News From Behind The
Facade
By John Pilger
09/14/05 "ICH" -- -- When I lived in
the United States in the late 1960s, my home was often New Orleans,
in a friend's rambling grey clapboard house that stood in a section
of the city where civil rights campaigners had taken refuge from the
violence of the Deep South. New Orleans was said to be cosmopolitan;
it was also sinister and murderous. We were protected by the then
District Attorney, Jim Garrison, a liberal maverick whose
investigations into the assassination of John Kennedy were to make
powerful enemies behind The Facade.
The Facade was how we
described the dividing line between the America of real life - of a
poverty so profound that slavery was still a presence and a
rapacious state power that waged war against its own citizens, as it
did against black and brown-skinned people in faraway countries -
and the America that spawned the greed of corporatism and invented
public relations as a means of social control; the "American Dream"
and the "American Way of Life" began as advertising
slogans.
The wilful neglect of the Bush regime before and
after hurricane Katrina offered a rare glimpse behind The Facade.
The poor were no longer invisible; the bodies floating in
contaminated water, the survivors threatened with police shotguns,
the distinct obesity of American poverty - all of it mocked the
forests of advertising billboards and relentless television
commercials and news sound-bites (average length 9.9 seconds) that
glorify the "dream" of wealth and power. A word long expropriated
and debased - reality - found its true meaning, if
briefly.
As if by accident, the American media, which is the
legitimising arm of corporate public relations, reported the truth.
For a few days, a selective group of liberal newspaper readers were
told that poverty had risen an amazing 17 per cent under Bush; that
an African-American baby born within a mile of the White House had
less chance of surviving its first year than an urban baby in India;
that the United States was now ranked 43rd in the world in infant
mortality, 84th for measles immunisation and 89th for polio; that
the world's richest oil company, ExxonMobil, would make 30 billion
dollars in profits this year, having received a huge slice of the
14.5 billion dollars in "tax breaks" which Bush's new energy bill
guarantees his elite cronies.
In his two elections, Bush has
received most of his "corporate contributions" - the euphemism for
bribes totalling 61.5 million dollars - from oil and gas companies.
The bloody conquest of Iraq, the world's second biggest source of
oil, will be their prize: their loot.
Iraq and New Orleans
are not far apart. On 13 April, 2003, Matt Frei, the BBC's
Washington correspondent, reported the bloodbath of the American
invasion with these words: "There's no doubt that the desire to
bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and
especially now to the Middle East... is now increasingly tied up
with military power." Frei's apologies for the Bush regime from in
front of the White House, and specifically for the architect of the
slaughter in Iraq, Paul Wolfowitz, were consistent with his
reporting from New Orleans, which was vivid. On 5 September, he
described battle-ready troops of the 82nd Airborne trudging through
the streets of New Orleans as the "heroes of Tikrit". Most of the
killing in Tikrit and elsewhere in Iraq has been done not by
"insurgents" but by such "heroes": a fact almost never allowed in
the "coverage", whether it is on Fox or the BBC. Shaking his head in
New Orleans, Frei wondered why Bush had done so little. Reality's
intrusion was complete.
Before the moment passes, and Bush's
atrocities and lies in Iraq are again allowed to proceed, it is
worth connecting his disregard for the suffering in New Orleans with
other truths behind The Facade. The unchanging nature of the
500-year western imperial crusade is exemplified in the unreported
suffering of people all over the world, declared enemies in their
own homes. The people of Tal Afar, a northern Iraqi town now in the
news as "an insurgent stronghold", refused to be expelled from their
homes, and as you read this, are being bombed and shelled and
strafed, just as the people of Fallujah were, and the people of
Najaf, and the people of Hongai, a "stronghold" in Vietnam, once the
most bombed place on earth, and the people of Neak Loeung in
Cambodia, one of countless towns flattened by B-52s. The list of
such places consigned to notoriety, then oblivion, is seemingly
endless. Why?
The answer largely is that so much of western
scholarship has taken the humanity out of the study of nations, of
people, congealing it with jargon and reducing it to an esotericism
called "international relations", the grand chess game of western
power that scores nations as useful or not, expendable or not.
(Listen to British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw talk about "failed
nations": the pure invention of Anglo-American IR zealots.) It is
this rampant orthodoxy that determines how power speaks and how its
historians and reporters report.
Such orthodoxy, says Richard
Falk, professor of International Relations at Princeton and a
distinguished dissenter, "which is so widely accepted among
political scientists as to be virtually unchallengeable in academic
journals, regards law and morality as irrelevant to the
identification of rational policy." Thus, western foreign policy is
formulated "through a self-righteous, one-way, moral/legal screen
[with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as
threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political
violence..." This is the filter through which most people get their
serious news. It is the reason why the most obvious truths, such as
the dominance of western state terrorism over the minuscule al-Qaeda
variety, is never reported. It is the reason why America's
destruction of 35 democracies in 30 countries (historian William
Blum's latest count), is unknown to the American public.
More
urgently, it is the reason why the historic implications of Bush's
and Blair's assaults on our most basic freedoms, such as habeas
corpus, are rarely reported. On 9 September, the American federal
appeals court handed down a judgement against Jose Padilla, an
alleged witness to an alleged "plot" inmate of Guantanamo Bay,
allowing the US military to hold him without charge, indefinitely.
Even though there is no case against him, the Supreme Court is
unlikely to overturn this travesty, which means the end of the Bill
of Rights and of the "very core of liberty... freedom from
indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive", as an
American jurist once famously wrote.
This was hardly news in
Britain, just as Lord Hoffmann's remarks passed most of us by. A Law
Lord, he said that Blair's plans to gut our own basic rights were a
greater threat than terrorism. Indefinite imprisonment for those
innocent before the law and the intimidation of a minority community
and of dissenters - these are the goals of Blair's "necessary
measures", borrowed from Bush. Who challenges him? His Downing
Street press conference is an august sheep pen, the baa-ing barely
audible. In India, the other day, reported the London Guardian's
political editor, "Mr Blair stood his ground when challenged over
the Iraq war" - by Indian reporters, that is. The Guardian described
neither their challenges nor Blair's replies.
Behind The
Facade, the destruction of democracy has been a long-term project.
The millions of poor, like most of the people of New Orleans, have
no place in the American system, which is why they don't vote. The
same is happening under Blair, who has achieved the lowest voter
turnouts since the franchise. Like Bush, this is not his concern,
for his horizons stretch far. Selling weapons and privatisation
deals to India one day, preparing the ground for attacking Iran the
next. Under Blair, the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, ran
Operation Mass Appeal, a campaign to plant stories in the media
about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Under Blair,
young Pakistanis living in Britain were trained as jihadi fighters
and recruited for the first of his wars - the dismemberment of
Yugoslavia in 1999. According to the Delhi-based Observer Research
Foundation, they joined this terrorist network "with the full
knowledge and complicity of the British and American intelligence
agencies."
In his classic work, The Grand Chessboard,
Zbigniew Brzezinski, the godfather of American policies and actions
in Afghanistan and Iraq, writes that for America to dominate the
world, it cannot sustain a genuine, popular democracy because "the
pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion...
Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilisation". He describes how he
secretly persuaded President Carter in 1976 to bankroll and arm the
jihadis in Pakistan and Afghanistan as a means of ensuring America's
Cold War dominance. When I asked him in Washington, two years ago,
if he regretted that the consequences were al-Qaeda and the attacks
of 11 September, he became very angry and did not reply; and a crack
in The Facade closed. It is time those of us paid to keep the record
straight tore it down completely.
First published in the New
Statesman - www.newstatesman.co.uk
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