ABSTRACT
Two events in the last few years have brought home to me how much we in North America are in the grip of Eurocentrism. The first was the ‘heroic’ intervention of the West into the Middle East in the MGM-acclaimed special known as ‘Desert Storm.’ For months the world was bombarded with a carefully controlled version of the events which created the image of a new crusade against a cunning and insane non-Western foe. The sum total of deaths on the Allied side was small-a proportion self-inflicted-with over 100,000 on the part of the Iraqis. This was despite the use of ‘clean bombs,’ one of the most horrifying of all terms devised by the military complex. In contrast a devastating typhoon in Bangladesh with a figure of 150,000 deaths managed to make our headlines for only two days: just another disaster from the Third World.
