John Pilger for the Fair Observer ~ Pasting snippets from the article. A must read. In politics as in journalism and the arts, it seems that dissent once tolerated in the “mainstream” has regressed to a dissidence: a metaphoric underground. When I began a career in Britain’s Fleet Street in the 1960s, it was acceptable to critique Western power as a rapacious force. Read James Cameron’s celebrated reports of the explosion of the hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll, the barbaric war in Korea and the American bombing of North Vietnam. Today’s grand illusion is of an information age when, in truth, we live in a media age in which incessant corporate propaganda is insidious, contagious, effective and liberal. “It’s a nice and convenient myth that liberals are peacemakers and conservatives the warmongers,” wrote the historian Hywel Williams in 2001. “But the imperialism of the liberal way may be more dangerous because of its open-ended nature: its conviction that it represents a superior form of life.” As advanced societies are de-politicized, the changes are both subtle and spectacular. In everyday discourse, political language is turned on its head, as Orwell prophesized in 1984. “Democracy” is now a rhetorical device. Peace is “perpetual war.” “Global” is imperial. The once hopeful concept of “reform” now means regression, even destruction. “Austerity” is the imposition of extreme capitalism on the poor and the gift of socialism for the rich: an ingenious system under which the majority service the debts of the few. Obama and American Exceptionalism ~ As the Iraqi city of Mosul fell to the jihadists of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), Obama said: “The American people made huge investments and sacrifices in order to give Iraqis the opportunity to chart a better destiny.” How “cool” is that lie? How “finely spoken” was Obama’s speech at the West Point military academy on May 28. Delivering his “state of the world” address at the graduation ceremony of those who “will take American leadership” across the world, Obama said: “The United States will use military force, unilaterally if necessary, when our core interests demand it. International opinion matters, but America will never ask permission.” In repudiating international law and the rights of independent nations, the US president claims a divinity based on the might of his “indispensable nation.” It is a familiar message of imperial impunity, though always bracing to hear. Evoking the rise of fascism in the 1930s, Obama said: “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.” Historian Norman Pollack wrote: “For goose-steppers, substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manqué, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while.” Fascists in Ukraine In February, the US mounted one of its “color” coups against the elected government in Ukraine, exploiting genuine protests against corruption in Kiev. Obama’s assistant secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, personally selected the leader of an “interim government.” She nicknamed him “Yats.” Vice President Joe Biden came to Kiev, as did CIA Director John Brennan. The shock troops of their putsch were Ukrainian fascists. For the first time since 1945, a neo-Nazi, openly anti-Semitic party controls key areas of state power in a European capital. No western European leader has condemned this revival of fascism in the borderland through which Adolf Hitler’s invading Nazis took millions of Russian lives. They were supported by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), responsible for the massacre of Jews and Russians they called “vermin.” The UPA is the historical inspiration of the present-day Svoboda Party and its fellow-traveling Right Sector. Oleh Tyahnybok, the Svoboda leader, has called for a purge of the “Moscow-Jewish mafia” and “other scum,” including gays, feminists and those on the political left. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US has ringed Russia with military bases, nuclear warplanes and missiles as part of its NATO Enlargement Project. Reneging on a promise made to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that it would not expand “one inch to the east,” NATO has, in effect, militarily occupied eastern Europe. In the former Soviet Caucasus, NATO’s expansion is the biggest military build-up since the Second World War. A NATO Membership Action Plan is Washington’s gift to the coup-regime in Kiev. In August, “Operation Rapid Trident” will put American and British troops on Ukraine’s Russian border, and “Sea Breeze” will send US warships within sight of Russian ports. Imagine the response if these acts of provocation, or intimidation, were carried out on America’s borders. In reclaiming Crimea — which Nikita Khrushchev illegally detached from Russia in 1954 — the Russians defended themselves as they have done for almost a century. More than 90% of the population of Crimea voted to return the territory to Russia. Crimea is the home of the Black Sea Fleet, and its loss would mean life or death for the Russian Navy and a prize for NATO. Confounding the war parties in Washington and Kiev, Vladimir Putin withdrew troops from the Ukrainian border and urged ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine to abandon separatism. In Orwellian fashion, this has been inverted in the West to the “Russian threat.” Hillary Clinton likened Putin to Hitler. Without irony, right-wing German commentators said as much. In the media, the Ukrainian neo-Nazis are sanitized as “nationalists” or “ultra nationalists.” What they fear is that Putin is skillfully seeking a diplomatic solution, and may succeed. On June 27, responding to Putin’s latest accommodation — his request to the Russian parliament to rescind legislation that gave him the power to intervene on behalf of Ukraine’s ethnic Russians — US Secretary of State John Kerry issued another of his ultimatums. Russia must “act within the next few hours, literally” to end the revolt in eastern Ukraine. Notwithstanding that Kerry is widely recognized as a buffoon, the serious purpose of these “warnings” is to confer pariah status on Russia and suppress news of the Kiev regime’s war on its own people. Media Unpeople Like Iraq’s embargoed infants, and Afghanistan’s “liberated” women and girls, terrorized by the CIA’s warlords, these ethnic people of Ukraine are media unpeople in the West; their suffering and the atrocities committed against them minimized, or suppressed. No sense of the scale of the regime’s assault is reported in the mainstream Western media. This is not unprecedented. Reading again Phillip Knightley’s masterly The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Mythmaker, I renewed my admiration for the Manchester Guardian’s Morgan Philips Price, the only Western reporter to remain in Russia during the 1917 revolution and report the truth of a disastrous invasion by the Western allies. Fair-minded and courageous, Philips Price alone disturbed what Knightley calls an anti-Russian “dark silence” in the West. On May 2, in Odessa, 41 ethnic Russians were burned alive in the trade union headquarters with police standing by. There is horrifying video evidence. The Right Sector leader, Dmytro Yarosh, hailed the massacre as “another bright day in our national history.” In the American and British media, this was reported as a “murky tragedy” resulting from “clashes” between “nationalists” (neo-Nazis) and “separatists” (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine). The New York Times buried it, having dismissed as Russian propaganda warnings about the fascist and anti-Semitic policies of Washington’s new clients. The Wall Street Journal damned the victims — “Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says.” Obama congratulated the junta for its “restraint.” On June 28, The Guardian devoted most of a page to declarations by the Kiev regime’s “president,” the oligarch Petro Poroshenko. Again, Orwell’s rule of inversion applied. There was no putsch; no war against Ukraine’s minority; the Russians were to blame for everything. “We want to modernise my country,” said Poroshenko. “We want to introduce freedom, democracy and European values. Somebody doesn’t like that. Somebody doesn’t like us for that.” The Guardian’s reporter, Luke Harding, evidently did not challenge these assertions, or mention the Odessa atrocity, the regime’s air and artillery attacks on residential areas, the killing and kidnapping of journalists, the firebombing of an opposition newspaper, and his threat to “free Ukraine from dirt and parasites.” The enemies are “rebels,” “militants,” “insurgents,” “terrorists” and stooges of the Kremlin. Summon from history the ghosts of Vietnam, Chile, East Timor, southern Africa, Iraq; note the same tags. Palestine is the lodestone of this unchanging deceit. On July 11, following the latest Israeli, American-equipped slaughter in Gaza — over 120 people, including six children in one family — an Israeli general writes in The Guardian under the headline, “A Necessary Show of Force.” In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl and asked about her films that glorified the Nazis. Using revolutionary camera and lighting techniques, she produced a documentary form that mesmerized Germans; it was her Triumph of the Will that reputedly cast Hitler’s spell. I asked her about propaganda in societies that imagined themselves superior. She replied that the “messages” in her films were dependent not on “orders from above,” but on a “submissive void” in the German population. “Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?” I asked. “Everyone,” she replied, “and of course the intelligentsia.”
Posted on: Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:32:30 +0000
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