reflection on security and the media

With the excitement of Halloween, everyone in class kept clinging to child-like activities like trick or treating and eating candy but my mind was focused on something else. With the public's constant need for security and prevention tactics to prevent terrorist activities, some students suggest that the media should play a role in educating us to protect ourselves from outside forces. This is a terrible idea for the media is not the type of educational source to teach us about stopping terrorists because they promote racial stereotypes of people we are at war with.

For example, in 1917, the US newspaper companies used propaganda that personified the German soldier as a barbaric creature. They also used the word "Hun" as a derogatory word for the Germans even though it was Kaiser Wilhelm who first used the term to motivate the ferocity of the German army. In 1940, Our generation of children were subjugated to WWII cartoons which characterized the Japanese as sub-humans while the Germans acted like clowns using broken German language and phrases. The Japanese stereotypes were unfair for because of this and the Pearl Harbor attacks, Americans treated the Japanese the same way the Western world treats Muslims today. Unlike the small number of German Americans who joined the Third Reich during its rise, a unanimous number of Japanese Americans pledged loyalty to the US because they hated their militaristic country, the opportunities the US could offer them, and their resistance to state nationalism. Despite this, they were still incarcerated in internment camps. Today the media still personifies the Japanese as cruel because of their spotlight on Japan's continued hunt for whales, which angered many animal rights groups and numerous protests by the Australian government. My grandmother still hates the Japanese even though I keep trying to show her that the Japanese Americans never posed a security threat just because of their identity.

During the Cold War, the media ran constant propaganda detailing safety procedures should the United States be under threat of a nuclear war. We also carried a a great stereotype of the Russians as cold, distrustful, and manipulative (even though this is used today). Even after the breakup of the Soviet Union, we are still being hit by anti-Russian sentiment in our newspapers like when the New York Times showed the Russians as the aggressors during the 2008 South Ossetia war. Then, the media showed the activities of the KGB, the Russian equivalent to our CIA, and how it poisoned one of its retired agents with radiative material after he accused the Russian government of precipitating the events leading to the Second Chechnya war (Our CIA uses water boarding and even wild animals to interrogate terrorist inmates so radiation poisoning is not the worst technique used by government secret agencies). Now with the war on terror going on, the public opinion regarding the Islamic community turned hostile ever since the 9/11 attacks. This rise in racial stereotyping paralleled the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attacks, both of which were attacks on US soil (even though Hawaii was a territory and not a state). In movies like 300 or Munich, we've taken the image of the Muslim individual and reduced him/her into an anti-Semitic, selfish, sexist and violent person and this is the Media's own doing. So should the media be our source of education? Maybe if you advocate sending our entire Muslim community into internment camps until the War on Terror ends, which it may not.