Casualties Of War

The national media echo chamber is not receptive to conscience. On television, the voices are usually loudand facile. People often seem to be shouting. In contrast, the human conscience is close to a whisper. Easilyunheard.

Now, the biggest media outlets are in a frenzy. The networks are at war. Every cable news channel hasenlisted. At the bottom of FM radio dials, NPR has been morphing into National Pentagon Radio.

With American tax dollars financing the war on Iraq, the urgent need for us to get in touch with ourconsciences has never been more acute. The rationales for this war have been thoroughly shredded. (To see howthe sordid deceptions and outright lies from the Bush team have been demolished by my colleagues at theInstitute for Public Accuracy, take a look at the www.accuracy.orgwebsite.) The propaganda edifice of the war rests on a foundation no more substantial than voluminous hot air.

"Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commitinjustices," Voltaire wrote in 1767. The quotation is sometimes rendered with different wording: "Aslong as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities."

Either way, a quarter of a millennium later, Voltaire's statement is all too relevant to this moment. TheBush administration is proud to turn urban areas of Iraq into hell -- defying most of the U.N. SecurityCouncil and violating the U.N. Charter -- all with the righteous claim that the United States is enforcingU.N. Security Council resolutions.

As the apt cliché says, truth is the first casualty of war. But another early casualty is conscience.

Rarely explored in news media, the capacity for conscience is what makes us human. Out of all thedifferences between people and other animals, Darwin wrote, "the moral sense of conscience is by far themost important."

Voltaire contended that "the safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience" and added:"With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear of death." Franz Kafka was alluding to asimilar truth when he wrote: "You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you have free permissionto do so and it is in accordance with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one sufferingthat you could have avoided."

Conscience is smaller than a single pixel, and much less visible. You can't see it on a TV screen. Or hearit. Or smell it. Or taste it. You can only feel it.

That's not a marketable sensation. The huge news outlets have swung behind slaughter in Iraq, and thedissent propelled by conscience is not deemed to be very newsworthy. The mass media are filled with brightlights and sizzle, with high production values and degraded human values, boosting the war effort while theU.S. government implements a massive crime against humanity.

In May 1952, the playwright Lillian Hellman wrote in a letter to the House Un-American ActivitiesCommittee: "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions."

In 2003, this year's media fashions are increasingly adorning the conformist models of pseudo-patriotism.For many Americans, the gap between what they believe and what's on their TV sets is the distance betweentheir truer selves and their fearful passivity.

In the domestic media siege being maintained by top-notch spinners and shrewd political advisers at theWhite House, conscience is in the cross hairs. They aim to intimidate, stampede and suppress the many millionsof Americans who recognize the deranged and murderous character of the war makers in Washington.

Half a century ago, Albert Einstein urged: "Never do anything against conscience even if the statedemands it." Today, one way or another, the mass media are going along with the Bush administration'sdemands that we not challenge the U.S. military actions now taking uncounted lives in Iraq.

Conscience is not on the military's radar screen, and it's not on our TV screen. But media messages do notdefine the limits and possibilities of conscience. We do.

Norman Solomon is co-author of the new book TargetIraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You. Courtesy: Znet