by EDWARD S. HERMAN
Thousands of bodies lie on the ground after the Kibelho Massacre PHOTO/George Gittoes
Propaganda shapes the flow of information in many different ways, including, obviously, the choice of the news fit to print, its placement, and the selection of authorities to make those facts credible. But equally important, and implicit in news choices, especially where there are political interests at stake and possible varying interpretations of the news, is omitting facts and ignoring sources that call the chosen (often official) perspective into question. Such Golden Silences and bypassing of inconvenient sources is incompatible with honest journalism but is standard operating procedure in mainstream journalism, with variations mainly in severity and depth of burial of the awkward facts. These latter are often not completely hidden but put so deep in an article and in such cautious or qualifying language as to be effectively buried or suppressed.
This is dramatically illustrated when we compare the treatment of “worthy” and “unworthy” victims, categories that Noam Chomsky and I stressed in Manufacturing Consent. (Chapter 2 is entitled “Worthy and Unworthy Victims.”) Worthy victims are victims of enemy and target states, whereas unworthy victims are killed by us or one of our allies or clients. We gave details on the huge media attention to the murder of a Polish priest in Communist Poland in 1984, a single worthy victim who, as we showed, got more U.S. media attention than 100 religious victims of U.S. client states in Latin America (1965- 1985), taken together. The latter were treated as unworthy by virtue of the client status of the killers, although 8 of the 100 were actually U.S. citizens. Rwanda has provided a stream of cases of worthy and unworthy victimhood. Paul Kagame and his Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) were (and remain) U.S. clients serving U.S. power-projection aims in the Great Lakes region of Africa. He has therefore had a free hand to kill, which he has done so lavishly in both Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), that his victim toll runs into the millions (see Herman and Peterson, Enduring Lies: The Rwanda Genocide in the Propaganda System, 20 Years Later, Real News Books, 2014, chapters 4 and 9). His killings of this vast number of unworthy victims have been given the Golden Silence treatment, and he has been portrayed in the United States, Britain, and Canada as a savior against “Hutu Power” violence, a genuine miracle of successful upside-down propaganda.
In September 1994, after Kagame had won his war of conquest in Rwanda, a State Department memo indicated that Kagame’s forces were killing Hutu civilians at the rate of some 10,000 per month. This memo had no effect on Kagame-supportive U.S. policy and was never picked up by the mainstream media. Imagine what would have happened if such a memo had described the behavior of the Iranian, North Korean, Russian, or Venezuelan governments. Another Golden Silence on Rwanda was displayed recently, with the 20th anniversary of the massacre at Kibelho, a Hutu refugee camp in south Rwanda. This took place mainly between April 19 and 23, 1995, but continued somewhat later as refugees fled the camp. This was long after the Rwanda Patriotic Front had conquered Rwanda, but with many displaced Hutu still housed in refugee camps—perhaps as many as 100,000 in Kibelho. The Kagame government decided to close this and other refugee camps and force the refugees to return to their home towns. This was accompanied by a slaughter, by gunfire, grenades, mortars, and artillery, watched in horror by a contingent of 32 UN-assigned Australian medics and soldiers. Australian Terry Pickard wrote in his memoir Combat Medic: “We could only hope the RPA [Rwandan Patriotic Army] would let us leave after what we had just witnessed. They had just murdered thousands of unarmed, starving, thirsty and helpless men, women, and children. Even babies had not b9uyeen spared. Some of those who had survived the lethal onslaught of 50 caliber machine guns, AK47 rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, and mortars were ruthlessly hunted down and bayoneted to death where they lay injured.”
The Australians tried to save some Hutu, but were forced by numbers and UN rules to merely observe. A photo taken by one of them shows a vast field of dead bodies and, in the aftermath, at UN instruction, some of them went out with pace-counters to count the dead bodies. They reached 4,000 and felt that they had covered less than half of the killing toll when their count was called off by RPF pressure. Several of them estimated that the full count would run to 8,000 or more (see Hugh Riminton, “Rwandan massacre still a burden for Diggers,” Herald Sun, Australia, April 20, 2015). The UN, however, eventually put out an estimate of 2,000. This lower estimate was preferred by the mainstream media. The New York Times, for example, repeated the phrase “as many as 2,000” in their modest news and editorial coverage throughout April and May 1995.
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