Case Study: Continental Drift Part 2
Read the 1st Part Here: Case Study: Continental Drift Part 1
Amanda Sakuma, another correspondent featured on this MSNBC online feature, repeats the discourses of European politicians and pundits, editorials, and commentators. She merely regurgitates the parrots of the very right-wing rhetoric and a-historical narratives that are used to fuel hatred and violence against migrants. In her contribution, which focuses on the situation in Libya, she writes:
To tell the story of Libya's escalating migration crisis, one must weave together the threads of instability left behind by a toppled dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, and the power vacuum filled by rivaling factions vying to take his place. The chaos allowed smuggling networks to thrive, suddenly opening up a lucrative market designed to profit off trading humans like other goods and commodities.
But who “toppled” Gaddafi? And how did his murder at the hands of NATO/American-supported militia become rewritten as a toppling in the first place? His assassination–one that led Hilary Clinton, then the Secretary of State in the Obama Administration, to ghoulishly boast that "We came. We saw. He Died"–is written away as a "fall from power and subsequent death in 2011," as if it all happened by natural causes.
Sakuma speaks of the chaos created in Libya after the violent removal of Gaddafi, recognizing the violence and insufferable chaos that enveloped the country in the aftermath. But she never tells us why and how this happened and erases our fingerprints over this disaster. She overtly lies and argues that:
Conditions inside Libya have deteriorated since the citizen uprising (emphasis mine) against Gaddafi and the government's collapse in 2014. Armed conflict between two rival factions has engulfed the country as they fight for legitimacy. The chaos has caused a massive displacement of hundreds of thousands of Libyans who are left now without work or a place to call home.
Gaddafi wasn’t toppled as a result of a “citizen uprising.” Sakuma knows this well. Even mainstream press, by 2015, when she penned this piece, had gotten over its previously propagandistic framing of the attack on Libya as a "citizen uprising." By 2015, no one would have had the audacity to make this false claim. But Sakuma and the editors at MSNBC, in collaboration with indifferent or unconcerned Magnum photographers, did make this claim.
It was the language of state propaganda, now repeated unthinkingly by a writer at a major news outlet. The fall of Gaddafi came as a result of an American-supported NATO assault on a sovereign nation, one that “violates international law, shows callous disregard for the innocent, and prosecutes a war approved by no international body, declared by no national parliament and sanctioned by no moral code." [Benjamin Barber, “Libya: This is Nato's Dirty War,” The Guardian, May 2, 2011]. The illegality of this attack, one that is repeatedly misrepresented as a “citizen uprising,” was such that even the New York Times, a publication that generally acts as a cheerleader for American wars, was forced to question President Obama’s decision to launch it. [Bruce Ackerman, “Legal Acrobatics, Illegal War,” New York Times, June 20, 2011].
The entire piece is a rewriting of Western imperial acts. It posits an innocent, calm, and tranquil Europe facing a wave of unwanted “others” streaming onto her shores, escaping chaos and violence that has little or nothing to do with Europe or America. The Other is the “threat,” forcing the West to ask tough questions, re-examine its ideas of self and society, and find ways to accept and accommodate those who “do not belong.”
Later in the same piece, Sakuma turns her attention to the Mexican and Central American migrant crisis, where caravans of migrants have been making their way across Mexico from countries like Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Sakuma is determined to pursue that classic strategy of Western journalism, speaking about the world through a lens that reifies political national boundaries as representative of genuine cultural separation and views acts of politics, economics, and society within these cartographic entities as isolated and independent of larger transnational forces such as international financial flows, multi-national corporate interests, imperial interventions, and cross-border cultural and personal histories.
She avoids bringing into her narrative the role the United States, the region's hegemonic political and economic power, has played in fomenting this crisis. As Rebecca Gordon points out:
There is indeed a real crisis at the US-Mexico border. Hundreds of thousands of people…are arriving there seeking refuge from dangers that were, to a significant degree, created by and are now being intensified by the United States. [Rebecca Gordon, “The Current Migrant Crisis Was Created by US Foreign Policy, Not Trump." The Nation, August 16, 2019]
[Aside: Other articles that point this out include Julian Border, “Fleeing a Hell the US Helped Create: Why Central Americans Journey North,” The Guardian, December 19, 2018; Mile Culpepper, “The Debt We Owe Central America,” Jacobin, November 2018, Stephen Kinzer, “Who’s responsible for the border crisis? The United States,” The Boston Globe, June 20, 2019.]
But Sakuma’s perspectives remain married to the official American line, rarely raising doubts about its public rhetoric and never looking past the neatly arranged national borders. “Congress agreed to invest $750 million,” she tells us, “to help prop up governments in the northern triangle. Another $40 million is dedicated to the international humanitarian groups that identify, vet, and process refugee candidates. Multiple US agencies assist in dismantling criminal "coyote" networks of human smugglers.”
She places the problems elsewhere, erases US trade practices and policies as a possible cause, and idealizes the USA's actions as only humanitarian. But, the story of refugees arriving at the shores of Europe cannot be written simplistically, not if we are to account for real lives and real humans. As Rodney Benson put it when speaking about the role of economic policies like NAFTA and European trading agreements with African nations:
The complexity of the international causes of migration cannot be easily expressed as a melodrama. And mentioning them is ideologically sensitive: it suggests there could be something wrong about an economic system that most politicians—and journalists—take for granted. From the early 1970s to the mid-2000s—a time of neoliberal globalization and bloody conflicts in Central America manipulated by the US—immigration stories that mentioned international causes fell from 30% to 12% in leading US papers…Yet, too often, both French and US media fail to give the full picture on immigration. Their focus on emotion and on individual stories diverts attention from the fundamental political issues and leaves the way open for the simplistic “solutions” advocated by the far right. [Rodney Benson, “The Story Behind The Stories,” Le Monde Diplomatique, May 2015].
Time and again, we see photojournalists “speaking out” on behalf of the rights of illegal immigrants crossing into the USA from Mexico, but rarely do we find one who will connect the dots that read NAFTA, the devastation of the rural economies of Mexico, the creation of a vast labor pool or underpaid and surplus labor that this agreement created and that now serves the sweatshops there. We talk about “climate refugees” in Bangladesh but never make the connection between international fishery trade agreements, intentional water salinization, and the mass displacement of farmers to open up lands for shrimp farms. [Donatien Garnier, “Bangladesh’s Climate Refugees,” Le Monde Diplomatique, May 2007].
Pieces such as this create fixed ideas of belonging and un-belonging and do it by distorting histories of social, political, and economic entanglement and, of course, bloody histories of wars, invasions, and occupations. But these stories must be told, yet Western journalists and photojournalists continue to produce simplistic, comic book-like narratives. [Daniel Trilling, “How the Media Contributed to the Migrant Crisis,” The Guardian, August 1, 2019].
We may speak out against child labor but will not connect the economic policies of a state and their close relationship to structural adjustment programs (SAP) supported by the IMF and the World Bank that cut social welfare spending and force families to send their children to sweatshops. We may speak out against the environmental degradation of Tunisian farmlands but say nothing about the massive hotel developments that serve the holiday needs of millions of European tourists and that for swimming pools, entire rivers are re-directed, and whole villages are cleared.
Where do our stories go, and why do our lives get so quickly subsumed into simple, neat little narratives, denied the complexity, the depth, the plurality, the psychological and emotional multiplicity they possess?