During the burlesque of the Bush and Gore show, journalists gave the public no sense of the true sources and contours of American power, of which the White House is only a showcase. This silence allowed accredited Mafiosi, such as the violent Bush clan, to pose as pillars of a democratic system. Why? Is it because the American academic factories have long determined the intellectual terms for the study of great power? For example, the discipline of international studies (known in Britain as international relations) was set up largely by the Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations in conjunction with a network drawn from the CIA’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and the Council on Foreign Relations.
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? …
The effect has been brainwashing by the incessant use of what Johnson calls ‘comforting rubrics’. Now and then, the rubrics are discarded. Last year, Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, and inspiration for Madeleine Albright, wrote: ‘The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-l5. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps’. Succinctly put. John Pilger, article December 2000, ‘US Foreign Policy Has Not Changed Since Vietnam and Potentially it is More Dangerous than Ever’
The effect has been brainwashing by the incessant use of what Johnson calls ‘comforting rubrics’. Now and then, the rubrics are discarded. Last year, Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, and inspiration for Madeleine Albright, wrote: ‘The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-l5. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps’. Succinctly put. John Pilger, article December 2000, ‘US Foreign Policy Has Not Changed Since Vietnam and Potentially it is More Dangerous than Ever’
The effect has been brainwashing by the incessant use of what Johnson calls ‘comforting rubrics’. Now and then, the rubrics are discarded. Last year, Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, and inspiration for Madeleine Albright, wrote: ‘The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-l5. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps’. Succinctly put. John Pilger, article December 2000, ‘US Foreign Policy Has Not Changed Since Vietnam and Potentially it is More Dangerous than Ever’
During my lifetime, America has been constantly waging war against much of humanity: impoverished people mostly, in stricken places. John Pilger, 2001
President Bush has promised to rid the world of evil and to lead the great mission to build free societies on every continent. To understand such an epic lie is to understand history – hidden history, suppressed history, history that explains why we in the west know a lot about the crimes of others, but almost nothing about our own. The missing word is empire. The existence of an America Empire is rarely acknowledged, or it’s smothered in displays of jingoism that celebrate war. And an arrogance that says no country has a right to go its own way unless that way coincides with the interests of the United States. For empires have nothing to do with freedom. They’re vicious. They’re about conquest and theft and control and secrets. Since 1945 the United States has attempted to overthrow fifty governments, many of them democracies. In the process thirty countries have been attacked and bombed, causing the loss of countless lives. John Pilger, The War on Democracy
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
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
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
Why do we tolerate the threat of another world war in our name? Why do we allow lies that justify this risk? The scale of our indoctrination, wrote Harold Pinter, is a ‘brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis’, as if the truth ‘never happened even while it was happening’.
Every year the American historian William Blum publishes his ‘updated summary of the record of US foreign policy’ which shows that, since 1945, the US has tried to overthrow more than 50 governments, many democratically elected; grossly interfered in elections in 30 countries; bombed the civilian populations of 30 countries; used chemical and biological weapons; and attempted to assassinate foreign leaders.
In many cases Britain has been a collaborator. The degree of human suffering, let alone criminality, is little acknowledged in the west, despite the presence of the world’s most advanced communications and nominally freest journalism. That the most numerous victims of terrorism – ‘our’ terrorism – are Muslims, is unsayable. That extreme jihadism, which led to 9/11, was nurtured as a weapon of Anglo-American policy (Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan) is suppressed. In April the US state department noted that, following Nato’s campaign in 2011, ‘Libya has become a terrorist safe haven’.
The name of ‘our’ enemy has changed over the years, from communism to Islamism, but generally it is any society independent of western power and occupying strategically useful or resource-rich territory. The leaders of these obstructive nations are usually violently shoved aside, such as the democrats Muhammad Mosaddegh in Iran and Salvador Allende in Chile, or they are murdered like Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. All are subjected to a western media campaign of caricature and vilification – think Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, now Vladimir Putin. John Pilger, article 13th May 2014, ‘Breaking the Silence: A World War is Beckoning’; viz also website
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 door 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 counties, 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.