In his epic acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature on 7 December, Harold Pinter spoke of ‘a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed’. He asked why ‘the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought’ of Stalinist Russia were well known in the west while US state crimes were merely ‘superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged’.
A silence has reigned. Across the world, the extinction and suffering of countless human beings can be attributed to rampant American power, ‘But you wouldn’t know it,’ said Pinter. ‘It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.’
To its credit, the Guardian published every word of Pinter’s warning. To its shame, though unsurprising, the state television broadcaster ignored it. All that Newsnight flatulence about the arts, all that recycled preening for the cameras at Booker Prize-giving events, yet the BBC could not make room for Britain's greatest living dramatist, so honoured, to tell the truth.
For the BBC, it simply never happened, just as the killing of half a million children by America’s medieval siege of Iraq during the 1990s never happened, just as the Dhafir and Padilla trials and the Senate vote banning freedom never happened. The political prisoners of Belmarsh barely exist; and a big, brave posse of Metropolitan police never swept away Maya Evans as she publicly grieved for British soldiers killed in the cause of nothing except rotten power.
Bereft of irony, but with a snigger, the newsreader Fiona Bruce introduced, as news, a Christmas propaganda film about Bush’s dogs. That happened. Now imagine Bruce reading the following: ‘Here is delayed news, just in. From 1945 to 2005, the United States attempted to overthrow 50 governments, many of them democracies, and to crush 30 popular movements fighting tyrannical regimes. In the process, 25 countries were bombed, causing the loss of several million lives and the despair of millions more.’ (Thanks to William Blum’s Rogue State, published by Common Courage Press.)
The icon of horror of Saddam Hussein’s rule is a 1988 film of petrified bodies of people in the Kurdish town of Halabja, killed in a chemical weapons attack. The attack has been referred to a great deal by Bush and Blair and the film shown a great deal by the BBC. At the time, as I know from personal experience, the Foreign Office tried to cover up the crime at Halabja. The Americans tried to blame it on Iran. Today, in an age of images, there are no images of the chemical weapons attack on Fallujah in November 2004. This allowed the Americans to deny it until they were caught out recently by investigators using the internet. For the BBC, American atrocities simply do not happen.
In 1999, while filming in Washington and Iraq, I learned the true scale of bombing in what the Americans and British then called Iraq’s ‘no-fly zones’. During the 18 months to 14 January 1999, US aircraft flew 24,000 combat missions over Iraq; almost every mission was bombing or strafing. ‘We’re down to the last outhouse,’ a US official protested. ‘There are still some things left [to bomb], but not many.’ That was seven years ago. In recent months, the air assault on Iraq has multiplied; the effect on the ground cannot be imagined. For the BBC, it has not happened.
The black farce extends to those pseudo-humanitarians in the media and elsewhere, who themselves have never seen the effects of cluster bombs and air-burst shells, yet continue to invoke the crimes of Saddam to justify the nightmare in Iraq and to protect a quisling prime minister who has sold out his country and made the world more dangerous. Curiously, some of them insist on describing themselves as ‘liberals’ and ‘left of centre’, even ‘anti-fascists’. They want some respectability, I suppose. This is understandable, given that the league table of carnage by Saddam Hussein was overtaken long ago by that of their hero in Downing Street, who will now support an attack on Iran.
This cannot change until we, in the west, look in the mirror and confront the true aims and narcissism of the power applied in our name, its extremes and terrorism. The usual double standard no longer works; there are now millions like Brian Haw, Maya Evans, John Catt and the man in the pinstriped suit, with his wreath. Looking in the mirror means understanding that a violent and undemocratic order is being imposed by those whose actions are little different from the actions of fascists. The difference used to be distance. Now they are bringing it home. John Pilger, article January 2006, ‘The Death of Freedom’
The struggle of ordinary people for jobs, security and dignity is the story of modern Britain. It’s been an epic story of gain and setback and courage – the miners, the transport workers, the nurses, the dockers, and it’s still going on especially here in Liverpool, although you wouldn’t know it reading the people’s papers. John Pilger, Breaking the Mirror: The Murdoch Effect
What Obama and the bankers and generals and the IMF, the CIA, and CNN and BBC fear is ordinary people coming together and acting together. It’s a fear as old as democracy, fear that suddenly people convert their fear to action as they have done so often in history. John Pilger, lecture Socialism Chicago 2009, ‘Power Illusion and America’s Last Taboo’; viz also website
These fences run like great ribbons across the islands. And the bases themselves cut swathes across Okinawa. But all around them are people with this continuing demonstration, this continuing resistance. John Pilger, The Coming War on China *****
The first principle of non-violent action is that of non-cooperation with everything humiliating. Cesar Chavez
Let the workers organize. Let the toilers assemble. Let their crystallized voice proclaim their injustices and demand their privileges. Let all thoughtful citizens sustain them, for the future of Labor is the future of America. John L Lewis
We should be able to demonstrate and protest and bring our grievances to the centre of political power in Britain without a policeman’s permission. Henry Porter
Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world ... would do this, it would change the earth. William Faulkner
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. Desmond Tutu
There is absolutely no greater high than challenging the power structure as a nobody, giving it your all, and winning! Abbie Hoffman
Very often the test of one’s allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience. I first became involved with the Czech opposition in 1968 when it was an intoxicating and celebrated cause. Then, during the depressing 1970s and 1980s I was a member of a routine committee that tried with limited success to help the reduced forces of Czech dissent to stay nourished (and published). The most pregnant moment of that commitment was one that I managed to miss at the time: I passed an afternoon with Zdenek Mlynar, exiled former secretary of the Czech Communist Party, who in the bleak early 1950s in Moscow had formed a friendship with a young Russian militant with an evident sense of irony named Mikhail Sergeyevitch Gorbachev. In 1988 I was arrested in Prague for attending a meeting of one of Vaclav Havel’s Charter 77 committees. That outwardly exciting experience was interesting precisely because of its almost Zen-like tedium. I had gone to Prague determined to be the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka, but the numbing bureaucracy got the better of me. When I asked why I was being detained, I was told that I had no need to know the reason! Totalitarianism is itself a cliché (as well as a tundra of pulverizing boredom) and it forced the cliché upon me in turn. I did have to mention Kafka in my eventual story. The regime fell not very much later, as I had slightly foreseen in that same piece that it would. (I had happened to notice that the young Czechs arrested with us were not at all frightened by the police, as their older mentors had been and still were, and also that the police themselves were almost fatigued by their job. This was totalitarianism practically yawning itself to death.) A couple of years after that I was overcome to be invited to an official reception in Prague, to thank those who had been consistent friends through the stultifying years of what ‘The Party’ had so perfectly termed ‘normalization’. As with my tiny moment with Nelson Mandela, a whole historic stretch of nothingness and depression, combined with the long and deep insult of having to be pushed around by boring and mediocre people, could be at least partially canceled and annealed by one flash of humor and charm and generosity. Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
The lady doth protest too much, methinks. William Shakespeare, Hamlet III ii 218, Queen to Hamlet
The American public has become so conditioned by crises, by warnings, by words, that there are few, other than the young, who protest against what is happening. J William Fulbright
We weren’t raised to protest. We weren’t raised to question. We were raised to wave the flag. To pledge allegiance. ‘My country, right or wrong.’ It’s a terrible, terrible trap. Phil Donahue
Mere sparks can ignite a popular movement that may seem dormant. Noam Chomsky
Killing is just superficial; it’s just the icing on the cake. I mean there’s plenty of repression short of killing. And it’s tough. People lose their jobs, they get blacklisted … There’s all kinds of ways of getting rid of people who are troublemakers from kindergarten up. And organising succeeds when people are willing to face those pressures and overcome them. And it’s hard to know what the secret is; sometimes people do it … For us it’s a picnic; what we call repression, in most of the world would be called a gift. I mean, go to a place like El Salvador and try to organise there; there it’s not a matter of they don’t like you, you end up in a ditch cut to pieces after torture – that’s what it means to organise there: they still do it, they keep coming back. Noam Chomsky, lecture 1992, ‘Deterring Democracy’