Friday, October 23, 2009

Silence amid the circus

Nick Griffin's appearance on the BBC's worn-out political forum Question Time was a predictably haphazard show-trial that generally worked wonders for its racist guest of honour.

Griffin, as expected, was amiable, skilful and evasive – unlike his tiresome fellow panellists.

But the most telling moment of last night's curious circus was not to be found in any of the BNP chief's guarded pronouncements. It was in the silence of his detractors.

At a stroke, blundering motormouth Jack "Listen, I am a minister of justice" Straw and impassioned Lib Dem warbler Chris Huhne fell silent when accused of murdering 800,000 Iraqis and tacitly supporting an invasion of the sovereign Islamic Republic of Iran.

It was the one and only statement from the serpentine Griffin that was not immediately ridiculed or quashed.

Not a peep.

Presumably the honourable ministers were too busy recharging their batteries in order to continue nobly rebutting the wearisome rhetoric of a chubby racist on live television.

After all, shooting fish in a barrel is certainly preferable to excusing state-sanctioned war crimes and wholesale terrorism.

Which brings us to last night's protests outside the BBC's television studios.

Despite their commendable intentions, the irony of 800 justice-seeking humans expressing outrage at a fascist party entering the headquarters of an organisation which implicitly supports aggressive, illegal wars and horrendous repression around the world was acute.

Though not nearly as acute as the horror and suffering of those currently quaking beneath the merciless shadow of western bombs in the Middle East. Those clinging on to shattered lives amid the rubble. Amid unseen, unheard, untold devastation.

Friday, October 16, 2009

Tony Blair: the true value of "his conviction"

...being the fact that Tony Blair is now the highest-paid public speaker in the world – a multi-millionaire garlanded and protected by the powerful global elite he served, strengthened and lied for while in office as the elected political leader of this country.

But let us be very clear. Blair's artful profiteering is no revelation in itself. It is merely the repugnant small-print of a truly shocking affront to humanity – namely, the impunity with which western war criminals who have wreaked unprecedented violence on millions of innocents now sail breezily on into the sunset, embraced warmly by the free market and all its muscular guardians.

Jim Holstun's outstanding new piece Tony Blair and the business of covering up war crimes, an extract of which is printed below, should be read by all.

On 27 June 2007, Blair left his job as UK prime minister under the cloud of the war on Iraq that he had concocted with former US President George W. Bush. Just hours later, he assumed his new position as the Special Envoy to the Mideast Quartet (EU, Russia, UN, US). He had long been a Zionist and a member of Labor Friends of Israel, and he received heartfelt farewells-and-hellos from Ehud Olmert ("A true friend of the State of Israel") and Tzipi Livni ("a very-well appreciated figure in Israel"). Palestinians living under Israeli occupation did not find this a very promising development.

Though Blair spends only a week a month in the Middle East, he has managed to keep busy. He maintains a gruelling, globe-trotting schedule of lectures, for which he receives up to $500,000. On top of this, he has been at work on his memoirs, for which he received a $7.3 million advance. Consulting work brought him $3.2 million (including a bonus) from J. P. Morgan Chase and $800,000 from Zurich Financi
al Services. By October 2008, he had amassed at least $19 million, far outdistancing even the enterprising Bill Clinton. He is thought to be the highest paid public speaker in the world.

Please visit the Blair War Crimes Foundation website to sign the appeal to indict Tony Blair. Sign up, and encourage all you know to do so as well.

If you are in any doubt as to why such campaigns are important, consider the testimony of a young Iraqi girl, who dubbed herself Riverbend, who sent regular reports from Iraq up until 2007.

On February 20, 2007, she wrote about the gang rape of an Iraqi woman, Sabine, by Iraqi "security forces". Riverbend concluded her piece with these words:

"As the situation continues to deteriorate both for Iraqis inside and outside of Iraq, and for Americans inside Iraq, Americans in America are still debating on the state of the war and occupation - are they winning or losing? Is it better or worse? Let me clear it up for any moron with lingering doubts: It’s worse. It’s over. You lost.

"You lost the day your tanks rolled into Baghdad to the cheers of your imported, American-trained monkeys. You lost every single family whose home your soldiers violated. You lost every sane, red-blooded Iraqi when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out and verified your atrocities behind prison walls as well as the ones we see in our streets.


"You lost when you brought murderers, looters, gangsters and militia heads to power and hailed them as Iraq’s first democratic government. You lost when a gruesome execution was dubbed your biggest accomplishment. You lost the respect and reputation you once had. You lost more than 3000 troops. That is what you lost America. I hope the oil, at least, made it worthwhile."


Monday, October 05, 2009

You couldn't make it up...

Well, of course, you could. And they have. And they will. Again and again.

Amid all the furore over Iran, this little-known fact has been glossed over.

In 1967, under the "Atoms for Peace" program launched by President Eisenhower, the US sold the Shah of Iran's government a 5-megawatt, light-water type research reactor. This small dome-shaped structure, located in the Tehran suburbs, was the foundation of Iran's nuclear program.

It remains at the center of the controversy over Iranian intentions, even today.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/1002/p04s01-usfp.html

Get informed.

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Exile on main street: Newspeak in the 21st Century

Now here's a queer thing.

A remarkable new book which...

a) contains explosive personal exchanges involving some of the most glittering names in the UK press pantheon (Jon Snow, George Monbiot and Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger to name but three);

b) reveals startling evidence concerning major war crimes and impending climate catastrophe; and

c) of which John Pilger writes: "Not since Orwell and Chomsky has perceived reality been so skilfully revealed in the cause of truth."

...has to date not been reviewed or mentioned in any mainstream UK newspaper.

Nothing. Nada. Zip.

In fact, David Cromwell and David Edwards' Newspeak in the 21st Century has received an even lower profile reception than Guardians of Power: the Myth of the Liberal Media, the duo's previous work, published in 2005.

And the reason?

Quite simply, the book, like its predecessor, is a brick-by-brick dismantling of the sham that is our "free press", eloquently exposing the BBC and other media behemoths as willing collaborators in western aggression, imperialist genocide and the destruction of our planet.

Sound good?

If you are a rational, truth-seeking human, it should do.

Click here for David McQueen's comprehensive review of the book, posted on the excellent Spinwatch.org.

As he says, "this may be the only review you will read..."

Thursday, September 24, 2009

What we say goes: Gaddafi and the herd mentality

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's 100-minute maiden address to the UN General Assembly in New York on Wednesday drew predictable ridicule from our hallowed media guardians.

Soon after the event, this piece by the Guardian's Ed Pilkington took pride of place on the front page of the paper's website. It is a cast-iron example of the uniform manner in which outspoken critics of western power are caricatured and summarily dismissed by our "free press".

Gaddafi, we are told, "fully lived up to his reputation for eccentricity, bloody-mindedness and extreme verbiage" – a crackpot simply "grabb[ing] his fifteen minutes of fame" in front of "startled delegates".

Pilkington was given free rein to make such cavalier – and patently editorialised – judgements in a supposedly serious news report not because Gaddafi over-shot his allotted speaking time, but because the Libyan leader dared to raise major issues concerning high-level western corruption and systemic crimes against humanity.

Gaddafi, it was reported, "accused the security council of being an al-Qaida-like terrorist body, called for George Bush and Tony Blair to be put on trial for the Iraq war, demanded $7.7tn in compensation for the ravages of colonialism on Africa, and... demanded to know who was behind the killing of JFK."

In line with the standard, highly rigid narrative that proclaims western global benevolence as the only acceptable political reality – a narrative dutifully repeated by our media at every turn – anyone making public proclamations of the above nature will be subject to immediate censure and derision.

As David Edwards of the website Media Lens told me:

"'We', the West, know (because we just do) that Gadaffi is a cartoon figure, like Chavez, to be mocked. This cartoon label is applied to anyone who speaks out – Galloway, Pinter, Pilger, Chomsky, Chavez, le Carre, even Greg Dyke. It's a sort of knowing, superior sneer – it works beautifully.

"The more passionate and sincere the person speaking out, the more potent the sneer becomes. I'm not saying Gadaffi should be compared to the great dissidents, but it's just the presumption that 'we' all know he's an idiot that strikes me. It's a type of thought control."

Edwards is entirely right to consider the Guardian piece "thought control". Such casual subversion is so common as to almost pass unnoticed. Yet Pilkington's report stands as a chillingly breezy example of propaganda flak, swiftly and effectively silencing such "outlandish" claims.

The irony is that to truly tackle the issues Gaddafi raised – several of which are not only valid but of critical importance – the Libyan leader would have needed more than 1000 minutes, let alone 100.

Regardless, it is simply taken as given that not only are his accusations unworthy of further comment, they are to be wholly ridiculed.

And this is because, the Guardian tells "us", Wednesday "was meant to be a day of global reconciliation, when the new leader of the free world put all the rancour of the past eight years behind him and heralded an era of unity."

Gaddafi, evidently, was unaware of his obligation to maintain an obedient silence regarding some of the more glaring details of that "rancour".

"And so it might have been," Pilkington laments, "were it not for a short man, swathed in saffron robes and a black felt hat waving his arms around and shouting: 'Terrorism!'"

The mocking tone, dismissing Gaddafi as the epitome of pantomime, speaks volumes about what truly passes for debate in our liberal newspapers:

"[T]he self-proclaimed king of kings, figurehead of a thousand African kingdoms, must have been chuffed by how his morning had turned out. Now, where to pitch that tent?"

Of course, as Edwards points out, when Gaddafi was "behaving himself", he was treated with considerable respect by the press: "He was a 'reformed' character, they told us."

But not, it seems, on Wednesday.

"They switch the 'respect' and 'contempt' modes on and off, and no-one notices."

Wednesday, September 02, 2009

Lockerbie: a furious sham

Not that you'd know it from the headline, or the egregiously selective summary written below the video, but Dr Jim Swire has tirelessly maintained that Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Libyan sentenced 27 years in prison for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, was and is wholly innocent.

Dr Swire – whose daughter Flora died in the bombing – has also long campaigned for a genuine inquiry into the tragedy, in direct and urgent opposition to the appalling lies, deliberate misdirection and reprehensible silence of the UK government over the true nature of the event.

Unsurprisingly, Swire's views are rarely aired in full.

His unerring and heartbreaking fury at the UK and US governments' despicable actions (a cover-up which goes "all the way to Number 10") is a rare thing to see published by any mainstream media outlet.

Watch the whole video.

Then do some digging.

You might begin here, or, say, with the unspoken mass crime of Iranian flight 655.

As the excellent Nick Turse has written, our capacity for gross hypocrisy knows no bounds.

Turse’s account of the differing treatments of al-Megrahi and William Calley – the US soldier sentenced to life in prison for the massacre of civilians in the Vietnamese village of My Lai in 1968 – is a remarkable exposition of the US regime’s near-psychopathic disregard for the lives and suffering of its victims.

So too its dutiful corporate press. Consider the gulf between reporting of Turse’s calibre and the mass media’s response.

Sunday, August 23, 2009

The medium kills the message: Obama and exercises in non-debate

A crude and highly dangerous poster which entirely misrepresents Barack Obama and uses a crass, fallacious slogan to describe his political vision has been circulating across America – and now, digitally, across the globe.

You can find it in this link.

Thankfully, the Obama-Joker-Socialism poster pictured above, which began appearing across Los Angeles and other parts of the US in July, is infinitely less disingenuous, less evacuated of all meaning and less entirely risible than Shepard Fairey's "iconic" propaganda sop.

Moreover, it is genuinely inspiring.

And what the image inspires, regardless of its true origin (the sole focus of all mainstream comment until 20-year-old student Firas Alkhateeb came forward last week), is a rare frame of criticism through which to reflect on the policies of the US regime’s latest frontman – and those of his cheerleaders.

Public satirisation, however rudimentary, of Obama's political creed has been almost entirely absent since his "historic" accession: that astonishingly a-critical fanfare most notable for its “intensification of feeling and degradation of significance”, to use Walter Lippman’s classic phrase.

And with good reason. Accepted unquestioningly as the benevolent face of an America renewed in moral purpose and direction, Obama’s messianic status has long been naturalised within mainstream commentary.

Accordingly, the initial media reaction to the Palestinian-American student’s admirable and entirely democratic subversion stands as a remarkable illustration of how restricted the parameters of mainstream debate remain over all things Barack.

The immediate response of the liberal press – a most accommodating vehicle for the US leader’s blandishments – was defensive, terse and one-dimensional.

“Obama as the Joker: just what is it supposed to mean?” asked the Guardian in a pithy news stub:

“A bizarre poster depicting the US president as Batman's arch-nemisis [sic] has everyone scratching their heads. There are many levels on which it doesn't quite work…”

A more sustained piece of “analysis” was subsequently provided by the Guardian’s Ben Walters, under the title “Why the Obama as Joker poster leaves a bad taste in the mouth”.

In this painfully narrow assessment of the poster’s possible implications, Walters griped that “this attempt to paint the US president as a supervillain” is “just wrongheaded. Plus, it's not even funny”.

The poster was dismissed as “the American right's first successful use of street art”.

This analysis largely represented the standard rebuttal of the poster across the liberal media spectrum, which was to scorn the “cohesion” of what was evidently an amateurishly misguided barb by the US right: pairing Obama with the “horror” of socialism, and lampooning him as evil incarnate.

In fact, this reading was a quite shocking "straw man" – in which the very idea that the poster might have originated from the left (mocking the risible myth of Obama’s global beneficence, for example) was wholly absent.

As commentator Kurt Nimmo wrote with devastating clarity:

“The basic problem with the Obama as Joker poster is that its message is lost on those who believe the government is basically good and all it takes to turn things around (things accomplished by that monster Bush) is that we elect the right man to the office of president. It is intellectual laziness that prevents most people from reading the true message.”

In this circumscribed scenario, the idea that Obama could be reproached for his reprehensible failings as a liberal – or, more simply, denounced as the fraudulent mask of a murderous rogue state – is an impossibility. It simply does not exist.

Neither does critical discernment. The addition of the word "Socialism" (allegedly appended to Alkhateeb's image by an anonymous other) actually dilutes the message, observed Nimmo, who went on explain the primary reason for the “laziness” described above:

“It is of course incomprehensible for most liberals to believe Obama represents the most violent and sadistic force in the world – the United States government long ago taken over by [a] bankster cartel or mafia. Three million dead Vietnamese, one million plus dead Iraqis, an undetermined number of Afghans and assorted others either directly slaughtered by the US war machine or its numerous proxies should be evidence enough.

“So should the penchant for torture and economic warfare, the latter waged against literally billions of people… Obama is the current and transitional face of this high-tech murder and economic violence machine.”

This reading of our perilous geopolitical moment is simply unacceptable within the confines of mainstream debate.

As Harold Pinter noted in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech of 2005:

"Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.

"But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now."

Pinter's summation is as biting now as then:

"It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."

The media – and especially in the US – also entertained the notion that the Obama as Joker poster contained racist connotations. This was, as ever, another lamentable abstraction designed to obfuscate any meaningful criticism of Obama’s contemptible record.

Nimmo wrote:

“Liberals far and wide are like Chatty Cathy dolls when it comes to either criticising or parodying Obama – they uniformly assert racism is at work. Of course, one of the reasons our rulers selected Obama is because they want to disarm all criticism by playing the race card. In our politically correct and brainwashed society, any allusion to racism immediately destroys an argument – no matter how reasoned or logical.

“The white face – and clowns usually hide their faces under white makeup (it is called “clown white”) – has nothing to do with an attempt to portray Obama as a white person. It’s about Obama as the Joker, and not necessarily the Joker played by the late Heath Ledger.

“Bob Kane’s original comic book Joker is a master criminal and a bizarre psychopath. Obama is not necessarily a psychopath – that is to say a ruthless hands-on serial killer – but by the standard of his office he is a master criminal, or rather a front man for a cartel of master criminals.

“In 2009, the office of the president is nothing if not a wholly owned subsidiary of the international bankers. In fact the whole of Congress is owned by the banksters and their corporate minions, a fact the liberals consistently miss or are incapable of understanding mostly because many of them are beholden to foundations established by the same bankster elite.”

So too a corporate media in thrall to pro-business governments – left, right, any-which-way.

All too quickly, of course, arrived the “revelation” that the author of this “wrongheaded” right-wing smear was in fact no angry conservative, but a student from Obama’s hometown who actually favoured “an even more liberal presidential candidate”.

A humble and bemused Alkhateeb explained his simple reasoning:

“After Obama was elected, you had all of these people who basically saw him as the second coming of Christ,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “From my perspective, there wasn't much substance to him.”

So wrote the Guardian after this turnaround:

“Firas Alkhateeb, 20, is far from one of the red-faced protesters who have shouted down Democratic politicians at constituent meetings, nor is he a smug young conservative standing against his Obama-enthralled peers.”

Yet these were the only positions plausible according to the paper’s initial non-analysis.

Beyond the cloying hagiographies and unwavering pro-Obama support of the liberal media, Alkhateeb’s depiction of the president as lacking in “substance” is easy enough to understand.

The exemplary Paul Street has written:

“Obama has remained amazingly silent on his campaign promise to advance the critical and overdue labor law reform - the Employee Free Choice Act (the EFCA) - that is required to re-legalize unions and restore strength to the labor movement (aptly described by John Edwards during the primary campaign as ‘the single greatest anti-poverty program in American history’). The EFCA is loathed by key segments of the business class and is therefore not currently on the table of recovery policy."

Of Obama's foreign policy pronouncements, Street adds:

"Obama is continuing core Bush policies on Israel and Iran. He refuses to pay honest attention to the legitimate grievances of the Palestinian people about whose fate he stayed revealingly mute during the savage U.S.-Israel assault on the people of Gaza last December and January. He made no effort to resist the U.S. Israel lobby's torpedoing of Charles Freeman's nomination as chair of the National Intelligence Council. Freeman, a veteran national security operative, was brusquely dismissed because he dared to suggest that the Israeli apartheid and occupation state might bear some responsibility for violence and hatred in the Middle East.

"Meanwhile, Obama dangerously and revealingly resists pressure to investigate and prosecute the monumental war and human rights crimes of the Bush administration. He quietly commits to the officially concealed trillion dollar annual Pentagon budget, a giant subsidy to high-tech industry that pays for more than 760 bases across more than 130 nations and accounts for nearly half the military spending on earth – all in the name of 'defense.' The leading Wall Street investment firm and bailout recipient Morgan Stanley reported the day after Obama's election victory that Obama 'has been advised and agrees that there is no peace dividend.'"

Elsewhere, the rigorous and uncompromising Street (author of what John Pilger has called "perhaps the only book that tells the truth about the 44th president of the United States", Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics) skewers the myth of Obama's domestic "Change" epoch:

“Obama refuses to advance the obvious cost-cutting and social democratic health-care solution: single-payer national health insurance (improved Medicare for all). Consistent with his recent description of himself as a New Democrat, Obama's Treasury Department and the secretive, unaccountable Federal Reserve Bank (to whom the new Administration increasingly wishes to pass the buck of the current financial crisis) will dispense untold trillions of dollars in further taxpayer handouts to the giant Wall Street firms who spent millions on his campaign and who drove the U.S. and world economy over a cliff.

“According to leading liberal economist James K. Galbraith in the Washington Monthly, Obama's plan to guarantee the financial, insurance, and real estate industries' toxic, hyper-inflated assets while keeping existing Wall Street management in place amounts to a massive effort to ‘keep perpetrators afloat.’

“By left-liberal writer William Greider's account, ‘Obama's approach so far is devoted to restoring Wall Street's famous names and his [supposedly non-ideological] advisors tell him this is the 'responsible' imperative, no matter that it might offend the unwashed public. Obama evidently agrees’ (Washington Post, March 22, 2009). The liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is ‘filled with a sense of despair’ by Obama's ‘bank rescue plan,’ which ‘recycles Bush administration policy – specifically the 'cash for trash' plan proposed, then abandoned, six months ago by then-Treasury secretary Henry Paulson’ (March 23, 2009).

“The Obama plan rewards reckless and selfish investor class behavior by funneling billions of taxpayer dollars to bankrupt banks. Under the scheme unveiled on March 23, 2009, the public is put on the hook to the tune of $1 trillion. The program amounts to what Krugman calls a coin flip in which investors win if it's heads and taxpayers lose if it's tails. As the Times quickly noted, ‘the Treasury and the Federal Reserve will be offering at least a tablespoon of financial sugar for every teaspoon of risk that investors agree to swallow,’ buying up the toxic mortgage assets that the investor class created in the first place. The government (identical to the people in a functioning democracy) will take more than 90 percent of the risk, but private investors reap at least half the reward.

“Meanwhile, the underlying insolvency of the banks continues, a problem the Obama administration hopes we will forget about as we get dazzled by their fancy and obscure plan. Beneath claims of allegiance to ‘free market’ ideals and ‘private enterprise,’ the Administration's ‘bank rescue’ design – described by former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich as a continuation of ‘the most expensive tax-supported fiasco in history’ (Salon, March 20, 2009) – boils down to a traditional exercise in Wall Street welfare: socialism for the rich, market discipline and capitalism for the rest of us. It is at heart what Greider calls an effort ‘to restore the old order that failed,’ the dark reality beneath newspaper headlines proclaiming a new age of progressive-style government regulation (‘Bill Moyers' Journal,’ PBS, March 27, 2009)."

Street’s last sentence is most instructive. A critical chasm separates the quality of this analysis from the robotic chorus played out by our daily newspapers.

The simple fact is that a mountain of evidence exists to illustrate how deplorably Obama’s actions – both domestically and abroad – belie the noxious façade so painstakingly sculpted by his administration.

The patently ephemeral nature of this façade was plain as day to a 20-year-old student of Palestinian origin, who was moved to satirise what he and many others rightly see as an epic exercise in truth-reversal.

Not so for our flagship media channels.

For them, the US president is "America’s hope, and, in no small way, ours too" – a saviour to be buttressed, airbrushed and resolutely defended.

Such are the permitted limits of dissent.