Have a Nice World War 3, Folks
kangarooistan
Have a Nice World War, Folks
By John Pilger
March 25, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- Here is news of the
Third World War. The United States has invaded Africa. US troops have
entered Somalia, extending their war front from Afghanistan and
Pakistan to Yemen and now the Horn of Africa. In preparation for an
attack on Iran, American missiles have been placed in four Persian
Gulf states, and “bunker-buster” bombs are said to be arriving at the
US base on the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
In Gaza, the sick and abandoned population, mostly children, is being
entombed behind underground American-supplied walls in order to
reinforce a criminal siege. In Latin America, the Obama administration
has secured seven bases in Colombia, from which to wage a war of
attrition against the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia,
Ecuador and Paraguay. Meanwhile, the secretary of “defence” Robert
Gates complains that “the general [European] public and the political
class” are so opposed to war they are an “impediment” to peace.
Remember this is the month of the March Hare.
According to an American general, the invasion and occupation of
Afghanistan is not so much a real war as a “war of perception”. Thus,
the recent “liberation of the city of Marja” from the Taliban’s
“command and control structure” was pure Hollywood. Marja is not a
city; there was no Taliban command and control. The heroic liberators
killed the usual civilians, poorest of the poor. Otherwise, it was
fake. A war of perception is meant to provide fake news for the folks
back home, to make a failed colonial adventure seem worthwhile and
patriotic, as if The Hurt Locker were real and parades of flag-wrapped
coffins through the Wiltshire town of Wooten Basset were not a cynical
propaganda exercise.
“War is fun”, the helmets in Vietnam used to say with bleakest irony,
meaning that if a war is revealed as having no purpose other than to
justify voracious power in the cause of lucrative fanaticisms such as
the weapons industry, the danger of truth beckons. This danger can be
illustrated by the liberal perception of Tony Blair in 1997 as one
“who wants to create a world [where] ideology has surrendered entirely
to values” (Hugo Young, the Guardian) compared with today’s public
reckoning of a liar and war criminal.
Western war-states such as the US and Britain are not threatened by
the Taliban or any other introverted tribesmen in faraway places, but
by the anti-war instincts of their own citizens. Consider the
draconian sentences handed down in London to scores of young people
who protested Israel’s assault on Gaza in January last year. Following
demonstrations in which paramilitary police “kettled” (corralled)
thousands, first-offenders have received two and a half years in
prison for minor offences that would not normally carry custodial
sentences. On both sides of the Atlantic, serious dissent exposing
illegal war has become a serious crime.
Silence in other high places allows this moral travesty. Across the
arts, literature, journalism and the law, liberal elites, having
hurried away from the debris of Blair and now Obama, continue to fudge
their indifference to the barbarism and aims of western state crimes
by promoting retrospectively the evils of their convenient demons,
like Saddam Hussein. With Harold Pinter gone, try compiling a list of
famous writers, artists and advocates whose principles are not
consumed by the “market” or neutered by their celebrity. Who among
them have spoken out about the holocaust in Iraq during almost 20
years of lethal blockade and assault? And all of it has been
deliberate. On 22 January 1991, the US Defence Intelligence Agency
predicted in impressive detail how a blockade would systematically
destroy Iraq’s clean water system and lead to “increased incidences,
if not epidemics of disease”. So the US set about eliminating clean
water for the Iraqi population: one of the causes, noted Unicef, of
the deaths of half a million Iraqi infants under the age of five. But
this extremism apparently has no name.
Norman Mailer once said he believed the United States, in its endless
pursuit of war and domination, had entered a “pre-fascist era”. Mailer
seemed tentative, as if trying to warn about something even he could
not quite define. “Fascism” is not right, for it invokes lazy
historical precedents, conjuring yet again the iconography of German
and Italian repression. On the other hand, American authoritarianism,
as the cultural critic Henry Giroux pointed out recently, is “more
nuance, less theatrical, more cunning, less concerned with repressive
modes of control than with manipulative modes of consent.”
This is Americanism, the only predatory ideology to deny that it is an
ideology. The rise of tentacular corporations that are dictatorships
in their own right and of a military that is now a state with the
state, set behind the façade of the best democracy 35,000 Washington
lobbyists can buy, and a popular culture programmed to divert and
stultify, is without precedent.