Obama and the age of permanent war America has emerged from the era of outright aggression on the rest of the world and into the age of nuanced terror.
Here is news of the Third World War. The United States has invaded Africa. US troops have entered Somalia, extending their war front from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and now the Horn of Africa. In preparation for an attack on Iran, "bunker-buster" bombs are said to be arriving at the US base on the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
In Gaza, the sick and abandoned population, mostly children, is being entombed behind underground American-supplied walls to reinforce a criminal siege. In Latin America, the Obama administration has secured seven bases in Colombia from which to wage a war of attrition against the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay. Meanwhile, the secretary of "defence", Robert Gates, complains that "the general [European] public and the political class" are so opposed to war, they are an "impediment" to peace. Remember, this is the month of the March Hare.
According to an American general, the invasion of Afghanistan is not so much a real war as a "war of perception". Thus, the recent "liberation of the city of Marjah" from the Taliban's "command-and-control structure" was pure Hollywood. Marjah is not a city; there was no Taliban command and control. The heroic liberators killed the usual civilians, the poorest of the poor. Otherwise, it was fake. A war of perception is meant to provide fake news for the folks back home, to make a failed colonial adventure seem worthwhile and patriotic, as if The Hurt Locker were real and the parades of flag-wrapped coffins through Wootton Bassett were not a cynical propaganda exercise.
Silent witness
“War is fun", the helmets in Vietnam used to say with bleakest irony, meaning that if a war is shown to have no purpose other than to justify voracious power in the cause of lucrative fanaticisms such as the weapons industry, the danger of truth beckons. This danger can be illustrated by comparing the liberal perception of Tony Blair in 1997 as one "who wants to create a world [where] ideology has surrendered entirely to 'values'" (Hugo Young, the Guardian) to the public reckoning today of a liar and war criminal.
Western war-states such as the US and Britain are threatened not by the Taliban or any other introverted tribesmen in faraway places, but by the anti-war instincts of their own citizens. Consider the draconian sentences handed down in London to scores of young people who protested against Israel's assault on Gaza in January last year. Following demonstrations in which paramilitary police "kettled" thousands, first offenders have received two and a half years in prison for minor offences that would not normally carry a custodial sentence. On both sides of the Atlantic, serious dissent exposing illegal war has become a serious crime.
Silence in other high places allows this moral travesty. Across the arts, literature, journalism and the law, liberal elites, having hurried away from the debris of Blair and now Obama, continue to fudge their indifference to the barbarism and aims of western state crimes by promoting retrospectively the evils of their convenient demons, such as Saddam Hussein. With Harold Pinter gone, try compiling a list of well-known writers, artists and advocates whose principles are not consumed by the "market" or neutered by their celebrity. Who among them has spoken out about the holocaust in Iraq during almost 20 years of lethal blockade and assault? And all of it has been deliberate. On 22 January 1991, the US Defence Intelligence Agency predicted in impressive detail how a blockade would systematically destroy Iraq's clean water system and lead to "increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease". So the US set about eliminating clean water for the Iraqi population: one of the causes, Unicef noted, of the deaths of half a million Iraqi infants under the age of five. But this extremism apparently has no name.
Partners in crime
Norman Mailer once said he believed the US, in its endless pursuit of war and domination, had entered a "pre-fascist era". Mailer seemed tentative, as if trying to warn about something even he could not quite define. "Fascism" is not right, for it invokes lazy historical precedents, conjuring yet again the iconography of German and Italian repression. On the other hand, American authoritarianism, as the American cultural critic Henry Giroux pointed out recently, is "more nuance, less theatrical, more cunning, less concerned with repressive modes of control than with manipulative modes of consent".
This is Americanism, the only predatory ideology to deny that it is an ideology. The rise of tentacular corporations that are dictatorships in their own right and of a military that is now a state within the state, set behind the façade of the best democracy 35,000 Washington lobbyists can buy, and a popular culture programmed to divert and stultify, is without precedent. More nuanced, perhaps, but the results are unambiguous. Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, the senior UN officials in Iraq during the US- and British-led blockade, are in no doubt they witnessed genocide. They saw no gas chambers. Insidious, undeclared, even presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, the Third World War and its genocide proceeded, human being by human being.
In the coming election campaign in Britain, the candidates will refer to this war only to laud "our boys". The candidates are almost identical political mummies, shrouded in the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes. As Blair demonstrated a mite too eagerly, the British elite love America because America allows them to barrack and bomb the natives and call themselves "partners". We should interrupt their fun.
'A Secret Country' 20 Years On
'A Secret Country', John Pilger's 'countering' history of Australia has been in continuous print since it was first published 20 years ago. He talks about what has and hasn't changed about Australia since then.
Why sharks should not own sport In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes how the rich and powerful have taken over and distorted the people's pleasure - sport, from Tiger Woods Inc to the World Cup, soon to begin in South Africa. Pilger looks at the way Fifa and multiple sponsors have invaded South Africa and ordinary South Africans have been pushed aside in the cause of profiteering.
As Tiger Woods returns to golf, not all his affairs are salacious headlines. In Dubai, the Tiger Woods Golf Course in Dubai is costing $100million to build. Dubai relies on cheap third world labour, as do certain consumer brands that have helped make Woods a billionaire. Nike workers in Thailand wrote to Woods, expressing their “utmost respect for your skill and perseverance as an athlete” but pointing out that they would need to work 72,000 years “to receive what you will earn from [your Nike] contract”.
The American sports writer, Dave Zirin, is one of the few to break media silence on the corporate distortion and corruption of sport. His forthcoming book Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love (Scribner) blows a long whistle on what money power has done to the people’s pleasure, its heroes like Woods and the communities it once served. He describes the impact of the Texan Tom Hicks’s half-ownership of Liverpool Football Club, which followed another rich and bored American Malcolm Glazer’s “leveraged takeover” of Manchester United in 2005. As a result, England’s most successful club (with Liverpool) is now 716.5 million pounds in debt.
How long has this been going on? In 1983, you could buy a ticket to a first division game for 75 pence. Today, the average at Old Trafford is around 34 pounds. Watch the latest crop of parents on morose queues to buy overpriced club strips and insignia, also made with cheap and often sweated labour, with the brand of a failed multinational emblazoned on it. Profiteering is now an incandescent presence across top-class sport. Sven-Goran Eriksson will trouser up to two million pounds for just three months’ work in Ivory Coast, where half the population has barely enough to survive. Australia’s finest, most boorish cricketers are collecting their bundles for a few months’ cavorting in the Indian franchises. The attitude is entitlement, the kind that less talented “celebrities” flaunt. It was in no way remarkable that in 2007-8 a number of the heirs to Don Bradman’s Invincibles achieved what was once nigh on impossible; they were disliked in their own country. Those high fives and air-punching fists have become salutes not to “everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards” (Bill Shankly), but to the voracious sponsor and the forensic camera.
Take for example FIFA, which has effectively taken charge of South Africa for the World Cup. Along with the International Olympic Committee, FIFA is sport’s Wall Street and Pentagon combined. They have this power because host politicians believe the “international prestige” of their visitation will bring economic and promotional benefits, especially to themselves. I was reminded of this watching a documentary by the South African director Craig Tanner, Fahrenheit 2010. His film is not opposed to the World Cup, but reveals how ordinary South Africans, whose game is football, have been shoved aside, dispossessed and further impoverished so that a giant TV façade can be erected in their country.
A new stadium near Nelspruit will host four World Cup matches over 10 days. Jimmy Mohlala, speaker of the local municipality, was gunned down in his home in January last year after whistle-blowing “irregularities” in the tenders. An entire school, which was in the way, has been removed into prefabricated, sweltering steel boxes on a desolate site with a road running through it. “When the World Cup is over,” said the writer Ashwin Desai, “it will become obvious that these stadiums are going to be empty shells, that our money has been used for what is really a pyramid scheme”.
A community of 20,000 people, the Joe Slovo Informal Settlement, is threatened with eviction from where they live near the main motorway between Cape Town and the city’s airport. They are deemed an “eyesore”. Street vendors will be arrested if they fail to comply with FIFA rules about trade and advertising and mention the words “World Cup”, even “2010”. FIFA will earn about two and quarter billion pounds from the TV rights, exceeding its income from the last two World Cups combined.
Incredibly, South Africa will get none of this. And this is country with up to 40 per cent unemployment, a male life expectancy of 49 and thousands of malnourished children. This truth about the “rainbow nation” is not what fans all over the world will see on their TV screens, although they may glimpse an unreported feature of modern South Africa, which is a vibrant, rolling resistance that has linked the World Cup to an economic apartheid that remains as divisive as ever. Indeed, another kind of World Cup for effective popular protest has long been won in the streets of South Africa’s townships.
In his chapter on Liverpool FC, Dave Zirin describes a similar resistance that also offers inspiration to those struggling to reclaim sport from the sharks. A fans’ organization, Share Liverpool FC, is aiming for 100,000 shareholders to buy back the club from Tom Hicks and his co-owner, George Gillett. Liverpool fans have also formed the Liverpool Supporters Union (LSU), which has had thousands in the streets calling for a boycott of the Bank of Scotland if it gives Hicks and Gillett any more credit. Remember how the boycott of Murdoch press succeeded in Liverpool following the Sun’s lies over the Hillsborough tragedy. “If we stand together and speak with one voice, regardless of language or accent,” says the LSU, “we can make a genuine difference to our football club, the city of Liverpool and indeed the wider footballing world.” On 17 April, Hicks and Gillett announced they were selling the club. Manchester United fans are mounting a similar, principled resistance in defence of the sport they love and which they believe rightly is theirs. We should support them.
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger inverts the perception of Greece as a "junk country" and sees hope in the uprising of ordinary Greeks protesting against the "bailout" of an economy plunged into debt by the tax-evading rich. Greece, he writes, is a microcosm for the developed world, where class war are the words seldom used because they are the truth.
As Britain’s political class pretends that its arranged marriage of Tweedledee to Tweedledum is democracy, the inspiration for the rest of us is Greece. It is hardly surprising that Greece is presented not as a beacon but as a “junk country” getting its comeuppance for its “bloated public sector” and “culture of cutting corners” (the Observer). The heresy of Greece is that the uprising of its ordinary people provides an authentic hope unlike that lavished upon the warlord in the White House.
The crisis that has led to the “rescue” of Greece by the European banks and the International Monetary Fund is the product of a grotesque financial system which itself is in crisis. Greece is a microcosm of a modern class war that is rarely reported as such and is waged with all the urgency of panic among the imperial rich.
What makes Greece different is that within its living memory is invasion, foreign occupation, betrayal by the West, military dictatorship and popular resistance. Ordinary people are not cowed by the corrupt corporatism that dominates the European Union. The right-wing government of Kostas Karamanlis, which preceded the present Pasok (Labour) government of George Papandreou, was described by the French sociologist Jean Ziegler as “a machine for systematic pillaging the country’s resources”.
The machine had infamous friends. The US Federal reserve Board is investigating the role of Goldman Sachs and other American hedge fund operators which gambled on the bankruptcy of Greece as public assets were sold off and its tax-evading rich deposited 360 billion euros in Swiss banks. The largest Greek ship-owners transferred their companies abroad. This haemorrhage of capital continues with the approval of the European central banks and governments.
At 11 per cent, Greece’s deficit is no higher than America’s. However, when the Papandreou government tried to borrow on the international capital market, it was effectively blocked by the American corporate ratings agencies, which “downgraded” Greece to “junk”. These same agencies gave triple-A ratings to billions of dollars in so-called sub-prime mortgage securities and so precipitated the economic collapse in 2008.
What has happened in Greece is theft on an epic, though not unfamiliar scale. In Britain, the “rescue” of banks like Northern Rock and the Royal Bank of Scotland has cost billions of pounds. Thanks to the former prime minister, Gordon Brown, and his passion for the avaricious instincts of the City of London, these gifts of public money were unconditional, and the bankers have continued to pay each other the booty they call bonuses. Under Britain’s political monoculture, they can do as they wish. In the United States, the situation is even more remarkable, reports investigative journalist David DeGraw, “[as the principal Wall Street banks] that destroyed the economy pay zero in taxes and get $33 billion in refunds”.
In Greece, as in America and Britain, the ordinary people have been told they must repay the debts of the rich and powerful who incurred the debts. Jobs, pensions and public services are to be slashed and burned, with privateers in charge. For the European Union and the IMF, the opportunity presents to “change the culture” and dismantle the social welfare of Greece, just as the IMF and the World Bank have “structurally adjusted” (impoverished and controlled) countries across the developing world.
Greece is hated for the same reason Yugoslavia had to be physically destroyed behind a pretence of protecting the people of Kosovo. Most Greeks are employed by the state, and the young and the unions comprise a popular alliance that has not been pacified; the colonels’ tanks on the campus of Athens University remain a political spectre. Such resistance is anathema to Europe’s central bankers and regarded as an obstruction to German capital’s need to capture markets in the aftermath of Germany’s troubled reunification.
In Britain, such has been the 30-year propaganda of an extreme economic theory known first as monetarism then as neo-liberalism, that the new prime minister can, like his predecessor, describe his demands that ordinary people pay the debts of crooks as “fiscally responsible”. The unmentionables are poverty and class. Almost a third of British children remain below the breadline. In working class Kentish Town in London, male life expectancy is 70. Two miles away, in Hampstead, it is 80. When Russia was subjected to similar “shock therapy” in the 1990s, life expectancy nosedived. A record 40 million impoverished Americans are currently receiving food stamps: that is, they cannot afford to feed themselves.
In the developing world, a system of triage imposed by the World Bank and the IMF has long determined whether people live or die. Whenever tariffs and food and fuel subsidies are eliminated by IMF diktat, small farmers know they have been declared expendable. The World Resources Institute estimates that the toll reaches 13-18 million child deaths every year. “This,” wrote the economist Lester C. Thurow, “is neither metaphor nor simile of war, but war itself.”
The same imperial forces have used horrific military weapons against stricken countries whose majorities are children, and approved torture as an instrument of foreign policy. It is a phenomenon of denial that none of these assaults on humanity, in which Britain is actively engaged, was allowed to intrude on the British election.
The people on the streets of Athens do not suffer this malaise. They are clear who the enemy is and they regard themselves as once again under foreign occupation. And once again, they are rising up, with courage. When David Cameron begins to cleave £6 billion from public services in Britain, he will be bargaining that Greece will not happen in Britain. We should prove him wrong
The Black Art Of ‘Master Illusions’ In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes the "master illusions" which have formed the basis of black propaganda and provided "false flags" for political chicanery and for wars and atrocities, such as Iraq and the Israeli assault on the Gaza peace flotilla.
How do wars begin? With a “master illusion”, according to Ralph McGehee, one of the CIA’s pioneers in “black propaganda”, known today as “news management”. In 1983, he described to me how the CIA had faked an “incident” that became the “conclusive proof of North Vietnam’s aggression”. This followed a claim, also fake, that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked an American warship in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964.
“The CIA,” he said, “loaded up a junk, a North Vietnamese junk, with communist weapons—the Agency maintains communist arsenals in the United States and around the world. They floated this junk off the coast of central Vietnam. Then they shot it up and made it look like a fire fight had taken place, and they brought in the American press. Based on this evidence, two Marine landing teams went into Danang and a week after that the American air force began regular bombing of North Vietnam.” An invasion that took three million lives was under way.
The Israelis have played this murderous game since 1948. The massacre of peace activists in international waters on 31 May was “spun” to the Israeli public for most of last week, preparing them for yet more murder by their government, with the unarmed flotilla of humanitarians described as terrorists or dupes of terrorists. The BBC was so intimidated that it reported the atrocity primarily as a “potential public relations disaster for Israel”, the perspective of the killers, and a disgrace for journalism.
A similar master illusion currently preoccupies Asian governments. On 20 May, South Korea announced that it had “overwhelming evidence” that one of its warships, the Cheonan, had been sunk by a torpedo fired by a North Korean submarine in March with the loss of 46 sailors. The United States maintains 28,000 troops in South Korea, where popular sentiment has long backed a détente with Pyongyang.
On 26 May, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton flew to Seoul and demanded that the “international community must respond” to “North Korea’s outrage”. She flew on to Japan, where the new “threat” from North Korea conveniently eclipsed the briefly independent foreign policy of Japanese prime minister Yukio Hatoyama, elected last year with popular opposition to America’s permanent military occupation of Japan. The “overwhelming evidence” is a torpedo propeller that “had been corroding at least for several months,” reported the Korea Times. In April, the director of South Korea’s national intelligence, Won See-hoon, told a parliamentary committee that there was no evidence linking the sinking of the Cheonan to North Korea. The defence minister agreed. The head of South Korea’s military marine operations said, “No North Korean warships have been detected [in] the waters where the accident took place.” The reference to “accident” suggests the warship struck a reef and broke in two.
To the American media, North Korea’s guilt is beyond doubt, just as North Vietnam’s guilt was beyond doubt, just as Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, just as Israel can terrorise with impunity. However, unlike Vietnam and Iraq, North Korea has nuclear weapons, which helps explain why it has not been attacked, not yet: a salutary lesson to other countries, such as Iran, currently in the crosshairs.
In Britain, we have our own master illusions. Imagine someone on state benefits caught claiming £40,000 of taxpayers’ money in a second home scam. A prison sentence would almost certainly follow. David Laws, chief secretary to the Treasury, does the same and is described as follows:
“I have always admired his intelligence, his sense of public duty and his personal integrity” (Nick Clegg, deputy prime minister). “You are a good and honourable man. I am sure that throughout you have been motivated by wanting to protect your privacy rather than anything else.” (David Cameron, prime minister ). Laws is “a man of quite exceptional nobility” (Julian Glover, the Guardian). A “brilliant mind” (BBC).
The Oxbridge club and its associate members in politics and the media have tried to link Laws’s “error of judgement” and “naivety” to his “right to privacy” as a gay man, an irrelevance. The “brilliant mind” is a wealthy Cambridge-groomed investment banker and gilts trader devoted to the noble task of cutting the public services of mostly poor and honest people.
Now imagine another public official, the force behind one of the great war criminals and liars. This official “spun” the illegal invasion of a defenceless country that resulted in the deaths of at least a million people and the dispossession of many more: in effect, the crushing of a human society. If this was the Balkans or Africa, he would very likely have been indicted by the International Criminal Court.
But crime pays for the clubbable. In quick step with the Laws affair, this truth was demonstrated by the continuing celebration of Alastair Campbell, whose frequent media appearances provide a vicarious thrill for the liberal intelligentsia. To the Guardian, Campbell is “bullish, sometimes misdirected, but unafraid to press on where others might have faltered”. The Guardian’s immediate interest is its “exclusive” publication of Campbell’s “politically explosive” and “uncut” diaries. Here is a flavour: “Saturday 14 May. I called Peter [Mandelson] and asked why he didn’t return my calls yesterday. ‘You know why.’ ‘No, I don’t.’ He said he was incandescent at my Newsnight interview …’ ”
In a promotional interview with the Guardian, Campbell dispensed more of this dated incest, referring just once to the bloodbath for which he was a principal apologist. “Did Iraq lose us support in 2005?” he asked rhetorically. “Without a doubt …” Thus, a criminal tragedy equal in scale to the Rwandan genocide was dismissed as a “loss” for New Labour: a master illusion of notable profanity.
It’s been a week since Rolling Stone published its article on General Stanley McChrystal that eventually led to him being fired by President Obama. Since the article came out, Rolling Stone and the reporter who broke the story, Michael Hastings, have come under attack in the mainstream media for violating the so-called "ground rules" of journalism. But the investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger says Hastings was simply doing what all true journalists need to do.
The charge of the media brigade In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes how an all-pervasive corporate media culture in the United States prepares the way for a permanent state of war. And yet for all the column inches and broadcast hours filled, the brainwashing is not succeeding. And this, he suggests, is 'America's greatest virtue'.
The TV anchorwoman was conducting a split screen interview with a journalist who had volunteered to be a witness at the execution of a man on death row in Utah for 25 years. “He had a choice,” said the journalist, “lethal injection or firing squad.” “Wow!” said the anchorwoman. Cue a blizzard of commercials for fast food, teeth whitener, stomach stapling, the new Cadillac. This was followed by the war in Afghanistan presented by a correspondent sweating in a flak jacket. “Hey, it’s hot,” he said on the split screen. “Take care,” said the anchorwoman. “Coming up” was a reality show in which the camera watched a man serving solitary confinement in a prison’s “hell hole”.
The next morning I arrived at the Pentagon for an interview with one of President Obama’s senior war-making officials. There was a long walk along shiny corridors hung with pictures of generals and admirals festooned in ribbons. The interview room was purpose-built. It was blue and arctic cold, and windowless and featureless except for a flag and two chairs: props to create the illusion of a place of authority. The last time I was in a room like this in the Pentagon a colonel called Hum stopped my interview with another war-making official when I asked why so many innocent civilians were being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then it was in the thousands; now it is more than a million. “Stop tape!” he ordered.
This time there was no Colonel Hum, merely a polite dismissal of soldiers’ testimony that it was a “common occurrence” that troops were ordered to “kill every mother fucker”. The Pentagon, says the Associated Press, spends $4.7 billion on public relations: that is, winning the hearts and minds not of recalcitrant Afghan tribesmen but of Americans. This is known as “information dominance” and PR people are “information warriors”.
American imperial power flows through a media culture to which the word imperial is anathema. To broach it is heresy. Colonial campaigns are really “wars of perception”, wrote the present commander, General David Petraeus, in which the media popularises the terms and conditions. “Narrative” is the accredited word because it is post-modern and bereft of context and truth. The narrative of Iraq is that the war is won, and the narrative of Afghanistan is that it is a “good war”. That neither is true is beside the point. They promote a “grand narrative” of a constant threat and the need for permanent war. “We are living in a world of cascading and intertwined threats,” wrote the celebrated New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, “that have the potential to turn our country upside down at any moment.”
Friedman supports an attack on Iran, whose independence is intolerable. This is the psychopathic vanity of great power which Martin Luther King described as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world”. He was then shot dead.
The psychopathic is applauded across popular, corporate culture, from the TV death watch of a man choosing a firing squad over lethal injection to the Oscar winning Hurt Locker and a new acclaimed war documentary Restrepo. Directors of both films deny and dignify the violence of invasion as “apolitical”. And yet behind the cartoon facade is serious purpose. The US is engaged militarily in 75 countries. There are some 900 US military bases across the world, many at the gateways to the sources of fossil fuels.
But there is a problem. Most Americans are opposed to these wars and to the billions of dollars spent on them. That their brainwashing so often fails in America’s greatest virtue. This is frequnetly due to courageous mavericks, especially those who emerge from the centrifuge of power. In 1971, military analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked documents known as the Pentagon Papers which put the lie to almost everything two presidents had claimed about Vietnam. Many of these insiders are not even renegades. I have a section in my address book filled with the names of former officers of the CIA, who have spoken out. They have no equivalent in Britain.
In 1993, C. Philip Liechty, the CIA operations officer in Jakarta at the time of Indonesia’s murderous invasion of East Timor, described to me how President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had given the dictator Suharto “ a green light” and secretly supplied the arms and logistics he needed. As the first reports of massacres arrived at his desk, he began to turn. “It was wrong,” he said. “I felt badly.”
Melvin Goodman is now a scholar at Johns Hopkins University in Washington. He was in the CIA more than 40 years and rose to be a senior Soviet analyst. When we met the other day, he described the conduct of the cold war as a series of gross exaggerations of Soviet “aggressiveness” that wilfully ignored the intelligence that the Soviets were committed to avoid nuclear war at all costs. Declassified official files on both sides of the Atlantic support this view. “What mattered to the hardliners in Washington,” he said, “was how a perceived threat could be exploited.” The present secretary of defence, Robert Gates, as deputy director of the CIA in the 1980s, had constantly hyped the “Soviet menace” and is, says Goodman, doing the same today “on Afghanistan, North Korea and Iran”.
Little has changed. In America, in 1939, W.H. Auden wrote:
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives […]
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong
Beyond the dross John Pilger and Steve Platt first worked together during the 1991 Gulf War, when they shared platforms at Media Workers Against the War rallies. Platt, who had just taken over as editor of the New Statesman, asked Pilger to contribute a regular column for the magazine – which he has continued under different editors and proprietors ever since. Best known for his hard‑hitting television and newspaper reports, and his excoriating analysis of the global warmongers, injustice and poverty, Pilger discusses here with Platt their shared craft of journalism
Steve Platt As an opener, I suppose we need to define our terms. What does ‘radical journalism’ mean to you, in principle and in practice? Did you see yourself as ‘radical’ from the outset or did that come through experience? Indeed, is ‘radical’ a term you would choose to use? I’d also be interested in your views on how things have changed since you first came into journalism. For all the proliferation of outlets today, would the young John Pilger find it easier or harder to find one?
John Pilger ‘Radical’ has been too often appropriated by those who are not. I describe myself simply as a journalist. It’s an honourable term if you retain your independence, if you are an agent of people, never of power, reporting the world from the ground up, never from the top down.
I grew up in a family that believed in supporting the underdog: is that radical? I took that principle and a strong anti-authoritarianism into journalism. I like to think that the origins of my anti-authoritarianism came from my great-great grandfather, who was transported to Australia from County Ruscommon for ‘uttering unlawful oaths’.
I worked my cadetship on a right-wing newspaper in Sydney that might have been a setting for Ben Hecht’s The Front Page. The volcanic proprietor, Sir Frank Packer, counted the paperclips and routinely fired the sub-editors if he didn’t like the first edition – or if his horse had lost.
That said, it was a superb place to learn the craft. I tried almost everything, from crime reporting to sport; by the age of 21 I was a deputy chief sub-editor. It was only when I arrived in England in the 1960s and was sent to report on a world I never imagined that I became what might be called ‘radical’. Since then, much has changed for young journalists, and much has not. A young me would still require the determination to navigate through an essentially conservative or ‘corporate’ system.
Platt Would you agree that that conventional cadetship is all but disappearing from journalism today? NUJ president Jeremy Dear (Red Pepper, Jan/Feb 2010) recently cited a prediction by media analyst Clare Enders that half of the country’s 1,300 local papers will close by 2013, with the loss of 20,000 jobs. The ‘conventional’ route into journalism these days seems to consist of a willingness to ‘churn’ (to use Nick Davies’ word) the same unoriginal material for a variety of outlets, on an insecure contract and a pittance in pay. How does the independent journalist deal with that?
Pilger I agree that the idea of a cadetship – in effect, a craft apprenticeship – is all but lost. I have never been convinced that graduate entry into journalism is right; too many media colleges are run by ex-Fleet Street types or ex-BBC people who merely recycle corporate journalism’s disguises. There are honourable exceptions, of course; I am associated with Lincoln University, whose media people have challenged the notion of ideological ‘war journalism’ as the standard for reporting conflict. I admire that.
Yes, the conventional route into journalism these days is a willingness to ‘churn’; it’s also a willingness to adopt a cynicism about readers, viewers and listeners that the young are encouraged to believe ordains them as proper journalists. That’s not new. When scepticism about power challenges this you have the making of an independent journalist. This often requires an iron determination to keep your principles and not be deceived by siren calls to BBC-type ‘professionalism’.
Platt How does one get round the fact that all of the major news outlets pursue broadly similar approaches? Independent journalism isn’t much use without a vehicle through which to express it. Where is the media of today prepared to give the modern independent journalist his or her head in the way that the Daily Mirror gave you the freedom to report from Vietnam and elsewhere in the 1960s?
Pilger The Daily Mirror of the 1960s/70s is unlikely to come back – although it did so for 18 memorable months from October 2001 under Piers Morgan, proving that nothing is lost forever. For young journalists, the internet and the technology to make films easily (if at times chaotically) is their ‘vehicle’. During the invasion of Iraq, Jo Wilding, a young Englishwoman, filed to her own website some of the best eyewitness war reporting I have read. She succeeded where the embedded reporters failed. Her independence made her journalism believable.
Platt I think it’s not just the Daily Mirror of the 1960s that is unlikely to return but the sort of mass readership that went with it. In the 1960s it was possible for a single feature to have an impact that is hard to imagine today. This was even more so with television. Think of Cathy Come Home, which led to the formation of Shelter, and its impact on attitudes – and public policy – towards the homeless. Does the internet and new technology have the same potential? And how do we filter out the stuff that is meaningful and substantial from the new oceans of dross?
Pilger Yes, sifting through the media dross is a big job, but there was always dross. I don’t agree that powerful popular journalism can’t make a splash these days. The Mirror following 9/11 demonstrated this (‘Blair: Blood on his hands’ and others); and the Mirror played an important part in helping to galvanise the anti-war movement in the build-up to the Iraq invasion. On television, think of the recent Dispatches that illuminated the true face of former New Labour ministers. Yes, there are changing trends and umpteen digital channels, but most digital TV is a stream of sameness. Documentaries that are not themselves dross and have something to report and say would draw the public if they were given a peak-time slot. Remember the public is far more aware than it was in the 1960s.
Platt Some people in the anti-war movement might say that the Mirror piggy-backed on what was already a huge upsurge of popular protest – and of course neither the Mirror nor the anti-war movement in general proved capable of taking that protest further once the war had started. I’m interested in how you think a running story (or a continuing injustice) can be kept in the public eye, which relates to how an independent journalist or campaigner can maintain interest or attention beyond the immediate ‘high points’ such as the 2003 protests. A lot of people’s experience of 2003 has finished up being a negative one, in the sense that in the end not even one or two million people on the streets could stop the war.
Pilger I think you are quite wrong to say the anti-war movement proved incapable of taking the protest forward once the invasion had happened. Stop the War in Britain is a remarkable organisation, which has played an unerring role in educating and supporting a consistent and growing public opposition to the war and Blair in the face of the disintegration of the Labour Party and a blizzard of disinformation, not to mention the hand-wringing of those who believed one demonstration would deter Blair’s fanaticism.
The Mirror’s role in the mobilisation for the anti-war effort in 2003 was certainly unusual but it was within an extraordinary tradition. In 1945, the Mirror mobilised its readers (and most of the electorate) to ‘Vote for them’ – ‘them’ meaning the returning troops and code for a reformist Britain.
Platt Why do you think it is that the left hasn’t managed to develop and sustain its own media in the way that the right has?
Pilger Most of the press is devoted to a corporate status quo, the Guardian included. Broadcasting is no different; the BBC has an enduring right-wing editorial agenda, regardless of its waffle about impartiality. The Tories nationalised the BBC so they could control it. And governments have, more or less. The left – regardless of its support – will never find a home in the corporate media; it must create its own, which it is doing on the web.
Platt You were one of the first journalists, if I remember rightly, to set up his own website. But am I right in thinking that it has been primarily a ‘shop window’ for your work in other media – film and print? As far as I know, you’ve never produced original work for the web. Have you considered, for example, blogging yourself – and do you read the blogs of others?
Pilger My website was set up by a group of young enthusiasts at what was then Central TV. I was an appreciative bystander. They launched me into cyberspace. One of them, Ollie Doward, has managed the site ever since. As for blogging? I spend too much time on my journalism and other commitments to blog. Also, there is an important difference between good journalism and blogging. Of course, there are excellent bloggers – I’ve mentioned Jo Wilding, for example – but there are too many middle-of-the-night, top-of-the-head blowhards.
Platt Do you follow anyone regularly on the web – or any particular websites? One of the things that strikes me persistently is how little truly original content there is out there: a plethora of regurgitated material and (too often right-wing, bigoted) opinion but far too little evidence of the authors getting up and talking to people, which is at the core of your own – and all good – journalism. What would be your advice to young journalists seeking to make the best use of the web?
Pilger The web is central to what I do now. I’ve long changed the habit of a lifetime. I open a newspaper – the Guardian – only after I have looked at at least four or five websites. I don’t agree with you about the web. It has some quite brilliant sites: trawls/digests some of them, yes, but many with original journalism. I’m long fed up with the right-wing press and with formulaic TV news. Have a look at the links on my website, many of them fine journals in their own right: www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partID=45.
Platt Do you find that the interactive aspects of the web have greatly increased your own interaction with people over your work? Where once there were only letters and perhaps public meetings, there are now many more – and much more immediate – forms of communication and contact. Not just a story but a campaign can now go global in an instant.
Pilger Email has made a real difference, especially when I’m travelling. And of course there are the mailing lists associated with the web and all the other wondrous mechanisms for mobilising and informing people. I have just downloaded valuable material from Wikileaks – the equivalent would have taken me weeks or months to unearth, if at all. But these are still only tools.
You refer to when there were ‘once’ public meetings. Are you not aware that the public meeting has never been more popular? Over Easter I attended (in Melbourne) what can only be described as a festival of debate and free speech on issues that the mass media ignores or suppresses. At each event there were up to 500 people present. Public meetings are the real test of public awareness, because they require us to get up from our computers and to take action.
Platt How do you feel about the description of yourself as a ‘campaigning journalist’? You’ve mentioned the anti-war movement. To what extent do you see yourself as an active campaigner, part of a movement rather than just an individual reporter? And to what extent do you think journalists should be involved in campaign activities? Is there a conflict?
Pilger I don’t use the term ‘campaigning journalist’; but as it often comes in good faith, I accept it. I am, above all, an independent journalist, which I have already described.
Platt A letter in a recent issue of the New Statesman, aimed at you personally, levels a complaint that is familiar to radical journalists and the left in general: ‘John Pilger tells us what he is against but fails to set out what he is for, and how to achieve it.’ How do you respond to that sort of criticism?
Pilger That letter was about my column on Haiti. Did you read the letter the following week which answered it? That writer described all that my article was ‘for’ – for example, I am for people living in secure structures that do not collapse because they are jerry-built; I am for people not having poverty imposed on them, and so on.
My job is to help give people the most essential power of all: truthful information, without which nothing can change. This can at times be a daunting task. Through all my work there runs a transparent set of positive, practical and achievable principles which, I believe, are necessary to build a new world. Unlike those who look for excuses, who cry out to be ‘led’, the great majority of my readers and viewers have no difficulty in understanding this.
Platt Of course the truth can set you free – and it’s certainly an essential prerequisite in any attempt to build a new world. But it isn’t enough in itself, is it? Eventually someone has to get their hands dirty and start building, even if it’s not the people who write about it. Are principles enough – or does there have to be practice?
Pilger I think I have done my share of ‘getting my hands dirty’ in order to produce a positive result. Cambodia. East Timor. Palestine. The thalidomide children. The struggle of indigenous people in Australia. Et cetera. If you go to a country that doesn’t have the privileges and, yes, freedoms our society still has, where struggle is raw and dangerous, and you plead, ‘Oh what can you do?’ people will look at you dumbfounded, because the question simply doesn’t arise. They know what to do. And so should we.
Platt Which of the many stories are you are most pleased (if that is the right word) to have covered in your career – and which would you have most liked to but didn’t?
Pilger It’s difficult to single out one that pleased me more than others. But several endure in the memory – Cambodia and East Timor, for example. The impact of the films I made there – five films in Cambodia – had real and positive consequences for the lives of many people. In my book, Heroes, I describe in some detail what happened in Cambodia. Year Zero raised, unsolicited, some $45 million, and led to the restoration of life in numerous forms.
In Britain, my TV and Mirror reports in support of the ‘Y List’ of Thalidomide victims led to their compensation. The Y List were working class children whose mothers had no record of taking the drug and were left out of the original settlement; the X List were mostly middle class children whose mothers had kept the prescription and had the support of the Sunday Times.
My reports about the maternity unit at Hackney Hospital, where conditions were so bad women had died in childbirth, led to its closure and the building of a new unit. I have reported extensively on Australia’s indigenous population, the poorest in the world. This has made me both friends and enemies in my homeland. Last year, I received the Sydney Peace Prize, Australia’s human rights prize. Accepting it in the city where I was born and grew up gave me particular pleasure.
Platt You remain notably optimistic about the potential for journalism in particular and people in general to change the world. So what is the story that is crying out for the attention of the young and optimistic independent/radical journalist of today?
Pilger The issue isn’t really one of optimism versus pessimism, or hope versus despair. (Woody Allen said he felt much better when he gave up hope.) These can replace rational thinking and prevent us from looking beyond the everyday cynicism and propaganda of corporate politics and the media and recognising the gains made in our lifetime by us: not least in our personal lives. The danger these days is manufactured illusion, presided over by a corporate cult of the ‘eternal present’, as Time magazine likes to call it.
The media in all its ephemeral and hi-tech forms is at the centre of this, especially in corrupting political language, fixing the boundaries of debate, promoting rapacious power and seeking to persuade us that ‘nothing can be done’. So I would say the story crying out for the attention of young journalists is propaganda in the media age: that is to say, all forms of the media, including advertising and corporate public relations.
PR Week once estimated that more than half of all newspaper content was PR-generated, particularly in the City and sports pages. The corporatising, or appropriation, of news and facts and truth, and the dereliction of public memory, are probably the most critical issues today – for one thing, they lead us to unnecessary war as a permanent state removed in distance and culture from our everyday lives.
This is barbaric, of course, as is its corollary: unnecessary poverty. We are not automatons; we have no choice but to deal with these challenges as human beings and to support those who struggle on our behalf.
In an article for the Guardian on the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, John Pilger describes the 'progression of lies' from the dust of that detonated city, to the wars of today - and the threatened attack on Iran.
When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then walked down to the river and met a man called Yukio, whose chest was still etched with the pattern of the shirt he was wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped.
He and his family still lived in a shack thrown up in the dust of an atomic desert. He described a huge flash over the city, "a bluish light, something like an electrical short", after which wind blew like a tornado and black rain fell. "I was thrown on the ground and noticed only the stalks of my flowers were left. Everything was still and quiet, and when I got up, there were people naked, not saying anything. Some of them had no skin or hair. I was certain I was dead." Nine years later, when I returned to look for him, he was dead from leukaemia.
In the immediate aftermath of the bomb, the allied occupation authorities banned all mention of radiation poisoning and insisted that people had been killed or injured only by the bomb's blast. It was the first big lie. "No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin" said the front page of the New York Times, a classic of disinformation and journalistic abdication, which the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett put right with his scoop of the century. "I write this as a warning to the world," reported Burchett in the Daily Express, having reached Hiroshima after a perilous journey, the first correspondent to dare. He described hospital wards filled with people with no visible injuries but who were dying from what he called "an atomic plague". For telling this truth, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared - and vindicated.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act on an epic scale. It was premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality. For this reason its apologists have sought refuge in the mythology of the ultimate "good war", whose "ethical bath", as Richard Drayton called it, has allowed the west not only to expiate its bloody imperial past but to promote 60 years of rapacious war, always beneath the shadow of The Bomb.
The most enduring lie is that the atomic bomb was dropped to end the war in the Pacific and save lives. "Even without the atomic bombing attacks," concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, "air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that ... Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."
The National Archives in Washington contain US government documents that chart Japanese peace overtures as early as 1943. None was pursued. A cable sent on May 5, 1945 by the German ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted by the US dispels any doubt that the Japanese were desperate to sue for peace, including "capitulation even if the terms were hard". Instead, the US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was "fearful" that the US air force would have Japan so "bombed out" that the new weapon would not be able "to show its strength". He later admitted that "no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb". His foreign policy colleagues were eager "to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip". General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified: "There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis." The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Truman voiced his satisfaction with the "overwhelming success" of "the experiment".
Since 1945, the United States is believed to have been on the brink of using nuclear weapons at least three times. In waging their bogus "war on terror", the present governments in Washington and London have declared they are prepared to make "pre-emptive" nuclear strikes against non-nuclear states. With each stroke toward the midnight of a nuclear Armageddon, the lies of justification grow more outrageous. Iran is the current "threat". But Iran has no nuclear weapons and the disinformation that it is planning a nuclear arsenal comes largely from a discredited CIA-sponsored Iranian opposition group, the MEK - just as the lies about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction originated with the Iraqi National Congress, set up by Washington.
The role of western journalism in erecting this straw man is critical. That America's Defence Intelligence Estimate says "with high confidence" that Iran gave up its nuclear weapons programme in 2003 has been consigned to the memory hole. That Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never threatened to "wipe Israel off the map" is of no interest. But such has been the mantra of this media "fact" that in his recent, obsequious performance before the Israeli parliament, Gordon Brown alluded to it as he threatened Iran, yet again.
This progression of lies has brought us to one of the most dangerous nuclear crises since 1945, because the real threat remains almost unmentionable in western establishment circles and therefore in the media. There is only one rampant nuclear power in the Middle East and that is Israel. The heroic Mordechai Vanunu tried to warn the world in 1986 when he smuggled out evidence that Israel was building as many as 200 nuclear warheads. In defiance of UN resolutions, Israel is today clearly itching to attack Iran, fearful that a new American administration might, just might, conduct genuine negotiations with a nation the west has defiled since Britain and America overthrew Iranian democracy in 1953.
In the New York Times on July 18, the Israeli historian Benny Morris, once considered a liberal and now a consultant to his country's political and military establishment, threatened "an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland". This would be mass murder. For a Jew, the irony cries out.
The question begs: are the rest of us to be mere bystanders, claiming, as good Germans did, that "we did not know"? Do we hide ever more behind what Richard Falk has called "a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted violence"? Catching war criminals is fashionable again. Radovan Karadzic stands in the dock, but Sharon and Olmert, Bush and Blair do not. Why not? The memory of Hiroshima requires an answer.
Tony Blair must be prosecuted In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger writes about the "paramount war crime" defined by the Nuremberg judges in 1946 and its relevance to the case of Tony Blair, whose shared responsibility for the Iraq invasion resulted in the deaths of more than a million people. New developments in international and domestic political attitudes towards war crimes mean that Blair is now 'Britain's Kissinger'.
Tony Blair must be prosecuted, not indulged like his mentor Peter Mandelson. Both have produced self-serving memoirs for which they have been paid fortunes. Blair’s will appear next month and earn him £4.6 million. Now consider Britain’s Proceeds of Crime Act. Blair consired in and executed an unprovoked war of aggression against a defenceless country, which the Nuremberg judges in 1946 described as the “paramount war crime”. This has caused, according to scholarly studies, the deaths of more than a million people, a figure that exceeds the Fordham University estimate of deaths in the Rwandan genocide.
In addition, four million Iraqis have been forced to flee their homes and a majority of children have descended into malnutrition and trauma. Cancer rates near the cities of Fallujah, Najaf and Basra (the latter “liberated” by the British) are now revealed as higher than those at Hiroshima. “UK forces used about 1.9 metric tons of depleted uranium ammunition in the Iraq war in 2003,” the Defence Secretary Liam Fox told parliament on 22 July. A range of toxic “anti-personnel” weapons, such as cluster bombs, was employed by British and American forces.
Such carnage was justified with lies that have been repeatedly exposed. On 29 January 2003, Blair told parliament, “We do know of links between al-Qaida and Iraq …”. Last month, the former head of the intelligence service, MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, told the Chilcot inquiry, “There is no credible intelligence to suggest that connection … [it was the invasion] that gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad”. Asked to what extent the invasion exacerbated the threat to Britain from terrorism, she replied, “Substantially”. The bombings in London on 7 July 2005 were a direct consequence of Blair’s actions.
Documents released by the High Court show that Blair allowed British citizens to be abducted and tortured. The then foreign secretary, Jack Straw, decided in January 2002 that Guantanamo was the “best way” to ensure UK nationals were “securely held”.
Instead of remorse, Blair has demonstrated a voracious and secretive greed. Since stepping down as prime minister in 2007, he has accumulated an estimated £20 million, much of it as a result of his ties with the Bush administration. The House f Commons Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, which vets jobs taken by former ministers, was pressured not to make public Blair’s “consultancy” deals with the Kuwaiti royal family and the South Korean oil giant UI Energy Corporation. He gets £2 million a year “advising” the American investment bank J P Morgan and undisclosed sums from financial services companies. He makes millions from speeches, including reportedly £200,000 for one speech in China.
In his unpaid but expenses-rich role as the West’s “peace envoy” in the Middle East, Blair is, in effect, a voice of Israel, which awarded him a $1 million “peace prize”. In other words, his wealth has grown rapidly since he launched, with George W. Bush, the bloodbath in Iraq.
His collaborators are numerous. The Cabinet in March 2003 knew a great deal about the conspiracy to attack Iraq. Jack Straw, later appointed “justice secretary”, suppressed the relevant Cabinet minutes in defiance of an order by the Information Commissioner to release them. Most of those now running for the Labour Party leadership supported Blair’s epic crime, rising as one to salute his final appearance in the Commons. As foreign secretary, David Miliband, sought to cover Britain’s complicity in torture, and promoted Iran as the next “threat”.
Journalists who once fawned on Blair as “mystical” and amplified his vainglorious bids now pretend they were his critics all along. As for the media’s gulling of the public, only the Observer’s David Rose, to his great credit, has apologised. The Wikileaks’ exposes, released with a moral objective of truth with justice, have been bracing for a public force-fed on complicit, lobby journalism. Verbose celebrity historians like Niall Ferguson, who rejoiced in Blair’s rejuvenation of “enlightened” imperialism, remain silent on the “moral truancy”, as Pankaj Mishra wrote, “of [those] paid to intelligently interpret the contemporary world”.
Is it wishful thinking that Blair will be collared? Just as the Cameron government understands the “threat” of a law that makes Britain a risky stopover for Israeli war criminals, a similar risk awaits Blair in a number of countries and jurisdictions, at least of being apprehended and questioned. He is now Britain’s Kissinger, who has long planned his travel outside the United States with the care of a fugitive.
Two recent events add weight to this. On 15 June, the International Criminal Court made the landmark decision of adding aggression to its list of war crimes to be prosecuted. This is defined as a “crime committed by a political or military leader which by its character, gravity and scale constituted a manifest violation of the [United Nations] Charter”. International lawyers described this as a “giant leap”. Britain is a signatory to the Rome statute that created the court and is bound by its decisions.
On 21 July, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, standing at the Commons despatch box, declared the invasion of Iraq illegal. For all the later “clarification” that he was speaking personally, he had made “a statement that the international court would be interested in”, said Philippe Sands, professor of international law at University College London.
Tony Blair came from Britain’s upper middle classes who, having rejoiced in his unctuous ascendancy, might now reflect on the principles of right and wrong they require of their own children. The suffering of the children of Iraq will remain a spectre haunting Britain while Blair remains free to profit.
Veteran investigative journalist John Pilger joins Riz Khan.
There is no pullout. The Pentagon has spent something like 4.5billion dollars over in the last 5 years on spin - media operations - and this is a pretty good example. There is no pullout. There is something called re branding. 'Combat operations' have become 'stability operations'. When you have major general Stephen Landslow, the spokesman in Baghdad, saying, as he said the the other day, in effect nothing has changed, you get an idea. There will 50,000 troops in 94 bases. There will be 100,00 so called contractors - mercenaries - and they will be increased. The US has no intention what so ever in leaving Iraq and pulling its military out. Its military isn't being pulled out. Its what the CIA used to called 'Master Illusion'
Flying the flag, faking the news Loud noises from Washington about a US pull-out from Iraq are a poor disguise for America’s determination to keep waging war. And the same sort of spin is at work here in Britain
Edward Bernays, the American nephew of Sigmund Freud, is said to have invented modern propaganda. During the First World War, he was one of a group of influential liberals who mounted a secret government campaign to persuade reluctant Americans to send an army to the bloodbath in Europe. In his book Propaganda, published in 1928, Bernays wrote that the "intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society", and that the manipulators "constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country". Instead of propaganda, he coined the euphemism "public relations".
The American tobacco industry hired Bernays to convince women that they should smoke in public. By associating smoking with women's liberation, he made cigarettes "torches of freedom". In 1954, he conjured a communist menace in Guatemala as an excuse for overthrowing the democratically elected government, whose social reforms were threatening the United Fruit Company's monopoly of the banana trade. He called it a "liberation".
Bernays was no rabid right-winger. He was an elitist liberal who believed that "engineering public consent" was for the greater good. This could be achieved by the creation of "false realities" which then became "news events". Here are examples of how it is done these days.
False reality The last US combat troops have left Iraq "as promised, on schedule", according to President Barack Obama. The TV news has been filled with cinematic images of the "last US soldiers", silhouetted against the dawn light, crossing the border into Kuwait.
Fact They have not left. At least 50,000 troops will continue to operate from 94 bases. American air assaults are unchanged, as are special forces' assassinations. The number of "military contractors" is 100,000 and rising. Most Iraqi oil is now under direct foreign control.
False reality BBC presenters have described the departing US troops as a "sort of victorious army" that has achieved "a remarkable change in [Iraq's] fortunes". Their commander, General David Petraeus, is a "celebrity", "charming", "savvy" and "remarkable".
Fact There is no victory of any sort. There is a catastrophic disaster, and attempts to present it as otherwise are a model of Bernays's campaign to "rebrand" the slaughter of the First World War as "necessary" and "noble". In 1980, Ronald Reagan, running for president, rebranded the invasion of Vietnam, in which up to three million people died, as a "noble cause", a theme taken up enthusiastically by Hollywood. Today's Iraq war movies have a similar purging theme: the invader as both idealist and victim.
False reality It is not known how many Iraqis have died. They are "countless", or maybe "in the tens of thousands".
Fact As a direct consequence of the Anglo-American-led invasion, a million Iraqis have died. This figure, from Opinion Research Business, follows peer-reviewed research by Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC, whose methods were secretly affirmed as "best practice" and "robust" by the Blair government's chief scientific adviser. This is rarely reported or presented to "charming" American generals. Neither is the dispossession of four million Iraqis, the malnourishment of most Iraqi children, the epidemic of mental illness, or the poisoning of the environment.
False reality The British economy has a deficit of billions which must be reduced with cuts in public services and regressive taxation, in a spirit of "we're all in this together".
Fact We are not in this together. What is remarkable about this PR triumph is that only 18 months ago, the diametric opposite filled TV screens and front pages. Then, in a state of shock, truth became unavoidable, if briefly. The Wall Street and City of London trough was on full view for the first time, along with the venality of once-celebrated snouts. Billions in public money went to inept and crooked organisations known as banks, which were spared debt liability by their Labour government sponsors.
Within a year, record profits and personal bonuses were posted and the "black hole" was no longer the responsibility of the banks, whose debt is to be paid by those not in any way responsible: the public. The received media wisdom of this "necessity" is now a chorus, from the BBC to the Sun. A masterstroke, Bernays would surely say.
False reality Ed Miliband offers a "genuine alternative" as leader of the Labour Party.
Fact Miliband, like his brother and almost all those standing for the Labour leadership, is immersed in the effluent of New Labour. As a New Labour MP and minister, he did not refuse to serve under Blair or to speak out against Labour's persistent warmongering. He now calls the invasion of Iraq a "profound mistake". Calling it a mistake insults the memory and the dead. It was a crime, of which the evidence is voluminous. He has nothing new to say about the other colonial wars, none of them mistakes. Neither has he demanded basic social justice - that those who caused the recession clear up the mess and that Britain's fabulously rich corporate minority be taxed seriously, starting with Rupert Murdoch.
The good news is that false realities often fail when the public trusts its own critical intelligence. Two classified documents recently released by WikiLeaks express the CIA's concern that the populations of European countries, which oppose their governments' war policies, are not succumbing to the usual propaganda spun through the media.
For the rulers of the world, this is a conundrum, because their unaccountable power rests on the false reality that no popular resistance works. And it does.
Why Wikileaks must be protected In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes the importance of Wikileaks as a new and fearless form of investigative journalism that threatens both the war-makers and their apologists, notably journalists who are state stenographers.
On 26 July, Wikileaks released thousands of secret US military files on the war in Afghanistan. Cover-ups, a secret assassination unit and the killing of civilians are documented. In file after file, the brutalities echo the colonial past. From Malaya and Vietnam to Bloody Sunday and Basra, little has changed. The difference is that today there is an extraordinary way of knowing how faraway societies are routinely ravaged in our name. Wikileaks has acquired records of six years of civilian killing for both Afghanistan and Iraq, of which those published in the Guardian, Der Spiegel and the New York Times are a fraction.
There is understandably hysteria on high, with demands that the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is “hunted down” and “rendered”. In Washington, I interviewed a senior Defence Department official and asked, “Can you give a guarantee that the editors of Wikileaks and the editor in chief, who is not American, will not be subjected to the kind of manhunt that we read about in the media?” He replied, “It’s not my position to give guarantees on anything”. He referred me to the “ongoing criminal investigation” of a US soldier, Bradley Manning, an alleged whistleblower. In a nation that claims its constitution protects truth-tellers, the Obama administration is pursuing and prosecuting more whistleblowers than any of its modern predecessors. A Pentagon document states bluntly that US intelligence intends to “fatally marginalise” Wikileaks. The preferred tactic is smear, with corporate journalists ever ready to play their part.
On 31 July, the American celebrity reporter Christiane Amanapour interviewed Secretary of Defence Robert Gates on the ABC network. She invited Gates to describe to her viewers his “anger” at Wikileaks. She echoed the Pentagon line that “this leak has blood on its hands”, thereby cueing Gates to find Wikileaks “guilty” of “moral culpability”. Such hypocrisy coming from a regime drenched in the blood of the people of Afghanistan and Iraq – as its own files make clear – is apparently not for journalistic enquiry. This is hardly surprising now that a new and fearless form of public accountability, which Wikileaks represents, threatens not only the war-makers but their apologists.
Their current propaganda is that Wikileaks is “irresponsible”. Earlier this year, before it released the cockpit video of an American Apache gunship killing 19 civilians in Iraq, including journalists and children, Wikileaks sent people to Baghdad to find the families of the victims in order to prepare them. Prior to the release of last month’s Afghan War Logs, Wikileaks wrote to the White House asking that it identify names that might draw reprisals. There was no reply. More than 15,000 files were withheld and these, says Assange, will not be released until they have been scrutinised “line by line” so that names of those at risk can be deleted.
The pressure on Assange himself seems unrelenting. In his homeland, Australia, the shadow foreign minister, Julie Bishop, has said that if her right-wing coalition wins the general election on 21 August, “appropriate action” will be taken “if an Australian citizen has deliberately undertake an activity that could put at risk the lives of Australian forces in Afghanistan or undermine our operations in any way”. The Australian role in Afghanistan, effectively mercenary in the service of Washington, has produced two striking results: the massacre of five children in a village in Oruzgan province and the overwhelming disapproval of the majority of Australians.
Last May, following the release of the Apache footage, Assange had his Australian passport temporarily confiscated when he returned home. The Labor government in Canberra denies it has received requests from Washington to detain him and spy on the Wikileaks network. The Cameron government also denies this. They would, wouldn’t they? Assange, who came to London last month to work on exposing the war logs, has had to leave Britain hastily for, as puts it, “safer climes”.
On 16 August, the Guardian, citing Daniel Ellsberg, described the great Israeli whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu as “the pre-eminent hero of the nuclear age”. Vanunu, who alerted the world to Israel’s secret nuclear weapons, was kidnapped by the Israelis and incarcerated for 18 years after he was left unprotected by the London Sunday Times, which had published the documents he supplied. In 1983, another heroic whistleblower, Sarah Tisdall, a Foreign Office clerical officer, sent documents to the Guardian that disclosed how the Thatcher government planned to spin the arrival of American cruise missiles in Britain. The Guardian complied with a court order to hand over the documents, and Tisdall went to prison.
In one sense, the Wikileaks revelations shame the dominant section of journalism devoted merely to taking down what cynical and malign power tells it. This is state stenography, not journalism. Look on the Wikileaks site and read a Ministry of Defence document that describes the “threat” of real journalism. And so it should be a threat. Having published skilfully the Wikileaks expose of a fraudulent war, the Guardian should now give its most powerful and unreserved editorial support to the protection of Julian Assange and his colleagues, whose truth-telling is as important as any in my lifetime.
I like Julian Assange’s dust-dry wit. When I asked him if it was more difficult to publish secret information in Britain, he replied, “When we look at Official Secrets Act labelled documents we see that they state it is offence to retain the information and an offence to destroy the information. So the only possible outcome we have is to publish the information.”
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum You cannot attach files in this forum You can download files in this forum
