Gallant Deeds: New Zealand SAS troopers returning from a bitter fire-fight at the Kabul Intercontinental Hotel, Afghanistan, June 2011. The NZ Defence Force is fanatical in its determination to control the totality of information emerging from the theatres in which its personnel are engaged. Independent journalism, of the sort so vital to the workings of a viable democracy, is aggressively discouraged.
WAR AND DEMOCRACY do not mix. They never have and they never
will.
Even during World War II – the “Just War” to beat all Just Wars
– a drastic curtailment of domestic civil rights was deemed unavoidable by
fascism’s democratic opponents.
The Cold War, similarly, engendered a climate of fear and suspicion.
Tremendous courage was required to challenge the “Free World’s” interpretation
of international affairs. At home, dissidence of any kind was met with vicious
persecution. Failure to toe the official line on “the communist threat” could seriously
threaten your career; your liberty; even your life.
Governments have
always preferred to fight their wars in black and white. Shades of grey are regarded
as, at best, confusing, and, at worst, demoralising. In the fraught aftermath
of the 9/11 attack on the United States, President George W. Bush made it chillingly
clear that the Global War on Terror would be waged uncompromisingly on this
crude binary basis. “Every nation in every region now has a decision to make”,
intoned the President. “Either you are with us, or you are with the
terrorists.”
Such statements are hostile to the very essence of
democracy, which, since its earliest manifestation in Ancient Athens, has been
about the people’s right to deliberate upon all matters relating to their
interests; about weighing the options carefully and responsibly; and, most
importantly, about their right to disagree.
But these, the fundamental tenets of democracy, are not the
fundamental tenets of waging war. Soldiers do not deliberate. They are not
encouraged to weigh their options. And they are absolutely forbidden to
disagree.
America’s experience in Vietnam demonstrated how rapidly the
efforts of the armed forces can be undermined by democratic disagreement at
home. The moral ambiguity of the Vietnam conflict made some degree of tension
between the battle front and the home front inevitable. The justifications offered
to the American public for the fight against fascism, which had kept them
behind the war-effort for the duration, simply weren’t available to America’s
leaders in their brutal struggle against Vietnamese peasants. Such
justifications as they did attempt were routinely demolished by the
uncompromising journalism of America’s war correspondents.
Never again. Less than ten years after America’s final,
panicked retreat from Vietnam, the British were waging a war in the Falkland
Islands from which any chance of independent and uncensored war journalism was
being ruthlessly excised. The concept of
“embedded” journalism (if not the expression) ensured that the content and
supervision of the war’s media presentation would remain firmly in Mrs
Thatcher’s hands. The Americans were only too happy to follow the lead of their
British cousins. By the time Uncle Sam was ready to pull on his desert camouflage
gear, independent war reporting had joined long hair and flared jeans as just
another icon of the seventies.
British and American politicians were as keen to apply the
new techniques of media management on the home front as the military had been
on the frontlines. Understandably so, since the military and civilian impacts
of war are impossible to separate. As the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George,
said of the horrors of World War I:
“If the people really knew, the war would be stopped
tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and can’t know. The correspondents
don’t write and the censorship wouldn’t pass the truth. What they do send is
not the war, but just a pretty picture of the war with everybody doing gallant
deeds.”
The True Face Of War:
"If people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow" - Lloyd George
The depiction of gallant deeds lies at the heart of the New
Zealand Defence Force’s media brief. It is what their political masters demand,
and their commitment to the task borders on the fanatical. Nothing strikes fear
into the NZDF like the news that an independent Kiwi journalist is in the field
asking questions, interviewing locals, following leads and painstakingly
assembling stories that owe nothing to, and may sharply contradict, the
official narrative. Operating in regions where New Zealand forces are deployed,
unembedded war correspondents are considered little better than terrorists.
This is how New Zealand’s wars are brought back home. Ultimately,
“managing” the media means subverting
the media. It’s about co-opting and corrupting the profession upon whose independence
and integrity a healthy democracy depends. A journalist persuaded to pull his
or her punches for the sake of “our men and women on the ground” may prove
equally cooperative in relation to other, equally “sensitive”, government
policies.
And it doesn’t stop there. New Zealand’s coroners will soon
be legally prevented from inquiring too closely into battlefield deaths. In the
interests of “national security” future investigations will be left to the
NZDF. According to an NZDF spokesperson, it is important to strike a balance
between independent investigation and ensuring judicial scrutiny does not
encroach into “matters of state”.
War’s aversion to democracy could hardly be more plainly
stated.
This essay was
originally published in The Press of Tuesday,
3 March 2015.
