May
17,2023
In
1935, the Congress of American Writers was held in New York City, followed by
another two years later. They called on “the hundreds of poets, novelists,
dramatists, critics, short story writers and journalists” to discuss the “rapid
crumbling of capitalism” and the beckoning of another war. They were electric
events which, according to one account, were attended by 3,500 members of the
public with more than a thousand turned away.
Arthur
Miller, Myra Page, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett warned that fascism was
rising, often disguised, and the responsibility lay with writers and
journalists to speak out. Telegrams of support from Thomas Mann, John
Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, C Day Lewis, Upton Sinclair and Albert Einstein
were read out.
The
journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn spoke up for the homeless and
unemployed, and “all of us under the shadow of violent great power.”
Martha,
who became a close friend, told me later over her customary glass of Famous
Grouse and soda: “The responsibility I felt as a journalist was immense. I had
witnessed the injustices and suffering delivered by the Depression, and I knew,
we all knew, what was coming if silences were not broken.”
Her
words echo across the silences today: they are silences filled with a consensus
of propaganda that contaminates almost everything we read, see and hear. Let me give you one example:
On
March 7, the two oldest newspapers in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald and
The Age, published several pages on “the looming threat” of China. They colored
the Pacific Ocean red. Chinese eyes were martial, on the march and menacing.
The Yellow Peril was about to fall down as if by the weight of gravity.
No
logical reason was given for an attack on Australia by China. A ‘panel of
experts’ presented no credible evidence: one of them is a former director of
the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a front for the Defense Department
in Canberra, the Pentagon in Washington, the governments of Britain, Japan and
Taiwan and the west’s war industry.
“Beijing
could strike within three years,” they warned. “We are not ready.” Billions of
dollars are to be spent on American nuclear submarines, but that, it seems, is
not enough. “Australia’s holiday from history is over”: whatever that might
mean.
There
is no threat to Australia, none. The faraway ‘lucky’ country has no enemies,
least of all China, its largest trading partner. Yet China-bashing that draws
on Australia’s long history of racism towards Asia has become something of a
sport for the self-ordained ‘experts’. What do Chinese-Australians make of
this? Many are confused and fearful.
The
authors of this grotesque piece of dog-whistling and obsequiousness to American
power are Peter Hartcher and Matthew Knott, ‘national security reporters’ I
think they are called. I remember Hartcher from his Israeli government-paid
jaunts. The other one, Knott, is a mouthpiece for the suits in Canberra. Neither has ever seen a war zone and its
extremes of human degradation and suffering.
“How
did it come to this?” Martha Gellhorn would say if she were here. “Where on
earth are the voices saying no? Where is the comradeship?”
The
voices are heard in the samizdat of this website and others. In literature, the
likes of John Steinbeck, Carson McCullers, and George Orwell are obsolete.
Post-modernism is in charge now. Liberalism has pulled up its political ladder.
A once somnolent social democracy, Australia, has enacted a web of new laws protecting
secretive, authoritarian power and preventing the right to know. Whistleblowers
are outlaws, to be tried in secret. An especially sinister law bans ‘foreign
interference’ by those who work for foreign companies. What does this mean?
Democracy
is notional now; there is the all-powerful elite of the corporation merged with
the state and the demands of ‘identity’. US admirals are paid thousands of
dollars a day by the Australian tax payer for ‘advice.’ Right across the West,
our political imagination has been pacified by PR and distracted by the
intrigues of corrupt, ultra low-rent politicians: a Johnson or a Trump or a
Sleepy Joe or a Zelensky.
No
writers’ congress in 2023 worries about “crumbling capitalism” and the lethal
provocations of ‘our’ leaders. The most infamous of these, Blair, a prima facie
criminal under the Nuremberg Standard, is free and rich. Julian Assange, who
dared journalists to prove their readers had a right to know, is in his second
decade of incarceration.
The
rise of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial. Or ‘neo-Nazism’ or ‘extreme
nationalism’, as you prefer. Ukraine as modern Europe’s fascist beehive has
seen the re-emergence of the cult of Stepan Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite
and mass murderer who lauded Hitler’s ‘Jewish policy’, which left 1.5 million
Ukrainian Jews slaughtered. “We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,” a
Banderist pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews.
Today,
Bandera is hero-worshiped in western Ukraine and scores of statues of him and
his fellow-fascists have been paid for by the EU and the US, replacing those of
Russian cultural giants and others who liberated Ukraine from the original
Nazis.
In
2014, neo-Nazis played a key role in a US-bankrolled coup against the elected
president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was accused of being ‘pro-Moscow’. The coup
regime included prominent ‘extreme nationalists’ — Nazis in all but name.
At
first, this was reported at length by the BBC and the European and US media. In
2019, Time magazine featured the ‘white supremacist militias‘ active in
Ukraine. NBC News reported, ‘Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real.’ The immolation of
trade unionists in Odessa was filmed and documented.
Spearheaded
by the Azov regiment, whose insignia, the ‘Wolfsangel’, was made infamous by
the German SS, Ukraine’s military invaded the eastern, Russian-speaking Donbas
region. According to the United Nations 14,000 in the east were killed. Seven
years later, with the Minsk peace conferences sabotaged by the West, as Angela
Merkel confessed, the Red Army invaded.
This
version of events was not reported in the West. To even utter it is to bring
down abuse about being a ‘Putin apologist’, regardless whether the writer (such
as myself) has condemned the Russian invasion. Understanding the extreme
provocation that a NATO-armed borderland, Ukraine, the same borderland through
which Hitler invaded, presented to Moscow, is anathema.
Journalists
who traveled to the Donbas were silenced or even hounded in their own country.
German journalist Patrik Baab lost his job and a young German freelance
reporter, Alina Lipp, had her bank account sequestered.
In
Britain, the silence of the liberal intelligentsia is the silence of
intimidation. State-sponsored issues like Ukraine and Israel are to be avoided
if you want to keep a campus job or a teaching tenure. What happened to Jeremy
Corbyn in 2019 is repeated on campuses where opponents of apartheid Israel are
casually smeared as anti-Semitic.
Professor
David Miller, ironically the country’s leading authority on modern propaganda,
was sacked by Bristol University for suggesting publicly that Israel’s ‘assets’
in Britain and its political lobbying exerted a disproportionate influence
worldwide — a fact for which the evidence is voluminous.
The
university hired a leading QC to investigate the case independently. His report
exonerated Miller on the ‘important issue of academic freedom of expression’
and found ‘Professor Miller’s comments did not constitute unlawful speech’. Yet
Bristol sacked him. The message is clear: no matter what outrage it
perpetrates, Israel has immunity and its critics are to be punished.
A
few years ago, Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at
Manchester University, reckoned that “for the first time in two centuries,
there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question
the foundations of the western way of life.”
No
Shelley spoke for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron damned the
corruption of the ruling class, no Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin revealed the
moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, George
Bernard Shaw had no equivalents today. Harold Pinter was alive then, “the last
to raise his voice’ “wrote Eagleton.
Where
did post-modernism — the rejection of actual politics and authentic dissent —
come from? The publication in 1970 of Charles Reich’s bestselling book, The
Greening of America, offers a clue. The United States then was in a state of
upheaval; Nixon was in the White House, a civil resistance, known as ‘the
movement’, had burst out of the margins of society in the midst of a war that
touched almost everybody. In alliance with the civil rights movement, it
presented the most serious challenge to Washington’s power for a century.
On
the cover of Reich’s book were these words: ‘There is a revolution coming. It
will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the
individual.’
At
the time, I was a correspondent in the US and
recall the overnight elevation to guru status of Reich, a young Yale
academic. The New Yorker had sensationally serialized his book, whose message
was that the ‘political action and truth-telling’ of the 1960s had failed and
only ‘culture and introspection’ would change the world. It felt as if hippydom
was claiming the consumer classes. And
in one sense it was.
Within
a few years, the cult of ‘me-ism’ had all but overwhelmed many people’s sense
of acting together, of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and
race were separated. The personal was the political and the media was the
message. Make money, it said.
As
for ‘the movement’, its hope and songs, the years of Ronald Reagan and Bill
Clinton put an end to all that. The police were now in open war with black
people; Clinton’s notorious welfare bills broke world records in the number of
mostly Blacks they sent to jail.
When
9/11 happened, the fabrication of new ‘threats’ on ‘America’s frontier’ (as the
Project for a New American Century called the world) completed the political disorientation
of those who, 20 years earlier, would have formed a vehement opposition.
In
the years since, America has gone to war with the world. According to a largely
ignored report by the Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for
Global Survival and the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the
Prevention of Nuclear War, the number killed in America’s ‘war on terror’ was
‘at least’ 1.3 million in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.
This
figure does not include the dead of US-led and fueled wars in Yemen, Libya,
Syria, Somalia and beyond. The true figure, said the report, ‘could well be in
excess of 2 million [or] approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public,
experts and decision makers are aware and [is] propagated by the media and
major NGOS.’
‘At
least’ one million were killed in Iraq, say the physicians, or five per cent of
the population.
The
enormity of this violence and suffering seems to have no place in the western
consciousness. ‘No one knows how many’ is the media refrain. Blair and George
W. Bush — and Straw and Cheney and Powell and Rumsfeld et al — were never in
danger of prosecution. Blair’s propaganda maestro, Alistair Campbell, is celebrated
as a ‘media personality’.
In
2003, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the acclaimed
investigative journalist. We discussed the invasion of Iraq a few months
earlier. I asked him, ‘What if the constitutionally freest media in the world
had seriously challenged George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and investigated
their claims, instead of spreading what turned out to be crude propaganda?’
He
replied. ‘If we journalists had done our job, there is a very, very good chance
we would have not gone to war in Iraq.’
I
put the same question to Dan Rather, the famous CBS anchor, who gave me the
same answer. David Rose of the Observer, who had promoted Saddam Hussein’s
‘threat’, and Rageh Omaar, then the BBC’s Iraq correspondent, gave me the same
answer. Rose’s admirable contrition at having been ‘duped’, spoke for many
reporters bereft of his courage to say so.
Their
point is worth repeating. Had journalists done their job, had they questioned
and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, a million Iraqi men,
women and children might be alive today; millions might not have fled their
homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and
Islamic State might not have existed.
Cast
that truth across the rapacious wars since 1945 ignited by the United States
and its ‘allies’ and the conclusion is breathtaking. Is this ever raised in
journalism schools?
Today,
war by media is a key task of so-called mainstream journalism, reminiscent of
that described by a Nuremberg prosecutor in 1945: ‘Before each major
aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a
press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German
people psychologically… In the propaganda system… it was the daily press and
the radio that were the most important weapons.’
One
of the persistent strands in US political life is a cultish extremism that
approaches fascism. Although Trump was credited with this, it was during Obama’s
two terms that US foreign policy flirted seriously with fascism. This was
almost never reported.
‘I
believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,’ said Obama,
who expanded a favorite presidential pastime, bombing, and death squads known
as ‘special operations’ as no other president had done since the first Cold
War.
According
to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016 Obama dropped 26,171 bombs.
That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed the poorest people and people of color:
in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan.
Every
Tuesday — reported the New York Times — he personally selected those who would
be murdered by hellfire missiles fired from drones. Weddings, funerals,
shepherds were attacked, along with those attempting to collect the body parts
festooning the ‘terrorist target’.
A
leading Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, estimated, approvingly, that
Obama’s drones had killed 4,700 people. ‘Sometimes you hit innocent people and
I hate that,’ he said, but we’ve taken out some very senior members of Al
Qaeda.’
In
2011, Obama told the media that the Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi was
planning ‘genocide’ against his own people. “We knew…,”he said, “that if we
waited one more day, Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte [North Carolina],
could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and
stained the conscience of the world.”
This
was a lie. The only ‘threat’ was the coming defeat of fanatical Islamists by
Libyan government forces. With his plans for a revival of independent
pan-Africanism, an African bank and African currency, all of it funded by
Libyan oil, Gaddafi was cast as an enemy of western colonialism on the
continent in which Libya was the second most modern state.
Destroying
Gaddafi’s ‘threat’ and his modern state was the aim. Backed by the US, Britain
and France, NATO launched 9,700 sorties against Libya. A third were aimed at
infrastructure and civilian targets, reported the UN. Uranium warheads were
used; the cities of Misrata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross
identified mass graves, and UNICEF reported that ‘most [of the children killed]
were under the age of ten’.
When
Hillary Clinton, Obama’s secretary of state, was told that Gaddafi had been
captured by the insurrectionists and sodomized with a knife, she laughed and
said to the camera: ‘We came, we saw, he died!’
On
14 September 2016, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in London
reported the conclusion of a year-long study into the NATO attack on Libya
which it described as an ‘array of lies’ — including the Benghazi massacre
story.
· The
NATO bombing plunged Libya into a humanitarian disaster, killing thousands of
people and displacing hundreds of thousands more, transforming Libya from the
African country with the highest standard of living into a war-torn failed
state.
Under
Obama, the US extended secret ‘special forces’ operations to 138 countries, or
70% of the world’s population. The first African-American president launched
what amounted to a full-scale invasion of Africa.
Reminiscent
of the Scramble for Africa in the 19th century, the US African Command
(Africom) has since built a network of supplicants among collaborative African
regimes eager for American bribes and armaments. Africom’s ‘soldier to soldier’
doctrine embeds US officers at every level of command from general to warrant
officer. Only pith helmets are missing.
It
is as if Africa’s proud history of liberation, from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson
Mandela, has been consigned to oblivion by a new white master’s black colonial
elite. This elite’s ‘historic mission’, warned the knowing Frantz Fanon, is the
promotion of “a capitalism rampant though camouflaged.”
In
the year NATO invaded Libya, 2011, Obama announced what became known as the
‘pivot to Asia’. Almost two-thirds of US naval forces would be transferred to
the Asia-Pacific to “confront the threat from China,” in the words of his
Defense Secretary.
There
was no threat from China; there was a threat to China from the United States;
some 400 American military bases formed an arc along the rim of China’s
industrial heartlands, which a Pentagon official described approvingly as a
“noose.”
At
the same time, Obama placed missiles in Eastern Europe aimed at Russia. It was
the beatified recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize who increased spending on
nuclear warheads to a level higher than that of any US administration since the
Cold War — having promised, in an emotional speech in the center of Prague in
2009, to ‘help rid the world of nuclear weapons’.
Obama
and his administration knew full well that the coup his assistant secretary of
state, Victoria Nuland, was sent to oversee against the government of Ukraine
in 2014 would provoke a Russian response and probably lead to war. And so it
has.
I
am writing this on April 30, the anniversary of the last day of the longest war
of the twentieth century, in Vietnam, which I reported. I was very young when I
arrived in Saigon and I learned a great deal. I learned to recognize the
distinctive drone of the engines of giant B-52s, which dropped their carnage
from above the clouds and spared nothing and no one; I learned not to turn away
when faced with a charred tree festooned with human parts; I learned to value
kindness as never before; I learned that Joseph Heller was right in his
masterly Catch-22: that war was not suited to sane people; and I learned about
‘our’ propaganda.
All
through that war, the propaganda said a victorious Vietnam would spread its
communist disease to the rest of Asia, allowing the Great Yellow Peril to its
north to sweep down. Countries would fall like ‘dominoes’.
Ho
Chi Minh’s Vietnam was victorious, and none of the above happened. Instead,
Vietnamese civilization blossomed, remarkably, in spite of the price they paid:
three million dead. The maimed, the deformed, the addicted, the poisoned, the
lost.
If
the current propagandists get their war with China, this will be a fraction of
what is to come. Speak up.
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