The Boston attacks and how mainstream media covers the world
The minute news broke that the suspects in the Boston Marathon attacks held ethnic ties to a majority-Muslim region, you knew where the media was going. (To a place called Makhachkala, it turned out.)
Nevermind that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev left Chechnya when they were relatively young, that the two men never spent significant time there, and that American knowledge of Chechnya is so scant that the Czech Republic’s ambassador to the United States felt it prudent to clarify the two places are “very different entities.”
Even normally intellectual and more nuanced commentators such as Juan Cole were scrambling to write something—anything (note the numerous rewrites and updates prominent throughout that post)—on possible Chechen ties to the bombings in Boston. (I’m not going to bother listing examples spewed by mainstream media outlets.)
Out of the cacophony of stereotypes and ignorance have emerged a few works of sober thought.
In an op-ed for Al Jazeera English, anthropologist Sarah Kendzior delivered a scathing takedown of the media’s predictable reliance on simplified ethnic and religious narratives.
“Despite the Tsarnaevs' American upbringing, the media has presented their lives through a Chechen lens,” she wrote. “Political strife in the North Caucasus, ignored by the press for years, has become the default rationale for a domestic crime.” (Read “The wrong kind of Caucasian.”)
Then, taking obvious inspiration from that essay, came a brilliant piece of satire from “freelance intellectual combatant” Eric Garland. In a post titled “If media covered America the way we cover foreign cultures” Garland wrote:
DATELINE APRIL 21, 2013
IT HAS HAPPENED AGAIN, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:
Yet another massacre has occurred in the historically war-torn region of the Southern United States – and so soon after the religious festival of Easter.
Brian McConkey, 27, a Christian fundamentalist militiaman living in the formerly occupied territory of Alabama, gunned down three men from an opposing tribe in the village square near Mobile, the capitol, over a discussion that may have involved the rituals of the local football cult. In this region full of heavily-armed local warlords and radical Christian clerics, gun violence is part of the life of many.
Many of the militiamen here are ethnic Scots-Irish tribesmen, a famously indomitable mountain people who have killed civilized men – and each other – for centuries. It appears that the wars that started on the fields of Bannockburn and Sterling have come to America.
As the sun sets over the former Confederate States of America, one wonders – can peace ever come to this land?
It’s funny stuff, but also very worthy of reflection. Readers are encouraged to read that post in its entirety at EricGarland.com.
Comments
2 Comments
ya
Apr 25, 2013 at 8:01am
And The Straight of course is going to save us dumb uneducated backward thinking duped dummies who disagree with left wing politics & viewpoints. Yup save us from the very bad evil mainstream media, because we're stupid unlike the Straight writers who know everything.
James G
Apr 25, 2013 at 8:21am
The Czech Republic made a proactive statement for it's own safety. Let's not forget that when George W. Bush was in power that his administration strived to find ways to mistake Iraq for Afghanistan.
It has become a knee-jerk reaction but a worthy one to re-examine media handling of events related to terrorist incidents. People should not be on trial on the basis of their ethnicity nor their religion. To blame instead an American education, as Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov has done, is also a non-starter. His reply was as widely reported as any other aspect of this unfortunate story. There is still another level left to examine.
If a person in the 1930s were to claim that the Cosa Nostra held disproportiate influence over Sicilian society, they might have ended up dead. The same person, making the same claim in the 1960s would have been accused of bigotry. The same person making that claim in this century is hailed as heroic. My point is that every culture contains some self-serving myth making about what it's limitations are and persons within the culture exploiting and advancing that myth.
There are some enclaves of political thinking within some cultures that proclaim terror as a legitimate tactic for the creation of a nation-state or the expansion of their power. Here, I have to state what I see as a universal: Terrorism is never justified, no matter the goal. If we don't want to examine what brought the Basque or the Irish or the Palestinians or the Chechens to the wrong conclusion out of some liberal angst about being seen as bigoted, we cannot root out that false premise and depose within that culture those who advance it.
These two terrorists in Boston may have had nothing to do with Beslan nor with the Moscow Mafia of the 1980s but that is not the point. We need probe a little deeper.