In this place [Lake Pyramid] late last century two decisive battles were fought between the US Army and the warriors of the Paiute tribe. The official version of what happened lauds the courage of the noble savage ... The truth of course is that the Indians have never won, and their struggle today at Pyramid Lake is one of hundreds of battles still being fought – battles of water rights, land rights, mineral rights, the right to survive. John Pilger, Pyramid Lake is Dying, ITV 1976
In Vietnam more Indians died proportionately than other Americans. ibid.
In the last half century United States administrations have overthrown fifty governments, many of them democracies. In the process thirty countries have been attacked and bombed with the loss of countless lives. John Pilger, author Freedom Next Time
The longer I stayed in Vietnam the more I realised that our atrocities were not isolated, nor were they aberrations. That the war itself was an atrocity – that was the big story and it was seldom news. ibid.
It is more than 100 days since Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. The ‘Obama brand’ has been named ‘Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for 2008’, easily beating Apple computers. David Fenton of MoveOn online describes Obama’s election campaign as ‘an institutionalised mass-level automated technological community organising that has never existed before and is a very, very powerful force’. Deploying the internet and a slogan plagiarised from the Latino union organiser César Chávez – ‘Sí, se puede!’ or ‘Yes, we can’ – the mass-level automated technological community marketed its brand to victory in a country desperate to be rid of George W Bush.
No-one knew what the new brand actually stood for. So accomplished was the advertising (a record $75m was spent on television commercials alone) that many Americans actually believed Obama shared their opposition to Bush’s wars. In fact, he had repeatedly backed Bush’s warmongering and its congressional funding. Many Americans also believed he was the heir to Martin Luther King’s legacy of anti-colonialism. Yet if Obama had a theme at all, apart from the vacuous ‘Change you can believe in’, it was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully. ‘We will be the most powerful’, he often declared.
Perhaps the Obama brand’s most effective advertising was supplied free of charge by those journalists who, as courtiers of a rapacious system, promote shining knights. They depoliticised him, spinning his platitudinous speeches as ‘adroit literary creations, rich, like those Doric columns, with allusion ...’ (Charlotte Higgins in the The Guardian). The San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford wrote: ‘Many spiritually advanced people I know ... identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who ... can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet’ ...
Much of the American establishment loathed Bush and Cheney for exposing, and threatening, the onward march of America’s ‘grand design’, as Henry Kissinger, war criminal and now Obama adviser, calls it. In advertising terms, Bush was a ‘brand collapse’ whereas Obama, with his toothpaste advertisement smile and righteous clichés, is a godsend. At a stroke, he has seen off serious domestic dissent to war, and he brings tears to the eyes, from Washington to Whitehall. He is the BBC’s man, and CNN’s man, and Murdoch’s man, and Wall Street’s man, and the CIA’s man. The Madmen did well. John Pilger, article New Statesman, ‘Obama’s 100 Days – The Mad Men Did Well’
However, the power of the American message is different. Whereas the Europeans were proud imperialists, Americans are trained to deny their imperialism. As Mexico was conquered and the Marines sent to rule Nicaragua, American text books referred to an ‘age of innocence’. American motives were well meaning, moral, exceptional, as the colonel said. There was no ideology, they said; and this is still the received wisdom. Indeed, Americanism is an ideology that is unique because its main element is its denial that it is an ideology. It is both conservative and liberal, both right and left. All else is heresy. John Pilger, lecture Socialism Chicago; viz website, ‘Power, Illusion & America’s Last Taboo’
Barack Obama is the embodiment of this ‘ism’. Since Obama was elected, leading liberals have talked about America returning to its true status as a ‘nation of moral ideals’ – the words of Paul Krugman in The New York Times. In the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford wrote that ‘spiritually advanced people regard the new president as ‘a Lightworker’ ... who can help usher in a new way of being on the planet’.
Tell that to an Afghan child whose family has been blown away by Obama’s bombs, or a Pakistani child whose family are among the 700 civilians killed by Obama’s drones. Or tell it to a child in the carnage of Gaza caused by American smart weapons which, disclosed Seymour Hersh, were re-supplied to Israel for use in the slaughter ‘only after the Obama team let it be known it would not object’. The man who stayed silent on Gaza is the man who now condemns Iran.
Obama’s is the myth that is America’s last taboo. His most consistent theme was never change – it was power. ‘The United States,’ he said, ‘leads the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good … We must lead by building a 21st century military to ensure the security of our people and advance the security of all people.’ And there is this remarkable statement: ‘At moments of great peril in the past century our leaders ensured that America, by deed and by example, led and lifted the world, that we stood and fought for the freedom sought by billions of people beyond their borders.’ At the National Archives on May 21, he said: ‘From Europe to the Pacific, we’ve been the nation that has shut down torture chambers and replaced tyranny with the rule of law.’
Since 1945, ‘by deed and by example’, the United States has overthrown fifty governments, including democracies, and crushed some 30 liberation movements, and supported tyrannies and set up torture chambers from Egypt to Guatemala. Countless men, women and children have been bombed to death. Bombing is apple pie. And yet here is the 44th President of the United States, having stacked his government with warmongers and corporate fraudsters and polluters from the Bush and Clinton eras, teasing us while promising more of the same.
Within three days of his inauguration, Obama was ordering the death of people in faraway countries – Pakistan and Afghanistan. And yet the peace movement it seems is prepared to look the other way and believe that the cool Obama will restore, as Krugman wrote, ‘The nation of moral ideals’. ibid.
The clever young man who recently made it to the White House is a very fine hypnotist, partly because it is indeed extraordinary to see an African American at the pinnacle of power in the land of slavery. However, this is the twenty-first century, and Race together with Gender and even Class can be very seductive tools of propaganda. For what is so often overlooked and what matters I believe above all is the class one serves. ibid.
Looking at the foreign policies of the two candidates – there’s no difference. What do you say to an Afghan child whose house has just had a five-hundred pound bomb dropped on it? John Pilger, In Conversation
The terrorism that never speaks its name, because it’s our terrorism. John Pilger, Breaking the Silence
To a growing number of people around the world, America’s War On Terror is about hypocrisy and double standards, about terrorists who are classified as good and bad, depending on their usefulness to the great game of power politics. For years, Osama bin Laden was not only regarded in Washington and London as a good terrorist, he was virtually our creation. ibid.
By the time George W Bush came to power, the link between Al Qaeda and the Taliban was an embarrassment ... The United States doesn’t usually attack strong countries ... Since World War Two there have been seventy-two interventions by the United States. ibid.
Do we forget the lies that justify the conquest of Iraq, and disguise America’s plans to dominate all the world? Do we forget that the British government has announced for the first time that it’s prepared to launch an attack with nuclear weapons, echoing yet again George Bush? And do we accept the distortion of intellect and morality? … That says it’s wrong for a terrorist to kill innocent people but right for governments to commit the same crimes in our name ... Public opinion now stirring all over the world perhaps as never before. Make no mistake it’s an epic struggle. The alternative is not just now just the conquest of far-away countries, it’s the conquest of us, of our minds, our humanity and our self-respect. If we remain silent, victory over us is assured. ibid.
More terrorists are given training and sanctuary in the United States than anywhere on earth. They include mass murderers, torturers, former and future tyrants and assorted international criminals. This is virtually unknown to the American public, thanks to the freest media on earth. John Pilger
Far from ‘deconstructing [sic] the war on terror’, Obama is clearly pursuing it with the same vigour, ideological backing and deception as the previous administration. George W Bush’s first war, in Afghanistan, and last war, in Pakistan, are now Obama’s wars – with thousands more US troops to be deployed, more bombing and more slaughter of civilians. On 22 January, the day he described Afghanistan and Pakistan as ‘the central front in our enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism’, 22 Afghan civilians died beneath Obama’s bombs in a hamlet populated mainly by shepherds and which, by all accounts, had not laid eyes on the Taliban. Women and children were among the dead, which is normal.
Far from ‘shutting down the CIA’s secret prison network’, Obama’s executive orders actually give the CIA authority to carry out renditions, abductions and transfers of prisoners in secret without the threat of legal obstruction. As the Los Angeles Times disclosed, ‘current and former intelligence officials said the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role’. A semantic sleight of hand is that ‘long term prisons’ are changed to ‘short term prisons’; and while Americans are now banned from directly torturing people, foreigners working for the US are not. This means that America’s numerous ‘covert actions’ will operate as they did under previous presidents, with proxy regimes, such as Augusto Pinochet’s in Chile, doing the dirtiest work.
Bush’s open support for torture, and Donald Rumsfeld’s extraordinary personal overseeing of certain torture techniques, upset many in America’s ‘secret army’ of subversive military and intelligence operators as it exposed how the system worked. Obama’s nominee for director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, has said the Army Field Manual may include new forms of ‘harsh interrogation’, which will be kept secret.