Pilger on Blair and new wave of protest

[Philip Ferguson <plf13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The following by John Pilger was posted on the Revo-readers list and I
thought people might be interested.  It's not very long and I don't have
the url for it, so I hope it's OK to post it in full:


JOHN PILGER:

Graham Greene once described a "subterranean world, where the hopes
and dreams of the mass of the people reside, unconnected with the
rarefied world above, until those above take one step too far". There
is a stirring in this people's world as those above take many steps
too far.

In the United States, according to the Institute for Policy Studies,
there were at least 400 major demonstrations against an attack on
Iraq up to mid-October. "There is a rising tide of activism,"
reported the Washington Post, "a burgeoning national anti-war
movement that is gaining momentum by the day . . . They talk of
protesting by people who have never protested before."

The acknowledgement was unusual. One measure of the strength of
popular anti-establishment movements is their suppression as news.
Millions of people took to the streets in Italy last month, yet the
main political news in Britain the next day was the latest
Machiavellian utterances of Gordon Brown. On 28 September, the
historic demonstration of 400,000 people in London was considered
worthy only of trivialisation by the Observer. Nowhere in the
begrudging reporting of that extraordinary day was there recognition
of a new, diverse and growing constituency of angry people no longer
interested in the small circuses that fill tombstones of column
inches, such as the diddum tears of Estelle Morris.

My guess is that a great many people would agree, for very different
reasons, with Peter Mandelson's prediction that "the era of
representative democracy is coming to an end". That has long been
demonstrably true in the United States. It is a truth that has eluded
many journalists and broadcasters, understandably, as the main
function of so much political reporting is to run a cigarette paper
between the parties and to channel spin.

The public understands this, which is why the audience for political
news on television has slumped. Blaming the public for its "lack of
interest in politics" is the self-deluding excuse of media executives
who claim an insight into the popular mood, yet are contemptuous of
it. In truth, the public has never been more interested in real
politics, which it does not associate with the deceptions and gossip of
an elective oligarchy.

Certainly, Tony Blair's obsession with Iraq has provided the fastest-
emerging public arena. But it runs deeper than that. Public anger at
the demise of true democracy has long been misjudged by the media as
apathy, in the same way that the public's "compassion fatigue" was
invented to cover the failure of broadcasters to report the lives and
struggles of the majority of humanity. That Blair is prepared to tear
up the United Nations' Charter and attack a country that offers
Britain no threat, transparently so that America and Britain can get
their hands on Iraqi oil, is perceived as an offence to basic decency
and to democracy itself.

People understand, I believe, that a government which has no popular
mandate for major policies covering war, health, education,
privatisation and transport is not democratic. A prime minister who
is prepared to use the royal prerogative, "the divine right of
kings", to attack another country illegally against the wishes of the
majority of his people, is clearly not a democratic leader.

The last British general election was misrepresented as a "landslide"
when, in reality, it was the lowest vote since universal suffrage
began. People were not indifferent. They were angry or dismissive,
and they went on strike on election day. Under Blair, a process
spanning two decades, from the creation of the Social Democratic
Party in 1981 and Labour's "policy review" six years later which
embraced Thatcherism, has reached its conclusion. The two main
Westminster parties have effectively converged. Britain is now a
single-ideology state with two principal competing factions. Both
agree on all major domestic and foreign policy.

For the first few years of Blair, those who clung to Labour struggled
with the nonsense of a "modernising third way" whose promoters, such
as Anthony Giddens, disingenuously persisted in calling it social
democracy. Mavericks elsewhere in the political spectrum were on to
Blair. "There is nothing anomalous about Blair's cultivating Formula
One racing millionaires, gangster-style newspaper proprietors and
spiv businessmen," wrote A N Wilson. " . . . he puts the Murdochs
into positions of absolute power and brings into being a sub-American
world, in which everything is wrecked - the past, the natural world,
our sense of decency."

One shame-faced MP recalls, "Remember the media triumph of single-
mother benefit cuts? On the night that Blair's babes waltz through
the lobbies taking £7.50 out of the purses of single mothers, we
have Blair drinking champagne with that arsehole Chris Evans in Downing
Street! How do you think that plays back in the constituencies?"

Three weeks ago, four eminent geographers explained to the Policy
Studies Association how the Blair government lied - manipulating and
omitting statistics on just about everything: education, health, the
economy. Does anyone believe Blair over Iraq? Lying about its war
aims has been a feature of the government, whose adventures have been
dressed up as "humanitarian intervention" by Blair's courtiers,
hoping to preserve the taboo that makes the link with British
imperialism. Not only are there the oil interests, but Britain is
second only to the United States as an owner of overseas investments.
This is a government of death. Britain under Blair exports chemical
weapons to 26 countries - so much for the hysteria about Saddam
Hussein.

The two most important roles played by the Blair government are
preventing any concerted opposition in the European Union to Bush's
war plans and lending respectability to the Americans' ruthlessness.
As the figleaf in an American "coalition", the government has spent a
billion pounds bombing Iraq; a criminal act by any reading of the
relevant conventions. "To be corrupted by totalitarianism," warned
George Orwell, "one does not have to live in a totalitarian country."
There is a growing understanding of this among British people. Every
day now there are packed political meetings somewhere in Britain:
from the thousand or more at one recent event in Birmingham, to an
overflowing hall in Salcombe, Devon. Where I live, in south London,
there is something major every evening. The energy and organisation
are far advanced on the 1960s, rather like the political awareness of
people themselves, especially the young.

For all the achievements of the movement against the Vietnam war, it
did not get under way until four years after the Americans had
invaded. Today, under countless banners, from the anti-globalisation
movement to the Stop the War campaign, the new movement, drawing
millions all over the world, may well be the greatest. We need it
urgently.

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