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COMMENT Cartoons aid US lynch mob mentality By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
analogous to the Nazi propaganda film Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew),
which showed maps of Europe teeming with rats and included the following
script: "Whenever rats appear they bring ruin ... just like the Jews among
human beings."
This recalls what sociologist Ervin Goffman has referred to as media's
"framing" ability, ie, "labeling" the hostile other, in the Nazi case the Jews
and in the current case the Iranians, as sub-
human candidates for extermination, subjected first to a combined intense
animosity and ritual humiliation through shame and ridicule.
Indeed, it is axiomatic that extreme prejudice, propagated through a
gratuitously offensive media campaign, goes hand in hand with war fever.
Political cartoons mirror political discourses, and pro-US-administration
cartoonists such as Ramirez are now helping with the media mob lynching of
Iran. That the mainstream US media publish such extremely offensive and racist
visual images of Iran and Iranians, worthy of the notorious Nazi paper Der
Stuermer, speaks volumes about the obscene anti-Iran climate sweeping the US
today.
Some may see this simply as just a matter of poor taste, or stooping to new low
levels, but the appearance of such cartoons in hundreds of US newspapers,
almost on a weekly basis, indeed reminds us of the Nazi analogy, that is, how
in the Nazi era the task of the art was to shape the population's attitude by
carrying political messages with set negative stereotypes promoting a politics
of eradicating the "enemy" in part with the help of cartoons' symbolism and
metonymy, ie, the trope, in which one word or image is used in place of another
that suggests it.
Of course, the comparison to Nazi propaganda has its own limitations, and the
US and European cartoon wars on Iran have transpired in the context of Western
democracies and what Habermas refers to as "pathologies of mass media". To add
to Habermas' insights on manufacturing consensus and "friendly fascism", the
Iran-bashing cartoons are symptomatic of a political pathology rooted in US
irrationalism, the same irrationalism that, 60-plus years after dropping the
bombs on Japan, still refuses to apologize for such nuclear barbarism, or that
bestowed a medal on Captain William C Rogers III, the US naval commander of the
USS Vincennes who shot down Iran Air Flight 655 with 290 civilian passengers
aboard on July 3, 1988. (Rogers remained in command of the Vincennes until May
27, 1989, and in 1990 president George H W Bush awarded him the Legion of Merit
medal for his tenure as commanding officer of the Vincennes and made no mention
of the downing of the Iranian airliner.)
Until and unless Americans confront the roots of their irrationalism, rooted in
their unique history, their exceptional wealth and power, their stupefying
intellectual discourses, such as clashing civilizations and/or "end of history"
and the like reflecting the age-old problem of America's intellectual paucity,
and their fears of losing their grip on the post-Cold War unipolar moment, this
problem will surely be aggravated in the years to come.
In conclusion, a question: What is the antidote to this pathology? The answer
is an alternative vision of America's role and responsibility in the world,
together with an accented focus on a pedagogy of tolerance, listening,
reciprocity, [3] dialogue and intercultural and interfaith understanding. That
is wishful thinking, however, as long as the war drums against Iran are getting
louder and louder.
Notes
1. For more on this see Afrasiabi,
Axis of evil seeps into Hollywood, Asia
Times Online, March 15, 2007.
2.
Controversy arises over dispatch 'Iran sewer' cartoon,
Progress Ohio, September 6, 2007.
3. Ironically, compared with the Ohio paper's Iran-bashing, Iranian people have
a warm feeling toward the state of Ohio because one of its sons, Howard
Baskerville, gave his life while fighting alongside the constitutionalists
against despotism at the turn of the 20th century. For more on this see the
author's
Ballad of Howard Baskerville, Iranian.Com,
September 6, 2007.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New
Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (West view Press) and co-author of
"Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume
XI, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Must Imbroglio. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's
nuclear potential latent", Harvard International Review, and is author of
Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
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