The Whole World Isn’t Watching Anymore

screen shot from a recent Guardian video of anti-war protesters outside the DNC convention in Chicago this week

More than half a century go, I was one of millions of protesters and demonstrators against the ghastly and criminal war in Vietnam, a war propagated by racist ideological fanatics with the broad support of the US governments of both parties, the media, and, for a time, befuddled US citizens. A war in which unimaginable atrocities were committed by all sides. Some of those atrocities were captured by media cameras, or on film smuggled out of Vietnam by opponents of the war. As many as three million Vietnamese died, most of them civilians, women and children. Hundreds of thousands in neighbouring countries were also killed. Much of the land was bombed, ruined, or made unliveable by toxic chemical weapons.

Now we’re witnessing another set of anti-war protests, in Chicago, at another DNC nominating convention. And again, the media have come out in favour of the war, and hostile to the protesters.

In the 1968 protests, the mainstream media, including the NYT, painted the protests as violent acts of civil disobedience and supported the vicious crackdown by city and state police and military forces. The senior editor of the NYT during the protests, Abe Rosenthal, was, according to his then-assistant, “firmly against what he saw as shapeless anarchy swirling up from the streets.” This anti-protest climate culminated two years later in the run-amok shooting by the National Guard of student protesters at Kent State University. Four of the students died. The case against the murdering National Guards was thrown out “for lack of evidence”.

What’s interesting is that most of the criticism of the media coverage of the war was not about how slow they were to come around to opposing the war per se, but that the press coverage tended to convey the impression that the American occupying forces were losing to a much smaller and weaker Vietnamese ‘enemy’. The fear of conservatives seemed to be that Americans would only continue to support the war as long as they were winning. The morality of the war was not an issue to either the government or the critics of the media’s coverage.

In the 1960s, the media were still trying to figure out the novelty of how to cover a ‘televised’ war. Like today, pictures then carried far more weight than words, and the government, allowing the media to ’embed’ with US troops, didn’t realize that photos of young US troops engaging, getting injured, and killed in guerrilla war, would galvanize opposition to the war far more than the accompanying coverage of American ‘successes’ in the media would sustain support for it. It was the photos, I would argue, not the words that accompanied them, that turned the public against the war. The bewildered press were dragged along behind them.

The press had been and continued to be pro-war even as the startling pictures showing the horror of war appeared on their front pages. The then-prominent Time-Life group of companies was especially hawkish. But between 1966 and early 1971 public support for the war dropped from over 50% to 28%. The press were out of step with their readers.

At least they were until 1967 when the senior editor of the Time-Life group wrote an editorial calling the war “un-winnable”. Not immoral. Not criminal. Un-winnable.

Much of the decline in popular support for the war came after Nixon widened the war to begin massive bombing raids in Cambodia in April 1970. Even then, the main issue in the press was not whether the war was morally justified, but whether it was “winnable”. (Sound familiar? It was the prequel for Afghanistan.)

The collapse of support for the war came before Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in June 1971, showing the American war crimes in Vietnam and the orchestrated lies about its progress that went all the way up to the Presidential offices, and over several Republican and Democratic administrations.

Governments have never forgiven the NYT and the other media that (after an agonizing process during which some media decided to keep them secret) decided to publish the Pentagon Papers. The media have been very ambivalent about publishing ‘leaked’ information in the Snowden/Assange era, and media such as the Guardian have become openly hostile to ‘illegal’ leakers and other whistle-blowers. The government and intelligence community, of course, show no such ambivalence. The cost of being a whistle-blower has always been high, and can often include a death sentence.

The chant at the DNC convention in Chicago in 1968, as berserk cops and state military forces charged into crowds of protesters cracking every head they could reach, was “The whole world is watching.” The shocking photos of violence and death in Vietnam were echoed in photos and video of the police violence in the streets of Chicago.

But the coverage of the protests produced an unexpected result: Even as most Americans were quickly turning against the Vietnam War, a similar majority blamed the protesters and demonstrators for most of the violence in the police riots in Chicago. Investigations that overwhelmingly showed the opposite to be true could not change the public’s minds.

The spin doctors were taking note. They realized that the best way for administrations, cops, military, and the mainstream media to keep the public pro-war and pro-intervention was to turn the cameras around and focus on the protesters and their violence, instead of the violence on the war front. If need be, they could even infiltrate protest groups, yell obscenities, hate speech and threats, and commit visually spectacular (for the well-prepped media to capture) acts of arson and vandalism. “Outside agitators” could also be invented and blamed, to tap into the well-stoked fear of the xenophobic American public.

So what’s changed since 1968? Are we seeing, or will we see, a similar souring of citizen support for the genocide in Palestine (and the proxy war in Ukraine) that we saw towards the war in Vietnam (and later, for the war in Afghanistan)?

A number of things have changed, which might change the trajectory this time:

1. The American war machine has learned that citizens don’t want American lives on the line. Endless, extravagantly expensive, socially traumatizing, arbitrary (killing and maiming mostly civilians, women and children), ecologically ruinous bombing campaigns are preferred over any activity that directly involves American casualties. It’s harder to support a war when everyone you know has lost a family member or friend in it.
2. Cameras are now kept from filming the carnage of American acts of slaughter. Even if the US are ‘merely’ the suppliers of billions of dollars of bombs and other war munitions, Americans are no longer able to see the blood, bodies, diseases, starvation, or the broken survivors caused by their government’s wars, genocides, coups, invasions, embargoes, ‘intelligence’ operations and other acts of oppression and destruction, on their TV screens. Unlike 50 years ago, they now have to actively go and look for it, and most citizens, quite understandably, don’t want to.
3. The US government no longer has a compulsory military draft (though there is some evidence it may restore it for the planned war against China). The automation and outsourcing of war to foreign proxies has enabled this. AI and drones are also now employed to further enable wars to be conducted without troops on the ground, or even in the air.
4. The average age of the population of all western nations is much older than was the case 50 years ago. The age cohort most supportive of the ongoing genocide in Palestine is, ironically, the same cohort who, when they were young, were the most vocal protesters. Most young Americans continue to oppose the genocide (though they remain staunch supporters of the war in Ukraine, due I would argue to their ignorance of the history leading up to it, and the impact of the anti-Russian propaganda, including staged photos, which is all the news of the current war they are able to see in the media).
5. Trust in the integrity of the media is even lower now than it was during the Vietnam War. This time, I would guess, the media may well turn against the genocide (as they finally get to see what’s happening first hand instead of through the filter of government-approved intelligence agencies) ahead of the citizenry, who, due to their distrust of everything they read, may well just entrench their current beliefs. I hope I’m wrong on this.
6. The media know that their access to information, especially of the type that will ‘sell’ their products, now depends on having a good ‘relationship’ with government and intelligence agencies. It is now so dangerous to be a leaker or whistle-blower of government misconduct that it is increasingly unlikely that we’ll ever learn the truth about the Palestine genocide or the Ukraine war the way we did, all too late, about Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The media are hence now forced to be obedient scribes for governments and ‘intelligence sources’, or they’ll be cut off even from that news. And it’s not like any of them actually do any investigative reporting of their own anymore.

The net effect of these changes, I think, will be that government, military and intelligence subterfuge will continue to become more and more opaque, and hence that the public, kept in the dark and suspicious of everything they hear from governments and media anyway, will be more reluctant to take any stand on any war or atrocity, and will hence be more complacent, and more easily propagandized.

In short, wars are likely to get longer and bloodier, and citizens are likely to be less and less aware of what’s happening in them, to the point that they’re just so overwhelmed and bewildered that they turn it all off, and stop watching or reading the news at all. The military, of course, would like nothing better.

There is one caveat to that dismal prognosis, though, I think. It was when Nixon widened the Vietnam War to Cambodia and then Laos that many Americans turned against it. The war was then not only immoral, it was also clearly un-winnable. I see some echoes in Israel’s moves to widen its genocidal war in Palestine to encompass Lebanon, Syria, and of course Iran. This can’t be done without US and NATO support, at a staggering cost and risk. We are about to see how effective Israel is at provoking such a war, especially with its recent assassination bombings in Lebanon and Iran. And then we will see how gullible the US and NATO administrations are to being sucked into a wider war, as happened 50 years ago in Cambodia and Laos.

And then we’ll see whether the citizens of the countries that could enable such a wider war, one that could well blow up in all our faces, will finally say no to more war. That will only happen if they’re paying attention, and if they believe they have any say in it.

Fifty years ago, to some extent, the whole world was watching, and turning away from the obscene and useless wars of that time. If those in the Global South are watching now, I suspect it’s just because they’re wondering when it will be their turn to be bombed, coup’ed, invaded, sanctioned, or destroyed. I’m not sure many citizens in the US and NATO countries are watching at all.

We believed, fifty years ago, that outrage and protest could end a war.

I don’t think many believe that now.