Subject: Americans have a lot invested in believing themselves to be the "Good Guys."
After reading this article you will understand why I cannot vote for President Obama. He is owned by the same International Corporate Empire that has seized control of most Western governments.
Obama, Bush II, Clinton, Bush I, and Reagan differ only in personality, and probably brains. But their Master is the same. And that Master is growing stronger by the year.
As you read, remind yourselves that what the UK and the USA did to the people of the Chagos islands, they can do to you and your loved ones.
Carl Jarvis
(Dad to some and Grandpa to others)
Americans have a lot invested in believing themselves to be the "Good Guys."
Leaving aside the fact that that moniker (along with the "Bad Guys") is
embarrassingly childish, it also betrays an ignorance of history. We are
not "special." We are people. Like other people. We are just as
corruptible as anyone else. Yet it's stunning how many Americans don't want
to believe it. When someone like journalist John Pilger catalogues a few of
our crimes and atrocities, he's shunned and denigrated.
But he continues. As we must. We who believe in the importance of
resistance. Of resisting injustice and calling it out. Even when we feel
like giving up. -Lisa Simeone
Leaving aside the fact that that moniker (along with the "Bad Guys") is
embarrassingly childish, it also betrays an ignorance of history. We are
not "special." We are people. Like other people. We are just as
corruptible as anyone else. Yet it's stunning how many Americans don't want
to believe it. When someone like journalist John Pilger catalogues a few of
our crimes and atrocities, he's shunned and denigrated.
But he continues. As we must. We who believe in the importance of
resistance. Of resisting injustice and calling it out. Even when we feel
like giving up. -Lisa Simeone
The world war on democracy
by John Pilger
by John Pilger
Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a wiry, fiercely intelligent
woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a presence. She was
the embodiment of people's resistance to the war on democracy. I first
glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about the Chagos islanders, a
tiny creole nation living midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian
Ocean. The camera panned across thriving villages, a church, a school, a
hospital, set in a phenomenon of natural beauty and peace. Lisette remembers
the producer saying to her and her teenage friends, "Keep smiling girls!"
Sitting in her kitchen in Mauritius many years later, she said, "I didn't
have to be told to smile. I was a happy child, because my roots were deep in
the islands, my paradise. My great-grandmother was born there; I made six
children there. That's why they couldn't legally throw us out of our own
homes; they had to terrify us into leaving or force us out. At first, they
tried to starve us. The food ships stopped arriving [then] they spread
rumours we would be bombed, then they turned on our dogs."
In the early 1960s, the Labour government of Harold Wilson secretly agreed
to a demand from Washington that the Chagos archipelago, a British colony,
be "swept" and "sanitised" of its 2,500 inhabitants so that a military base
could be built on the principal island, Diego Garcia. "They knew we were
inseparable from our pets," said Lizette, "When the American soldiers
arrived to build the base, they backed their big trucks against the brick
shed where we prepared the coconuts; hundreds of our dogs had been rounded
up and imprisoned there. Then they gassed them through tubes from the
trucks' exhausts. You could hear them crying."
Lisette and her family and hundreds of islanders were forced on to a rusting
steamer bound for Mauritius, a distance of 2,500 miles. They were made to
sleep in the hold on a cargo of fertiliser: bird shit. The weather was
rough; everyone was ill; two women miscarried. Dumped on the docks at Port
Louis, Lizette's youngest children, Jollice, and Regis, died within a week
of each other. "They died of sadness," she said. "They had heard all the
talk and seen the horror of what had happened to the dogs. They knew they
were leaving their home forever. The doctor in Mauritius said he could not
treat sadness."
This act of mass kidnapping was carried out in high secrecy. In one official
file, under the heading, "Maintaining the fiction", the Foreign Office legal
adviser exhorts his colleagues to cover their actions by "re-classifying"
the population as "floating" and to "make up the rules as we go along".
Article 7 of the statute of the International Criminal Court says the
"deportation or forcible transfer of population" is a crime against
humanity. That Britain had committed such a crime -- in exchange for a
$14million discount off an American Polaris nuclear submarine - was not on
the agenda of a group of British "defence" correspondents flown to the
Chagos by the Ministry of Defence when the US base was completed. "There is
nothing in our files," said a ministry official, "about inhabitants or an
evacuation."
Today, Diego Garcia is crucial to America's and Britain's war on democracy.
The heaviest bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan was launched from its vast
airstrips, beyond which the islanders' abandoned cemetery and church stand
like archaeological ruins. The terraced garden where Lisette laughed for the
camera is now a fortress housing the "bunker-busting" bombs carried by
bat-shaped B-2 aircraft to targets in two continents; an attack on Iran will
start here. As if to complete the emblem of rampant, criminal power, the CIA
added a Guantanamo-style prison for its "rendition" victims and called it
Camp Justice.
What was done to Lisette's paradise has an urgent and universal meaning, for
it represents the violent, ruthless nature of a whole system behind its
democratic facade, and the scale of our own indoctrination to its messianic
assumptions, described by Harold Pinter as a "brilliant, even witty, highly
successful act of hypnosis." Longer and bloodier than any war since 1945,
waged with demonic weapons and a gangsterism dressed as economic policy and
sometimes known as globalisation, the war on democracy is unmentionable in
western elite circles. As Pinter wrote, "it never happened even while it was
happening". Last July, American historian William Blum published his
"updated summary of the record of US foreign policy". Since the Second World
War, the US has:
- Attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of them
democratically-elected.
- Attempted to suppress a populist or national movement in 20 countries.
- Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.
- Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.
- Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.
In total, the United States has carried out one or more of these actions in
69 countries. In almost all cases, Britain has been a collaborator. The
"enemy" changes in name - from communism to Islamism -- but mostly it is the
rise of democracy independent of western power or a society occupying
strategically useful territory, deemed expendable, like the Chagos Islands.
The sheer scale of suffering, let alone criminality, is little known in the
west, despite the presence of the world's most advanced communications,
nominally freest journalism and most admired academy. That the most numerous
victims of terrorism - western terrorism - are Muslims is unsayable, if it
is known. That half a million Iraqi infants died in the 1990s as a result of
the embargo imposed by Britain and America is of no interest. That extreme
jihadism, which led to 9/11, was nurtured as a weapon of western policy
("Operation Cyclone") is known to specialists but otherwise suppressed.
While popular culture in Britain and America immerses the Second World War
in an ethical bath for the victors, the holocausts arising from
Anglo-American dominance of resource-rich regions are consigned to oblivion.
Under the Indonesian tyrant Suharto, anointed "our man" by Thatcher, more
than a million people were slaughtered. Described by the CIA as "the worst
mass murder of the second half of the 20th century", the estimate does not
include a third of the population of East Timor who were starved or murdered
with western connivance, British fighter-bombers and machine guns.
These true stories are told in declassified files in the Public Record
Office, yet represent an entire dimension of politics and the exercise of
power excluded from public consideration. This has been achieved by a regime
of un-coercive information control, from the evangelical mantra of consumer
advertising to sound-bites on BBC news and now the ephemera of social media.
It is as if writers as watchdogs are extinct, or in thrall to a sociopathic
zeitgeist, convinced they are too clever to be duped. Witness the stampede
of sycophants eager to deify Christopher Hitchens, a war lover who longed to
be allowed to justify the crimes of rapacious power. "For almost the first
time in two centuries", wrote Terry Eagleton, "there is no eminent British
poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the
western way of life". No Orwell warns that we do not need to live in a
totalitarian society to be corrupted by totalitarianism. No Shelley speaks
for the poor, no Blake proffers a vision, no Wilde reminds us that
"disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original
virtue". And grievously no Pinter rages at the war machine, as in American
Football:
Hallelujah.
Praise the Lord for all good things...
We blew their b---s into shards of dust,
Into shards of f---ing dust...
Into shards of f---ing dust go all the lives blown there by Barack Obama,
the Hopey Changey of western violence. Whenever one of Obama's drones wipes
out an entire family in a faraway tribal region of Pakistan, or Somalia, or
Yemen, the American controllers in front of their computer-game screens type
in "Bugsplat". Obama likes drones and has joked about them with journalists.
One of his first actions as president was to order a wave of Predator drone
attacks on Pakistan that killed 74 people. He has since killed thousands,
mostly civilians; drones fire Hellfire missiles that suck the air out of the
lungs of children and leave body parts festooned across scrubland.
Remember the tear-stained headlines when Brand Obama was elected:
"momentous, spine-tingling": the Guardian. "The American future," wrote
Simon Schama, "is all vision, numinous, unformed, light-headed ..." The San
Francisco Chronicle's columnist saw a spiritual "lightworker [who can] usher
in a new way of being on the planet". Beyond the drivel, as the great
whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg had predicted, a military coup was taking
place in Washington, and Obama was their man. Having seduced the anti-war
movement into virtual silence, he has given America's corrupt military
officer class unprecedented powers of state and engagement. These include
the prospect of wars in Africa and opportunities for provocations against
China, America's largest creditor and new "enemy" in Asia. Under Obama, the
old source of official paranoia Russia, has been encircled with ballistic
missiles and the Russian opposition infiltrated. Military and CIA
assassination teams have been assigned to 120 countries; long planned
attacks on Syria and Iran beckon a world war. Israel, the exemplar of US
violence and lawlessness by proxy, has just received its annual pocket money
of $3bn together with Obama's permission to steal more Palestinian land.
Obama's most "historic" achievement is to bring the war on democracy home to
America. On New Year's Eve, he signed the National Defense Authorization Act
(NDAA), a law that grants the Pentagon the legal right to kidnap both
foreigners and US citizens and indefinitely detain, interrogate and torture,
or even kill them. They need only "associate" with those "belligerent" to
the United States. There will be no protection of law, no trial, no legal
representation. This is the first explicit legislation to abolish habeus
corpus (the right to due process of law) and effectively repeal the Bill of
Rights of 1789.
On 5 January, in an extraordinary speech at the Pentagon, Obama said the
military would not only be ready to "secure territory and populations"
overseas but to fight in the "homeland" and provide "support to the civil
authorities". In other words, US troops will be deployed on the streets of
American cities when the inevitable civil unrest takes hold.
America is now a land of epidemic poverty and barbaric prisons: the
consequence of a "market" extremism which, under Obama, has prompted the
transfer of $14 trillion in public money to criminal enterprises in Wall
Street. The victims are mostly young jobless, homeless, incarcerated
African-Americans, betrayed by the first black president. The historic
corollary of a perpetual war state, this is not fascism, not yet, but
neither is it democracy in any recognisable form, regardless of the placebo
politics that will consume the news until November. The presidential
campaign, says the Washington Post, will "feature a clash of philosophies
rooted in distinctly different views of the economy". This is patently
false. The circumscribed task of journalism on both sides of the Atlantic is
to create the pretence of political choice where there is none.
The same shadow is across Britain and much of Europe where social democracy,
an article of faith two generations ago, has fallen to the central bank
dictators. In David Cameron's "big society", the theft of 84bn pounds in
jobs and services even exceeds the amount of tax "legally" avoid by
piratical corporations. Blame rests not with the far right, but a cowardly
liberal political culture that has allowed this to happen, which, wrote
Hywel Williams in the wake of the attacks on 9/11, "can itself be a form of
self righteous fanaticism". Tony Blair is one such fanatic. In its
managerial indifference to the freedoms that it claims to hold dear,
bourgeois Blairite Britain has created a surveillance state with 3,000 new
criminal offences and laws: more than for the whole of the previous century.
The police clearly believe they have an impunity to kill. At the demand of
the CIA, cases like that of Binyam Mohamed, an innocent British resident
tortured and then held for five years in Guantanamo Bay, will be dealt with
in secret courts in Britain "in order to protect the intelligence agencies"
- the torturers.
This invisible state allowed the Blair government to fight the Chagos
islanders as they rose from their despair in exile and demanded justice in
the streets of Port Louis and London. "Only when you take direct action,
face to face, even break laws, are you ever noticed," said Lisette. "And the
smaller you are, the greater your example to others." Such an eloquent
answer to those who still ask, "What can I do?"
I last saw Lisette's tiny figure standing in driving rain alongside her
comrades outside the Houses of Parliament. What struck me was the enduring
courage of their resistance. It is this refusal to give up that rotten power
fears, above all, knowing it is the seed beneath the snow.
http://www.johnpilger.com/articles/the-world-war-on-democracy
woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a presence. She was
the embodiment of people's resistance to the war on democracy. I first
glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about the Chagos islanders, a
tiny creole nation living midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian
Ocean. The camera panned across thriving villages, a church, a school, a
hospital, set in a phenomenon of natural beauty and peace. Lisette remembers
the producer saying to her and her teenage friends, "Keep smiling girls!"
Sitting in her kitchen in Mauritius many years later, she said, "I didn't
have to be told to smile. I was a happy child, because my roots were deep in
the islands, my paradise. My great-grandmother was born there; I made six
children there. That's why they couldn't legally throw us out of our own
homes; they had to terrify us into leaving or force us out. At first, they
tried to starve us. The food ships stopped arriving [then] they spread
rumours we would be bombed, then they turned on our dogs."
In the early 1960s, the Labour government of Harold Wilson secretly agreed
to a demand from Washington that the Chagos archipelago, a British colony,
be "swept" and "sanitised" of its 2,500 inhabitants so that a military base
could be built on the principal island, Diego Garcia. "They knew we were
inseparable from our pets," said Lizette, "When the American soldiers
arrived to build the base, they backed their big trucks against the brick
shed where we prepared the coconuts; hundreds of our dogs had been rounded
up and imprisoned there. Then they gassed them through tubes from the
trucks' exhausts. You could hear them crying."
Lisette and her family and hundreds of islanders were forced on to a rusting
steamer bound for Mauritius, a distance of 2,500 miles. They were made to
sleep in the hold on a cargo of fertiliser: bird shit. The weather was
rough; everyone was ill; two women miscarried. Dumped on the docks at Port
Louis, Lizette's youngest children, Jollice, and Regis, died within a week
of each other. "They died of sadness," she said. "They had heard all the
talk and seen the horror of what had happened to the dogs. They knew they
were leaving their home forever. The doctor in Mauritius said he could not
treat sadness."
This act of mass kidnapping was carried out in high secrecy. In one official
file, under the heading, "Maintaining the fiction", the Foreign Office legal
adviser exhorts his colleagues to cover their actions by "re-classifying"
the population as "floating" and to "make up the rules as we go along".
Article 7 of the statute of the International Criminal Court says the
"deportation or forcible transfer of population" is a crime against
humanity. That Britain had committed such a crime -- in exchange for a
$14million discount off an American Polaris nuclear submarine - was not on
the agenda of a group of British "defence" correspondents flown to the
Chagos by the Ministry of Defence when the US base was completed. "There is
nothing in our files," said a ministry official, "about inhabitants or an
evacuation."
Today, Diego Garcia is crucial to America's and Britain's war on democracy.
The heaviest bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan was launched from its vast
airstrips, beyond which the islanders' abandoned cemetery and church stand
like archaeological ruins. The terraced garden where Lisette laughed for the
camera is now a fortress housing the "bunker-busting" bombs carried by
bat-shaped B-2 aircraft to targets in two continents; an attack on Iran will
start here. As if to complete the emblem of rampant, criminal power, the CIA
added a Guantanamo-style prison for its "rendition" victims and called it
Camp Justice.
What was done to Lisette's paradise has an urgent and universal meaning, for
it represents the violent, ruthless nature of a whole system behind its
democratic facade, and the scale of our own indoctrination to its messianic
assumptions, described by Harold Pinter as a "brilliant, even witty, highly
successful act of hypnosis." Longer and bloodier than any war since 1945,
waged with demonic weapons and a gangsterism dressed as economic policy and
sometimes known as globalisation, the war on democracy is unmentionable in
western elite circles. As Pinter wrote, "it never happened even while it was
happening". Last July, American historian William Blum published his
"updated summary of the record of US foreign policy". Since the Second World
War, the US has:
- Attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of them
democratically-elected.
- Attempted to suppress a populist or national movement in 20 countries.
- Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.
- Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.
- Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.
In total, the United States has carried out one or more of these actions in
69 countries. In almost all cases, Britain has been a collaborator. The
"enemy" changes in name - from communism to Islamism -- but mostly it is the
rise of democracy independent of western power or a society occupying
strategically useful territory, deemed expendable, like the Chagos Islands.
The sheer scale of suffering, let alone criminality, is little known in the
west, despite the presence of the world's most advanced communications,
nominally freest journalism and most admired academy. That the most numerous
victims of terrorism - western terrorism - are Muslims is unsayable, if it
is known. That half a million Iraqi infants died in the 1990s as a result of
the embargo imposed by Britain and America is of no interest. That extreme
jihadism, which led to 9/11, was nurtured as a weapon of western policy
("Operation Cyclone") is known to specialists but otherwise suppressed.
While popular culture in Britain and America immerses the Second World War
in an ethical bath for the victors, the holocausts arising from
Anglo-American dominance of resource-rich regions are consigned to oblivion.
Under the Indonesian tyrant Suharto, anointed "our man" by Thatcher, more
than a million people were slaughtered. Described by the CIA as "the worst
mass murder of the second half of the 20th century", the estimate does not
include a third of the population of East Timor who were starved or murdered
with western connivance, British fighter-bombers and machine guns.
These true stories are told in declassified files in the Public Record
Office, yet represent an entire dimension of politics and the exercise of
power excluded from public consideration. This has been achieved by a regime
of un-coercive information control, from the evangelical mantra of consumer
advertising to sound-bites on BBC news and now the ephemera of social media.
It is as if writers as watchdogs are extinct, or in thrall to a sociopathic
zeitgeist, convinced they are too clever to be duped. Witness the stampede
of sycophants eager to deify Christopher Hitchens, a war lover who longed to
be allowed to justify the crimes of rapacious power. "For almost the first
time in two centuries", wrote Terry Eagleton, "there is no eminent British
poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the
western way of life". No Orwell warns that we do not need to live in a
totalitarian society to be corrupted by totalitarianism. No Shelley speaks
for the poor, no Blake proffers a vision, no Wilde reminds us that
"disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original
virtue". And grievously no Pinter rages at the war machine, as in American
Football:
Hallelujah.
Praise the Lord for all good things...
We blew their b---s into shards of dust,
Into shards of f---ing dust...
Into shards of f---ing dust go all the lives blown there by Barack Obama,
the Hopey Changey of western violence. Whenever one of Obama's drones wipes
out an entire family in a faraway tribal region of Pakistan, or Somalia, or
Yemen, the American controllers in front of their computer-game screens type
in "Bugsplat". Obama likes drones and has joked about them with journalists.
One of his first actions as president was to order a wave of Predator drone
attacks on Pakistan that killed 74 people. He has since killed thousands,
mostly civilians; drones fire Hellfire missiles that suck the air out of the
lungs of children and leave body parts festooned across scrubland.
Remember the tear-stained headlines when Brand Obama was elected:
"momentous, spine-tingling": the Guardian. "The American future," wrote
Simon Schama, "is all vision, numinous, unformed, light-headed ..." The San
Francisco Chronicle's columnist saw a spiritual "lightworker [who can] usher
in a new way of being on the planet". Beyond the drivel, as the great
whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg had predicted, a military coup was taking
place in Washington, and Obama was their man. Having seduced the anti-war
movement into virtual silence, he has given America's corrupt military
officer class unprecedented powers of state and engagement. These include
the prospect of wars in Africa and opportunities for provocations against
China, America's largest creditor and new "enemy" in Asia. Under Obama, the
old source of official paranoia Russia, has been encircled with ballistic
missiles and the Russian opposition infiltrated. Military and CIA
assassination teams have been assigned to 120 countries; long planned
attacks on Syria and Iran beckon a world war. Israel, the exemplar of US
violence and lawlessness by proxy, has just received its annual pocket money
of $3bn together with Obama's permission to steal more Palestinian land.
Obama's most "historic" achievement is to bring the war on democracy home to
America. On New Year's Eve, he signed the National Defense Authorization Act
(NDAA), a law that grants the Pentagon the legal right to kidnap both
foreigners and US citizens and indefinitely detain, interrogate and torture,
or even kill them. They need only "associate" with those "belligerent" to
the United States. There will be no protection of law, no trial, no legal
representation. This is the first explicit legislation to abolish habeus
corpus (the right to due process of law) and effectively repeal the Bill of
Rights of 1789.
On 5 January, in an extraordinary speech at the Pentagon, Obama said the
military would not only be ready to "secure territory and populations"
overseas but to fight in the "homeland" and provide "support to the civil
authorities". In other words, US troops will be deployed on the streets of
American cities when the inevitable civil unrest takes hold.
America is now a land of epidemic poverty and barbaric prisons: the
consequence of a "market" extremism which, under Obama, has prompted the
transfer of $14 trillion in public money to criminal enterprises in Wall
Street. The victims are mostly young jobless, homeless, incarcerated
African-Americans, betrayed by the first black president. The historic
corollary of a perpetual war state, this is not fascism, not yet, but
neither is it democracy in any recognisable form, regardless of the placebo
politics that will consume the news until November. The presidential
campaign, says the Washington Post, will "feature a clash of philosophies
rooted in distinctly different views of the economy". This is patently
false. The circumscribed task of journalism on both sides of the Atlantic is
to create the pretence of political choice where there is none.
The same shadow is across Britain and much of Europe where social democracy,
an article of faith two generations ago, has fallen to the central bank
dictators. In David Cameron's "big society", the theft of 84bn pounds in
jobs and services even exceeds the amount of tax "legally" avoid by
piratical corporations. Blame rests not with the far right, but a cowardly
liberal political culture that has allowed this to happen, which, wrote
Hywel Williams in the wake of the attacks on 9/11, "can itself be a form of
self righteous fanaticism". Tony Blair is one such fanatic. In its
managerial indifference to the freedoms that it claims to hold dear,
bourgeois Blairite Britain has created a surveillance state with 3,000 new
criminal offences and laws: more than for the whole of the previous century.
The police clearly believe they have an impunity to kill. At the demand of
the CIA, cases like that of Binyam Mohamed, an innocent British resident
tortured and then held for five years in Guantanamo Bay, will be dealt with
in secret courts in Britain "in order to protect the intelligence agencies"
- the torturers.
This invisible state allowed the Blair government to fight the Chagos
islanders as they rose from their despair in exile and demanded justice in
the streets of Port Louis and London. "Only when you take direct action,
face to face, even break laws, are you ever noticed," said Lisette. "And the
smaller you are, the greater your example to others." Such an eloquent
answer to those who still ask, "What can I do?"
I last saw Lisette's tiny figure standing in driving rain alongside her
comrades outside the Houses of Parliament. What struck me was the enduring
courage of their resistance. It is this refusal to give up that rotten power
fears, above all, knowing it is the seed beneath the snow.
http://www.johnpilger.com/articles/the-world-war-on-democracy
No comments:
Post a Comment