http://www.dailynews.lk/2013/03/22/fea01.asp

ONCE a dustman, always a dustman

Dr Kamal Wickremasinghe

The notorious propaganda video producer Callum Macrae’s bio-data includes a two year period he has worked as a dustman, the polite British description of a council worker who removes suburban garbage, before the typically crass Americanism “garbage collector” replaced this euphemism.

Despite social perceptions to the contrary, there is nothing inherently inferior about the job of garbage collection – they carry out the essential service of maintaining urban sanitation. However, Macrae’s subsequent work such as the recent video on the Sri Lankan war shows that the job could be habit-forming - Macrae has remained a dustman.

A soldier helping an elderly Tamil woman during the humanitarian operation

Currently Macrae must be smugly watching from London the political chaos his garbage has created in India, and the disgusting violence being perpetrated against Sri Lankan monks, pilgrims, and tourists by mobs in Chennai. These are the exact behavioural effects he probably strived to induce by including the two images of Prabhakaran’s son in his disgraceful video.

Macrae’s technique is well-worn

There is nothing new in the use of ‘film’ by people with ulterior motives to arouse baser instincts in target audiences subliminally, in order to activate them. The capacity of visual images to confine the perception of ultimate reality in the viewer’s mental world to those images, to the exclusion of alternative perspectives, has always provided a potent weapon for propaganda film makers.

The Nazis, for example, made highly emotional films about the suffering of the German minority in Czechoslovakia and Poland to create popular support for occupying the Sudetenland – the region of the northern Czech Republic along the Polish border inhabited by ethnic Germans - and attacking Poland - Fritz Hippler, Joseph Goebbels’ under study in the Propaganda Ministry of the Third Reich, produced Derewige Jude, (The Wandering Jew), one of the most powerful propaganda films of the 1940s that depicted Jews as avaricious barbarians putting on a front for civilised European society.

Callum Macrae

Frederick Remington

William Randolph Hearst

Callum Macrae, like all conspirators before him, has been successful in delivering his subliminal message to the particularly unsophisticated South Indian audiences that the “Sinhalese are child killers”, through the use of those two images of Prabhakaran’s son.

The fact that the two photographs do not tell a story has been irrelevant to the irrational minds of Tamil Nadu. Macrae’s use of the two images of Prabhakaran’s son, one alive and the other dead, in the context of the war, together with images of Sri Lankan soldiers was effective in creating the perception in the already biased minds of Chennai mobs.

They obviously fail to see the entirely speculative nature of Macrae’s story based on the two photographs which lack continuity and a ‘smoking gun’ by way of a soldier anywhere near the boy or his body. They act upon the firm belief that the two images are proof that it was an army killing and they have become oblivious to the numerous other ‘possibilities’ that could explain the boy’s death.

Macrae engages in classic “yellow journalism”

Macrae’s style of unethical, biased reporting designed to inspire specific opinions in the minds of an audience by ‘manufacturing’ stories falls in to the category of “yellow journalism”, a trend that originated in New York during the late 19th century newspaper circulation wars between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal.

One of the most infamous examples of yellow journalism emanates from a communication between the newspaper owner William Randolph Hearst and his illustrator cum correspondent Frederick Remington whom he sent to Cuba in 1897 to report on the second Cuban rebellion against the Spanish rule. Remington, having noticed upon arrival in Cuba that there was no evidence of “massive battles” as had been reported previously in his paper, cabled to Hearst - “Everything is quiet. There is no trouble. I wish to return.” Supposedly, Hearst quickly wired back - “Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”

An objective look at Macrae’s body of work shows that he is prone to biased and unbelievably exaggerated reporting. As to the sources of the materials he uses, he does not seem to even ‘pretend’ to look at ‘both sides” of a story. These traits are clearly indicative of a political agenda of his own or his pay masters’.

Callum Macrae who grew up in Nigeria and Scotland has a life story that can be described as ‘colourful’ - he has studied painting for five years, been a dustman for two years, run a pirate radio station for six months and was a teacher for seven years.

He has then become a full-time writer working for a variety of newspapers and magazines. In 1992 he has entered the television world, Channel 4 to be specific.

In 1993 he has co-founded his own production company, directing, reporting, filming and executive-producing for the BBC, ITV, the American PBS and other TV channels. Macrae confesses that closely argued polemics is one of the genres he has been working in.

Macrae’s film on the Sri Lankan war is funded by the Pulitzer Centre

Though the above anecdote of yellow journalism relates to Hearst, his competitor Joseph Pulitzer is considered the man who invented the practice, and is widely regarded as, by far, the worse offender. It is not surprising then to find that Macrae’s film on Sri Lanka has been financed by the Pulitzer Centre on Crisis Reporting (PCCR), a “charity” that claims “deep ties” to the Pulitzer family, receiving primary core support from Emily Rauh Pulitzer, the Emily Rauh Pulitzer Foundation, David Moore, and the David and Katherine Moore Family Foundation.

The PCCR describes itself as a “non-profit journalism organisation dedicated to supporting the independent international journalism that US media organisations are increasingly less able to undertake.”

They also claim to focus on under-reported topics, creating platforms that reach broad and diverse audiences. The PCCR is a tax-exempt organisation under the Internal Revenue Code of the US., and has commissioned 85 projects in 2012, a 50 percent increase from 2011.

The list of donors to PCCR, especially on specific projects, includes the ‘usually suspect’ neocons and foundations who finance the global neocon project - the Rockfellers, Carnegie Corporation of New York(on a Fragile States project!), Humanity United Population Services International (PSI) and International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), The Stanley Foundation(on Fragile States and Rising Powers reporting projects!) are all there.

No Fire Zone – a caricature of poetic license

Macrae’s latest work of fiction with a woman named Zoe Sale, No Fire Zone, claims to be a feature length film about the final months of the Sri Lankan army defeat of the LTTE terrorists.

The producers make the sensational claim that it is a story of the worst war crimes and crimes against humanity of recent times “told by the people who lived through it”.

But to a critical viewer, the film does nothing more than exposing the unsound and unethical methods adopted by Macrae to sensationalise allegations based on ‘hearsay’ and manufactured “evidence”.

He uses footage provided by the so-called victims, who are clearly ex-LTTE combatants who have been granted asylum in Western countries, supplemented by testimonies from Peter Mackay and Benjamin Dix, neocons who operated under UN cover and were forced to leave by the UN. Based on such evidence Macrae brandishes around the “estimated” 40,000 to 70,000 civilian deaths, attributed “mostly” to shelling by Sri Lankan “government”.

Such lies merely reflect the neocon unhappiness about the Sri Lankan government eliminating the LTTE, without leaving them much hope for attempts to revive them for another day. They express their anger through the financing of propaganda manufactured by “artists” like Macrae.

The No Fire Zone tale starts in September 2008 in Kilinochchi, which they describe as the de facto capital of the Tamil “homelands” of northern Sri Lanka.

Images of LTTE atrocities against Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim civilians over the previous 25 years do not get a guernsey in the film because that was not going to help Macrae’s cause.

Obviously the starting point of the film, the beginning of the retreat of their ‘tool’, the LTTE, was chosen to enable the pursuing Sri Lankan army as the “aggressor”.

The story of Vany, portrayed as a young British Tamil medical technician who was trapped along with hundreds of thousands of others desperately fleeing the government “onslaught” while visiting relatives in Sri Lanka, including the sensational lie that she had to perform major surgery without general anaesthetic is an outright lie because it was revealed at the time that she and others with foreign para-medical training arrived in Sri Lanka at the time to assist heavy LTTE casualties.

Macrae’s lies will be inconsequential

Macrae’s video together with the Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group reports was part of the NGO thrust they launched at the UNHRC meeting. Such propaganda would have made the NGO parasites happy. But these lies add nothing to the broader picture of the final stages of the Sri Lankan war.

The Sri Lankan government or the army does not have to deny that there could have been civilian deaths, caught on the cross-fire, and those held as human shields by the LTTE leadership. Such regrettable deaths do not constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity because there was no systematic programme of action to kill civilians. That is fundamental humanitarian law to the extent some such thing exists.

Macrae’s fraud does not change this reality.

Macrae claims “Without truth there can be no justice in Sri Lanka. And without justice there can be no peace.” He should learn that manufacturing lies to achieve such self-proclaimed ideals is a crime against civilisation. Garbage by any other name stinks as foul.