Diplomats avoid historical self-awareness by feigning not to hear uncomfortable questions.

Evidence

Enemies include anyone who asks the West to consider its past, not so much out of guilt as out of self-awareness: such people are simply to be ignored. A symbolically powerful instance of this took place during the West Point press conference. A person in the audience declared that it was “the height of hypocrisy for the United States government to talk about torture” when the United States had abetted the mutilation of Iranians during the Pahlevi era. Bruce Laingen, the Teheran embassy’s chargé d’affaires and the United States’ senior diplomat in Iran, said twice that he had not heard the question, then moved rapidly to the more congenial subject of Iranian brutality and American innocence. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 93

Categorization

• SHARE: For a friend in diplomacy or media studies: the Laingen ‘twice said he had not heard the question’ detail is a perfect miniature of willful official obliviousness.