This commentary was first published in the Palestine Chronicles 2005 02 08 and is copyright protected.

The Geography of Terror – Views from Middle America

The National Geographic Society, with a membership of over five million people, “the largest nonprofits scientific and educational institution in the world,” should have a large impact on the geographic information that reaches the American public. Yet after more than a century of providing information the “National Geographic Society today is propelled by new concerns: the alarming lack of geographic knowledge among our nation’s young people and the pressing need to protect the planet’s natural resources.” Although widely disseminated throughout households and schools, there is this recognized lack of knowledge that seems unreasonable in a society that flaunts itself as the best in the world and having the best educational opportunities globally. So what is wrong? I see two possible answers. First, those five million plus are already the reasonably well informed, leaving the other several hundred millions to gather their geographic knowledge through other media such as CNN and Time/Warner and Walt Disney, not exactly paragons of high level research and thinking skills. But that also may be the problem with the National Geographic.

The Geographic covers a wide range of topics from hard geography (volcanoes, tsunamis), which require very little in the way of opinion, to cultural geography, which readily reflects biases and presumptions. The cultural aspect is perhaps the weakest link, as the Geographic traditionally tries to ‘fairly’ present the various sides of the issues without advocating one or the other. Unfortunately, they themselves acknowledge, as seen with the quote above, that there is an alarming lack of knowledge. Could it be that this very ‘fairness’ and lack of advocacy that harms the dissemination of the information, pureed and made bland for the consumption of all equally? How is one to improve geographic knowledge, cultural in particular, and environmental knowledge, without taking a position of advocacy? Having said that, a recent article in the Geographic, “World of Terror” by Walter Laqueur, formerly of the right wing think tank the “Kissinger Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies” in Washington D.C., is very much an advocacy article, by omission.

That omission, and one that affects many of the National Geographic articles and other publications and appears to be systemic to their editing and perspective, is a singular lack of recognition that the United States has had little if any influence on all the negatives that are happening around the globe. Certainly the points of view of the various peoples involved are represented, but any historical or informational background somehow avoids any significant implication of U.S. involvement in many global current affairs, in the case of Laqueur - terror.

The phrase that truly reveals Laqueur’s viewpoint is that “In the past the typical victim of terrorism was an emperor or a king, a president, a general, or at least a government official.” That would probably be news to the native Americans that were slaughtered in various ways, moved from their homelands and forced to live in essentially foreign areas. It would also be news to the slaves that were transported to America, held in chains, beaten, executed on whatever whim of their white masters, although perhaps their would be a captured king or emperor among them somewhere. Also the workers of America came under attack in the “Ludlow massacre” when the Rockefellers, who owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Corporation, hired others to do their dirty work, including the “little cowboy governor” of the state of Colorado (Zinn,Passionate Declarations). And not to be consistent chronologically, Sherman’s march through the south is considered to be a march of terror, as he used “tactics of retaliatory terror…inflicting starvation, murder, and destruction” on the south (Carr, The Lessons of Terror). I do not think there were too many kings or generals among those folks.

That all took place inside America, but the United States also used terror abroad once it became a continental nation. The Philippines suffered terrorism when the Americans took over from the Spanish and began their overseas empire. During the guerrilla war “at least a quarter of a million Filipinos, most of them civilians, were killed.” The Moro massacre took place in 1906 “when at least nine hundred Filipinos, including women and children, were trapped in a volcanic crater…and shot at and bombarded for days” for which Roosevelt congratulated General Wood because he “upheld the honor of the American flag.”(Foster and McChesney, Pox Americana). Must have been a rather large royal family.

Later came World War II, in itself a cause for which there was little doubt about fighting Nazis, but the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were by all current accounts meant to demonstrate to the Russians that the American military was the dominant power. The American forces had previously rejected submissions from Japan for surrender that asked the Emperor to remain on his throne; the Americans rejected the latter idea and then kept the Emperor there anyway as it was politically expedient to do so in order to control the Japanese. As a result hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths, not one of them an emperor.

And then of course Vietnam, the fight to control a country that would have democratically voted to join the South with the North had the United States not interfered in the process. During those long years millions of people died from weapons of mass destruction (as aerial carpet bombing should be considered, and chemical agents) and many other little massacres needed to prevent the Kings and Generals of Vietnam from succeeding – another attempt by the American military to expand their nascent empire. On into Latin America with the subversive activities in Nicaragua and the training of the local right wing militaries in methods of torture and “interrogation” from the “School of the Americas”. This continued on into other Latin countries and continues in different form today in Venezuela and Colombia.

The National Geographic does its readers a great disservice to not recognize the role the U.S. has had in conducting terror operations in many parts of the world including its own homeland. All the information is readily available from American sources, well documented, well referenced to anecdotal experiences in the aggrieved countries and from U.S. government documents. The American educational system obviously does not present this particular perspective to its students. Perhaps the National Geographic, who bemoans the lack of geographical knowledge, should step into the void and provide more accurate information than the short article “World of Terror” provides.