[Peace-discuss] News From Behind The Facade

[C. G. Estabrook]

  News From Behind The Facade 
  September 20, 2005
  By John Pilger

When I lived in the United States in the late 1960s, my home
was often New Orleans, in a friend's rambling grey clapboard
house that stood in a section of the city where civil rights
campaigners had taken refuge from the violence of the Deep
South. New Orleans was said to be cosmopolitan; it was also
sinister and murderous. We were protected by the then District
Attorney, Jim Garrison, a liberal maverick whose
investigations into the assassination of John Kennedy were to
make powerful enemies behind The Facade.

The Facade was how we described the dividing line between the
America of real life - of a poverty so profound that slavery
was still a presence and a rapacious state power that waged
war against its own citizens, as it did against black and
brown-skinned people in faraway countries - and the America
that spawned the greed of corporatism and invented public
relations as a means of social control; the "American Dream"
and the "American Way of Life" began as advertising slogans.

The wilful neglect of the Bush regime before and after
hurricane Katrina offered a rare glimpse behind The Facade.
The poor were no longer invisible; the bodies floating in
contaminated water, the survivors threatened with police
shotguns, the distinct obesity of American poverty - all of it
mocked the forests of advertising billboards and relentless
television commercials and news sound-bites (average length
9.9 seconds) that glorify the "dream" of wealth and power. A
word long expropriated and debased - reality - found its true
meaning, if briefly.

As if by accident, the American media, which is the
legitimising arm of corporate public relations, reported the
truth. For a few days, a selective group of liberal newspaper
readers were told that poverty had risen an amazing 17 per
cent under Bush; that an African-American baby born within a
mile of the White House had less chance of surviving its first
year than an urban baby in India; that the United States was
now ranked 43rd in the world in infant mortality, 84th for
measles immunisation and 89th for polio; that the world's
richest oil company, ExxonMobil, would make 30 billion dollars
in profits this year, having received a huge slice of the 14.5
billion dollars in "tax breaks" which Bush's new energy bill
guarantees his elite cronies.

In his two elections, Bush has received most of his "corporate
contributions" - the euphemism for bribes totalling 61.5
million dollars - from oil and gas companies. The bloody
conquest of Iraq, the world's second biggest source of oil,
will be their prize: their loot.

Iraq and New Orleans are not far apart. On 13 April, 2003,
Matt Frei, the BBC's Washington correspondent, reported the
bloodbath of the American invasion with these words: "There's
no doubt that the desire to bring good, to bring American
values to the rest of the world, and especially now to the
Middle East... is now increasingly tied up with military power."

Frei's apologies for the Bush regime from in front of the
White House, and specifically for the architect of the
slaughter in Iraq, Paul Wolfowitz, were consistent with his
reporting from New Orleans, which was vivid. On 5 September,
he described battle-ready troops of the 82nd Airborne trudging
through the streets of New Orleans as the "heroes of Tikrit".
Most of the killing in Tikrit and elsewhere in Iraq has been
done not by "insurgents" but by such "heroes": a fact almost
never allowed in the "coverage", whether it is on Fox or the
BBC. Shaking his head in New Orleans, Frei wondered why Bush
had done so little. Reality's intrusion was complete.

Before the moment passes, and Bush's atrocities and lies in
Iraq are again allowed to proceed, it is worth connecting his
disregard for the suffering in New Orleans with other truths
behind The Facade. The unchanging nature of the 500-year
western imperial crusade is exemplified in the unreported
suffering of people all over the world, declared enemies in
their own homes. The people of Tal Afar, a northern Iraqi town
now in the news as "an insurgent stronghold", refused to be
expelled from their homes, and as you read this, are being
bombed and shelled and strafed, just as the people of Fallujah
were, and the people of Najaf, and the people of Hongai, a
"stronghold" in Vietnam, once the most bombed place on earth,
and the people of Neak Loeung in Cambodia, one of countless
towns flattened by B-52s. The list of such places consigned to
notoriety, then oblivion, is seemingly endless. Why?

The answer largely is that so much of western scholarship has
taken the humanity out of the study of nations, of people,
congealing it with jargon and reducing it to an esotericism
called "international relations", the grand chess game of
western power that scores nations as useful or not, expendable
or not. (Listen to British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw talk
about "failed nations": the pure invention of Anglo-American
IR zealots.) It is this rampant orthodoxy that determines how
power speaks and how its historians and reporters report.

Such orthodoxy, says Richard Falk, professor of International
Relations at Princeton and a distinguished dissenter, "which
is so widely accepted among political scientists as to be
virtually unchallengeable in academic journals, regards law
and morality as irrelevant to the identification of rational
policy." Thus, western foreign policy is formulated "through a
self-righteous, one-way, moral/legal screen [with] positive
images of western values and innocence portrayed as
threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political
violence..."

This is the filter through which most people get their serious
news. It is the reason why the most obvious truths, such as
the dominance of western state terrorism over the minuscule
al-Qaeda variety, is never reported. It is the reason why
America's destruction of 35 democracies in 30 countries
(historian William Blum's latest count), is unknown to the
American public.

More urgently, it is the reason why the historic implications
of Bush's and Blair's assaults on our most basic freedoms,
such as habeas corpus, are rarely reported. On 9 September,
the American federal appeals court handed down a judgement
against Jose Padilla, an alleged witness to an alleged "plot"
inmate of Guantanamo Bay, allowing the US military to hold him
without charge, indefinitely. Even though there is no case
against him, the Supreme Court is unlikely to overturn this
travesty, which means the end of the Bill of Rights and of the
"very core of liberty... freedom from indefinite imprisonment
at the will of the Executive", as an American jurist once
famously wrote.

This was hardly news in Britain, just as Lord Hoffmann's
remarks passed most of us by. A Law Lord, he said that Blair's
plans to gut our own basic rights were a greater threat than
terrorism. Indefinite imprisonment for those innocent before
the law and the intimidation of a minority community and of
dissenters - these are the goals of Blair's "necessary
measures", borrowed from Bush. Who challenges him? His Downing
Street press conference is an august sheep pen, the baa-ing
barely audible. In India, the other day, reported the London
Guardian's political editor, "Mr Blair stood his ground when
challenged over the Iraq war" - by Indian reporters, that is.
The Guardian described neither their challenges nor Blair's
replies.

Behind The Facade, the destruction of democracy has been a
long-term project. The millions of poor, like most of the
people of New Orleans, have no place in the American system,
which is why they don't vote. The same is happening under
Blair, who has achieved the lowest voter turnouts since the
franchise. Like Bush, this is not his concern, for his
horizons stretch far. Selling weapons and privatisation deals
to India one day, preparing the ground for attacking Iran the
next. Under Blair, the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, ran
Operation Mass Appeal, a campaign to plant stories in the
media about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

Under Blair, young Pakistanis living in Britain were trained
as jihadi fighters and recruited for the first of his wars -
the dismemberment of Yugoslavia in 1999. According to the
Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation, they joined this
terrorist network "with the full knowledge and complicity of
the British and American intelligence agencies."

In his classic work, The Grand Chessboard, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, the godfather of American policies and actions in
Afghanistan and Iraq, writes that for America to dominate the
world, it cannot sustain a genuine, popular democracy because
"the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular
passion... Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilisation". He
describes how he secretly persuaded President Carter in 1976
to bankroll and arm the jihadis in Pakistan and Afghanistan as
a means of ensuring America's Cold War dominance. When I asked
him in Washington, two years ago, if he regretted that the
consequences were al-Qaeda and the attacks of 11 September, he
became very angry and did not reply; and a crack in The Facade
closed. It is time those of us paid to keep the record
straight tore it down completely.

  ###