[Mb-civic] Attacking Our Memory

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Today's commentary:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-02/19pilger.cfm

==================================

ZNet Commentary
Attacking Our Memory February 19, 2005
By John Pilger 

How does thought control work in societies that call themselves free? Why
are famous journalists so eager, almost as a reflex, to minimise the
culpability of political leaders such as Bush and Blair who share
responsibility for the unprovoked attack on a defenceless people, for
laying to waste their land and for killing at least 100,000 people, most
of them civilians, having sought to justify this epic crime with
demonstrable lies? What does BBC reporter describe the invasion of Iraq 
as
"a vindication for Blair"? 

Why have broadcasters never associated the British or American state with
terrorism? Why have such privileged communicators, with unlimited 
access
to the facts, lined up to describe an unobserved, unverified,
illegitimate, cynically manipulated election, held under a brutal
occupation, as "democratic" with the pristine aim of being "free and
fair"? 

Do they not read history? Or is the history they know, or choose to know,
subject to such amnesia and omission that it produces a world view as seen
only through a one-way moral mirror? There is no suggestion of 
conspiracy.
This one-way mirror ensures that most of humanity is regarded in terms of
its usefulness to "us", its desirability or expendability, its worthiness
or unworthiness: for example, the notion of "good" Kurds in Iraq and 
"bad"
Kurds in Turkey. The unerring assumption is that "we" in the dominant 
west
have moral standards superior to "them". 

One of "their" dictators (often a former client of ours, like Saddam
Hussein) kills thousands of people and he is declared a monster, a second
Hitler. When one of our leaders does the same, he is viewed, at worst like
Blair, in Shakespearean terms. Those who kill people with car bombs are
"terrorists"; those who kill far more people with cluster bombs are the
noble occupants of a "quagmire".

Historical amnesia can spread quickly. Only ten years after the Vietnam
war, which I reported, an opinion poll in the United States found that a
third of Americans could not remember which side their government had
supported. This demonstrated the insidious power of the dominant
propaganda, that the war was essentially a conflict of "good" Vietnamese
against "bad" Vietnamese, in which the Americans became "involved",
bringing democracy to the people of southern Vietnam faced with a
"communist threat". 

Such a false and dishonest assumption permeated the media coverage, with
honourable exceptions. The truth is that the longest war of the 20th
century was a war waged against Vietnam, north and south, communist and
non-communist, by America. It was an unprovoked invasion of their 
homeland
and their lives, just like the invasion of Iraq. Amnesia ensures that,
while the relatively few deaths of the invaders are constantly
acknowledged, the deaths of up to five million Vietnamese are consigned 
to
oblivion.

What are the roots of this? Certainly, "popular culture", especially
Hollywood movies, can decide what and how little we remember. Selective
education at a tender age performs the same task. I have been sent a
widely used revision guide for students of modern world history, on
Vietnam and the cold war. This is learned by 14 to 16-year-olds in British
schools, sitting for the critical GCSE exam. It informs their
understanding of a pivotal historical period, which must influence how
they make sense of today's news from Iraq and elsewhere.

It is shocking. It says that under the 1954 Geneva agreement: "Vietnam 
was
partitioned into communist north and democratic south." In one sentence,
truth is dispatched. The final declaration of the Geneva conference
divided Vietnam "temporarily" until free national elections were held on
26 July 1956. There was little doubt that Ho Chi Minh would win and form
Vietnam's first democratically elected government. Certainly, President
Eisenhower was in no doubt of this. "I have never talked with a person
knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs," he wrote, "who did not agree
that... 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the communist
Ho Chi Minh as their leader." 

Not only did the United States refuse to allow the UN to administer the
agreed elections two years later, but the "democratic" regime in the south
was an invention. One of the inventors, the CIA official Ralph McGehee,
describes in his masterly book Deadly Deceits how a brutal expatriate
mandarin, Ngo Dinh Diem, was imported from New Jersey to be 
"president"
and a fake government was put in place. "The CIA", he wrote, "was 
ordered
to sustain that illusion through propaganda [placed in the media]."

Phoney elections were arranged, hailed in the west as "free and fair",
with American officials fabricating "an 83 per cent turnout despite
Vietcong terror". The guide alludes to none of this, nor that "the
terrorists", whom the Americans called the Vietcong, were also southern
Vietnamese defending their homeland against the American invasion and
whose resistance was popular. For Vietnam, read Iraq. 

The tone of this tract is from the point of view of "us". There is no
sense that a national liberation movement existed in Vietnam, merely "a
communist threat", merely the propaganda that "the USA was terrified that
many other countries might become communist and help the USSR - they
didnÂ’t want to be outnumbered", merely that President Johnson "was
determined to keep South Vietnam communist-free" (emphasis as in the
original). 

This proceeds quickly to the Tet Offensive in 1968, which "ended in the
loss of thousands of American lives - 14,000 in 1969 - most were young
men". There is no mention of the millions of Vietnamese lives also lost in
the offensive. And America merely began "a bombing campaign": there is 
no
mention of the greatest tonnage of bombs dropped in the history of
warfare, of a military strategy that was deliberately designed to force
millions of people to abandon their homes, and of chemicals used in a
manner that profoundly changed the environment and the genetic order,
leaving a once-bounty ful land all but ruined. 

This revision guide reflects the bias and distortions reflect of the
official syllabuses, such as the prestiugous syllabus from Oxford and
Cambridge, used all over the world as a model. Its cold war section refers
to Soviet "expansionism" and the "spread" of communism; there is not a
word about the "spread" of rapacious America. One of its "key questions"
is: "How effectively did the USA contain the spread of communism?" 
Good
versus evil for untutored minds.

"Phew, loads for you to learn here..." say the authors of the revision
guide, "so get it learned right now." Phew, the British empire did not
happen; there is nothing about the atrocious colonial wars that were
models for the successor power, America, in Indonesia, Vietnam, Chile, El
Salvador, Nicaragua, to name but a few along modern history's imperial
trail of blood, of which Iraq is the latest. 

And now Iran? The drumbeat has already begun. How many more innocent
people have to die before those who filter the past and the present wake
up to their moral responsibility to protect our memory and the lives of
human beings?


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"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
   ---   George Orwell


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