The denial of death

Abstract

Preparations for each new war are based on the last comparable previous conflict. For the United States, ‘Vietnam was the critical benchmark in preparing for the Gulf. For Britain, the Gulf was compared with the Falklands—the lack of political debate and the agenda for media control both reflected the 1982 crisis. The Labour opposition was afraid of the political damage that criticizing the government's war policy might have caused it, as it was thought to have done in the Falklands case. Nevertheless, the (curiously few) opinion polls taken before the January 16 offensive showed a division of opinion similar to that in the United States over the immediate resort to war. This indicated a problem for the management of public opinion, which was quickly suppressed during the six weeks of the war itself but which actually continued beneath the surface, as we found out when we asked people a wider range of questions. It was to this problem that the policies of political‐military news managers and the policies of editors and media controllers (if not the journalists themselves) were largely addressed. The conformity of the media in Britain to official views during the Gulf War was certainly overdetermined: by the efficient U.S.‐organized‐coalition control of information; by the Iraqis’ own censorship, which blocked information on the losses they were sustaining; by the lack of domestic political legitimation for criticism of coalition policy; and by the media's and government's desire to learn from their conflicts during the Falklands War and to produce an understanding that would preserve some journalistic autonomy within a framework of military‐political control. In much of the tabloid press, the conformity was compounded by a synthetic jingoism, seeking to reproduce (unsuccessfully, many argued, given the very different context of the Gulf) the patriotic aura of the Falklands War. Only in some of the quality papers, especially in the liberal Independent and Guardian, were there sustained efforts to break through the “screening off of the war's realities by the official control of information. But even these publications were severely hampered by the difficulties of access to most of the actual “fighting.” British controls went further than many: The BBC's banning of sixty‐seven popular songs as well as comedy films and series with a vaguely military theme, and a minority channel's banning of a series of Vietnamese films, produced a level of general cultural control that went beyond the political or military censorship that occurred in all the countries directly involved in the conflict. This was reflected in the wider cultural establishment, for example in the Victoria and Albert Museum's banning of an exhibition, The Art of Death,” which included tombstones, mourning fans, and funeral loaves.