Pigasus, the Press and Public Opinion
On my way home from work this evening, I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, No Such Thing As A Fish. It’s a trivia program hosted by four brilliant researchers where they spend each episode sharing fascinating facts and trivia about the world we live in, on just about any topic. Today, I learned about Pigasus the Immortal, a 60+kg pig that became the symbol of a protest movement led by the Youth International Party, an American countercultural revolutionaries, particularly used in protest of the US's role in the Vietnam War.
One of the hosts, Anna Ptaszynski, shared some background on the Youth International Party, also commonly known as the Yippies. She mentioned in passing that they were a group of 'activist dissenters who sort of didn't like the war in Vietnam, as no one did, and they made a big fuss about it'. By virtue of my great parasocial relationship with Anna, I’m quite positive that it was just an offhand remark, but this statement really gave me pause. It's now widely accepted that the Vietnam War was a huge failure for the US. "Historians argue about whether a given battle was a success or a failure, but, over-all, the military mission was catastrophic on many levels", says Louis Menand for the New Yorker (2018)
Despite all of this, there was support for the involvement of the US in the Vietnam War. Maybe not much support from the US' gen-pop, but certainly from its halls of power. And the media played an unprecedented role in allowing it unfold the way it did. "Many experts who have studied the role of the media have concluded that prior to 1968, most reporting was actually supportive of the US effort in Vietnam. The February 1968 assessment by Walter Cronkite, the anchor of the CBS Evening News (known as "the most trusted man in America"), that the conflict was "mired in stalemate" was seen by many as the signal of sea change in reporting about Vietnam, and it is said to have inspired President Lyndon B. Johnson to state, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America."" - Source: Britannica
It's impossible to overlook the parallels between the genocide that devastated the Vietnamese people, and the genocide that is now devastating the Palestinian people. They are not identical by any means. The Vietnam War was likely the first war that was comprehensively reported and broadcasted on television. Since October 7, 2023, what has been dubbed 'The Israel-Hamas War' but is in fact a genocide, is the first livestreamed genocide witnessed primarily on social media. Just like with Vietnam, the evolution of media today has made it impossible to control the flow of information. The obvious discord between the facts as shared in as raw a format as can be by Palestinian voices like those of Bisan Owda, Wael Dahdouh and Motaz Azaiza and every Palestinian in Gaza and the West Bank with access to a smartphone and an e-sim, and the polished PR rhetoric of the US Department of State spokesman Matthew Miller has never been more jarring.
It has been a year of Zionist hasbara-spouting talking heads demanding the world disbelieve the evidence presented before our very own eyes. A year of conflating anti-Zionism with anti-semitism. A year of gaping double standards where the lives of murdered Palestinians and now Lebanese innocents are seen as a tragic necessity, compared with the notion that only the lives of Israeli citizens are allowed to be publicly mourned. A year of watching Israeli hostages get struck or shot by their own armies, and Palestinians still getting the blame for it. A year of people quite literally setting themselves on fire to tell the world that everything must stop, that what is happening in Palestine cannot possibly continue. A year of watching Israelis on Tiktok and Instagram cruelly mock Palestinian blood being shed. A year of collective punishment. A year of starvation. A year of witnessing. A year of watching the notions of international law, public order, and diplomacy disappear before our very eyes. A year of watching international media outlets like CNN and the BBC spread actual direct Zionist lies to give cover to Israeli war crimes.
Are we going to look back in 40 years time and say that 'no one supported this'? Is there going to be a podcast or program sharing trivia about the 2020s, which will recount this dark year as the era of the genocide that 'everyone was against'? It should be extremely alarming for all of us that the realities we live in today, the atrocities we are being forced to face, might one day so easily be glossed over.
After watching this report (shared below) by Al Jazeera on how deeply and unforgivably western media failed Gaza (and all of Palestine), there are a few things that gives me some form of comfort: that all the millions of even billions of dollars and the thousands of collective hours spent trying to convince the world that Palestinians should pay the price for the crimes of Europeans have utterly failed when faced with the truth of Palestinian existence. And that the hubris of Israeli occupation forces' in filming their own crimes for all to see, and the impunity of both the Israeli entity and its spokespeople in the West, will be held accountable the very institutions that were supposedly built to ensure one thing: Never again.