'These lands do not belong to us.' Robert Fisk's The Age of the Warrior

Reading award-winning British war correspondent Robert Fisk's The Age of the Warrior (Nation Books, 2008), I was often reminded of two recently published collections of George Orwell's essays. Like Orwell, Fisk writes about many things--history, literature, cinema, locomotives, cats--and also like Orwell, whose "serious work" was always, "directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism," Fisk's writings are always in opposition to war, which he has defined so well as "the total failure of the human spirit." "A reporter's supposed lack of 'bias'--which, I suspect, is now the great sickness of our Western press and television--has become the antidote to personal feeling, the excuse for all of us to avoid the truth," he writes. Having allowed himself access to his human feelings, Fisk is able to report on the horrors of war as a human being and without being stupefied by fealty to the mythological god "objectivity," to which so many of our American journalists are willing devotees, having failed to heed evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould's warning: "[It] is dangerous for a scholar even to imagine that he might attain complete neutrality, for then one stops being vigilant about personal preferences and their influences"and then one truly falls victim to the dictates of prejudice. Objectivity must be operationally defined as fair treatment of data, not absence of preference." (There are brave exceptions over here, like Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges, who was forced from his post at the New York Times after refusing to stop speaking out against the 2003 US/UK invasion of Iraq.) Given his refusal to submit to the demands of the powerful, Fisk's writing can't pass through the US media's content colander (see: Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky's propaganda model) and remains largely unknown here. Chomsky, a pretty heavy reader, once told me that "I don't recall ever having seen him in the US press." So, thanks is due to Nation Books for bringing us this collection of essays, most of which originally appeared in the British daily, The Independent. Fisk has lived in Lebanon for decades and doesn't use email ("[F]orcing people to write real letters cuts down on the amount of ungrammatical and often abusive messages we receive," he writes in an essay titled "The pen, the telex, the phone and the despised email".), so he's pretty difficult to reach from North Carolina. However, he generously took the time to participate, by post card, in a single-question interview. I asked how he would reply to folks who opposed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, but who now have serious concerns about the fates of those countries' citizens should the occupiers withdraw. "Invading or occupying armies always say that leaving would then harm the populations (who never asked to be invaded or occupied in the first place)," he wrote. "But their populations must decide their own future in their time. Yes, it will be a long time before 'gender equality' exists in Afghanistan if we leave. But does it exist now? We cannot change these societies--that's up to them. These lands do not belong to us--they belong to the people who live there. Militarily, we should withdraw. If we want them to change, why not invite their tribal elders to visit the West??? Maybe they'll learn something--or maybe not..." Nick Holt's website is Grits and Roses.