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John Pilger hears Blair echo Mussolini<br>
by John Pilger September 16, 2004 <br>
New Statesman <br>
<br>
The world is dividing into two hostile camps: Islam and "us".
That <br>
is the unerring message from western governments, press, radio and <br>
television. For Islam, read terrorists. It is reminiscent of the <br>
cold war, when the world was divided between "Reds" and us, and
even <br>
a strategy of annihilation was permissible in our defence. We now <br>
know, or we ought to know, that so much of that was a charade; <br>
released official files make clear the Soviet threat was for public
<br>
consumption only. <br><br>
Every day now, as during the cold war, a one-way moral mirror is <br>
held up to us as a true reflection of events. The new threat is <br>
given impetus with every terrorist outrage, be it at Beslan or <br>
Jakarta. Seen in the one-way mirror, our leaders make grievous <br>
mistakes, but their good intentions are not in question. Tony <br>
Blair's "idealism" and "decency" are promoted by his
accredited <br>
mainstream detractors, as the concocted Greek tragedy of his <br>
political demise opens on the media stage. Having taken part in the
<br>
killing of as many as 37,000 Iraqi civilians, Blair's distractions,
<br>
not his victims, are news: from his arcane rivalry with treasurer <br>
Gordon Brown, his Tweedledee, to his damascene conversion to the <br>
perils of global warming. On the atrocity at Beslan, Blair is <br>
allowed to say, without irony or challenge, that "this international
<br>
terrorism will not prevail". These are the same words spoken by
<br>
Mussolini soon after he had bombed civilians in Abyssinia. <br><br>
Heretics who look behind the one-way mirror and see the utter <br>
dishonesty of all this, who identify Blair and his collaborators as
<br>
war criminals in the literal and legal sense and present evidence of
<br>
his cynicism and immorality, are few; but they have wide support <br>
among the public, whose awareness has never been higher, in my <br>
experience. It is the British public's passionate indifference, if <br>
not contempt for the political games of Blair/Brown and their courts
<br>
and its accelerating interest in the way the world really is, that <br>
unnerves those with power. <br><br>
Let's look at a few examples of the way the world is presented and <br>
the way it really is. The occupation of Iraq is presented as "a
<br>
mess": a blundering, incompetent American military up against <br>
Islamic fanatics. In truth, the occupation is a systematic, <br>
murderous assault on a civilian population by a corrupt American <br>
officer class, given licence by its superiors in Washington. Last <br>
May, the US Marines used battle tanks and helicopter gunships to <br>
attack the slums of Fallujah. They admitted killing 600 people, a <br>
figure far greater than the total number of civilians killed by <br>
the "insurgents" during the past year. The generals were
candid; <br>
this futile slaughter was an act of revenge for the killing of three
<br>
American mercenaries. Sixty years earlier, the SS Das Reich division
<br>
killed 600 French civilians at Oradour-sur-Glane as revenge for the
<br>
kidnapping of a German officer by the resistance. Is there a <br>
difference? <br><br>
These days, the Americans routinely fire missiles into Falluja and <br>
other dense urban areas; they murder whole families. If the word <br>
terrorism has any modern application, it is this industrial state <br>
terrorism. The British have a different style. There are more than <br>
40 known cases of Iraqis having died at the hands of British <br>
soldiers; just one soldier has been charged. In the current issue of
<br>
the magagazine The Journalist, Lee Gordon, a freelance reporter, <br>
wrote, "Working as a Brit in Iraq is hazardous, particularly in the
<br>
south where our troops have a reputation (unreported at home) for <br>
brutality." Neither is the growing disaffection among British troops
<br>
reported at home. This is so worrying the Ministry of Defence that <br>
it has moved to placate the family of 17-year-old soldier David <br>
McBride by taking him off the AWL list after he refused to fight in
<br>
Iraq. Almost all the families of soldiers killed in Iraq have <br>
denounced the occupation and Blair, all of which is unprecedented.
<br><br>
Only by recognising the terrorism of states is it possible to <br>
understand, and deal with, acts of terrorism by groups and <br>
individuals which, however horrific, are tiny by comparison. <br>
Moreover, their source is inevitably the official terrorism for <br>
which there is no media language. Thus, the State of Israel has been
<br>
able to convince many outsiders that it is merely a victim of <br>
terrorism when, in fact, its own unrelenting, planned terrorism is <br>
the cause of the infamous retaliation by Palestinian suicide <br>
bombers. For all of Israel's perverse rage against the BBC - a <br>
successful form of intimidation - BBC reporters never report <br>
Israelis as terrorists: that term belongs exclusively to <br>
Palestinians imprisoned in their own land. It is not surprising, as
<br>
the recent Glasgow University study concluded, that many television
<br>
viewers in Britain believe that the Palestinians are the invaders <br>
and occupiers. <br><br>
On 7 September, a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 16 Israelis in <br>
the town of Beersheba. Every television news report allowed the <br>
Israeli government spokesman to use this tragedy to justify the <br>
building of an apartheid wall - when the wall is pivotal to the <br>
causes of Palestinian violence. Almost every news report marked the
<br>
end of a five-month period of "relative peace and calm" and
"a lull <br>
in the violence". During those five months of relative peace and
<br>
calm, almost 400 Palestinians were killed, 71 of them in <br>
assassinations. During the lull in the violence, more than 73 <br>
Palestinian children were killed. A 13 year old was murdered with a
<br>
bullet through the heart, a five year old was shot in her face as <br>
she walked arm in arm with her two-year-old sister. The body of <br>
Mazen Majid, aged 14, was riddled with 18 Israeli bullets as he and
<br>
his family fled their bulldozed home. <br><br>
None of this was reported in Britain as terrorism. Most of it was <br>
not reported at all. After all, this was a period of peace and calm,
<br>
a lull in the violence. On 19 May, Israeli tanks and helicopters <br>
fired on peaceful demonstrators, killing eight of them. This <br>
atrocity had a certain significance; the demonstration was part of a
<br>
growing non-violent Palestinian movement, which has seen peaceful <br>
protest gatherings, often with prayers, along the apartheid wall. <br>
The rise of this Gandhian movement is barely noted in the outside <br>
world. <br><br>
The truth about Chechyna is similarly suppressed. On 4 February <br>
2000, Russian aircraft attacked the Chechen village of Katyr Yurt. <br>
They used "vacuum bombs", which release petrol vapour and suck
<br>
people's lungs out, and are banned under the Geneva Convention. The
<br>
Russians bombed a convoy of survivors under a white flag. They <br>
murdered 363 men, women and children. It was one of countless, <br>
little known acts of terrorism in Chechnya perpetrated by the <br>
Russian state, whose leader, Vladimir Putin, has the "complete
<br>
solidarity" of Tony Blair. <br><br>
"Few of us", wrote the playwright Arthur Miller, "can
easily <br>
surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The <br>
thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many <br>
innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be <br>
internally denied." <br><br>
It is time we stopped denying it.<br><br>
John Pilger's new book, Tell Me No Lies: investigative journalism <br>
and its triumphs, is published by Jonathan Cape next month<br><br>
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