I had some blog time yesterday but I spent it following up a story. Somebody told me that the main route to the airport from Baghdad is called 'route Irish' by the US military and that, while the term was commonly used by the US media it was being avoided by the Irish. This would be in keeping with the Irish media's craven response to the war. The main, so called 'liberal' media outlets, are in fact dominated by the PDs, who are an extremist right wing party which has added an explicit racist agenda to its previous take on laissez faire, 19th century right wing liberalism. The largest newspaper The Independent, and many others, are owned by a baron somewhat like Murdoch but much less pleasant and interesting. And then there are the English papers transplanted here which are, as in England, racist.
Anyway, I went to check the story out, and there isn't the empirical evidence to back it up. True, the Irish media have avoided any mention, but with the relative numbers of articles there would be no expectation that it would crop up in the Irish media. Really it barely features in the US media too and their focus is much sharper on Iraq. Or at least they write about it a lot more even if their gaze is rather choosy. We also might expect the term more readily there as they fetishise the US military with their 'thunder runs' and coopting of military propaganda terms in an unblinking fashion - a process that really saw the light of day when the US media invented an organisation called the viet cong, which is quite hilarious but another story entirely (see the introduction to Philip Jones Griffiths Vietnam Inc. where he gives the US military propaganda name that they insisted be used by accredited journalists with the alternative name, you can really see how they created a fantasy world where they were loved by the locals, a cosy fantasy that obviously convinced many, long after they were tipping the hueys into the sea and promising to pay a few paltry billions in reparations for the millions of civilians they murdered. Billions they forgot to pay.)
I mention all this as I am avoiding doing a project on blogs in Ireland. There is a cosy consensus in Ireland of quite extreme right wing opinion. This is continually reinforced by the media. A (pro-war) american friend of mine who is leaving here as soon as he can told me shortly after he arrived here that he found it really funny that Irish media sources continually got away with saying that this country was 'anti-business'. He claims you wouldn't get away with that in the US. This country is 'the most globalised in the world', is rapidly heading from a country of have nots and hereditary wealth (those that invaded and those that collaborated) to a country of have-nots and robber barons. Our media is turning the other way. At the same time a movement appears, to me, to be gathering at the fringe of the media. This movement is of independent but mutually supportive groups, lobbying and colinising cyberspace with hate and contempt filled rants. These people bolster each other, and talk of ranters like Kevin Myers as an intellectual and free thinker, rather than an intellectual minnow and bigot. There are people there like the freedom institute and the open republic that need to be monitored. They are pushing a cosy consensus further and further to the right, further towards extremism, racism, and ulitmately facism if they are not checked. I think of leaving here too. Let it fester in its hate filled, racist, kill the poor, culturally backward, weeping wound of a public discourse. Though for evil to prosper... Well, I'm not a good man anyway, but it's time I did something. And as I pointed out at the beginning of this piece, counting and logging what they are saying to check what is really going on is a start, although I really don't look forward to immersing myself in that filth.
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