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Click on the following link to find books by John Pilger:

http://www.tomfolio.com/SearchAuthorTitle.asp?Aut=John_Pilger

 

 

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http://www.newstatesman.com/200607310018

 

Empire: war and propaganda

 

The US role in supporting Israel's military assault on Lebanon falls into a pattern of imperial tyranny, where history is rewritten to suit America's needs while Europe stands cravenly by.

 

by John Pilger

 

New Statesman (July 31 2006)

 

The National Museum of American History is part of the celebrated Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Surrounded by mock Graeco-Roman edifices with their soaring Corinthian columns, rampant eagles and chiselled profundities, it is at the centre of Empire, though the word itself is engraved nowhere. This is understandable, as the likes of Hitler and Mussolini were proud imperialists, too: on a "great mission to rid the world of evil", as President Bush has also said.

 

One of the museum's exhibitions is called "The Price of Freedom: Americans at war". In the spirit of Santa's Magic Grotto, this travesty of revisionism helps us understand how silence and omission are so successfully deployed in free, media-saturated societies. The shuffling lines of ordinary people, many of them children, are dispensed the vainglorious message that America has always "built freedom and democracy" - notably at Hiroshima and Nagasaki where the atomic bombing saved "a million lives", and in Vietnam where America's crusaders were "determined to stop communist expansion", and in Iraq where the same true hearts "employed air strikes of unprecedented precision".

 

The words "invasion" and "controversial" make only fleeting appearances; there is no hint that the "great mission" has overseen, since 1945, the attempted overthrow of fifty governments, many of them democracies, along with the crushing of popular movements struggling against tyranny and the bombing of thirty countries, causing the loss of countless lives. In central America, in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan's arming and training of gangster-armies saw off

300,000 people; in Guatemala, this was described by the UN as genocide. No word of this is uttered in the Grotto. Indeed, thanks to such displays, Americans can venerate war, comforted by the crimes of others and knowing nothing about their own.

 

In Santa's Grotto, there is no place for Howard Zinn's honest People's History of the United States, or I F Stone's revelation of the truth of what the museum calls "the forgotten war" in Korea, or Mark Twain's definition of patriotism as the need to keep "multitudinous uniformed assassins on hand at heavy expense to grab slices of other people's countries". Moreover, at the Price of Freedom Shop, you can buy US Army Monopoly, and a "grateful nation blanket" for just $200. The exhibition's corporate sponsors include Sears, Roebuck, the mammoth retailer. The point is taken.

 

To understand the power of indoctrination in free societies is also to understand the subversive power of the truth it suppresses. During the Blair era in Britain, precocious revisionists of Empire have been embraced by the pro-war media. Inspired by America's Messianic claims of "victory" in the cold war, their pseudo-histories have sought not only to hose down the blood slick of slavery, plunder, famine and genocide that was British imperialism ("the Empire was an exemplary force for good": Andrew Roberts) but also to rehabilitate Gladstonian convictions of superiority and promote "the imposition of western values", as Niall Ferguson puts it.

 

Ferguson relishes "values", an unctuous concept that covers both the barbarism of the imperial past and today's ruthless, rigged "free" market. The new code for race and class is "culture". Thus, the enduring, piratical campaign by the rich and powerful against the poor and weak, especially those with natural resources, has become a "clash of civilisations". Since Francis Fukuyama wrote his drivel about "the end of history" (since recanted), the task of the revisionists and mainstream journalism has been to popularise the "new" imperialism, as in Ferguson's War of the World series for Channel 4 and his frequent soundbites on the BBC. In this way, the public is "softened up" for the rapacious invasion of countries on false pretences, including a not unlikely nuclear attack on Iran, and the ascent in Washington of an executive dictatorship, as called for by Vice-President Cheney. So imminent is the latter that a supine Congress will almost certainly reverse the Supreme Court's recent decision to outlaw the Guantanamo kangaroo courts. The judge who wrote the majority opinion - in a high court Bush himself stacked - sounded his alarm through this seminal quotation of James Madison: "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny".

 

The catastrophe in the Middle East is a product of such an imperial tyranny. It is clearly a US-ordained operation, with the long-planned assault on Gaza and the destruction of Lebanon pretexts for a wider campaign with the goal of installing American puppets in Lebanon, Syria and eventually Iran. "The pay-off time has come", wrote the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe; "now the proxy should salvage the entangled Empire".

 

The attendant propaganda - the abuse of language and eternal hypocrisy - has reached its nadir in recent weeks. An Israeli soldier belonging to an invasion force was captured and held, legitimately, as a prisoner of war. Reported as a "kidnapping", this set off yet more slaughter of Palestinian civilians. The seizure of two Palestinian civilians two days before the capture of the soldier was of no interest. Neither was the incarceration of thousands of Palestinian hostages in Israeli prisons, and the torture of many of them, as documented by Amnesty. The kidnapped soldier story cancelled any serious inquiry into Israel's plans to reinvade Gaza, from which it had staged a phoney withdrawal. The fact and meaning of Hamas's self-imposed sixteen-month ceasefire were lost in inanities about "recognising Israel", along with Israel's state of terror in Gaza - the dropping of a 500 pound bomb on a residential block, the firing of as many as 9,000 heavy artillery shells into one of the most densely populated places on earth and the nightly terrorising with sonic booms.

 

"I want nobody to sleep at night in Gaza", declared the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, as children went out of their minds. In their defence, the Palestinians fired a cluster of Qassam missiles and killed eight Israelis: enough to ensure Israel's victimhood on the BBC; even Jeremy Bowen struck a shameful "balance", referring to "two narratives". The historical equivalent is not far from that of the Nazi bombardment and starvation of the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto. Try to imagine that described as "two narratives".

 

Watching this unfold in Washington - I am staying in a hotel taken over by evangelical "Christians for Israel" apparently seeking rapture - I have heard only the crudest colonial refrain and no truth. Hezbollah, drone America's journalistic caricatures, is "armed and funded by Syria and Iran", and so they beckon an attack on those countries, while remaining silent about America's $3 billion-a-day gift of planes and small arms and bombs to a state whose international lawlessness is a registered world record. There is never mention that, just as the rise of Hamas was a response to the atrocities and humiliations the Palestinians have suffered for half a century, so Hezbollah was formed only as a defence against Ariel Sharon's murderous invasion of Lebanon in 1982 which left 22,000 people dead. There is never mention that Israel intervenes at will, illegally and brutally, in the remaining 22 per cent of historic Palestine, having demolished 11,000 homes and walled off people from their farmlands, and families, and hospitals, and schools. There is never mention that the threat to Israel's existence is a canard, and the true enemy of its people is not the Arabs, but Zionism and an imperial America that guarantees the Jewish state as the antithesis of humane Judaism.

 

 

Government silence

 

The epic injustice done to the Palestinians is the heart of the matter. While European governments (with the honourable exception of the Swiss) have remained craven, it is only Hezbollah that has come to the Palestinians' aid. How truly shaming. There is no media "narrative" of the Palestinians' heroic stand during two uprisings, and with slingshots and stones most of the time. Israel's murders of Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall have left them utterly alone. Neither is the silence of governments all that is shocking. On a major BBC programme, Maureen Lipman, a Jew and promoter of selective good causes, is allowed to say, without serious challenge, that "human life is not cheap to the Israelis, and human life on the other side is quite cheap actually ... "

 

Let Lipman see the children of Gaza laid out after an Israeli bombing run, their parents petrified with grief. Let her watch as a young Palestinian woman - and there have been many of them - screams in pain as she gives birth in the back seat of a car at night at an Israeli roadblock, having been wilfully refused right of passage to a hospital. Then let Lipman watch the child's father carry his newborn across freezing fields until it turns blue and dies.

 

I think Orwell got it right in this passage from Nineteen Eighty-Four, a tale of the ultimate empire:

 

"And in the general hardening of outlook that set in ... practices which had been long abandoned - imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions ... and the deportation of whole populations - not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive".

_

 

John Pilger's new book, Freedom Next Time, is published by Bantam Press (GBP 17.99)

 

Copyright (c) New Statesman 1913 - 2006

 

 

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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/112505I.shtml

 

A News Revolution Has Begun

By John Pilger

 

t r u t h o u t | Perspective

 

Friday 25 November 2005

 

The Indian writer Vandana Shiva has called for an "insurrection of subjugated knowledge." The insurrection is well under way. In trying to make sense of a dangerous world, millions of people are turning away from the traditional sources of news and information and toward the world wide web, convinced that mainstream journalism is the voice of rampant power. The great scandal of Iraq has accelerated this. In the United States, several senior broadcasters have confessed that had they challenged and exposed the lies told about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, instead of amplifying and justifying them, the invasion might not have happened.

 

Such honesty has yet to cross the Atlantic. Since it was founded in 1922, the BBC has served to protect every British establishment during war and civil unrest. "We" never traduce and never commit great crimes. So the omission of shocking events in Iraq - the destruction of cities, the slaughter of innocent people and the farce of a puppet government - is routinely applied. A study by the Cardiff School of Journalism found that 90 per cent of the BBC's references to Saddam Hussein's WMDs suggested he possessed them and that "spin from the British and US governments was successful in framing the coverage." The same "spin" has ensured, until now, that the use of banned weapons by the Americans and British in Iraq has been suppressed as news.

 

An admission by the US State Department on 10 November that its forces had used white phosphorus in Fallujah followed "rumours on the internet," according to the BBC's Newsnight. There were no rumours. There was first-class investigative work that ought to shame well-paid journalists. Mark Kraft of insomnia.livejournal.com found the evidence in the March-April

2005 issue of Field Artillery magazine and other sources. He was supported by the work of film-maker Gabriele Zamparini, founder of the excellent site, thecatsdream.com.

 

Last May, David Edwards and David Cromwell of medialens.org posted a revealing correspondence with Helen Boaden, the BBC's director of news. They had asked her why the BBC had remained silent on known atrocities committed by the Americans in Fallujah. She replied, "Our correspondent in Fallujah at the time of the US attack, Paul Wood, did not report any of these things because he did not see any of these things." It is a statement to savour. Wood was "embedded" with the Americans. He interviewed none of the victims of American atrocities nor un-embedded journalists. He not only missed the Americans' use of white phosphorus, which they now admit, he reported nothing of the use of another banned weapon, napalm. Thus, BBC viewers were unaware of the fine words of Colonel James Alles, commander of the US Marine Air Group II. "We napalmed both those bridge approaches," he said. "Unfortunately, there were people there ... you could see them in the cockpit video ... It's no great way to die. The generals love napalm. It has a big psychological effect."

 

Once the unacknowledged work of Mark Kraft and Gabriele Zamparini had appeared in the Guardian and Independent and forced the Americans to come clean about white phosphorous, Wood was on Newsnight describing their admission as "a public relations disaster for the US." This echoed Menzies Campbell of the Liberal-Democrats, perhaps the most quoted politician since Gladstone, who said, "The use of this weapon may technically have been legal, but its effects are such that it will hand a propaganda victory to the insurgency."

 

The BBC and most of the British political and media establishment invariably cast such a horror as a public relations problem while minimizing the crushing of a city the size of Leeds, the killing and maiming of countless men, women and children, the expulsion of thousands and the denial of medical supplies, food and water - a major war crime.

 

The evidence is voluminous, provided by refugees, doctors, human rights groups and a few courageous foreigners whose work appears only on the internet. In April last year, Jo Wilding, a young British law student, filed a series of extraordinary eye-witness reports from inside the city. So fine are they that I have included one of her pieces in an anthology of the best investigative journalism.* Her film, "A Letter to the Prime Minister," made inside Fallujah with Julia Guest, has not been shown on British television. In addition, Dahr Jamail, an independent Lebanese-American journalist who has produced some of the best frontline reporting I have read, described all the "things" the BBC failed to "see." His interviews with doctors, local officials and families are on the internet, together with the work of those who have exposed the widespread use of uranium-tipped shells, another banned weapon, and cluster bombs, which Campbell would say are "technically legal." Try these web sites: dahrjamail.com, zmag.org, antiwar.com, truthout.org, indymedia.org.uk, internationalclearinghouse.info, counterpunch.org, voicesuk.org. There are many more.

 

"Each word," wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, "has an echo. So does each silence."

 

Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs, edited by John Pilger, is published by Vintage.

 

This article originally appeared in the Daily Standard.


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