|
Bringing Down The New Berlin walls
In his latest article for the New Statesman, John Pilger
describes how the Palestinian breakout of Gaza offers
inspiration for people struggling to bring down the new Berlin
Walls all over the world.
By John Pilger
15/02/08 "ICH"
-- -- The recent breakout of the people of Gaza provided a
heroic spectacle unlike any other since the Warsaw ghetto
uprising and the smashing down of the Berlin Wall. Whereas on
the occupied West Bank, Ariel Sharon's master plan of walling in
the population and stealing their land and resources has all but
succeeded, requiring only a Palestinian Vichy to sign it off,
the people of Gaza have defied their tormentors, however
briefly, and it is a guarantee they will do so again. There is
profound symbolism in their achievement, touching lives and
hopes all over the world.
"[Sharon's] fate for us," wrote Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian,
"was a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated,
violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed, ruled by disparate
militias, gangs, religious ideologues and extremists, broken up
into ethnic and religious tribalism, and co-opted [by]
collaborationists. Look to the Iraq of today – that is what he
had in store for us and he nearly achieved it."
Israel's and America's experiments in mass suffering nearly
achieved it. There was First Rains, the code name for a terror
of sonic booms that came every night and sent Gazan children
mad. There was Summer Rains, which showered bombs and missiles
on civilians, then extrajudicial executions, and finally a land
invasion. Ehud Barak, the current Israeli defence minister, has
tried every kind of blockade: the denial of electricity for
water and sewage pumps, incubators and dialysis machines and the
denial of fuel and food to a population of mostly malnourished
children. This has been accompanied by the droning, insincere,
incessant voices of western broadcasters and politicians, one
merging with the other, platitude upon platitude, tribunes of
the "international community" whose response is not to help, but
to excuse an indisputably illegal occupation as "disputed" and
damn a democratically elected Palestinian Authority as "Hamas
militants" who "refuse to recognise Israel's right to exist"
when it is Israel that demonstrably refuses to recognise the
Palestinians' right to exist.
"What is being hidden from the [Israeli] public," wrote Uri
Avnery, a founder of Gush Shalom, the Israeli peace movement, on
26 January, "is that the launching of the Qassams [rockets from
Gaza] could be stopped tomorrow. Several months ago, Hamas
proposed a ceasefire. It repeated the offer this week . . . Why
doesn't our government jump at this proposal? Simple: to make
such a deal, we must speak to Hamas . . . It is more important
to boycott Hamas than to put an end to the suffering of Sderot.
All the media co-operate with this pretence." Hamas long ago
offered Israel a ten-year ceasefire and has since recognised the
"reality" of the Jewish state. This is almost never reported in
the west.
The inspiration of the Palestinian breakout from Gaza was
dramatically demonstrated by the star Egyptian midfielder
Mohamed Aboutreika. Helping his national side to a 3-0 victory
over Sudan in the African Nations Cup, he raised his shirt to
reveal a T-shirt with the words "Sympathise with Gaza" in
English and Arabic. The crowd stood and cheered, and hundreds of
thousands of people around the world expressed their support for
him and for Gaza. An Egyptian journalist who joined a delegation
of sports writers to Fifa to protest against Aboutreika's yellow
card said: "It is actions like his that bring many walls down,
walls of silence, walls in our minds."
In the murdochracies, where most of the world is viewed as
useful or expendable, we have little sense of this. The news
selection is unremittingly distracting and disabling. The
cynicism of an identical group of opportunists laying claim to
the White House is given respectability as each of them competes
to support the Bush regime's despotic war-making. John McCain,
almost certainly the Republican nominee for president, wants a
"hundred-year war". That the leading Democratic candidates are a
woman and a black man is of supreme irrelevance; the fanatical
Condoleezza Rice is both female and black. Look into the murky
world behind Hillary Clinton and you find the likes of Monsanto,
a company that produced Agent Orange, the war chemical that
continues to destroy Vietnam. One of Barack Obama's chief
whisperers is Zbigniew Brzezinski, architect of Operation
Cyclone in Afghanistan, which spawned jihadism, al-Qaeda and
9/11.
This malign circus has been silent on Palestine and Gaza and
almost anything that matters, including the following
announcement, perhaps the most important of the century: "The
first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of
escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of
weapons of mass destruction." Inviting incredulity, these words
may require more than one reading. They come from a statement
written by five of the west's top military leaders, an American,
a Briton, a German, a Frenchman and a Dutchman, who help run the
club known as Nato. They are saying the west should nuke
countries that have weapons of mass destruction – with the
exclusion, that is, of the west's nuclear arsenal. Nuking will
be necessary because "the west's values and way of life are
under threat".
Where is this threat coming from? "Over there," say the
generals.
Where? In "the brutal world".
On 21 January, on the eve of the Nato announcement, Gordon Brown
also out-Orwelled Orwell. He said that "the race for more and
bigger stockpiles of nuclear destruction [sic]" is over. The
reason he gave was that "the international community"
(basically, the west) was facing "serious challenges". One of
these challenges is Iran, which has no nuclear weapons and no
programme to build them, according to America's National
Intelligence Estimates. This is in striking contrast to Brown's
Britain, which, in defiance of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty, has commissioned an entirely new Trident nuclear arsenal
at a cost believed to be as much as £25bn. What Brown was doing
was threatening Iran on behalf of the Bush regime, which wants
to attack Iran before the end of the presidential year.
Jonathan Schell, author of the seminal Fate of the Earth,
provides compelling evidence in his recently published The
Seventh Decade: the New Shape of Nuclear Danger that nuclear war
has now moved to the centre of western foreign policy even
though the enemy is invented. In response, Russia has begun to
restore its vast nuclear arsenal. Robert McNamara, the US
defence secretary during the Cuban crisis, describes this as
"Apocalypse Soon". Thus, the wall dismantled by young Germans in
1989 and sold to tourists is being built in the minds of a new
generation.
For the Bush and Blair regimes, the invasion of Iraq and the
campaigns against Hamas, Iran and Syria are vital in fabricating
this new "nuclear threat". The effect of the Iraq invasion, says
a study cited by Noam Chomsky, is a "sevenfold increase in the
yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks".
Behold Nato's instant "brutal world".
Of course, the highest and oldest wall is that which separates
"us" from "them". This is described today as a great divide of
religions or "a clash of civilisations", which are false
concepts, propagated in western scholarship and journalism to
provide what Edward Said called "the other" – an identifiable
target for fear and hatred that justifies invasion and economic
plunder. In fact, the foundations for this wall were laid more
than 500 years ago when the privileges of "discovery and
conquest" were granted to Christopher Columbus in a world that
the then all-powerful pope considered his property, to be
disposed of according to his will.
Nothing has changed. The World Bank, the International Monetary
Fund, the World Trade Organisation and now Nato are invested
with the same privileges of conquest on behalf of the new papacy
in Washington. The goal is what Bill Clinton called the
"integration of countries into the global free-market
community", the terms of which, noted the New York Times,
"require the United States to get involved in the plumbing and
wiring of other nations' internal affairs more deeply than ever
before".
This modern system of dominance requires sophisticated
propaganda that presents its aims as benign, even "promoting
democracy in Iraq", according to BBC executives responsible for
responding to sceptical members of the public. That "we" in the
west have the unfettered right to exploit the economies and
resources of the poor world while maintaining tariff walls and
state subsidies is taught as serious scholarship in the
economics departments of leading universities. This is
neoliberalism – socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor.
"Rather than acknowledging," wrote Chalmers Johnson, "that free
trade, privatisation and the rest of their policies are
ahistorical, self-serving economic nonsense, apologists for
neoliberalism have also revived an old 19th-century and neo-Nazi
explanation for developmental failure – namely, culture."
What is rarely discussed is that liberalism as an open-ended,
violent ideology is destroying liberalism as a reality. Hatred
of Muslims is widely advertised by those claiming the
respectability of what they call "the left". At the same time,
opponents of the new papacy are routinely smeared, as seen in
the recent fake charges of narcoterrorism against Hugo Chávez.
Having insinuated their way into public debate, the smears
deflect authentic critiques of Chávez's Venezuela and prepare
the ground for an assault on it.
This is the role that journalism has played in the invasion of
Iraq and the great injustice in Palestine. It also represents a
wall, on which Aldous Huxley, describing his totalitarian utopia
in Brave New World, might have written: "Opposition is apostasy.
Fatalism is ideal. Silence is preferred." If the people of Gaza
can disobey all three, why can't we?
Click on "comments" below to read or post comments
Comment Guidelines
Be succinct, constructive and
relevant to the story.
We encourage engaging, diverse
and meaningful commentary. Do not include
personal information such as names, addresses,
phone numbers and emails. Comments falling
outside our guidelines – those including
personal attacks and profanity – are not
permitted.
See our complete
Comment Policy
and
use this link to notify us if you have concerns
about a comment.
We’ll promptly review and remove any
inappropriate postings.
Send Page To a Friend
In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational
purposes. Information Clearing House has no
affiliation whatsoever with the originator of
this article nor is Information ClearingHouse
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
|
