State and corporate media control through censorship is intended to have a psychological effect on the masses. The genocide in Palestine reveals the dangers of this depraved effort. What happens when we are told not to believe what we see?
Most of us have been prevented from watching the recent BBC documentary about how three children and one young woman are surviving in today's Gaza. From all accounts, since we are only allowed clips, this documentary is authentic, harrowing, and poignant, narrated as it is by the children themselves, and seen from their point of view with nothing left out. The local cameramen and the production wanted the raw truth.
The reason we were prevented from seeing it is that the BBC gave in to pressure from 45 Israeli journalists and other zionist covert leverage for it to be withdrawn under the pretext the key narrator, a thirteen year old boy, was the son of a Hamas civilian official, Minister of Agriculture.
But the pretext, like all zionist narratives, is skewed: the presence of a child telling his version of the ordeal he was going through, the identity of his father, the recent confession by Anthony Blinken that "Hamas ended up with more recruits than at the beginning of the war," the knowledge that these are the children, who have seen what no child should see, who volunteer to Hamas - all these factors turned a valuable documentary into an archive to be censored.
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The positive aspect of this withdrawal is double: it has paradoxically drawn attention to the documentary, and it has highlighted what I would like to write about in this article: a very negative form of censorship that is tested in the newsrooms and spreads to the rest of society.
The genocide in Gaza and the West Bank has created a new deadly syndrome in the western psyche. I use the word deadly in the sense that the syndrome will destroy the brain and sane vision as lethally as a deadly virus. It is vested in the following newsroom prescription, as one of the journalists puts it: " Do not describe what your eyes are seeing. " I challenge neuroscientists to trace the harm to specific areas of the brain when a human is forbidden to communicate or act on what his senses are registering.
We have pre-recorded in our DNA a fight, flight, or freeze mechanism faced with the perception of danger, but if we are told that the greater danger lies in perceiving those signals of danger and reacting to them, the brain is confused and tricked.
So let's give this syndrome a name. A working title.
PRESCRIBED DENIAL OF DANGER TRAUMA ( PDDT)
Here is how it works: You see an extreme form of torture or cruelty in front of your eyes - in the documentary in question, a desperate Gaza surgeon holds up the arm of the child he has had to amputate - but you trick your own brain into disbelieving it and you share that denial in exchange for pay, security and in the long term your own mental health.
For the journalist, the target of the prescription, it is a lose-lose situation. If, in the newsroom, you disregard the prescription and allow forbidden empathy and compassion to set in, then you, too, are othered, ostracized, and "punished" by the state. If, on the other hand, you obey the prescription and wear the state-offered blinker, you accept the prospect of physical and spiritual lobotomy. Is this close to what Gregory Bateson, who was studying methods of torture under the nazis, called the double bind? I leave you to decide. Bateson concluded that failure to find a solution to the double bind led to mental illness in particular schizophrenia.
Already, now that it has been practiced in Gaza, the spin doctors are applying PDDT to the psychopathology of everyday life closer to home: "avert your gaze and you will be safe" starts to hold "true" everywhere, beginning with your own family, education, career, aims and your vision of the future.
With PDDT in place, the current shortage of law enforcement officers is solved: we police ourselves, saving the state plenty of dollars and fewer cop cities while we still pay taxes to fund the police.
It is a win-win prescription - that is, if it wins.
So how do we defeat it?
Frantz Fanon used to sit the torturers down and analyze them just as he analyzed the freedom fighters he worked with and defended. He knew the truth came from a clinical understanding of the madness of the oppressor - a madness used to contaminate the puppets the oppressor works with and through.
Here are a few counter prescriptions :
1 ) Since the avowed and hypocritical goal of the newsrooms is that being "impartial" and balancing the narratives actually favors the zionist narrative - we seek to create a positive imbalance favoring the Palestinian "tale" as Refaat Alareer asks us to.
2 ) Use our strengths, in particular, the speed of virality of social media images that the zionist spin doctors cannot catch up with.
In this instance, the leaked clips of the censored documentary constitute a riveting "trailer". An iconic example is the footage of Sinwar throwing his stick at the drone that was to execute him - footage that went around the world before Israeli propaganda script writers could catch up with it and even begin to rewrite it.
3) Let more and more people know about the physical and spiritual consequences of PDDT
4 ) Study the conclusions drawn by Frantz Fanon yesterday on the psyche of settler colonialism and today by psychiatrists such as Dr. Bandy Lee profiling those who rule us as well as the urgency of finding antidotes to a malignant narcissism that has the ability to spread.
5 ) As activist, poet, and award-winning novelist Susan Abulhawa says, we should not listen to the statements manufactured for our consumption but rather listen to and study what the zionists say between themselves when they think nobody is listening.
6 ) Always add context to stories cut off from their historical roots.
7) Give the People who are fighting and dying for their ancestral land the mic, and theirs is the last word.
8) The zionists and their USA enablers will not stop of their own will because they "get off on it" - financially and narcissistically - and they need by all means necessary to conceal that they are hollow men.
9) Footage and film are double-edged weapons. In fact, USA films, mostly from Hollywood are the second biggest export after weapons. A recent article by William Astore in the Hollywood Progressive analyzes how "war" movies pull in teens by exploiting a "feel good" instinct of heroism - but always heroism for the right, orthodox, state-approved side.
Way before the genocidal war against Gaza was in progress a number of videos revisited the fact that the Pentagon has an office in Hollywood whose job description is to vet and help rewrite "sensitive scripts".
10) Way before October 7th, 2023, the systematic weaponization of children in the war of ethnic cleansing against Palestine was and remains deliberate and tenacious.
Children, the witnesses of the murder of their families, are considered by the IDF as future Hamas recruits.
From the cynical and inhumane trafficking of minors by the Jeffrey Epstein network in the USA to the testimony borne by Gazan doctors that children were executed by a calculated sniper action in the head not to speak of the chilling statement by a Israeli politician that " The Children of Gaza brought it upon themselves"- it is the children who are the bullseye.
The children of Palestine are the most targeted historically in any war we have known - they deserve not a terminal solution but a systematic solution terminating the death-bound nature of their existence once and for all.
11) Just as the zionist spin doctors would have us deny the horrors they visit upon their human animals before applying them to us, they would have us deny the peoples' victories.
In fact, it is more and more vital to them that we deny that the resistance of Gaza's People - the only agency that led to a ceasefire, not Trump nor Netanyahu - is historically a victory.
The agony of capitalism creates a hall of mirrors where our actions are deformed. Heaven forbid we realize we have won when we really have.
Blinded by an induced underestimation of ourselves, we keep shooting ourselves in the historic foot. So, for the last word, I will hand the mike to the author and editor of the Palestine Chronicle, Dr Ramzy Baroud, who stated at a webinar called "Trump and the Prospects for Peace in 2025" on January 19th :
"(...) All the achievements of Vietnam, all the resistance and victories in various parts of Africa and Asia and South America have either been missed, completely neglected, relegated, or actually processed to be a negative thing as far as the Left and progressives have done throughout the years . And I say this is a new opportunity - what happened in Gaza, what's happened in Palestine, in Lebanon, in Yemen - it's a new opportunity to show that no, we can actually be victorious if we appreciate the significance, the historical significance of this moment and build on it (...)."
(c) Julia Wright. February 22nd, 2025. All Rights Reserved with thanks to Dr. Ramzy Baroud, Sara Flounders, Susan Abulhawa, and the poet Refaat Alareer, murdered by the IDF.
Julia Wright is the elder of Richard Wright and executrix of his estate. She worked as a journalist in Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana until the coup d'etat in 1966. She was a member of SNCC and accompanied the BPP to the First Panafrican Festival in Algiers. She has been in the campaign to free Mumia since the mid-eighties.
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