[News] Have a Nice World War, Folks

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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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