Britain is said to be approaching its Berlusconi Moment. That is to say, if Rupert Murdoch wins control of Sky he will command half the television and newspaper market and threaten what is known as public service broadcasting. Although the alarm is ringing, it is unlikely that any government will stop him while his court is packed with politicians of all parties.
The problem with this and other Murdoch scares is that, while one cannot doubt their gravity, they deflect from an unrecognised and more insidious threat to honest information. For all his power, Murdoch’s media is not respectable. Take the current colonial wars. In the United States, Murdoch’s Fox Television is almost cartoon-like in its warmongering. It is the august, tombstone New York Times, "the greatest newspaper in the world," and others such as the once-celebrated Washington Post, that have given respectability to the lies and moral contortions of the "war on terror," now [recast] as "perpetual war."
In Britain, the liberal Observer performed this task in making respectable Tony Blair’s deceptions on Iraq. More importantly, so did the BBC, whose reputation is its power. In spite of one maverick reporter’s attempt to expose the so-called dodgy dossier, the BBC took Blair’s sophistry and lies on Iraq at face value.
This was made clear in studies by Cardiff University and the German-based Media Tenor. The BBC’s coverage, said the Cardiff study, was overwhelmingly "sympathetic to the government’s case." According to Media Tenor, a mere two per cent of BBC news in the build-up to the invasion permitted antiwar voices to be heard. Compared with the main American networks, only CBS was more pro-war.
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Blair was embraced by the new BBC corporate class, which regards itself as meretorious and non-ideological: the natural leaders in a managerial Britain in which class is unspoken. Few did more to enunciate Blair’s "vision" than Andrew Marr, then a leading newspaper journalist and today the BBC’s ubiquitous voice of middle-class Britain. Just as Murdoch’s Sun declared in 1995 it shared the rising Blair’s "high moral values" so Marr, writing the Observer in 1999, lauded the new prime minister’s "substantial moral courage" and the "clear distinction in his mind between prudently protecting his power base and rashly using his power for high moral purpose." What impressed Marr was Blair’s "utter lack of cynicism" along with his bombing of Yugoslavia which would "save lives."
By March 2003, Marr was the BBC’s political editor. Standing in Downing Street on the night of the "shock and awe" assault on Iraq, he rejoiced at the vindication of Blair who, he said, had promised "to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right" and as a result "tonight he stands as a larger man." In fact, the criminal conquest of Iraq smashed a society, killing up to a million people, driving four million from their homes, contaminating cities like Fallujah with cancer-causing poisons and leaving a majority of young children malnourished in a country once described by Unicef as a "model."
A war criminal is a war criminal is a war criminal. And Tony Blair assuredly is one, and George W. Bush, and Dick Cheney, and the Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama.
"Armies win wars and armies lose wars," wrote Chris Hedges. "But politicians start wars and politicians end them."
So, what do you call it when the U.S. army, navy, air force and CIA are fighting an "enemy" that has no army; that has no navy; that has no air force? Do you call this a war?
And since our army (and CIA, they fought in Viet Nam too, don't you know - Lansdale, John Paul Vann, etc, etc) is not fighting an army, how can our army win this war? And for that matter, how can our army lose that war?
American politicians started the wars waged upon the people of Afghanistan, Iraq and now Pakistan. But the politicians of those countries do not have the power to end those wars. Only the American politicians, the American President, and / or the American Congress, have the power to end those wars. And yes, they DO have the power to do so -- the President can order it to be done and FIRE the generals who would oppose him and the Congress can cut off the war funding. Simple. Very simple. All it takes is a matter of will.
Do they have the will to do so? No. Absolutely not. For had they the will, they should, could, and would have already done so. They have not paid a heavy enough price yet. It has not cost them enough, enough of their power, enough of their political capital. To hell with the blood and treasure of the U.S. citizen that fight their wars, and of the immigrants who have signed up to fight their wars in order to gain citizenship.
I believe in justice. I believe in karma. I believe in a balancing of the scales. I believe there is something beyond my life in the here and now. I believe there is a crack in everything; that's how the light gets in; that's how the light gets in.
And when it does come, and these wars are ended, the war mongers will start up again; they will blame the American people for not having the will to fight. They will blame "the left," "the media," "the socialists," "the intellectuals," "the dirty f-cking hippies," "the homosexual agenda," "the women's libbers," and they will make the claims that the soldiers were spat upon when they returned home, and they will plot and plan and scheme and pray for the day to come when they can once again say, "We've licked the Iraq syndrome once and for all."
But for now, the politicians have had no price to pay; and the profits to the war machine are still too large; and the media whores have bought into it, and they will sell it to us.
The only enemy the politicians and the corporate class truly fears is the American people. When (if) this group awakens from its slumber, there could be hell to pay.
But this becomes less and less likely, each and every day.
