[Marxism] John Pilger On The Hype Surrounding Obama

[Jscotlive@xxxxxxx]

_http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/news/features/surplus_of_bollocks_ 
(http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/news/features/surplus_of_bollocks)  
Growing up in an Antipodean society proud of its rich variety of expletives,  
I never heard the word bollocks. It was only on arrival in England that I  
understood its magisterial power.  
All classes used it. Judges grunted it; an editor of the Daily Mirror used it 
 as noun, adjective and verb. Certainly, the resonance of a double vowel saw 
off  its closest US contender. It had authority.  
A high official with the Gilbertian title of Lord West of Spithead used it to 
 great effect on January 27.  
The former admiral, who is a security adviser to Gordon Brown, was referring  
to Tony Blair's assertion that invading countries and killing innocent people 
 did not increase the threat of terrorism at home.  
"That was clearly bollocks," said his lordship, who warned of a perceived  
"linkage between the US, Israel and the UK" in the horrors inflicted on Gaza 
and 
 the effect on the recruitment of terrorists in Britain.  
In other words, he was stating the obvious: that state terrorism begets  
individual or group terrorism at source.  
Just as Blair was the prime mover of the London bombings of July 7 2005, so  
Brown, having pursued the same cynical crusades in Muslim countries and having 
 armed and disported himself before the criminal regime in Tel Aviv, will 
share  responsibility for related atrocities at home.  
There is a lot of bollocks about at the moment.  
The BBC's explanation for banning an appeal on behalf of the stricken people  
of Gaza is a vivid example.  
Mark Thompson, the BBC's director general, cited the corporation's legal  
requirement to be "impartial ... because Gaza remains a major ongoing news 
story  
in which humanitarian issues ... are both at the heart of the story and  
contentious."  
In a letter to Thompson, David Bracewell, a licence-fee payer, illuminated  
the deceit behind this.  
He pointed to previous BBC appeals for the Disasters Emergency Committee that 
 were not only made in the midst of "an ongoing news story" in which 
humanitarian  issues were "contentious" but also demonstrated how the 
corporation took 
sides.  
In 1999, at the height of the illegal NATO bombing of Serbia and Kosovo, the  
TV presenter Jill Dando made an appeal on behalf of Kosovar refugees.  
The BBC web page for that appeal was linked to numerous articles meant to  
stress the gravity of the humanitarian issue.  
These included quotations from Blair himself, such as: "This will be a daily  
pounding until he (Slobodan Milosevic) comes into line with the terms that 
NATO  has laid down."  
There was no significant balance of view from the Yugoslav side and not a  
single mention that the flight of Kosovar refugees began only after NATO had  
started bombing.  
Similarly, in an appeal for victims of the civil war in the Congo, the BBC  
favoured the regime led by Joseph Kabila by not referring to Amnesty, Human  
Rights Watch and other reports accusing his forces of atrocities.  
In contrast, the rebel leader Laurent Nkunda was "accused of committing  
atrocities" and ordained the bad guy by the BBC.  
Kabila, who represented Western interests, was clearly the good guy - just  
like NATO in the Balkans and Israel in the Middle East.  
While Thompson and his satraps richly deserve the Lord West of Spithead  
Bollocks Blue Ribbon, that honour goes to the cheer squad of President Barack  
Obama, whose cult-like obeisance goes on and on.  
On January 23, the Guardian's front page declared: "Obama shuts network of  
CIA 'ghost prisons'."  
The "wholesale deconstruction (sic) of George Bush's war on terror," said the 
 report, had been ordered by the new president, who would be "shutting down 
the  CIA's secret prison network, banning torture and rendition..."  
The bollocks quotient on this was so high that it read like the press release 
 it was, citing "officials briefing reporters at the White House yesterday."  
Obama's orders, according to a group of 16 retired generals and admirals who  
attended a presidential signing ceremony, "would restore America's moral  
standing in the world."  
What moral standing?  
It never ceases to astonish that experienced reporters can transmit PR stunts 
 like this, bearing in mind the moving belt of lies from the same source 
under  only nominally different management.  
Far from "deconstructing the war on terror," Obama is clearly pursuing it  
with the same vigour, ideological backing and deception as the previous  
administration.  
George W Bush's first war, in Afghanistan, and last war, in Pakistan, are now 
 Obama's wars - with thousands more US troops to be deployed, more bombing 
and  more slaughter of civilians.  
Last month, on the day he described Afghanistan and Pakistan as "the central  
front in our enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism," 22 Afghan  
civilians died beneath Obama's bombs in a hamlet populated mainly by shepherds  
and which, by all accounts, had not laid eyes on the Taliban. Women and 
children  were among the dead, which is normal.  
Far from "shutting down the CIA's secret prison network," Obama's executive  
orders actually give the CIA authority to carry out renditions, abductions and 
 transfers of prisoners in secret without threat of legal obstruction.  
As the Los Angeles Times disclosed, "current and former US intelligence  
officials said that the rendition programme might be poised to play an expanded 
 
role."  
A semantic sleight of hand is that "long-term prisons" are changed to  
"short-term prisons" and while US personnel are now banned from directly  
torturing 
people, foreigners working for the US are not.  
This means that the US's numerous "covert actions" will operate as they did  
under previous presidents, with proxy regimes, such as Augusto Pinochet's in  
Chile, doing the dirtiest work.  
Bush's open support for torture, and Donald Rumsfeld's extraordinary personal 
 overseeing of certain torture techniques, upset many in America's "secret 
army"  of subversive military and intelligence operators because it exposed how 
the  system worked.  
Obama's newly confirmed director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis  
Blair, has said the Army Field Manual may include new forms of "harsh  
interrogation" which will be kept secret.  
Obama has chosen not to stop any of this. Neither do his ballyhooed executive 
 orders put an end to Bush's assault on constitutional and international law. 
 
He has retained Bush's "right" to imprison anyone, without trial or charge.  
No "ghost prisoners" are being released or are due to be tried before a 
civilian  court.  
His nominee for attorney general, Eric Holder, has endorsed an extension of  
Bush's totalitarian USA Patriot Act, which allows federal agents to demand US  
citizens' library and bookshop records. The man of "change" is changing 
little.  That ought to be front-page news from Washington.  
The Lord West of Spithead Bollocks Prize (Runner-Up) is shared.  
On January 28, a nationally run Greenpeace advertisement opposing a third  
runway at Heathrow airport in London summed up the almost wilful naivety that  
has obstructed informed analysis of the Obama administration.  
"Fortunately," declared Greenpeace beneath a Godlike picture of Obama, "the  
White House has a new occupant, and he has asked us all to roll back the 
spectre  of a warming planet."  
This was followed by Obama's rhetorical flourish about "putting off  
unpleasant decisions."  
In fact, the president has made no commitment to curtail the US's infamous  
responsibility for the causes of global warming.  
As with George W Bush and most other modern-era presidents, it is oil, not  
stemming carbon emissions, that informs his administration.  
His national security adviser General Jim Jones, a former NATO supreme  
commander, made his name planning US military control over the exploitation of  
oil 
and gas reserves from the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea to the Gulf of  
Guinea off Africa.  
Sharing the Bollocks Runner-Up Prize is the Observer, which on January 25  
published a major news report headlined: "How Obama set the tone for a new US  
revolution."  
This was reminiscent of the Observer almost a dozen years ago when  
liberalism's other great white hope, Tony Blair, came to power.  
"Goodbye xenophobia" was the Observer's post-election front page in 1997 and  
"The Foreign Office says 'Hello World, remember us?'."  
The government, said the breathless text, would push for "new worldwide rules 
 on human rights and the environment" and implement "tough new limits" on 
arms  sales.  
The opposite happened. Last year, Britain was the biggest arms dealer in the  
world; currently, it is second only to the United States.  
In the Blair mould, the Obama White House "sprang into action" with its  
"radical plans."  
The president's first phone call was to that Palestinian quisling, the  
unelected and deeply unpopular Mahmoud Abbas.  
There was a "hot pace" and a "new era," in which a notorious name from an  
ancien régime, Richard Holbrooke, was despatched to Pakistan.  
In 1978, Holbrooke betrayed a promise to normalise relations with the  
Vietnamese on the eve of a vicious embargo ruined the lives of countless  
Vietnamese 
children.  
Under Obama, the "sense of a new era abroad," declared the Observer, "was  
reinforced by the confirmation of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state."  
Clinton has threatened to "entirely obliterate Iran" on behalf of Israel.  
What the childish fawning over Obama obscures is the dark power assembled  
under cover of the US's first "post-racial president."  
Apart from the US, the world's most dangerous state is demonstrably Israel,  
having recently killed and maimed some 4,000 people in Gaza with impunity.  
On February 10, a bellicose Israeli electorate is likely to put Binyamin  
Netanyahu into power.  
Netanyahu is a fanatic's fanatic who has made clear his intention of  
attacking Iran.  
In the Wall Street Journal of January 24, he described Iran as the "terrorist 
 mother base" and justified the murder of civilians in Gaza because "Israel  
cannot accept an Iranian terror base (Gaza) next to its major cities."  
On January 31, unaware he was being filmed, Tel Aviv's ambassador to  
Australia described the massacres in Gaza as a "pre-introduction" - a dress  
rehearsal - for an attack on Iran.  
For Netanyahu, the reassuring news is that the new US administration is the  
most zionist in living memory, a truth that has struggled to be told from  
beneath the soggy layers of Obama-love.  
Not a single member of the president's team demurred from his support for  
Israel's barbaric actions in Gaza.  
Obama himself likened the safety of his two young daughters to that of  
Israeli children but made not a single reference to the thousands of 
Palestinian  
children killed with US weapons - a violation of both international and US law. 
 
He did, however, demand that the people of Gaza be denied "smuggled" small  
arms with which to defend themselves against the world's fourth-largest 
military  power.  
And he paid tribute to the Arab dictatorships, such as Egypt, which are  
bribed by the US treasury to help the United States and Israel enforce policies 
 
described by the UN special rapporteur Richard Falk, a Jew, as "genocidal."  
It is time the Obama lovers grew up. It is time those paid to keep the record 
 straight gave us the opportunity to debate informatively. In the 21st 
century,  people power remains a huge and exciting and largely untapped force 
for 
change,  but it is nothing without truth.  
"In the time of universal deceit," wrote George Orwell, "telling the truth is 
 a revolutionary act."  
This article appeared in the New  Statesman.
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