SC278-4

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57514.htm

John Pilger on the coming war. Speak up. Now

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 7 March, the two oldest newspapers in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, published several pages on 'the looming threat' of China. They coloured 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 Defence 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, 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'. American 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-worshipped 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 an American 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 American 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 travelled 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 intelligensia 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.  America 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 United States and  recall the overnight elevation to guru status of Reich, a young Yale academic. The New Yorker had sensationally serialised 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 fuelled 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 American political life is a cultish extremism that approaches fascism. Although Trump was credited with this, it was during Obama's two terms that American foreign policy flirted seriously with fascism. This was almost never reported.  

'I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being,' said Obama, who expanded a favourite 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 colour: 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 Misurata 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 sodomised 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 per cent 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 Defence 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 centre 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, Patricia 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 30 April, 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 recognise 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 civilisation 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.

....

https://scheerpost.com/2023/05/02/matt-taibbi-america-the-single-opinion-cult/

America, the Single-Opinion Cult

Narrowing permitted ideas on both left and right, one unsuitable voice at a time.  

That interview says it all, doesn’t it?  ( Interview at article address )

Not long ago I was writing in defense of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. When she first entered Congress as an inner-city twenty something who’d knocked off longtime insider Joe Crowley with a Sandersian policy profile, her own party’s establishment ridiculed her as a lefty Trump. Nancy Pelosi scoffed that her win just meant voters “made a choice in one district,” so “let’s not get carried away.” Ben Ritz, director of the Progressive Policy Institute, an offshoot of the old Democratic Leadership Council, groused, “Oh, please, she just promised everyone a bunch of free stuff.”

This was before AOC decided to be the next Pelosi, instead of the next Sanders. The above sit-down on MSNBC shows the transformation. Having shed the mantle of an outsider who shook the old guard with online savvy, she appeared in soft light for a softball “interview,” by a literal Biden official (Inside With Jen Psaki is as close as you can get to a formal dissolution of the line between White House and media). In it, she seemed to argue for the outlaw of Fox News. “We have very real issues with what is permissible on air,” she said, adding people like Tucker Carlson are “very clearly” guilty of “incitement to violence,” a problem in light of “federal regulation in terms of what’s allowed on air and what isn’t.”

I was attracted to liberalism as a young person precisely because it didn’t want to ban things. Every liberal morality play in the seventies, eighties and nineties featured a finger-wagging moralist who couldn’t stomach an obscene joke (Jerry Falwell, over a Hustler parody), “obscene” art (Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center, over Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos), “objectionable” music (Tipper Gore, in the now-seems-tame record-labeling furor), or unpredictable humor (NBC, in its attempts to put Richard Pryor on tape delay for Saturday Night Live). Pryor’s favored writer Paul Mooney objected so much to all the hoops they had to jump through to be allowed on air, he ended up writing a parody “job interview” skit that sent SNL’s ratings soaring, though ironically it would probably never air today:

Hollywood made self-congratulating feature films about nearly every one of those speech clashes, from The People vs. Larry Flynt to Dirty Pictures (starring James Woods, about the Cincinnati episode!) to Parental Advisory. The movie Field of Dreams features Ray Kinsella’s wife Annie telling off “IRATE MOTHER” in a school library debate about banning writer Terrence Mann, with Annie saying after: “Fascist. I’d like to ease her pain!” (The actual book Shoeless Joe featured J.D. Salinger, one of America’s most-censored authors). From To Kill a Mockingbird to Dead Man Walking liberalism celebrated the belief that truth, tolerance, and forgiveness are the way to reach closed minds. I mentioned this before, but Rob Reiner’s The American President — a naked hagiography of Clintonian politics — came to a climax with “President Andrew Shepherd” defending his flag-burning girlfriend’s honor, saying:

You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating, at the top of his lungs, that which you would spend a lifetime opposing…

That scene, which sounds like it should apply to any Democrat thinking about someone like Carlson, would become ironic later. Back to AOC and Fox: like so many other things in America, the marketplace of ideas is no longer a market. Voices with organic appeal are artificially restricted. Watching “approved” news these days is like watching scab baseball: you know most of the players the crowds really want to see aren’t even in the dugout. By no means is this phenomenon confined to the right.

As far back as the spring of 2017, when Google introduced “Project Owl,” a new tool designed to “surface more authoritative content,” outlets like the World Socialist Web Site, Alternet, Truthdig, Democracy Now!, and Consortium News reported dramatic drops in audience. Wikileaks traffic plummeted (that site’s content is extremely difficult to access for a variety of reasons now). Years later, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google employed “maintainers” to tend to an “‘anti-misinformation’ blacklist” to prevent sites from “appearing in Google News and other products.”

The next big event was the removal of Alex Jones from Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and Spotify. No fan of Jones, I was struck by how quickly critics moved to looking around for the next targets. Rob Reiner, the “acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil” auteur, said on MSNBC, “You have Fox, Breitbart, Sinclair, and Alex Jones, which has now been taken off of Facebook, thank God…” Senator Chris Murphy said Jones was just the “tip of a giant iceberg” and “companies must do more than take down one website”:

Apple CEO Tim Cook insisted the Jones episode was not coordinated with the other firms, saying, “I’ve had no conversation. And to my knowledge, no one at Apple has.” Later stories like the Apple-Amazon squeeze of Parler ended the ruse that the major distribution platforms were not working together to create private agreements on speech, and the #TwitterFiles showed countless episodes of supposedly independent companies engaging in seeming anticompetitive behavior, coordinating on everything from election “misinformation” to pandemic messaging and holding regular “industry meetings” with government to discuss moderation issues.

The attendees of the call below include Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Reddit, Pinterest, Wikimedia, even Medium, gathering to hear the “USG” list “watch-outs” and other threats:

In the six years since “Project Owl,” think about how many voices have been fully or partially removed from public view. True-blue “progressives” won’t mourn many, from Jones to Donald Trump to Carlson to RT and Sputnik to former weapons inspector Scott Ritter and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Add the deamplification or algorithmic blacklisting of sites like Truthdig, Wikileaks and third-party candidates like Jill Stein, the removal under government pressure of content from people like Joe Rogan, and the seemingly endless advertiser boycotts of various other classes of badthinker, and the field of view has been drastically narrowed.

The one undeniable fact about Carlson’s show is that it was materially different from other Fox content. The product was not the same as what you heard in the Hannity slot. As was the case with Donald Trump, you don’t need to cheer the message, or believe it’s sincere, to recognize that this differentiation exists. For instance, the Washington Post this week cited “people familiar with” Rupert Murdoch’s thinking in saying Carlson’s ongoing eye-rolling about the war in Ukraine, and use of terms like “pimp” to describe Volodymyr Zelensky, had “drawn furious blowback from powerful Republicans who see U.S. support for Ukraine as a bulwark in a fight for freedom and democracy — some of whom had Murdoch’s ear.”

Removing Carlson from Fox makes the rest of conservative media more homogeneous. The constant policing of content in blue media accomplishes the same. When the American Prospect ran a feature about Carlson that merely had a sarcastic headline (“The Smuggest Man On Air”) and was only critical roughly every second or third paragraph, filling in the rest of the space with detached analysis of what made Carlson’s show successful (e.g. a willingness to “mock ruling elites”), the magazine was hit with the usual grab-bag of Scanners-style head-exploding from a handful of reporters. This immediately caused two Prospect editors to roll over, throw their writers overboard, and replace the mildly different piece with the usual wire-to-wire bloodcurdling diatribe against Carlson as a “neofascist” “threat to democracy.”

I like and respect editor David Dayen, but a sequence like this sends a message to every writer that you’d better come at topics in a certain way if you want to be bylined. Liberals in the Bush years used to mock the metronome predictability of Fox, but the same kind of thing has been going on on what used to be my side of the aisle for so long, most mainstream media products are basically identical. Everyone with a noticeably different point of view gets moved out, even if they’re obvious audience assets, with Glenn Greenwald (pushed out of the Intercept for wanting to publish what turned out to be the correct angle on the Hunter Biden laptop story) and Lee Fang being notable examples.

It doesn’t take a genius to see where this is going. To paraphrase Mencken, you don’t have to think Carlson’s motivations were noble to see that his rhetoric on Ukraine stood out in the current TV environment like a wart on a bald head. The rest of the corporate press, be it left or right, will now be a parade of generals and security experts whose argument won’t be about whether or not the U.S. should be involved in Ukraine, but which party is most committed and whose strategy will lead to Putin’s defeat faster. We are moving back toward an era of two homogeneous messaging landscapes that will intersect on national security issues, with the beaten antiwar left a fading memory and the isolationist right fired, under indictment, or banned.

People like AOC can couch these moves in terms of prevention of violence all they want, but it’s just too conspicuous that what’s left of major commercial media also happens to be much engaged in the trumpeting of government messaging, to the point where the people reading the news are government officials. It was once considered healthy for the press to play to mass audiences and position itself as a skeptical thorn in the side of officialdom.

There is no institution like that left in American life. What we have instead is an increasingly pissed-off population that needs to look about eighty results down in every Google search to find its point of view represented. Who thinks that situation is going to hold?