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<h1><b>Have a Nice World War, Folks</b></h1><font size=3>By
<a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/johnpilger">John
Pilger</a><br>
<a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/have-a-nice-world-war-folks-by-john-pilger" eudora="autourl">
http://www.zcommunications.org/have-a-nice-world-war-folks-by-john-pilger<br>
<br>
</a>Friday, March 26, 2010<br><br>
<br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
"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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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." <br><br>
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.
<br><br>
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.<br><br>
<a href="http://www.johnpilger.com">www.johnpilger.com</a><br><br>
<br><br>
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