On Myth - Introduction.
“Yes, news media distort the true facts of war (violence), creating a myth. The question is not whether, but how much? I remember the day we completed the hotly contested occupation of the city of Zamboanga in the Philippine Islands. That evening my platoon was occupying the dock when the big brass came ashore, followed by the media. I was present and overheard the media interviewing the big brass about the battle. The big brass gave numbers of enemy dead that I knew to be inflated. The Japanese had an evacuation route that was open and at the last minute they used it. All in all, the story given the press was designed to make the US military look good, without concern for its accuracy. I was shocked, but soon learned that the military shaped its news releases. That was on a very minor scale, but it is a factual example. It reminded me of Caesar upon his return to Rome from Egypt. After he described a series of Roman victories there he was acclaimed a hero. No one seemed to notice that his army did not return with him. It couldn't, it had been depleted. Historians picked up the Egypt side of the story later. Maybe historians, some time after the fact, find all the truths that the news media missed or miss-described. Let us hope so.” -Thomas Brownhill, WWII Veteran, personal correspondence 11/28/05
This quote suggests that the myth of war is simply a distortion of the facts, a trick to make the military ‘look good’, but interrogating the motive behind this distortion reveals another aspect of mythology as a traditional, epic narrative. The social expectations that inspire the military’s version of a victory report are rooted in the illusory significations of popular mythology. For the American military in the South Pacific during WWII, success hung on the annihilation of the dehumanized Japanese. Myths fueled a propaganda culture, building hatred for the Japanese military upon existing racist sentiments. This discourse reached beyond government-issued propaganda, even the New York Times used sweeping language to describe the Japanese enemy as savage and superstitious, primitive and bestial. Also in invoking Caesar, this quote reflects the tendency of war accounts to hark back on classical mythology. In this case it is clear that mythology inspires both the language and the memory of war.
In a hyper-mediated world filled to the brim with curly mustachioed terrorists, atomic weapons, war games and urban warfare, it can be easy to lose sight of the traditional narratives underlying the shroud of modernity. But why is it important to couch this observation in terms of traditional mythology? For one thing, myth dually signifies both a contrived and traditional narrative. Secondly, it places news media in a continuum with the history of war reporting. The town crier of a medieval village probably appeared every bit as legitimate and modern within that context as a newscaster appears on CNN. If war narratives retain fundamental qualities across different media and war reporting holds the same basic role in societies throughout history, it makes sense to describe modern war reporting as an invocation of mythology. It may also prove a valuable way to drive a wedge between the “real” war experience and its representation, a fundamental divide discussed by many veterans of war.
Roland Barthes describes modern mythology as a secondary signification, a social construction that is assumed to be natural fact and thereby obscures the true implications of an object or event. He discusses mythology creation as a fundamentally bourgeois practice that marginalizes opposing models of perception. A similar argument is voiced on page 5 of Terry Eagleton’s Ideology: An Introduction:
A dominant power may legitimate itself by promoting beliefs and values congenial to it; naturalizing and universalizing such beliefs so as to render them self-evident and apparently inevitable; denigrating ideas which might challenge it; excluding rival forms of thought, perhaps by some unspoken but systematic logic; and obscuring social reality in ways convenient to itself. Such ‘mystification’, as it is commonly known, frequently takes the form of masking or suppressing social conflicts, from which arises the conception of ideology as an imaginary resolution of real contradictions.
In this sense, the language of mythology is part of a power dynamic that implicitly legitimates existing forces of power and represses opposition. Government-spawned terms like ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ and ‘collateral damage’ pervade news coverage of the Iraq war and reflect Barthes’ and Eagleton’s observations about mythological significations that redirect the decoding of language. These terms connote a sterile purity, the pervading myth of clean modern warfare. I would argue that these mythological connotations are not simply an illusion scripted by those in power but, like the propaganda of World War II and earlier, are a reappropriation of traditional narratives that have been constantly remediated through the course of our cultural history.
In investigating the history, culture, remediation, and narrative of war mythology across a few different cultures I hope to draw upon similarities in the assimilation of mythology into foreign policy. American mythology is an amalgamation of many different traditions, but myths reinforced by mainstream network news are noticeably Western-centric and traditionalist. In the next few sections I hope to look at these mythic traditions that serve to structure America news media and public debate.
While the mythologies of different cultures typically includes a cast of universally recognizable figures, the decisions by the government and the media as to which real-world players to cast as which mythic players is a telling and potentially hypocritical process. Mythology is flexible enough to allow the same entity to be typecast as a hero or a villain depending on the framing, but mythology is also evocative enough to belie alternative discourses once the narrative has been cast. Many scholars have recently addressed these same issues eloquently and effectively in different terms, but hopefully this approach will draw the abuses of modern war out of the limited scope of modernity and place these wartime narratives in an historical continuum.