@@ British, invented war propaganda @@
Arash
October 17, 2005
We need to be told
When journalists report propaganda instead of the truth, the consequences can be
catastrophic - as one largely forgotten instance demonstrates.
By John Pilger
''The propagandist's purpose", wrote Aldous Huxley, "is to make one set of people
forget that certain other sets of people are human".
The British, who invented modern war propaganda and inspired Joseph Goebbels, were
specialists in the field.
At the height of the slaughter known as the First World War, the prime minister,
David Lloyd George (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lloyd_George), confided to C P
Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian: "If people really knew the truth, the war
would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know, and can't know".
What has changed?
"If we had all known then what we know now", said the New York Times on 24 August,
"the invasion of Iraq would have been stopped by a popular outcry". The admission was
saying, in effect, that powerful newspapers, like powerful broadcasting
organisations, had betrayed their readers and viewers and listeners by not finding
out - by amplifying the lies of Bush and Blair instead of challenging and exposing
them. The direct consequences were a criminal invasion called "Shock and Awe" and the
dehumanising of a whole nation.
This remains largely an unspoken shame in Britain, especially at the BBC, which
continues to boast about its rigour and objectivity while echoing a corrupt and lying
government, as it did before the invasion. For evidence of this, there are two
academic studies available - though the capitulation of broadcast journalism ought to
be obvious to any discerning viewer, night after night, as "embedded" reporting
justifies murderous attacks on Iraqi towns and villages as "rooting out insurgents"
and swallows British army propaganda designed to distract from its disaster, while
preparing us for attacks on Iran and Syria.
Like the New York Times and most of the American media, had the BBC done its job,
many thousands of innocent people almost certainly would be alive today.
When will important journalists cease to be establishment managers and analyse and
confront the critical part they play in the violence of rapacious governments? An
anniversary provides an opportunity. Forty years ago this month, Major General
Suharto began a seizure of power in Indonesia by unleashing a wave of killings that
the CIA described as "the worst mass murders of the second half of the 20th century".
Much of this episode was never reported and remains secret. None of the reports of
recent terror attacks against tourists in Bali mentioned the fact that near the major
hotels were the mass graves of some of an estimated 80,000 people killed by mobs
orchestrated by Suharto and backed by the American and British governments.
Indeed, the collaboration of western governments, together with the role of western
business, laid the pattern for subsequent Anglo-American violence across the world:
such as Chile in 1973, when Augusto Pinochet's bloody coup was backed in Washington
and London; the arming of the shah of Iran and the creation of his secret police; and
the lavish and meticulous backing of Saddam in Iraq, including black propaganda by
the Foreign Office which sought to discredit press reports that he had used nerve gas
against the Kurdish village of Halabja.
In 1965, in Indonesia, the American embassy furnished General Suharto with roughly
5000 names. These were people for assassination, and a senior American diplomat
checked off the names as they were killed or captured. Most were members of the PKI,
the Indonesian Communist Party. Having already armed and equipped Suharto's army,
Washington secretly flew in state-of-the-art communication equipment whose high
frequencies were known to the CIA and the National Security Council advising the
president, Lyndon B Johnson. Not only did this allow Suharto's generals to
co-ordinate the massacres, it meant that the highest echelons of the U.S.
administration were listening in.
The Americans worked closely with the British. The British ambassador in Jakarta, Sir
Andrew Gilchrist, cabled the Foreign Office: "I have never concealed from you my
belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to
effective change". The "little shooting" saw off between half a million and a million
people.
However, it was in the field of propaganda, of "managing" the media and eradicating
the victims from people's memory in the west, that the British shone. British
intelligence officers outlined how the British press and the BBC could be
manipulated. "Treatment will need to be subtle", they wrote, "eg, a) all activities
should be strictly unattributable, b) British government participation or
co-operation should be carefully concealed". To achieve this, the Foreign Office
opened a branch of its Information Research Department (IRD) in Singapore.
The IRD was a top-secret, cold war propaganda unit headed by Norman Reddaway, one of
Her Majesty's most experienced liars. Reddaway and his colleagues manipulated the
"embedded" press and the BBC so expertly that he boasted to Gilchrist in a secret
message that the fake story he had promoted - that a communist takeover was imminent
in Indonesia - "went all over the world and back again". He described how an
experienced Sunday newspaper journalist agreed "to give exactly your angle on events
in his article . . . ie, that this was a kid-glove coup without butchery".
These lies, bragged Reddaway, could be "put almost instantly back to Indonesia via
the BBC". Prevented from entering Indonesia, Roland Challis, the BBC's south-east
Asia corres-pondent, was unaware of the slaughter. "My British sources purported not
to know what was going on", Challis told me, "but they knew what the American plan
was. There were bodies being washed up on the lawns of the British consulate in
Surabaya, and British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the
Malacca Straits so that they could take part in this terrible holocaust. It was only
later that we learned that the American embassy was supplying names and ticking them
off as they were killed. There was a deal, you see. In establishing the Suharto
regime, the involvement of the IMF and the World Bank was part of it . . . Suharto
would bring them back. That was the deal."
The bloodbath was ignored almost entirely by the BBC and the rest of the western
media. The headline news was that "communism" had been overthrown in Indonesia,
which, Time reported, "is the west's best news in Asia". In November 1967, at a
conference in Geneva overseen by the billionaire banker David Rockefeller, the booty
was handed out. All the corporate giants were represented, from General Motors, Chase
Manhattan Bank and U.S. Steel to ICI and British American Tobacco. With Suharto's
connivance, the natural riches of his country were carved up.
Suharto's cut was considerable. When he was finally overthrown in 1998, it was
estimated that he had up to $10bn in foreign banks, or more than 10 per cent of
Indonesia's foreign debt. When I was last in Jakarta, I walked to the end of his
leafy street and caught sight of the mansion where the mass murderer now lives in
luxury. As Saddam heads for his own show trial on 19 October, he must ask himself
where he went wrong. Compared with Suharto's crimes, Saddam's seem second-division.
With British-supplied Hawk jets and machine-guns, Suharto's army went on to crush the
life out of a quarter of the population of East Timor: 200,000 people. Using the same
Hawk jets and machine-guns, the same genocidal army is now attempting to crush the
life out of the resistance movement in West Papua and protect the Freeport company,
which is mining a mountain of copper in the province. (Henry Kissinger is "director
emeritus"). Some 100,000 Papuans, 18% of the population, have been killed; yet this
British-backed "project", as new Labour likes to say, is almost never reported.
What happened in Indonesia, and continues to happen, is almost a mirror image of the
attack on Iraq. Both countries have riches coveted by the west; both had dictators
installed by the west to facilitate the passage of their resources; and in both
countries, blood-drenched Anglo-American actions have been disguised by propaganda
willingly provided by journalists prepared to draw the necessary distinctions between
Saddam's regime ("monstrous") and Suharto's ("moderate" and "stable").
Since the invasion of Iraq, I have spoken to a number of principled journalists
working in the pro-war media, including the BBC, who say that they and many others
"lie awake at night" and want to speak out and resume being real journalists. I
suggest now is the time.
* John Pilger's book "Tell Me No Lies: investigative journalism and its triumphs"
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1560257865) is published in paperback
by Vintage. http://pilger.carlton.com
http://www.newstatesman.com/200510170022