The New World War
The Silence Is A Lie
In an article for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes the
'great silence' over the annual British party conferences as
politicians and their club of commentators say nothing about a
war provoked and waged across the world the responsibility for
which lies close at hand.
By John Pilger
25/09/08 "ICH" -- - Britain's political conference season of
2008 will be remembered as The Great Silence. Politicians have
come and gone and their mouths have moved in front of large
images of themselves, and they often wave at someone. There has
been lots of news about each other. Adam Boulton, the political
editor of Sky News, and billed as "the husband of Blair aide
Anji Hunter", has published a book of gossip derived from his
"unrivalled access to No 10". His revelation is that Tony
Blair's mouthpiece told lies. The war criminal himself has been
absent, but the former mouthpiece has been signing his own book
of gossip, and waving. The club is celebrating itself, including
all those, Labour and Tory, who gave the war criminal a standing
ovation on his last day in parliament and who have yet to vote
on, let alone condemn, Britain's part in the wanton human,
social and physical destruction of an entire nation. Instead,
there are happy debates such as, "Can hope win?" and, my
favourite, "Can foreign policy be a Labour strength?" As Harold
Pinter said of unmentionable crimes: "Nothing ever happened.
Even while it was happening, it wasn't happening. It didn't
matter. It was of no interest."
The Guardian's economics editor, Larry Elliott, has written that
the Prime Minister "resembles a tragic hero in a Hardy novel: an
essentially good man brought down by one error of judgement".
What is this one error of judgement? The bank- rolling of two
murderous colonial adventures? No. The unprecedented growth of
the British arms industry and the sale of weapons to the poorest
countries? No. The replacement of manufacturing and public
service by an arcane cult serving the ultra-rich? No. The Prime
Minister's "folly" is "postponing the election last year". This
is the March Hare Factor.
Reality can be detected, however, by applying the Orwell Rule
and inverting public pronouncements and headlines, such as
"Aggressor Russia facing pariah status, US warns", thereby
identifying the correct pariah; or by crossing the invisible
boundaries that fix the boundaries of political and media
discussion. "When truth is replaced by silence," said the Soviet
dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko, "the silence is a lie."
Understanding this silence is critical in a society in which
news has become noise. Silence covers the truth that Britain's
political parties have converged and now follow the
single-ideology model of the United States. This is different
from the political consensus of half a century ago that produced
what was known as social democracy. Today's political union has
no principled social democratic premises. Debate has become just
another weasel word and principle, like the language of Chaucer,
is bygone. That the poor and the state fund the rich is a given,
along with the theft of public services, known as privatisation.
This was spelt out by Margaret Thatcher but, more importantly,
by new Labour's engineers. In The Blair Revolution: Can New
Labour Deliver? Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle declared
Britain's new "economic strengths" to be its transnational
corporations, the "aerospace" industry (weapons) and "the
pre-eminence of the City of London". The rest was to be
asset-stripped, including the peculiar British pursuit of
selfless public service. Overlaying this was a new social
authoritarianism guided by a hypocrisy based on "values".
Mandelson and Liddle demanded "a tough discipline" and a
"hardworking majority" and the "proper bringing-up [sic] of
children". And in formally launching his Murdochracy, Blair used
"moral" and "morality" 18 times in a speech he gave in Australia
as a guest of Rupert Murdoch, who had recently found God.
A "think tank" called Demos exemplified this new order. A
founder of Demos, Geoff Mulgan, himself rewarded with a job in
one of Blair's "policy units", wrote a book called Connexity.
"In much of the world today," he offered, "the most pressing
problems on the public agenda are not poverty or material
shortage . . . but rather the disorders of freedom: the troubles
that result from having too many freedoms that are abused rather
than constructively used." As if celebrating life in another
solar system, he wrote: "For the first time ever, most of the
world's most powerful nations do not want to conquer territory."
That reads, now as it ought to have read then, as dark parody in
a world where more than 24,000 children die every day from the
effects of poverty and at least a million people lie dead in
just one territory conquered by the most powerful nations.
However, it serves to remind us of the political "culture" that
has so successfully fused traditional liberalism with the lunar
branch of western political life and allowed our "too many
freedoms" to be taken away as ruthlessly and anonymously as
wedding parties in Afghanistan have been obliterated by our
bombs.
The product of these organised delusions is rarely acknowledged.
The current economic crisis, with its threat to jobs and savings
and public services, is the direct consequence of a rampant
militarism comparable, in large part, with that of the first
half of the last century, when Europe's most advanced and
cultured nation committed genocide. Since the 1990s, America's
military budget has doubled. Like the national debt, it is
currently the largest ever. The true figure is not known,
because up to 40 per cent is classified "black" – it is hidden.
Britain, with a weapons industry second only to the US, has also
been militarised. The Iraq invasion has cost $5trn, at least.
The 4,500 British troops in Basra almost never leave their base.
They are there because the Americans demand it. On 19 September,
Robert Gates, the American defence secretary, was in London
demanding $20bn from allies like Britain so that the US invasion
force in Afghanistan could be increased to 44,000. He said the
British force would be increased. It was an order.
In the meantime, an American invasion of Pakistan is under way,
secretly authorised by President Bush. The "change" candidate
for president, Barack Obama, had already called for an invasion
and more aircraft and bombs. The ironies are searing. A
Pakistani religious school attacked by American drone missiles,
killing 23 people, was set up in the 1980s with CIA backing. It
was part of Operation Cyclone, in which the US armed and funded
mujahedin groups that became al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The aim
was to bring down the Soviet Union. This was achieved; it also
brought down the Twin Towers.
On 20 September the inevitable response to the latest invasion
came with the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad. For
me, it is reminiscent of President Nixon's invasion of Cambodia
in 1970, which was planned as a diversion from the coming defeat
in Vietnam. The result was the rise to power of Pol Pot's Khmer
Rouge. Today, with Taliban guerrillas closing on Kabul and Nato
refusing to conduct serious negotiations, defeat in Afghanistan
is also coming.
It is a war of the world. In Latin America, the Bush
administration is fomenting incipient military coups in
Venezuela, Bolivia, and possibly Paraguay, democracies whose
governments have opposed Washington's historic rapacious
intervention in its "backyard". Washington's "Plan Colombia" is
the model for a mostly unreported assault on Mexico. This is the
Merida Initiative, which will allow the United States to fund
"the war on drugs and organised crime" in Mexico – a cover, as
in Colombia, for militarising its closest neighbour and ensuring
its "business stability".
Britain is tied to all these adventures – a British "School of
the Americas" is to be built in Wales, where British soldiers
will train killers from all corners of the American empire in
the name of "global security".
None of this is as potentially dangerous, or more distorted in
permitted public discussion, than the war on Russia. Two years
ago, Stephen Cohen, professor of Russian Studies at New York
University, wrote a landmark essay in the Nation which has now
been reprinted in Britain.* He warns of "the gravest threats
[posed] by the undeclared Cold War Washington has waged, under
both parties, against post-communist Russia during the past 15
years". He describes a catastrophic "relentless winner-take-all
of Russia's post-1991 weakness", with two-thirds of the
population forced into poverty and life expectancy barely at 59.
With most of us in the West unaware, Russia is being encircled
by US and Nato bases and missiles in violation of a pledge by
the United States not to expand Nato "one inch to the east". The
result, writes Cohen, "is a US-built reverse iron curtain [and]
a US denial that Russia has any legitimate national interests
outside its own territory, even in ethnically akin former
republics such as Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia. [There is even]
a presumption that Russia does not have fully sovereignty within
its own borders, as expressed by constant US interventions in
Moscow's internal affairs since 1992 . . . the United States is
attempting to acquire the nuclear responsibility it could not
achieve during the Soviet era."
This danger has grown rapidly as the American media again
presents US-Russian relations as "a duel to the death – perhaps
literally". The liberal Washington Post, says Cohen, "reads like
a bygone Pravda on the Potomac". The same is true in Britain,
with the regurgitation of propaganda that Russia was wholly
responsible for the war in the Caucasus and must therefore be a
"pariah". Sarah Palin, who may end up US president, says she is
ready to attack Russia. The steady beat of this drum has seen
Moscow return to its old nuclear alerts. Remember the 1980s,
writes Cohen, "when the world faced exceedingly grave Cold War
perils, and Mikhail Gorbachev unexpectedly emerged to offer a
heretical way out. Is there an American leader today ready to
retrieve that missed opportunity?" It is an urgent question that
must be asked all over the world by those of us still unafraid
to break the lethal silence.
WWW.JOHNPILGER.COM
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