[A-List] John Pilger hears Blair echo Mussolini

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The terrorism of groups and individuals, however horrific, is tiny by comparison
with that of states. But the media have no language to describe state terrorism.

by John Pilger

New Statesman (September 20 2004)

The world is dividing into two hostile camps: Islam and 'us'. That is the
unerring message from western governments, press, radio and television. For
Islam, read terrorists. It is reminiscent of the cold war when the world
was divided between 'Reds' and us, and even a strategy of annihilation was
permissible in our defence. We now know, or we ought to know, that so much
of that was a charade; released official files make clear the Soviet threat
was for public consumption only.

Every day now, as during the cold war, a one-way moral mirror is held up to
us as a true reflection of events. The new threat is given impetus with each
terrorist outrage, be it in Beslan or Jakarta. Seen in the one-way mirror, our
leaders make grievous mistakes, but their good intentions are not in question.
Tony Blair's 'idealism' and 'decency' are promoted by his accredited mainstream
detractors, as the concocted Greek tragedy of his political demise opens on
the media stage. Having taken part in the killing of as many as 37,000 Iraqi
civilians, Blair's distractions, not his victims, are news: from his arcane
'struggle' with his Tweedledee, Gordon Brown, to his damascene conversion to
the perils of global warming. On the atrocity at Beslan, Blair is allowed to say,
without irony or challenge, that 'this international terrorism will not prevail'.
These are the same words spoken by Mussolini soon after he had bombed civilians
in Abyssinia.

Heretics who look behind the one-way mirror and see the utter dishonesty of all
this, who identify Blair and his collaborators as war criminals in the literal
and legal sense and present evidence of his cynicism and immorality, are few;
but they have wide support among the public, whose awareness has never been
higher, in my experience. It is the public's passionate indifference, if not
contempt, for the political games of Blair/Brown and their courts, and its
accelerating interest in the way the world really is, that unnerves those
with power.

Let's look at a few examples of the way the world is presented and the way
it really is. The occupation of Iraq is presented as 'a mess': a blundering,
incompetent American military up against Islamic fanatics. In truth, the
occupation is a systematic, murderous assault on a civilian population by a
corrupt American officer class, given licence by its superiors in Washington.
In May, the US marines used battle tanks and helicopter gunships to attack the
slums of Fallujah. They admitted killing 600 people, a figure far greater than
the total number of civilians killed by the 'insurgents' during the past year.
The generals were candid; this futile slaughter was an act of revenge for the
killing of three US mercenaries. Sixty years earlier, the SS Das Reich division
killed 600 French civilians at Oradour-sur-Glane as revenge for the kidnapping
of a German officer by the resistance. Is there a difference?

These days, the Americans routinely fire missiles into Fallujah and other dense
urban areas; they murder whole families. If the word terrorism has any modern
application, it is this industrial state terrorism. The British have a different
style. There are more than forty known cases of Iraqis having died at the hands
of British soldiers; just one soldier has been charged. In the current issue
of the NUJ magazine, The Journalist, Lee Gordon, a freelance reporter, wrote:
'Working as a Brit in Iraq is hazardous, particularly in the south where our
troops have a reputation (unreported at home) for brutality'.

Neither is the growing disaffection among British troops reported at home. This
is so worrying the Ministry of Defence that it has moved to placate the family
of the seventeen-year-old soldier David McBride by taking him off the AWL list
after he refused to fight in Iraq. Almost all the families of soldiers killed
in Iraq have denounced the occupation and Blair, all of which is unprecedented.

Only by recognising the terrorism of states is it possible to understand, and
deal with, acts of terrorism by groups and individuals which, however horrific,
are tiny by comparison. Moreover, their source is inevitably the official
terrorism for which there is no media language. Thus, the state of Israel has
been able to convince many outsiders that it is merely a victim of terrorism
when, in fact, its own unrelenting, planned terrorism is the cause of the
infamous retaliation by Palestinian suicide bombers. For all of Israel's
perverse rage against the BBC - a successful form of intimidation - BBC
reporters never report Israelis as terrorists: that term belongs exclusively
to Palestinians imprisoned in their own land. It is not surprising, as a recent
Glasgow University study concluded, that many television viewers in Britain
believe that the Palestinians are the invaders and occupiers.

On 7 September, Palestinian suicide bombers killed 16 Israelis in the town of
Beersheba. Every television news report allowed the Israeli government spokesman
to use this tragedy to justify the building of an apartheid wall - when the
wall is pivotal to the causes of Palestinian violence. Almost every news report
marked the end of a five-month period of 'relative peace and calm' and 'a lull
in the violence'. During those five months of relative peace and calm, almost
400 Palestinians were killed, 71 of them in assassinations. During the lull in
the violence, more than 73 Palestinian children were killed. A thirteen-year-old
was murdered with a bullet through the heart, a five-year-old was shot in her
face as she walked arm in arm with her two-year old-sister. The body of Mazen
Majid, aged fourteen, was riddled with 18 Israeli bullets as he and his family
fled their bulldozed home.

None of this was reported in Britain as terrorism. Most of it was not reported
at all. After all, this was a period of peace and calm, a lull in the violence.
On 19 May, Israeli tanks and helicopters fired on peaceful demonstrators,
killing eight of them. This atrocity had a certain significance; the
demonstration was part of a growing non-violent Palestinian movement, which has
seen peaceful protest gatherings, often with prayers, along the apartheid wall.
The rise of this Gandhian movement is barely noted in the outside world.

The truth about Chechnya is similarly suppressed. On 4 February 2000, Russian
aircraft attacked the Chechen village of Katyr-Yurt. They used 'vacuum bombs',
which release petrol vapour and suck people's lungs out, and are banned under
the Geneva Convention. The Russians bombed a convoy of survivors under a white
flag. They murdered 363 men, women and children. It was one of countless,
little-known acts of terrorism in Chechnya perpetrated by the Russian state,
whose leader, Vladimir Putin, has the 'complete solidarity' of Blair.

'Few of us', wrote the playwright Arthur Miller, 'can easily surrender our
belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has
lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And
so the evidence has to be internally denied.'

It is time we stopped denying it.

http://www.newstatesman.com/site.php3?newTemplate=NSArticle_NS&newTop=Section:%20Front%20Page&newDisplayURN=200409200016

John Pilger's new book, Tell Me No Lies: investigative journalism
and its triumphs, is published by Jonathan Cape next month.

Copyright 2004 New Statesman Ltd

Please also see:-

"What exactly are we witnessing?"
by Scott Burchill, ZNet Commentary (September 17 2004)
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2004-09/17burchill.cfm

"The War OF Terrorism
by Edward Herman, ZNet Commentary (September 11 2004)
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2004-09/11herman.cfm
posted here on September 12th.

Bill Totten     http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/