MB Civic

ZNet Commentary
The US Empire  Makes Its Move To Take Over The Middle East
July 27, 2006
By John Pilger

The National Museum of American History is part of the celebrated
Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Surrounded by mock Graeco-Roman
edifices with their soaring Corinthian columns, rampant eagles and
chiselled profundities, it is at the centre of Empire, though the word
itself is engraved nowhere. This is understandable, as the likes of Hitler
and Mussolini were proud imperialists, too: on a “great mission to rid the
world of evil”, to borrow from President Bush.

One of the museum’s exhibitions is called “The Price of Freedom: Americans
at war”. In the spirit of Santa’s Magic Grotto, this travesty of
revisionism helps us understand how silence and omission are so
successfully deployed in free, media-saturated societies. The shuffling
lines of ordinary people, many of them children, are dispensed the
vainglorious message that America has always “built freedom and democracy”
– notably at Hiroshima and Nagasaki where the atomic bombing saved “a
million lives”, and in Vietnam where America’s crusaders were “determined
to stop communist expansion”, and in Iraq where the same true hearts
“employed air strikes of unprecedented precision”.

The words “invasion” and “controversial” make only fleeting appearances;
there is no hint that the “great mission” has overseen, since 1945, the
attempted overthrow of 50 governments, many of them democracies, along
with the crushing of popular movements struggling against tyranny and the
bombing of 30 countries, causing the loss of countless lives. In central
America, in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan’s arming and training of
gangster-armies saw off 300,000 people; in Guatemala, this was described
by the UN as genocide. No word of this is uttered in the Grotto. Indeed,
thanks to such displays, Americans can venerate war, comforted by the
crimes of others and knowing nothing about their own.

In Santa’s Grotto, there is no place for Howard Zinn’s honest People’s
History of the United States, or I F Stone’s revelation of the truth of
what the museum calls “the forgotten war” in Korea, or Mark Twain’s
definition of patriotism as the need to keep “multitudinous uniformed
assassins on hand at heavy expense to grab slices of other people’s
countries”. Moreover, at the Price of Freedom Shop, you can buy US Army
Monopoly, and a “grateful nation blanket” for just $200. The exhibition’s
corporate sponsors include Sears, Roebuck, the mammoth retailer. The point
is taken.

To understand the power of indoctrination in free societies is also to
understand the subversive power of the truth it suppresses. During the
Blair era in Britain, precocious revisionists of Empire have been embraced
by the pro-war media. Inspired by America’s Messianic claims of “victory”
in the cold war, their pseudo-histories have sought not only to hose down
the blood slick of slavery, plunder, famine and genocide that was British
imperialism (“the Empire was an exemplary force for good”: Andrew Roberts)
but also to rehabilitate Gladstonian convictions of superiority and
promote “the imposition of western values”, as Niall Ferguson puts it.

Ferguson relishes “values”, an unctuous concept that covers both the
barbarism of the imperial past and today’s ruthless, rigged “free” market.
The new code for race and class is “culture”. Thus, the enduring,
piratical campaign by the rich and powerful against the poor and weak,
especially those with natural resources, has become a “clash of
civilisations”. Since Francis Fukuyama wrote his drivel about “the end of
history” (since recanted), the task of the revisionists and mainstream
journalism has been to popularise the “new” imperialism, as in Ferguson’s
War of the World series for Channel 4 and his frequent soundbites on the
BBC. In this way, the public is “softened up” for the rapacious invasion
of countries on false pretences, including a not unlikely nuclear attack
on Iran, and the ascent in Washington of an executive dictatorship, as
called for by Vice-President Cheney. So imminent is the latter that a
supine Congress will almost certainly reverse the Supreme Court’s recent
decision to outlaw the Guantanamo kangaroo courts. The judge who wrote the
majority opinion – in a high court Bush himself stacked – sounded his
alarm through this seminal quotation of James Madison: “The accumulation
of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands,
whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or
elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

The catastrophe in the Middle East is a product of such an imperial
tyranny. It is clear that the long-planned assault on Gaza and now the
destruction of Lebanon are Washington-ordained and pretexts for a wider
campaign with the goal of installing American puppets in Lebanon, Syria
and eventually Iran. “The pay-off time has come,” wrote the Israeli
historian Ilan Pappe; “now the proxy should salvage the entangled Empire.”

The attendant propaganda – the abuse of language and eternal hypocrisy –
has reached its nadir in recent weeks. An Israeli soldier belonging to an
invasion force was captured and held, legitimately, as a prisoner of war.
Reported as a “kidnapping”, this set off yet more slaughter of Palestinian
civilians. The seizure of two Palestinian civilians two days before the
capture of the soldier was of no interest. Neither was the incarceration
of thousands of Palestinian hostages in Israeli prisons, and the torture
of many of them, as documented by Amnesty. The kidnapped soldier story
cancelled any serious inquiry into Israel’s plans to reinvade Gaza, from
which it had staged a phoney withdrawal.

The fact and meaning of Hamas’s self-imposed 16-month ceasefire were lost
in inanities about “recognising Israel”, along with Israel’s state of
terror in Gaza – the dropping of a 500lb bomb on a residential block, the
firing of as many as 9,000 heavy artillery shells into one of the most
densely populated places on earth and the nightly terrorising with sonic
booms.

“I want nobody to sleep at night in Gaza,” declared the Israeli prime
minister, Ehud Olmert, as children went out of their minds. In their
defence, the Palestinians fired a cluster of Qassam missiles and killed
eight Israelis: enough to ensure Israel’s victimhood on the BBC; even
Jeremy Bowen struck a shameful “balance”, referring to “two narratives”.
The historical equivalent is not far from that of the Nazi bombardment and
starvation of the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto. Try to imagine that described as
“two narratives”.

Watching this unfold in Washington – I am staying in a hotel taken over by
evangelical “Christians for Israel” apparently seeking rapture – I have
heard only the crudest colonial refrain and no truth. Hezbollah, drone
America’s journalistic caricatures, is “armed and funded by Syria and
Iran”, and so they beckon an attack on those countries, while remaining
silent about America’s $3bn-a-day gift of planes and small arms and bombs
to a state whose international lawlessness is a registered world record.

There is never mention that, just as the rise of Hamas was a response to
the atrocities and humiliations the Palestinians have suffered for half a
century, so Hezbollah was formed only as a defence against Ariel Sharon’s
murderous invasion of Lebanon in 1982 which left 22,000 people dead.

There is never mention that Israel intervenes at will, illegally and
brutally, in the remaining 22 per cent of historic Palestine, having
demolished 11,000 homes and walled off people from their farmlands, and
families, and hospitals, and schools. There is never mention that the
threat to Israel’s existence is a canard, and the true enemy of its people
is not the Arabs, but Zionism and an imperial America that guarantees the
Jewish state as the antithesis of humane Judaism.

The epic injustice done to the Palestinians is the heart of the matter.
While European governments (with the honourable exception of the Swiss)
have remained craven, it is only Hezbollah that has come to the
Palestinians’ aid. How truly shaming. There is no media “narrative” of the
Palestinians’ heroic stand during two uprisings, and with slingshots and
stones most of the time. Israel’s murders of Rachel Corrie and Tom
Hurndall have left them utterly alone. Neither is the silence of
governments all that is shocking. On a major BBC programme, Maureen
Lipman, a Jew and promoter of selective good causes, is allowed to say,
without serious challenge, that “human life is not cheap to the Israelis,
and human life on the other side is quite cheap actually . . .”

Let Lipman see the children of Gaza laid out after an Israeli bombing run,
their parents petrified with grief. Let her watch as a young Palestinian
woman – and there have been many of them – screams in pain as she gives
birth in the back seat of a car at night at an Israeli roadblock, having
been wilfully refused right of passage to a hospital. Then let Lipman
watch the child’s father carry his newborn across freezing fields until it
turns blue and dies.

I think Orwell got it right in this passage from Nineteen Eighty-Four, a
tale of the ultimate empire:

“And in the general hardening of outlook that set in . . . practices which
had been long abandoned – imprisonment without trial, the use of war
prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions . .
. and the deportation of whole populations – not only became common again,
but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves
enlightened and progressive.”

John Pilger’s new book, “Freedom Next Time”, is published by Bantam Press

***

Gush Shalom Ad:

“We warned them
And called on them
To escape!”

That is disgusting
Hypocrisy.

Because we have:
Bombed the roads.
Destroyed the bridges.
Cut off the supply of gasoline.
Killed whole families on the way.

There is only one way
Of preventing more such disasters,
Which turn us into monsters:
T O  S T O P!

There is no military solution!

—
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“Our German forbearers in the 1930s sat around, blamed their rulers, said ‘maybe everything’s going to be alright.’ That is something we cannot do. I do not want my grandchildren asking me years from now, ‘why didn’t you do something to stop all this?” –Ray McGovern,  former CIA analyst of 27 years, referring to the actions and crimes of the Bush Administration