"Any sensible dictator knows that in terms of unfavorable international publicity, it is perfectly safe to kill the social entity known to news editors as "tribesmen" in fairly large numbers-- let us say up to 30,000, to be on the safe side. "Peasants" -- a noun with affecting pastoral undetones -- are a little trickier. Perhaps one "peasant" for every hundred "tribesmen." Rations vary from area to area. The murder of priests, missionaries, and nuns is an affair of the nicest jdugement, as we shall see in the case of El Salvador. It is really a mattor of location, race, and religious persuasion. As a rule of thumb, men of the cloth should be spared, although the elimination of Dmonicans, particularly those in rural areas, may be practiced in modernation. Count 200 peasants for one priest.
What our Third World dictator should avoid is the murder of journalists, or at least of those who are citizens of the United States. The penalties -- denunciation in Congress and in the news media -- are obvious. Count 10,000 peasants for one American reporter; 30,000, if the reporter is from one of the networks; 50,000 if the murder takes place on camera........
[snip....he then goes on to speculate and how these numbers would affect us if the news were domestic...]
From the press El Salvador received your basic coverage (SMALL MASSACRE IN EL SALVADOR, NOT MANY DEAD). A representative example of such coverage is the following Reuters dispatch of June 10, 1980. Since descriptions of El Salvador almost invariably include the information that it is the size of Massachusetts, I have taken the liberty of substituting place names from the Commonwealth for Salvadorian equivalents, to 'bring the news home,' as one might say:
A wave of bombings shook the capital and at least thirty-four people were murdered in another weekend of political bloodshed in Massachusetts. Five kidnap victims, including a pregnant woman, were found dead in Lynn, seven bodies were discovered in Quincy -- one with the initials EM carved in his chest; a student was machine-gunned in New Bedford and twenty-one people were killed in Boston as right- and left-wingers clashed in the streets. EM is a right-wing group which has declared open war on left-wing sympathizers who are thrying to overthrow the military junta installed last October.
Here's a nother sample of news from El Salvador/Massachusetts, from a UPI report of October 30, 1980: "The Rector of the University of Massachusetts died yesterday of a bullent wound received in a street attack, one of forty-two political slayings reported in the past twenty-four hours in troubled Massachusetts, authorities said. Most of the victims were found tortured and shot to death, including a woman with a machete stuck in her chest, authorities said, apparently the latest in the 8,000 political slayings (in this El Salvador-sized state) recorded this year by the Catholic Church....The junta said it would be willing to open the university, but only if it gave up its legal protection against police and army raids."....[but it was the Junta whose difficulties were decried in the press] "The country's buffeted junta, weathering almost daily disorders and vicious verbal attacks from both the left and the right, faces its most serious tempest to date."
[snip]
Of course, just about the time that Reagan's men were complaining about Carter-sponsored social reform in El Salvador, uniformed national guardsmen were supervising the torture and murder of liberal and leftist leaders and themselves raping and murdering American nuns. Not too much concern was expressed about the dead politicians ('extremists of the left') But the nuns were a different matter, even though it is true that the news function of nuns in the Third World countries was pithily summed up in the terse cry of a British reporter at Brussels airport when nuns began returning from the Congo in the early 60's: 'Anyone here been raped and speak English?' The Carter administration suspended aid to El Salvador. Count 1,000 dead peasants for one raped, dead American nun."
...and so it goes. The Lebanese/Israeli ratio is running about 20/1, leaving aside the destruction of Lebanese infrastructure and the displacement of nearly one million people. We should note however that this disproportion elicits no outrage in the press since it is simply another indication of the superiority of the white-sponsored zionist state compared to the dark turbaned terrorist ragheads. In the same way that a black man could be lynched for not giving a white man sufficient berth, so now, the murder of hundreds of Lebanese civilians, the maiming of thousands more, and the destruction of a country is weighed in the balance with Israel's right to self-defense and found appropriate.
...or, at least, I take this to be the moral that Pugliese draws when he rejoins this list to let everyone know that the moral crisis of the present is the continuing existence and defense of the zionist state.
Oh, and speaking of anti-semitism, another Cockburn tidbit caught my eye from October 26, 1982:
"Michael Kramer, fanzine booster of Arik Sharon, writes in New York magazine about Israel's No. One joke: 'One Palestinian in the sea equals pollution; all Palestinians in the sea quals [sic] solution.'"
First, I will give a dollar to anyone who convincingly demonstrates to me that he or she heard this joke in Israel in the last six months. Secondly, I wonder if New York magazine would have so blithely printed a sentence reading 'One Jew in the sea equals pollution; all Jews in the sea equal solution.'?
....the arithmetic of empire....
Joanna