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Having reported the long, epic ordeal of Julian Assange, John
Pilger gave this address outside the Central Criminal Court in London on
September 7 as the WikiLeaks Editor’s extradition hearing entered its
final stage.
When I first met Julian Assange more than ten years ago, I asked him
why he had started WikiLeaks. He replied: “Transparency and
accountability are moral issues that must be the essence of public life
and journalism.”
I had never heard a publisher or an editor invoke morality in this
way. Assange believes that journalists are the agents of people, not
power: that we, the people, have a right to know about the darkest
secrets of those who claim to act in our name.
If the powerful lie to us, we have the right to know. If they say one
thing in private and the opposite in public, we have the right to know.
If they conspire against us, as Bush and Blair did over Iraq, then
pretend to be democrats, we have the right to know.
It is this morality of purpose that so threatens the collusion of
powers that want to plunge much of the world into war and wants to bury
Julian alive in Trumps fascist America.
In 2008, a top secret US State Department report described in detail
how the United States would combat this new moral threat. A
secretly-directed personal smear campaign against Julian Assange would
lead to “exposure [and] criminal prosecution”.
The aim was to silence and criminalise WikiLeaks and its founder.
Page after page revealed a coming war on a single human being and on the
very principle of freedom of speech and freedom of thought, and
democracy.
The imperial shock troops would be those who called themselves
journalists: the big hitters of the so-called mainstream, especially the
“liberals” who mark and patrol the perimeters of dissent.
And that is what happened. I have been a reporter for more than 50
years and I have never known a smear campaign like it: the fabricated
character assassination of a man who refused to join the club: who
believed journalism was a service to the public, never to those above.
Assange shamed his persecutors. He produced scoop after scoop. He
exposed the fraudulence of wars promoted by the media and the homicidal
nature of America’s wars, the corruption of dictators, the evils of
Guantanamo.
He forced us in the West to look in the mirror. He exposed the
official truth-tellers in the media as collaborators: those I would call
Vichy journalists. None of these imposters believed Assange when he
warned that his life was in danger: that the “sex scandal” in Sweden was
a set up and an American hellhole was the ultimate destination. And he
was right, and repeatedly right.
The extradition hearing in London this week is the final act of an
Anglo-American campaign to bury Julian Assange. It is not due process.
It is due revenge. The American indictment is clearly rigged, a
demonstrable sham. So far, the hearings have been reminiscent of their
Stalinist equivalents during the Cold War.
Today, the land that gave us Magna Carta, Great Britain, is
distinguished by the abandonment of its own sovereignty in allowing a
malign foreign power to manipulate justice and by the vicious
psychological torture of Julian – a form of torture, as Nils Melzer, the
UN expert has pointed out, that was refined by the Nazis because it was
most effective in breaking its victims.
Every time I have visited Assange in Belmarsh prison, I have seen the
effects of this torture. When I last saw him, he had lost more than 10
kilos in weight; his arms had no muscle. Incredibly, his wicked sense of
humor was intact.
As for Assange’s homeland, Australia has displayed only a cringeing
cowardice as its government has secretly conspired against its own
citizen who ought to be celebrated as a national hero. Not for nothing
did George W. Bush anoint the Australian prime minister his “deputy
sheriff”.
It is said that whatever happens to Julian Assange in the next three
weeks will diminish if not destroy freedom of the press in the West. But
which press? The Guardian? The BBC, The New York Times, the Jeff Bezos Washington Post?
No, the journalists in these organisations can breathe freely. The Judases on the Guardian who
flirted with Julian, exploited his landmark work, made their pile then
betrayed him, have nothing to fear. They are safe because they are
needed.
Freedom of the press now rests with the honourable few: the
exceptions, the dissidents on the internet who belong to no club, who
are neither rich nor laden with Pulitzers, but produce fine,
disobedient, moral journalism – those like Julian Assange.
Meanwhile, it is our responsibility to stand by a true journalist
whose sheer courage ought to be inspiration to all of us who still
believe that freedom is possible. I salute him.
Palestinians search through the rubble of their destroyed homes hit by
Israeli strikes in the northern Gaza Strip, during the 2014 assault.
(IMAGE: UN Photo/Shareef Sarhan, Flickr)
Almost six decades on, there’s an enduring silence by those in the
halls of power – and in the media – on Palestine, writes John Pilger.
When I first went to Palestine as a young reporter in the 1960s, I
stayed on a kibbutz. The people I met were hard-working, spirited and
called themselves socialists. I liked them.
One evening at dinner, I asked about the silhouettes of people in the far distance, beyond our perimeter.
“Arabs”, they said, “nomads”. The words were almost spat out. Israel,
they said, meaning Palestine, had been mostly wasteland and one of the
great feats of the Zionist enterprise was to turn the desert green.
They gave as an example their crop of Jaffa oranges, which was
exported to the rest of the world. What a triumph against the odds of
nature and humanity’s neglect.
It was the first lie. Most of the orange groves and vineyards
belonged to Palestinians who had been tilling the soil and exporting
oranges and grapes to Europe since the eighteenth century. The former
Palestinian town of Jaffa was known by its previous inhabitants as “the
place of sad oranges”. One of the many orange orchards seized from Palestinians in Jaffa. (IMAGE: gnuckx, Flickr)
On the kibbutz, the word “Palestinian” was never used. Why, I asked. The answer was a troubled silence.
All over the colonised world, the true sovereignty of indigenous
people is feared by those who can never quite cover the fact, and the
crime, that they live on stolen land.
Denying people’s humanity is the next step – as the Jewish people
know only too well. Defiling people’s dignity and culture and pride
follows as logically as violence.
In Ramallah, following an invasion of the West Bank by the late Ariel
Sharon in 2002, I walked through streets of crushed cars and demolished
houses, to the Palestinian Cultural Centre. Until that morning, Israeli
soldiers had camped there.
I was met by the centre’s director, the novelist, Liana Badr, whose
original manuscripts lay scattered and torn across the floor. The hard
drive containing her fiction, and a library of plays and poetry had been
taken by Israeli soldiers. Almost everything was smashed, and defiled. Ramallah, Palestine. (IMAGE: Michael Rose, Flickr)
Not a single book survived with all its pages; not a single master tape from one of the best collections of Palestinian cinema.
The soldiers had urinated and defecated on the floors, on desks, on
embroideries and works of art. They had smeared faeces on children’s
paintings and written – in shit – “Born to kill”.
Liana Badr had tears in her eyes, but she was unbowed. She said, “We will make it right again.”
What enrages those who colonise and occupy, steal and oppress,
vandalise and defile is the victims’ refusal to comply. And this is the
tribute we all should pay the Palestinians. They refuse to comply. They
go on. They wait – until they fight again. And they do so even when
those governing them collaborate with their oppressors.
In the midst of the 2014 Israeli bombardment of Gaza, the Palestinian
journalist Mohammed Omer never stopped reporting. He and his family
were stricken; he queued for food and water and carried it through the
rubble. When I phoned him, I could hear the bombs outside his door. He
refused to comply.
Mohammed’s reports, illustrated by his graphic photographs, were a
model of professional journalism that shamed the compliant and craven
reporting of the so-called mainstream in Britain and the United States.
The BBC notion of objectivity – amplifying the myths and lies of
authority, a practice of which it is proud – is shamed every day by the
likes of Mohamed Omer. A file image of Gaza in 2009. (IMAGE: gloucester2gaza, Flickr)
For more than 40 years, I have recorded the refusal of the people of
Palestine to comply with their oppressors: Israel, the United States,
Britain, the European Union.
Since 2008, Britain alone has granted licences for export to Israel
of arms and missiles, drones and sniper rifles, worth £434 million.
Those who have stood up to this, without weapons, those who have
refused to comply, are among Palestinians I have been privileged to
know:
My friend, the late Mohammed Jarella, who toiled for the United
Nations agency UNRWA, in 1967 showed me a Palestinian refugee camp for
the first time. It was a bitter winter’s day and schoolchildren shook
with the cold. “One day …” he would say. “One day …”
Mustafa Barghouti, whose eloquence remains undimmed, who described
the tolerance that existed in Palestine among Jews, Muslims and
Christians until, as he told me, “the Zionists wanted a state at the expense of the Palestinians.”
Dr. Mona El-Farra, a physician in Gaza, whose passion was raising
money for plastic surgery for children disfigured by Israeli bullets and
shrapnel. Her hospital was flattened by Israeli bombs in 2014.
Dr. Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist, whose clinics for children in Gaza
– children sent almost mad by Israeli violence – were oases of
civilisation. UK
Minister of State for International Development, Alan Duncan MP, visits
Gaza, 10th December 2012. He is the first British minister to visit
Gaza since the ceasefire entered into force on 21 November. (IMAGE:
UNRWA/Shareef Sarhan, Flickr).
Fatima and Nasser are a couple whose home stood in a village near
Jerusalem designated “Zone A and B”, meaning that the land was declared
for Jews only. Their parents had lived there; their grandparents had
lived there. Today, the bulldozers are laying roads for Jews only,
protected by laws for Jews only.
It was past midnight when Fatima went into labour with their second
child. The baby was premature; and when they arrived at a checkpoint
with the hospital in view, the young Israeli soldier said they needed
another document.
Fatima was bleeding badly. The soldier laughed and imitated her moans
and told them, “Go home”. The baby was born there in a truck. It was
blue with cold and soon, without care, died from exposure. The baby’s
name was Sultan.
For Palestinians, these will be familiar stories. The question is:
why are they not familiar in London and Washington, Brussels and Sydney?
In Syria, a recent liberal cause – a George Clooney cause – is
bankrolled handsomely in Britain and the United States, even though the
beneficiaries, the so-called rebels, are dominated by jihadist fanatics,
the product of the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and the destruction
of modern Libya.
And yet, the longest occupation and resistance in modern times is not
recognized. When the United Nations suddenly stirs and defines Israel
as an apartheid state, as it did this year, there is outrage – not
against a state whose “core purpose” is racism but against a UN
commission that dared break the silence.
“Palestine,” said Nelson Mandela, “is the greatest moral issue of our time.”
Why is this truth suppressed, day after day, month after month, year after year? Israel’s ‘security wall’, on the outskirts of Jerusalem. (IMAGE: Chris Graham, New Matilda).
On Israel – the apartheid state, guilty of a crime against humanity
and of more international law-breaking than any other – the silence
persists among those who know and whose job it is to keep the record
straight.
On Israel, so much journalism is intimidated and controlled by a
groupthink that demands silence on Palestine while honourable journalism
has become dissidence: a metaphoric underground.
A single word – “conflict” – enables this silence. “The Arab-Israeli conflict”,
intone the robots at their tele-prompters. When a veteran BBC reporter,
a man who knows the truth, refers to “two narratives”, the moral
contortion is complete.
There is no conflict, no two narratives, with their moral fulcrum. There is a military occupation enforced by a nuclear-armed power backed by the greatest military power on earth; and there is an epic injustice.
The word “occupation” may be banned, deleted from the dictionary. But
the memory of historical truth cannot be banned: of the systemic
expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland. “Plan D” the Israelis
called it in 1948.
The Israeli historian Benny Morris describes how David Ben-Gurion,
Israel’s first prime minister, was asked by one of his generals: “What
shall we do with the Arabs?” The Knesset, Israel’s parliament. (IMAGE: Ze’ev Barkan, Flickr)
The prime minister, wrote Morris, “made a dismissive, energetic gesture with his hand”. “Expel them!” he said.
Seventy years later, this crime is suppressed in the intellectual and
political culture of the West. Or it is debatable, or merely
controversial. Highly-paid journalists eagerly accept Israeli government
trips, hospitality and flattery, then are truculent in their
protestations of independence. The term, “useful idiots”, was coined for
them.
In 2011, I was struck by the ease with which one of Britain’s most
acclaimed novelists, Ian McEwan, a man bathed in the glow of bourgeois
enlightenment, accepted the Jerusalem Prize for literature in the
apartheid state.
Would McEwan have gone to Sun City in apartheid South Africa? They
gave prizes there, too, all expenses paid. McEwan justified his action
with weasel words about the independence of “civil society”.
Propaganda – of the kind McEwan delivered, with its token slap on the
wrists for his delighted hosts – is a weapon for the oppressors of
Palestine. Like sugar, it insinuates almost everything today.
Understanding and deconstructing state and cultural propaganda is our
most critical task. We are being frog-marched into a second cold war,
whose eventual aim is to subdue and balkanise Russia and intimidate
China. Russian president Vladimir Putin (IMAGE: Screengrab, RT).
When Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin spoke privately for more than
two hours at the G20 meeting in Hamburg, apparently about the need not
to go to war with each other, the most vociferous objectors were those
who have commandeered liberalism, such as the Zionist political writer
of the Guardian.
“No wonder Putin was smiling in Hamburg,” wrote Jonathan Freedland.
“He knows he has succeeded in his chief objective: he has made American
weak again.” Cue hissing for Evil Vlad.
These propagandists have never known war but they love the game they
play. What Ian McEwan calls “civil society” has become a rich source of
related propaganda.
Take a term often used by the guardians of civil society – “human
rights”. Like another noble concept, “democracy”, “human rights” has
been all but emptied of its meaning and purpose.
Like “peace process” and “road map”, human rights in Palestine have
been hijacked by Western governments and the corporate NGOs they fund
and which claim a quixotic moral authority.
So when Israel is called upon by governments and NGOs to “respect
human rights” in Palestine, nothing happens, because they all know there
is nothing to fear.
Mark the silence of the European Union, which accommodates Israel
while refusing to maintain its commitments to the people of Gaza – such
as keeping the lifeline of the Rafah border crossing open: a measure it
agreed to as part of its role in the cessation of fighting in 2014. A
seaport for Gaza – agreed by Brussels in 2014 – has been abandoned.
The UN commission I have referred to – its full name is the UN
Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia – described Israel as,
and I quote, “designed for the core purpose” of racial discrimination. The United Nations.
Millions understand this. What the governments in London, Washington,
Brussels and Tel Aviv cannot control is that humanity at street level
is changing perhaps as never before.
People everywhere are stirring and more aware, in my view, than ever
before. Some are already in open revolt. The atrocity of Grenfell Tower
in London has brought communities together in a vibrant almost national
resistance.
Thanks to a people’s campaign, the judiciary is today examining the
evidence of a possible prosecution of Tony Blair for war crimes. Even if
this fails, it is a crucial development, dismantling yet another
barrier between the public and its recognition of the voracious nature
of the crimes of state power – the systemic disregard for humanity
perpetrated in Iraq, in Grenfell Tower, in Palestine.
Those are the dots waiting to be joined.
For most of the 21st century, the fraud of corporate power
posing as democracy has depended on the propaganda of distraction:
largely on a cult of “me-ism” designed to overwhelm our sense of looking
out for others, of acting together, of social justice and
internationalism.
Class, gender and race were wrenched apart. Only the personal became
the political and the media the message. The promotion of bourgeois
privilege was presented as “progressive” politics. It wasn’t. It never
is. It is the promotion of privilege, and power.
Among young people, internationalism has found a vast new audience.
Look at the support for Jeremy Corbyn and the reception the G20 circus
in Hamburg received. By understanding the truth and imperatives of
internationalism, we understand the struggle of Palestine.
Mandela put it this way: “We know only too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” A Nelson Mandela bust in London. (IMAGE: Paul Simpson, flickr)
At the heart of the Middle East is the historic injustice in
Palestine. Until that is resolved, and Palestinians have their freedom
and homeland, and Israelis and Palestinians are equal before the law,
there will be no peace in the region, or perhaps anywhere.
What Mandela was saying is that freedom itself is precarious while
powerful governments can deny justice to others, terrorise others,
imprison and kill others, in our name. Israel certainly understands the
threat that one day it might have to be normal.
That is why its ambassador to Britain is Mark Regev, well known to
journalists as a professional propagandist, and why the “huge bluff” of
charges of anti-Semitism, as Ilan Pappe called it, was allowed to
contort the Labour Party and undermine Jeremy Corbyn as leader. The
point is, it did not succeed.
Events are moving quickly now. The remarkable Boycott, Disinvestment
and Sanctions campaign (BDS) is succeeding, day-by-day; cities and
towns, trade unions and student bodies are endorsing it. The British
government’s attempt to restrict local councils from enforcing BDS has
failed in the courts.
These are not straws in the wind. When the Palestinians rise again,
as they will, they may not succeed at first – but they will eventually
if we understand that they are us, and we are them.
This is an abridged version of John Pilger’s address to the
Palestinian Expo in London on 8 July, 2017. John Pilger’s film,
‘Palestine Is Still the Issue’, can be viewed here.
John Pilger is a regular contributor to
New Matilda, and an award-winning Australian journalist and documentary
film-maker. Some of his more famous works include Secret Country, Utopia
and Cambodia: Year Zero.
On the day President Trump is inaugurated, thousands of writers in
the United States will express their indignation. “In order for us to
heal and move forward …,” say Writers Resist, “we wish to bypass direct
political discourse, in favour of an inspired focus on the future, and
how we, as writers, can be a unifying force for the protection of
democracy.”
And: “We urge local organizers and speakers to avoid using the names
of politicians or adopting ‘anti’ language as the focus for their
Writers Resist event. It’s important to ensure that nonprofit
organizations, which are prohibited from political campaigning, will
feel confident participating in and sponsoring these events.”
Thus, real protest is to be avoided, for it is not tax exempt.
Compare such drivel with the declarations of the Congress of American
Writers, held at Carnegie Hall, New York, in 1935, and again two years
later. They were electric events, with writers discussing how they could
confront ominous events in Abyssinia, China and Spain. Telegrams from
Thomas Mann, C Day Lewis, Upton Sinclair and Albert Einstein were read
out, reflecting the fear that great power was now rampant and that it
had become impossible to discuss art and literature without politics or,
indeed, direct political action.
“A writer,” the journalist Martha Gellhorn told the second congress,
“must be a man of action now . . . A man who has given a year of his
life to steel strikes, or to the unemployed, or to the problems of
racial prejudice, has not lost or wasted time. He is a man who has known
where he belonged. If you should survive such action, what you have to
say about it afterwards is the truth, is necessary and real, and it will
last.”
Her words echo across the unction and violence of the Obama era and the silence of those who colluded with his deceptions.
That the menace of rapacious power — rampant long before the rise of
Trump — has been accepted by writers, many of them privileged and
celebrated, and by those who guard the gates of literary criticism, and
culture, including popular culture, is uncontroversial. Not for them the
impossibility of writing and promoting literature bereft of politics.
Not for them the responsibility to speak out, regardless of who occupies
the White House.
Today, false symbolism is all. “Identity” is all. In 2016, Hillary
Clinton stigmatised millions of voters as “a basket of deplorables,
racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it”. Her
abuse was handed out at an LGBT rally as part of her cynical campaign
to win over minorities by abusing a white mostly working-class majority.
Divide and rule, this is called; or identity politics in which race and
gender conceal class, and allow the waging of class war. Trump
understood this.
“When the truth is replaced by silence,” said the Soviet dissident poet Yevtushenko, “the silence is a lie.”
This is not an American phenomenon. A few years ago, Terry Eagleton,
then professor of English literature at Manchester University, reckoned
that “for the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British
poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the
western way of life”.
No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron
damns the corruption of the ruling class, no Thomas Carlyle and John
Ruskin reveal the moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar
Wilde, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw have no equivalents today. Harold
Pinter was the last to raise his voice. Among today’s insistent voices
of consumer-feminism, none echoes Virginia Woolf, who described “the
arts of dominating other people… of ruling, of killing, of acquiring
land and capital”.
There is something both venal and profoundly stupid about famous
writers as they venture outside their cosseted world and embrace an
“issue”. Across the Review section of the Guardian on 10 December was a
dreamy picture of Barack Obama looking up to the heavens and the words,
“Amazing Grace” and “Farewell the Chief”.
The sycophancy ran like a polluted babbling brook through page after
page. “He was a vulnerable figure in many ways …. But the grace. The
all-encompassing grace: in manner and form, in argument and intellect,
with humour and cool ….[He] is a blazing tribute to what has been, and
what can be again … He seems ready to keep fighting, and remains a
formidable champion to have on our side … … The grace … the almost
surreal levels of grace …”
I have conflated these quotes. There are others even more hagiographic and bereft of mitigation. The Guardian’s
chief apologist for Obama, Gary Younge, has always been careful to
mitigate, to say that his hero “could have done more”: oh, but there
were the “calm, measured and consensual solutions …”
None of them, however, could surpass the American writer, Ta-Nehisi
Coates, the recipient of a “genius” grant worth $625,000 from a liberal
foundation. In an interminable essay for The Atlantic entitled,
“My President Was Black”, Coates brought new meaning to prostration.
The final “chapter”, entitled “When You Left, You Took All of Me With
You”, a line from a Marvin Gaye song, describes seeing the Obamas
“rising out of the limo, rising up from fear, smiling, waving, defying
despair, defying history, defying gravity”. The Ascension, no less.
One of the persistent strands in American political life is a cultish
extremism that approaches fascism. This was given expression and
reinforced during the two terms of Barack Obama. “I believe in American
exceptionalism with every fibre of my being,” said Obama, who expanded
America’s favourite military pastime, bombing, and death squads
(“special operations”) as no other president has done since the Cold
War.
According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016 alone
Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed the
poorest people on earth, in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria,
Iraq, Pakistan.
Every Tuesday — reported the New York Times — he personally
selected those who would be murdered by mostly hellfire missiles fired
from drones. Weddings, funerals, shepherds were attacked, along with
those attempting to collect the body parts festooning the “terrorist
target”. A leading Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, estimated,
approvingly, that Obama’s drones killed 4,700 people. “Sometimes you hit
innocent people and I hate that,” he said, but we’ve taken out some
very senior members of Al Qaeda.”
Like the fascism of the 1930s, big lies are delivered with the
precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent media whose
description now fits that of the Nuremberg prosecutor: “Before each
major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they
initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to
prepare the German people psychologically … In the propaganda system …
it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important
weapons.
Take the catastrophe in Libya. In 2011, Obama said Libyan president
Muammar Gaddafi was planning “genocide” against his own people. “We
knew… that if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city the size of
Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across
the region and stained the conscience of the world.”
This was the known lie of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan
government forces. It became the media story; and Nato – led by Obama
and Hillary Clinton – launched 9,700 “strike sorties” against Libya, of
which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. Uranium warheads
were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red
Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that “most [of the
children killed] were under the age of ten”.
Under Obama, the US has extended secret “special forces” operations
to 138 countries, or 70 per cent of the world’s population. The first
African-American president launched what amounted to a full-scale
invasion of Africa. Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the late
19th century, the US African Command (Africom) has built a network of
supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for American
bribes and armaments. Africom’s “soldier to soldier” doctrine embeds US
officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer.
Only pith helmets are missing.
It is as if Africa’s proud history of liberation, from Patrice
Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, is consigned to oblivion by a new master’s
black colonial elite whose “historic mission”, warned Frantz Fanon half a
century ago, is the promotion of “a capitalism rampant though
camouflaged”.
It was Obama who, in 2011, announced what became known as the “pivot
to Asia”, in which almost two-thirds of US naval forces would be
transferred to the Asia-Pacific to “confront China”, in the words of his
Defence Secretary. There was no threat from China; the entire
enterprise was unnecessary. It was an extreme provocation to keep the
Pentagon and its demented brass happy.
In 2014, the Obama’s administration oversaw and paid for a
fascist-led coup in Ukraine against the democratically-elected
government, threatening Russia in the western borderland through Hitler
invaded the Soviet Union, with a loss of 27 million lives. It was Obama
who placed missiles in Eastern Europe aimed at Russia, and it was the
winner of the Nobel Peace Prize who increased spending on nuclear
warheads to a level higher than that of any administration since the
cold war — having promised, in an emotional speech in Prague, to “help
rid the world of nuclear weapons”.
Obama, the constitutional lawyer, prosecuted more whistleblowers than
any other president in history, even though the US constitution
protects them. He declared Chelsea Manning guilty before the end of a
trial that was a travesty. He has refused to pardon Manning who has
suffered years of inhumane treatment which the UN says amounts to
torture. He has pursued an entirely bogus case against Julian Assange.
He promised to close the Guantanamo concentration camp and didn’t.
Following the public relations disaster of George W. Bush, Obama, the
smooth operator from Chicago via Harvard, was enlisted to restore what
he calls “leadership” throughout the world. The Nobel Prize committee’s
decision was part of this: the kind of cloying reverse racism that
beatified the man for no reason other than he was attractive to liberal
sensibilities and, of course, American power, if not to the children he
kills in impoverished, mostly Muslim countries.
This is the Call of Obama. It is not unlike a dog whistle: inaudible
to most, irresistible to the besotted and boneheaded, especially
“liberal brains pickled in the formaldehyde of identity politics,” as
Luciana Bohne put it. “When Obama walks into a room,” gushed George
Clooney, “you want to follow him somewhere, anywhere.”
William I. Robinson, professor at the University of California, and
one of an uncontaminated group of American strategic thinkers who have
retained their independence during the years of intellectual
dog-whistling since 9/11, wrote this last week:
“President Barack Obama … may have done more than anyone
to assure [Donald] Trump’s victory. While Trump’s election has triggered
a rapid expansion of fascist currents in US civil society, a fascist
outcome for the political system is far from inevitable …. But that
fight back requires clarity as to how we got to such a dangerous
precipice. The seeds of 21st century fascism were planted, fertilized
and watered by the Obama administration and the politically bankrupt
liberal elite.”
Robinson points out that “whether in its 20th or its emerging 21st
century variants, fascism is, above all, a response to deep structural
crises of capitalism, such as that of the 1930s and the one that began
with the financial meltdown in 2008 …. There is a near-straight line
here from Obama to Trump … The liberal elite’s refusal to challenge the
rapaciousness of transnational capital and its brand of identity
politics served to eclipse the language of the working and popular
classes … pushing white workers into an ‘identity’ of white nationalism
and helping the neo-fascists to organise them”..
The seedbed is Obama’s Weimar Republic, a landscape of endemic
poverty, militarised police and barbaric prisons: the consequence of a
“market” extremism which, under his presidency, prompted the transfer of
$14 trillion in public money to criminal enterprises in Wall Street.
Perhaps his greatest “legacy” is the co-option and disorientation of
any real opposition. Bernie Sanders’ specious “revolution” does not
apply. Propaganda is his triumph.
The lies about Russia — in whose elections the US has openly
intervened — have made the world’s most self-important journalists
laughing stocks. In the country with constitutionally the freest press
in the world, free journalism now exists only in its honourable
exceptions.
The obsession with Trump is a cover for many of those calling
themselves “left/liberal”, as if to claim political decency. They are
not “left”, neither are they especially “liberal”. Much of America’s
aggression towards the rest of humanity has come from so-called liberal
Democratic administrations — such as Obama’s. America’s political
spectrum extends from the mythical centre to the lunar right. The “left”
are homeless renegades Martha Gellhorn described as “a rare and wholly
admirable fraternity”. She excluded those who confuse politics with a
fixation on their navels.
While they “heal” and “move forward”, will the Writers Resist
campaigners and other anti-Trumpists reflect upon this? More to the
point: when will a genuine movement of opposition arise? Angry,
eloquent, all-for-one-and-one-for all. Until real politics return to
people’s lives, the enemy is not Trump, it is ourselves.
The majority vote by Britons to leave the European Union was an act of
raw democracy. Millions of ordinary people refused to be bullied,
intimidated and dismissed with open contempt by their presumed betters
in the major parties, the leaders of the business and banking oligarchy
and the media.
This was, in great part, a vote by those angered and demoralised by
the sheer arrogance of the apologists for the “Remain” campaign and the
dismemberment of a socially just civil life in Britain. The last
bastion of the historic reforms of 1945, the National Health Service,
has been so subverted by Tory and Labour-supported privateers it is
fighting for its life.
A forewarning came when the Treasurer, George Osborne, the embodiment of both Britain’s ancient regime and
the banking mafia in Europe, threatened to cut £30 billion from public
services if people voted the wrong way; it was blackmail on a shocking
scale.
Immigration was exploited in the campaign with consummate cynicism,
not only by populist politicians from the lunar right, but by Labour
politicians drawing on their own venerable tradition of promoting and
nurturing racism, a symptom of corruption not at the bottom but at the
top. The reason millions of refugees have fled the Middle East – first
Iraq, now Syria – are the invasions and imperial mayhem of Britain, the
United States, France, the European Union and Nato. Before that, there
was the wilful destruction of Yugoslavia. Before that, there was the
theft of Palestine and the imposition of Israel.
The pith helmets may have long gone, but the blood has never dried. A
nineteenth century contempt for countries and peoples, depending on
their degree of colonial usefulness, remains a centrepiece of modern
“globalisation”, with its perverse socialism for the rich and capitalism
for the poor: its freedom for capital and denial of freedom to labour;
its perfidious politicians and politicised civil servants.
All this has now come home to Europe, enriching the likes of Tony
Blair and impoverishing and disempowering millions. On 23 June, the
British said no more.
The most effective propagandists of the “European ideal” have not
been the far right, but an insufferably patrician class for whom
metropolitan London is the United Kingdom. Its leading members see
themselves as liberal, enlightened, cultivated tribunes of the 21st
century zeitgeist, even “cool”. What they really are is a bourgeoisie
with insatiable consumerist tastes and ancient instincts of their own
superiority. In their house paper, the Guardian, they have
gloated, day after day, at those who would even consider the EU
profoundly undemocratic, a source of social injustice and a virulent
extremism known as “neoliberalism”.
The aim of this extremism is to install a permanent, capitalist
theocracy that ensures a two-thirds society, with the majority divided
and indebted, managed by a corporate class, and a permanent working
poor. In Britain today, 63 per cent of poor children grow up in families
where one member is working. For them, the trap has closed. More than
600,000 residents of Britain’s second city, Greater Manchester, are,
reports a study, “experiencing the effects of extreme poverty” and 1.6
million are slipping into penury.
On the morning after the vote, a BBC radio reporter welcomed
politicians to his studio as old chums. “Well,” he said to “Lord” Peter
Mandelson, the disgraced architect of Blairism, “why do these people
want it so badly?” The “these people” are the majority of Britons.
The wealthy war criminal Tony Blair remains a hero of the Mandelson “European” class, though few will say so these days. The Guardian
once described Blair as “mystical” and has been true to his “project”
of rapacious war. The day after the vote, the columnist Martin Kettle
offered a Brechtian solution to the misuse of democracy by the masses.
“Now surely we can agree referendums are bad for Britain”, said the
headline over his full-page piece. The “we” was unexplained but
understood — just as “these people” is understood. “The referendum has
conferred less legitimacy on politics, not more,” wrote Kettle. “ … the
verdict on referendums should be a ruthless one. Never again.”
The kind of ruthlessness Kettle longs for is found in Greece, a
country now airbrushed. There, they had a referendum and the result was
ignored. Like the Labour Party in Britain, the leaders of the Syriza
government in Athens are the products of an affluent, highly privileged,
educated middle class, groomed in the fakery and political treachery
of post-modernism. The Greek people courageously used the referendum to
demand their government sought “better terms” with a venal status quo in
Brussels that was crushing the life out of their country. They were
betrayed, as the British would have been betrayed.
On Friday, the Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was asked by the
BBC if he would pay tribute to the departed Cameron, his comrade in the
“remain” campaign. Corbyn fulsomely praised Cameron’s “dignity” and
noted his backing for gay marriage and his apology to the Irish families
of the dead of Bloody Sunday.
He said nothing about Cameron’s
divisiveness, his brutal austerity policies, his lies about “protecting”
the Health Service. Neither did he remind people of the war mongering
of the Cameron government: the dispatch of British special forces to
Libya and British bomb aimers to Saudi Arabia and, above all, the
beckoning of world war three.
In the week of the referendum vote, no British politician and, to my
knowledge, no journalist referred to Vladimir Putin’s speech in St.
Petersburg commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of Nazi Germany’s
invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June, 1941. The Soviet victory – at
a cost of 27 million Soviet lives and the majority of all German forces
– won the Second World War.
Putin likened the current frenzied build up of Nato troops and war
material on Russia’s western borders to the Third Reich’s Operation
Barbarossa. Nato’s exercises in Poland were the biggest since the Nazi
invasion; Operation Anaconda had simulated an attack on Russia,
presumably with nuclear weapons. On the eve of the referendum, the
quisling secretary-general of Nato, Jens Stoltenberg, warned Britons
they would be endangering “peace and security” if they voted to leave
the EU. The millions who ignored him and Cameron, Osborne, Corbyn,
Obama and the man who runs the Bank of England may, just may, have
struck a blow for real peace and democracy in Europe.
Returning to the United States in an election year, I am struck by
the silence. I have covered four presidential campaigns, starting with
1968; I was with Robert Kennedy when he was shot and I saw his assassin,
preparing to kill him. It was a baptism in the American way, along with
the salivating violence of the Chicago police at the Democratic Party’s
rigged convention. The great counter revolution had begun.
The first to be assassinated that year, Martin Luther King, had dared
link the suffering of African-Americans and the people of Vietnam. When
Janis Joplin sang, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to
lose”, she spoke perhaps unconsciously for millions of America’s victims
in faraway places.
“We lost 58,000 young soldiers in Vietnam, and they died defending
your freedom. Now don’t you forget it.” So said a National Parks
Service guide as I filmed last week at the Lincoln Memorial in
Washington. He was addressing a school party of young teenagers in
bright orange T-shirts. As if by rote, he inverted the truth about
Vietnam into an unchallenged lie.
The millions of Vietnamese who died and were maimed and poisoned and
dispossessed by the American invasion have no historical place in young
minds, not to mention the estimated 60,000 veterans who took their own
lives. A friend of mine, a marine who became a paraplegic in Vietnam,
was often asked, “Which side did you fight on?”
A few years ago, I attended a popular exhibition called “The Price of
Freedom” at the venerable Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The
lines of ordinary people, mostly children shuffling through a Santa’s
grotto of revisionism, were dispensed a variety of lies: the atomic
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved “a million lives”; Iraq was
“liberated [by] air strikes of unprecedented precision”. The theme was
unerringly heroic: only Americans pay the price of freedom.
The 2016 election campaign is remarkable not only for the rise of
Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders but also for the resilience of an
enduring silence about a murderous self-bestowed divinity. A third of
the members of the United Nations have felt Washington’s boot,
overturning governments, subverting democracy, imposing blockades and
boycotts. Most of the presidents responsible have been liberal – Truman,
Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama.
The breathtaking record of perfidy is so mutated in the public mind,
wrote the late Harold Pinter, that it “never happened …Nothing ever
happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t
matter. It was of no interest. It didn’t matter … “. Pinter expressed a
mock admiration for what he called “a quite clinical manipulation of
power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a
brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
Take Obama. As he prepares to leave office, the fawning has begun all
over again. He is “cool”. One of the more violent presidents, Obama
gave full reign to the Pentagon war-making apparatus of his discredited
predecessor. He prosecuted more whistleblowers – truth-tellers – than
any president. He pronounced Chelsea Manning guilty before she was
tried. Today, Obama runs an unprecedented worldwide campaign of
terrorism and murder by drone.
In 2009, Obama promised to help “rid the world of nuclear weapons”
and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. No American president has built
more nuclear warheads than Obama. He is “modernising” America’s doomsday
arsenal, including a new “mini” nuclear weapon, whose size and “smart”
technology, says a leading general, ensure its use is “no longer
unthinkable”.
James Bradley, the best-selling author of Flags of Our Fathers
and son of one of the US marines who raised the flag on Iwo Jima, said,
“[One] great myth we’re seeing play out is that of Obama as some kind
of peaceful guy who’s trying to get rid of nuclear weapons. He’s the
biggest nuclear warrior there is. He’s committed us to a ruinous course
of spending a trillion dollars on more nuclear weapons. Somehow, people
live in this fantasy that because he gives vague news conferences and
speeches and feel-good photo-ops that somehow that’s attached to actual
policy. It isn’t.”
On Obama’s watch, a second cold war is under way. The Russian
president is a pantomime villain; the Chinese are not yet back to their
sinister pig-tailed caricature – when all Chinese were banned from the
United States – but the media warriors are working on it.
Neither Hillary Clinton nor Bernie Sanders has mentioned any of this.
There is no risk and no danger for the United States and all of us. For
them, the greatest military build-up on the borders of Russia since
World War Two has not happened. On May 11, Romania went “live” with a
Nato “missile defence” base that aims its first-strike American missiles
at the heart of Russia, the world’s second nuclear power.
In Asia, the Pentagon is sending ships, planes and special forces to
the Philippines to threaten China. The US already encircles China with
hundreds of military bases that curve in an arc up from Australia, to
Asia and across to Afghanistan. Obama calls this a “pivot”.
As a direct consequence, China reportedly has changed its nuclear
weapons policy from no-first-use to high alert and put to sea submarines
with nuclear weapons. The escalator is quickening.
It was Hillary Clinton who, as Secretary of State in 2010, elevated
the competing territorial claims for rocks and reef in the South China
Sea to an international issue; CNN and BBC hysteria followed; China was
building airstrips on the disputed islands. In its mammoth war game in
2015, Operation Talisman Sabre, the US practiced “choking” the Straits
of Malacca through which pass most of China’s oil and trade. This was
not news.
Clinton declared that America had a “national interest” in these
Asian waters. The Philippines and Vietnam were encouraged and bribed to
pursue their claims and old enmities against China. In America, people
are being primed to see any Chinese defensive position as offensive, and
so the ground is laid for rapid escalation. A similar strategy of
provocation and propaganda is applied to Russia.
Clinton, the “women’s candidate”, leaves a trail of bloody coups: in
Honduras, in Libya (plus the murder of the Libyan president) and
Ukraine. The latter is now a CIA theme park swarming with Nazis and the
frontline of a beckoning war with Russia. It was through Ukraine –
literally, borderland — that Hitler’s Nazis invaded the Soviet Union,
which lost 27 million people. This epic catastrophe remains a presence
in Russia. Clinton’s presidential campaign has received money from all
but one of the world’s ten biggest arms companies. No other candidate
comes close.
Sanders, the hope of many young Americans, is not very different from
Clinton in his proprietorial view of the world beyond the United
States. He backed Bill Clinton’s illegal bombing of Serbia. He supports
Obama’s terrorism by drone, the provocation of Russia and the return of
special forces (death squads) to Iraq. He has nothing to say on the
drumbeat of threats to China and the accelerating risk of nuclear war.
He agrees that Edward Snowden should stand trial and he calls Hugo
Chavez – like him, a social democrat – “a dead communist dictator”. He
promises to support Clinton if she is nominated.
The election of Trump or Clinton is the old illusion of choice that
is no choice: two sides of the same coin. In scapegoating minorities and
promising to “make America great again”, Trump is a far right-wing
domestic populist; yet the danger of Clinton may be more lethal for the
world.
“Only Donald Trump has said anything meaningful and critical of US
foreign policy,” wrote Stephen Cohen, emeritus professor of Russian
History at Princeton and NYU, one of the few Russia experts in the
United States to speak out about the risk of war.
In a radio broadcast, Cohen referred to critical questions Trump
alone had raised. Among them: why is the United States “everywhere on
the globe”? What is NATO’s true mission? Why does the US always pursue
regime change in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine? Why does Washington treat
Russia and Vladimir Putin as an enemy?
The hysteria in the liberal media over Trump serves an illusion of
“free and open debate” and “democracy at work”. His views on immigrants
and Muslims are grotesque, yet the deporter-in-chief of vulnerable
people from America is not Trump but Obama, whose betrayal of people of
colour is his legacy: such as the warehousing of a mostly black prison
population, now more numerous than Stalin’s gulag.
This presidential campaign may not be about populism but American
liberalism, an ideology that sees itself as modern and therefore
superior and the one true way. Those on its right wing bear a likeness
to 19th century Christian imperialists, with a God-given duty to convert or co-opt or conquer.
In Britain, this is Blairism. The Christian war criminal Tony Blair
got away with his secret preparation for the invasion of Iraq largely
because the liberal political class and media fell for his “cool
Britannia”. In the Guardian, the applause was deafening; he was
called “mystical”. A distraction known as identity politics, imported
from the United States, rested easily in his care.
History was declared over, class was abolished and gender promoted as
feminism; lots of women became New Labour MPs. They voted on the first
day of Parliament to cut the benefits of single parents, mostly women,
as instructed. A majority voted for an invasion that produced 700,000
Iraqi widows.
The equivalent in the US are the politically correct warmongers on the New York Times, the Washington Post and
network TV who dominate political debate. I watched a furious debate on
CNN about Trump’s infidelities. It was clear, they said, a man like
that could not be trusted in the White House. No issues were raised.
Nothing on the 80 per cent of Americans whose income has collapsed to
1970s levels. Nothing on the drift to war. The received wisdom seems to
be “hold your nose” and vote for Clinton: anyone but Trump. That way,
you stop the monster and preserve a system gagging for another war.
A virulent if familiar censorship is about to descend on the US
election campaign. As the cartoon brute, Donald Trump, seems almost
certain to win the Republican Party’s nomination, Hillary Clinton is
being ordained both as the “women’s candidate” and the champion of
American liberalism in its heroic struggle with the Evil One.
This is drivel, of course; Hillary Clinton leaves a trail of blood
and suffering around the world and a clear record of exploitation and
greed in her own country. To say so, however, is becoming intolerable in
the land of free speech.
The 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama should have alerted
even the most dewy-eyed. Obama based his “hope” campaign almost entirely
on the fact of an African-American aspiring to lead the land of
slavery. He was also “antiwar”.
Obama was never antiwar. On the contrary, like all American
presidents, he was pro-war. He had voted for George W. Bush’s funding of
the slaughter in Iraq and he was planning to escalate the invasion of
Afghanistan. In the weeks before he took the presidential oath, he
secretly approved an Israeli assault on Gaza, the massacre known as
Operation Cast Lead. He promised to close the concentration camp at
Guantanamo and did not. He pledged to help make the world “free from
nuclear weapons” and did the opposite.
As a new kind of marketing manager for the status quo, the unctuous
Obama was an inspired choice. Even at the end of his blood-spattered
presidency, with his signature drones spreading infinitely more terror
and death around the world than that ignited by jihadists in Paris and
Brussels, Obama is fawned on as “cool” (the Guardian).
On March 23, CounterPunch published my article, “A World War
has Begun: Break the Silence”. As has been my practice for years, I
then syndicated the piece across an international network, including Truthout.com,
the liberal American website. Truthout publishes some important
journalism, not least Dahr Jamail’s outstanding corporate exposes.
Truthout rejected the piece because, said an editor, it had appeared on CounterPunch and had broken “guidelines”. I replied that this had never been a problem over many years and I knew of no guidelines.
My recalcitrance was then given another meaning. The article was
reprieved provided I submitted to a “review” and agreed to changes and
deletions made by Truthout’s “editorial committee”. The result was the
softening and censoring of my criticism of Hillary Clinton, and the
distancing of her from Trump. The following was cut:
Trump is a media hate figure. That alone should
arouse our scepticism. Trump’s views on migration are grotesque, but no
more grotesque than David Cameron. It is not Trump who is the Great
Deporter from the United States, but the Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack
Obama … The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton.
She is no maverick. She embodies the resilience and violence of a
system … As presidential election day draws near, Clinton will be hailed
as the first female president, regardless of her crimes and lies– just
as Barack Obama was lauded as the first black president and liberals
swallowed his nonsense about “hope”.
The “editorial committee” clearly wanted me to water down my argument that Clinton represented a proven extreme
danger to the world. Like all censorship, this was unacceptable. Maya
Schenwar, who runs Truthout, wrote to me that my unwillingness to submit
my work to a “process of revision” meant she had to take it off her
“publication docket”. Such is the gatekeeper’s way with words.
At the root of this episode is an enduring unsayable. This is the
need, the compulsion, of many liberals in the United States to embrace a
leader from within a system that is demonstrably imperial and violent.
Like Obama’s “hope”, Clinton’s gender is no more than a suitable facade.
This is an historical urge. In his 1859 essay “On Liberty,” to which
modern liberals seem to pay unflagging homage, John Stuart Mill
described the power of empire. “Despotism is a legitimate mode of
government in dealing with barbarians,” he wrote, “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.
“It’s a nice and convenient myth that liberals are the peacemakers
and conservatives the warmongers,” wrote the British 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 [while denying its] self righteous
fanaticism.” He had in mind a speech by Tony Blair in the aftermath of
the 9/11 attacks, in which Blair promised to “reorder this world around
us” according to his “moral values”. The carnage of a million dead in
Iraq was the result.
Blair’s crimes are not unusual. Since 1945, some 69 countries — more
than a third of the membership of the United Nations – have suffered
some or all of the following. They have been invaded, their governments
overthrown, their popular movements suppressed, their elections
subverted and their people bombed. The historian Mark Curtis estimates
the death toll in the millions. With the demise of the European empires,
this has been the project of the liberal flame carrier, the
“exceptional” United States, whose celebrated “progressive” president,
John F Kennedy, according to new research, authorised the bombing of
Moscow during the Cuban crisis in 1962.
“If we have to use force,” said Madeleine Albright, US secretary of
state in the liberal administration of Bill Clinton and today a
passionate campaigner for his wife, “it is because we are America. We
are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the
future.”
One of Hillary Clinton’s most searing crimes was the destruction of
Libya in 2011. At her urging, and with American logistical support,
NATO, launched 9,700 “strike sorties” against Libya, according to its
own records, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets.
They included missiles with uranium warheads. See the photographs of the
rubble of Misurata and Sirte, and the mass graves identified by the Red
Cross. Read the UNICEF report on the children killed, “most [of them]
under the age of ten”.
In Anglo-American scholarship, followed slavishly by the liberal
media on both sides of the Atlantic, influential theorists known as
“liberal realists” have long taught that liberal imperialists – a term
they never use – are the world’s peace brokers and crisis managers,
rather than the cause of a crisis. They have taken the humanity out of
the study of nations and congealed it with a jargon that serves
warmongering power. Laying out whole nations for autopsy, they have
identified “failed states” (nations difficult to exploit) and “rogue
states” (nations resistant to western dominance).
Whether or not the targeted regime is a democracy or dictatorship is
irrelevant. In the Middle East, western liberalism’s collaborators have
long been extremist Islamists, lately al-Qaeda, while cynical notions of
democracy and human rights serve as rhetorical cover for conquest and
mayhem — as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Haiti, Honduras.
See the record of those good liberals Bill and Hillary Clinton. Theirs
is a standard to which Trump can only aspire.
A Response from Truthout and a Letter from Truthout’s publisher.
Dear Jeffrey,
I’m writing in response to Counterpunch’s publication of a highly
misleading and factually inaccurate article by John Pilger today
regarding Truthout and our editor-in-chief Maya Schenwar, “Trump and Clinton: Censoring the Unpalatable“.
The idea that Truthout is stifling criticism of Hillary Clinton holds
no water, and this takes very little time to verify – I’ve appended
below a few of the many uncompromisingly critical articles we’ve
published about her.
John Pilger’s history of excellent journalism is without question.
However, the reality of this situation is that each and every writer who
submits work to Truthout for publication or republication need to work
with our editors, and treat them with some basic professional courtesy.
That did not happen in this case.
It has long been Truthout’s policy that for articles to be featured
as Truthout originals, they need to either be exclusive content or to be
very substantially revised and rewritten versions of content that has
appeared elsewhere. This was communicated to John Pilger, and his
refusal to acknowledge this or to engage in civil discussion with our
editors led to our decision not to republish this piece.
As Pilger states, the article had already been published
elsewhere. Calling the decision not to run it again censorship is
inaccurate – Truthout makes judgment calls as to what to republish every
day, and a decision not to republish an article does not mean we are
damning that piece by implication, let alone censoring it. Calling the
decision politically-motivated censorship stemming from a desire to
protect Hillary Clinton is wildly, maliciously inaccurate and easily
demonstrable as false.
This article is a misrepresentation of Truthout, a misrepresentation
of Maya Schenwar, and a misrepresentation of what “censorship” entails
that does a disservice to the concept. It calls Counterpunch’s
credibility into question for as long as this story remains on your site
in its current form.
I have been filming in the Marshall Islands, which lie north of
Australia, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Whenever I tell people
where I have been, they ask, “Where is that?” If I offer a clue by
referring to “Bikini”, they say, “You mean the swimsuit.”
Few seem aware that the bikini swimsuit was named to celebrate the
nuclear explosions that destroyed Bikini island. Sixty-six nuclear
devices were exploded by the United States in the Marshall Islands
between 1946 and 1958 — the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima bombs every day
for twelve years.
Bikini is silent today, mutated and contaminated. Palm trees grow in
a strange grid formation. Nothing moves. There are no birds. The
headstones in the old cemetery are alive with radiation. My shoes
registered “unsafe” on a Geiger counter.
Standing on the beach, I watched the emerald green of the Pacific
fall away into a vast black hole. This was the crater left by the
hydrogen bomb they called “Bravo”. The explosion poisoned people and
their environment for hundreds of miles, perhaps forever.
On my return journey, I stopped at Honolulu airport and noticed an American magazine called Women’s Health.
On the cover was a smiling woman in a bikini swimsuit, and the
headline: “You, too, can have a bikini body.” A few days earlier, in
the Marshall Islands, I had interviewed women who had very different
“bikini bodies”; each had suffered thyroid cancer and other
life-threatening cancers.
Unlike the smiling woman in the magazine, all of them were
impoverished: the victims and guinea pigs of a rapacious superpower
that is today more dangerous than ever.
I relate this experience as a warning and to interrupt a distraction
that has consumed so many of us. The founder of modern propaganda,
Edward Bernays, described this phenomenon as “the conscious and
intelligent manipulation of the habits and opinions” of democratic
societies. He called it an “invisible government”.
How many people are aware that a world war has begun? At present, it
is a war of propaganda, of lies and distraction, but this can change
instantaneously with the first mistaken order, the first missile.
In 2009, President Obama stood before an adoring crowd in the centre
of Prague, in the heart of Europe. He pledged himself to make “the world
free from nuclear weapons”. People cheered and some cried. A torrent of
platitudes flowed from the media. Obama was subsequently awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize.
It was all fake. He was lying.
The Obama administration has built more nuclear weapons, more nuclear
warheads, more nuclear delivery systems, more nuclear factories.
Nuclear warhead spending alone rose higher under Obama than under any
American president. The cost over thirty years is more than $1 trillion.
A mini nuclear bomb is planned. It is known as the B61 Model 12.
There has never been anything like it. General James Cartwright, a
former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said, “Going
smaller [makes using this nuclear] weapon more thinkable.”
In the last eighteen months, the greatest build-up of military forces
since World War Two — led by the United States — is taking place along
Russia’s western frontier. Not since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union
have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia.
Ukraine – once part of the Soviet Union – has become a CIA theme
park. Having orchestrated a coup in Kiev, Washington effectively
controls a regime that is next door and hostile to Russia: a regime
rotten with Nazis, literally. Prominent parliamentary figures in Ukraine
are the political descendants of the notorious OUN and UPA fascists.
They openly praise Hitler and call for the persecution and expulsion of
the Russian speaking minority.
This is seldom news in the West, or it is inverted to suppress the truth.
In Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — next door to Russia – the US
military is deploying combat troops, tanks, heavy weapons. This extreme
provocation of the world’s second nuclear power is met with silence in
the West.
What makes the prospect of nuclear war even more dangerous is a parallel campaign against China.
Seldom a day passes when China is not elevated to the status of a
“threat”. According to Admiral Harry Harris, the US Pacific commander,
China is “building a great wall of sand in the South China Sea”.
What he is referring to is China building airstrips in the Spratly
Islands, which are the subject of a dispute with the Philippines – a
dispute without priority until Washington pressured and bribed the
government in Manila and the Pentagon launched a propaganda campaign
called “freedom of navigation”.
What does this really mean? It means freedom for American warships
to patrol and dominate the coastal waters of China. Try to imagine the
American reaction if Chinese warships did the same off the coast of
California.
I made a film called The War You Don’t See, in which I
interviewed distinguished journalists in America and Britain: reporters
such as Dan Rather of CBS, Rageh Omar of the BBC, David Rose of the Observer.
All of them said that had journalists and broadcasters done their job
and questioned the propaganda that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of
mass destruction; had the lies of George W. Bush and Tony Blair not been
amplified and echoed by journalists, the 2003 invasion of Iraq might
not have happened, and hundreds of thousands of men, women and children
would be alive today.
The propaganda laying the ground for a war against Russia and/or
China is no different in principle. To my knowledge, no journalist in
the Western “mainstream” — a Dan Rather equivalent, say –asks why China is building airstrips in the South China Sea.
The answer ought to be glaringly obvious. The United States is
encircling China with a network of bases, with ballistic missiles,
battle groups, nuclear -armed bombers.
This lethal arc extends from Australia to the islands of the Pacific,
the Marianas and the Marshalls and Guam, to the Philippines, Thailand,
Okinawa, Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India. America has
hung a noose around the neck of China. This is not news. Silence by
media; war by media.
In 2015, in high secrecy, the US and Australia staged the biggest
single air-sea military exercise in recent history, known as Talisman
Sabre. Its aim was to rehearse an Air-Sea Battle Plan, blocking sea
lanes, such as the Straits of Malacca and the Lombok Straits, that cut
off China’s access to oil, gas and other vital raw materials from the
Middle East and Africa.
In the circus known as the American presidential campaign, Donald
Trump is being presented as a lunatic, a fascist. He is certainly
odious; but he is also a media hate figure. That alone should arouse
our scepticism.
Trump’s views on migration are grotesque, but no more grotesque than
those of David Cameron. It is not Trump who is the Great Deporter from
the United States, but the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama.
According to one prodigious liberal commentator, Trump is “unleashing the dark forces of violence” in the United States. Unleashing them?
This is the country where toddlers shoot their mothers and the police
wage a murderous war against black Americans. This is the country that
has attacked and sought to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of
them democracies, and bombed from Asia to the Middle East, causing the
deaths and dispossession of millions of people.
No country can equal this systemic record of violence. Most of
America’s wars (almost all of them against defenceless countries) have
been launched not by Republican presidents but by liberal Democrats:
Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama.
In 1947, a series of National Security Council directives described
the paramount aim of American foreign policy as “a world substantially
made over in [America’s] own image”. The ideology was messianic
Americanism. We were all Americans. Or else. Heretics would be
converted, subverted, bribed, smeared or crushed.
Donald Trump is a symptom of this, but he is also a maverick. He says
the invasion of Iraq was a crime; he doesn’t want to go to war with
Russia and China. The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary
Clinton. She is no maverick. She embodies the resilience and violence
of a system whose vaunted “exceptionalism” is totalitarian with an occasional liberal face.
As presidential election day draws near, Clinton will be hailed as
the first female president, regardless of her crimes and lies – just as
Barack Obama was lauded as the first black president and liberals
swallowed his nonsense about “hope”. And the drool goes on.
Described by the Guardian columnist Owen Jones as “funny,
charming, with a coolness that eludes practically every other
politician”, Obama the other day sent drones to slaughter 150 people in
Somalia. He kills people usually on Tuesdays, according to the New York Times, when he is handed a list of candidates for death by drone. So cool.
In the 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton threatened to
“totally obliterate” Iran with nuclear weapons. As Secretary of State
under Obama, she participated in the overthrow of the democratic
government of Honduras. Her contribution to the destruction of Libya in
2011 was almost gleeful. When the Libyan leader, Colonel Gaddafi, was
publicly sodomised with a knife – a murder made possible by American
logistics – Clinton gloated over his death: “We came, we saw, he died.”
One of Clinton’s closest allies is Madeleine Albright, the former
secretary of State, who has attacked young women for not supporting
“Hillary”. This is the same Madeleine Albright who infamously
celebrated on TV the death of half a million Iraqi children as “worth
it”.
Among Clinton’s biggest backers are the Israel lobby and the arms
companies that fuel the violence in the Middle East. She and her
husband have received a fortune from Wall Street. And yet, she is about
to be ordained the women’s candidate, to see off the evil Trump, the
official demon. Her supporters include distinguished feminists: the
likes of Gloria Steinem in the US and Anne Summers in Australia.
A generation ago, a post-modern cult now known as “identity politics”
stopped many intelligent, liberal-minded people examining the causes
and individuals they supported — such as the fakery of Obama and
Clinton; such as bogus progressive movements like Syriza in Greece,
which betrayed the people of that country and allied with their enemies.
Self absorption, a kind of “me-ism”, became the new zeitgeist in
privileged western societies and signaled the demise of great collective
movements against war, social injustice, inequality, racism and
sexism.
Today, the long sleep may be over. The young are stirring again.
Gradually. The thousands in Britain who supported Jeremy Corbyn as
Labour leader are part of this awakening – as are those who rallied to
support Senator Bernie Sanders.
In Britain last week, Jeremy Corbyn’s closest ally, his shadow
treasurer John McDonnell, committed a Labour government to pay off the
debts of piratical banks and, in effect, to continue so-called
austerity.
In the US, Bernie Sanders has promised to support Clinton if or when
she’s nominated. He, too, has voted for America’s use of violence
against countries when he thinks it’s “right”. He says Obama has done “a
great job”.
In Australia, there is a kind of mortuary politics, in which tedious
parliamentary games are played out in the media while refugees and
Indigenous people are persecuted and inequality grows, along with the
danger of war. The government of Malcolm Turnbull has just announced a
so-called defence budget of $195 billion that is a drive to war. There
was no debate. Silence.
What has happened to the great tradition of popular direct action,
unfettered to parties? Where is the courage, imagination and commitment
required to begin the long journey to a better, just and peaceful world?
Where are the dissidents in art, film, the theatre, literature?
Where are those who will shatter the silence? Or do we wait until the first nuclear missile is fired?
This is an edited version of an address by John Pilger at the University of Sydney, entitled A World War Has Begun.
On 26 January, one of the saddest days in human history will be
celebrated in Australia. It will be “a day for families”, say the
newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch. Flags will be dispensed at street
corners and displayed on funny hats. People will say incessantly how
proud they are.
For many, there is relief and gratitude. In my lifetime,
non-indigenous Australia has changed from an Anglo-Irish society to one
of the most ethnically diverse on earth. Those we used to call “New
Australians” often choose 26 January, “Australia Day”, to be sworn in
as citizens. The ceremonies can be touching. Watch the faces from the
Middle East and understand why they clench their new flag.
It was sunrise on 26 January so many years ago when I stood with
Indigenous and non Indigenous Australians and threw wreaths into Sydney
Harbour. We had climbed down to one of the perfect sandy coves where
others had stood as silhouettes, watching as the ships of Britain’s
“First Fleet” dropped anchor on 26 January, 1788. This was the moment
the only island continent on earth was taken from its inhabitants; the
euphemism was “settled”. It was, wrote Henry Reynolds, one of few honest
Australian historians, one of the greatest land grabs in world history.
He described the slaughter that followed as “a whispering in our
hearts”.
The original Australians are the oldest human presence. To the
European invaders, they did not exist because their continent had been
declared terra nullius: empty land. To justify this fiction, mass murder was ordained. In 1838, the Sydney Monitor
reported: “It was resolved to exterminate the whole race of blacks in
that quarter.” This referred to the Darug people who lived along the
great Hawkesbury River not far from Sydney. With remarkable ingenuity
and without guns, they fought an epic resistance that remains almost a
national secret. In a land littered with cenotaphs honouring Australia’s
settler dead in mostly imperial wars, not one stands for those warriors
who fought and fell defending Australia.
This truth has no place in the Australian consciousness. Among
settler nations with indigenous populations, apart from a facile
“apology” in 2008, only Australia has refused to come to terms with the
shame of its colonial past. A Hollywood film, Soldier Blue, in
1970 famously inverted racial stereotypes and gave Americans a glimpse
of the genocide in their own mythical “settlement”. Almost half a
century later, it is fair to say an equivalent film would never be made
in Australia.
In 2014, when my own film, Utopia, which told the story of
the Australian genocide, sought a local distributor, I was advised by a
luminary in the business: “No way I could distribute this. The audiences
wouldn’t accept it.”
He was wrong — up to a point. When Utopia opened in Sydney a
few days before 26 January, under the stars on vacant land in an
Indigenous inner-city area known as The Block, more than 4,000 people
came, the majority non-Indigenous. Many had travelled from right across
the continent. Indigenous leaders who had appeared in the film stood in
front of the screen and spoke in “language”: their own. Nothing like it
had happened before. Yet, there was no press. For the wider community,
it did not happen. Australia is a murdochracy, dominated by the ethos of
a man who swapped his nationality for the Fox Network in the US.
The star Indigenous AFL footballer Adam Goodes wrote movingly to the Sydney Morning Herald
demanding that “the silence is broken”. “Imagine,” he wrote, “watching a
film that tells the truth about the terrible injustices committed
against your people, a film that reveals how Europeans, and the
governments that have run our country, have raped, killed and stolen
from your people for their own benefit.
“Now imagine how it feels when the people who benefited most from
those rapes, those killings and that theft – the people in whose name
the oppression was done – turn away in disgust when someone seeks to
expose it.”
Goodes himself had already broken a silence when he stood against
racist abuse thrown at him and other Indigenous sportspeople. This
courageous, talented man retired from football last year as if under a
cloud — with, wrote one commentator, “the sporting nation divided about
him”. In Australia, it is respectable to be “divided” on opposing
racism.
On Australia Day 2016– Indigenous people prefer Invasion Day or
Survival Day– there will be no acknowledgement that Australia’s
uniqueness is its first people, along with an ingrained colonial
mentality that ought to be an abiding embarrassment in an independent
nation. This mentality is expressed in a variety of ways, from
unrelenting political groveling at the knee of a rapacious United States
to an almost casual contempt for Indigenous Australians, an echo of
“kaffir”-abusing South Africans.
Apartheid runs through Australian society. Within a short flight from
Sydney, Indigenous people live the shortest of lives. Men are often
dead before they reach 45. They die from Dickensian diseases, such as
rheumatic heart disease. Children go blind from trachoma, and deaf from
otitis media, diseases of poverty. A doctor told me, “I wanted to give a
patient an anti-inflammatory for an infection that would have been
preventable if living conditions were better, but I couldn’t treat her
because she didn’t have enough food to eat and couldn’t ingest the
tablets. I feel sometimes as if I’m dealing with similar conditions as
the English working class of the beginning of the industrial
revolution.”
The racism that allows this in one of the most privileged societies
on earth runs deep. In the 1920s, a “Protector of Aborigines” oversaw
the theft of mixed race children with the justification of “breeding out
the colour”. Today, record numbers of Indigenous children are removed
from their homes and many never see their families again. On 11
February, an inspiring group called Grandmothers Against Removals will
lead a march on Federal Parliament in Canberra, demanding the return of
the stolen children.
Australia is the envy of European governments now fencing in their
once-open borders while beckoning fascism, as in Hungary. Refugees who
dare set sail for Australia in overcrowded boats have long been treated
as criminals, along with the “smugglers” whose hyped notoriety is used
by the Australian media to distract from the immorality and criminality
of their own government. The refugees are confined behind barbed wire on
average for well over a year, some indefinitely, in barbaric conditions
that have led to self-harm, murder, suicide and mental illness.
Children have not been spared. An Australian Gulag run by sinister
private security firms includes concentration camps on the remote
Pacific islands of Manus and Nauru. People often have no idea when they
might be freed, if at all.
The Australian military — whose derring-do is the subject of
uncritical tomes that fill the shelves of airport bookstalls — has
played an important part in “turning back the boats” of refugees fleeing
wars, such as in Iraq, launched and prolonged by the Americans and
their Australian mercenaries. No irony, let alone responsibility, is
acknowledged in this cowardly role.
On this Australia Day, the “pride of the services” will be on
display. This pride extends to the Australian Immigration Department,
which commits people to its Gulag for “offshore processing”, often
arbitrarily, leaving them to grieve and despair and rot. Last week it
was announced that Immigration officials had spent $400,000 on medals
which they will award their heroic selves. Put out more flags.
On January 26, Indigenous Australians and their supporters will
march from The Block in Redfern, Sydney, to the Sydney Town Hall. The
march will begin at 10 am. On Thursday February 11, Grandmothers Against Removals will
address a rally in Canberra. This will start at 12 noon at the
Aboriginal Tent Embassy, then march to Parliament House.
