Monthly Media Roundup: On Propaganda
In the year of my birth, much was made of a child who maybe died, maybe lived, or maybe never existed.
On April 5, 1986, terrorists bombed a discothèque in West Berlin, killing three and injuring 229: two dead US servicemen, and 79 injured US citizens. It was the latest in a series of attacks on European countries, and US President Ronald Reagan felt certain that Libya’s Colonel Muammad Gaddafi was behind this latest violence.
Gaddafi was pro-Eastern Bloc, pro-Cuba, pro-PLO and anti-Zionist, pro-IRA, pro-Nelson Mandela, pro-Black-civil-rights, and at war with Chad while advocating for pan-African politics. He was a threat to Western powers for nationalizing when they wanted more control, but used his nationalism to exploit Libya himself. Although he was celebrated for some efforts to improve women’s rights within Islamic parameters, he was also a serial rapist who sexually assaulted his staff and security force, and whose people kidnapped and held women and children for him to abuse as well.
(Not directly important to our story today—but important to remember in general.)
European intelligence at the time disagreed with Reagan’s assessment of culpability for April 5. So too would a follow-up investigation by West Berlin in 1987. Evidence-gathering efforts after 1990 eventually yielded a four-year trial in which four people were found guilty, but only after a maddening run of resistance from the German and US governments to share evidence. No direct connections to Gaddafi emerged.
Ten days after the West Berlin incident, though, Reagan instructed his military to bomb Tripoli, Benghazi, and two airports. It was clear to everyone that Reagan was trying to kill Gaddafi directly.
He failed, but that’s where the story of Hana Gaddafi started. Hana, Libyan media claimed, was a baby Gaddafi had adopted, and whom the US had killed in their airstrikes instead. But did she die? Or even exist? Skepticism emerged despite a reporter being shown a body, and flickers of competing data resurfaced decades later. Some think that she lived and escaped, growing up to become a doctor. Others claim that Gaddafi adopted another child and repurposed the name in honour of the Hana he’d lost—a common enough practice in many cultures before child mortality rates declined. Others suggest she was a complete fabrication.
Why did it matter?
Because Hana’s death was being used to hold the moral high ground against the US for bombing Libya expressly to kill—not to capture, not to bring to a US court—a man that Reagan had unilaterally decided was responsible. Instead of any of that broader moral question holding the news cycle, everything was reduced to this child. She—the idea of Hana—became a propaganda proxy for everything else.
And that fascinates me.
The passport age for a Hana related to this decades-long intrigue lists her birthday as November 11, 1985. Less than two months older than me.
It is a mere fluke of birth circumstances that I didn’t become a pawn in propaganda wars, like so many other babies who live and die in conflict zones the world over.
I could have been a Hana. Any of us could have.
But the real challenge—a challenge I see us failing at time and again—is remembering that even if our life stories aren’t as theatrical as Hana’s, we are still part of a propaganda machine. In peace, as in war, there will always be people who want us to serve as open receivers to whatever stories those in power wish to spin.
A few weeks back, I discussed Wag the Dog as a reflection on political propaganda, and civic interest in being receptacles for it. In today’s monthly media round-up for paid subscribers, I look at three other pieces that highlight the propaganda that shapes ever so much of our world: in climate change and personal life, as in active war.
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