Silences filled with an agreement of propaganda contaminate almost everything we read, see and hear. War by media is now an essential task of so-called mainstream journalism.
By John PILGER
In 1935, the Congress of American Writers was kept in New york city City, followed by another 2 years later on. They contacted “the hundreds of poets, authors, dramatists, critics, short story writers and journalists” to go over the “quick falling apart of capitalism” and the beckoning of another war. They were electrical events which, according to one account, were gone to by 3,500 members of the public with more than a thousand turned away.
Arthur Miller, Myra Page, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett warned that fascism was rising, frequently camouflaged, and the duty lay with writers and reporters to speak out. Telegrams of assistance from Thomas Mann, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, C Day Lewis, Upton Sinclair and Albert Einstein were read out.
The reporter and novelist Martha Gellhorn spoke up for the homeless and jobless, and “all of us under the shadow of violent great power.”
Martha, who became a friend, told me later over her traditional glass of Famous Grouse and soda:
“The duty I felt as a journalist was tremendous. I had actually witnessed the injustices and suffering delivered by the Anxiety, and I knew, all of us knew, what was coming if silences were not broken.”
Her words echo throughout the silences today: they are silences filled with an agreement of propaganda that infects practically whatever we read, see and hear. Let me provide you one example:
On March 7, the 2 oldest newspapers in Australia, the Sydney Early Morning Herald and The Age, released several pages on “the looming threat” of China. They coloured the Pacific Ocean red. Chinese eyes were martial, on the march and menacing. The Yellow Peril was about to drop as if by the weight of gravity.
No rational factor was provided for an attack on Australia by China. A “panel of professionals” provided no trustworthy proof: one of them is a previous director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a front for the Defence Department in Canberra, the Pentagon in Washington, the governments of Britain, Japan and Taiwan and the West’s war market.
“Beijing might strike within three years,” they cautioned. “We are not prepared.” Billions of dollars are to be invested in American nuclear submarines, however that, it seems, is insufficient.”‘Australia’s vacation from history is over”: whatever that might suggest.
There is no risk to Australia, none. The far “lucky” nation has no enemies, least of all China, its largest trading partner. Yet China-bashing that makes use of Australia’s long history of bigotry towards Asia has ended up being something of a sport for the self-ordained “professionals.” What do Chinese-Australians make from this? Numerous are puzzled and afraid.
The authors of this grotesque piece of dog-whistling and obsequiousness to American power are Peter Hartcher and Matthew Knott, “national security reporters” I think they are called. I keep in mind Hartcher from his Israeli government-paid jaunts. The other one, Knott, is a mouthpiece for the suits in Canberra. Neither has ever seen a war zone and its extremes of human deterioration and suffering.
“How did it come to this?” Martha Gellhorn would state if she were here. “Where on earth are the voices stating no? Where is the comradeship?”
Post-Modernism in Charge
The voices are heard in the samizdatof this site and others. In literature, the similarity John Steinbeck, Carson McCullers, George Orwell are outdated. Post-modernism is in charge now. Liberalism has pulled up its political ladder. An as soon as somnolent social democracy, Australia, has enacted a web of brand-new laws protecting deceptive, authoritarian power and avoiding the right to understand. Whistleblowers are hooligans, to be attempted in secret. A specifically ominous law bans “foreign disturbance” by those who work for foreign companies. What does this mean?
Democracy is notional now; there is the all-powerful elite of the corporation merged with the state and the demands of “identity.” American admirals are paid thousands of dollars a day by the Australian tax payer for “advice.” Right throughout the West, our political creativity has actually been pacified by PR and sidetracked by the intrigues of corrupt, ultra low-rent political leaders: a Boris Johnson or a Donald Trump or a Drowsy Joe or a Volodymyr Zelensky.
No authors’ congress in 2023 stress over “falling apart commercialism” and the deadly justifications of “our” leaders. The most notorious of these, Tony Blair, a prima facie criminal under the Nuremberg Standard, is free and rich. Julian Assange, who dared reporters to prove their readers had a right to know, remains in his second decade of imprisonment.
The rise of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial. Or “neo-Nazism” or “severe nationalism,” as you prefer. Ukraine as modern-day Europe’s fascist beehive has seen the re-emergence of the cult of Stepan Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite and mass murderer who admired Hitler’s “Jewish policy,” which left 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews slaughtered. “We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,” a Banderist pamphlet declared to Ukrainian Jews.
Stepan Bandera torchlight parade in Kiev, Jan. 1, 2020.(A1/Wikimedia Commons)
Today, Bandera is hero-worshipped in western Ukraine and scores of statues of him and his fellow-fascists have actually been spent for by the EU and the U.S., replacing those of Russian cultural giants and others who liberated Ukraine from the initial Nazis.
In 2014, neo Nazis played an essential role in an American bankrolled coup against the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was accused of being “pro-Moscow.” The coup regime included popular “severe nationalists”– Nazis in all however name.
At first, this was reported at length by the BBC and the European and American media. In 2019,Timemagazine included the “white supremacist militias” active in Ukraine. NBC News reported, “Ukraine’s Nazi problem is genuine.” The immolation of trade unionists in Odessa was filmed and recorded.
Led by the Azov regiment, whose insignia, the “Wolfsangel,” was made notorious by the German SS, Ukraine’s military invaded the eastern, Russian-speaking Donbass region. According to the United Nations 14,000 in the east were eliminated. 7 years later, with the Minsk peace conferences messed up by the West, as Angela Merkel admitted, the Red Army invaded.
A march of Azov veterans and fans in Kiev, 2019.(Goo3, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)This version of events was not reported in the West. To even utter it is to bring down abuse about being a “Putin apologist,” regardless whether the writer (such as myself) has actually condemned the Russian invasion. Understanding the severe justification that a NATO-armed borderland, Ukraine, the very same borderland through which Hitler got into, provided to Moscow, is anathema.
Journalists who travelled to the Donbass were silenced or perhaps pestered in their own nation. German journalist Patrik Baab lost his job and a young German freelance reporter, Alina Lipp, had her checking account sequestered.
Silence of Intimidation
In Britain, the silence of the liberal intelligentsia is the silence of intimidation. State-sponsored issues like Ukraine and Israel are to be prevented if you want to keep a campus task or a teaching period. What took place to former Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 is duplicated on campuses where challengers of apartheid Israel are delicately smeared as anti-Semitic.
Professor David Miller, ironically the nation’s leading authority on contemporary propaganda, was sacked by Bristol University for suggesting publicly that Israel’s “assets” in Britain and its political lobbying exerted a disproportionate impact worldwide– a reality for which the proof is large.
The university worked with a leading QC to investigate the case independently. His report exonerated Miller on the “essential concern of scholastic liberty of expression” and found “Teacher Miller’s comments did not constitute unlawful speech.” Yet Bristol sacked him. The message is clear: no matter what outrage it commits, Israel has immunity and its critics are to be punished.
A few years back, Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at Manchester University, reckoned that “for the very first time in two centuries, there is no distinguished British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the structures of the Western way of living.”
No Shelley spoke for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron damned the corruption of the gentility, no Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin exposed the moral disaster of industrialism. William Morris, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw had no equivalents today. Harold Pinter was alive then, “the last to raise his voice,” composed Eagleton.
Where did post-modernism– the rejection of real politics and authentic dissent– come from? The publication in 1970 of Charles Reich’s bestselling book, The Greening of America, offers a clue. America then was in a state of turmoil; Richard Nixon was in the White Home, a civil resistance, called “the movement,” had break out of the margins of society in the midst of a war that touched nearly everybody. In alliance with the civil rights movement, it provided the most severe challenge to Washington’s power for a century.
On the cover of Reich’s book were these words: “There is a transformation coming. It will not be like transformations of the past. It will come from with the person.”
At the time I was a correspondent in the United States and remember the over night elevation to master status of Reich, a young Yale academic. TheNew Yorkerhad actually sensationally serialised his book, whose message was that the “political action and truth-telling” of the 1960s had stopped working and just “culture and introspection” would change the world. It felt as if hippydom was claiming the customer classes. And in one sense it was.
Within a couple of years, the cult of “me-ism” had all however overwhelmed lots of people’s sense of acting together, of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated. The individual was the political and the media was the message. Earn money, it said.
When it comes to “the movement,” its hope and songs, the years of Ronald Reagan and Costs Clinton put an end to all that. The authorities were now in open war with black individuals; Clinton’s notorious welfare costs broke world records in the variety of primarily blacks they sent to jail.
George Floyd protesters in Miami respond to authorities firing chemical irritants on Might 30, 2020. (Mike Shaheen, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
When 9/11 occurred, the fabrication of new “dangers” on “America’s frontier” (as the Job for a New American Century called the world) completed the political disorientation of those who, 20 years previously, would have formed a vehement opposition.
In the years because, America has actually fought with the world. According to a largely overlooked report by the Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival and the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Avoidance of Nuclear War, the number killed in America’s “war on fear” was ‘at least’ 1.3 million in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.
This figure does not consist of the dead of U.S.-led and fuelled wars in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Somalia and beyond. The true figure, stated the report, “might well remain in excess of 2 million [or] approximately 10 times greater than that of which the general public, specialists and decision makers know and [is] propagated by the media and major NGOS.”
“A minimum of” one million were killed in Iraq, say the doctors, or 5 percent of the population.
Nobody Understands The Number Of Eliminated
The enormity of this violence and suffering seems to have no location in the Western awareness. “Nobody knows the number of” is the media refrain. Blair and George W. Bush– and Straw and Cheney and Powell and Rumsfeld et al— were never in danger of prosecution. Blair’s propaganda master, Alistair Campbell, is celebrated as a “media character.”
In 2003, I recorded an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the acclaimed investigative reporter. We talked about the invasion of Iraq a couple of months earlier. I asked him, “What if the constitutionally freest media on the planet had seriously challenged George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and investigated their claims, instead of spreading what ended up being crude propaganda?”
He replied. “If we journalists had actually done our job, there is a very, excellent possibility we would have not fought in Iraq.”
I put the exact same question to Dan Rather, the popular CBS anchor, who provided me the exact same response. David Rose of the Observer, who had actually promoted Saddam Hussein’s “risk,” and Rageh Omaar, then the BBC’s Iraq reporter, provided me the exact same answer. Rose’s admirable contrition at having actually been “deceived,” spoke for many press reporters bereft of his nerve to say so.
Their point is worth duplicating. Had actually reporters done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda rather of amplifying it, a million Iraqi guys, women and children might be alive today; millions may not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have sparked, and Islamic State may not have actually existed.
Mock coffins positioned near the offices of military contractors during a demonstration versus the Iraq war around Washington. March 21, 2009. (Victor Reinhart, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Cast that fact across the rapacious wars considering that 1945 fired up by the United States and its “allies” and the conclusion is awesome. Is this ever raised in journalism schools?
Today, war by media is an essential task of so-called mainstream journalism, reminiscent of that described by a Nuremberg district attorney in 1945:
“Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press project determined to deteriorate their victims and to prepare the German individuals mentally … In the propaganda system … it was the day-to-day press and the radio that were the most essential weapons.”
One of the consistent hairs in American political life is a cultish extremism that approaches fascism. Although Trump was credited with this, it was during Barack Obama’s 2 terms that American foreign policy flirted seriously with fascism. This was almost never reported.
“I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being,” stated Obama, who expanded a favourite presidential activity, battle, and death teams called “special operations” as no other president had actually done since the first Cold War.
According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016 Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed the poorest people and people of colour: in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan.
Every Tuesday– reported TheNew York City Times– he personally picked those who would be murdered by hellfire rockets fired from drones. Wedding events, funerals, shepherds were attacked, in addition to those attempting to collect the body parts festooning the “terrorist target.”
A leading Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, approximated, approvingly, that Obama’s drones had killed 4,700 people. “Often you hit innocent people and I dislike that,” he said, however we’ve taken out some very senior members of Al Qaeda.’
In 2011, Obama informed the media that the Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi was planning “genocide” versus his own individuals. “We knew …,” he stated, “that if we waited another day, Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte [North Carolina], could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the area and stained the conscience of the world.”
This was a lie. The only “risk” was the coming defeat of fanatical Islamists by Libyan federal government forces. With his plans for a revival of independent pan-Africanism, an African bank and African currency, all of it moneyed by Libyan oil, Gaddafi was cast as an enemy of Western colonialism on the continent in which Libya was the 2nd most modern state.
Ruining Gaddafi’s “risk” and his contemporary state was the goal. Backed by the U.S., Britain and France, NATO released 9,700 sorties versus Libya. A third were focused on facilities and civilian targets, reported the UN. Uranium warheads were utilized; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that “most [of the kids eliminated] were under the age of ten.”
When Hillary Clinton, Obama’s secretary of state, was told that Gaddafi had actually been captured by the insurrectionists and sodomised with a knife, she chuckled and said to the camera: “We came, we saw, he died!”
On 14 September 2016, your home of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in London reported the conclusion of a year-long research study into the NATO attack on Libya which it described as an “array of lies”– including the Benghazi massacre story.
The NATO battle plunged Libya into a humanitarian disaster, eliminating thousands of individuals and displacing numerous thousands more, transforming Libya from the African nation with the greatest requirement of living into a war-torn failed state.
Under Obama, the U.S. extended secret “special forces” operations to 138 countries, or 70 percent of the world’s population. The first African-American president launched what amounted to a major intrusion of Africa.
Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the 19th century, the U.S. African Command (Africom) has actually given that built a network of supplicants amongst collaborative African regimes excited for American allurements and armaments. Africom’s “soldier to soldier” teaching embeds U.S. officers at every level of command from general to necessitate officer. Just pith helmets are missing out on.
It is as if Africa’s happy history of freedom, from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, has been consigned to oblivion by a new white master’s black colonial elite. This elite’s “historic mission,” cautioned the understanding Frantz Fanon, is the promo of “an industrialism rampant though camouflaged.”
In the year NATO invaded Libya, 2011, Obama revealed what became called the “pivot to Asia.” Almost two-thirds of U.S. marine forces would be moved to the Asia-Pacific to “challenge the hazard from China,” in the words of his defence secretary.
There was no danger from China; there was a risk to China from the United States; some 400 American military bases formed an arc along the rim of China’s commercial heartlands, which a Pentagon official described approvingly as a “noose.”
At the very same time, Obama placed missiles in Eastern Europe focused on Russia. It was the beatified recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize who increased spending on nuclear warheads to a level greater than that of any U.S. administration given that the Cold War– having guaranteed, in a psychological speech in the centre of Prague in 2009, to “help rid the world of nuclear weapons.”
Obama and his administration knew complete well that the coup his assistant secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, was sent out to oversee against the federal government of Ukraine in 2014 would provoke a Russian response and most likely lead to war. And so it has.
I am writing this on 30 April, the anniversary of the last day of the longest war of the 20th century, in Vietnam, which I reported. I was very young when I showed up in Saigon and I discovered a great deal. I discovered to recognise the unique drone of the engines of giant B-52s, which dropped their carnage from above the clouds and spared nothing and nobody; I learned not to turn away when confronted with a charred tree festooned with human parts; I found out to value generosity as never ever prior to; I found out that Joseph Heller was right in his masterly Catch-22: that war was not matched to sane individuals; and I found out about “our” propaganda.
All through that war, the propaganda said a victorious Vietnam would spread its communist illness to the rest of Asia, permitting the Excellent Yellow Danger to its north to sweep down. Nations would fall like “dominoes.”
Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam was triumphant, and none of the above took place. Instead, Vietnamese civilisation blossomed, remarkably, in spite of the cost they paid: 3 million dead. The incapacitated, the warped, the addicted, the poisoned, the lost.
If the existing propagandists get their war with China, this will be a fraction of what is to come. Speak up.