Robert Fisk Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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As you describe your work, and you're doing it so well, it strikes me that it's time to ask you about -- the American awful way of saying it is "mission statement." But let's say as a journalist and ...
I hate "mission statement" -- awful.
Okay. But what is your goal in what you do? I think it's about critiquing power on the one hand, which you've just done, but it's almost about, from what you just said, empathy with the people who are suffering the consequences.
I tell you, I go into a hospital or a ruined building in Lebanon and I see children with their hands chopped off, and I see things that would make you puke every morning. And then I sit in Beirut and I turn on my television and I see our own dear Lord Blair: "Well, we can only absolutely have a cease-fire when we're sure that that cease fire will hold," and I know he's lying. What he means is that Bush doesn't want a cease-fire yet because he wants the Israelis to have more time to beat the Hezbolah, therefore more children are going to be shrieking in hospitals. But they don't care about that.
Their experience of war is television. There isn't a single Western cabinet minister anywhere in the Western hemisphere or the Western world that's ever experienced war now. Amazing. When I grew up we had on the prime ministers Eden, Churchill, Atlee, that had been in the First and Second World Wars. When I first worked in Northern Ireland, the first secretary of state was William Whitelaw, who'd been in the crossing of the Rhine, invasion of Germany, '44, '45. Our leaders now just take it all off Hollywood. "Bring 'em on!," wasn't that what Bush said? Where did he get this? Where was this from, which movie, you know?
It's our leaders who are that way but it's also our soldiers, because they're playing computer games before they go to war.
Yeah, but once they're in the war I can tell you that they play the computer games with a different framework of mind. I talk to American troops in Iraq. I talk to French troops in southern Lebanon, I talk to [other] soldiers, as well. But again, yes, it's seeing this suffering on this scale. Sometimes the family is standing by the bed of a dying child and they round on me, you know, who am I and what do I care? I got beaten up by a gang of Afghans in a village just after 2001, 9/11, on the border. Their families were all being killed in B-52 strikes, and they attacked me with stones and banging rocks into my face. It was very bad. I was very close to being killed. And I wrote in the paper, "If my family had been killed by a B-52 and I was an Afghan I'd probably do the same to Robert Fisk." It doesn't forgive them or excuse them but I understand it, you know?
You see this terrible suffering, these monumental crimes against humanity. Let's speak frankly. That's what we are talking about. We've all committed them, not just al Qaeda. We all committed crimes against humanity. If you don't report it people won't know. I always say in a rather arrogant way, as I think I've come to realize, that we can tell you what's happening, don't ever say no one told you, don't say you didn't know. Add to that, and this is in the book, and I know you've interviewed Amira Hass, the very fine Israeli journalist's view on what our job is or should be -- should be, it isn't necessarily -- of foreign correspondents, and our job is to monitor the centers of power, to challenge authority all the time, all the time, all the time, especially when they go to war and they're going to kill people and lie about it.
The sad thing is that we largely don't do that. You only have to watch the press conferences. "Mr. President, Mr. President!" "Yes, Bob." "Yes, Judy." "Yes, John." You know? This osmotic parasitic relationship between journalism and power, particularly in the United States, but it applies in Europe and especially Britain, is very painful to watch because the questions are like, "Can you give us some more information, General, about how many of your men were involved?," rather than, "Can you explain why three children have been brought in dead and we've seen the videotape, and your men were there?" You know? Totally the hugging close to power. You watch American television, the State Department correspondent, the White House correspondent, the Pentagon -- they're basically spokesmen, or spokespersons as you like to call it, spokeswomen. They are no more journalists than the official spokesman for the State Department or the President or the White House. This glomming across of journalism into power -- I saw it very clearly in 1990 when American troops were gathering in Saudi Arabia for the first Gulf War, to liberate Kuwait from Saddam. The funny thing was, lots and lots of journalists were turning up, especially from America, Midwest guys who'd never been abroad before, in military costume. One guy turned up from actually Denver wearing shoes with camouflaged leaves on them.
[laughs]
Camouflaged leaves -- no, seriously. I mean, if you've seen the desert, even in a picture, you'll know that there aren't an awful lot of trees there!
But the funny thing was, I'd go out in the desert and I wasn't embedded at all, I'd just drive up to American troops or British troops and they'd talk to me because they were lonely and they were tired and they were wet and they had food poisoning all the time. I'd always bring piles of newspapers to give them and packets of cigarettes, and they'd talk and they were all writing, they were trying to write poetry. One guy in an Abrams tank had worked up a huge board game about flying between planets and knowing when they could refuel their spaceship. It was, of course, about being a tank crewman in a desert not knowing if they'd get a re-supply of fuel, as I quickly realized. And these were quite literary people. A British guy was trying to write poetry, it wasn't very good but he was trying. And it suddenly dawned on me that all the soldiers wanted to be journalists and all the journalists wanted to be soldiers. There's something there which was very dangerous, getting loose.
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