Unremembering

While the world watches aghast as Israel "disproportionately" levels Hamas targets in Gaza, the little pieces of historical context lie untouched at the side, sitting there peacefully, smiling up at the rest of us. I wonder if they ever imagine that they'll actually be pulled into the discussion, their legs straightened so that the rest of us can see what they really are. But that's kind of a ridiculous thought isn't it? History is becoming something you report, package for a YouTube culture that lives off of 30-second video feeds and flash phrases, and then throw in the vault.

The concept of newspeak comes to mind, the Orwellian designation from "1984" that's used to classify the media's ability to tell and then to untell, and the public's ability to remember and then unremember everything that has come before. Perhaps we're not at that exact level just now, but the media does have an incredibly good understanding of what it means to emphasize and to deemphasize, and knows how horrible realities can become forgotten hiccups in our minds.

And so it is with the current "conflict" that is reported in excruciating detail on a daily basis, with play-by-play commentary on bombs dropped, troops amassed, and people killed. Israel, for all intensive purposes, is portrayed as a monster that bombs indiscriminately and with little justification. Yeah, sure, they like to toss in phrases like "militants" and sometimes they like to say that the bombing started because of Hamas rocket launching into Southern Israel, but are we really falling for these pieces of feigned "balanced reporting"? Just this morning a mosque was leveled. A mosque! It doesn't make any damn difference what was going on in this "mosque" or why it was targeted or any of that stuff. And even if they did thrown in some of those cold facts, hey, our sensible Western minds can't help but feel outrage at the idea that a country could bomb a mosque.

But then wait a second, didn't something happen in Lebanon last year (well, 2007) where the Lebanese military went into a "refugee" camp in Lebanon and duked it out with a "terrorist" cell (notice how we've suddenly replaced the word "militant" with "terrorist," although I think we've also been conditioned to think of ourselves as overreactors, that we shouldn't really be scared or concerned about "terrorists" because most of them are, of course, innocent people who our government and the rest of the corrupt governments in the West have misclassified for personal gain, like all that money we were supposed to make off of oil by invading Iraq, you know what I mean)? Yeah, I think something did happen in 2007 but, for some reason, I don't remember hearing all that much about it. For some reason, it never made the sort of impression that everything in Gaza seems to be making now. That, and I'm really wracking my brains to try to recall this, seemed to be very justified and this, well, I don't know, it doesn't have the same feel to it. The same feel, because that's really what matters here, how I feel about all this, not what actually happened. This seems a lot badder than that was. But, wow, look at that, the conflict actually last three months and hundreds of people were killed. Really? Odd that it's not as clear in my head as I thought it would be.

I'm, of course, by no means justifying any specific military actions based on a finger-pointing strategy of "oh, but he got to do it and no one really said anything." I'm only highlighting this one small incident that happened only a year and a half ago as an example of our ability to classify things in our mind based on the outrage that the media wants us to have, based on their portrayal of moral equivalence, and based on our own biases. That didn't seem like such a big deal, but this does, even to someone such as myself who expresses a pretty strong pro-Israel lean. The same way that the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia that killed hundreds of people never really made me flinch the same way that the 2006 "Lebanon War" did. Who will remember that Russia-Georgia war in a year? Meanwhile the 2006 Lebanon War will forever stay singed in the world's collective memory as yet another act of Israel "disproportionality."

You have to have respect for how well the media plays its game. Even people who maybe notice that something is going on are still made to feel as if it's just in their heads, that, no, it's impossible, the media can't really be doing that, and I can't really be falling for it. I guess if you emphasize something enough and deemphasize something else just as much, then you begin believing what is fed to you. And because the delivery can be so subtle and clean, so draped in the promise of "only reporting the facts," you don't really get that empty feeling in your stomach that makes you wonder whether you're being played.

Sorry. Really I am. Maybe I'm just doublethinking this.