Provoking nuclear war by media – John Pilger
Journalist, film-maker and author, John Pilger is one
of two to win British journalism’s highest award twice. For his documentary
films, he has won an Emmy and a British Academy Award, a BAFTA. Among numerous
other awards, he has won a Royal Television Society Best Documentary Award. His
epic 1979 Cambodia Year Zero is ranked by the British Film Institute as one of
the ten most important documentaries of the 20th century.
Published time: 23 Aug, 2016 12:53Edited time: 23 Aug,
2016 22:31
© Christof Stache / AFP
The exoneration of a man accused of the worst of
crimes, genocide, made no headlines. Neither the BBC nor CNN covered it. The
Guardian allowed a brief commentary. Such a rare official admission was buried
or suppressed, understandably. It would explain too much about how the rulers
of the world rule.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslavia (ICTY) has quietly cleared the late Serbian president, Slobodan
Milosevic, of war crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, including
the massacre at Srebrenica.
Far from conspiring with the convicted Bosnian-Serb
leader Radovan Karadzic, Milosevic actually “condemned ethnic
cleansing”, opposed Karadzic and tried to stop the war that dismembered
Yugoslavia. Buried near the end of a 2,590-page judgement on Karadzic last
February, this truth further demolishes the propaganda that justified Nato’s
illegal onslaught on Serbia in 1999.
Milosevic died of a heart attack in 2006, alone in his
cell in The Hague, during what amounted to a bogus trial by an
American-invented “international tribunal”. Denied heart surgery
that might have saved his life, his condition worsened and was monitored and
kept secret by US officials, as WikiLeaks has since revealed.
Milosevic was the victim of war propaganda that today
runs like a torrent across our screens and newspapers and beckons great danger
for us all. He was the prototype demon, vilified by the western media as the “butcher
of the Balkans” who was responsible for “genocide”,
especially in the secessionist Yugoslav province of Kosovo. Prime Minister Tony
Blair said so, invoked the Holocaust and demanded action against “this
new Hitler”.
David Scheffer, the US ambassador-at-large for war
crimes [sic], declared that as many as “225,000 ethnic Albanian men
aged between 14 and 59” may have been murdered by Milocevic’s forces.
This was the justification for Nato’s bombing, led by
Bill Clinton and Blair, that killed hundreds of civilians in hospitals,
schools, churches, parks and television studios and destroyed Serbia’s economic
infrastructure. It was blatantly ideological; at a notorious “peace
conference” in Rambouillet in France, Milosevic was confronted by
Madeleine Albright, the US secretary of state, who was to achieve infamy with
her remark that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children were “worth
it”.
Albright delivered an “offer” to
Milosevic that no national leader could accept. Unless he agreed to the foreign
military occupation of his country, with the occupying forces “outside
the legal process”, and to the imposition of a neo-liberal “free
market”, Serbia would be bombed. This was contained in an “Appendix B”,
which the media failed to read or suppressed. The aim was to crush Europe’s
last independent “socialist” state.
Once Nato began bombing, there was a stampede of
Kosovar refugees “fleeing a holocaust”. When it was over,
international police teams descended on Kosovo to exhume the victims. The FBI
failed to find a single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team did
the same, its leader angrily denouncing “a semantic pirouette by the
war propaganda machines”. The final count of the dead in Kosovo was 2,788.
This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the
pro-Nato Kosovo Liberation Front. There was no genocide. The Nato attack was
both a fraud and a war crime.
All but a fraction of America’s vaunted “precision
guided” missiles hit not military but civilian targets, including the
news studios of Radio Television Serbia in Belgrade. Sixteen people were
killed, including cameramen, producers and a make-up artist. Blair described
the dead, profanely, as part of Serbia’s “command and control”.
In 2008, the prosecutor of the International Criminal
Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Carla Del Ponte, revealed that she had been
pressured not to investigate Nato’s crimes.
This was the model for Washington’s subsequent
invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and, by stealth, Syria. All qualify as“paramount
crimes” under the Nuremberg standard; all depended on media
propaganda. While tabloid journalism played its traditional part, it was
serious, credible, often liberal journalism that was the most effective – the
evangelical promotion of Blair and his wars by the Guardian, the incessant lies
about Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction in the Observer
and the New York Times, and the unerring drumbeat of government propaganda by the
BBC in the silence of its omissions.
At the height of the bombing, the BBC’s Kirsty Wark
interviewed General Wesley Clark, the Nato commander. The Serbian city of Nis
had just been sprayed with American cluster bombs, killing women, old people
and children in an open market and a hospital. Wark asked not a single question
about this, or about any other civilian deaths.
Others were more brazen. In February 2003, the day
after Blair and Bush had set fire to Iraq, the BBC’s political editor, Andrew
Marr, stood in Downing Street and made what amounted to a victory speech. He
excitedly told his viewers that Blair had “said they would be able to
take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be
celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively
right.” Today, with a million dead and a society in ruins, Marr’s BBC
interviews are recommended by the US embassy in London.
Marr’s colleagues lined up to pronounce Blair “vindicated”.
The BBC’s Washington correspondent, Matt Frei, said, “There’s no doubt
that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the
world, and especially to the Middle East … is now increasingly tied up with
military power.”
This obeisance to the United States and its
collaborators as a benign force “bringing good” runs deep in
western establishment journalism. It ensures that the present-day catastrophe
in Syria is blamed exclusively on Bashar al-Assad, whom the West and Israel
have long conspired to overthrow, not for any humanitarian concerns, but to
consolidate Israel’s aggressive power in the region. The jihadist forces
unleashed and armed by the US, Britain, France, Turkey and their “coalition”
proxies serve this end. It is they who dispense the propaganda and videos that
becomes news in the US and Europe, and provide access to journalists and
guarantee a one-sided “coverage” of Syria.
The city of Aleppo is in the news. Most readers and
viewers will be unaware that the majority of the population of Aleppo lives in
the government-controlled western part of the city. That they suffer daily
artillery bombardment from western-sponsored al-Qaida is not news. On 21 July,
French and American bombers attacked a government village in Aleppo province,
killing up to 125 civilians. This was reported on page 22 of the Guardian;
there were no photographs.
Having created and underwritten jihadism in
Afghanistan in the 1980s as Operation Cyclone - a weapon to destroy the Soviet
Union - the US is doing something similar in Syria. Like the Afghan Mujahideen,
the Syrian “rebels” are America’s and Britain’s foot soldiers.
Many fight for al-Qaida and its variants; some, like the Nusra Front, have
rebranded themselves to comply with American sensitivities over 9/11. The CIA
runs them, with difficulty, as it runs jihadists all over the world.
The immediate aim is to destroy the government in
Damascus, which, according to the most credible poll (YouGov Siraj), the
majority of Syrians support, or at least look to for protection, regardless of
the barbarism in its shadows. The long-term aim is to deny Russia a key Middle
Eastern ally as part of a Nato war of attrition against the Russian Federation
that eventually destroys it.
The nuclear risk is obvious, though suppressed by the
media across “the free world”. The editorial writers of the
Washington Post, having promoted the fiction of WMD in Iraq, demand that Obama
attack Syria. Hillary Clinton, who publicly rejoiced at her executioner’s role
during the destruction of Libya, has repeatedly indicated that, as president,
she will “go further” than Obama.
Gareth Porter, a journalist reporting from Washington,
recently revealed the names of those likely to make up a Clinton cabinet, who
plan an attack on Syria. All have belligerent cold war histories; the former CIA
director, Leon Panetta, says that“the next president is gonna have to
consider adding additional special forces on the ground”.
What is most remarkable about the war propaganda now
in flood tide is its patent absurdity and familiarity. I have been looking
through archive film from Washington in the 1950s when diplomats, civil
servants and journalists were witch-hunted and ruined by Senator Joe McCarthy
for challenging the lies and paranoia about the Soviet Union and China. Like a
resurgent tumor, the anti-Russia cult has returned.
In Britain, the Guardian’s Luke Harding leads his
newspaper’s Russia-haters in a stream of journalistic parodies that assign to
Vladimir Putin every earthly iniquity. When the Panama Papers leak was
published, the front page said Putin, and there was a picture of Putin; never
mind that Putin was not mentioned anywhere in the leaks.
Like Milosevic, Putin is Demon Number One. It was
Putin who shot down a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine. Headline: “As
far as I’m concerned, Putin killed my son.” No evidence required. It
was Putin who was responsible for Washington’s documented (and paid for)
overthrow of the elected government in Kiev in 2014. The subsequent terror
campaign by fascist militias against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine
was the result of Putin’s “aggression”. Preventing Crimea from
becoming a Nato missile base and protecting the mostly Russian population who
had voted in a referendum to rejoin Russia – from which Crimea had been annexed
– were more examples of Putin’s “aggression”. Smear by media
inevitably becomes war by media. If war with Russia breaks out, by design or by
accident, journalists will bear much of the responsibility.
In the US, the anti-Russia campaign has been elevated
to virtual reality. The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, an economist
with a Nobel Prize, has called Donald Trump the “Siberian Candidate” because
Trump is Putin’s man, he says. Trump had dared to suggest, in a rare lucid
moment, that war with Russia might be a bad idea. In fact, he has gone further
and removed American arms shipments to Ukraine from the Republican platform. “Wouldn’t
it be great if we got along with Russia,” he said.
This is why America’s warmongering liberal
establishment hates him. Trump’s racism and ranting demagoguery have nothing to
do with it. Bill and Hillary Clinton’s record of racism and extremism can
out-trump Trump’s any day. (This week is the 20th anniversary of the Clinton
welfare “reform” that launched a war on African-Americans). As for Obama: while
American police gun down his fellow African-Americans the great hope in the
White House has done nothing to protect them, nothing to relieve their
impoverishment, while running four rapacious wars and an assassination campaign
without precedent.
The CIA has demanded Trump is not elected. Pentagon
generals have demanded he is not elected. The pro-war New York Times - taking a
breather from its relentless low-rent Putin smears - demands that he is not
elected. Something is up. These tribunes of “perpetual war” are
terrified that the multi-billion-dollar business of war by which the United
States maintains its dominance will be undermined if Trump does a deal with
Putin, then with China’s Xi Jinping. Their panic at the possibility of the
world’s great power talking peace – however unlikely – would be the blackest
farce were the issues not so dire.
“Trump would have loved Stalin!” bellowed Vice-President Joe Biden at a rally for
Hillary Clinton. With Clinton nodding, he shouted, “We never bow. We
never bend. We never kneel. We never yield. We own the finish line. That’s who
we are. We are America!”
In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn has also excited hysteria
from the war-makers in the Labour Party and from a media devoted to trashing
him. Lord West, a former admiral and Labour minister, put it well. Corbyn was
taking an “outrageous” anti-war position “because it
gets the unthinking masses to vote for him”.
In a debate with leadership challenger Owen Smith,
Corbyn was asked by the moderator: “How would you act on a violation by
Vladimir Putin of a fellow Nato state?”
We
found out 20 years later they were lying about Milosevic. They're doing the
same lying about Assad now @HKX07@snarwani @Souria4Syrians
Corbyn replied: “You would want to avoid that
happening in the first place. You would build up a good dialogue with Russia …
We would try to introduce a de-militarisation of the borders between Russia,
the Ukraine and the other countries on the border between Russia and Eastern
Europe. What we cannot allow is a series of calamitous build-ups of troops on
both sides which can only lead to great danger.”
Pressed to say if he would authorize war against
Russia “if you had to”, Corbyn replied: “I don’t wish
to go to war – what I want to do is achieve a world that we don’t need to go to
war.”
The line of questioning owes much to the rise of
Britain’s liberal war-makers. The Labour Party and the media have long offered
them career opportunities. For a while the moral tsunami of the great crime of
Iraq left them floundering, their inversions of the truth a temporary
embarrassment. Regardless of Chilcot and the mountain of incriminating facts,
Blair remains their inspiration, because he was a “winner”.
Dissenting journalism and scholarship have since been
systematically banished or appropriated, and democratic ideas emptied and
refilled with “identity politics” that confuse gender with
feminism and public angst with liberation and willfully ignore the state
violence and weapons profiteering that destroys countless lives in faraway
places, like Yemen and Syria, and beckon nuclear war in Europe and across the
world.
The stirring of people of all ages around the
spectacular rise of Jeremy Corbyn counters this to some extent. His life has
been spent illuminating the horror of war. The problem for Corbyn and his
supporters is the Labour Party. In America, the problem for the thousands of
followers of Bernie Sanders was the Democratic Party, not to mention their
ultimate betrayal by their great white hope.
In the US, home of the great civil rights and anti-war
movements, it is Black Lives Matter and the likes of Codepink that lay the
roots of a modern version.
For only a movement that swells into every street and
across borders and does not give up can stop the warmongers. Next year, it will
be a century since Wilfred Owen wrote the following. Every journalist should
read it and remember it.
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
JohnPilger.com - the films and journalism of John Pilger
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
JohnPilger.com - the films and journalism of John Pilger
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