One of the first to be attacked was Guatemala ... They are indigenous Mayan people and very poor. In the 1950s, 2% of the population of Guatemala controlled the natural wealth in collusion with the giant US corporations like the United Fruit Company, which dominated banana growing. On the board of United Fruit was John Foster Dulles who happened to be US Secretary of State. His brother Allen happened to run the CIA. Both were Christian fundamentalists, who regarded any opposition as the work of communism and the devil. In 1950 this man Jacobo Arbenz became the first Guatemalan leader to be democratically elected by a majority of his people, who saw in him the hope of social justice. He was the Hugo Chavez of his day ... His land reform policies were modest. Washington was having none of it. ibid.
General Rios Montt was to be one of Washington’s faces of liberty. During his time as president in the 1980s thousands of people were murdered by death squads, most of them indigenous men, women and children. His guns and helicopters came from the United States. President Reagan flew in to endorse the general, who he described as ‘a man of great personal integrity’. The crushing of Guatemala became America’s blueprint. ibid.
In Guatemala, the United Nations described the Washington-backed campaign against the Mayan People as genocide. ibid.
This is a death squad in action in El Salvador. Actually, it’s the National Police, many of whom were trained at the School of the Americas. Here, on the steps of San Salvador Cathedral, they’re gunning down mourners who were attending the funeral of Archbishop Romero, who was murdered as he said mass on March 23rd 1980. 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
They finally made their way to the High Court in London after many years. The judges of the High Court were ... horrified by the story. They invoked the Magna Carta which is the basis for all our laws and says you cannot throw people out of their homeland. They described the decisions by governments as outrageous and said they could go back. The British government of Tony Blair decided this wasn’t what they wanted so they invoked a Royal Decree power ... The High Court threw out the government’s decree ... The struggle goes on. ibid.
This is Diego Garcia, the main Island of the Chagos Group in the Indian Ocean. It was once a phenomenon of natural beauty and peace. A paradise. Today, it is one of America’s biggest military bases in the world. There are more than 2,000 troops, two bomber runways, thirty warships and a satellite spy station. From here the United States has attacked Afghanistan and Iraq. The Pentagon calls it an indispensable platform for policing the world. Diego Garcia is a British colony. It lies midway between Africa and Asia. One of a group of coral islands ... 2,000 lived in the Chagos Islands ... A benign undisturbed way of life. John Pilger, Stealing a Nation
A conspiracy was underway between the governments of Britain and the United States. The year is 1961. In this film never seen before the man on the right is Rear Admiral Grantham of the US Navy. His visit to Diego Garcia marked the beginning of a top-secret Anglo-American survey of the Island for a military base so vast it would cost over a billion dollars ... Hidden from the Parliament and the US Congress the deal was this: the Americans wanted the island in their words swept and sanitised. An entire population was declared expendable; all of them were to be deported. ibid.
By the end of 1975 the secret expulsion of the people of the Chagos Islands was complete. A survey of their conditions in exile told of twenty-six families who had died together in poverty, of nine suicides, of young girls forced into prostitution in order to survive. ibid.
What was done to these people is today defined in International Law as a crime against humanity. ibid.
In the 1990s the Islanders’ struggle took a dramatic turn with the discovery of these documents in the Public Record Office in London. Here was the evidence that they and their supporters were looking for. These long-forgotten secret official files reveal the full scale of the conspiracy and the cynicism that drove it. ibid.
The reason the government won’t allow the Islanders to go home is not money. It’s power. American power and its self-given role to dominate. ibid.
What was done to the people of the Chagos raises wider questions for those of us who live in powerful states like Britain and America. Why do we continue to allow our governments to treat people in small countries as either useful or expendable? Why do we except specious reasons for the unacceptable? Four years ago the High Court delivered one of the most damning indictments of a British government. It said the secret expulsion of the Chagos Islanders was wrong; that judgment must be upheld. And the people of a group of beautiful once-peaceful islands must be helped to go home and compensated fully and without delay for their suffering. Anything less diminishes the rest of us. ibid.
This year on May 11th two judges described the actions of the British government as outrageous, repugnant and illegal. So it’s unequivocal, it’s wrong, and under the statutes of the International Criminal Court it’s a major crime. You can’t do that. So what the Blair government has done to try to undercut the High Court is to invoke the Royal Prerogative. John Pilger, interview Guardian Hay Festival 2006
In every major deal Mr Kissinger has done in recent years food has been a decisive factor ... For prolonging the war in Vietnam the generals in Saigon got American food, which they sold for arms ... There is a new more powerful weapon – food. And this one is lethal. John Pilger, Zap! The Weapon is Food for Dictators, ITV 1976; viz also website
People starve to death for a number of reasons; the least understood reason is the denial of food for motives of politics and profit. ibid.
One of the weapons that brought down the democratically elected Allende government in Chile was food. On Dr Kissinger’s orders most American food aid to Chile was cut off, and hunger and disorder followed, leading to a military takeover which brought Chile back into the American fold. And of course once the generals and admirals were in power, Chile got its food back. ibid.
Up to 1974 the US government had paid American farmers $3 billion not to plant millions of acres of cereal crops. This kept the world price inflated. And as a result the food that was available was beyond the reach of those countries on the Zap List like Chile, and countries like Bangladesh that were considered strategically expendable and had no reserves of hard currency. ‘Hunger,’ said President Harry Truman, ‘is fostered not by scarcity but by greed.’ 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 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 2009, ‘Power, Illusion & America’s Last Taboo’; viz also website
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.’ ibid.