HomeOld_PostsBreaking through the nexus of terror and media

Breaking through the nexus of terror and media

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By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

IN the May 22 instalment I observed that ‘technocrats’ approved by the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to impose structural adjustment (ESAP) on Zimbabwe in the 1990s tried to explain and justify what they were doing. They organised hundreds of workshops and bought acres of media space to try to market IMF-WB programmes to the public. This was before September 11 2001, before the US administration launched ‘the War on Terror’ on the back of terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. In contrast, the new Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) in the form of the IMF’s Staff Monitoring Programme (SMP) and its second phase, the Successor Staff Monitoring Programme (SSMP) have not been explained. And the role of the media in SMP and SSMP has been limited to that of a mere conveyer-belt for ex-Cathedra declarations, policy dictations and press conferences. This is the new approach of the global financial dictatorship after 2001 and George W Bush’s War on Terror. Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, has traced the history of this development which we are now experiencing in Zimbabwe. ESAP was introduced before Zimbabweans had yet gone through the shock of financial war and sanctions waged between 2000 and 2009. SMP and SSMP have been introduced to consolidate the policy gains for corporate dictatorship set in motion by ESAP, by sanctions and by financial warfare. According to Klein: “If an economic crisis hits (people) and is severe enough – a currency meltdown, a market crash, a major recession (or deflation) – it blows everything else out of the water, and leaders (in our case ‘technocrats’) are liberated to do whatever is necessary (or is said to be necessary) in the name of responding to a national (economic) emergency. Crises are, in a way, democracy-free zones – (they are) gaps in politics as usual when the need for consent and consensus does not seem to apply.” Moreover, there is an assumption that the foreign-orchestrated turmoil which the people have gone through – – ESAP, IMF riots, stay-aways, inflation, financial warfare and agitation for illegal regime change – – have induced enough fatigue and shock to numb the population, so that fewer and fewer people demand clear explanations of critical policy changes. Such policies can now be dictated from the top without any prior warning. “The idea that policy change should be like launching a surprise military attack is a recurring theme for economic shock therapists (employed by the IMF and the World Bank.) In Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance … the authors state that the invading force should ‘seize control of the (entire) environment and paralyse or so overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events so that the enemy would be incapable of resistance.’ Economic shock works according to a similar theory: the premise is that people can develop responses to gradual change – a slashed health programme here, a trade deal there – but if dozens of changes come from all directions at once, a feeling of futility sets in, and populations go limp.” So, from the point of view of the forces driving IMF and WB policies, the upheavals which people of Zimbabwe experienced as a result of ESAP, sanctions and hyperinflation present a great opportunity to introduce strange and radical economic changes without being stopped to explain. ESAP, AIDS, sanctions, financial war, hyperinflation and the illegal regime change onslaught in fact overloaded the people’s perceptions of reality. In the case of Bolivia in the 1980s, for instance, “that meant that hyperinflation (or any severe economic crisis) was not a problem to be solved, as Jeffrey Sachs believed, but a golden opportunity to be seized.” For the IMF, WB and its neoliberal ‘economists’ the suffering of the people under illegal sanctions is good for introducing fast-moving drastic ‘changes’. The meaning of September 11 2001 In this context, September 11 2001 is a milestone in the consolidation of a global corporate dictatorship desired by Washington and Europe for the following reasons: First, September 11 was used to launch and justify an open-ended war which did not have to be justified or won, the War on Terror. Second, it established the idea that government did not have to be led by accountable officials who knew what they were doing and could explain it to the electorate: No, all the officials needed to do was to prepare blank cheques and corporate-friendly contracts for outsourcing both policy-making and policy implementation to the corporate sector and its specialised agencies, that is, to experts and entrepreneurs who ‘know’ what to do and how to make it profitable. Third, September 11 consolidated the destruction of journalism and its replacement with media as a mere conveyer belt of data for the benefit of profit making corporate speculators. Fourth, it solidified the new role of media as an integral part of the global nexus of terror and corporate propaganda. Criminal defamation of entire nations now precedes their destruction via the War on Terror. The US-spawned terror outfit Isis or ISIL is a media phenomenon. Fifth, September 11 solidified what Lynda McQuaig had called ‘The Cult of Impotence’ in a book by that title. The main function of the majority of media outlets was no longer investigative journalism, but the mass-marketing of a world that was beyond the understanding of the ordinary citizen, a world in which the masses should settle for spectacle, titillation, sex and service delivery at the mercy of global monopolies. The definitive answer to those trying to insist on old-fashioned public affairs underpinned by investigative journalism was given by one of George W Bush’s Cabinet Secretaries, Donald Ramsfeldt, when he justified the invasion of Iraq and the War on Terror saying: “Reports saying something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns, there are things we know we know. We also know that there are known unknowns: that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” Therefore ‘we’ can make far-reaching policy decisions without having to account or explain! The essence of this apparently nonsensical outburst was to say that both citizens and journalists should stop worrying about accountability, transparency and explanation. The War on terror required no explanation and no closure because terrorists are everywhere and they do not follow known plans. Klein quoted the US of Homeland Security booklet which says: “Today’s terrorists can strike at any place, any time, and with virtually any weapon.” So, another Bush Cabinet official, Dick Cheyney, said it was not necessary to prove that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction capable of destroying Europe and North America, as George Bush and Tony Blair alleged. “If there is a one percent chance that something is a threat, it requires that the US respond as if the threat is a 100 percent certainty.” So just the mere allegation that Iraq was a threat should be enough to justify its pre-emptive destruction and elimination. Applied to the economy, any fear or suspicion or doubt in the minds of the experts, technocrats and entrepreneurs can be adopted as a government policy and tax-payers should be willing to suffer its consequences or to spend money on it without explanation. In Zimbabwe, if the Governor of the Reserve Bank fears the return of the national currency, there shall be no national currency. There is no longer any need to consult people in Muzarabani or Tamandayi or Mwenezi.

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