The question influences the answer
The way Susan asks the questions, her manner and her bearing will all impact upon the response. Her questions are also a product of her assumptions; what if she asks the question in a different way?
Likewise, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Paul Dirac identified how light appears to be a particle if we ask a particle-like question, and a wave if we ask a wave-like question. (As Ludwig Wittgenstein would say, “all I know is what I have words for.”)
The indigenous versus the missionaries’ narratives (The Stolen Generations: Australia in the 1940s)
The indigenous victims of the “Stolen Generations” were, like Friday, denied a voice and their own (indigenous) stories. Their stories were smothered by the controlling white authorities who determined their fate. The missionaries had a policy forbidding the use of Aboriginal languages. (cf Cruso)
One indigenous woman, placed at the Umewarra Mission in South Australia described how the authorities banned their language which literally and symbolically denied the aborigines a voice. “In the home they used to tell us not to talk that language, that it’s devil’s language. And they’d wash our mouths with soap. We sorta had to sit down with Bible language all the time. So it sorta wiped out all our language that we knew.”
OR
One indigenous woman who was removed from her family in the Kimberley region in Western Australia in 1940 and placed in the Cherboug reserve said: “Aboriginal people weren’t allowed to speak their language while white people were around. They had to go out into the bush or talk their lingoes on their own. .. We could have a corroboree if the Protector issued a permit. It was completely up to him. I never had a chance to learn about my traditional and customary way of life when I was on the reserves.”
The story of adventure and the assumptions we make
As Coetzee points out, cannibals and slaves are integral to the adventure and the discovery of new lands.
Think about this Herald Sun introduction (29/1/16), which you could use as a model. It certainly attracts the reader’s curiosity and is so “foe-like”. “It’s the holiday story from hell – a woman gang raped by a ‘cannibal’ tribe in PNG as her boyfriend was held captive. But is that what really happened?”
You could add another short paragraph/link to prompt: “However, after hearing the stories of an eye-witness, as well as the translated testimony of one of the women in the “tribe” it seems the story-teller is more intent on relying on stereotypes and clichés to dramatise an event rather than investigating the subtleties of an unfortunate encounter.”
The story of Eliza Fraser, who was shipwrecked off the coast of Queensland in 1836, and her own encounter with the “cannibalistic savages” has, likewise, had many re-readings by Australian writers in films, books and academic journals. In her own writings, Eliza said she found the indigenous rescuers “extremely filthy” and was insulted that she was asked to do menial jobs such as watching children and digging for yams. They covered her body with salt, charcoal and grease, because she was heavily sunburned and, as some suggest, was the target of jealousy, hence the marking of her with an ochre sign. The indigenous did not recognise as Michael Alexander noted in Mrs Fraser on the Fatal Shore (1971) that she could have taught them English, hygiene, cooking, needlework and Sunday School.
In her book, Finding Eliza, Larissa Behrendt seeks to imagine the Butchulla people’s side of the story – their struggle to protect Mrs Fraser from the scorching sun, the attempt to protect her from the men, hence the ochre sign, the attempt to feed her during times of extreme drought, and the fact that she was not fit for more demanding survival tasks – hence the menial jobs.
Silence and alternative voices: the loss of origin/alternative voices and stories
In June 2011, a singer called Ibrahim Qualoush performed a song at an anti-regime demonstration in Hama, Syria. It was based on a simple lyric that a crowd had chanted back at him, “come on Bashar (Assad), leave!” A few days later, Ibrahim’s body was pulled out of the Orontes River. His vocal chords had been cut out.
By killing those who gave voice to the revolution, the Assad regime was trying to re-establish a silence that it had imposed on the country for 40 years.
However, although the regime silenced Ibrahim, there has been during the past decade an outpouring of artistic expression. Painting, song, satire, poetry, film, graffiti, posters and cartoons as well as bloggers speak of the horror of tyranny. Add to these stories, that of the image of the drowned three year old boy in Bodrum, (of Aylan Kurdi from Kobani) one of 2,500 Syrians who have drowned fleeing the civil war. The Syrian regime cannot silence the stories of horror, which like the stories of victims, everywhere, undermine the official, government story.
Those in positions of power seek to control our realities
The story of the conqueror, those in positions of power, seems to take priority.
As Naomi Klein asserts in her book, Shock Doctrine, the American Government’s anti-Marshall Plan formed the basis of the war against Iraq in 2002, and the theme of the conquest is the rise of corporate America. Like all conquest stories, it was based on the unquestioned assumptions about U.S. superiority and Iraqi inferiority. “The US federal government contracts commissioned a kind of country-in-a-box, designed n Virginia and Texas, to be assembled in Iraq.” The occupation authorities repeatedly said, “It was a “gift from the people of the United States to the people of Iraq”. All Iraqis needed to do was to “unwrap it”. However, in the unwrapping process, foreign labourers employed by the major U.S. contractors were used. Iraqi workers were cast in the role of “awed spectators”. Klein concludes that just about all key Iraqi governmental functions in Iraq were handed over to U.S. private contractors and Iraqis themselves were excluded from the gold rush.
Often the control of reality is heavy-handed in state-controlled countries such as North Korea and China.
This is clearly evident in the manner in which the Chinese government seeks to control public anger relating to its handling of a $US5 trillion ($7 trillion) stock rout and the deadly Tianjin chemical warehouse blasts. In order to manipulate the public’s response, it stages “confessions” on live television the purpose of which is to minimise state culpability and shift the blame onto the subversive actions of its citizens.
For example, the state broadcaster CCTV showed a contrite Wang Xiaolu, a journalist with the financial magazine Caijing, deliver his statement: “I, through private inquiries, these sorts of abnormal channels, obtained news materials,” Wang said. “And then through adding my own subjective judgement, I wrote this news report. During a sensitive period, I should not have published a report which had such a huge negative impact on the sharemarket.”
Wang was disciplined because he strayed from the party line. The official news agency Xinhua said Wang had written about the Chinese stock market “based on hearsay and his own subjective guesses” that “inflicted huge losses on the country and investors”. Law enforcement officials have disciplined nearly 200 people for spreading “rumours” online in connection with recent “major news events”.
Al Hayat is a highly sophisticated media outlet of IS. It streams continuous propaganda videos, filmed in high definition and expertly edited with music, action scenes from the battlefield and even scenes from video games like Call of Duty. Al Hayat produced the videos of three American and British men who have all died at the hand of a fanatic’s knife. This appalled the world and spurred western military intervention.
Recently, the world has been shocked by the graphic beheadings of men in orange suits kneeling on the sand, their fate in the hands of those with the machete. In the wake of these numerous beheadings Naomi Wolfe asks whether the “ISIL videos” of the beheadings are true? Are they just a case of ”fear porn”? She continues: “Why do I often not take political narratives at face value as they are dictated to the press? A. Because I am a journalist… but more importantly, b) because I worked for two presidential campaigns”. (Naomi Wolfe)
Link to Prompt: Governments often “overexaggerate” (ex President George Bush) the facts to suit their political and social agendas. Likewise, media outlets also influence the public’s knowledge of issues by presenting and concealing certain information.
This admission from former US President George W Bush provides a stark reminder of what can happen when powerful institutions misrepresent or distort reality. In this case, the tendency to “misoverexaggerate the nature of the threat”, led to the Iraq War in 2002. Up to the 10-year anniversary of the war, which prompted Mr Bush’s apology, the war had claimed the lives of at least 36,000 US soldiers and more than 100,000 civilians.
In 2002, Joseph Charles Wilson (a United States diplomat) undertook a trip to Niger to investigate allegations that Saddam Hussein was attempting to purchase yellowcake uranium to produce his weapons of mass destruction. In an article, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa”, Wilson states that on the basis of his “experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war”, he has “little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.”
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