We want other societies and cultures to change, and to be more like us... We cant achieve this by bombing and killing, by force... Domestic violence is linked to poverty, lack of education, and having few options in life... Picture swathes of poor, unemployed, young men trapped in the ghetto that is Gaza; picture the frustration and anger and feelings of helplessness or impotence that gives rise to... The attacks we are standing by and witnessing can only make the situation worse. Picture the situation in Syria, where infrastructure is absent; universities and schools are closed and girls who used to receive free education and be given the choice as to how to dress are now living in fear of their lives... Picture the situation in Afghanistan, where warlords we armed spread fear and violence, and again closed or destroyed schools; picture the situation now, where bombs still fall on unarmed civilians from unmanned US drones... johnpilger/articles/the-return-of-george-orwell-and-big-brothers-war-on-palestine-ukraine-and-truth ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- As advanced societies are de-politicised, the changes are both subtle and spectacular. In everyday discourse, political language is turned on its head, as Orwell prophesised 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. ...the invasion of Iraq - the exemplar of an act of unprovoked aggression the Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson called the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole... As Iraq is dismembered as a consequence of the Blair/Bush invasion, a Guardian headline declares: Toppling Saddam was right, but we pulled out too soon. This ran across a prominent article on 13 June by a former Blair functionary, John McTernan, who also served Iraqs CIA installed dictator Iyad Allawi. In calling for a repeat invasion of a country his former master helped destroy, he made no reference to the deaths of at least 700,000 people, the flight of four million refugees and sectarian turmoil in a nation once proud of its communal tolerance. In a village in Afghanistan, inhabited by the poorest of the poor, I filmed Orifa, kneeling at the graves of her husband, Gul Ahmed, a carpet weaver, seven other members of her family, including six children, and two children who were killed in the adjacent house. A precision 500-pound bomb fell directly on their small mud, stone and straw house, leaving a crater 50 feet wide. Lockheed Martin, the planes manufacturers, had pride of place in the Guardians advertisement. The former US secretary of state and aspiring president of the United States, Hillary Clinton, was recently on the BBCs Womens Hour, the quintessence of media respectability. The presenter, Jenni Murray, presented Clinton as a beacon of female achievement. She did not remind her listeners about Clintons profanity that Afghanistan was invaded to liberate women like Orifa. She asked Clinton nothing about her administrations terror campaign using drones to kill women, men and children. There was no mention of Clintons idle threat, while campaigning to be the first female president, to eliminate Iran, and nothing about her support for illegal mass surveillance and the pursuit of whistle-blowers. Murray did ask one finger-to-the-lips question. Had Clinton forgiven Monica Lewinsky for having an affair with husband? Forgiveness is a choice, said Clinton, for me, it was absolutely the right choice. This recalled the 1990s and the years consumed by the Lewinsky scandal. President Bill Clinton was then invading Haiti, and bombing the Balkans, Africa and Iraq. He was also destroying the lives of Iraqi children; Unicef reported the deaths of half a million Iraqi infants under the age of five as a result of an embargo led by the US and Britain. The children were media unpeople, just as Hillary Clintons victims in the invasions she supported and promoted - Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia - are media unpeople. Murray made no reference to them. A photograph of her and her distinguished guest, beaming, appears on the BBC website. 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 Britains Fleet Street in the 1960s, it was acceptable to critique western power as a rapacious force. Read James Camerons celebrated reports of the explosion of the Hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll, the barbaric war in Korea and the American bombing of North Vietnam. Todays 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. In his 1859 essay On Liberty, to which modern liberals pay homage, John Stuart Mill wrote: Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end. The barbarians were large sections of humanity of whom implicit obedience was required. Its 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. He had in mind a speech by Blair in which the then prime minister promised to reorder the world around us according to his moral values. Richard Falk, the respected authority on international law and the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine, once described a a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political violence. It is so widely accepted as to be virtually unchallengeable. Tenure and patronage reward the guardians. On BBC Radio 4, Razia Iqbal interviewed Toni Morrison, the African-American Nobel Laureate. Morrison wondered why people were so angry with Barack Obama, who was cool and wished to build a strong economy and health care. Morrison was proud to have talked on the phone with her hero, who had read one of her books and invited her to his inauguration. Neither she nor her interviewer mentioned Obamas seven wars, including his terror campaign by drone, in which whole families, their rescuers and mourners have been murdered. What seemed to matter was that a finely spoken man of colour had risen to the commanding heights of power. In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon wrote that the historic mission of the colonised was to serve as a transmission line to those who ruled and oppressed. In the modern era, the employment of ethnic difference in western power and propaganda systems is now seen as essential. Obama epitomises this, though the cabinet of George W. Bush - his warmongering clique - was the most multiracial in presidential history. In February, the US mounted one of its colour coups against the elected government in Ukraine, exploiting genuine protests against corruption in Kiev. Obamas 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 Hitlers 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-travelling Right Sector. Svoboda leader Oleh Tyahnybok 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 United States 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 Nato would not expand one inch to the east, Nato has, in effect, militarily occupied eastern Europe. In the former Soviet Caucasus, Natos expansion is the biggest military build-up since the Second World War. A Nato Membership Action Plan is Washingtons gift to the coup-regime in Kiev. In August, Operation Rapid Trident will put American and British troops on Ukraines 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 Americas borders. In reclaiming Crimea - which Nikita Kruschev illegally detached from Russia in 1954 - the Russians defended themselves as they have done for almost a century. More than 90 per cent 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 sanitised as nationalists or ultra nationalists. What they fear is that Putin is skilfully seeking a diplomatic solution, and may succeed. On 27 June, responding to Putins latest accommodation - his request to the Russian Parliament to rescind legislation that gave him the power to intervene on behalf of Ukraines ethnic Russians - 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 recognised as a buffoon, the serious purpose of these warnings is to confer pariah status on Russia and suppress news of the Kiev regimes war on its own people. A third of the population of Ukraine are Russian-speaking and bilingual. They have long sought a democratic federation that reflects Ukraines ethnic diversity and is both autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most are neither separatists nor rebels but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland. Separatism is a reaction to the Kiev juntas attacks on them, causing as many as 110,000 (UN estimate) to flee across the border into Russia. Typically, they are traumatised women and children. Like Iraqs embargoed infants, and Afghanistans liberated women and girls, terrorised by the CIAs warlords, these ethnic people of Ukraine are media unpeople in the west, their suffering and the atrocities committed against them minimised, or suppressed. No sense of the scale of the regimes assault is reported in the mainstream western media. This is not unprecedented. Reading again Phillip Knightleys masterly The First Casualty: the war correspondent as hero, propagandist and mythmaker, I renewed my admiration for the Manchester Guardians 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 2 May, 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 Washingtons 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 28 June, the Guardian devoted most of a page to declarations by the Kiev regimes president, the oligarch Petro Poroshenko. Again, Orwells rule of inversion applied. There was no putsch; no war against Ukraines 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 doesnt like that. Somebody doesnt like us for that. According to his report, the Guardians reporter, Luke Harding, did not challenge these assertions, or mention the Odessa atrocity, the regimes 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 enemy 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 11 July, following the latest Israeli, American equipped slaughter in Gaza - 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 her about her films that glorified the Nazis. Using revolutionary camera and lighting techniques, she produced a documentary form that mesmerised Germans; it was her Triumph of the Will that reputedly cast Hitlers 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: Tue, 15 Jul 2014 12:10:18 +0000
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