st century vocabulary of war.

“How could freedom be slavery or war be peace?” a modern reader might ask.

And yet when you look at terms like “friendly fire”, “carpet bombing”, or “collateral damage” it’s clear that the language we use has been twisted completely to avoid describing the terrible reality of modern warfare.

There is nothing friendly about friendly fire, described as the act of killing people on your “own side”, no carpets involved in carpet bombing, and not much collateral in collateral damage. To those preposterous terms, we might also want to add the term “peace prize”.

In recent years, the notion of a peace prize seems to have lost all meaning.

Last October, for example, the then US Secretary of State, John Kerry, flew into Ireland to collect the Tipperary Peace Award.

Remembering a Syrian child, murdered in a US
air strike, during a protest at Shannon Airport

As he was just two months away from the end of the Obama presidency, you might have thought he had more pressing concerns on his mind. But he was delighted to fly to Ireland to pick up his award.

The then US Secretary of State might have been shocked, even, to get this recognition from the Tipperary Peace Convention as he looked up the tiny village of Aherlow on a map ahead of the awards ceremony.

After Kerry flew into Shannon, effectively a US military base for the past 16 years, before being whisked to Aherlow, it is doubtful that anyone mentioned the seven wars the US had engaged in – and countless lives lost – during the eight years of the Obama administration.

Such talk would hardly have been appropriate in the context of this glittering prize, presented at a star-studded event in rural Tipperary.

There was no mention of the “terror Tuesdays” when President Obama would sit down with his advisers to plan bombings across the globe from the relative comfort of Washington DC.

We tend not to see the victims of those bombings on our TV screens, so their lives don’t matter in the greater scheme of things.

In Tipperary, nobody cared to mention that Obama dropped 26,171 bombs in his last year in office. And it’s doubtful that anyone expressed concern that even a few innocent civilians lost their lives due to these bombings by the administration which won the 2016 Tipperary International Peace Prize.

The Tipperary committee were dazzled to have such a giant on the international stage in their midst last October and Kerry himself was clearly delighted to pick up their award as he came to the end of his term of office.

Local heroes don't make international headlines

It seemed that nobody, apart from a few vocal protesters outside the gates, expressed concern at what it meant to give the representative of such a Government a “peace prize”.

It’s doubtful if the organisers sought feedback from civilians in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, and Syria, where over two million people lost their lives in wars involving the Obama administration.

Just days before John Kerry’s award was announced, 85 people in a tiny Syrian village were murdered in a US air strike in an atrocity which was barely mentioned in the Irish or British media.

John Kerry, the 2016 winner of the controversial
Tipperary Peace Award

Those villagers were not on anyone’s radar when Kerry arrived in Aherlow to collect his prize.

Garnering publicity and rubbing shoulders with the powerful were far more important than showing any understanding of the meaning of the words "peace prize".

So now the Tipperary Peace Award is in the headlines again this month, with Syria’s White Helmets in line to pick up the 2017 prize.

The 3,000 volunteers who constitute the White Helmets are said to have saved more than 60,000 lives since the outbreak of the terrible civil war in Syria in 2011.

An estimated 160 members of the Syria Civil Defence (the 'official' name of the White Helmets), who are based in rebel-held areas, have lost their lives in the civil war.

They have shown great bravery on the front lines in places like Aleppo, a city which faced relentless bombardment from Russian military aircraft last year.

There is no doubt that the men who volunteer for the White Helmets are immensely brave, but does it not devalue their “peace prize” that the 2016 winner was part of an administration which brought so much death and destruction to countries such as Syria and Iraq?

And isn't it amazing that a small committee in Tipperary knows enough about the war in Syria - where the truth is so hard to find - that they can give their coveted "peace prize" to a controversial group which faces questions over its founding, its funding, and even links to radical groups?

Ironically, when John Kerry flew into Shannon in October 2016 he was faced by a small group of protesters who have staged a monthly protest at the airport every month over the past 16 years.

Ireland is supposed to be a “neutral” country and respected academics at Shannonwatch have been highlighting Shannon Airport’s role in the US “war on terror” since 2001.

They have documented every plane carrying US troops and possibly munitions landing at or leaving Shannon over that period, despite indifference or downright hostility from the Irish authorities.

These local heroes give up their free time in a bid to stop bombings in countries such as Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

They are kept under surveillance outside the airport fence, while nobody in authority ever stops to search the planes, bringing so much destruction to the Middle East, inside.

Respected academics like Edward Horgan and John Lannon, who are regularly filmed by undercover Gardai just for staging a peaceful monthly protest, might not generate the same international headlines as the White Helmets or John Kerry.

I guess that’s why they are never in the reckoning to pick up a Tipperary “peace prize”.



Ciaran Tierney is a journalist, blogger, and digital storyteller, based in Galway, Ireland. You can check out his Facebook page here

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Two tragedies, worlds apart

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I got home from work and turned on the BBC News last night, expecting to hear something, anything, about a tragedy I’d been alerted to earlier in the day.

But there was nothing, not a word.                                  

I switched over to RTE News, and it was the same. Nothing. Silence.            

Coalition forces bomb a populated area in Syria

I felt I was living in an Orwellian world, where the people in authority, the elite, the Government, the authorities, call them what you wish, wanted to control what news I heard or saw.

At 7pm, I switched to Channel 4 News, and in fairness, at last, a mainstream channel on these islands dared to report on a horrific tragedy which had happened the day before.

I had read it in the Daily Telegraph, I had seen it on Russian Television, but when I watched both the BBC and RTE I began to disbelieve what I’d seen and heard.

How could such a tragic loss of life be considered so unworthy of attention?

Just a day earlier, an estimated 85 civilians, including almost a dozen children, had lost their lives. Yet there was no condemnation from our leaders, no minute’s silence, no expressions of regret about the loss of so many innocent lives.

The dead were in Syria, killed by air strikes.

US combatants had targeted an area in northern Syria which had been held by Islamic State (IS) or Daesh fighters.

85 lives lost, a death toll which was eerily similar to the 85 lives lost when a terrorist in a truck ploughed through a crowd of revellers celebrating Bastille Day in the French city of Nice.

All across Europe, people were, naturally, in shock at the news of another terrorist atrocity on French soil, coming so soon after the relief of seeing the European Championships football tournament conclude without any major incident.

Malcolm X: his jaundiced views of elements of the media
seem even more appropriate in 2016

France was in mourning again, yet we hardly ever hear news reports about the bombings carried out by the French in Libya or Syria.

After the latest Syrian attack, there were no commemorative walks along the Salthill Promenade or books of condolences opened up in Dublin.

Editors at the BBC and RTE did not even deem the attacks worthy of reportage.

So why is this important?

Well, the ‘terrorists’ who carried out this attack regularly stop to refuel their war planes at my local international airport. Nobody knows what they carry through Shannon, because nobody dares to find out.

On the day after the atrocity in Tokhar, the Irish Government confirmed in the Dail - the Irish parliament - that over 25,000 US troops had passed through Shannon Airport in the first six months of this year.

Gardai won’t search their war planes and those “dissidents” who dare to do so, some of them respected academics, can expect to make a visit to Ennis District Court.

When over 120 civilians are killed in just a few days in Syria and Iraq, we don’t see their faces on the TV (unless we go looking for obscure channels) and we aren’t even told that the French or the Americans killed them on our behalf.

It is believed that eight families were wiped out in the attack on Tokhar on Tuesday, in one of the deadliest bombings by coalition forces since the outbreak of war in Syria.

Two days earlier, a woman, four children, and an elderly man were also killed by coalition forces in an air strike on the Syrian city of Manjib.

The US military says it is investigating the civilian deaths, which is more than can be said for the Irish authorities who haven’t a clue who or what has been flown through Shannon (in ‘neutral’ little Ireland) over the past 13 years.

The loss of any innocent human life, whether in France or Syria, is a tragedy.

But some elements of our media don’t even bother to report some of them and, when they do, they refer to the lives lost as “collateral damage”.

How dehumanising our language has become over the 80 years since George Orwell used to write about Big Brother and the brainwashing of the totalitarian state.

Now “we” use drones to kill people thousands of kilometres away – US President Barack Obama famously sits down every Tuesday with his advisers to decide who should be slaughtered this week.

We rightly condemn the Islamic terrorists who carry out atrocities on European soil, but we ignore or are afraid to condemn the “terrorists” in uniforms who carry out atrocities on our behalf.

We don’t see their victims and the perpetrators view them from the skies, or military bases hundreds or even thousands of kilometres away, as though they were playing video games.

How much easier it is to "dehumanise" a civilian victim in Iraq, Syria, or Afghanistan when you kill them by pressing a button far removed from the combat zone.

So over the past week we've had at least two tragedies, which seem to be worlds apart.

We stop to mourn the deaths of innocents in Nice, and rightly so, but our "masters" decide not to even
tell us about a tragic loss of life in a Syrian town.

Why would we mourn them?

We never, or hardly ever, see their anguished relatives on our TV screens.

The monthly protest against US military
use of Shanon Airpor

And then we wonder why people in the Middle East detest the western world?

The attacks on civilians in Syria or Iraq don’t justify the appalling scenes we have seen in France and Belgium over the past couple of years, but they do at least provide some sort of context which is dangerously lacking from elements of our media.

It’s easier to understand why there is so much hatred out there when our politicians and news channels make it clear that some lives don’t really matter.

There is no doubt that ISIS are murderous terrorists, who pose a threat to the entire world.

But the people who bomb cities thousands of miles away don’t always do so with good intentions, as the Chilcot Inquiry found when it investigated Tony Blair’s rush to war in Iraq.

Sometimes the “terrorists” are on our side, too, much as we choose to ignore the uncomfortable truth about what’s really going on in the unreported parts of the world.




You can watch an Al Jazeera report of the tragedy in Syria here:

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/07/led-air-strikes-kill-21-civilians-syria-160719045329897.html

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Imagine ... there is no war

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Today I read a post on Facebook by a Galway man who said he “did not feel safe near any Muslim” following the appalling terrorist attacks in Brussels.

“Can anyone blame me?” he asked, mulling over the fact that the person beside him in an airport, cinema, or train station could be just about to detonate a bomb.

When taken to task by anti-racism activists, concerned that he has a prominent position at a Galway sports club, the man refused to withdraw his words.

Imagine, just imagine, how disgusted people would be if a British person made such a sweeping generalisation about all Irish people during the height of the IRA bombing campaigns in the 1970s or 1980s.

Imagine how awful it would sound if someone made a comment about how unsafe they’d feel beside Jewish people. We saw how the demonization of that particular religion led to the insane killings of six million people in Europe in the 1940s. Well, never again.

There are 1.7 billion Muslims all across the globe, yet now some people in the US or Europe are prepared to demonise them all.

US Presidential candidate Donald Trump would prefer to turn all 1.7 billion of them away at the border, while ordinary people in Galway now say they don't feel comfortable standing beside them at the cinema or the bus queue.

Racism is unacceptable, so is ignorance. Views like that, based on nothing but racism and fear, lead to the kind of mentality which allows people like Donald Trump to demonise minorities.

There is no war between Muslims and non-Muslims.

How can we hate all Muslims? I spent three weeks on a Muslim island in January and the only thing that made me fearful was how crazy some of them were on the roads.

A few extremist yobs use the name of Islam to destroy innocent lives, just as the US military bastardises the word “freedom” when it bombs the hell out of innocent people in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, or Iraq.

What happened in Brussels yesterday is appalling and, yes, we should mourn the dead. 

But some lives are more important than others and we can be so selective in our grief. 

What kind of message does it send out when we mourn the loss of innocent lives in Paris or Brussels, but ignore those lost in Yemen or Syria?

George Orwell was right. Some animals are more equal than others. The media make that very clear in the wake of each and every atrocity. Some get wall-to-wall coverage, some are conveniently ignored. Sky News spend a full week reporting on a tragedy in Brussels, but hardly bother to mention the loss of innocent lives in Beirut.

We will have images from Brussels on our TV screens for the next week, before the networks move on to the next 'big story'. But we never, ever see the pain on the faces of ordinary children in Syria or Iraq. We hardly ever get to hear their stories, in contrast to the saturation coverage from the streets of Brussels, including interviews with neighbours where the Islamist terrorists lived.

We should mourn the loss of all innocent lives. 

 

How ISIS attacks are reported in the news

Most people, whether they are white Europeans or Iraqi Muslims, just want to bring up their children in peace and get on with their lives.

We should ask what motivates young men to blow people up in train stations or airports.

Just as we should ask why innocent people thousands of kilometres away are slaughtered in the name of freedom – and why we never see their anguished faces on our TV screens.

Often the truth is too uncomfortable to face. The young men who commit these atrocities in Europe grow up in our cities, attend our schools, and yet seem so alienated from the Western world. 

Most of them are not, as the Daily Mail might suggest, refugees from the war-torn Middle East who sneaked into Europe along with thousands of migrants, hell bent on destruction.

It's scary that these young Muslim men, after growing up in Europe, can be brainwashed into thinking that they will be whisked to Paradise if they blow up 20 innocent people in a busy airport or train station.

It's equally scary to think that they've seen through the hypocrisy of it all, that spilling blood in some cities generates far more publicity than the loss of life in other parts of the world. Because, most of the media tell us, that's just the way it is. 


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