[Peace-discuss] US Empire…

[Morton K. Brussel]

What I would like to see appear in the News-Gazette, or the NYT.  --mkb

July 27, 2006

The Us Empire Makes Its Move To Take Over The Middle East

By John Pilger

The National Museum of American History is part of the celebrated  
Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Surrounded by mock Graeco- 
Roman edifices with their soaring Corinthian columns, rampant eagles  
and chiselled profundities, it is at the centre of Empire, though the  
word itself is engraved nowhere. This is understandable, as the likes  
of Hitler and Mussolini were proud imperialists, too: on a "great  
mission to rid the world of evil", to borrow from President Bush.

One of the museum's exhibitions is called "The Price of Freedom:  
Americans at war". In the spirit of Santa's Magic Grotto, this  
travesty of revisionism helps us understand how silence and omission  
are so successfully deployed in free, media-saturated societies. The  
shuffling lines of ordinary people, many of them children, are  
dispensed the vainglorious message that America has always "built  
freedom and democracy" - notably at Hiroshima and Nagasaki where the  
atomic bombing saved "a million lives", and in Vietnam where  
America's crusaders were "determined to stop communist expansion",  
and in Iraq where the same true hearts "employed air strikes of  
unprecedented precision".

The words "invasion" and "controversial" make only fleeting  
appearances; there is no hint that the "great mission" has overseen,  
since 1945, the attempted overthrow of 50 governments, many of them  
democracies, along with the crushing of popular movements struggling  
against tyranny and the bombing of 30 countries, causing the loss of  
countless lives. In central America, in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan's  
arming and training of gangster-armies saw off 300,000 people; in  
Guatemala, this was described by the UN as genocide. No word of this  
is uttered in the Grotto. Indeed, thanks to such displays, Americans  
can venerate war, comforted by the crimes of others and knowing  
nothing about their own.

In Santa's Grotto, there is no place for Howard Zinn's honest  
People's History of the United States, or I F Stone's revelation of  
the truth of what the museum calls "the forgotten war" in Korea, or  
Mark Twain's definition of patriotism as the need to keep  
"multitudinous uniformed assassins on hand at heavy expense to grab  
slices of other people's countries". Moreover, at the Price of  
Freedom Shop, you can buy US Army Monopoly, and a "grateful nation  
blanket" for just $200. The exhibition's corporate sponsors include  
Sears, Roebuck, the mammoth retailer. The point is taken.

To understand the power of indoctrination in free societies is also  
to understand the subversive power of the truth it suppresses. During  
the Blair era in Britain, precocious revisionists of Empire have been  
embraced by the pro-war media. Inspired by America's Messianic claims  
of "victory" in the cold war, their pseudo-histories have sought not  
only to hose down the blood slick of slavery, plunder, famine and  
genocide that was British imperialism ("the Empire was an exemplary  
force for good": Andrew Roberts) but also to rehabilitate Gladstonian  
convictions of superiority and promote "the imposition of western  
values", as Niall Ferguson puts it.

Ferguson relishes "values", an unctuous concept that covers both the  
barbarism of the imperial past and today's ruthless, rigged "free"  
market. The new code for race and class is "culture". Thus, the  
enduring, piratical campaign by the rich and powerful against the  
poor and weak, especially those with natural resources, has become a  
"clash of civilisations". Since Francis Fukuyama wrote his drivel  
about "the end of history" (since recanted), the task of the  
revisionists and mainstream journalism has been to popularise the  
"new" imperialism, as in Ferguson's War of the World series for  
Channel 4 and his frequent soundbites

on the BBC. In this way, the public is "softened up" for the  
rapacious invasion of countries on false pretences, including a not  
unlikely nuclear attack on Iran, and the ascent in Washington of an  
executive dictatorship, as called for by Vice-President Cheney. So  
imminent is the latter that a supine Congress will almost certainly  
reverse the Supreme Court's recent decision to outlaw the Guantanamo  
kangaroo courts. The judge who wrote the majority opinion - in a high  
court Bush himself stacked - sounded his alarm through this seminal  
quotation of James Madison: "The accumulation of all powers,  
legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of  
one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or  
elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

The catastrophe in the Middle East is a product of such an imperial  
tyranny. It is clear that the long-planned assault on Gaza and now  
the destruction of Lebanon are Washington-ordained and pretexts for a  
wider campaign with the goal of installing American puppets in  
Lebanon, Syria and eventually Iran. "The pay-off time has come,"  
wrote the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe; "now the proxy should salvage  
the entangled Empire."

The attendant propaganda - the abuse of language and eternal  
hypocrisy - has reached its nadir in recent weeks. An Israeli soldier  
belonging to an invasion force was captured and held, legitimately,  
as a prisoner of war. Reported as a "kidnapping", this set off yet  
more slaughter of Palestinian civilians. The seizure of two  
Palestinian civilians two days before the capture of the soldier was  
of no interest. Neither was the incarceration of thousands of  
Palestinian hostages in Israeli prisons, and the torture of many of  
them, as documented by Amnesty. The kidnapped soldier story cancelled  
any serious inquiry into Israel's plans to reinvade Gaza, from which  
it had staged a phoney withdrawal. The fact and meaning of Hamas's  
self-imposed 16-month ceasefire were lost in inanities about  
"recognising Israel", along with Israel's state of terror in Gaza -  
the dropping of a 500lb bomb on a residential block, the firing of as  
many as 9,000 heavy artillery shells into one of the most densely  
populated places on earth and the nightly terrorising with sonic booms.

"I want nobody to sleep at night in Gaza," declared the Israeli prime  
minister, Ehud Olmert, as children went out of their minds. In their  
defence, the Palestinians fired a cluster of Qassam missiles and  
killed eight Israelis: enough to ensure Israel's victimhood on the  
BBC; even Jeremy Bowen struck a shameful "balance", referring to "two  
narratives". The historical equivalent is not far from that of the  
Nazi bombardment and starvation of the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto. Try to  
imagine that described as "two narratives".

Watching this unfold in Washington - I am staying in a hotel taken  
over by evangelical "Christians for Israel" apparently seeking  
rapture - I have heard only the crudest colonial refrain and no  
truth. Hezbollah, drone America's journalistic caricatures, is "armed  
and funded by Syria and Iran", and so they beckon an attack on those  
countries, while remaining silent about America's $3bn-a-day gift of  
planes and small arms and bombs to a state whose international  
lawlessness is a registered world record.

There is never mention that, just as the rise of Hamas was a response  
to the atrocities and humiliations the Palestinians have suffered for  
half a century, so Hezbollah was formed only as a defence against  
Ariel Sharon's murderous invasion of Lebanon in 1982 which left  
22,000 people dead.

There is never mention that Israel intervenes at will, illegally and  
brutally, in the remaining 22 per cent of historic Palestine, having  
demolished 11,000 homes and walled off people from their farmlands,  
and families, and hospitals, and schools. There is never mention that  
the threat to Israel's existence is a canard, and the true enemy of  
its people is not the Arabs, but Zionism and an imperial America that  
guarantees the Jewish state as the antithesis of humane Judaism. The  
epic injustice done to the Palestinians is the heart of the matter.  
While European governments (with the honourable exception of the  
Swiss) have remained craven, it is only Hezbollah that has come to  
the Palestinians' aid. How truly shaming. There is no media  
"narrative" of the Palestinians' heroic stand during two uprisings,  
and with slingshots and stones most of the time. Israel's murders of  
Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall have left them utterly alone. Neither  
is the silence of governments all that is shocking. On a major BBC  
programme, Maureen Lipman, a Jew and promoter of selective good  
causes, is allowed to say, without serious challenge, that "human  
life is not cheap to the Israelis, and human life on the other side  
is quite cheap actually . . ."

Let Lipman see the children of Gaza laid out after an Israeli bombing  
run, their parents petrified with grief. Let her watch as a young  
Palestinian woman - and there have been many of them - screams in  
pain as she gives birth in the back seat of a car at night at an  
Israeli roadblock, having been wilfully refused right of passage to a  
hospital. Then let Lipman watch the child's father carry his newborn  
across freezing fields until it turns blue and dies.

I think Orwell got it right in this passage from Nineteen Eighty- 
Four, a tale of the ultimate empire:

"And in the general hardening of outlook that set in . . . practices  
which had been long abandoned - imprisonment without trial, the use  
of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract  
confessions . . . and the deportation of whole populations - not only  
became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people  
who considered themselves enlightened and progressive."

John Pilger's new book, "Freedom Next Time", is published by Bantam  
Press
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