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International
Relations
in THE AGE OF EMPIRE
From Iraq to the G8: The Polite
Crushing of Dissent and Truth
John Pilger, 7 July 2005, [Courtesy Znet ]
"..Over the past two weeks, the
contrast between two related "global" events has been
salutary. The first was the World
Tribunal on Iraq held in Istanbul; the second the
G8 meeting in Scotland and the Make Poverty History campaign.
Reading the papers and watching television in Britain,
you would know nothing about the Istanbul meetings,
which produced the most searing evidence to date of the
greatest political scandal of modern times: the attack
on a defenceless Iraq by America and Britain...even
those of us who have tried to follow the war closely
are not aware of a fraction of the horrors that have
been unleashed in Iraq.. no one in the "mainstream" -
from the embedded media to the Make Poverty History
organisers and the accredited, acceptable celebrities -
made the obvious connection of Bush's and Blair's
enduring crime in Iraq...
... Deploying the unction of Bono,
Madonna, Paul McCartney and of course Geldoff, whose
Live Aid 21 years ago achieved nothing for the people
of Africa, the contemporary plunderers and pawnbrokers
of that continent have pulled off an unprecedented
scam: the antithesis of 15 February 2003 when two
million people brought both their hearts and brains to
the streets of London."
Over the past two weeks, the contrast between two related
"global" events has been salutary. The first was the
World Tribunal on Iraq held in Istanbul;
the second the G8 meeting in Scotland and the Make Poverty History campaign. Reading
the papers and watching television in Britain, you would
know nothing about the Istanbul meetings, which produced
the most searing evidence to date of the greatest
political scandal of modern times: the attack on a
defenceless Iraq by America and Britain.
The tribunal is a serious international public inquiry
into the invasion and occupation, the kind governments
dare not hold. "We are here," said the author
Arundathi Roy in Istanbul, "to examine a vast
spectrum of evidence (about the war) that has been
deliberately marginalised and suppressed, its legality,
the role of international institutions and major
corporations in the occupation, the role of the media,
the impact of weapons such as depleted uranium munitions,
napalm, and cluster bombs, the use and legitimising of
torture . . . This tribunal is an attempt to correct the
record: to document the history of the war not from the
point of view of the victors but of the temporarily
anguished."
"Temporarily anguished" implies that, even faced with
such rampant power, the Iraqi people will recover. You
certainly need this sense of hope when reading the
eyewitness testimonies which demonstrate, as Roy pointed
out, "that even those of us who have tried to follow the
war closely are not aware of a fraction of the horrors
that have been unleashed in Iraq."
The most shocking testimony was given
by Dahr Jamail. Unless you read the internet, you
will not know who Dhar Jamail is. He is not an amusing
Baghdad blogger. For me, he is the finest reporter
working in Iraq. With the exception of Robert Fisk,
Patrick Cockburn and several others, mostly
freelancers, he shames the flak-jacketed, cliché
crunching camp followers known as "embeds". A Lebanese
with American citizenship, Jamail has been almost
everywhere the camp followers have not. He has reported
from the besieged city of Fallujah, whose destruction
and atrocities have been suppressed by western
broadcasters, notably by the BBC. (See http://www.medialens.org/alerts/index.php).
In Istanbul, Jamail bore his independent reporter's
witness to the thousands of Iraqis tortured in Abu Ghraib
and other American prisons. His account of what happened
to a civil servant in Baghdad was typical. This man, Ali
Abbas, had gone to a US base to inquire about his missing
neighbours. On his third visit, he was arrested without
charge, stripped naked, hooded and forced to simulate sex
with other prisoners . This was standard procedure. He
was beaten on his genitals, electrocuted in the anus,
denied water and forced to watch as his food was thrown
away. A loaded gun was held to his head to prevent him
from screaming in pain as his wrists were bound so
tightly that the blood drained from his hands. He was
doused in cold water while a fan was held to his
body.
"They put on a loud speaker," he told Jamail, "put
the speakers on my ears and said, 'Shut up, fuck, fuck,
fuck!' He was refused sleep. Shit was wiped on him and
dogs were used on him. "Sometimes at night when he read
his Koran," said Jamail, "(he) had to hold it in the
hallway for light. Soldiers would come by and kick the
Holy Koran, and sometimes they would try to piss on it
or wipe shit on it." A female soldier told him, "Our
aim is to put you in hell . . . These are the orders
from our superiors, to turn your lives into hell."
Jamail described how Fallujah's hospitals have been
subjected to an American tactic of collective punishment,
with US marines assaulting staff and stopping the wounded
entering, and American snipers firing at the doors and
windows, and medicines and emergency blood prevented from
reaching the hospitals. Children were shot dead in front
of their families, in cold blood.
The two men responsible for this, George Bush and Tony
Blair, attended the G8 meeting at Gleneagles. Unlike the
Iraq Tribunal, there was saturation coverage, yet no one
in the "mainstream" - from the embedded media to the Make
Poverty History organisers and the accredited, acceptable
celebrities - made the obvious connection of Bush's and
Blair's enduring crime in Iraq. No one stood and said
that Blair's smoke-and-mirrors "debt cancellation" at
best amounted to less than the money the government spent
in a week brutalising Iraq, where British and American
violence was the cause of the doubling of child poverty
and malnutrition since Saddam Hussein was overthrown
(Unicef).
In Edinburgh, a shameless invitation-only meeting of
Christian Aid supporters and church leaders was addressed
by Britain's treasurer, Gordon Brown, the paymaster of
this carnage. Only one person asked him, "When will you
stop the rape of the poor's resources? Why are there so
many conditions on aid?" This lone protestor was not
referring specifically to Iraq, but to most of the world.
He was thrown out, to cheers from among the assembled
Christians.
That set the theme for the G8 week: the silencing and
pacifying and co-option of real dissent and truth. It was
Frantz
Fanon, the great intellectual-activist of Africa, who
exposed colonial greed and violence dressed up as polite
do-goodery, and nothing has changed, in Africa, as in
Iraq. The mawkish images on giant screens behind the pop
stars in Hyde Park beckoned a wilful, self-satisfied
ignorance. There was none of the images that television
refuses to show: of murdered Iraqi doctors with the blood
streaming from their heads, cut down by Bush's
snipers.
On the front page of the Guardian, the Age of Irony was
celebrated as real life became more satirical than satire
could ever be. There was Bob Geldoff resting his smiling
face on smiling Blair's shoulder, the war criminal and
his jester. Elsewhere, there was an heroically
silhouetted Bono, who celebrates men like Jeffrey Sachs
as saviours of the world's poor while lauding
"compassionate" George Bush's "war on terror" as one of
his generation's greatest achievements; and there again
was Brown, the enforcer of unfair rules of trade, saying
incredibly that "unfair rules of trade shackle poor
people"; and Paul Wolfowitz, beaming next to the
Archbishop of Canterbury: this is the man who, before he
was handed control of the World Bank, devised much of
Bush's so-called neo-conservative putsch, the mendacious
justification for the bloodfest in Iraq and the notion of
"endless war".
And if you missed all that, there is a downloadable PDF
kit from a "one Campaign" e-mail to "help you organise
your very own ongoing Live8 party". The suppression of
African singers and bands, parked where Geldoff decreed,
in an environmental theme park in Cornwall, in front of
an audience of less than 50 people, was described
correctly by Andy Kershaw as "musical apartheid".
Has there ever been a censorship as complete and
insidious and ingenious as this? Even when Stalin
airbrushed his purged comrades from the annual photograph
on top of Lenin's mausoleum, the Russian people could
fill in the gaps. Media and cultural hype provide
infinitely more powerful propaganda weapons in the age of
Blair. With Diana, there was grief by media. With Iraq,
there was war by media. Now there is mass distraction by
media, a normalising of the unmentionable that "the state
has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent
people", wrote the playwright Arthur Miller, "and so the
evidence has to be internally denied."
Deploying the unction of Bono, Madonna, Paul McCartney
and of course Geldoff, whose Live Aid 21 years ago
achieved nothing for the people of Africa, the
contemporary plunderers and pawnbrokers of that continent
have pulled off an unprecedented scam: the antithesis of
15 February 2003 when two million people brought both
their hearts and brains to the streets of London.
"(Ours) is not a march in the sense of a demonstration,
but more of a walk, " said Make Poverty History's Bruce
Whitehead. "The emphasis is on fun in the sun. The
intention is to welcome the G8 leaders to Scotland and
ask them to deliver trade justice, debt cancellation and
increased aid to developing countries."
Really?
In Lewis Carroll's classic, Alice asked the Cheshire Cat
and the Mad Hatter to show her the way out of wonderland.
They did, over and again, this way, that way, until she
lost her temper and brought down her dream world, waking
her up. The people killed and maimed in Iraq and the
people wilfully impoverished in Africa by our governments
and our institutions in our name, demand that we wake
up.
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