[Peace-discuss] BBC, CBS, … What's the difference?
Morton K. Brussel
brussel4 at insightbb.com
Mon Oct 17 11:29:19 CDT 2005
ZNet | Foreign Policy
Suharto to Iraq
Nothing has Changed
by John Pilger; October 15, 2005
"The propagandist’s purpose,” wrote Aldous Huxley, “is to make one
set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”
The British, who invented modern war propaganda and inspired Joseph
Goebbels, were specialists in the field. At the height of the
slaughter known as the First World War, the prime minister, David
Lloyd George, confided to C P Scott, editor of the Manchester
Guardian: “If people really knew [the truth], the war would be
stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know, and can’t know.”
What has changed?
“If we had all known then what we know now,” said the New York Times
on 24 August, “the invasion [of Iraq] would have been stopped by a
popular outcry.” The admission was saying, in effect, that powerful
newspapers, like powerful broadcasting organisations, had betrayed
their readers and viewers and listeners by not finding out – by
amplifying the lies of Bush and Blair instead of challenging and
exposing them. The direct consequences were a criminal invasion
called “Shock and Awe” and the dehumanising of a whole nation.
This remains largely an unspoken shame in Britain, especially at the
BBC, which continues to boast about its rigour and objectivity while
echoing a corrupt and lying government, as it did before the
invasion. For evidence of this, there are two academic studies
available – though the capitulation of broadcast journalism ought to
be obvious to any discerning viewer, night after night, as “embedded”
reporting justifies murderous attacks on Iraqi towns and villages as
“rooting out insurgents” and swallows British army propaganda
designed to distract from its disaster, while preparing us for
attacks on Iran and Syria. Like the New York Times and most of the
American media, had the BBC done its job, many thousands of innocent
people almost certainly would be alive today.
When will important journalists cease to be establishment managers
and analyse and confront the critical part they play in the violence
of rapacious governments? An anniversary provides an opportunity.
Forty years ago this month, Major General Suharto began a seizure of
power in Indonesia by unleashing a wave of killings that the CIA
described as “the worst mass murders of the second half of the 20th
century”. Much of this episode was never reported and remains secret.
None of the reports of recent terror attacks against tourists in Bali
mentioned the fact that near the major hotels were the mass graves of
some of an estimated 80,000 people killed by mobs orchestrated by
Suharto and backed by the American and British governments.
Indeed, the collaboration of western governments, together with the
role of western business, laid the pattern for subsequent Anglo-
American violence across the world: such as Chile in 1973, when
Augusto Pinochet’s bloody coup was backed in Washington and London;
the arming of the shah of Iran and the creation of his secret police;
and the lavish and meticulous backing of Saddam Hussein in Iraq,
including black propaganda by the Foreign Office which sought to
discredit press reports that he had used nerve gas against the
Kurdish village of Halabja.
In 1965, in Indonesia, the American embassy furnished General Suharto
with roughly 5,000 names. These were people for assassination, and a
senior American diplomat checked off the names as they were killed or
captured. Most were members of the PKI, the Indonesian Communist
Party. Having already armed and equipped Suharto’s army, Washington
secretly flew in state-of-the-art communication equipmen! t whose
high frequencies were known to the CIA and the National Security
Council advising the president, Lyndon B Johnson. Not only did this
allow Suharto’s generals to co-ordinate the massacres, it meant that
the highest echelons of the US administration were listening in.
The Americans worked closely with the British. The British ambassador
in Jakarta, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, cabled the Foreign Office: “I have
never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in
Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change.” The
“little shooting” saw off between half a million and a million
people. However, it was in the field of propaganda, of “managing” the
media and eradicating the victims from people’s memory in the west,
that the British shone. British intelligence officers outlined how
the British press and the BBC could be manipulated. “Treatment will
need to be subtle,” they wrote, “eg, a) all activities should be
strictly unattributable, b) British [government] participation or co-
operation should be carefully concealed.” To achieve this, the
Foreign Office opened a branch of its Information Research Department
(IRD) in Singapore.
The IRD was a top-secret, cold war propaganda unit headed by Norman
Reddaway, one of Her Majesty’s most experienced liars. Reddaway and
his colleagues manipulated the “embedded” press and the BBC so
expertly that he boasted to Gilchrist in a secret message that the
fake story he had promoted – that a communist takeover was imminent
in Indonesia – “went all over the world and back again”. He described
how an experienced Sunday newspaper journalist agreed “to give
exactly your angle on events in his article . . . ie, that this was a
kid-glove coup without butchery”. These lies, bragged Reddaway, could
be “put almost instantly back to Indonesia via the BBC”. Prevented
from entering Indonesia, Roland Challis, the BBC’s south-east Asia
corres-pondent, was unaware of the slaughter. “My British sources
purported not to know what was going on,” Challis told me, “but they
knew what the American plan was. There were bodies being washed up on
the lawns of the British consulate in Surabaya, and British warships
escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the Malacca Straits so
that they could take part in this terrible holocaust. It was only
later that we learned that the American embassy was supplying names
and ticking them off as they were killed. There was a deal, you see.
In establishing the Suharto regime, the involvement of the IMF and
the World Bank was part of it . . . Suharto would bring them back.
That was the deal.”
The bloodbath was ignored almost entirely by the BBC and the rest of
the western media. The headline news was that “communism” had been
overthrown in Indonesia, which, Time reported, “is the west’s best
news in Asia”. In November 1967, at a conference in Geneva overseen
by the billionaire banker David Rockefeller, the booty was handed
out. All the corporate giants were represented, from General Motors,
Chase Manhattan Bank and US Steel to ICI and British American
Tobacco. With Suharto’s connivance, the natural riches of his country
were carved up.
Suharto’s cut was considerable. When he was finally overthrown in
1998, it was estimated that he had up to $10bn in foreign banks, or
more than 10 per cent of Indonesia’s foreign debt. When I was last in
Jakarta, I walked to the end of his leafy street and caught sight of
the mansion where the mass murderer now lives in luxury. As Saddam
Hussein heads for his own show trial on 19 October, he must ask
himself where he went wrong. Compared with Suharto’s crimes, Saddam’s
seem second-division. With British-supplied Hawk jets and machine-
guns, Suharto’s army went on to crush the life out of a quarter of
the populationof East Timor: 200,000 people. Using the same Hawk jets
and machine-guns, the same genocidal army is now attempting to crush
the life out of the resistance movement in West Papua and protect the
Freeport company, which is mining a mountain of copper in the
province. (Henry Kissinger is “director emeritus”.) Some 100,000
Papuans, 18 per cent of the population, have been killed; yet this
British-backed “project”, as new Labour likes to say, is almost never
reported. What happened in Indonesia, and continues to happen, is
almost a mirror image of the attack on Iraq. Both countries have
riches coveted by the west; both had dictators installed by the west
to facilitate the passage of their resources; and in both countries,
blood-drenched Anglo-American actions have been disguised by
propaganda willingly provided by journalists prepared to draw the
necessary distinctions between Saddam’s regime (“monstrous”) and
Suharto’s (“moderate” and “stable”).
Since the invasion of Iraq, I have spoken to a number of principled
journalists working in the pro-war media, including the BBC, who say
that they and many others “lie awake at night” and want to speak out
and resume being real journalists. I suggest now is the time.
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