The US government "is the world's leading purveyor of violence". The words are those of that noted anti-American, Martin Luther King, and though they were spoken in 1967, they offer a context for some of the righteousness emanating from the parishes to our west.
The world's death toll at the hands of the US and its proxies in the last half-century is in the millions, the vast majority of them non-combatants. Osama bin Laden was one such proxy, and when his mujahadeen mates were firing US-supplied Stinger missiles into Afghan schools (the schools taught girls, you see), Ronald Reagan was calling them freedom-fighters - a perversely accurate term, when you think about it.
A few of us reckoned such points were worth making last week, in light of the bellicosity and "Good v Evil" rhetoric that was, quite understandably perhaps, dominating the airwaves. They're still worth making, as the freedom-loving regimes of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Indonesia, and the like, line up, some of them obviously at gunpoint, to join the forces of "Good".
As Noam Chomsky pointed out this week on The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday), citing Ireland as supporting evidence, if you're actually interested in removing the threat of violence, you seek to understand it, especially in the heat of a terrible moment. If, on the other hand, you're interested in escalating the cycle of violence, you don't.
Anyway, for our troubles, some of us were vilified in the Sunday Independent. And since that newspaper has a circulation of more than 300,000, we're inclined to take notice when we're accused of being Taliban-supporters and justifiers of mass murder. (By the way, though I was on radio a bit last week, Sunday Independent writers didn't, quite, cite me by name, possibly because my New York roots make me an improbable vector for the infection of anti-Americanism in the Irish media. They stuck mainly to knocking Robert Fisk, whose mind is clearly poisoned by too much actual, on-the-ground knowledge of what he's talking about.)
Some of this week's radio voices made the best possible reply to those pundits who will ride out this "war against terrorism" from safety. By far the most diverse range of opinions about what the US has done and what it should do next was mouthed in American accents.
When programmes, including Liveline (RT╔ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) and Nicky Campbell (BBC Radio 5 Live, Monday to Friday), decamped to New York and Washington, respectively, for the week, they might have risked simply chasing after more tears and gore. Instead, they found in their interviews, phone-ins and vox-pops not only earnest desire for retribution, but also voices of caution, of doubt and of questioning. The real anti-Americanism is the attempt to stifle this debate, with its huge implications for the US and the world - especially given the baldly imperial rhetoric coming from some corners of the US administration.
In general, the debate is clearly not thriving in the US mass media, and is only so-so here. For example, we're told Americans are rallying around their president and love his wild-west rhetoric. What few outlets told us was what Bush actually said; I heard it on 5 Live and checked the transcript on the New York Times website just to be sure: "All I'm doing is remembering when I was a kid, I remember that they used to put out there in the old west, a wanted poster. It said, 'Wanted, Dead or Alive' . . ." Yes, the president's sentence implied that he grew up in the old west, though this was, I think, a case of a Bushy missing ellipsis, rather than a Reaganite fact-fiction synapse; either way, it hardly inspires confidence and so was widely suppressed.
RT╔'s apparent stacking of the panel on TV's Questions and Answers, in what looked like fear of having to make a subsequent BBC-type apology if anyone harshly criticised the US, was not repeated on any radio show that I heard. Today with Pat Kenny (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday), in particular, continued to seek expertise and opinion from a range of sources. But elsewhere in Montrose's radio centre, there was some sense of retrenchment. Charlie Bird's late arrival in New York and, on Monday's Morning Ireland (RT╔ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), his absurd recapitulation of everything the world already knew, was evidence of this from the journalistic side. The only novel words he spoke were patently untrue: he said the re-opening New York Stock Exchange "may not be the most important in the world", but he said it is symbolically important.
New York's is, of course, the world's most important exchange, and Charlie missed the real symbolism of its opening on Monday. It was so important to get this capitalist exchange up and running that the rest of lower Manhattan was neglected: even City Hall's phones weren't working, but Wall Street's were. And its workers were forced into their offices, adjacent to a mass grave that was still being pried open in streets full of toxic fumes.
Elsewhere, Gerry Ryan has been sounding rather too up-for-the-fight for my liking, given his likely ineligibility for the draft. Marian Finucane also let the liberal facade drop early this week. One hopes it was just a syntactically challenged Bushy moment, rather than a statement of her true beliefs: while rhetorically defending Muslims in the Republic and elsewhere against racist "reprisals", Finucane said that of course "supporters" of Osama bin Laden should face "the full rigours of the law". Does she really reckon mere support for this disgusting figure should constitute a crime?
The Last Word continued to offer some of Irish radio's best and bravest analysis of this crisis. However, Dunphy's apparent ideological confusion has been getting the better of him; his bizarre affinity with the British Right is starting to show.
How else can you can explain his use this week of the red-baiting term "Useful Idiots" to describe those who - like so many of his guests - have raised questions about Western history and policy? The phrase, lifted straight from the leader page of the war-crazed Daily Telegraph, suggests that they, we, constitute a fifth column for terrorism. It is employed to kill intelligent and informed debate, which means The Last Word is the last place it belongs.
hbrowne@irish-times.ie