[News] Have a Nice World War, Folks
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Fri Mar 26 12:05:24 EDT 2010
Have a Nice World War, Folks
By <http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/johnpilger>John Pilger
http://www.zcommunications.org/have-a-nice-world-war-folks-by-john-pilger
Friday, March 26, 2010
Here is news of the Third World War. The United
States has invaded Africa. US troops have entered
Somalia, extending their war front from
Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and now the
Horn of Africa. In preparation for an attack on
Iran, American missiles have been placed in four
Persian Gulf states, and "bunker-buster" bombs
are said to be arriving at the US base on the
British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
In Gaza, the sick and abandoned population,
mostly children, is being entombed behind
underground American-supplied walls in order to
reinforce a criminal siege. In Latin America, the
Obama administration has secured seven bases in
Colombia, from which to wage a war of attrition
against the popular democracies in Venezuela,
Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay. Meanwhile, the
secretary of "defense" Robert Gates complains
that "the general [European] public and the
political class" are so opposed to war they are
an "impediment" to peace. Remember this is the month of the March Hare.
According to an American general, the invasion
and occupation of Afghanistan is not so much a
real war as a "war of perception". Thus, the
recent "liberation of the city of Marja" from the
Taliban's "command and control structure" was
pure Hollywood. Marja is not a city; there was no
Taliban command and control. The heroic
liberators killed the usual civilians, poorest of
the poor. Otherwise, it was fake. A war of
perception is meant to provide fake news for the
folks back home, to make a failed colonial
adventure seem worthwhile and patriotic, as if
The Hurt Locker were real and parades of
flag-wrapped coffins through the Wiltshire town
of Wooten Basset were not a cynical propaganda exercise.
"War is fun", the helmets in Vietnam used to say
with bleakest irony, meaning that if a war is
revealed as having no purpose other than to
justify voracious power in the cause of lucrative
fanaticisms such as the weapons industry, the
danger of truth beckons. This danger can be
illustrated by the liberal perception of Tony
Blair in 1997 as one "who wants to create a world
[where] ideology has surrendered entirely to
values" (Hugo Young, the Guardian) compared with
today's public reckoning of a liar and war criminal.
Western war-states such as the US and Britain are
not threatened by the Taliban or any other
introverted tribesmen in faraway places, but by
the antiwar instincts of their own citizens.
Consider the draconian sentences handed down in
London to scores of young people who protested
Israel's assault on Gaza in January last year.
Following demonstrations in which paramilitary
police "kettled" (corralled) thousands,
first-offenders have received two and a half
years in prison for minor offences that would not
normally carry custodial sentences. On both sides
of the Atlantic, serious dissent exposing illegal
war has become a serious crime.
Silence in other high places allows this moral
travesty. Across the arts, literature, journalism
and the law, liberal elites, having hurried away
from the debris of Blair and now Obama, continue
to fudge their indifference to the barbarism and
aims of western state crimes by promoting
retrospectively the evils of their convenient
demons, like Saddam Hussein. With Harold Pinter
gone, try compiling a list of famous writers,
artists and advocates whose principles are not
consumed by the "market" or neutered by their
celebrity. Who among them have spoken out about
the holocaust in Iraq during almost 20 years of
lethal blockade and assault? And all of it has
been deliberate. On 22 January 1991, the US
Defense Intelligence Agency predicted in
impressive detail how a blockade would
systematically destroy Iraq's clean water system
and lead to "increased incidences, if not
epidemics of disease". So the US set about
eliminating clean water for the Iraqi population:
one of the causes, noted Unicef, of the deaths of
half a million Iraqi infants under the age of
five. But this extremism apparently has no name.
Norman Mailer once said he believed the United
States, in its endless pursuit of war and
domination, had entered a "pre-fascist
era". Mailer seemed tentative, as if trying to
warn about something even he could not quite
define. "Fascism" is not right, for it invokes
lazy historical precedents, conjuring yet again
the iconography of German and Italian repression.
On the other hand, American authoritarianism, as
the cultural critic Henry Giroux pointed out
recently, is "more nuance, less theatrical, more
cunning, less concerned with repressive modes of
control than with manipulative modes of consent."
This is Americanism, the only predatory ideology
to deny that it is an ideology. The rise of
tentacular corporations that are dictatorships in
their own right and of a military that is now a
state with the state, set behind the façade of
the best democracy 35,000 Washington lobbyists
can buy, and a popular culture programmed to
divert and stultify, is without precedent. More
nuanced perhaps, but the results are both
unambiguous and familiar. Denis Halliday and Hans
von Sponeck, the senior United Nations officials
in Iraq during the American and British-led
blockade, are in no doubt they witnessed
genocide. They saw no gas chambers. Insidious,
undeclared, even presented wittily as
enlightenment on the march, the Third World War
and its genocide proceeded, human being by human being.
In the coming election campaign in Britain, the
candidates will refer to this war only to laud
"our boys". The candidates are almost identical
political mummies shrouded in the Union Jack and
the Stars and Stripes. As Blair demonstrated a
mite too eagerly, the British elite loves America
because America allows it to barrack and bomb the
natives and call itself a "partner". We should interrupt their fun.
<http://www.johnpilger.com>www.johnpilger.com
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