John Pilger on the never ceasing Iranian Crisis
I've admired John Pilger's writing for almost five years since I first encountered him, back in the run up to the invasion of Iraq in 2002. HE has covered wars around the globe for 40 years. His assessment is glum. I can't think of anyone who has ever overstated how much carnage the imperialistic, triumphalist fantasies of war-mongering U.S. Presidents (Truman, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, Shrub I, Shrub II in my lifetime) produce upon the poor non-anglo citizens of the world.
His take on the chency sock-puppet administration and mine coincide. We both believe the neocons and theocons still ruling aspire to a state of perpetual war in order to advance the political fortunes of the republican party, the republican party's corporate sponsors (and benefactors) and the fundamentalist religious right.
Pilger and I both believe Shrub wants desparately to attack Iran in order to prevent the loss of control of the Office of the Dauphin over the mideastern iron grab. We the people of conscience, must resist being lulled into sleep, we must resist being frightened by monsters, living mostly in the heads of those who transmit hate and cruelty in the name of "bringing freedom and democracy to the free peoples of the world."
Below is Pilger's article in its entirety.
The Israeli journalist Amira Hass describes the moment her mother, Hannah, was marched from a cattle train to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. “They were sick and some were dying,” she says. “Then my mother saw these German women looking at the prisoners, just looking. This image became very formative in my upbringing, this despicable ‘looking from the side’.”
(MG) "looking from the side" sure sounds like much of the U.S. population
It is time we in Britain and other Western countries stopped looking from the side. We are being led towards perhaps the most serious crisis in modern history as the Bush-Cheney-Blair “long war” edges closer to Iran for no reason other than that nation's independence from rapacious America. The safe delivery of the 15 British sailors into the hands of Rupert Murdoch and his rivals (with tales of their “ordeal” almost certainly authored by the Ministry of Defence -- until it got the wind up) is both a farce and a distraction. The Bush administration, in secret connivance with Blair, has spent four years preparing for “Operation Iranian Freedom.” Forty-five cruise missiles are primed to strike. According to Russia's leading strategic thinker General Leonid Ivashov: “Nuclear facilities will be secondary targets . . . at least 20 such facilities need to be destroyed. Combat nuclear weapons may be used. This will result in the radioactive contamination of all the Iranian territory, and beyond.”
(MG) In Joe Conanson's recent book, It CAN Happen Here he lays out the rovian plan to keep the republican party in power ad infinitum ... maintain a state of perpetual war by keeping the GAP (great american public) in a state of constant fear
And yet there is a surreal silence, save for the noise of “news” in which our powerful broadcasters gesture cryptically at the obvious but dare not make sense of it, lest the one-way moral screen erected between us and the consequences of an imperial foreign policy collapse and the truth be revealed. John Bolton, formerly Bush's man at the United Nations, recently spelled out the truth: that the Bush-Cheney-Blair plan for the Middle East is "an agenda to maintain division and ethnic tension". In other words, bloodshed and chaos equals control. He was referring to Iraq, but he also meant Iran.
(MG) ... lest the one-way moral screen erected between us and the consequences of an imperial foreign policy collapse and the truth be revealed. We must never forget this ... U.S. foreign policy has consequences. If the U.S. were to withdraw its support of Israel (financial and military) the Arab world, and the Islamic communities of the world would change their attitudes. The first president to do this will be lauded around the world forever.
Sounds of Silence by Paul Simon
Hello darkness, my old friend,
I've come to talk with you again,
Because a vision softly creeping,
Left its seeds while I was sleeping,
And the vision that was planted in my brain,
Still remains, within the sound of silence.
In restless dreams I walked alone,
Narrow streets of cobblestone,
'neath the halo of a street lamp,
turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed
by the flash of a neon light
That split the night,
and touched the sound of silence.
And in the naked light I saw,
Ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking,
People hearing without listening,
People writing songs,
that voices never share.
And no one dared,
Disturb the sound of silence.
"Fools" said I, "You do not know,
Silence like a cancer grows.
Hear my words that I might teach you,
Take my arms that I might reach you."
But my words
like silent raindrops fell,
And echoed,
In the wells of silence
And the people bowed and prayed,
To the neon god they made.
And the sign flashed out its warning,
In the words that it was forming.
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets
are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls."
and whisper'd in the sounds of silence.
Hello darkness, my old friend,
I've come to talk with you again,
Because a vision softly creeping,
Left its seeds while I was sleeping,
And the vision that was planted in my brain,
Still remains, within the sound of silence.
In restless dreams I walked alone,
Narrow streets of cobblestone,
'neath the halo of a street lamp,
turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed
by the flash of a neon light
That split the night,
and touched the sound of silence.
And in the naked light I saw,
Ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking,
People hearing without listening,
People writing songs,
that voices never share.
And no one dared,
Disturb the sound of silence.
"Fools" said I, "You do not know,
Silence like a cancer grows.
Hear my words that I might teach you,
Take my arms that I might reach you."
But my words
like silent raindrops fell,
And echoed,
In the wells of silence
And the people bowed and prayed,
To the neon god they made.
And the sign flashed out its warning,
In the words that it was forming.
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets
are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls."
and whisper'd in the sounds of silence.
One million Iraqis fill the streets of Najaf demanding that Bush and Blair get out of their homeland -- that is the real news: not our nabbed sailor-spies, nor the political dance macabre of the pretenders to Blair's Duce delusions. Whether it is treasurer Gordon Brown, the paymaster of the Iraq bloodbath, or John Reid, who sent British troops to pointless deaths in Afghanistan, or any of the others who sat through cabinet meetings knowing that Blair and his acolytes were lying through their teeth, only mutual distrust separates them now. They knew about Blair's plotting with Bush. They knew about the fake 45-minute “warning”. They knew about the fitting up of Iran as the next “enemy”.
Declared Brown to the Daily Mail: “The days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over. We should celebrate much of our past rather than apologise for it.” In Late Victorian Holocausts, the historian Mike Davis documents that as many as 21 million Indians died unnecessarily in famines criminally imposed by British colonial policies. Moreover, since the formal demise of that glorious imperium, declassified files make it clear that British governments have borne “significant responsibility” for the direct or indirect deaths of between 8.6 million and 13.5 million people throughout the world from military interventions and at the hands of regimes strongly supported by Britain. The historian Mark Curtis calls these victims “unpeople”. Rejoice! said Margaret Thatcher. Celebrate! says Brown. Spot the difference.
(MG) this is Albion's stain - the mantle of Great Britian's murderous imperial ways has been taken up by the U.S. Well, after WWII, the Independence of India, etc, the British Empire became but a shell of its former self ... clearly, the dream of a glorious Victorian-like British Empire burns brightly in the minds of some highly placed British public officials
(MG) the brits called it "the white man's burden", the earlier Americans called it "manifest destinay" it's all the same baloney ... justification of imperialism based on the alleged "superiority" of the white race ... hell, if the white race were so superior, why would they have to say it all the time ... actions speak louder than words
(MG) what exactly is it about the white race that makes it so imperialistic? There's an obvious answer -- genetic mutations. The scientific community agrees that the first humans came from Africa. Have you ever looked at the pigmentation of the hands of a black person and compared to the pigmentation of the hands of a white person? Both races have hands which are "white". Leo Shlain, writing in The Goddess Versus the Alphabet hypothesizes there are evolutionary reasons for this .. that people needed hand signals at night to communicate quietly over distances. So, the whiteness of our hands results from a long process of genetic mutations.
(MG) but sometimes, the white pigmentation mutations affected more than just the hands, and a lighter race came into being, a race ill-suited for the heat and sun of Africa, and not well suited for the heat and sun of the deserts. A race that had to migrate ever northward, to the colder climes, where, in the winters, food was scarce. So, to survive, the lighter-skinned races needed to pillage and plunder. The white skin pigmentation mutation gene wold also seem to carry the seeds of a mentality that countenances pillaging and plundering for survival. Thus, the white race can be viewed (and I do view it this way) as an inferior race with war-like, imperialist tendencies towards pillaging and plundering, and an inferior intellect -- cognitive dissonance that prevents many from seeing the race for what it has been, and what it is.
(MG) But a race which at its core, understands the magnitude of it's own evil. But rather than confront that evil, it projects that inherent evil, that tendency towards pillage and plunder, rape and murder, chaotic destruction onto "the other", the darker-skinned other. Thus we have neocons, and the fundie theocons, genetic and mental defective descendants who self-justify their cruelty via a complicated belief system that revolves around the ideas of: the superiority of the white race; the choseness (by the white god) of the white people. And, when you have the guns and you have the god, who can defeat you?
(MG) when you have the guns, when you have the god, and you are defeated (as were the Germans in WWI, as were the Americans in their attempts to occupy and keep in power their client puppet in Viet Nam) how could this have happened? ENEMIES FROM WITHIN -- commies, pinkos, fags, niggers, spics, injuns, egg-heads, jews, catholics, a-rabs, bithces, and WORST OF ALL ... liberals.
(MG) To return to its god-mandated former glory, the country must be purged of these enemies of state. Adolf Hitler rose to power .. demonizing "the other", Joe McCarthy too, GWB too. And you don't need THAT many "true believers", somewhere I read what is needed is about one-third of a nations adult population of true believers in the Arryan Race, true believers in the Reich, or, more recently, true believers in GWB as god's own appointed ruler. KILL ALL THE LIBERALS ... and THEN go back and wage war on the yellow people, the brown people, the black people ... teach 'em a thing or two ... put 'em back in their place ... SHOW them the awesome power of white race ... er, ain't that America.
Brown is no different from Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and the other warmongering Democrats he admires and who support an unprovoked attack on Iran and the subjugation of the Middle East to "our interests" -- and Israel's, of course. Nothing has changed since the US and Britain destroyed Iran's democratic government in 1953 and installed Reza Shah Pahlavi, whose regime had "the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture" that was "beyond belief" (Amnesty).
(MG) warmongering Democrats who support an unprovoked attack on Iran and the subjugation of the Middle East ... I've already posted about Obama. Hillary will be worse, Edwards too -- what is the matter with these people? I'd say it's political. AIPAC has LOTS of money to support candidates who will carry Israel's water ... but merely electing a president from the democratic party in 2008 will NOT be enough. Hillary, Barak, Edwards -- if elected will give us more of the same in the middle East -- the situation will exacerbate, middle eastern peoples WILL hate us more than ever, for our government's foreign policies, which have ALWAYS been the problem. "They" have NEVER hated "us" for "our freedoms." That's just a sound bite. They despise our government for its policies; it's the policies, stupid.
(MG) But unless the foreign policies change dramatically, and soon and very soon, they will hate "us" for our inertia, for our de facto countenance of illegal wars, for our rapes and murders, for our renditions, for our pillaging of their lands, for our pilfering of their natural assets, for our indifference to their suffering, for our wanton consumption of far more than a fair portion of the world's resources. Hell, I despise myself for not taking a stronger stand earlier. But I'll get over it. I'll try to make things better, in any small way, each and every day.
Look behind the one-way moral screen and you will distinguish the Blairite elite by its loathing of the humane principles that mark a real democracy. They used to be discreet about this, but no more. Two examples spring to mind. In 2004, Blair used the secretive "royal prerogative" to overturn a high court judgment that had restored the very principle of human rights set out in Magna Carta to the people of the Chagos Islands, a British colony in the Indian Ocean. There was no debate. As ruthless as any dictator, Blair dealt his coup de grâce with the lawless expulsion of the islanders from their homeland, now a US military base, from which Bush has bombed Iraq and Afghanistan and will bomb Iran.
In the second example, only the degree of suffering is different. Last October, the Lancet published research by Johns Hopkins University in the US and al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, which calculated that 655,000 Iraqis had died as a direct result of the Anglo-American invasion. Downing Street officials derided the study as “flawed”. They were lying. They knew that the chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence, Sir Roy Anderson, had backed the survey, describing its methods as “robust” and “close to best practice,” and other government officials had secretly approved the “tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones”. The figure for Iraqi deaths is now estimated at close to a million -- carnage equivalent to that caused by the Anglo-American economic siege of Iraq in the 1990s, which produced the deaths of half a million infants under the age of five, verified by UNICEF. That, too, was dismissed contemptuously by Blair.
(MG) I hadn't seen the "close to a million" estimate of the number of Iraqi deaths that have resulted as direct and indirect consequences of governor bush's decision to attack. But I had seen the 650,000 figure. But that was a while ago. Let's see, some rough calculations:
almost 1,000,000 dead
2,000,000 have left Iraq
1,900,000 have been forced to flee their homes (but can't get out)
Iraq's population at the start of the invasion was about 27,000,000
The U.S. population was about 10 times greater
Let's do another actuarial type study to put the Iraqi numbers into an American context
Easy calculation ... just inflate by a factor of ten
almost 10,000,000 dead
almost 20,000,000 emigrating from the country
19,000,000 forced to flee their homes
Until we here in America can understand consequences to our country of THAT magnitude, it's not too difficult
“This Labour government, which includes Gordon Brown as much as it does Tony Blair,” wrote Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, “is party to a war crime of monstrous proportions. Yet our political consensus prevents any judicial or civil society response. Britain is paralysed by its own indifference.”
Such is the scale of the crime and of our “looking from the side.” According to the Observer of 8 April, the voters’ “damning verdict” on the Blair regime is expressed by a majority who have “lost faith” in their government. No surprise there. Polls have long shown a widespread revulsion to Blair, demonstrated at the last general election, which produced the second lowest turnout since the franchise. No mention was made of the Observer's own contribution to this national loss of faith. Once celebrated as a bastion of liberalism that stood against Anthony Eden's lawless attack on Egypt in 1956, the new right-wing, lifestyle Observer enthusiastically backed Blair's lawless attack on Iraq, having helped lay the ground with major articles falsely linking Iraq with the 9/11 attacks -- claims now regarded even by the Pentagon as fake.
(MG) the problem when "the people" lose faith in their elected leaders, in their government, becomes mistrust and apathy ... it is precisely at such moments that the cracks open up, "what me vote? they're all crooks anyway, what difference does it make?" and that virulent strain of white-supremacist war-mongering fascists can take over, literally coopt the governance of a county.
As hysteria is again fabricated, for Iraq, read Iran. According to the former US treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, the Bush cabal decided to attack Iraq on “day one” of Bush's administration, long before 11 September 2001. The main reason was oil. O'Neill was shown a Pentagon document entitled “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts,” which outlined the carve-up of Iraq's oil wealth among the major Anglo-American companies. Under a law written by US and British officials, the Iraqi puppet regime is about to hand over the extraction of the largest concentration of oil on earth to Anglo-American companies.
Nothing like this piracy has happened before in the modern Middle East, where Opec has ensured that oil business is conducted between states. Across the Shatt al-Arab waterway is another prize: Iran's vast oilfields. Just as non-existent weapons of mass destruction or facile concerns for democracy had nothing to do with the invasion of Iraq, so non-existent nuclear weapons have nothing to do with the coming American onslaught on Iran. Unlike Israel and the United States, Iran has abided by the rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which it was an original signatory, and has allowed routine inspections under its legal obligations. The International Atomic Energy Agency has never cited Iran for diverting its civilian program to military use. For the past three years, IAEA inspectors have said they have been allowed to “go anywhere.” The recent UN Security Council sanctions against Iran are the result of Washington's bribery.
(MG) okay folks, HERE we have it. I've not seen such a bold statement anywhere else. Pilger's knife cuts to the heart of truth. You'll be seeing this statement atop my blogs for a long time to come.
Until recently, the British were unaware that their government was one of the world's most consistent abusers of human rights and backers of state terrorism. Few Britons knew that the Muslim Brotherhood, the forerunner of al-Qaeda, was sponsored by British intelligence as a means of systematically destroying secular Arab nationalism, or that MI6 recruited young British Muslims in the 1980s as part of a $4bn Anglo-American-backed jihad against the Soviet Union known as “Operation Cyclone.” In 2001, few Britons knew that 3,000 innocent Afghan civilians were bombed to death as revenge for the attacks of 11 September. No Afghans brought down the twin towers. Thanks to Bush and Blair, awareness in Britain and all over the world has risen as never before. When homegrown terrorists struck London in July 2005, few doubted that the attack on Iraq had provoked the atrocity and that the bombs that killed 52 Londoners were, in effect, Blair's bombs.
(MG) I have never seen this connection between the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda and MI6 before. This is ALL news to me. Somehow or another, I am neither surprised, nor shocked.
In my experience, most people do not indulge the absurdity and cruelty of the “rules” of rampant power. They do not contort their morality and intellect to comply with double standards and the notion of approved evil, of worthy and unworthy victims. They would, if they knew, grieve for all the lives, families, careers, hopes and dreams destroyed by Blair and Bush. The sure evidence is the British public's wholehearted response to the 2004 tsunami, shaming that of the government.
Certainly, they would agree wholeheartedly with Robert H Jackson, chief of counsel for the United States at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders at the end of the Second World War. “Crimes are crimes,” he said, "whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct which we would not be willing to have invoked against us."
As with Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld, who dare not travel to certain countries for fear of being prosecuted as war criminals, Blair as a private citizen may no longer be untouchable. On 20 March, Baltasar Garzón, the tenacious Spanish judge who pursued Augusto Pinochet, called for indictments against those responsible for “one of the most sordid and unjustifiable episodes in recent human history” -- Iraq. Five days later, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, to which Britain is a signatory, said that Blair could one day face war-crimes charges.
These are critical changes in the way the sane world thinks -- again, thanks to the Reich of Blair and Bush. However, we live in the most dangerous of times. On 6 April, Blair accused “elements of the Iranian regime” of “backing, financing, arming and supporting terrorism in Iraq.” He offered no evidence, and the Ministry of Defence has none. This is the same Goebbels-like refrain with which he and his coterie, Gordon Brown included, brought an epic bloodletting to Iraq. How long will the rest of us continue looking from the side?
John Pilger is an internationally renowned investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker. His newest book is Freedom Next Time (Bantam Press, June 2006). Visit John Pilger's website: www.johnpilger.com.
