John Pilger on the kidnapping of Haiti:
The theft of Haiti has been swift and crude. On 22 January, the United States secured “formal approval” from the United Nations to take over all air and sea ports in Haiti, and to “secure” roads. No Haitian signed the agreement, which has no basis in law. Power rules in an American naval blockade and the arrival of 13,000 marines, special forces, spooks and mercenaries, none with humanitarian relief training.
The airport in the capital, Port-au-Prince, is now an American military base and relief flights have been re-routed to the Dominican Republic. All flights stopped for three hours for the arrival of Hillary Clinton. Critically injured Haitians waited unaided as 800 American residents in Haiti were fed, watered and evacuated. Six days passed before the US Air Force dropped bottled water to people suffering thirst and dehydration.
The first TV reports played a critical role, giving the impression of widespread criminal mayhem. Matt Frei, the BBC reporter dispatched from Washington, seemed on the point of hyperventilation as he brayed about the “violence” and need for “security”. In spite of the demonstrable dignity of the earthquake victims, and evidence of citizens’ groups toiling unaided to rescue people, and even an American general’s assessment that the violence in Haiti was considerably less than before the earthquake, Frei claimed that “looting is the only industry” and “the dignity of Haiti’s past is long forgotten.” Thus, a history of unerring US violence and exploitation in Haiti was consigned to the victims. “There’s no doubt,” reported Frei in the aftermath of America’s bloody invasion of Iraq in 2003, “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.”
John Pilger writes in the New Statesman on the growing global call for BDS – it can’t be stopped and nor should it until Israel abides by international law (despite Zionists claiming that Arab “violence” justifies holding onto occupied territory forever):
In the United States and Europe, trade unions, mainstream churches and academic associations have brought back the strategies that were used against apartheid South Africa. In a resolution adopted by 431 votes to 62, the US Presbyterian Church voted for a process of “phased, selective disinvestment” in multinational corporations doing business with Israel. This followed the opinion of the International Court of Justice that Israel’s wall and its “settler” colonies were illegal. A similar declaration by the court in 1971, denouncing South Africa’s occupation of Namibia, ignited the international boycott.
Like the South Africa campaign, the issue of law is central. No state is allowed to flout international law as wilfully as Israel. In 1990, a UN Security Council resolution demanding that Saddam Hussein get out of Kuwait was the same, almost word for word, as the one demanding that Israel get out of the West Bank. Iraq was driven out while Israel has been repeatedly rewarded. On 11 December, Barack Obama announced $2.8bn in “aid” for Israel, part of the $30bn US taxpayers will gift from their stricken economy during this decade.
John Pilger on Australia’s secret shame:
…The rate of incarceration of black Australians is five times that of South Africa during the last years of apartheid. The state of Western Australia imprisons Aboriginal men at eight times the apartheid figure, an Aussie world record.
…
There is currently a liberal clarion call in Australia for a Bill of Rights, and the republican movement is stirring again. These debates are meaningless until white Australia summons the moral and political imagination to offer its first people a genuine treaty, as well as universal land rights and a proper share of the country’s resources. And respect. Only then will this fortunate society earn the respect it so often craves by other means.
John Pilger, who turned 69 last week, on the proper role of media:
If journalists can look behind the press-release version of events, or push back the screen of what is often propaganda but rarely recognised as such, then we will produce true journalism, not a form of PR. We ought to be the agents of people, not power.
John Pilger, New Statesman, September 24:
Britain’s political conference season of 2008 will be remembered as The Great Silence. Politicians have come and gone and their mouths have moved in front of large images of themselves, and they often wave at someone. There has been lots of news about each other. Adam Boulton, the political editor of Sky News, and billed as “the husband of Blair aide Anji Hunter”, has published a book of gossip derived from his “unrivalled access to No 10″. His revelation is that Tony Blair’s mouthpiece told lies. The war criminal himself has been absent, but the former mouthpiece has been signing his own book of gossip, and waving.
The club is celebrating itself, including all those, Labour and Tory, who gave the war criminal a standing ovation on his last day in parliament and who have yet to vote on, let alone condemn, Britain’s part in the wanton human, social and physical destruction of an entire nation. Instead, there are happy debates such as, “Can hope win?” and, my favourite, “Can foreign policy be a Labour strength?” As Harold Pinter said of unmentionable crimes: “Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”
The Guardian’s economics editor, Larry Elliott, has written that the Prime Minister “resembles a tragic hero in a Hardy novel: an essentially good man brought down by one error of judgement”. What is this one error of judgement? The bank- rolling of two murderous colonial adventures? No. The unprecedented growth of the British arms industry and the sale of weapons to the poorest countries? No. The replacement of manufacturing and public service by an arcane cult serving the ultra-rich? No. The Prime Minister’s “folly” is “postponing the election last year”. This is the March Hare Factor.
This is how Israel treats Palestinian journalists who struggle to report on the indignity of the Zionist occupation of their land.
Some journalists, in the words of John Pilger, “pretend to be objective while ensuring his or her words remain within the undeclared limits set by authority”.
Two American journalists were central figures in pushing the Bush administration’s case for war against Iraq, erroneously linking al-Qaeda to Saddam.
Of course, their careers have blossomed since 2003.
John Pilger on what real liberation should teach us:
We’re invited to be obedient and passive and to believe there is nothing we can do to influence the course of apparently invincible events – whether they’re the criminal disasters in the Middle East, or the distortion of resources and wealth in our own societies. Then suddenly we glimpse the possible in the action of those with nothing, such as the heroism of the people of Gaza in breaking out of the prison of their homeland. They ought to inspire us to break down our own walls.
Indonesian dictator Soeharto died yesterday. He was one of the 20th centuries most brutal dictators, killing over one million people in the name of strengthening his rule.
The Australian newspaper, however, decides to praise the man and primarily discusses his economic “reforms”. Of course, if Cambodia’s Pol Pot had left his country in better financial shape, the Murdoch press would have undoubtedly praised him, too. These newspaper figures praise “stability”, “pro-Western” governments and “economic reform”. Human rights are largely irrelevant.
The paper’s editorial today proves this point:
Despite his many failings, Australia has reason to be thankful for the steadying hand former Indonesian president Suharto brought to the world’s most populous Muslim nation, immediately to our north.
Hitler improved Germany’s economy, too and the trains ran on time.
Once a friend of Western elite power – unless you’re somebody like Saddam Hussein who turned on his original Western backers – always a friend of the Western business and media elite.
UPDATE: The CIA has described the effects of Soeharto’s takeover of Indonesia as “the worst mass murders of the second half of the 20th century.”
John Pilger, January 23:
Barack Obama is a glossy Uncle Tom who would bomb Pakistan. Hillary Clinton, another bomber, is anti-feminist. John McCain’s one distinction is that he has personally bombed a country. They all believe the US is not subject to the rules of human behaviour, because it is “a city upon a hill”, regardless that most of humanity sees it as a monumental bully which, since 1945, has overthrown 50 governments, many of them democracies, and bombed 30 nations, destroying millions of lives.
