Tarek Atia rails against the moral ambiguities in today's violence-saturated media There is a decisive moment in the epic film Gandhi starring Ben Kingsley when the populist Indian leader takes his followers on a virtual suicide mission of non-violent protest against their being barred from a salt mine. One by one, the peaceful protesters are struck down by Indian policemen working at their British overlords' request. One by one, they mechanically take their blows and fall. In the distance, the line of willing sacrificial patriots seems to stretch forever. As the brutal clubbing continues, the focus shifts to an American journalist -- played by Martin Sheen -- scribbling furious notes, and then excitedly dictating the story over a crackly long-distance phone line to his editors back home. Boldly declaring that he is on the scene as the British occupation of India comes to an end, he says, "Whatever moral ascendance the West held, was lost today." That kind of coverage, by Vince Foster of the New York Times and other US reporters, certainly played a major part in Gandhi's success -- by awakening the Western (US and UK) public to the basic injustices of colonialism. But if Gandhi's non-violent struggle made sense to the media back then, it would only appear odd, irrelevant and even somewhat tedious today. How would Foster and the others have covered suicide bombings, the battle for Falluja, and torture at Abu Ghraib? We will never know, because today's media mostly thrives on the speed and spectacle of daily violence, more than on any studied understanding of the complex geopolitical issues behind the drama. As the announcers pompously spout out death tolls as if they were daily calorie intakes or the weather report, the endless images of war and violence, resistance and counter-violence, begin to hint that their true purpose is not to offer us a moral compass in a complex and painful world, but rather to confirm the political and economic superiority of the culture that wields the camera. In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan made clear that "all wars have been fought by the latest technology available in any culture." In today's war, saturated with cutting-edge devices like the half-tonne bombs that the coalition forces dropped on Baghdad, the real super-advanced precision weaponry are not arms which despite their much-vaunted accuracy remain tragically imprecise, but the images that hit their target every single time. Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post described the Abu Ghraib abuse images in just that way. "What made one aspect of the Abu Ghraib horrors even more incendiary," he wrote, were "the pictures of American women soldiers mocking, humiliating and dominating naked and abused Arab men. One could not have designed a more symbolic representation of the Islamist warning about where Western freedom ultimately leads than Thursday's Washington Post photo of a uniformed American woman holding a naked Arab man on a leash." That same precision-guided accuracy was also in play the night that Al-Jazeera decided to show photos of US POWs. Predictably, all hell broke loose. It was another hole in one. That the media -- on all sides -- would continue to flog such superficial, stereotypical images, waging a war over exclusives rather than seeking out a nuanced and accurate understanding of the helplessness of the subjects themselves, reveals a lot about how far from its original path -- reporting the truth and informing the public -- this mind-melding behemoth has strayed. The speed of today's media necessitates that a whole slew of complex historical, geopolitical and fundamentally important information is always left out of the mix, leaving the recipients (us) grappling with effervescent half-truths, often skewed towards hate. For the media is at its most violent when it makes no sense. When it hurls its audience into a story it does not have time to tell properly, merely providing lurid snippets -- US raid kills 50, suicide bombings kill 34, beheadings and kidnappings everywhere. In that atmosphere, can there ever again be a media moment that juxtaposes the violent with the non-violent, to the benefit of the latter, as the reports of Gandhi's movement did? Globally adored actor Tom Hanks reflected the feelings of many when he described the current media-generated dynamic "not only in the United States, but around the world... [as] an extremely tough time... a very confusing time. We're up against a type of philosophy that we don't quite understand. This is not as it was in WWII. I think then we had a pretty good idea of twin evil empires that were bent on world domination. We are in a sort of grey area now, that defies logic and common sense more often than not." But the question remains, if we know that we are being assaulted by one of the most violent tools man has ever created, why do we continue to watch? Why would ordinary people who want to live peaceful, comfortable and secure lives, who want their kids to grow up in places devoid of violence, bigotry and hate, continue to cheerfully digest such a horrible stream of reality? Instead of allowing ourselves the luxury of free thought, we choose to allow our brains to be occupied by the violent tendencies of others. By constantly pushing the envelope when it comes to the gap between what we are seeing, and what we are able to comprehend, the media's focus on the fantastic violence being committed by various international state and non-state actors is an addiction that is by its very nature not only brutal, but inherently psychotic -- for we ourselves choose to expose ourselves to it every single day. Perhaps our willingness to stand in line to be metaphorically clubbed on the head by the continuously violent media machine is today's version of Gandhi's self-sacrificial, revolutionary, non-violent protest. But if so, then the twist is that we are not only the poor colonised Indians trying to get into the salt mine that is rightfully ours. We are also the police, doing the imperial masters' bidding, and beating up the protesters. We are fully complicit in this assault on our own senses and sensibilities. For while Gandhi was fighting the empire where the sun never sets, we are fighting a far more formidable foe -- our very own brains. Maybe it is our relationship with the media that might just be the perfect storybook juxtaposition of the powerful and the powerless; although even then, there is something missing from this picture -- that gung-ho, scrappy reporter willing to go the distance to uncover the truth. After all, this report would be all about people who feel powerless to stop an onslaught on their resources, but know that doing so may be the only way to avoid complete subjugation. So they hope against all hope. And they gather together, regardless of status, willing to suffer all for their cause. And as we watch the news, the reporter would finally turn to us and say, "Whatever moral ascendance the media held was lost today."
