Case Study: Continental Drift Part 1
This case study was included in the post: The Disappeared.
In 2015, MSNBC, in collaboration with Magnum Photos, published an online multi-media series called Continental Driftı. This was at the height of the so-called "European migrant crisis," as tens of thousands of people fled the chaos and deadly aftermaths of American and European wars in the Middle East. Written by Tony Doukopil and Amanda Sakuma, the entire piece–beautifully designed and powerfully photographed by several Magnum photographers–conveniently conflated the thousands driven across the waters of the Mediterranean because of Western wars with those forced across the deserts of Africa because of unjust and exploitative trade agreements signed between Europe and other nations.
[Note: This essay is no longer available on the MSNBC website, where it first appeared in 2015. It can be found via The Way Back Machine.
The main essay is here: https://web.archive.org/web/20160304220313/http://www.msnbc.com/specials/migrant-crisis/mediterranean and https://web.archive.org/web/20160303173423/https://www.msnbc.com/MigrantCrisis.
The Libyan portion of this piece, written by Amanda Sakuma, can be found here: https://web.archive.org/web/20160517151940/https://www.msnbc.com/specials/migrant-crisis/libya.
Her second essay, one on the Mexican and Central American migration crisis, is archived online here: https://web.archive.org/web/20170501225348/http://www.msnbc.com/specials/migrant-crisis/mexico].
I address three parts of this series in this essay.]At the height of one of the biggest stories in Western media, a journalist spends thousands of words addressing the issue of migrants but assiduously and determinedly avoids touching on the causes and reasons for the creation of the crisis. He spends thousands of words avoiding using any word that may reveal the horrors that the West has spread and the realities of the millions of lives that it has destroyed. This essay, cleverly crafted and beautifully photographed, becomes an exercise in obfuscation and erasure.
Tony Doukopil, in the chapter called "The Mediterranean Route," explicitly identifies regions of recent Western militarism as a significant source of refugees; he assiduously avoided speaking about Western wars as the cause and reason for people fleeing.
A bizarrely and unconscionably evasive graphic showing the number of refugees by year, only four major events are highlighted as relevant: the 1975 fall of Saigon, the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, the 1998 war in Kosovo, and the 2011 start of the Syrian “civil war.” Apparently, between 1998 and 2011, a thirteen-year gap where we say America and its Western allies attacked and invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya and began massive campaigns of war in regions of Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and, of course, Syria was not worthy of highlighting. The entire graphic erases Western aggression as a milestone worth highlighting–the 2001 illegal invasion of Afghanistan, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the 2011 USA/NATO attack on Libya, and so on, do not count as significant enough to note.
Doukopil’s only reference to the recent displacement of millions from Western geographies of war is made in a somewhat evasive and misleading paragraph that states:
Most Americans are familiar with the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and possibly Syria’s foul and bloody civil war. But what about the Yemeni Civil War? Or the clash between rival governments in Libya? Or the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians forcibly displaced within their borders?
Note how all these conflicts are written as if they had nothing to do with the aftermath of US direct or indirect political and military interference. So desperate is he to avoid pointing the finger at the single most significant political power destabilizing the region, killing hundreds of thousands, dropping bombs, running torture centers, carrying out invasions, and supporting occupations that he has to jump through time loops in ways that time travels would envy. For example, when speaking about the reasons for the millions drifting onto the shores of Greece and Italy, Doupkobil claims that:
They turn away from ISIS in Iraq, civil war in Syria, and religious violence throughout the Middle East and North Africa. What they face in exchange is a wall of public anxiety, virulent populism, and the threat of closed borders for thousands of miles.
Civil war, religious violence, populism, and ISIS. It is as simple as that if you have the superpower to control time and manipulate histories. Western journalists do. Instead, we are told, using some of the worst racist cliches about regions of the Middle East, that the refugees:
Instead of ducking dictators and kings, they run from terrorists and warlords.
We see how, in Doupkobil’s world, colonial, imperial, and political histories vanish and how the chaos the West creates is white-washed by journalists as “civil war” or blamed on the demons like ISIS that the US practices, policies, invasions, and violence give birth to. The chaos unleashed across the region, the millions killed and displaced now roaming in desperation, become victims of “religious violence,” or those of ISIS. But the West, its barbarism, and policies and practices are never center stage. American and Western innocence, a form of Western exceptionalism, is religiously preserved in such narratives and reportage projects that invest heavily in aesthetics and spectacle yet remain shallow and evasive in providing understanding and truths.
Doupkobil has to go further to sustain these obfuscations because he has to speak about causes. For this, he constructs, however, inadvertently, the specter of "dangerous Muslims" now roaming the graceful and peaceful landscapes of "innocent" Europe. The article discusses terror attacks in European capitals without once mentioning that European states have been willing and excited collaborators in America’s military adventures and occupations, torture programs, rendition schemes, and targeting of dissenters and whistleblowers. They are complicit and willing belligerents waging war across the Middle East.
European countries like Austria, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Indonesia Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Macedonia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom were “actively involved in assisting in the capture and transport of detainees; permitting the use of domestic airspace and airports for secret flights transporting detainees; providing intelligence leading to the secret detention and extraordinary rendition of individuals; and interrogating individuals who were secretly being held in the custody of other governments.” [Amrit Singh, “Globalising Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Renditions,” Open Society Justice Initiative Report, 2013].
For millions, they are the very enemy that destroyed their societies, communities, and lives. But this cannot be acknowledged. For Western journalism, the chaos and madness of the “Other over there” has nothing to do with us over “here." Violence in our peaceful and innocent capital cities has no relation to the mass death and chaos Western societies have funded, armed, and diplomatically enabled.