The Spinning Head

There is no better region for manufacturing differences than the Middle East. There is no greater antithesis to the liberal, tolerant West than the Muslim. US journalists working in the area or covering anything to do with Muslims seem to be at a loss of common sense and self-reflection. There is a long history of…

Operating outside their social, cultural, and political comfort zones, US journalists struggle to come “to grips with a social reality that is systematically different from one’s own, and to explain its specific logic and momentum are most difficult conceptual and pedagogical tasks.” [Jayant Lele, “Orientalism and the Social Sciences,” In Carol A. Breckenridge & Peter…

The West has become a vast moral project, an intimidating claim to write and speak for the world, and an unending politicization of power…For conscripts of Western civilization, this transformations implies that some desires have been forcibly eliminated…and others put in their place. – Talal Asad The world outside the West is filled with strange…

Colonial feminism–one of colonialism’s earliest obsessions and justifications–reared its head in the nineteenth century. It achieves widespread resonance in the Western imagination because of the West’s inherent sense of its cultural and intellectual superiority–what Edward W. Said labeled “Orientalism.” It was one of several justifications for an empire to help veil its instrumental and political…

The Middle East has long been US journalism’s Achilles heel. Faced with the scale of the US imperial footprint in the region and the violence required to establish it, they have to perform some incredible feats of language and narrative to veil US responsibility for so much of what cripples democratic and social development in…

Journalists have come up with various tactics to either justify or veil US imperialism’s destructive footprint. Whether this is done intentionally or inadvertently isn’t relevant. One of the most common tactics used by reporters, particularly foreign correspondents, is to use what Mary Pratt has called an “anti-conquest” stance. [Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing…

Hidden in those shadows are the bodies of millions the US has killed in its single-minded pursuit of revenge. It remains shocking to me that not a single Western journalist or publication of note has, in the last twenty years, produced a significant body of work on the lives of the millions living in the…

Around 1991, just before the launch of Operation Desert Storm (aka the Persian Gulf War, First Gulf War, Kuwait War, First Iraq War, or Iraq War), which began in January of 1991, the US military seduced the US media into a Faustian bargain: It would give them access to its frontline troops, senior commanders, facilities,…

Few things have characterised the post-9/11 American world more than our worshipful embrace of our generals. They’ve become our heroes, our sports stars, and our celebrities all rolled into one. – William J. Astore It was a pivotal moment in the history of US media and changed it forever. But it has been relegated to…