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.
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, ITV 2003
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.
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.
Obama has chosen not to stop any of this. Neither do his ballyhooed executive orders put an end to Bush’s assault on constitutional and international law. He has retained Bush’s ‘right’ to imprison anyone, without trial or charges. No ‘ghost prisoners’ are being released or are due to be tried before a civilian court. His nominee for attorney-general, Eric Holder, has endorsed an extension of Bush’s totalitarian USA Patriot Act, which allows federal agents to demand Americans’ library and bookshop records. The man of ‘change’, is changing little. That ought to be front page news from Washington. John Pilger, article New Statesman, ‘The Politics of Bollocks’; viz also website
In these surreal days there is one truth. Nothing justified the killing of innocent people in America last week and nothing justifies the killing of innocent people anywhere else. John Pilger, 2001
1898 President McKinley orders US troops to invade Cuba; 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt orders the invasion of Honduras; 1912 President Taft orders the invasion of Nicaragua; 1914-1918 President Wilson invades Haiti, Cuba and Panama; 1924-26 President Coolidge invades Nicaragua and Honduras; 1954 Eisenhower approves the overthrow of the elected government of Guatemala; 1961 Kennedy approves the CIA invasion of Cuba; 1965 Johnson invades the Dominican Republic; 1973 Nixon approves the overthrow of the elected government of Chile; 1981 President Reagan approves the CIA secret war against Nicaragua; 1983 President Reagan orders the invasion of Granada. John Pilger, Nicaragua – A Nation’s Right to Survive
The murder was typical of the slaughter of more than a million people: teachers, students, civil servants, peasants. Described by the CIA as ‘one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century’, it brought to power the dictator Suharto, the West’s man. Within a year of the bloodbath, Indonesia’s economy was redesigned in America, giving western capital access to vast mineral wealth, markets and cheap labour. What has since emerged is evidence of the extent to which American officials designed the bloodbath.
In 1990, the investigative journalist Kathy Kadane revealed that US officials in Jakarta systematically compiled lists of thousands of communists and other opponents of the Indonesian military and passed them to Suharto’s generals, then ticked off the names of those who had been killed. Ralph McGehee, a senior CIA operations officer, has described the massacre as a ‘model operation’. The ‘model operation’ was repeated in Chile in 1972. ‘Disturbed at the Chilean military’s unwillingness to take action against [the elected President] Allende’, wrote McGehee, ‘the CIA forged a document purporting to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean military leaders. The discovery of this ‘plot’ was headlined in the media, and Allende was deposed and murdered. There is a similarity with what happened in Indonesia in 1965.’ McGehee says the Indonesia massacres were also the model for ‘Operation Phoenix’ in Vietnam, where American-run death squads killed up to 50,000 people. Other ‘model operations’ were conducted in Latin America. The most successful of these was the Contra, based in Honduras, whose death squads waged a ‘secret war’ against the reformist Sandinista government of Nicaragua following its victory in democratic elections. Trained and funded by the CIA, their specialities were slitting the throats of midwives, literacy teachers and anyone else trying to improve the lot of the campesinos.
The common strand in these and other interventions all over the world is an undeclared war against democracy and popular movements that resist or limit American strategic and economic influence. Having reported from a number of these front lines, I had them in mind as I watched the relentless television coverage of the presidential election absurdities in the United States. Summing up, a reporter said: ‘Above all, America is a nation devoted to the rule of law.’ This was the protective media theme. As an antidote, I recommend Greg Palast’s articles on the internet about the Florida state government’s use of a private company to ‘cleanse’ names from voter registration lists. A ‘scrub list’ of 173,000 was declared ineligible to vote for reasons ranging from ‘might be deceased’ to ‘possible felons’; at least 15,000 alleged felons had committed no crime. The majority were non-whites.
Florida is not alone; there are other states as corrupt, and the presidential contest is the most corrupt of all. Unless a candidate has tens of millions of dollars and the backing of the great corporate interests, he can forget it. Backing both Bush and Gore were the war industries that dominate the world trade in weapons and have ensured that the Suhartos and Pinochets get the means of repressing their people. There may have been political nuances and trivialities dividing Bush and Gore; on election day, nearly half of all registered voters, to say nothing of millions of US citizens who refuse even to register, failed to spot them and found something better to do than vote.
At revealing times such as this, Americans are handed down tablets of pompous mysticism about what august institutions they have and how they invented democracy. ‘The myths of a democracy are not delusions’, wrote David Shipler in the The New York Times. ‘They may be part of the truth, or embellishments of an inner reality in the culture’s creed [sic]. But coupled with freedom to expose the country’s flaws, the myths have power because they celebrate the powerful ideas that government belongs to the people, that voting is a universal right, that all citizens are equal,that people are governed by the rule of law, that minority views are protected no matter how abhorrent to the majority …