media

"I think it is one of the great tragedies of our time that so many people have died, so many people have been displaced and so many people face famine as a result of the events of Darfur."

It is, most certainly. According to (that well-known trusted source) the BBC, 'Some 200,000 people have been killed and 2m displaced in Darfur since 2003.' The BBC devotes video, audio and textual reports accompanied by photos to the protests being held today, with the message 'don't look away'. Gordon Brown is played over and over again on the World Service, sounding sober and sympathetic, in control.

What a tragic contrast with the total lack of attention given last week to a new poll by ORB, a respected polling company used and normally quoted by the BBC. A google search for 'bbc iraq poll orb' brings up just 2 polls quoted by the BBC: one asked British parents whether they would be happy for their son to join the army, and the second asked whether British troops were winning or losing the war. But the ORB poll that asked Iraqi citizens how many of their household had died since the invasion as a result of the violence has been almost totally ignored, as far as I can see.

That poll, conducted in August of this year, suggests that there have been 1,220,580 Iraqi deaths since the invasion in 2003. That is over a million deaths since the already sanctions-crushed Iraqis were invaded by the world's greatest military power (and its poodle).

The figure of a million roughly tallies with an estimate from Just Foreign Policy, based on the Lancet study (last October) and 'a rate of increase derived from Iraq Body Count'. Just Foreign Policy also reckon the death count is just over a million: 1,044,607 (to date). And the figure also tallies roughly with an estimate by Gideon Polya, a scientist and writer, in February of this year. He too used the Lancet study as a basis, and estimated that by February 2006, there had been over a million victims as a result of the invasion. 600,000 of those needless deaths, he estimates, were children under 5.

If 200,000 deaths and 2 million displaced is one of the great tragedies, what is a million deaths (or more) and 4 million displaced? What is it when those deaths have come about as a result of a pre-planned invasion, built on fabricated reasons and a deliberate policy of false propaganda? What is it when the invading poodle, the British Ministry of Defence states publicly that it "does not maintain records that would enable a definitive number of [Iraqi] civilian fatalities to be recorded."? And what is it when the British media keeps silent about 1 million deaths, pointedly ignores them, and presents the man who wrote the cheques for war as sober, sympathetic, in control?

Well - what would it be, if it had been Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, China or Iran who had invaded, unprovoked, through deceit, and for selfish gain, causing a million needless deaths?

"How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought."

About two years ago, a friend in Russia said that she had long been thinking about interviewing the last survivors of the Stalin era, to see how they perceived those years, and to remind the Russian public of the full horror of what happened. She was concerned about the gradual rehabilitation of Stalin in official discourse, the return to power of Russia's secret services and the increasingly authoritarian tendencies of the Putin regime. And she was concerned that young people in today's Russia are taught almost nothing about that period of history; that almost all they know about it is from the official discourse.

I had an ulterior motive in joining her in the project - a motive which in a way was opposite to hers. I was concerned about the discourse in the 'west', where enemy dictators are identified and vilified, then separated off from the context and society in which they have come to power. I was sick of the finger-pointing, the moral high-horses, and the evil dictator discourse - whether that concerned Stalin or Hitler or Saddam or Slobodan (depending on the point the finger-pointer needed to make or the country they wanted to invade). I was sick of the idea that you remove the man and plant democracy in his place, and sick of what Jean Bricmont calls the humanitarian imperialists: self-righteous politicians, journalists and academics justifying savage bombing campaigns, illegal invasions and punitive economic sanctions in the name of human rights. Or human rights workers standing on the fence while the bombs fly.

In the 'west', dictators are the ultimate evil, along with paedophiles - and anything is justified to take them off the earth. But I wish the west (by which I mean humanitarian imperialists in the west) would take note of the other dictators, those we have supported or put into power - like Pinochet, Suharto or even Saddam in another era. I wish the west would look at daily life in a dictatorship, and daily life in an invaded, war-torn country - and then say which is best. I wish the west would ask whether a death from torture is anyway much worse than death from malnutrition or starvation, and I wish the west would look at how they (we) treat the citizens of developing nations, safely beyond our borders and safely out of reach of the human rights instruments which only apply to governments' treatment of their own citizens. I wish that we would try our own mass murderers in an international court, that we would count the victims that we are responsible for murdering in other regions of the world. We do not even bother to do that.

And I wish the humanitarian imperialists would see that if they do fail to do all this, if they fail to be informed about the crimes their own governments are committing, if they fail to shout about those crimes, and fail to keep on shouting until the crimes have stopped - then they show that they would be the ones who would be propping up dictators, had they been unfortunate enough to have been born in another part of the globe.

I am of course delighted that John Simpson appears to have experienced a personal epiphany, and now admits to having understood something that he apparently had failed to understand before (despite 40-odd years of war reporting and 2 insignificant daughters):

'It is that life itself is immensely valuable. Not just the lives of people who think and look and maybe worship like you and me, people who are attractive or well-educated or rich, people who are the right type of Christian or the right type of Muslim. All lives.'

A bit late for the 1/2 million Iraqi children whose lives were lost as a result of a brutal sanctions regime, under-reported, un-reported or dispassionately reported; a bit late for the 1 million-odd Iraqis whose lives have been lost as a result of the invasion - an invasion that Simpson reported with such dispassion and even-handed respect for all sides that warmongers were barely recognisable as warmongers. A bit late, too, for all those other millions (unattractive, poor, ill-educated) around the world who have been maimed, killed, starved, irradiated, or tortured as a result of policy decisions by the British Government (and others); and whose damaged or curtailed lives have been reported even-handedly, as matters of hard fact, impartially - if at all.

But still, maybe better late than never. Perhaps John Simpson would now like to ask the BBC to update his quote on their page about 'impartiality':

"During the war in Iraq, opinions were fiercely divided. Both sides were certain they were right. So, as journalists, we had to be very clear about our function. It's to give people the plain, unvarnished facts."

Or maybe not, since the quote bears no relation to reality before Simpson's epiphany either. He didn't give the facts: not unvarnished, not varnished, not at all. Nor did anyone at the BBC, except perhaps one person - and he was sacked. The war would probably not have happened if they had done so.

When I was a tidy and naive right-winger, I thought it was very important to read the press of the 'opposition', rather than to read journalists who viewed things in the same way as you did. So I bought the Guardian rather than the Daily Telegraph, studying the opposition's best arguments for their position, trying to understand how they could believe in anything as obviously outdated and absurd as 'socialism' (as it was still called, just).

I thought that we would only ever get a true discourse between different ideologies if each side really understood the other - and that meant living, breathing, feeling the arguments as expounded by the others' best exponents. Trying to understand how on earth they could believe in them.

It seemed quite clear - and still does - that one could never expect to do that, if one only ever looked at the newspapers and journals that most naturally appealed. But that is exactly what happens: one side reads one set of arguments, statistics and interpretations; political 'opponents' read another set, completely different. Each set has been carefully selected and selected out to back up an existing position and appeal to readers who agree with it already. Not surprisingly, ne'er the twain do meet.

Something must have met - fleetingly, momentarily - in me, on my journey to the left. The trouble is, I don't remember passing through the mid-point, even if I noticed it. The first few months of Guardian reading made only imperceptible, tidy little alterations to my outlook. By the time I saw that I was on the move, I was going at such a pace that I could barely see the passing scenery. Since then I only seem to keep accelerating.

If I were true to my word (and beliefs) I should be reading the Telegraph again by now. I persuade myself that I don't need to because I've been there, done that, know the arguments. The truth is that I can't bring myself to do it, and find nothing except emptiness and odious opinions when I open it. Even the Guardian would represent an 'other' to my current thinking (and reading). Even the Guardian is often odious (with honourable exceptions).

But the danger in not looking at the odious opinions is that we then can't find the way back to another point of view. That doesn't matter too much if you really know you never want to go back; but it does matter for other reasons. First of all it matters because there are people - nice people - who actually believe the odious things. That is very difficult to reconcile. Secondly, it matters because it becomes increasingly difficult to engage in any sort of useful dialogue with anyone outside a narrow circle. Thirdly, it matters if you want (and need) the help of those who are still 'back' there to bring the world forward - and there is no doubt that we do.