A Paradigm Shift on How History is Written?

There is that old adage that "history is written by the victors." And that has indeed been true for much of human history. Yet something has shifted with the technology that now powers global communication systems.

No longer can a government dictate what gets reported. No longer can a newspaper or television channel be the sole determinant of who and what gets counted as news, and therefore, as "historical reality." The new media, powered by millions of citizen journalists are changing that adage on writing history.

As we have seen repeatedly in India, citizen journalists are faster to get the news out than traditional media. True, many complain, they provide "superficial" or "unsubstantiated" information and thus muddy the waters.

Very often these complaints are from those who form part of the government establishments and/or mainstream media. It is true that most citizen journalists or as Mumbai and Gaza reveal, twitter-nalists only provide quick facts. Some of it is not verified, but simply sent out. Yet that is what many reporters on the ground - file in copy with their immediate experience and let the news desk make sense of it back home. Now with the "over-democratization" of news, all of us can be our own news-desk, filtering through accounts to decide for ourselves to analyse and understand issues and events. For an old-style liberal like me, that is a dream come true.

Of course, there are problems. Like all human inventions, the over-democratised new media is only as good as the people running with it. Yes there are vanity contests, and propaganda wars, and shoddy reporting. But that is no excuse for throwing out the baby with the bathwater, especially when that baby is overturning the old maxim and giving the vanquished a chance to write history too.

My contribution to that paradigm shift are the following links, all providing images and news from inside Gaza:

1. A detailed blog on the conditions in Gaza from a medical angle dating back to July 2008: A must read for all those who believe the Palestinians instigated this particular crisis.

2. A poignant blog by a Palestinian journalist and mother on raising two children in a perpetual war-zone.

3. Sameh Habeeb's blog on the Untold Story of Gaza.

4. And finally, a poignant, heart-warming photo-log from inside Gaza, again by Sameh Habeeb.

Over-democratization of the media? Bring it on!

Never Again? Lets Not Kid Ourselves!

When I studied in the USA, I was constantly told that "never again" was the moral to live by. Holocaust studies, memorials, monuments, documentaries, novels, memoirs dominated and still dominate the Western marketplace and psyche. In that process what is lost is the genocide determinedly practised over 60 years by survivors of the Holocaust.

Like children of abusers and alcoholics, the survivors of the Nazi Holocaust have grown to refine and put into practice the very atrocities they suffered from and apparently fought against. And they have had their cheerleaders and enablers to continue their abuse, as is borne out by the most recent massacre in Gaza.

For the past week, I have been sickened by the hypocrisy and hubris displayed by Western politicians and press over the massacre in Gaza. Again and again, we are told that Hamas is to blame. That they "started" it by lobbing rockets at Israeli towns - which just for the record have killed all of FOURTEEN Israelis in the past SEVEN years. Compare that to Israel's record of killing over 5000 Palestinian civilians in the same period.

The same press and politicians care not to talk of overt acts of war practised by Israel in breach of all international law including:

1. Blockade of sea/land/air in Gaza
2. Collective punishment by denying basic amenities to civilian population whose only crime is to vote against Western wishes, and for the party that provides them the basic modicum of education, health-care, social services.
3. Assassination and kidnapping of elected leaders of government, which would be considered acts of war against any "sovereign" state.
4. Killing of civilians during the same acts of war.
5. Illegal incarceration of thousands of Palestinians with no trial or reason.

And that is not even going back to the simplest point: that Israel has behaved as a racist, imperialist power since its inception. And it flouts all international law with full support of its Western cheerleaders and paymasters who consider the Palestinians simply as Israel's unter-menschen, to be incarcerated, humiliated and killed with impunity. But since words no longer suffice, the picture below speaks loud and clear:



So yes, indeed, Hamas is to blame. As is Fatah. And the PFLP. And every Palestinian who dares to protest the genocide they are being subjected to, and thus challenges the logic of the superior race in the Holy Land!

Never again? Yeah sure, but not when its practised by the worthy heirs of the Nazis!

Hubris, Ignorance or Just Plain Don't Care?

I have been a news addict since I was a child.

My father's job required him to monitor all media very closely, so we all grew up with obscene amounts of newspapers, reports, clippings, and then finally television news around us. Dinner conversations in my parents house often feel like policy debates - and there have been instances when a dinner debate has formed the nucleus of the country's major policy document.

A not so pleasant aspect of this news addiction is of course the constant awareness of bias and ignorance regarding India (and a lot of other countries) in "western" press. Some how media based in USA, UK and Europe has greater credibility, partly due to history and partly due to the economic, military and political clout of these countries. It also helps that the same countries come up with increasingly unbelievable rankings and reports on "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press."

Just think back to the WMDs in Iraq hysteria before that nation was attacked and you get the picture. Think back to the self-censorship of the western press regarding Iraqi and Afghan casualties. Or just think back to the level of attention paid to Mumbai simply because some of the victims were Western.

Yet its not just the "big" stories that get reported with glaring errors and free editorialising. The western media spends a lot of time and energy embedding value judgements into what appear to be "news stories." The result - and perhaps the motivation - is to subtly perpetuate a narrative, a stereotype, an idea that is more pleasing and acceptable to western powers, press and bulk of the readers/viewers. And in doing so, they choose to jettison the most basic qualities of reporting and the simplest of journalistic standards!

This morning brought home that realisation rather starkly. In the Times was a story about film-makers attempting to cash in on the Mumbai attacks and the public revulsion that such actions have unleashed. So far so good.

Except the story had serious factual bloopers: Filmmaker Ram Gopal Verma did tour the Taj, but not with his actor son, but rather with the now thankfully resigned Maharashtra CM Vilasrao Deshmukh's son.

And we won't even go into the overly generalised, condescending bit of editorialising that declares: "There are, however, indications that Indian audiences who are more used to lavish musicals will watch films that examine terrorism from fresh perspectives." Really? Like we did back in 1996? Or should we go further back to Roja and Bombay?

As the cherry on top, the story also cites unnamed critics who say: "Indian cinema has a history of films that address current affairs but most dealing with terrorism have used real-life events as springboards for crudely nationalistic action movies, critics say."

Ahem: I guess the critics missed films like the Mani Rathnam trilogy? Or Gulzar's Maachis? Or Mission Kashmir, which not only linked terrorism in Kashmir to bin Laden well before 9/11, but included the acclaimed novelist Vikram Chandra as one of its scriptwriters? We won't even go into the range of politically complex, ideologically sophisticated and well researched films, including Sarfarosh, 16 December: All Forces Alert, Fiza, Fanaa, Rang de Basanti that have taken on terrorism in the past decade.

Sure the western press trots out the handful of Indian writers/novelists on its op-ed pages to provide the illusion of objectivity. But beyond all that, a little painful truth I learned as a child remains: the western press will print what it likes about India, especially if it feeds their own illusions about the country. Anything actually based in facts is a little too politically, ideologically, possibly even morally, inconvenient!