Angry in the Great White North
Cognitive Dissonance
Saturday, March 25, 2006 at 02:00 PM

Read other posts by Steve Janke published by the National Post
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Of course, we all know what the war in Iraq is all about -- oil, right? And the men and women in the coalition fighting it are murdering countless innocents who were better off under the gentle hand of Saddam Hussein.

Naomi Klein is one of those who knows better:

MONDAY FEB 21ST, 6-9PM
LA FUNDRAISER
NAOMI KLEIN
FREE IRAQ! From Killer Liberators and the Corporations They Serve

Venice United Methodist Church
1020 Victoria Ave. (at Lincoln)

Of course, for Naomi Klein, everything reduces to corporations.

So what happens when the brutal killers don't act in a brutal and murderous manner? The obvious thing to do is to ignore evidence contradictory to what you know to be true. This is the most common defence in the face of cognitive dissonance, the state in which a person finds himself or herself when two contradictory realities are perceived.

Of course, any conservative will tell you there is only one reality, and you have to face up to it. But for idealists, who fill the ranks of the left, there is the world as it is, and the world as it should be (that being defined differently by each person, of course). When they don't match, there is a drive to resolve the dissonance -- but very few adjust their ideals. Best to adjust the perception of reality.

For instance, coalition soldiers should be killers in the service of corporate interests because George W Bush is evil (or stupid, depending on which ideal reality you believe in).

But then we learn that soon after a number of Christian pacifists who have been highly critical of the coalition, who subscribe to the idea that all the wrongs of the world are the fault of the Americans, and specifically of the conservatives, were kidnapped by the poor oppressed people they came to help, those same coalition forces began planning the rescue of those pacifists.

This week, the rescue happened:

But, in the event, the coalition devoted huge resources to securing their release. The SAS, special forces from the US and Canada and military intelligence officers spent months trying to locate them.

A force consisting of SAS troopers backed up by about 50 paratroops and Marines spearheaded the task force that rescued them. US and Iraqi troops were also involved in the mission.

So the reality is that the evil corporate thugs risked their lives to rescue those who kept insisting to the world that these people were evil corporate thugs.

You'd think that revelation would require a major rethink. Of course, the simplest thing to do is to pretend that these brave and selfless men and women don't even exist:

NORMAN KEMBER, the freed peace activist, will arrive back in Britain today amid growing controversy over his failure publicly to thank the military forces who rescued him.

Neither Professor Kember nor the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) organisation for whom he worked have acknowledged the work of the soldiers who rescued him and two Canadian hostages on Thursday, or of the teams of military and intelligence officials who spent months trying to track them down.

General Sir Mike Jackson, the head of the British Army, expressed the unhappiness of the military last night when he told Channel 4 News that he was “saddened that there doesn’t seem to have been a note of gratitude for the soldiers who risked their lives to save those lives”.

This is to be expected. These pacifists and their kind have invested a great deal of time and effort in constructing a world in which the US is evil, all the world's problems are related to lack of access to abortion, that capitalism doesn't work, that recycling is the right thing to do at any cost (even if it costs more in energy and resources than making a new item), that the legends and myths of native people are inherently better at describing the world than Western science (unless those cultural beliefs lead those same native peoples to eat seals and whales, in which case another acute case of cognitive dissonance develops).

The problem with the case of the Christian Peacemaker Teams is that the press has not played its accustomed role. See, the way to avoid cognitive dissonance is to avoid data that contradicts your idealized world view. As long as the media continues to report on explosions in Baghdad and never reports on the schools, the hospitals, the rebuilt infrastructure, and so on, there is no cognitive dissonance.

But in this case, the media has let the left down. Not only did it report on the rescue, it compounded the problem by reporting on the amount of effort put into the operation and then made things worse by obliquely suggesting that the rescued hostages and their colleagues were wrong not to aknowledge their rescuers.

It's going to take a lot of marches, placards, slogans, and fundraisers by luminaries on the left to set the world right after this mess.

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