The New World War ---- The Silence Is A Lie
Sep 24, 2008 By John Pilger
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.
War of the world
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.
Sep 24, 2008 By John Pilger
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.
War of the world
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.
date: Thu, 25 Sep 2008 07:35:57 +0100
author: Tony B
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