America and its allies together embody the very definition of
tyranny
BY JOHN PILGER
The National Museum of American History is part of the
celebrated Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Surrounded by mock
Graeco-Roman edifices with their soaring Corinthian columns, rampant
eagles and chiselled profundities, it is at the centre of Empire, though
the word itself is engraved nowhere. This is understandable, as the likes
of Hitler and Mussolini were proud imperialists, too: on a "great mission
to rid the world of evil", to borrow from President Bush.
One of the museum’s exhibitions is called "The Price of
Freedom: Americans at war". In the spirit of Santa’s Magic Grotto, this
travesty of revisionism helps us understand how silence and omission are
so successfully deployed in free, media-saturated societies. The shuffling
lines of ordinary people, many of them children, are dispensed the
vainglorious message that America has always "built freedom and democracy"
– notably at Hiroshima and Nagasaki where the atomic bombing saved "a
million lives", and in Vietnam where America’s crusaders were "determined
to stop communist expansion", and in Iraq where the same true hearts
"employed air strikes of unprecedented precision".
The words "invasion" and "controversial" make only
fleeting appearances; there is no hint that the "great mission" has
overseen, since 1945, the attempted overthrow of 50 governments, many of
them democracies, along with the crushing of popular movements struggling
against tyranny and the bombing of 30 countries, causing the loss of
countless lives. In Central America, in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan’s arming
and training of gangster-armies saw off 300,000 people; in Guatemala, this
was described by the UN as genocide. No word of this is uttered in the
Grotto. Indeed, thanks to such displays, Americans can venerate war,
comforted by the crimes of others and knowing nothing about their own.
In Santa’s Grotto there is no place for Howard Zinn’s
honest People’s History of the United States, or IF Stone’s
revelation of the truth of what the museum calls "the forgotten war" in
Korea, or Mark Twain’s definition of patriotism as the need to keep
"multitudinous uniformed assassins on hand at heavy expense to grab slices
of other people’s countries". Moreover, at the Price of Freedom Shop, you
can buy US Army Monopoly, and a "grateful nation blanket" for just $200.
The exhibition’s corporate sponsors include Sears, Roebuck, the mammoth
retailer. The point is taken.
To understand the power of indoctrination in free
societies is also to understand the subversive power of the truth it
suppresses. During the Blair era in Britain, precocious revisionists of
Empire have been embraced by the pro-war media. Inspired by America’s
messianic claims of "victory" in the cold war, their pseudo-histories have
sought not only to hose down the blood slick of slavery, plunder, famine
and genocide that was British imperialism ("the Empire was an exemplary
force for good": Andrew Roberts) but also to rehabilitate Gladstonian
convictions of superiority and promote "the imposition of western values",
as Niall Ferguson puts it.
Ferguson relishes "values", an unctuous concept that
covers both the barbarism of the imperial past and today’s ruthless,
rigged "free" market. The new code for race and class is "culture". Thus,
the enduring, piratical campaign by the rich and powerful against the poor
and weak, especially those with natural resources, has become a "clash of
civilisations". Since Francis Fukuyama wrote his drivel about "the end of
history" (since recanted), the task of the revisionists and mainstream
journalism has been to popularise the "new" imperialism, as in Ferguson’s
War of the World series for Channel 4 and his frequent sound bites on the
BBC. In this way, the public is "softened up" for the rapacious invasion
of countries on false pretences, including a not unlikely nuclear attack
on Iran and the ascent in Washington of an executive dictatorship, as
called for by Vice-President Cheney. So imminent is the latter that a
supine Congress will almost certainly reverse the Supreme Court’s recent
decision to outlaw the Guantánamo kangaroo courts. The judge who wrote the
majority opinion – in a high court Bush himself stacked – sounded his
alarm through this seminal quotation of James Madison: "The accumulation
of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands,
whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed or
elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."
The catastrophe in the Middle East is a product of such an
imperial tyranny. It is clear that the long planned assault on Gaza and
now the destruction of Lebanon are Washington-ordained and pretexts for a
wider campaign with the goal of installing American puppets in Lebanon,
Syria and eventually Iran. "The pay-off time has come," wrote the Israeli
historian Ilan Pappe; "now the proxy should salvage the entangled Empire."
The attendant propaganda – the abuse of language and
eternal hypocrisy – has reached its nadir in recent weeks. An Israeli
soldier belonging to an invasion force was captured and held,
legitimately, as a prisoner of war. Reported as a "kidnapping", this set
off yet more slaughter of Palestinian civilians. The seizure of two
Palestinian civilians two days before the capture of the soldier was of no
interest. Neither was the incarceration of thousands of Palestinian
hostages in Israeli prisons, and the torture of many of them, as
documented by Amnesty. The kidnapped soldier story cancelled any serious
inquiry into Israel’s plans to re-invade Gaza, from which it had staged a
phoney withdrawal. The fact and meaning of Hamas’s self-imposed 16-month
ceasefire were lost in inanities about "recognising Israel", along with
Israel’s state of terror in Gaza – the dropping of a 500lb bomb on a
residential block, the firing of as many as 9,000 heavy artillery shells
into one of the most densely populated places on earth and the nightly
terrorising with sonic booms.
"I want nobody to sleep at night in Gaza," declared the
Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, as children went out of their minds.
In their defence, the Palestinians fired a cluster of Qassam missiles and
killed eight Israelis: enough to ensure Israel’s victimhood on the BBC;
even Jeremy Bowen struck a shameful "balance", referring to "two
narratives". The historical equivalent is not far from that of the Nazi
bombardment and starvation of the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto. Try to imagine
that described as "two narratives".
Watching this unfold in Washington – I am staying in a
hotel taken over by evangelical "Christians for Israel" apparently seeking
rapture – I have heard only the crudest colonial refrain and no truth.
Hizbollah, drone America’s journalistic caricatures, is "armed and funded
by Syria and Iran", and so they beckon an attack on those countries while
remaining silent about America’s $3bn-a-day gift of planes and small arms
and bombs to a state whose international lawlessness is a registered world
record. There is never mention that just as the rise of Hamas was a
response to the atrocities and humiliations the Palestinians have suffered
for half a century, so Hizbollah was formed only as a defence against
Ariel Sharon’s murderous invasion of Lebanon in 1982 which left 22,000
people dead. There is never mention that Israel intervenes at will,
illegally and brutally, in the remaining 22 per cent of historic
Palestine, having demolished 11,000 homes and walled off people from their
farmlands, and families, and hospitals, and schools. There is never
mention that the threat to Israel’s existence is a canard and the true
enemy of its people is not the Arabs, but Zionism and an imperial America
that guarantees the Jewish state as the antithesis of humane Judaism.
The epic injustice done to the Palestinians is the heart
of the matter. While European governments (with the honourable exception
of the Swiss) have remained craven, it is only Hizbollah that has come to
the Palestinians’ aid. How truly shaming. There is no media "narrative" of
the Palestinians’ heroic stand during two uprisings, and with slingshots
and stones most of the time. Israel’s murders of Rachel Corrie and Tom
Hurndall have left them utterly alone. Neither is the silence of
governments all that is shocking. On a major BBC programme, Maureen Lipman,
a Jew and promoter of selective good causes, is allowed to say, without
serious challenge, that "human life is not cheap to the Israelis and human
life on the other side is quite cheap actually..."
Let Lipman see the children of Gaza laid out after an
Israeli bombing run, their parents petrified with grief. Let her watch as
a young Palestinian woman – and there have been many of them – screams in
pain as she gives birth in the back seat of a car at night at an Israeli
roadblock, having been wilfully refused right of passage to a hospital.
Then let Lipman watch the child’s father carry his newborn across freezing
fields until it turns blue and dies.
I think Orwell got it right in this passage from
Nineteen Eighty-Four, a tale of the ultimate empire: "And in the
general hardening of outlook that set in… practices which had been long
abandoned – imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as
slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions... and the
deportation of whole populations – not only became common again, but were
tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves
enlightened and progressive."
(John Pilger is an award winning war correspondent,
filmmaker and author.)
http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=404