Worthy and Unworthy Victims

- by Stephen Lendman
5/2/07

Economist and media critic Edward S. Herman and social and political critic Noam Chomsky note two kinds of victims in their classic 1988 book "Manufacturing Consent." So does journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger in his writings. "Unworthy" ones are the many unmentioned tens of thousands killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and all other places by US, Israeli and other rapacious imperial waring and occupying forces. "Worthy" ones, however, are those prominently mentioned who died or were hurt on September 11, 2001 in the US, on July 7, 2005 in a dubious London "terrorist" bombing, on March 11, 2004 in the Madrid train bombings, and the Israeli corporal practically the whole free world still knows about since he was taken captive in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) last summer and is still being held. More recent "worthy" victims are the 15 British Royal Navy seamen arrested by Iranian armed forces, now released, and BBC journalist Alan Johnston, also apparently abducted and held captive in the OPT since March 12 when his employer reported he was forcibly seized from his car by gunpoint driving home from work in Gaza City.

The Royal Navy and Johnston instances particularly stand out with the kind of steady BBC and western media reporting on the incidents usually reserved for figures of note but common as well for ordinary types when it serves a propaganda purpose....

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The most recent instance of "worthy" victim "made-for-TV" coverage happened April 16 in Blacksburg, VA, southwest of Roanoke, on Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University's campus. It was falsely reported to be the deadliest shooting incident in modern US history conveniently ignoring state-sponsored ones and others of greater magnitude only one of which was the 1923 Rosewood, Florida massacre of up to 150 "unworthy" innocent black people.

Add bombings to shootings, and there was the May 18, 1927 dynamiting of a school in Bath, MI killing 45, mostly children; the Oklahoma City April 19,1995 bombing killing 168; the 51 day state-sponsored (US Army Delta force-FBI Hostage Rescue Team) terror siege and immolation of the Branch Davidian's Mount Carmel Waco ranch compound killing 84 innocent men, women and children; not to mention the 9/11 attacks killing several thousand or more cited above. And these attacks pale in significance to 500 years of state-sponsored genocidal terror attacks still ongoing against Native Indian peoples in all the Americas killing an estimated 100 million plus as many as 50 million black African captives perishing during a Middle Passage voyage never reaching shore for them. And this leaves out many millions more murdered by American imperial marauding on six continents with US presidents trying to best the appalling records of their predecessors and George Bush racing to the top of the charts....

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The Unknown, Unseen, Nameless, Faceless "Unworthy Victims"

In a recent article, John Pilger quotes historian Mark Curtis' characterization of "unworthy victims" as "unpeople" while Herman and Chomsky explain the "propaganda system," played out in the dominant media, characterizes people abused and victimized by us or our client states as "unworthy." They're everywhere in numbers so huge choices to cite are limitless. None, however, stand out more prominently than those in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) where beleaguered Palestinians have endured six horrific decades under harsh Israeli rule and occupation. Their desperate state rarely gets media coverage, and when it does it's inadequate, demeaning, hostile and falsely reported turning victim into victimizer. Unmentioned is that Palestinians face daily constant Israeli-imposed assaults, restrictions and severe hardships creating nightmarish conditions for them living in virtual open air prisons enduring the cruelest kinds of endless collective punishments ignored in the West....

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"Unworthy" Iraqis

In March, 2003, US forces came, saw and "liberated" 26 million Iraqis from their freedom in a war beginning in January, 1991. They destroyed a once prosperous nation, the most advanced in the Middle East, leaving in its wake a surreal lawless armed camp wasteland with few or no essential services like electricity, clean water, medical care, fuel or most everything else needed for sustenance and survival. They also burnt, looted or destroyed most of Iraq's institutions of higher learning; plundered the nation's archeological museums, historic sites, libraries and archives - all part of a barbaric planned effort to destroy the country's cultural identity, control its vast oil resources, eliminate all opposition through daily land and air rampages through cities and neighborhoods assassinating targeted victims and randomly killing anyone including women and children sometimes for sport or out of anger. It's called democracy, US-style, through the barrel of a gun, where the law is what the occupier says it is and "unworthy" victimized subjects have no say in their own country known as "the cradle of civilization" now disappearing at the dawn of the 21st century.

Then there are the prisons. An unknown number of US-run ones are in Iraq and Afghanistan plus other proxy ones throughout the greater Middle East, Eastern Europe, parts of Africa and wherever else Washington can bribe or coerce other nations to be our enforcers to treat prisoners sent there the way we do in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib hellholes and the lesser known but equally infamous one at Bagram airbase near Kabul, Afghanistan.

Two Iraq prisons (Camp Bucca in the south and Camp Cropper near Baghdad) alone reportedly hold 18,000 captives among an official 34,000 known held throughout the country with the true number likely much higher. It's called justice, US-style meaning none whatever for our targeted nameless, faceless, unknown "unworthy victims" the West ignores with rare exceptions like the case of Australian David Hicks....

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