ONCE a dustman, always a dustman
Dr Kamal Wickremasinghe
The notorious propaganda video producer Callum Macrae’s bio-data
includes a two year period he has worked as a dustman, the polite
British description of a council worker who removes suburban garbage,
before the typically crass Americanism “garbage collector” replaced this
euphemism.
Despite social perceptions to the contrary, there is nothing
inherently inferior about the job of garbage collection – they carry out
the essential service of maintaining urban sanitation. However, Macrae’s
subsequent work such as the recent video on the Sri Lankan war shows
that the job could be habit-forming - Macrae has remained a dustman.
A soldier helping an elderly Tamil woman during the
humanitarian operation |
Currently Macrae must be smugly watching from London the political
chaos his garbage has created in India, and the disgusting violence
being perpetrated against Sri Lankan monks, pilgrims, and tourists by
mobs in Chennai. These are the exact behavioural effects he probably
strived to induce by including the two images of Prabhakaran’s son in
his disgraceful video.
Macrae’s technique is well-worn
There is nothing new in the use of ‘film’ by people with ulterior
motives to arouse baser instincts in target audiences subliminally, in
order to activate them. The capacity of visual images to confine the
perception of ultimate reality in the viewer’s mental world to those
images, to the exclusion of alternative perspectives, has always
provided a potent weapon for propaganda film makers.
The Nazis, for example, made highly emotional films about the
suffering of the German minority in Czechoslovakia and Poland to create
popular support for occupying the Sudetenland – the region of the
northern Czech Republic along the Polish border inhabited by ethnic
Germans - and attacking Poland - Fritz Hippler, Joseph Goebbels’ under
study in the Propaganda Ministry of the Third Reich, produced Derewige
Jude, (The Wandering Jew), one of the most powerful propaganda films of
the 1940s that depicted Jews as avaricious barbarians putting on a front
for civilised European society.
Callum Macrae |
Frederick Remington |
William Randolph Hearst |
Callum Macrae, like all conspirators before him, has been successful
in delivering his subliminal message to the particularly unsophisticated
South Indian audiences that the “Sinhalese are child killers”, through
the use of those two images of Prabhakaran’s son.
The fact that the two photographs do not tell a story has been
irrelevant to the irrational minds of Tamil Nadu. Macrae’s use of the
two images of Prabhakaran’s son, one alive and the other dead, in the
context of the war, together with images of Sri Lankan soldiers was
effective in creating the perception in the already biased minds of
Chennai mobs.
They obviously fail to see the entirely speculative nature of
Macrae’s story based on the two photographs which lack continuity and a
‘smoking gun’ by way of a soldier anywhere near the boy or his body.
They act upon the firm belief that the two images are proof that it was
an army killing and they have become oblivious to the numerous other
‘possibilities’ that could explain the boy’s death.
Macrae engages in classic “yellow journalism”
Macrae’s style of unethical, biased reporting designed to inspire
specific opinions in the minds of an audience by ‘manufacturing’ stories
falls in to the category of “yellow journalism”, a trend that originated
in New York during the late 19th century newspaper circulation wars
between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s
New York Journal.
One of the most infamous examples of yellow journalism emanates from
a communication between the newspaper owner William Randolph Hearst and
his illustrator cum correspondent Frederick Remington whom he sent to
Cuba in 1897 to report on the second Cuban rebellion against the Spanish
rule. Remington, having noticed upon arrival in Cuba that there was no
evidence of “massive battles” as had been reported previously in his
paper, cabled to Hearst - “Everything is quiet. There is no trouble. I
wish to return.” Supposedly, Hearst quickly wired back - “Please remain.
You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”
An objective look at Macrae’s body of work shows that he is prone to
biased and unbelievably exaggerated reporting. As to the sources of the
materials he uses, he does not seem to even ‘pretend’ to look at ‘both
sides” of a story. These traits are clearly indicative of a political
agenda of his own or his pay masters’.
Callum Macrae who grew up in Nigeria and Scotland has a life story
that can be described as ‘colourful’ - he has studied painting for five
years, been a dustman for two years, run a pirate radio station for six
months and was a teacher for seven years.
He has then become a full-time writer working for a variety of
newspapers and magazines. In 1992 he has entered the television world,
Channel 4 to be specific.
In 1993 he has co-founded his own production company, directing,
reporting, filming and executive-producing for the BBC, ITV, the
American PBS and other TV channels. Macrae confesses that closely argued
polemics is one of the genres he has been working in.
Macrae’s film on the Sri Lankan war is funded by the Pulitzer Centre
Though the above anecdote of yellow journalism relates to Hearst, his
competitor Joseph Pulitzer is considered the man who invented the
practice, and is widely regarded as, by far, the worse offender. It is
not surprising then to find that Macrae’s film on Sri Lanka has been
financed by the Pulitzer Centre on Crisis Reporting (PCCR), a “charity”
that claims “deep ties” to the Pulitzer family, receiving primary core
support from Emily Rauh Pulitzer, the Emily Rauh Pulitzer Foundation,
David Moore, and the David and Katherine Moore Family Foundation.
The PCCR describes itself as a “non-profit journalism organisation
dedicated to supporting the independent international journalism that US
media organisations are increasingly less able to undertake.”
They also claim to focus on under-reported topics, creating platforms
that reach broad and diverse audiences. The PCCR is a tax-exempt
organisation under the Internal Revenue Code of the US., and has
commissioned 85 projects in 2012, a 50 percent increase from 2011.
The list of donors to PCCR, especially on specific projects, includes
the ‘usually suspect’ neocons and foundations who finance the global
neocon project - the Rockfellers, Carnegie Corporation of New York(on a
Fragile States project!), Humanity United Population Services
International (PSI) and International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF),
The Stanley Foundation(on Fragile States and Rising Powers reporting
projects!) are all there.
No Fire Zone – a caricature of poetic license
Macrae’s latest work of fiction with a woman named Zoe Sale, No Fire
Zone, claims to be a feature length film about the final months of the
Sri Lankan army defeat of the LTTE terrorists.
The producers make the sensational claim that it is a story of the
worst war crimes and crimes against humanity of recent times “told by
the people who lived through it”.
But to a critical viewer, the film does nothing more than exposing
the unsound and unethical methods adopted by Macrae to sensationalise
allegations based on ‘hearsay’ and manufactured “evidence”.
He uses footage provided by the so-called victims, who are clearly
ex-LTTE combatants who have been granted asylum in Western countries,
supplemented by testimonies from Peter Mackay and Benjamin Dix, neocons
who operated under UN cover and were forced to leave by the UN. Based on
such evidence Macrae brandishes around the “estimated” 40,000 to 70,000
civilian deaths, attributed “mostly” to shelling by Sri Lankan
“government”.
Such lies merely reflect the neocon unhappiness about the Sri Lankan
government eliminating the LTTE, without leaving them much hope for
attempts to revive them for another day. They express their anger
through the financing of propaganda manufactured by “artists” like
Macrae.
The No Fire Zone tale starts in September 2008 in Kilinochchi, which
they describe as the de facto capital of the Tamil “homelands” of
northern Sri Lanka.
Images of LTTE atrocities against Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim civilians
over the previous 25 years do not get a guernsey in the film because
that was not going to help Macrae’s cause.
Obviously the starting point of the film, the beginning of the
retreat of their ‘tool’, the LTTE, was chosen to enable the pursuing Sri
Lankan army as the “aggressor”.
The story of Vany, portrayed as a young British Tamil medical
technician who was trapped along with hundreds of thousands of others
desperately fleeing the government “onslaught” while visiting relatives
in Sri Lanka, including the sensational lie that she had to perform
major surgery without general anaesthetic is an outright lie because it
was revealed at the time that she and others with foreign para-medical
training arrived in Sri Lanka at the time to assist heavy LTTE
casualties.
Macrae’s lies will be inconsequential
Macrae’s video together with the Human Rights Watch and the
International Crisis Group reports was part of the NGO thrust they
launched at the UNHRC meeting. Such propaganda would have made the NGO
parasites happy. But these lies add nothing to the broader picture of
the final stages of the Sri Lankan war.
The Sri Lankan government or the army does not have to deny that
there could have been civilian deaths, caught on the cross-fire, and
those held as human shields by the LTTE leadership. Such regrettable
deaths do not constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity because
there was no systematic programme of action to kill civilians. That is
fundamental humanitarian law to the extent some such thing exists.
Macrae’s fraud does not change this reality.
Macrae claims “Without truth there can be no justice in Sri Lanka.
And without justice there can be no peace.” He should learn that
manufacturing lies to achieve such self-proclaimed ideals is a crime
against civilisation. Garbage by any other name stinks as foul. |