John Pilger's
latest article in New Statesman exposes the political and corporate extremism that masquerades as democracy:
Arriving in a village in southern Vietnam, I caught sight of two
children who bore witness to the longest war of the 20th century. Their
terrible deformities were familiar. All along the Mekong river, where
the forests were petrified and silent, small human mutations lived as
best they could.
Today, at the Tu Du paediatrics hospital in Saigon, a former
operating theatre is known as the "collection room" and, unofficially,
as the "room of horrors". It has shelves of large bottles containing
grotesque foetuses. During its invasion of Vietnam, the United States
sprayed a defoliant herbicide on vegetation and villages to deny "cover
to the enemy". This was Agent Orange, which contained dioxin, poisons of
such power that they cause foetal death, miscarriage, chromosomal
damage and cancer.
In 1970, a US Senate report revealed that "the US has dumped [on
South Vietnam] a quantity of toxic chemical amounting to six pounds per
head of population, including woman and children". The code-name for
this weapon of mass destruction, Operation Hades, was changed to the
friendlier Operation Ranch Hand. Today, an estimated 4.8 million
victims of Agent Orange are children.
Len Aldis, secretary of the Britain-Vietnam Friendship Society,
recently returned from Vietnam with a letter for the International
Olympic Committee from the Vietnam Women's Union. The union's president,
Nguyen Thi Thanh Hoa, described "the severe congenital deformities
[caused by Agent Orange] from generation to generation". She asked the
IOC to reconsider its decision to accept sponsorship of the London
Olympics from the Dow Chemical Corporation, which was one of the
companies that manufactured the poison and has refused to compensate its
victims.
Aldis hand-delivered the letter to the office of Lord Coe, chairman
of the London Organising Committee. He has had no reply. When Amnesty
International pointed out that in 2001 Dow Chemical acquired "the
company responsible for the Bhopal gas leak [in India in 1984] which
killed 7,000 to 10,000 people immediately and 15,000 in the following
twenty years", David Cameron described Dow as a "reputable company".
Cheers, then, as the TV cameras pan across the £7 million decorative
wrap that sheathes the Olympic stadium: the product of a 10-year "deal"
between the IOC and such a reputable destroyer.
History is buried with the dead and deformed of Vietnam and Bhopal.
And history is the new enemy. On 28 May, President Obama launched a
campaign to falsify the history of the war in Vietnam. To Obama, there
was no Agent Orange, no free fire zones, no turkey shoots, no cover-ups
of massacres, no rampant racism, no suicides (as many Americans took
their own lives as died in the war), no defeat by a resistance army
drawn from an impoverished society. It was, said Mr. Hopey Changey, "one
of the most extraordinary stories of bravery and integrity in the
annals of [US] military history".
The following day, the New York Times published a long article
documenting how Obama personally selects the victims of his drone
attacks across the world. He does this on "terror Tuesdays" when he
browses through mug shots on a "kill list", some of them teenagers,
including "a girl who looked even younger than her 17 years". Many are
unknown or simply of military age. Guided by "pilots" sitting in front
of computer screens in Las Vegas, the drones fire Hellfire missiles that
suck the air out of lungs and blow people to bits. Last September,
Obama killed a US citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, purely on the basis of
hearsay that he was inciting terrorism. "This one is easy," he is quoted
by aides as saying as he signed the man's death warrant. On 6 June, a
drone killed 18 people in a village in Afghanistan, including women,
children and the elderly who were celebrating a wedding.
The New York Times article was not a leak or an expose. It was a
piece of PR designed by the Obama administration to show what a tough
guy the 'commander-in-chief' can be in an election year. If re-elected,
Brand Obama will continue serving the wealthy, pursuing truth-tellers,
threatening countries, spreading computer viruses and murdering people
every Tuesday.
The threats against Syria, co-ordinated in Washington and London,
scale new peaks of hypocrisy. Contrary to the raw propaganda presented
as news, the investigative journalism of the German daily Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung identifies those responsible for the massacre in
Houla as the 'rebels' backed by Obama and Cameron. The paper's sources
include the rebels themselves. This has not been completely ignored in
Britain. Writing in his personal blog, ever so quietly, Jon Williams,
the BBC world news editor, effectively dishes his own 'coverage', citing
western officials who describe the 'psy-ops' operation against Syria as
'brilliant'. As brilliant as the destruction of Libya, and Iraq, and
Afghanistan.
And as brilliant as the psy-ops of the Guardian's latest promotion of
Alastair Campbell, the chief collaborator of Tony Blair in the criminal
invasion of Iraq. In his "diaries", Campbell tries to splash Iraqi
blood on the demon Murdoch. There is plenty to drench them all. But
recognition that the respectable, liberal, Blair-fawning media was a
vital accessory to such an epic crime is omitted and remains a singular
test of intellectual and moral honesty in Britain.
How much longer must we subject ourselves to such an "invisible
government"? This term for insidious propaganda, first used by Edward
Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud and inventor of modern public
relations, has never been more apt. "False reality" requires historical
amnesia, lying by omission and the transfer of significance to the
insignificant. In this way, political systems promising security and
social justice have been replaced by piracy, "austerity" and "perpetual
war": an extremism dedicated to the overthrow of democracy. Applied to
an individual, this would identify a psychopath. Why do we accept it?
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