What we say goes: Gaddafi and the herd mentality

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's 100-minute maiden address to the UN General Assembly in New York on Wednesday drew predictable ridicule from our hallowed media guardians.

Soon after the event, this piece by the Guardian's Ed Pilkington took pride of place on the front page of the paper's website. It is a cast-iron example of the uniform manner in which outspoken critics of western power are caricatured and summarily dismissed by our "free press".

Gaddafi, we are told, "fully lived up to his reputation for eccentricity, bloody-mindedness and extreme verbiage" – a crackpot simply "grabb[ing] his fifteen minutes of fame" in front of "startled delegates".

Pilkington was given free rein to make such cavalier – and patently editorialised – judgements in a supposedly serious news report not because Gaddafi over-shot his allotted speaking time, but because the Libyan leader dared to raise major issues concerning high-level western corruption and systemic crimes against humanity.

Gaddafi, it was reported, "accused the security council of being an al-Qaida-like terrorist body, called for George Bush and Tony Blair to be put on trial for the Iraq war, demanded $7.7tn in compensation for the ravages of colonialism on Africa, and... demanded to know who was behind the killing of JFK."

In line with the standard, highly rigid narrative that proclaims western global benevolence as the only acceptable political reality – a narrative dutifully repeated by our media at every turn – anyone making public proclamations of the above nature will be subject to immediate censure and derision.

As David Edwards of the website Media Lens told me:

"'We', the West, know (because we just do) that Gadaffi is a cartoon figure, like Chavez, to be mocked. This cartoon label is applied to anyone who speaks out – Galloway, Pinter, Pilger, Chomsky, Chavez, le Carre, even Greg Dyke. It's a sort of knowing, superior sneer – it works beautifully.

"The more passionate and sincere the person speaking out, the more potent the sneer becomes. I'm not saying Gadaffi should be compared to the great dissidents, but it's just the presumption that 'we' all know he's an idiot that strikes me. It's a type of thought control."

Edwards is entirely right to consider the Guardian piece "thought control". Such casual subversion is so common as to almost pass unnoticed. Yet Pilkington's report stands as a chillingly breezy example of propaganda flak, swiftly and effectively silencing such "outlandish" claims.

The irony is that to truly tackle the issues Gaddafi raised – several of which are not only valid but of critical importance – the Libyan leader would have needed more than 1000 minutes, let alone 100.

Regardless, it is simply taken as given that not only are his accusations unworthy of further comment, they are to be wholly ridiculed.

And this is because, the Guardian tells "us", Wednesday "was meant to be a day of global reconciliation, when the new leader of the free world put all the rancour of the past eight years behind him and heralded an era of unity."

Gaddafi, evidently, was unaware of his obligation to maintain an obedient silence regarding some of the more glaring details of that "rancour".

"And so it might have been," Pilkington laments, "were it not for a short man, swathed in saffron robes and a black felt hat waving his arms around and shouting: 'Terrorism!'"

The mocking tone, dismissing Gaddafi as the epitome of pantomime, speaks volumes about what truly passes for debate in our liberal newspapers:

"[T]he self-proclaimed king of kings, figurehead of a thousand African kingdoms, must have been chuffed by how his morning had turned out. Now, where to pitch that tent?"

Of course, as Edwards points out, when Gaddafi was "behaving himself", he was treated with considerable respect by the press: "He was a 'reformed' character, they told us."

But not, it seems, on Wednesday.

"They switch the 'respect' and 'contempt' modes on and off, and no-one notices."