Empire:
War And Propaganda
By John Pilger
27 July, 2006
The New Statesman
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", as President Bush has also said.
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 I F 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 soundbites 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 Guantanamo 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 her editary, 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 clearly a US-ordained
operation, with the long-planned assault on Gaza and the destruction
of Leba non 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 reinvade 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. Hezbollah, 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-year 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 Hezbollah 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.
Government silence
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 Hezbollah 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's new book, "Freedom
Next Time", is published by Bantam Press
This article first appeared
in the New Statesman.