Peter Espeut
Peter Espeut
A COLLEAGUE and I are in Europe fund-raising for aspects of the Jamaican environment. We passed through Miami (intransit), and never have I been so harassed at any international airport in my life! I was sent into a little room where I was interrogated by an official who, it must be said, afterwards openly wondered why I had been sent to her. The immigration officer had stared into his computer for a long time. I wonder if my recent column on U.S. national paranoia is bouncing back on me?
In contrast to our approach to and departure from the U.S. capital last month (when we were warned to keep our seats for 30 minutes or the flight would be diverted), we had a comfortable approach to and touchdown at London's Heathrow Airport, and an uneventful passage through immigration and customs. No paranoia here! The same was true for our passage through Charles de Gaulle International Airport to Paris, from where I write. No paranoia here either! I have not been asked to take off my shoes.
REFRESHINGLY CRITICAL
The media in the UK even the government-owned media are refreshingly critical of Britain's participation in the Iraq War, and of the government in general; they do, it seems to me, what media are supposed to do: examine everything objectively and critically. The uncritical cheerleading of the U.S. media, frankly, is cloying. They, I suppose, have taken their President seriously when, as he launched his 'War on Terror', he warned that "Those who are not with us, are against us." I did not hear anyone in the U.S. media challenge that false and illogical dichotomy, or the inherently contradictory doctrine of the 'pre-emptive strike in self-defence'. Isn't it ironic that in a country where the mass media are massive and privately-owned, they almost operate as official organs of the state? Is this a really free press?
LAND OF THE FREE
But then maybe I am over-analysing. We are familiar with the level of objective reporting we get during the Olympics from the U.S. networks. Nationalism of a sort, it seems, is justification enough for American journalists to throw even the pretence of objectivity out the window. I grew up listening to a series of foreign cricket commentators describe their teams taking a beating from the West Indies; now that our fortunes have fallen, I listen to them describe their prowess. No jingoism there. Is it a difference in journalistic style, or a difference in national (and international) world-view?
The Americans sing that they are the 'Land of the free and the home of the brave'. Is the U.S. really as free a society as they would have us believe? And as brave? The freedom in to the Old World class-based societies is able tolerate a level of dissent which, in the Land of the Free, might lead to the accusation of being 'un-American', and would certainly provoke close FBI surveillance.
In past decades I travelled to the UK in the dangerous days of the IRA bombings; and to France just after the height of the campaign of the ETA terrorists. I was in Barbican by the old city of London about a week before a massive IRA bomb blast wreaked havoc in the area. Some years ago the Chief of Police of a major city in the south of France near the Spanish Border, personally gave me a tour of their Situation Room where they kept track of ETA operatives and Algerian terrorists.
RESPONSE TO TERRORISM
The response to terrorism of these Old World countries mature nations, used to the blood of war on their soil has not been to create national fortresses and enclaves. That is real bravery! I guess we can put down recent efforts of the U.S. at homeland security to 'youthful exuberance'.
I hold no brief for the Old World, whose civilisation was built with raw materials from the New, and the blood of Africa. Last week, as I went boating up the Severn with friends, up the Avon to Bristol, in the wake (in my mind) of slave ships travelling the last part of the last leg of the famous triangular trade, I was conscious of how the rising of some has led to the falling of others. There is something of Jamaica in those docks, in those buildings, and in the sweets and chocolates which now form an essential part of European culture.
But the Old World can still teach the New a thing or two about freedom.
Peter Espeut is a sociologist and is executive director of an environment and development NGO.
