A Murderous
Theatre of the Absurd
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger examines
news as parody as those prominent in the British media seek to
justify the official versions of the invasions of Iraq and
Afghanistan.
By John Pilger
11/09/08 "ICH"
-- - Try to laugh, please. The news is now officially parody
and a game for all the family to play.
First question: Why are “we” in Afghanistan? Answer: “To try to
help in the country’s rebuilding programme.” Who says so? Huw
Edwards, the BBC’s principal newsreader. What wags the Welsh
are.
Second question: Why are “we” in Iraq? Answer: To “plant a
western-style open democracy”. Who says so? Paul Wood, the
former BBC defence correspondent, and his boss Helen Boaden,
director of BBC News. To prove her point, Boaden supplied
Medialens.org with 2,700 words of quotations from Tony Blair and
George W Bush. Irony? No, she meant it.
Take Andrew Martin, divisional adviser at BBC Complaints, who
has been researching Bush’s speeches for “evidence” of noble
democratic reasons for laying to waste an ancient civilisation.
Says he: “The ‘D’ word is not there, but the phrase ‘united,
stable and free’ [is] clearly an allusion to it.” After all, he
says, the invasion of Iraq “was launched as ‘Operation Iraqi
Freedom’”. Moreover, says the BBC man, “in Bush’s 1 May 2003
speech (the one on the aircraft carrier) he talked repeatedly
about freedom and explicitly about the Iraqi transition to
democracy . . . These examples show that these were on Bush’s
mind before, during and after the invasion.”
Try to laugh, please.
Laughing may be difficult, I agree, given the slaughter of
civilians in Afghanistan by “coalition” aircraft, including
those directed by British forces engaged in “the country’s
rebuilding programme”. The bombing of civilian areas has
doubled, along with the deaths of civilians, says Human Rights
Watch. Last month, “our” aircraft slaughtered nearly 100
civilians, two-thirds of them children between the ages of three
months and 16 years, while they slept, according to
eyewitnesses. BBC television news initially devoted nine seconds
to the Human Rights Watch report, and nothing to the fact that
“less than peanuts” (according to an aid worker) is being spent
on rebuilding anything in Afghanistan.
As for the notion of a “united, stable and free” Iraq, consider
the no-bid contracts handed to the major western oil companies
for ownership of Iraq’s oil. “Theft” is a more truthful word.
Written by the companies themselves and US officials, the
contracts have been signed off by Bush and Nouri al-Maliki,
“prime minister” of Iraq’s “democratic” government that resides
in an air-conditioned American fortress. This is not news.
Try to laugh, please, while you consider the devastation of
Iraq’s health, once the best in the Middle East, by the
ubiquitous dust from British and US depleted uranium weapons. A
World Health Organisation study reporting a cancer epidemic has
been suppressed, says its principal author. This has been
reported in Britain only in the Glasgow Sunday Herald and the
Morning Star. According to a study last year by Basra University
Medical College, almost half of all deaths in the contaminated
southern provinces were caused by cancer.
Try to laugh, please, at the recent happy-clappy Nurembergs from
which will come the next president of the United States. Those
paid to keep the record straight have strained to present a
spectacle of choice. Barack Obama, the man of “change”, wants to
“build a 21st-century military . . . to stay on the offensive
everywhere”. Here comes the new Cold War, with promises of more
bombs, more of the militarised society with its 730 bases
worldwide, on which Americans spend 42 cents of every tax
dollar.
At home, Obama offers no authentic measure that might ease
America’s grotesque inequality, such as basic health care. John
McCain, his Republican opponent, may well be a media cartoon
figure – the fake “war hero” now joined with a
Shakespeare-banning, gun-loving, religious fanatic – yet his
true significance is that he and Obama share essentially the
same dangerous prescriptions.
Thousands of decent Americans came to the two nominating
conventions to express the dissenting opinion of millions of
their compatriots who believe, with good cause, that their
democracy is evaporating. They were intimidated, arrested,
beaten, pepper-gassed; and they were patronised or ignored by
those paid to keep the record straight.
In the meantime, Justin Webb, the BBC’s North America editor,
has launched a book about America, his “city on a hill”. It is a
sort of Mills & Boon view of the rapacious system he admires
with such obsequiousness. The book is called Have a Nice Day.
Try to laugh, please.Click on
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