When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, unforgettably. When I returned many years later, it was gone: taken away, “disappeared,” a political embarrassment.

I have spent two years making a documentary film,��The Coming War on China,��in which the evidence and witnesses warn that nuclear war is no longer a shadow, but a contingency. The greatest build-up of since the Second World War is well under way. They are in the northern hemisphere, on the western borders of Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, confronting China.

The great danger this beckons is not news, or it is buried and distorted: a drumbeat of mainstream fake news that echoes the psychopathic fear embedded in public consciousness during much of the 20^th������Գٳܰ���.

Like the renewal of post-Soviet Russia, the rise of China as an economic power is declared an “existential threat” to the divine right of the United States to rule and dominate human affairs.

To counter this, in 2011 President Barack Obama announced a “pivot to Asia,” which meant that almost two-thirds of US naval forces would be transferred to Asia and the Pacific by 2020. Today, more than 400 American military bases with missiles, bombers, warships and, above all, nuclear weapons. From Australia north through the Pacific to Japan, Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India, the bases form, says one US strategist, “the perfect noose.”

A study by the RAND Corporation—which, since Vietnam, has planned America’s wars—is entitled,��.��Commissioned by the US Army, the authors evoke the Cold War when RAND made notorious the catch cry of its chief strategist, Herman Kahn—“thinking the unthinkable.” Kahn’s book,��On Thermonuclear War,��elaborated a plan for a “winnable” nuclear war against the Soviet Union.

Today, his apocalyptic view is shared by those holding real power in the US: the militarists and neoconservatives in the executive, the Pentagon, the intelligence and “national security” establishment and Congress.

The current secretary of defense, Ashley Carter, a verbose provocateur, says US policy is to confront those “who see America’s dominance and want to take that away from us.”

For all the attempts to detect a departure in foreign policy, this is almost certainly the view of Donald Trump, whose abuse of China during the election campaign included that of “” of the American economy. On December 2, in a direct provocation of China, President-Elect Trump , which China considers a renegade province of the mainland. Armed with American missiles, Taiwan is an enduring flashpoint between Washington and Beijing.

“Punish” China

“The United States,” , professor of international affairs at George Washington University, “is preparing for a war with China, a momentous decision that so far has failed to receive a thorough review from elected officials, namely the White House and Congress.” ��This war would begin with a “blinding attack against Chinese anti-access facilities, including land and sea-based missile launchers … satellite and anti-satellite weapons.”

The incalculable risk is that “deep inland strikes could be mistakenly perceived by the Chinese as pre-emptive attempts to take out its nuclear weapons, thus cornering them into ‘a terrible use-it-or-lose-it dilemma’ [that would] lead to nuclear war.”

In 2015, the Pentagon released its��Law of War Manual. “The United States,” it says, “has not accepted a treaty rule that prohibits the use of nuclear weapons��per se, and thus nuclear weapons are lawful weapons for the United States.”

In China, a strategist told me: “We are not your enemy, but if you [in the West] decide we are, we must prepare without delay.” China’s military and arsenal are small compared to America’s. However, “for the first time,” of the Union of Concerned Scientists, “China is discussing putting its nuclear missiles on high alert so that they can be launched quickly on warning of an attack … This would be a significant and dangerous change in Chinese policy … Indeed, the nuclear weapon policies of the United States are the most prominent external factor influencing Chinese advocates for raising the alert level of China’s nuclear forces.”

Professor Ted Postol was scientific adviser to the head of US naval operations. An authority on nuclear weapons, he told me: “Everybody here wants to look like they’re tough. See I got to be tough … I’m not afraid of doing anything military, I’m not afraid of threatening; I’m a hairy-chested gorilla. And we have gotten into a state, the United States has gotten into a situation where there’s a lot of saber-rattling, and it’s really being orchestrated from the top.”��I said: “This seems incredibly dangerous.”

In 2015, in considerable secrecy, the US staged its biggest single military exercise since the Cold War. This was Talisman Saber; an armada of ships and long-range bombers rehearsed an “Air-Sea Battle Concept for China” (ASB), blocking sea lanes in the Straits of Malacca and cutting off China’s access to oil, gas and other raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.

It is such a provocation, and the fear of a US Navy blockade, that has seen China feverishly building strategic airstrips on disputed reefs and islets in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea.��In July, the United Nations Permanent Court of Arbitration over these islands. Although the action was brought by the Philippines, it was presented by leading American and British lawyers and could be traced to former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

In 2010, Clinton flew to Manila. She demanded that America’s former colony reopen the US military bases closed down in the 1990s following a popular campaign against the violence they generated, especially against Filipino women. She declared China’s claim on the Spratly Islands—which lie more than 7,500 miles from the United States—a threat to US “national security” and to “freedom of navigation.”

Handed millions of dollars in arms and military equipment, the then-government of President Benigno Aquino broke off bilateral talks with China and signed a secretive Enhanced Defense Co-operation Agreement with the US. This established five rotating US bases and restored a hated colonial provision that American forces and contractors were immune from Philippine law.

The election of Rodrigo Duterte in April 2016 has unnerved Washington. Calling himself a socialist, he , “In our relations with the world, the Philippines will pursue an independent foreign policy” and noted that the US had not apologized for its colonial atrocities. “I will break up with America,” he said, and promised to expel US troops. But the US remains in the Philippines; and joint military exercises continue.

In 2014, under the rubric of “information dominance”—the jargon for media manipulation, or fake news, on which the Pentagon spends more than $4 billion—the Obama administration launched a propaganda campaign that cast China, the world’s greatest trading nation, as a threat to “freedom of navigation.”

CNN led the way, with its “national security reporter” reporting excitedly from on board a US Navy surveillance flight over the Spratlys. The BBC persuaded frightened Filipino pilots to fly a single-engine Cessna over the disputed islands “to see how the Chinese would react.” None of these reporters questioned why the Chinese were building airstrips off their own coastline, or why American military forces were massing on China’s doorstep.

The designated chief propagandist is Admiral Harry Harris, the US military commander in Asia and the Pacific. “My responsibilities,” he told , “cover Bollywood to Hollywood, from polar bears to penguins.”��Never was imperial domination described as pithily.

Malleable media and obsequious partners

Harris is one of a brace of Pentagon admirals and generals briefing selected, malleable journalists and broadcasters, with the aim of justifying a threat as specious as that with which George W. Bush and Tony Blair justified the destruction of Iraq and much of the Middle East.

In Los Angeles in September, Harris he was “ready to confront a revanchist Russia and an assertive China … If we have to fight tonight, I don’t want it to be a fair fight. If it’s a knife fight, I want to bring a gun. If it’s a gun fight, I want to bring in the artillery … and all our partners with their artillery.”

These “partners” include South Korea, the launch pad for the Pentagon’s Terminal High Altitude Air Defense system, known as THAAD, ostensibly aimed at North Korea.��As Professor Postol points out, it targets China.

In Sydney, Australia, Harris called on China to “tear down its Great Wall in the South China Sea.” The imagery was front page news. Australia is America’s most obsequious “partner”; its political elite, military, intelligence agencies and the media are integrated into what is known as the “alliance.” Closing the Sydney Harbour Bridge for the motorcade of a visiting American government “dignitary” is not uncommon.�� The war criminal Dick Cheney was afforded this honor.

Although China is Australia’s biggest trader, on which much of the national economy relies, “confronting China” is the diktat from Washington. The few political dissenters in Canberra risk McCarthyite smears in the Murdoch press. “You in Australia are with us come what may,” said one of the architects of the Vietnam war, McGeorge Bundy. One of the most important US bases is Pine Gap near Alice Springs. Founded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), it spies on China and all of Asia, and is a vital contributor to Washington’s murderous war by drone in the Middle East.

In October, Richard Marles, the defense spokesman of the main Australian opposition party, the Labor Party, demanded that “operational decisions” in provocative acts against China be left to military commanders in the South China Sea. In other words, a decision that could mean war with a nuclear power should not be taken by an elected leader or a parliament, but by an admiral or a general.

This is the Pentagon line, a historic departure for any state calling itself a democracy. The ascendancy of the Pentagon in Washington—which Daniel Ellsberg has called a silent coup—is reflected in the since 9/11, according to a study by Brown University. The and the flight of 12 million refugees from at least four countries are the consequence.

Peaceful resistance

The Japanese island of Okinawa has 32 military installations, from which Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Iraq have been attacked by the US. Today, the principal target is China, with whom Okinawans have close cultural and trade ties.

51�Թ� provides you deep and diverse insights for free. Remember that we still have to pay for servers, website maintenance and much more. So, to keep us free, fair and independent.

There are military aircraft constantly in the sky over Okinawa; they sometimes crash into homes and schools. People cannot sleep, teachers cannot teach. Wherever they go in their own country, they are fenced in and told to keep out.

A popular Okinawan anti-base movement has been growing since a by US troops in 1995. It was one of hundreds of such crimes, many of them never prosecuted. Barely acknowledged in the wider world, the resistance has seen the election of Japan’s first anti-base governor, Takeshi Onaga, and presented an unfamiliar hurdle to the Tokyo government and the ultra-nationalist Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s plans to repeal Japan’s “peace constitution.”

The resistance includes Fumiko Shimabukuro, aged 87, a survivor of the Second World War when a quarter of Okinawans died in the American invasion. Fumiko and hundreds of others took refuge in beautiful Henoko Bay, which she is now fighting to save. The US wants to destroy the bay in order to extend runways for its bombers. “We have a choice,” she said, “silence or life.” As we gathered peacefully outside the US base, Camp Schwab, giant Sea Stallion helicopters hovered over us for no reason other than to intimidate.

Across the East China Sea lies the Korean island of Jeju, a semi- tropical sanctuary��and World Heritage Site declared “an island of world peace.” On this island of world peace has been built one of the most provocative military bases in the world, less than 400 miles from Shanghai. The fishing village of Gangjeong is dominated by a South Korean naval base purpose-built for US aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and destroyers equipped with the Aegis missile system, aimed at China.

A people’s resistance to these war preparations has been a presence on Jeju for almost a decade. Every day, often twice a day, villagers, Catholic priests and supporters from all over the world stage a religious mass that blocks the gates of the base. In a country where political demonstrations are often banned, unlike powerful religions, the tactic has produced an inspiring spectacle.

One of the leaders, Father Mun Jeong-hyeon, told me: “I sing four songs every day at the base, regardless of the weather. I sing in typhoons—no exception. To build this base, they destroyed the environment, and the life of the villagers, and we should be a witness to that. They want to rule the Pacific. They want to make China isolated in the world. They want to be emperor of the world.”

I flew from Jeju to Shanghai for the first time in more than a generation. When I was last in China, the loudest noise I remember was the tinkling of bicycle bells; Mao Zedong had recently died, and the cities seemed dark places, in which foreboding and expectation competed. Within a few years, Deng Xiaoping, the “man who changed China,” was the “paramount leader.” Nothing prepared me for the astonishing changes today.

The world is shifting east

China presents exquisite ironies, not least the house in Shanghai where Mao and his comrades secretly founded the Communist Party of China in 1921. Today, it stands in the heart of a very capitalist shipping district; you walk out of this communist shrine with your Little Red Book and your plastic bust of Mao into the embrace of Starbucks, Apple, Cartier, Prada.

Would Mao be shocked? I doubt it. Five years before his great revolution in 1949, he sent this secret message to Washington. “China must industrialize.” he wrote, “This can only be done by free enterprise. Chinese and American interests fit together, economically and politically. America need not fear that we will not be cooperative. We cannot risk any conflict.”

Mao offered to meet Franklin Roosevelt in the White House, and his successor Harry Truman, and his successor Dwight Eisenhower. He was rebuffed, or willfully ignored. The opportunity that might have changed contemporary history, prevented wars in Asia and saved countless lives was lost because the truth of these overtures was denied in 1950s Washington “when the catatonic Cold War trance,” wrote the critic James Naremore, “held our country in its rigid grip.”

The fake mainstream news that once again presents China as a threat is of the same mentality.

The world is inexorably shifting east, but the astonishing vision of Eurasia from China is barely understood in the West. The “New Silk Road” is a ribbon of trade, ports, pipelines and high-speed trains all the way to Europe.��The world’s leader in rail technology, China is negotiating with 28 countries for routes on which trains will reach up to 400 km/h. This opening to the world has the approval of much of humanity and, along the way, is uniting China and Russia.

“,” said Barack Obama, evoking the fetishism of the 1930s. This modern cult of superiority is Americanism, the world’s dominant predator. Under the liberal Obama, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, nuclear warhead spending has risen higher than under any president since the end of the Cold War. A mini nuclear weapon is planned. Known as the B61 Model 12, it will mean, says General James Cartwright, former vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that “going smaller [makes its use] more thinkable.”

In September, the Atlantic Council, a mainstream US geopolitical think tank, published a report that predicted a Hobbesian world “.” The new enemies were a “resurgent” Russia and an “increasingly aggressive” China. Only heroic America can save us.

There is a demented quality about this war mongering. It is as if the “American Century”—proclaimed in 1941 by the American imperialist Henry Luce, owner of��Time��magazine—has ended without notice and no one has had the courage to tell the emperor to take his guns and go home.

*[A version of this article was originally published by the .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit:

The post The Coming War on China appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Julian Assange, the founder and editor of WikiLeaks, gave this interview to John Pilger in the embassy of Ecuador in London where he has lived as a political refugee for more than four years. Granted asylum by the government of Ecuador, Assange faces arrest and extradition to Sweden and the United States if he steps outside the embassy.

WikiLeaks has published more than 33,000 emails from, to or about US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who is under investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

John Pilger: What’s the significance of the FBI’s intervention in these last days of the US election campaign, in the case against Hillary Clinton?

Julian Assange: If you look at the history of the FBI, it has become effectively America’s political police. The FBI demonstrated this by taking down the former head of the CIA [General David Petraeus] over classified information given to his mistress. Almost no-one is untouchable.��The FBI is always trying to demonstrate that no-one can resist us. But Hillary Clinton very conspicuously resisted the FBI’s investigation, so there’s anger within the FBI because it made the FBI look weak.��We’ve [WikiLeaks] published about 33,000 of Clinton’s emails when she was secretary of state. They come from a batch of just over 60,000 emails, [of which] Clinton has kept about half—30,000—to herself, and we’ve published about half.

Then there are the Podesta emails we’ve been publishing. [John] Podesta is Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign manager, so there’s a thread that runs through all these emails; there are quite a lot of pay-for-play, as they call it, giving access in exchange for money to states, individuals and corporations. [These emails are] combined with the cover up of the Hillary Clinton emails when she was secretary of state, [which] has led to an environment where the pressure on the FBI increases.

Pilger: The Clinton campaign has said that Russia is behind all of this, that Russia has manipulated the campaign and is the source for WikiLeaks and its emails.

Assange: The Clinton camp has been able to project that kind of neo-McCarthy hysteria: that Russia is responsible for everything. Hilary Clinton stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 US intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That is false; we can say that the Russian government is not the source.

WikiLeaks has been publishing for 10 years, and in those 10 years, we have published 10 million documents, several thousand individual publications, several thousand different sources, and we have never got it wrong.

Pilger: The emails that give evidence of access for money and how Hillary Clinton herself benefited from this, and how she is benefitting politically, are quite extraordinary. I’m thinking of��when the Qatari representative was given five minutes with Bill Clinton for a million-dollar check.

Assange: And $12 million dollars from Morocco.

Pilger: $12 million from Morocco, yeah.

Assange: For Hillary Clinton to attend [a party].

Pilger: In terms of the foreign policy of the United States, that’s where the emails are most revealing, where they show the direct connection between Hillary Clinton and the foundation of jihadism, of ISIL [Islamic State], in the Middle East. Can you talk about how the emails demonstrate the connection between those who are meant to be fighting the jihadists of ISIL are actually those who have helped create it?

Assange: There’s an early 2014 email from Hillary Clinton, not so long after she left the State Department, to her campaign manager John Podesta that states ISIL is funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Now, this is the most significant email in the whole collection, and perhaps because Saudi and Qatari money is spread all over the Clinton Foundation.��Even the US government agrees that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIL, or ISIS. But the dodge has always been that, well it’s just some rogue princes, using their cut of the oil money to do whatever they like, but actually the government disapproves.

But that email says that no, it is the governments of Saudi and Qatar that have been funding ISIS.

Pilger: The Saudis, the Qataris, the Moroccans, the Bahrainis—particularly the Saudis and the Qataris—are giving all this money to the Clinton Foundation while Hilary Clinton is secretary of state and the State Department is approving massive arms sales, particularly to Saudi Arabia.

Assange: Under Hillary Clinton, the world’s largest ever arms deal was made with Saudi Arabia, [worth] more than $80 billion. In fact, during her tenure as secretary of state, total arms exports from the United States in terms of the dollar value doubled.

Pilger: Of course, the consequence of that is that the notorious terrorist group called ISIL or ISIS is created largely with money from the very people who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation.

Assange: Yes.

Pilger: That’s extraordinary.

Assange: I actually feel quite sorry for Hillary Clinton as a person because I see someone who is eaten alive by their ambitions, tormented literally to the point where they become sick; they faint as a result of [the reaction] to their ambitions. She represents a whole network of people and a network of relationships with particular states. The question is how does Hilary Clinton fit in this broader network?��She’s a centralizing cog. You’ve got a lot of different gears in operation from the big banks like Goldman Sachs and major elements of Wall Street, and intelligence and people in the State Department and the Saudis.

51�Թ� provides you deep and diverse insights for free. Remember that we still have to pay for servers, website maintenance and much more. So, to keep us free, fair and independent.

She’s the centralizer that inter-connects all these different cogs. She’s the smooth central representation of all that, and “all that” is more or less what is in power now in the United States. It’s what we call the establishment or the DC consensus. One of the more significant Podesta emails that we released was about how the Obama cabinet was formed and how half the Obama cabinet was basically nominated by a representative from Citibank. This is quite amazing.

Pilger: Didn’t Citibank supply a list … ?

Assange: Yes.

Pilger: … which turned out to be most of the Obama cabinet?

Assange: Yes.

Pilger: So Wall Street decides the cabinet of the president of the United States?

Assange: If you were following the Obama campaign back then, closely, you could see it had become very close to banking interests.

So I think you can’t properly understand Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy without understanding Saudi Arabia. The connections with Saudi Arabia are so intimate.

Pilger: Why was she so demonstrably enthusiastic about the destruction of Libya?��Can you talk a little about just what the emails have told us, told you about what happened there, because Libya is such a source for so much of the mayhem now in Syria, the ISIL jihadism and so on, and it was almost Hillary Clinton’s invasion.��What do the emails tell us about that?

Assange: Libya, more than anyone else’s war, was Hillary Clinton’s war. Barack Obama initially opposed it. Who was the person championing it?��Hillary Clinton.��That’s documented throughout her emails. She had put her favored agent, Sidney Blumenthal, on to that; there’s more than 1,700 emails out of the 33,000 Hillary Clinton emails that we’ve published just about Libya. It’s not that Libya has cheap oil. She perceived the removal of [Muammar] Gaddafi and the overthrow of the Libyan state—something that she would use in her run-up to the general election for president.

So, in late 2011, there is an internal document called the Libya Tick Tock that was produced for Hillary Clinton, and it’s the chronological description of how she was the central figure in the destruction of the Libyan state, which resulted in around 40,000 deaths within Libya—jihadists moved in, ISIS moved in, leading to the European refugee and migrant crisis.

Not only did you have people fleeing Libya, people fleeing Syria, the destabilization of other African countries as a result of arms flows, but the Libyan state itself err was no longer able to control the movement of people through it. Libya faces along to the Mediterranean and had been effectively the cork in the bottle of Africa. So all problems, economic problems and civil war in Africa—previously people fleeing those problems didn’t end up in Europe because Libya policed the Mediterranean. That was said explicitly at the time, back in early 2011 by Gaddafi: “What do these Europeans think they’re doing, trying to bomb and destroy the Libyan State? There’s going to be floods of migrants out of Africa and jihadists into Europe,” and this is exactly what happened.

Pilger: You get complaints from people saying, “What is WikiLeaks doing?��Are they trying to put Donald Trump in the White House?”

Assange: My answer is that Trump would not be permitted to win. Why do I say that?�� Because he’s had every establishment off side; Trump doesn’t have one establishment—maybe with the exception of the evangelicals, if you can call them an establishment—but banks, intelligence [agencies], arms companies … big foreign money … are all united behind Hillary Clinton, and the media as well, media owners and even journalists themselves.

Pilger: There is the accusation that WikiLeaks is in league with the Russians. Some people say, “Well, why doesn’t WikiLeaks investigate and publish emails on Russia?”

Assange: We have published about 800,000 documents of various kinds that relate to Russia. Most of those are critical; and a great many books have come out of our publications about Russia, most of which are critical. Our [Russia] documents have gone on to be used in quite a number of court cases: refugee cases of people fleeing some kind of claimed political persecution in Russia, which they use our documents to back up.

Pilger: Do you yourself take a view of the US election?��Do you have a preference for Clinton or Trump?

Assange: [Let’s talk about] Donald Trump. What does he represent in the American mind and in the European mind? He represents American white trash, [which Hillary Clinton called] “deplorable and irredeemable.” It means from an establishment or educated cosmopolitan, urbane perspective, these people are like the red necks, and you can never deal with them.��Because he so clearly—through his words and actions and the type of people that turn up at his rallies—represents people who are not the middle, not the upper-middle educated class, there is a fear of seeming to be associated in any way with them, a social fear that lowers the class status of anyone who can be accused of somehow assisting Trump in any way, including any criticism of Hillary Clinton. If you look at how the middle class gains its economic and social power, that makes absolute sense.

Pilger: I’d like to talk about Ecuador, the small country that has given you refuge and [political asylum] in this embassy in London.��Now Ecuador has cut off the internet from here where we’re doing this interview, in the embassy, for the clearly obvious reason that they are concerned about appearing to intervene in the US election campaign.��Can you talk about why they would take that action and your own views on Ecuador’s support for you?

Assange: Let’s let go back four years.��I made an asylum application to Ecuador in this embassy, because of the US extradition case, and the result was that after a month, I was successful in my asylum application. The embassy since then has been surrounded by police: quite an expensive police operation which the British government admits to spending more than £12.6 million. They admitted that over a year ago.

Now there’s undercover police and there are robot surveillance cameras of various kinds—so that there has been quite a serious conflict right here in the heart of London between Ecuador, a country of 16 million people, and the United Kingdom, and the Americans who have been helping on the side.��So that was a brave and principled thing for Ecuador to do. Now we have the US election [campaign], the Ecuadorian election is in February next year, and you have the White House feeling the political heat as a result of the true information that we have been publishing.

WikiLeaks does not publish from the jurisdiction of Ecuador, from this embassy or in the territory of Ecuador; we publish from France, we publish from, from Germany, we publish from The Netherlands and from a number of other countries, so that the attempted squeeze on WikiLeaks is through my refugee status; and this is, this is really intolerable. [It means] that [they] are trying to get at a publishing organization; [they] try and prevent it from publishing true information that is of intense interest to the American people and others about an election.

Pilger: Tell us what would happen if you walked out of this embassy.

Assange: I would be immediately arrested by the British police, and I would then be extradited either immediately to the United States or to Sweden. In Sweden I am not charged—I have already been previously cleared [by the Senior Stockholm Prosecutor Eva Finne]. We were not certain exactly what would happen there, but then we know that the Swedish government has refused to say that they will not extradite me to the United States—we know they have extradited 100% of people whom the US has requested since at least 2000. So over the last 15 years, every single person the US has tried to extradite from Sweden has been extradited, and they refuse to provide a guarantee [that won’t happen].

Pilger: People often ask me how you cope with the isolation in here.

Assange: Look, one of the best attributes of human beings is that they’re adaptable; one of the worst attributes of human beings is they are adaptable.��They adapt and start to tolerate abuses, they adapt to being involved themselves in abuses, they adapt to adversity and they continue on. So in my situation, frankly, I’m a bit institutionalized—this [the embassy] is the world … it’s visually the world [for me].

Pilger: It’s the world without sunlight, for one thing, isn’t it?

Assange: It’s the world without sunlight, but I haven’t seen sunlight in so long, I don’t remember it.

Pilger: Yes.

Assange: So, yes, you adapt.��The one real irritant is that my young children, they also adapt. They adapt to being without their father. That’s a hard, hard adaption which they didn’t ask for.

Pilger: Do you worry about them?

Assange: Yes, I worry about them; I worry about their mother.

Pilger: Some people would say, “Well, why don’t you end it and simply walk out the door and allow yourself to be extradited to Sweden?”

Assange: The UN [the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention] has looked into this whole situation. They spent 18 months in formal, adversarial litigation. [So it’s] me and the UN versus Sweden and the UK. Who’s right? The UN made a conclusion that I am being arbitrarily detained illegally, deprived of my freedom, and that what has occurred has not occurred within the laws that the United Kingdom and Sweden, and that [those countries] must obey. It is an illegal abuse.��It is the United Nations formally asking, “What’s going on here? What is your legal explanation for this? [Assange] says that you should recognize his asylum.” [And here is]

Sweden formally writing back to the United Nations to say, “No, we’re not going to [recognize the UN ruling],” so leaving open their ability to extradite.

I just find it absolutely amazing that the narrative about this situation is not put out publicly in the press, because it doesn’t suit the Western establishment narrative—that yes, the West has political prisoners, it’s a reality, it’s not just me, there’s a bunch of other people as well.��The West has political prisoners. Of course, no state accepts [that it should call] the people it is imprisoning or detaining for political reasons, political prisoners. They don’t call them political prisoners in China, they don’t call them political prisoners in Azerbaijan, and they don’t call them political prisoners in the United States, UK or Sweden. It is absolutely intolerable to have that kind of self-perception.

Here we have a case, the Swedish case, where I have never been charged with a crime, where I have already been cleared [by the Stockholm prosecutor] and found to be innocent, where the woman herself said that the police made it up, where the United Nations formally said the whole thing is illegal, where the state of Ecuador also investigated and found that I should be given asylum.��Those are the facts, but what is the rhetoric?

Pilger: Yes, it’s different.

Assange: The rhetoric is pretending, constantly pretending that I have been charged with a crime, and never mentioning that I have been already previously cleared, never mentioning that the woman herself says that the police made it up. [The rhetoric] is trying to avoid [the truth that] the UN formally found that the whole thing is illegal, never even mentioning that Ecuador made a formal assessment through its formal processes and found that yes, I am subject to persecution by the United States.

*[John Pilger’s articles and films can be found on his . This interview has been republished with permission from Mr. Pilger.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit:

The post WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange Talks to John Pilger appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The American journalist Edward Bernays is often described as the man who invented modern propaganda. The nephew of Sigmund Freud, the pioneer of psychoanalysis, it was Bernays who coined the term “public relations” as a euphemism for spin and its deceptions.

In 1929, he persuaded feminists to promote cigarettes for women by smoking in the New York Easter Parade, behavior then considered outlandish. One feminist, Ruth Booth, declared, “Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!”

Bernays’ influence extended far beyond advertising. His greatest success was his role in convincing the American public to join the slaughter of the First World War.��The secret, he said, was “engineering the consent” of people in order to “control and regiment [them] according to our will without their knowing about it.” He described this as “the true ruling power in our society” and called it an “invisible government.”

Today, the invisible government has never been more powerful and less understood. In my career as a journalist and filmmaker, I have never known propaganda to insinuate our lives and as it does now and to go unchallenged.

A Tale of Two Cities

Imagine two cities. Both are under siege by the forces of the government of that country. Both cities are occupied by fanatics who commit terrible atrocities, such as beheading people.

But there is a vital difference. In one siege, the government soldiers are described as liberators by Western reporters embedded with them, who enthusiastically report their battles and air strikes. There are front-page pictures of these heroic soldiers giving a V-sign for victory. There is scant mention of civilian casualties.

In the second city, in another country nearby, almost exactly the same is happening. Government forces are laying siege to a city controlled by the same breed of fanatics.

The difference is that these fanatics are supported, supplied and armed by “us”: the United States and Britain. They even have a media center that is funded by Britain and America.

Another difference is that the government soldiers laying siege to this city are the bad guys, condemned for assaulting and bombing the city, which is exactly what the good soldiers do in the first city.

Confusing? Not really. Such is the basic double standard that is the essence of propaganda. I am referring, of course, to the current siege of the city of Mosul by the government forces of Iraq, who are backed by the United States and Britain and to the siege of Aleppo by the government forces of Syria, backed by Russia. One is good; the other is bad.

What is seldom reported is that both cities would not be occupied by fanatics and ravaged by war if Britain and the United States had not invaded Iraq in 2003. That criminal enterprise was launched on lies strikingly similar to the propaganda that now distorts our understanding of the civil war in Syria.

Without this drumbeat of propaganda dressed up as news, the monstrous Islamic State (IS), al-Qaeda, Jabhat al-Nusra and the rest of the jihadist gang might not exist, and the people of Syria might not be fighting for their lives today.

Vindicated

Some may remember in 2003 a succession of BBC reporters turning to the camera and telling us that Tony Blair was “vindicated” for what turned out to be the crime of the century. US television networks produced the same validation for George W. Bush. Fox News brought on Henry Kissinger to effuse over Colin Powell’s fabrications.

The same year, soon after the invasion, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the renowned American investigative journalist. I asked him: “What would have happened if the freest media in the world had seriously challenged what turned out to be crude propaganda?”��He replied that if journalists had done their job, “there is a very, very good chance we would not have gone to war in Iraq.”

51�Թ� provides you deep and diverse insights for free. Remember that we still have to pay for servers, website maintenance and much more. So, to keep us free, fair and independent.

It was a shocking statement, and one supported by other famous journalists to whom I put the same question—Dan Rather of CBS, David Rose of The Observer and journalists and producers in the BBC, who wished to remain anonymous.

In other words, had journalists done their job, had they challenged and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today, and there would be no IS and no siege of Aleppo or Mosul.

There would have been no atrocity on the London Underground on July 7, 2005.��There would have been no flight of millions of refugees. There would be no miserable camps. When the terrorist attacks happened in Paris in��November 2015, French President Francois Hollande immediately sent planes to bomb Syria and more terrorism followed, predictably—the product of Hollande’s bombast about France being “at war” and “showing no mercy.” That state violence and jihadist violence feed off each other is the truth that no national leader has the courage to speak.

“When the truth is replaced by silence,” said the Soviet dissident Yevtushenko, “the silence is a lie.”

Independence is Intolerable

The attack on Iraq, the attack on Libya, the attack on Syria happened because the leader in each of these countries was not a puppet of the West. The human rights record of a Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi was irrelevant. They did not obey orders and surrender control of their country.

The same fate awaited Slobodan Milosevic once he had refused to sign an “agreement” that demanded the occupation of Serbia and its conversion to a market economy. His people were bombed, and he was prosecuted in The Hague. Independence of this kind is intolerable.

As , it was only when the Syrian President��Bashar al-Assad in 2009 rejected an oil pipeline, running through his country from Qatar to Europe, that he was attacked.

From that moment, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) planned to destroy the government of Syria with jihadist fanatics—the same fanatics currently holding the people of Mosul and eastern Aleppo hostage.

Why is this not news? The former British Foreign Office official Carne Ross, who was responsible for operating sanctions against Iraq, told me: “We would feed journalists factoids of sanitized intelligence, or we would freeze them out. That is how it worked.”

The West’s medieval client, Saudi Arabia, to which the US and Britain sell billions of dollars’ worth of arms, is at present destroying Yemen, a country so poor that in the best of times half the children are malnourished. Look on YouTube and you will see the kind of massive bombs—“our” bombs—that the , and against weddings, and funerals.

The explosions look like small atomic bombs. Those directing the bombs in Saudi Arabia work side-by-side with British officers. This fact is not on the evening news.

Propaganda is most effective when our consent is engineered by those with a fine education— Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia—and with careers on the BBC, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post.

These organizations are known as the liberal media. They present themselves as enlightened, progressive tribunes of the moral zeitgeist. They are anti-racist, pro-feminist and pro-LGBT.

And they love war. While they speak up for feminism, they support rapacious wars that deny the rights of countless women, including the right to life.

In 2011, Libya, then a modern state, was destroyed on the pretext that Gaddafi was about to commit genocide on his own people.��That was the incessant news; and there was no evidence. It was a lie.

In fact, Britain, Europe and the US wanted what they like to call “regime change” in Libya, the biggest oil producer in Africa. Gaddafi’s influence in the continent and, above all, his independence was intolerable.

Ukraine is another media triumph. Respectable liberal newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Guardian, and mainstream broadcasters such as the BBC, NBC, CBS and CNN have played a critical role in conditioning their viewers to accept a new and dangerous cold war.

So he was murdered with a knife in his rear by fanatics, backed by America, Britain and France.��Hillary Clinton cheered his gruesome death for the camera, declaring, “We came, we saw, he died!”

The destruction of Libya was a media triumph. As the war drums were beaten, Jonathan Freedland wrote in The Guardian: “Though the risks are very real, the case for intervention remains strong.” Intervention—what a polite, benign, Guardian word, whose real meaning, for Libya, was death and destruction.

According to its own records, the��, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. They included missiles with uranium warheads. Look at the photographs of the rubble of Misrata and Sirte, and the mass graves identified by the Red Cross. The report on the children killed says, most of them under the age of 10.

As a direct consequence, Sirte became the .

Media Triumph

Ukraine is another media triumph. Respectable liberal newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Guardian, and mainstream broadcasters such as the BBC, NBC, CBS and CNN have played a critical role in conditioning their viewers to accept a new and dangerous cold war.

All have misrepresented events in Ukraine as a malign act by Russia when, in fact, the coup in Ukraine in 2014 was the work of the United States, aided by Germany and NATO. This inversion of reality is so pervasive that Washington’s military intimidation of Russia is not news; it is suppressed behind a smear and scare campaign of the kind I grew up with during the first Cold War. Once again, the Ruskies are coming to get us, led by another Joseph Stalin, whom The Economist depicts as the devil.

The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts I can remember. The fascists who engineered the coup in Kiev are the same breed that backed the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Of all the scares about the rise of fascist anti-Semitism in Europe, no leader ever mentions the —except Vladimir Putin, but he does not count.

Many in the Western media have worked hard to present the ethnic Russian-speaking population of Ukraine as outsiders in their own country, as agents of Moscow, almost never as Ukrainians seeking a federation within Ukraine and as Ukrainian citizens resisting a foreign-orchestrated coup against their elected government.

There is almost the joie d’esprit of a class reunion of warmongers. The drum-beaters of The Washington Post inciting war with Russia are the very same editorial writers who published the lie that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

Threat to the Status Quo

To most of us, the American presidential campaign is a media freak show in which Donald Trump is the arch villain. But Trump is loathed by those with power in the United States for reasons that have little to do with his obnoxious behavior and opinions. To the invisible government in Washington, the unpredictable Trump is an obstacle to America’s design for the 21^st century. This is to maintain the dominance of the United States and to subjugate Russia and, if possible, China.

To the militarists in Washington, the real problem with Trump is that, in his lucid moments, he seems not to want a war with Russia; he wants to talk with the Russian president, not fight him; he says he wants to talk with the president of China.

In the first debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump promised not to be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into a conflict. He said, “I would certainly not do first strike. Once the nuclear alternative happens, it’s over.” That was not news.

Did he really mean it? Who knows? He often contradicts himself. But what is clear is that Trump is considered a serious threat to the status quo maintained by the vast national security machine that runs the United States, regardless of who is in the White House.

The CIA wants him beaten. The Pentagon wants him beaten. The media wants him beaten. Even his own party wants him beaten. He is a threat to the rulers of the world—unlike Clinton who has left no doubt she is prepared to go to war with nuclear-armed Russia and China.

Clinton has the form, as she often boasts. Indeed, her record is proven. As a senator, she backed the bloodbath in Iraq.��When she ran against Barack Obama in 2008, she threatened to “totally obliterate” Iran. As secretary of state, she colluded in the destruction of governments in Libya and , and set in train the baiting of China.

She has now pledged to support a no fly zone in Syria—a direct provocation for war with Russia. Clinton may well become the most dangerous president of the United States in my lifetime—a distinction for which the competition is fierce.

Without a shred of evidence, she has accused Russia of supporting Trump and hacking her emails. Released by WikiLeaks, these emails tell us that what Clinton says in private, in speeches to the rich and powerful, is the opposite of what she says in public.

That is why silencing and threatening Julian Assange is so important. As the editor of WikiLeaks, Assange knows the truth. And let me assure those who are concerned, he is well, and WikiLeaks is operating on all cylinders.

Today, the greatest build-up of American-led forces since World War Two is under way—in the Caucasus and eastern Europe, on the border with Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, where China is the target.

Keep that in mind when the presidential election circus reaches its finale on November 8. If the winner is Clinton, a Greek chorus of witless commentators will celebrate her coronation as a great step forward for women. None will mention Clinton’s victims: the women of Syria, the women of Iraq, the women of Libya. None will mention the civil defense drills being conducted in Russia.��None will recall Edward Bernays’ “torches of freedom.”

George W. Bush’s press spokesman once called the media “complicit enablers.” Coming from a senior official in an administration whose lies, enabled by the media, caused such suffering, that description is a warning from history.

In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media: “Before every major aggression, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack. In the propaganda system, it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.”

��The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit:��

The post Inside America’s Invisible Government appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The exoneration of a man accused of the worst of crimes, genocide, made no headlines. Neither the BBC nor CNN covered it. The Guardian allowed a brief commentary. Such a rare official admission was buried or suppressed, understandably. It would explain too much about how the rulers of the world rule.

Slobodan Milosevic

The��International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY)��in The Hague has quietly cleared the late Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, of war crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian War, including the massacre at Srebrenica.

Far from conspiring with the convicted Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, Milosevic actually “,” opposed Karadzic and tried to stop the war that dismembered Yugoslavia. Buried near the end of a 2,590-page judgement on Karadzic last February, this truth further demolishes the propaganda that justified NATO’s illegal onslaught on Serbia in 1999.

Milosevic died of a , alone in his cell in The Hague, during what amounted to a bogus trial by an American-invented “international tribunal.” Denied heart surgery that might have saved his life, his condition worsened and was monitored and kept secret by US officials, as WikiLeaks has since revealed.

Slobodan Milosevic was the victim of war propaganda that today runs like a torrent across our screens and newspapers and beckons great danger for us all. He was the prototype demon, vilified by Western media as the “” who was responsible for “,” especially in the secessionist Yugoslav province of Kosovo. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said so, invoked the Holocaust and demanded action against “this new Hitler.”��David Scheffer, the US ambassador-at-large for war crimes, declared that as many as “” may have been murdered by Milosevic’s forces.

This was the justification for NATO’s bombing, led by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, that killed hundreds of civilians in hospitals, schools, churches, parks and television studios and destroyed Serbia’s economic infrastructure. It was blatantly ideological; at a notorious “peace conference” in Rambouillet in France, Milosevic was confronted by Madeleine Albright, the US secretary of state, who was to achieve infamy with her remark that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children were “.”

Albright delivered an “offer” to Milosevic that no national leader could accept. Unless he agreed to the foreign military occupation of his country, with the occupying forces “outside the legal process,” and to the imposition of a neoliberal “free market,” Serbia would be bombed. This was contained in an “Appendix B,” which the media failed to read or suppressed. The aim was to crush Europe’s last independent “socialist” state.

Once NATO began bombing, there was a stampede of Kosovar refugees “fleeing a holocaust.” When it was over, international police teams descended on Kosovo to exhume the victims of the “holocaust.” The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) failed to find a single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily denouncing “a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines.” The final count of the dead in Kosovo was 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the pro-NATO Kosovo Liberation Front. There was no genocide. The NATO attack was both a fraud and a war crime.

All but a fraction of America’s vaunted “precision guided” missiles hit not military, but civilian targets, including the news studios of Radio Television Serbia in Belgrade. Sixteen people were killed, including cameramen, producers and a make-up artist. Blair described the dead, profanely, as part of Serbia’s “command and control.” In 2008, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Carla Del Ponte, revealed that she had been pressured not to investigate NATO’s crimes.

The Iraq War

This was the model for Washington’s subsequent invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and, by stealth, Syria. All qualify as “paramount crimes” under the Nuremberg standard; all depended on media propaganda. While tabloid journalism played its traditional part, it was serious, credible, often liberal journalism that was the most effective—the evangelical promotion of Blair and his wars by The Guardian, the incessant lies about Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in The Observer and The New York Times, and the unerring drumbeat of government propaganda by the BBC in the silence of its omissions.

At the height of the bombing, the BBC’s Kirsty Wark interviewed General Wesley Clark, the NATO commander. The Serbian city of Nis had just been sprayed with American cluster bombs, killing women, old people and children in an open market and a hospital. Wark asked not a single question about this, or about any other civilian deaths.

Others were more brazen. In February 2003, the day after Blair and Bush had set fire to Iraq, the BBC’s political editor, Andrew Marr, stood in Downing Street��and made what amounted to a victory speech. He had “said they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right.”

Today, with a million dead and a society in ruins, Marr’s BBC interviews are recommended by the US Embassy in London.

The editorial writers of The Washington Post, having promoted the fiction of WMDs in Iraq, demand that President Barack Obama attacks Syria.

Marr’s colleagues lined up to pronounce Blair “vindicated.” The BBC’s Washington correspondent, Matt Frei, said: “There’s no doubt that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially to the Middle East … is now increasingly tied up with military power.”

Assault on Syria

This obeisance to the United States and its collaborators as a benign force “bringing good” runs deep in Western establishment journalism. It ensures that the present-day catastrophe in Syria is blamed exclusively on President Bashar al-Assad, whom the West and Israel have long conspired to overthrow, not for any humanitarian concerns, but to consolidate Israel’s aggressive power in the region. The jihadist forces unleashed and armed by the US, Britain, France, Turkey and their “coalition” proxies serve this end. It is they who dispense the propaganda and videos that become news in the US and Europe, and provide access to journalists and guarantee a one-sided “coverage” of Syria.

The city of Aleppo is in the news. Most readers and viewers will be unaware that the majority of the population of Aleppo lives in the government-controlled western part of the city. That they suffer daily artillery bombardment from Western-sponsored al-Qaeda is not news. On��July 21, French and American bombers attacked a government village in Aleppo province, killing up to 125 civilians. This was reported on page 22 of The Guardian; there were no photographs.

Having created and underwritten jihadism in Afghanistan in the 1980s as Operation Cyclone—a weapon to destroy the Soviet Union—the US is doing something similar in Syria. Like the Afghan mujahedeen, the Syrian “rebels” are America’s and Britain’s foot soldiers. Many fight for al-Qaeda and its variants; some, like the Nusra Front, have rebranded themselves to comply with American sensitivities over 9/11. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) runs them, with difficulty, as it runs jihadists all over the world.

The immediate aim is to destroy the government in Damascus which, according to the most credible , the majority of Syrians support, or at least look to for protection, regardless of the barbarism in its shadows. The long-term aim is to deny Russia a key Middle Eastern ally as part of a NATO war of attrition against the Russian Federation that eventually destroys it.

The nuclear risk is obvious, though suppressed by the media across “the free world.” The editorial writers of The Washington Post, having promoted the fiction of WMDs in Iraq, demand that President Barack Obama attacks Syria. Hillary Clinton, who publicly rejoiced at her executioner’s role during the destruction of Libya, has repeatedly indicated that, as president, she will “go further” than Obama.

Gareth Porter, a��samidzat��journalist reporting from Washington, recently revealed the names of those likely to make up a Clinton cabinet, who plan an attack on Syria. All have belligerent Cold War histories; the former CIA director, Leon Panetta, says that “the next president is gonna have to consider adding additional special forces on the ground.”

What is most remarkable about the war propaganda now in floodtide is its patent absurdity and familiarity. I have been looking through archive film from Washington in the 1950s when diplomats, civil servants and journalists were witch-hunted and ruined by Senator Joe McCarthy for challenging the lies and paranoia about the Soviet Union and China. Like a resurgent tumor, the anti-Russia cult has returned.

Putin’s Russia

In Britain, The �ҳܲ����徱����’s leads his newspaper’s Russia-haters in a stream of journalistic parodies that assign to President Vladimir Putin every earthly iniquity. When the was published, the front page said Putin and there was a picture of Putin; never mind that Putin was not mentioned anywhere in the leaks.

In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn has also excited hysteria from the war-makers in the Labour Party and from a media devoted to trashing him.

Like Milosevic, Putin is “Demon Number One.” It was Putin who shot down a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine. Headline: “.” No evidence required. It was Putin who was responsible for Washington’s documented (and paid for) overthrow of the elected government in Kiev in 2014. The subsequent terror campaign by fascist militias against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine was the result of Putin’s “aggression.” Preventing Crimea from becoming a NATO missile base and protecting the mostly Russian population who had voted in a referendum to rejoin Russia—from which Crimea had been annexed—were more examples of Putin’s “aggression.”��Smear by media inevitably becomes war by media. If war with Russia breaks out—by design or by accident—journalists will bear much of the responsibility.

In the US, the anti-Russia campaign has been elevated to virtual reality. The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, an economist with a Nobel Prize, has called Donald Trump the “” because Trump is Putin’s man, he says. Trump had dared to suggest, in a rare lucid moment, that war with Russia might be a bad idea. In fact, he has gone further and removed American arms shipments to Ukraine from the Republican platform. “,” he said.

This is why America’s warmongering liberal establishment hates him. Trump’s racism and ranting demagoguery have nothing to do with it. Bill and Hillary Clinton’s record of racism and extremism can out-trump Trump’s any day. (This week is the 20^th��anniversary of the Clinton welfare “reform” that launched a war on African-Americans.) As for Obama: While American police gun down his fellow African Americans, the great hope in the White House has done nothing to protect them, nothing to relieve their impoverishment, while running four rapacious wars and an assassination campaign without precedent.

The CIA has demanded that Trump is not elected. Pentagon generals have demanded that he is not elected. The pro-war New York Times—taking a breather from its relentless low-rent Putin smears—demands that he is not elected. Something is up. These tribunes of “perpetual war” are terrified that the multi-billion-dollar business of war by which the United States maintains its dominance will be undermined if Trump does a deal with Putin, then with China’s Xi Jinping.��Their panic at the possibility of the world’s great power talking peace—however unlikely—would be the blackest farce were the issues not so dire.

“Trump would have loved Stalin!” bellowed Vice President Joe Biden at a rally for Hillary Clinton. With Clinton nodding, he shouted: “We never bow. We never bend. We never kneel. We never yield. We own the finish line. That’s who we are. We are America!”

Anti-War Corbyn

In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn has also excited hysteria from the war-makers in the Labour Party and from a media devoted to trashing him. Lord Alan West, a former admiral and Labour minister, put it well. Corbyn was taking an “outrageous” anti-war position “because it gets the unthinking masses to vote for him.”

In a debate with leadership challenger Owen Smith, Corbyn was asked by the moderator: “How would you act on a violation by Vladimir Putin of a fellow NATO state?”

Corbyn : “You would want to avoid that happening in the first place. You would build up a good dialogue with Russia … We would try to introduce a de-militarization of the borders between Russia, the Ukraine and the other countries on the border between Russia and eastern Europe. What we cannot allow is a series of calamitous build-ups of troops on both sides which can only lead to great danger.”

Pressed to say if he would authorize war against Russia “if you had to,” Corbyn replied: “I don’t wish to go to war—what I want to do is achieve a world that we don’t need to go to war.”

The line of questioning owes much to the rise of Britain’s liberal war-makers. The Labour Party and the media have long offered them career opportunities.��For a while, the moral tsunami of the great crime of Iraq left them floundering, their inversions of the truth a temporary embarrassment. Regardless of Chilcot Report and the mountain of incriminating facts, Blair remains their inspiration, because he was a “winner.”

Dissenting��journalism and scholarship have since been systematically banished or appropriated, and democratic ideas emptied and refilled with��“identity politics” that confuse gender with feminism and public angst with liberation and willfully ignore the state violence and weapons profiteering that destroys countless lives in faraway places, like Yemen and Syria, and beckon nuclear war in Europe and across the world.

The stirring of people of all ages around the spectacular rise of Jeremy Corbyn counters this to some extent. His life has been spent illuminating the horror of war. The problem for Corbyn and his supporters is the Labour Party. In America, the problem for the thousands of followers of Bernie Sanders was the Democratic Party, not to mention their ultimate betrayal by their great white hope. In the US, home of the great civil rights and anti-war movements, it is Black Lives Matter and the likes of CodePink that lay the roots of a modern version.

For only a movement that swells into every street and across borders and does not give up can stop the warmongers. Next year, it will be a century since Wilfred Owen wrote the following. Every journalist should read it and remember it.

“If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood / Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, / Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud / Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, / My friend, you would not tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit:

We bring you perspectives from around the world. Help us to inform and educate. Your����is tax-deductible. Join over 400 people to become a donor or you could choose to be a��.

The post Provoking Nuclear War by Media appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The majority vote by Britons to leave the European Union (EU) was an act of raw democracy. Millions of ordinary people refused to be bullied, intimidated and dismissed with open contempt by their presumed betters in the major parties, the leaders of the business and banking oligarchy, and the media.

This was, in great part, a vote by those angered and demoralized by the sheer arrogance of the apologists for the Remain campaign and the dismemberment of a socially just civil life in Britain. The last bastion of the historic reforms of 1945, the National Health Service (NHS), has been so subverted by Tory and Labour-supported privateers it is fighting for its life.

Rejecting the Ancien Regime

A forewarning came when the treasurer, George Osborne, the embodiment of both Britain’s ancien regime and the banking mafia in Europe, if people voted the wrong way; it was blackmail on a shocking scale.

Immigration was exploited in the campaign with consummate cynicism, not only by populist politicians from the lunar right, but by Labour politicians drawing on their own venerable tradition of promoting and nurturing racism, a symptom of corruption not at the bottom but at the top. The reason millions of refugees have fled the Middle East—first Iraq, now Syria—are the invasions and imperial mayhem of Britain, the United States, France, the EU and NATO. Before that, there was the willful destruction of Yugoslavia. Before that, there was the theft of Palestine and the imposition of Israel.

The pith helmets may have long gone, but the blood has never dried. A 19th-century contempt for countries and peoples, depending on their degree of colonial usefulness, remains a centerpiece of modern “globalization,” with its perverse socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor, its freedom for capital and denial of freedom to labor, its perfidious politicians and politicized civil servants.

All this has now come home to Europe, enriching the likes of Tony Blair and impoverishing and disempowering millions. On June 23, 2016, the British said, “No more.”

The aim of this extremism is to install a permanent, capitalist theocracy that ensures a two-thirds society, with the majority divided and indebted, managed by a corporate class, and a permanent working poor.

The most effective propagandists of the “European ideal” have not been the far right, but an insufferably patrician class for whom metropolitan London is the United Kingdom. Its leading members see themselves as liberal, enlightened, cultivated tribunes of the 21st-century zeitgeist, even “cool.” What they really are is a bourgeoisie with insatiable consumerist tastes and ancient instincts of their own superiority. In their house paper, The Guardian, they have gloated, day after day, at those who would even consider the EU profoundly undemocratic, a source of social injustice and a virulent extremism known as “neoliberalism.”

The aim of this extremism is to install a permanent, capitalist theocracy that ensures a two-thirds society, with the majority divided and indebted, managed by a corporate class, and a permanent working poor. In Britain today, . For them, the trap has closed. More than 600,000 residents of Britain’s second city, Greater Manchester, are, reports a study, “” and 1.6 million are slipping into penury.

“These People”

Little of this social catastrophe is acknowledged in the bourgeois-controlled media, notably the Oxbridge-dominated BBC. During the referendum campaign, almost no insightful analysis was allowed to intrude upon the clichéd hysteria about “leaving Europe,” as if Britain was about to be towed in hostile currents somewhere north of Iceland.

On the morning after the vote, a BBC radio reporter welcomed politicians to his studio as old chums. “Well,” he said to “Lord” Peter Mandelson, the disgraced architect of Blairism, “why do these people want it so badly?” The “these people” are the majority of Britons.

The wealthy war criminal Tony Blair remains a hero of the Mandelson “European” class, though few will say so these days. The Guardian once described Blair as “mystical” and has been true to his “project” of rapacious war. The day after the vote, the columnist Martin Kettle offered a Brechtian solution to the misuse of democracy by the masses. “Now surely we can agree referendums are bad for Britain,” said the headline over his full-page piece. The “we” was unexplained but understood—just as “these people” is understood. “The referendum has conferred less legitimacy on politics, not more,” wrote Kettle. “[T]he verdict on referendums should be a ruthless one. Never again.”

The kind of ruthlessness Kettle longs is found in Greece, a country now airbrushed. There, they had a referendum and the result was ignored. Like the Labour Party in Britain, the leaders of the Syriza government in Athens are the products of an affluent, highly privileged, educated middle class, groomed in the fakery and political treachery of postmodernism. The Greek people courageously used the referendum to demand their government sought “better terms” with a venal status in Brussels that was crushing the life out of their country. They were betrayed, as the British would have been betrayed.

On June 24, the Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was asked by the BBC if he would pay tribute to the departed David Cameron, his comrade in the Remain campaign. “dignity” and noted his backing for gay marriage and his apology to the Irish families of the dead of Bloody Sunday. He said nothing about Cameron’s divisiveness, his brutal austerity policies, his lies about “protecting” the NHS. Neither did he remind people of the warmongering of the Cameron government: the dispatch of British special forces to Libya and British bomb aimers to Saudi Arabia and, above all, the beckoning of World War III.

In the week of the referendum, no British politician and, to my knowledge, no journalist referred to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech in St. Petersburg commemorating the 75th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The Soviet victory—at a cost of 27 million Soviet lives and the majority of all German forces —won the Second World War.

Putin likened the current frenzied and war material on Russia’s western borders to the Third Reich’s Operation Barbarossa. NATO exercises in Poland were the biggest since the Nazi invasion; Operation Anaconda had simulated an attack on Russia, presumably with nuclear weapons.

On the eve of the referendum, the quisling secretary-general of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, warned Britons they would be endangering “peace and security” if they voted to leave the EU. The millions who ignored him and David Cameron, George Osborne, Jeremy Corbyn, Barack Obama and the man who runs the Bank of England may, just may, have struck a blow for real peace and democracy in Europe.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit:�� /��

We bring you perspectives from around the world. Help us to inform and educate. Your donation is tax-deductible. Join over 400 people to become a or you could choose to be a .

The post Why the British Said No to Europe appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Returning to the United States in an election year, I am struck by the silence. I have covered four presidential campaigns, starting with 1968; I was with Robert Kennedy when he was shot and I saw his assassin, preparing to kill him. It was a baptism in the American way, along with the salivating violence of the Chicago police at the Democratic Party’s rigged convention. The great counterrevolution had begun.

The first to be assassinated that year, Martin Luther King, had dared link the suffering of African-Americans and the people of Vietnam. When Janis Joplin sang, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” she spoke perhaps unconsciously for millions of America’s victims in faraway places.

“We lost 58,000 young soldiers in Vietnam, and they died defending your freedom. Now don’t you forget it.” So said a National Parks Service guide as I filmed recently at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. He was addressing a school party of young teenagers in bright orange t-shirts. As if by rote, he inverted the truth about Vietnam into an unchallenged lie.

The millions of Vietnamese who died and were maimed and poisoned and dispossessed by the American invasion have no historical place in young minds, not to mention the estimated 60,000 veterans who took their own lives. A friend of mine, a marine who became a paraplegic in Vietnam, was often asked, “Which side did you fight on?”

A few years ago, I attended a popular exhibition called “The Price of Freedom” at the venerable Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. The lines of ordinary people, mostly children shuffling through a Santa’s grotto of revisionism, were dispensed a variety of lies: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved “a million lives”; Iraq was “liberated [by] air strikes of unprecedented precision.” The theme was unerringly heroic: Only Americans pay the price of freedom.

The 2016 election campaign is remarkable not only for the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, but also for the resilience of an enduring silence about a murderous self-bestowed divinity. A third of the members of the United Nations have felt Washington’s boot, overturning governments, subverting democracy, imposing blockades and boycotts. Most of the presidents responsible have been liberal—Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama.

The breathtaking record of perfidy is so mutated in the public mind, wrote the late Harold Pinter, that it “never happened … Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. It didn’t matter.” Pinter expressed a mock admiration for what he called “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.”

Obama and Nukes

Take Obama. As he prepares to leave office, the fawning has begun all over again. He is “cool.” One of the more violent presidents, Obama gave full reign to the Pentagon war-making apparatus of his discredited predecessor. He —truth-tellers—than any president. He pronounced Chelsea Manning guilty before she was tried. Today, Obama runs an unprecedented worldwide campaign of terrorism and murder by drone.

In 2009, Obama promised to help “” and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.��No American president has built more than Obama. He is “modernizing” America’s doomsday arsenal, including a new “mini” nuclear weapon, whose size and “smart” technology, says a leading general, ensure its use is “no longer unthinkable.”

James Bradley, the best-selling author of��Flags of Our Fathers��and son of one of the US marines who raised the flag on Iwo Jima, said: “[One] great myth we’re seeing play out is that of Obama as some kind of peaceful guy who’s trying to get rid of nuclear weapons. He’s the biggest nuclear warrior there is. He’s committed us to a ruinous course of spending a trillion dollars on more nuclear weapons. Somehow, people live in this fantasy that because he gives vague news conferences and speeches and feel-good photo-ops that somehow that’s attached to actual policy. It isn’t.”

On Obama’s watch, a second cold war is under way. The Russian president is a pantomime villain; the Chinese are not yet back to their sinister pig-tailed caricature—when all Chinese were banned from the United States—but the media warriors are working on it.

No Change

Neither Hillary Clinton nor Bernie Sanders has mentioned any of this. There is no risk and no danger for the US and all of us. For them, the since World War II has not happened. On May 11, Romania went “live” with a NATO “missile defense” base that aims its first-strike American missiles at the heart of Russia, the world’s second nuclear power.

In Asia, the Pentagon is sending ships, planes and Special Forces to the Philippines to threaten China. The US already encircles China with hundreds of military bases that curve in an arc up from Australia, to Asia and across to Afghanistan. Obama calls this a “pivot.”

Bernie Sanders, the hope of many young Americans, is not very different from Clinton in his proprietorial view of the world beyond the US.

As a direct consequence, China reportedly has changed its nuclear weapons policy from no-first-use to high alert and put to sea submarines with nuclear weapons. The escalator is quickening.

It was Hillary Clinton who, as secretary of state in 2010, elevated the competing territorial claims for rocks and reef in the South China Sea to an international issue; CNN and BBC hysteria followed; China was building airstrips on the disputed islands. In its mammoth war game in 2015, Operation Talisman Sabre, the US practiced “choking” the Straits of Malacca through which pass most of China’s oil and trade. This was not news.

Clinton declared that America had a “national interest” in these Asian waters. The Philippines and Vietnam were encouraged and bribed to pursue their claims and old enmities against China. In America, people are being primed to see any Chinese defensive position as offensive, and so the ground is laid for rapid escalation. A similar strategy of provocation and propaganda is applied to Russia.

Clinton, the “women’s candidate,” leaves a trail of bloody coups: in Honduras, in Libya (plus the murder of the Libyan leader) and Ukraine. The latter is now a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) theme park swarming with Nazis and the frontline of a beckoning war with Russia. It was through Ukraine—literally, borderland—that Adolf Hitler’s Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, which lost 27 million people. This epic catastrophe remains a presence in Russia. Clinton’s presidential campaign has received money from all but one of the world’s 10 biggest arms companies. No other candidate comes close.

Bernie Sanders, the hope of many young Americans, is not very different from Clinton in his proprietorial view of the world beyond the US. He backed President Bill Clinton’s illegal bombing of Serbia. He supports Obama’s terrorism by drone, the provocation of Russia and the return of Special Forces (death squads) to Iraq. He has nothing to say on the drumbeat of threats to China and the accelerating risk of nuclear war. He agrees that Edward Snowden should stand trial and he calls Hugo Chavez—like him, a social democrat—“a dead communist dictator.” He promises to support Clinton if she is nominated.

The Media

The election of Trump or Clinton is the old illusion of choice that is no choice: two sides of the same coin. In scapegoating minorities and promising to “make America great again,” Trump is a far right-wing domestic populist; yet the danger of Clinton may be more lethal for the world.

“,” said Stephen Cohen, emeritus professor of Russian History at Princeton and NYU, one of the few Russia experts in the US to speak out about the risk of war.

In a radio broadcast, Cohen referred to critical questions Trump alone had raised. Among them: Why is the United States “everywhere on the globe”? What is NATO’s true mission? Why does the US always pursue regime change in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine? Why does Washington treat Russia and Vladimir Putin as an enemy?

The hysteria in the liberal media over Trump serves an illusion of “free and open debate” and “democracy at work.” His views on immigrants and Muslims are grotesque, yet the deporter-in-chief of vulnerable people from America is not Trump but Obama, whose betrayal of people of color is his legacy: such as the warehousing of a mostly black prison population, now more numerous than Joseph Stalin’s gulag.

This presidential campaign may not be about populism but American liberalism, an ideology that sees itself as modern and, therefore, superior and the one true way. Those on its right wing bear a likeness to 19^th��century Christian imperialists, with a God-given duty to convert or co-opt or conquer.

In Britain, this is Blairism. The Christian war criminal Tony Blair got away with his secret preparation for the invasion of Iraq largely because the liberal political class and media fell for his “cool Britannia.” In The��Guardian, the applause was deafening; he was called “mystical.” A distraction known as identity politics, imported from the US, rested easily in his care.

History was declared over, class was abolished and gender promoted as feminism; lots of women became New Labour MPs. They voted on the first day of Parliament to cut the benefits of single parents, mostly women, as instructed. A majority voted for an invasion that .

The equivalent in the US are the politically correct warmongers on The��New York Times,��The��Washington Post��and network TV who dominate political debate. I watched a furious debate on CNN about Trump’s infidelities. It was clear, they said, a man like that could not be trusted in the White House. No issues were raised. Nothing on the 80% of Americans whose income has collapsed to 1970s levels. Nothing on the drift to war. The received wisdom seems to be “hold your nose” and vote for Clinton: anyone but Trump. That way, you stop the monster and preserve a system gagging for another war.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit:

We bring you perspectives from around the world. Help us to inform and educate. Your����is tax-deductible. Join over 400 people to become a donor or you could choose to be a��.

The post Silencing America as it Prepares for War appeared first on 51�Թ�.

I had a call from Rosalie Kunnoth-Monks the other day. Rosalie is an elder of the Arrernte-Alyawarra people who lives in Utopia—a vast and remote region in the “red heart” of Australia. The nearest town is Alice Springs, more than 200 miles across an ancient landscape of spinifex and swirling skeins of red dust. The first Europeans who came here, perhaps demented by the heat, imagined a white utopia that was not theirs to imagine; for this is a sacred place, the homeland of the oldest, most continuous human presence on Earth.

Rosalie was distressed, defiant and eloquent. Her distinction as one unafraid to speak up in a society so often deaf to the cries and anguish of its first people, its singular uniqueness, is well earned. She appears in my 2013 film, , with a searing description of a discarded people: “We are not wanted in our own country.” She has described the legacies of a genocide—a word political Australia loathes and fears.

A Genocide

A week ago, Rosalie and her daughter Ngarla put out an alert that people were starving in Utopia. They said that elderly indigenous people in the homelands had received no food from an aged care program funded by the Australian government and administered by the regional council. “One elderly man with end-stage Parkinson’s received two small packets of mincemeat and white bread,” said Ngarla, “the elderly woman living nearby received nothing.” In calling for food drops, Rosalie said, “The whole community including children and the elderly go without food, often on a daily basis.” She and Ngarla and their community have cooked and distributed food as best they can.

This is not unusual. Four years ago, I drove into the red heart and met Dr. Janelle Trees. A general practitioner whose indigenous patients live within a few miles of $1,000-a-night tourist resorts serving Uluru (Ayers Rock), she said: “Malnutrition is common. I wanted to give a patient an anti-inflammatory for an infection that would have been preventable if living conditions were better, but I couldn’t treat her because she didn’t have enough food to eat and couldn’t ingest the tablets. I feel sometimes as if I’m dealing with similar conditions as the English working class at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.”

“There’s asbestos in many Aboriginal homes, and when somebody gets a fiber of asbestos in their lungs and develops mesothelioma, [the government] doesn’t care. When the kids have chronic infections and end up adding to these incredible statistics of indigenous people dying of renal disease, and vulnerable to world record rates of rheumatic heart disease, nothing is done. I ask myself: Why not?”

When Rosalie phoned me from Utopia, she said: “It’s not so much the physical starvation as the traumatizing of my people, of whole communities. We are duped all the time. White Australia sets up organizations and structures that offer the pretense of helping us, but it’s a pretense, no more. If we oppose it, it’s a crime. Simply belonging is a crime. Suicides are everywhere. [She gave me details of the suffering in her own family.] They’re out to kill our values, to break down our traditional life until there’s nothing there anymore.”

Barkly Regional Council says its aged care packages get through and protests that the council is “the poorest of the three tiers of government and is very much dependent on [Northern] Territory and [federal] governments for funds to provide such services to the bush. Barbara Shaw, the council’s president, agreed that it was “totally unacceptable that people should be starving in a rich and well-developed country like Australia” and that “it is disgusting and wrong that indigenous people experience deep poverty such as this.”

The Intervention

The starvation and poverty and the division often sewn among indigenous people themselves as they try to identify those responsible stem in large part from an extraordinary episode known as the “intervention.” This is Australia’s dirty secret.

In 2007, then-Prime Minister John Howard sent the army into indigenous communities in the Northern Territory to “rescue children” who, claimed his minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Mal Brough, were being abused by pedophile gangs in “unthinkable numbers.”

Subsequently exposed as a fraud by the , the Northern Territory police and a damning report by child medical specialists, the “intervention” nonetheless allowed the government to destroy many of the vestiges of self-determination in the Northern Territory, the only part of Australia where Aboriginal people had won federally-legislated land rights. Here, they had administered their homelands with the dignity of self-determination and connection to land and culture and, as reported, a 40% lower mortality rate. Distribution of food was never a problem.

It is this “traditional life” that is anathema to a parasitic white industry of civil servants, contractors, lawyers and consultants that controls and often profits from Aboriginal Australia, if indirectly through the corporate structures imposed on indigenous organizations. The remote homelands are seen as an ideological threat, for they express a communalism at odds with the neo-conservatism that rules Australia and demands “assimilation.”

It is as if the enduring existence of a people who have survived and resisted more than two colonial centuries of massacre and theft remains a specter on white Australia—a reminder of whose land this really is.

I know these communities and their people who have showed me the conditions imposed on them. Many are denied consistent running water, sanitation and power. That basic sustenance should join this list is not surprising.

White Supremacy

According to the , Australia is the richest place on Earth. Politicians in Canberra are among the wealthiest citizens; they like to hang indigenous art on the white walls of their offices in the bleakly modern Parliament House. Their self-endowment is legendary. The Labor Party’s last minister for indigenous affairs, Jenny Macklin, refurbished her office at a cost to the taxpayer of more than $330,000.��During her tenure, the number of Aboriginal people living in slums increased by almost a third.

When Professor James Anaya, the respected United Nations rapporteur on the rights of indigenous people, described the “intervention” as racist, the opposition spokesman on indigenous affairs, Tony Abbott, told Anaya to “get a life” and not “just listen to the old victim brigade.” Abbott was promoted to prime minister of Australia; he was evicted in 2015.

When I began filming Indigenous Australia some 30 years ago, a global campaign was under way to end apartheid in South Africa. Having reported from South Africa, I was struck by the similarity of white supremacy and the compliance, defensiveness and indifference of people who saw themselves as liberal. For example, black incarceration in Australia is greater than that of black people in apartheid South Africa. Indigenous people go to prison, are beaten up in custody and die in custody as a matter of routine. In despairing communities, children as young as 10��take their own lives.

Yet no international opprobrium, no boycotts have disturbed the surface of “lucky” Australia. As Rosalie’s call reminds us, that surface should be shattered without delay.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit: ��/ ��

We bring you perspectives from around the world. Help us to inform and educate. Your����is tax-deductible. Join over 400 people to become a donor or you could choose to be a��.

The post Australia’s Treatment of Aboriginal People is Its Dirty Secret appeared first on 51�Թ�.

I have been filming in the Marshall Islands, which lie north of Australia, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Whenever I tell people where I have been, they ask, “Where is that?” If I offer a clue by referring to “Bikini,” they say, “You mean the swimsuit.”

Few seem aware that the bikini swimsuit was named to celebrate the nuclear explosions that destroyed Bikini island. by the United States in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958—the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima bombs every day for 12 years.

Bikini is silent today, mutated and contaminated. Palm trees grow in a strange grid formation. Nothing moves. There are no birds. The headstones in the old cemetery are alive with radiation. My shoes registered “unsafe” on a Geiger counter.

Standing on the beach, I watched the emerald green of the Pacific fall away into a vast black hole. This was the crater left by the hydrogen bomb they called “.” The explosion poisoned people and their environment for hundreds of miles, perhaps forever.

On my return journey, I stopped at Honolulu airport and noticed an American magazine called Women’s Health. On the cover was a smiling woman in a bikini swimsuit, and the headline: “You, too, can have a bikini body.” A few days earlier, in the Marshall Islands, I had interviewed women who had very different “bikini bodies”— each had suffered thyroid cancer and other life-threatening cancers. Unlike the smiling woman in the magazine, all of them were impoverished: the victims and guinea pigs of a rapacious superpower that is today more dangerous than ever.

I relate this experience as a warning and to interrupt a distraction that has consumed so many of us. The founder of modern propaganda, Edward Bernays, described this phenomenon as “” of democratic societies. He called it an “invisible government.”

Russia and Ukraine

How many people are aware that a world war has begun? At present, it is a war of propaganda, of lies and distraction, but this can change instantaneously with the first mistaken order, the first missile.

In 2009, US President Barack Obama stood before an adoring crowd in the center of Prague, in the heart of Europe. He pledged himself to make “.” People cheered and some cried. A torrent of platitudes flowed from the media. Obama was subsequently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Barack Obama © Shutterstock

It was all fake. He was lying. The Obama administration has built , more nuclear warheads, more nuclear delivery systems, more nuclear factories.��Nuclear warhead spending alone rose higher under Obama than under any American president. The .

A mini nuclear bomb is planned. It is known as the . There has never been anything like it. General James Cartwright, a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said: “.”

In the last 18 months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War II—led by the US—is .��Not since Adolf Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia.

Ukraine, once part of the Soviet Union,��has become a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) theme park. Having , Washington effectively controls a regime that is next door and hostile to Russia: a regime rotten with Nazis, literally. Prominent parliamentary figures in Ukraine are the political descendants of the notorious OUN and UPA fascists. They and call for the persecution and expulsion of the Russian-speaking minority. This is seldom news in the West, or it is inverted to suppress the truth.

In —next door to Russia—the US military is deploying combat troops, tanks and heavy weapons. This extreme provocation of the world’s second nuclear power is met with silence in the West.

South China Sea

What makes the prospect of nuclear war even more dangerous is a parallel campaign against China. Seldom a day passes when China is not elevated to the status of a “threat.” According to Admiral Harry Harris, the US Pacific commander, China is “” in the South China Sea.

What he is referring to is China building airstrips in the Spratly Islands, which are the subject of a dispute with the Philippines—a dispute without priority until Washington pressured and bribed the government in Manila and the Pentagon launched a propaganda campaign called “.”

What does this really mean? It means freedom for American warships to patrol and dominate the coastal waters of China.��Try to imagine the American reaction if Chinese warships did the same off the coast of California.

I made a film called , in which I interviewed distinguished journalists in America and Britain: reporters such as Dan Rather of CBS, Rageh Omaar of the BBC, David Rose of The Observer. All of them said that had journalists and broadcasters done their job and questioned the propaganda that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, and had the lies of George W. Bush and Tony Blair not been amplified and echoed by journalists, the 2003 invasion of Iraq might not have happened, and��hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today.

The propaganda for a war against Russia and/or��China is no different in principle. To my knowledge, no journalist in the Western “mainstream”—a Dan Rather equivalent, say—asks why China is building airstrips in the South China Sea. The answer ought to be glaringly obvious. The US is encircling China with a network of bases, with ballistic missiles, battle groups, nuclear-armed bombers.

This lethal arc extends from Australia to the islands of the Pacific, the Marianas and the Marshalls and Guam, to the Philippines, Thailand, Okinawa, Korea and��across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India. America has hung a noose around the neck of China. This is not news. Silence by media; war by media.

Donald Trump © Shutterstock

In 2015, in high secrecy, the US and Australia staged the biggest single air-sea military exercise in recent history, known as . Its aim was to rehearse an air-sea battle plan, blocking sea lanes—such as the Straits of Malacca and the Lombok Straits—that cut off China’s access to oil, gas and other vital raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.

US Presidential Election

In the circus known as the American presidential campaign, Donald Trump is being presented as a lunatic, a fascist. He is certainly odious, but he is also a media hate figure. That alone should arouse our skepticism.��Trump’s views on migration are grotesque, but no more grotesque than those of British Prime Minister David Cameron. It is not Trump who is the Great Deporter from the US, but the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama.

According to one prodigious liberal commentator, Trump is “unleashing the dark forces of violence” in the US. Unleashing them?

This is a country where and the police wage a murderous war against black Americans. This is the country that has to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of them democracies, and bombed from Asia to the Middle East, causing the deaths and dispossession of millions of people.

No country can equal this systemic record of violence. Most of America’s wars (almost all of them against defenseless countries) have been launched not by Republican presidents, but by liberal Democrats: Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

In 1947, a series of National Security Council directives described the paramount aim of American foreign policy as “.”��The ideology was messianic Americanism. We were all Americans. Or else. Heretics would be converted, subverted, bribed, smeared or crushed.

Hillary Clinton

Trump is a symptom of this, but he is also a maverick. He says the invasion of Iraq was a crime; he doesn’t want to go to war with Russia and China. The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton. She is no maverick. She embodies the resilience and violence of a system whose vaunted “exceptionalism” is totalitarian with an occasional liberal face.

As election day draws near, Clinton will be hailed as the first female president, regardless of her crimes and lies—just as Obama was lauded as the first black president and liberals swallowed his nonsense about “hope.” And the drool goes on.

Described by The Guardian columnist Owen Jones as “,” Obama recently sent drones to . He kills people usually on Tuesdays, according to The New York Times, when he is by drone.

In the 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton threatened to “” Iran.��As secretary of state under Obama, she of Honduras. Her contribution to the destruction of Libya in 2011 was almost gleeful. When the Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, was —a murder made possible by American logistics—Clinton gloated over his death: “.”

One of Clinton’s closest allies is Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state, who has attacked “Hillary.” This is the same Madeleine Albright��who infamously celebrated on TV the death of half a million Iraqi children as “.”

Among Clinton’s biggest backers are the Israel lobby and the arms companies that fuel the violence in the Middle East. She and her husband have received a fortune from Wall Street. And yet, she is about to be ordained the women’s candidate, to see off the evil Trump, the official demon. Her supporters include distinguished feminists: the likes of in the US and Anne Summers in Australia.

© Shutterstock

A generation ago, a postmodern cult now known as “identity politics” stopped many intelligent, liberal-minded people examining the causes and individuals they supported—such as the fakery of Obama and Clinton; such as bogus progressive movements like Syriza in Greece, which betrayed the people of that country and allied with their enemies.

Self-absorption, a kind of “me-ism,” became the new zeitgeist in privileged Western societies and signaled the demise of great collective movements against war, social injustice, inequality, racism and sexism.

Today, the long sleep may be over. The young are stirring again, gradually. The thousands in Britain who supported Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party leader are part of this awakening—as are those who rallied to support Senator Bernie Sanders.

In Britain, Corbyn’s closest ally, his Shadow Treasurer John McDonnell, recently committed a Labour government to pay off the debts of piratical banks and, in effect, to continue so-called austerity.

In the US, Sanders has promised to support Clinton if or when she’s nominated. He, too, has voted for when he thinks it’s “right.” He says Obama has done “.”

In Australia, there is a kind of mortuary politics, in which tedious parliamentary games are played out in the media, while refugees and indigenous people are persecuted and inequality grows, along with the danger of war. The government of Malcolm Turnbull has just announced a so-called that is a drive to war.��There was no debate. Silence.

What has happened to the great tradition of popular direct action, unfettered to parties? Where is the courage, imagination and commitment required to begin the long journey to a better, just and peaceful world? Where are the dissidents in art, film, the theatre, literature?

Where are those who will shatter the silence? Or do we wait until the first nuclear missile is fired?

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit:�� / ��/ /��

We bring you perspectives from around the world. Help us to inform and educate. Your ��is tax-deductible. Join over 400 people to become a donor or you could choose to be a��.

The post A World War Has Begun appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Secret documents found in the Australian National Archives provide a glimpse of how one of the greatest crimes of the 20^th century was executed and covered up. They also help us understand how and for whom the world is run.

The documents refer to East Timor, now known as Timor-Leste, and were written by diplomats in the Australian Embassy in Jakarta. The date was November 1976, less than a year after the Indonesian dictator General Suharto seized the then-Portuguese colony on the island of Timor.

Mass Murder

The terror that followed has few parallels; not even Pol Pot succeeded in killing, proportionally, as many Cambodians as Suharto and his fellow generals killed in East Timor. Out of a population of almost a million, up to a third were extinguished.

This was the second holocaust for which Suharto was responsible. A decade earlier, in 1965, Suharto wrested power in in a bloodbath that took more than a million lives. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reported: “In terms of numbers killed, the massacres rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20^th ����Գٳܰ���.”

This was greeted in the Western press as “.” The BBC’s correspondent in Southeast Asia, Roland Challis, later described the cover-up of the massacres as a triumph of media complicity and silence; the “official line” was that Suharto had “saved” Indonesia from a communist takeover.

“Of course my British sources knew what the American plan was,” he told me. “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, so that they could take part in this terrible holocaust. It was only much later that we learned that the American embassy was supplying [Suharto with] names and ticking them off as they were killed. There was a deal, you see. In establishing the Suharto regime, the involvement of the [US-dominated] International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were part of it. That was the deal.”

I have interviewed many of the survivors of 1965, including the acclaimed Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who bore witness to an epic of suffering “forgotten” in the West because Suharto was “our man.”��A second holocaust in resource-rich East Timor, an undefended colony, was almost inevitable.

In 1994, I filmed clandestinely in Occupied East Timor; I found a land of crosses and unforgettable grief. In my film, Death of a Nation, there is a sequence shot on board an aircraft flying over the Timor Sea. A party is in progress. Two men in suits are toasting each other in champagne. “This is a uniquely historical moment,” babbles one of them, “that is truly, uniquely historical.”

© Shutterstock

This is Australia’s foreign minister, Gareth Evans. The other man is Ali Alatas, the principal mouthpiece of Suharto. It is 1989 and they are making a symbolic flight to celebrate a piratical deal they called a “treaty.” This allowed Australia, the Suharto dictatorship and the international oil companies to divide the spoils of East Timor’s oil and gas resources.

Thanks to Evans, Australia’s then-Prime Minister Paul Keating—who regarded Suharto as a father figure—and a gang that ran Australia’s foreign policy establishment, the country distinguished itself as the only Western nation formally to recognize Suharto’s genocidal conquest. The prize, said Evans, was “zillions” of dollars.

Members of this gang reappeared the other day in documents found in the National Archives by two researchers from Monash University in Melbourne, Sara Niner and Kim McGrath. In their own handwriting, senior officials of the Department of Foreign Affairs mock reports of the rape, torture and execution of East Timorese by Indonesian troops. In scribbled annotations on a memorandum that refers to atrocities in a concentration camp, one diplomat wrote: “sounds like fun.” Another wrote: “sounds like the population are in raptures.”

Referring to a report by the Indonesian resistance, Fretilin, which describes Indonesia as an “impotent” invader, another diplomat sneered: “If ‘the enemy was impotent,’ as stated, how come they are daily raping the captured population? Or is the former a result of the latter?”

The documents, Niner says, are “vivid evidence of the lack of empathy and concern for human rights abuses in East Timor” in the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA). “The archives reveal that this culture of cover-up is closely tied to the DFA’s need to recognise Indonesian sovereignty over East Timor so as to commence negotiations over the petroleum in the East Timor Sea.”

Oil and Gas

This was a conspiracy to steal East Timor’s oil and gas. In leaked diplomatic cables in August 1975, the Australian ambassador to Jakarta, Richard Woolcott, wrote to Canberra: “It would seem to me that the Department [of Minerals and Energy] might well have an interest in closing the present gap in the agreed sea border and this could be much more readily negotiated with Indonesia … than with Portugal or independent Portuguese Timor.” Woolcott revealed that he had been briefed on Indonesia’s secret plans for an invasion. He cabled Canberra that the government should “assist public understanding in Australia” to counter “criticism of Indonesia.”

In 1993, I interviewed C. Philip Liechty, a former senior CIA operations officer in the Jakarta embassy during the invasion of East Timor. He told me: “Suharto was given the green light [by the US] to do what he did. We supplied them with everything they needed [from] M16 rifles [to] US military logistical support … maybe 200,000 people, almost all of them non-combatants died. When the atrocities began to appear in the CIA reporting, the way they dealt with these was to cover them up as long as possible; and when they couldn’t be covered up any longer, they were reported in a watered-down, very generalized way, so that even our own sourcing was sabotaged.”

I asked Liechty what would have happened had someone spoken out. “Your career would end,” he replied. He said his interview with me was one way of making amends for “how badly I feel.”

© Shutterstock

The gang in the Australian Embassy in Jakarta appear to suffer no such anguish.��One of the scribblers on the documents, Cavan Hogue, told The Sydney Morning Herald: “It does look like my handwriting. If I made a comment like that, being the cynical bugger that I am, it would certainly have been in the spirit of irony and sarcasm. It’s about the [Fretilin] press release, not the Timorese.” Hogue said there were “atrocities on all sides.”

As one who reported and filmed the evidence of genocide, I find this last remark especially profane. The Fretilin “propaganda” he derides was accurate. The subsequent report of the United Nations (UN) on East Timor describes thousands of cases of summary execution and violence against women by Suharto’s Kopassus special forces, many of whom were trained in Australia. “Rape, sexual slavery and sexual violence were tools used as part of the campaign designed to inflict a deep experience of terror, powerlessness and hopelessness upon pro-independence supporters,” the UN says.

Cavan Hogue, the joker and “cynical bugger,” was promoted to senior ambassador and eventually retired on a generous pension. Richard Woolcott was made head of the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra and, in retirement, has lectured widely as a “respected diplomatic intellectual.”

Journalists watered at the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, notably those employed by Rupert Murdoch, who controls almost 70% of Australia’s capital city press.��Murdoch’s correspondent in Indonesia was Patrick Walters, who reported that Jakarta’s “economic achievements” in East Timor were “impressive,” as was Jakarta’s “generous” development of the blood-soaked territory. As for the East Timorese resistance, it was “leaderless” and beaten. In any case, “no one was now arrested without proper legal procedures.”

In December 1993, one of Murdoch’s veteran retainers, Paul Kelly, then-editor-in-chief of The Australian, was appointed by Foreign Minister Evans to the Australia-Indonesia Institute, a body funded by the Australian government to promote the “common interests” of Canberra and the Suharto dictatorship. Kelly led a group of Australian newspaper editors to Jakarta for an audience with the mass murderer. There is a photograph of one of them bowing.

Bullying Campaign

East Timor won its independence in 1999 with the blood and courage of its ordinary people. The tiny, fragile democracy was immediately subjected to a relentless campaign of bullying by the Australian government, which sought to maneuver it out of its legal ownership of the sea bed’s oil and gas revenue. To get its way, Australia refused to recognize the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and the Law of the Sea, and unilaterally changed the maritime boundary in its own favor.

In 2006, a deal was finally signed, mafia-style, largely on Australia’s terms. Soon afterward, Prime Minister Mari Alkitiri, a nationalist who had stood up to Canberra, was effectively deposed in what he called an “attempted coup” by “outsiders.” The Australian military, which had “peace-keeping” troops in East Timor, had trained his opponents.

In the 17 years since East Timor won its independence, the Australian government has taken nearly $5 billion in oil and gas revenue—money that belongs to its impoverished neighbor.

Australia has been called America’s “deputy sheriff” in the South Pacific. One man with the badge is Gareth Evans, the foreign minister filmed lifting his champagne glass to toast the theft of East Timor’s natural resources. Today, Evans is a lectern-trotting zealot promoting a brand of war-mongering known as “RTP,” or “Responsibility to Protect.” As co-chair of a New York-based “Global Center,” he runs a US-backed lobby group that urges the “international community” to attack countries where “the [UN] Security Council rejects a proposal or fails to deal with it in a reasonable time.” The man for the job, as the East Timorese might say.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit: / / ��/��

We bring you perspectives from around the world. Help us to inform and educate. Your����is tax-deductible. Join over 400 people to become a donor or you could choose to be a��.

The post The Rape of East Timor appeared first on 51�Թ�.

One of the epic miscarriages of justice of our time is unraveling. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention—the international tribunal that adjudicates and decides whether governments comply with their human rights obligations—has ruled that has been detained unlawfully by Britain and Sweden.

After five years of fighting to clear his name—having been smeared relentlessly yet charged with no crime—Assange is closer to justice and vindication, and perhaps freedom, than at any time since he was arrested and held in London under a European Extradition Warrant, itself now discredited by parliament.

The United Nations Working Group bases its judgments on the European Convention on Human Rights and three other treaties that are binding on all its signatories. Both Britain and Sweden participated in the 16-month long United Nations (UN) investigation and submitted evidence and defended their position before the tribunal. It would fly contemptuously in the face of international law if they did not comply with the judgment and allow Assange to leave the refuge granted to him by the Ecuadorean government in its London embassy.

In previous, celebrated cases ruled upon by the Working Group—Aung Sang Suu Kyi in , imprisoned opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim in Malaysia, detained Washington Post journalist in Iran—both Britain and Sweden have given support to the tribunal. The difference now is that Assange’s persecution and confinement endures in the heart of London.

The Background

The Assange case has never been primarily about allegations of sexual misconduct in Sweden, where the Stockholm chief prosecutor, Eva Finne, dismissed the case, saying: “I don’t believe there is any reason to suspect that he has committed rape.” One of the women involved accused the police of fabricating evidence and “railroading” her, protesting that she “did not want to accuse JA of anything,” and a second prosecutor mysteriously reopened the case after political intervention, but then stalled it.

The Assange affair is rooted across the Atlantic in Pentagon-dominated Washington, obsessed with pursuing and prosecuting whistleblowers, especially Julian Assange for having exposed, in WikiLeaks, US capital crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq: the wholesale killing of civilians and contempt for sovereignty and international law.��None of this truth-telling is illegal under the US Constitution. As a presidential candidate in 2008, Barack Obama, a professor of constitutional law, as “part of a healthy democracy [and they] must be protected from reprisal.”

Obama, the betrayer, has since prosecuted more whistleblowers than all the US presidents combined. The courageous Chelsea Manning is serving 35 years in prison, having been tortured during her long pre-trial detention.

Ecuador Embassy © Shutterstock

The prospect of a similar fate has hung over Assange like a Damocles sword. According to documents released by , Assange is on a “Manhunt target list.” US Vice President Joe Biden has called him a “cyber terrorist.” In Alexandra, Virginia, a secret grand jury has attempted to concoct a crime for which Assange can be prosecuted in a court. Even though he is not an American, he is currently being fitted up with an espionage law dredged up from a century ago when it was used to silence conscientious objectors during World War I; the Espionage Act has provisions of both life imprisonment and the death penalty.

Assange’s ability to defend himself in this Kafkaesque world has been handicapped by the US declaring his case a state secret. A federal court has blocked the release of all information about what is known as the “national security” investigation of WikiLeaks.

The supporting act in this charade has been played by the second Swedish prosecutor, Marianne Ny. Until recently, Ny had refused to comply with a routine European procedure that required her to travel to London to question Assange and so advance the case that James Catlin, one of Assange’s barristers, called “a laughing stock … it’s as if they make it up as they go along.”

Indeed, even before Assange had left Sweden for London in 2010, Ny made no attempt to question him. In the years since, she has never properly explained, even to her own judicial authorities, why she has not completed the case she so enthusiastically reignited—just as the she has never explained why she has refused to give Assange a guarantee that he will not be extradited to the US under a secret arrangement agreed between Stockholm and Washington. In 2010, The Independent in London revealed that the two governments had discussed Assange’s onward extradition.

Then there is tiny, brave Ecuador. One of the reasons Ecuador granted Julian Assange political asylum was that his own government, in Australia, had offered him none of the help to which he had a legal right and so abandoned him. Australia’s collusion with the United States against its own citizen is evident in leaked documents; no more faithful vassals has America than the obeisant politicians of the Antipodes.

Freeing Assange

Four years ago, in Sydney, I spent several hours with Malcolm Turnbull, a Liberal member of the Federal Parliament. We discussed the threats to Assange and their wider implications for freedom of speech and justice, and why Australia was obliged to stand by him. Turnbull is now the prime minister of Australia and, as I write, is attending an international conference on Syria hosted the British government—about a 15-minute cab ride from the room that Julian Assange has occupied for three and a half years in the small Ecuadorean embassy just along from Harrods. The Syria connection is relevant if unreported; it was WikiLeaks which revealed that the US had long planned to overthrow the Assad government in Syria.

Today, as he meets and greets, Prime Minister Turnbull has an opportunity to contribute a modicum of purpose and truth to the conference by speaking up for his unjustly imprisoned compatriot, for whom he showed such concern when we met.��All he need do is quote the judgment of the UN Working Party on Arbitrary Detention. Will he reclaim this shred of Australia’s reputation in the decent world?

What is certain is that the decent world owes much to Julian Assange. He told us how indecent power behaves in secret, how it lies and manipulates and engages in great acts of violence, sustaining wars that kill and maim and turn millions into the refugees now in the news. Telling us this truth alone earns Assange his freedom, whereas justice is his right.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit: / ��/��

We bring you perspectives from around the world. Help us to inform and educate. Your����is tax-deductible. Join over 400 people to become a donor or you could choose to be a��.

The post Freeing Julian Assange: The Last Chapter appeared first on 51�Թ�.

On January 26, one of the saddest days in human history will be celebrated in . It will be “a day for families,” say the newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch. Flags will be dispensed at street corners and displayed on funny hats. People will say incessantly how proud they are.

For many, there is relief and gratitude. In my lifetime, non-indigenous Australia has changed from an Anglo-Irish society to one of the most ethnically diverse on Earth. Those we used to call “New Australians” often choose January 26, “Australia Day,” to be sworn in as citizens. The ceremonies can be touching. Watch the faces from the and understand why they clench their new flag.

It was sunrise on January 26 so many years ago when I stood with indigenous and non-indigenous Australians and threw wreaths into Sydney Harbour. We had climbed down to one of the perfect sandy coves where others had stood as silhouettes, watching as the ships of Britain’s “First Fleet” dropped anchor on January 26, 1788. This was the moment the only island continent on Earth was taken from its inhabitants; the euphemism was “settled.” It was, wrote Henry Reynolds, one of few honest Australian historians, one of the greatest land grabs in world history. He described the slaughter that followed as “a whispering in our hearts.”

Native Australians

The original Australians are the oldest human presence. To the European invaders, they did not exist because their continent had been declared terra nullius: empty land. To justify this fiction, mass murder was ordained. In 1838, the Sydney Monitor reported: “It was resolved to exterminate the whole race of blacks in that quarter.” This referred to the Darug people who lived along the great Hawkesbury River not far from Sydney. With remarkable ingenuity and without guns, they fought an epic resistance that remains almost a national secret. In a land littered with cenotaphs honoring Australia’s settler dead in mostly imperial wars, not one stands for those warriors who fought and fell defending Australia.

This truth has no place in the Australian consciousness. Among settler nations with indigenous populations, apart from a facile “apology” in 2008, only Australia has refused to come to terms with the shame of its colonial past. A Hollywood film, Soldier Blue, in 1970 famously inverted racial stereotypes and gave Americans a glimpse of the genocide in their own mythical “settlement.” Almost half a century later, it is fair to say an equivalent film would never be made in Australia.

In 2014, when my own film, Utopia, which told the story of the Australian genocide, sought a local distributor, I was advised by a luminary in the business: “No way I could distribute this. The audiences wouldn’t accept it.”

He was wrong—up to a point. When Utopia opened in Sydney a few days before January 26, under the stars on vacant land in an indigenous inner-city area known as The Block, more than 4,000 people came, the majority non-indigenous. Many had traveled from right across the continent. Indigenous leaders who had appeared in the film stood in front of the screen and spoke in “language”—their own. Nothing like it had happened before. Yet there was no press. For the wider community, it did not happen. Australia is a Murdochracy, dominated by the ethos of a man who swapped his nationality for the Fox Network in the US.

The star indigenous AFL footballer Adam Goodes wrote movingly to the Sydney Morning Herald demanding that “the silence is broken.” “Imagine,” he wrote, “watching a film that tells the truth about the terrible injustices committed against your people, a film that reveals how Europeans, and the governments that have run our country, have raped, killed and stolen from your people for their own benefit.

“Now imagine how it feels when the people who benefited most from those rapes, those killings and that theft – the people in whose name the oppression was done – turn away in disgust when someone seeks to expose it.”

Goodes himself had already broken a silence when he stood against racist abuse thrown at him and other indigenous sportspeople. This courageous, talented man retired from football in 2015 as if under a cloud—with, wrote one commentator, “the sporting nation divided about him.” In Australia, it is respectable to be “divided” on opposing racism.

Invasion Day

On Australia Day 2016—indigenous people prefer Invasion Day or Survival Day—there will be no acknowledgement that the country’s uniqueness is its first people, along with an ingrained colonial mentality that ought to be an abiding embarrassment in an independent nation. This mentality is expressed in a variety of ways—from unrelenting political groveling at the knee of a rapacious United States to an almost casual contempt for Indigenous Australians, an echo of “kaffir” abusing South Africans.

Apartheid runs through Australian society. Within a short flight from Sydney, indigenous people live the shortest of lives. Men are often dead before they reach 45. They die from Dickensian diseases, such as rheumatic heart disease. Children go blind from trachoma, and deaf from otitis media, diseases of poverty. A doctor told me: “I wanted to give a patient an anti-inflammatory for an infection that would have been preventable if living conditions were better, but I couldn’t treat her because she didn’t have enough food to eat and couldn’t ingest the tablets. I feel sometimes as if I’m dealing with similar conditions as the English working class of the beginning of the industrial revolution.”

The racism that allows this in one of the most privileged societies on Earth runs deep. In the 1920s, a “Protector of Aborigines” oversaw the theft of mixed race children with the justification of “breeding out the color.”��Today, record numbers of indigenous children are removed from their homes and many never see their families again. On February 11, an inspiring group called Grandmothers Against Removals will lead a march on Federal Parliament in Canberra, demanding the return of the stolen children.

Australia is the envy of European governments now fencing in their once-open borders while beckoning fascism, as in . Refugees who dare set sail for Australia in overcrowded boats have long been treated as criminals, along with the “smugglers” whose hyped notoriety is used by the Australian media to distract from the immorality and criminality of their own government. The refugees are confined behind barbed wire on average for well over a year, some indefinitely, in barbaric conditions that have led to self-harm, murder, suicide and mental illness. Children have not been spared. An Australian Gulag run by sinister private security firms includes concentration camps on the remote Pacific islands of Manus and Nauru. People often have no idea when they might be freed, if at all.

The Australian military—whose derring-do is the subject of uncritical tomes that fill the shelves of airport bookstalls—has played an important part in “turning back the boats” of refugees fleeing wars, such as in Iraq, launched and prolonged by the Americans and their Australian mercenaries. No irony, let alone responsibility, is acknowledged in this cowardly role.

On this Australia Day, the “pride of the services” will be on display. This pride extends to the Australian Immigration Department, which commits people to its Gulag for “offshore processing,” often arbitrarily, leaving them to grieve and despair and rot. Last week, it was announced that immigration officials had spent $400,000 on medals that they will award their heroic selves. Put out more flags.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit: ��/��

We bring you perspectives from around the world. Help us to inform and educate. Your����is tax-deductible. Join over 400 people to become a donor or you could choose to be a��.

The post Australia’s Day For Secrets, Flags and Cowards appeared first on 51�Թ�.

George Orwell said: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

These are dark times, in which the propaganda of deceit touches all our lives. It is as if political reality has been privatized and illusion legitimized. The information age is a media age. We have politics by media; censorship by media; war by media; retribution by media; diversion by media—a surreal assembly line of clichés and false assumptions.

Wondrous technology has become both our friend and our enemy. Every time we turn on a computer or pick up a digital device—our secular rosary beads—we are subjected to control: to surveillance of our habits and routines, and to lies and manipulation.

Edward Bernays, who invented the term “public relations” as a euphemism for “propaganda,” predicted this more than 80 years ago. He called it “the invisible government.”

He wrote: “Those who manipulate this unseen element of [modern democracy] constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country … We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”

The aim of this invisible government is the conquest of us—of our political consciousness, our sense of the world, our ability to think independently, to separate truth from lies.

This is a form of fascism, a word we are rightly cautious about using, preferring to leave it in the flickering past.��But an insidious modern fascism is now an accelerating danger. As in the 1930s, big lies are delivered with the regularity of a metronome. Muslims are bad. Saudi bigots are good. Islamic State bigots are bad. Russia is always bad. China is getting bad. Bombing Syria is good. Corrupt banks are good. Corrupt debt is good. Poverty is good. War is normal.

Those who question these official truths, this extremism, are deemed in need of a lobotomy—until they are diagnosed on-message. The BBC provides this service free of charge. Failure to submit is to be tagged a “radical”—whatever that means.

Real dissent has become exotic, yet those who dissent have never been more important. is an antidote to a fascism that never speaks its name.

It’s a revolutionary book, just as WikiLeaks itself is revolutionary—exactly as Orwell meant in the quote I used at the beginning.��For it says that we need not accept these the daily lies. We need not remain silent. Or as Bob Marley once sang: “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery.”

In the introduction, Julian Assange explains that it is never enough to publish the secret messages of great power: That making sense of them is crucial, as well as placing them in the context of today and historical memory.

That is the remarkable achievement of this anthology, which reclaims our memory. It connects the reasons and the crimes that have caused so much human turmoil—from Vietnam and Central America, to the Middle East and Eastern Europe, with the matrix of rapacious power: the United States.

There is currently an American and European attempt to destroy the government of Syria. British Prime Minister David Cameron is especially keen. This is the same Cameron I remember as an unctuous PR man employed by an asset stripper of Britain’s independent commercial television.

Cameron, Obama and the ever obsequious Francois Hollande want to destroy the last remaining multicultural authority in Syria, an action that will surely make way for the fanatics of the Islamic State.

This is insane, of course, and the big lie justifying this insanity is that it is in support of Syrians who rose against Bashar al-Assad in the Arab Spring. As The WikiLeaks Files reveals, the destruction of Syria has long been a cynical imperial project that pre-dates the Arab Spring uprising against Assad.

To the rulers of the world in Washington and Europe, Syria’s true crime is not the oppressive nature of its government, but its independence from American and Israeli power—just as Iran’s true crime is its independence, and Russia’s true crime is its independence and China’s true crime is its independence. In an American-owned world, independence is intolerable.

This book reveals these truths, one after the other—the truth about a War on Terror that was always a war of terror; the truth about Guantanamo; the truth about Iraq, Afghanistan and Latin America.

Never has such truth-telling been so urgently needed. With honorable exceptions, those in the media paid ostensibly to keep the record straight are now absorbed into a system of propaganda that is no longer journalism, but anti-journalism. This is true of the liberal and respectable as it is of Rupert Murdoch. Unless you are prepared to monitor and deconstruct every specious assertion, so-called news has become unwatchable and unreadable.

Reading The WikiLeaks Files, I remembered the words of the late Howard Zinn, who often referred to “a power that governments can’t suppress.” That describes WikiLeaks, and it describes true whistleblowers who share their courage.

On a personal note, I have known the people of WikiLeaks for some time now. That they have achieved what they have in circumstances not of their choosing is a source of constant admiration. Their rescue of Edward Snowden comes to mind. Like him, they are heroic—nothing less.

Sarah Harrison’s chapter, “Indexing the Empire,” describes how she and her comrades set up an entire Public Library of US Diplomacy. There are more than 2 million documents, now available to all. “Our work,” she writes, “is dedicated to making sure history belongs to everyone.”��How thrilling it is to read those words, which also stand as a tribute to her own courage.

From the confinement of a room in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, the courage of Julian Assange is an eloquent response to the cowards who have smeared him and the rogue power seeking revenge on him and waging a war on democracy. None of this has deterred Assange and his comrades at WikiLeaks—not one bit. Isn’t that something?

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit: ��/��

We bring you perspectives from around the world. Help us to inform and educate. Your����is tax-deductible. Join over 400 people to become a donor or you could choose to be a��.

The post The Revolutionary Act of Telling the Truth appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Author’s Note: This is an updated version of John Pilger’s 2014 , which tells the unreported story of an unrelenting campaign to deny Julian Assange justice and silence WikiLeaks—a campaign now reaching a dangerous stage.

The siege of Knightsbridge is both an emblem of gross injustice and a grueling farce.��For three years, a police cordon around the Ecuadorean Embassy in London has served no purpose other than to flaunt the power of the state. It has cost��£12 million. The quarry is an Australian charged with no crime, a refugee whose only security is the room given to him by a brave South American country. His “crime” is to have initiated a wave of truth-telling in an era of lies, cynicism and war.

The persecution of is about to flare again as it enters a dangerous stage. From��August 20, three-quarters of the Swedish prosecutor’s case against Assange regarding sexual misconduct in 2010 will disappear as the statute of limitations expires. At the same time, Washington’s obsession with Assange and WikiLeaks has intensified. Indeed, it is vindictive American power that offers the greatest threat—as Chelsea Manning and those still held in can attest.

The Americans are pursuing Assange because WikiLeaks exposed their epic crimes in and : the wholesale killing of tens of thousands of civilians, which they covered up, and their contempt for sovereignty and international law, as demonstrated vividly in their leaked diplomatic cables. WikiLeaks continues to expose criminal activity by the United States, having just published top secret US intercepts—American spies’ reports detailing private phone calls of French presidents and German chancellors and other senior officials, relating to internal European political and economic affairs.

None of this is illegal under the US Constitution. As a presidential candidate in 2008, , a professor of constitutional law, lauded whistleblowers as “part of a healthy democracy [and they] must be protected from reprisal.” In 2012, the campaign to re-elect President Barack Obama boasted on its website that he had prosecuted more whistleblowers in his first term than all other US presidents combined. Before Chelsea Manning had even received a trial, Obama had pronounced the whistleblower guilty. Manning was subsequently sentenced to 35 years in prison, having been tortured during his long pre-trial detention.

The Prosecutor

Few doubt that should the US get their hands on Assange, a similar fate awaits him. Threats of the capture and assassination of Assange became the currency of the political extremes in the US following Vice-President Joe Biden’s preposterous slur that the WikiLeaks founder was a “cyber-terrorist.” Those doubting the degree of ruthlessness Assange can expect should remember the forcing down of the Bolivian president’s plane in 2013—wrongly believed to be carrying .

According to documents released by Snowden, Assange is on a “Manhunt target list.” Washington’s bid to get him, say Australian diplomatic cables, is “unprecedented in scale and nature.” In Alexandria, Virginia, a secret grand jury has spent five years attempting to contrive a crime for which Assange can be prosecuted. This is not easy. The First Amendment to the US Constitution protects publishers, journalists and whistleblowers.

Faced with this constitutional hurdle, the US Justice Department has contrived charges of “espionage,” “conspiracy to commit espionage,” “conversion” (theft of government property), “computer fraud and abuse” (computer hacking) and general “conspiracy.” The Espionage Act has life in prison and death penalty provisions.

Assange’s ability to defend himself in this Kafkaesque world has been handicapped by the US declaring his case a state secret. In March, a federal court in Washington blocked the release of all information about the “national security” investigation against WikiLeaks, because it was “active and ongoing” and would harm the “pending prosecution” of Assange. The judge, Barbara J. Rothstein, said it was necessary to show “appropriate deference to the executive in matters of national security.” Such is the “justice” of a kangaroo court.

The supporting act in this grim farce is Sweden, played by the Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny. Until recently, Ny refused to comply with a routine European procedure that required her to travel to London to question Assange and so advance the case. For four and a half years, Ny has never properly explained why she has refused to visit London, just as Swedish authorities have never explained why they refuse to give Assange a guarantee that they will not extradite him to the US under a secret arrangement agreed between Stockholm and Washington. In December 2010,��The Independent revealed that the two governments had discussed his onward extradition to the US.

Contrary to its 1960s reputation as a liberal bastion, Sweden has drawn so close to Washington that it has allowed secret “renditions” by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), including the illegal deportation of refugees. The rendition and subsequent torture of two Egyptian political refugees in 2001 was condemned by the United Nations Committee Against Torture, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch; the complicity and duplicity of the Swedish state are documented in successful civil litigation and in WikiLeaks cables. In summer 2010, Assange had flown to Sweden to talk about WikiLeaks revelations of the Afghanistan War—in which Sweden had forces under US command.

© Shutterstock

“Documents released by WikiLeaks since Assange moved to England,” wrote Al Burke, editor of the online Nordic News Network, an authority on the multiple twists and dangers facing Assange, “clearly indicate that Sweden has consistently submitted to pressure from the United States in matters relating to civil rights. There is every reason for concern that if Assange were to be taken into custody by Swedish authorities, he could be turned over to the United States without due consideration of his legal rights.”

Why hasn’t the Swedish prosecutor resolved the Assange case?��Many in the legal community in Sweden believe her behavior inexplicable. Once implacably hostile to Assange, the Swedish press has published headlines such as: “Go to London, for God’s sake.”

Why hasn’t she? More to the point, why won’t she allow the Swedish court access to hundreds of SMS messages that the police extracted from the phone of one of the two women involved in the misconduct allegations? Why won’t she hand them over to Assange’s Swedish lawyers? Ny says she is not legally required to do so until a formal charge is laid and she has questioned him. Then, why doesn’t she question him? And if she did question him, the conditions she would demand of him and his lawyers—that they could not challenge her—would make injustice a near certainty.

On a point of law, the Swedish Supreme Court has decided Ny can continue to obstruct on the vital issue of the SMS messages. This will now go to the European Court of Human Rights. What Ny fears is that the SMS messages will destroy her case against Assange. One of the messages makes clear that one of the women did not want any charges brought against Assange, “but the police were keen on getting a hold on him.” She was “shocked” when they arrested him because she only “wanted him to take [an HIV] test.” She “did not want to accuse JA [Julian Assange] of anything” and “it was the police who made up the charges.” (In a witness statement, she is quoted as saying that she had been “railroaded by police and others around her.”)

The Case

Neither woman claimed she had been raped. Indeed, both have denied they were raped and one of them has since tweeted, “I have not been raped.” That they were manipulated by police and their wishes ignored is evident—whatever their lawyers might say now. Certainly, they are victims of a saga that blights the reputation of Sweden itself.

For Assange, his only trial has been trial by media. On August 20, 2010, Swedish police opened a “rape investigation” and immediately—and unlawfully—told the Stockholm tabloids that there was a warrant for Assange’s arrest for the “rape of two women.” This was the news that went round the world.

In Washington, a smiling US Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters that the arrest “sounds like good news to me.” Twitter accounts associated with the Pentagon described Assange as a “rapist” and a “fugitive.”

© Shutterstock

Less than 24 hours later, the Stockholm chief prosecutor, Eva Finne, took over the investigation. She wasted no time in cancelling the arrest warrant, saying, “I don’t believe there is any reason to suspect that he has committed rape.” Four days later, she dismissed the rape investigation altogether, saying, “There is no suspicion of any crime whatsoever.”��The file was closed.

Enter Claes Borgstrom, a high profile politician in the Social Democratic Party, then standing as a candidate in Sweden’s imminent general election. Within days of the chief prosecutor’s dismissal of the case, Borgstrom, a lawyer, announced to the media that he was representing the two women and had sought a different prosecutor in the city of Gothenberg. This was Marianne Ny, whom Borgstrom knew well, personally and politically.

On��August 30, Assange attended a police station in Stockholm voluntarily and answered all the questions put to him. He understood that was the end of the matter. Two days later, Ny announced she was re-opening the case. Borgstrom was asked by a Swedish reporter why the case was proceeding when it had already been dismissed, citing one of the women as saying she had not been raped. He replied, “Ah, but she is not a lawyer.” Assange’s Australian barrister, James Catlin, responded, “This is a laughing stock … it’s as if they make it up as they go along.”

On the day Ny reactivated the case, the head of Sweden’s military intelligence service—which has the acronym MUST—publicly denounced WikiLeaks in an article entitled “WikiLeaks [is] a threat to our soldiers.” Assange was warned that the Swedish intelligence service, SAPO, had been told by its US counterparts that US-Sweden intelligence-sharing arrangements would be “cut off” if Sweden sheltered him.

For five weeks, Assange waited in Sweden for the new investigation to take its course. The Guardian was then on the brink of publishing the Iraq “War Logs,” based on WikiLeaks’ disclosures, which Assange was to oversee. His lawyer in Stockholm asked Ny if she had any objection to his leaving the country. She said he was free to leave.

Inexplicably, as soon as he left Sweden—at the height of media and public interest in the WikiLeaks disclosures—Ny issued a European Arrest Warrant and an Interpol “red alert,” which is normally used for terrorists and dangerous criminals. Put out in five languages around the world, it ensured a media frenzy.

Assange attended a police station in London, was arrested and spent ten days in Wandsworth Prison, in solitary confinement. Released on £340,000 bail, he was electronically tagged, required to report to police daily and placed under virtual house arrest while his case began its long journey to the Supreme Court. He still had not been charged with any offence. His lawyers repeated his offer to be questioned by Ny in London, pointing out that she had given him permission to leave Sweden. They suggested a special facility at Scotland Yard commonly used for that purpose. She refused.

Katrin Axelsson and Lisa Longstaff of Women Against Rape wrote:

“The allegations against [Assange] are a smokescreen behind which a number of governments are trying to clamp down on WikiLeaks for having audaciously revealed to the public their secret planning of wars and occupations with their attendant rape, murder and destruction … The authorities care so little about violence against women that they manipulate rape allegations at will. [Assange] has made it clear he is available for questioning by the Swedish authorities, in Britain or via Skype. Why are they refusing this essential step in their investigation? What are they afraid of?”

This question remained unanswered as Ny deployed the European Arrest Warrant (EAW), a draconian and now discredited����product of the “War on Terror” supposedly designed to catch terrorists and organized criminals. The EAW had abolished the obligation on a petitioning state to provide any evidence of a crime. More than a thousand EAWs are issued each month; only a few have anything to do with potential “terror” charges. Most are issued for trivial offences, such as overdue bank charges and fines. Many of those extradited face months in prison without charge. There have been a number of shocking miscarriages of justice, of which British judges have been highly critical.

© Shutterstock

UK Courts

The Assange case finally reached the UK Supreme Court in May 2012. In a judgment that upheld the EAW—whose rigid demands had left the courts almost no room for maneuver—the judges found that European prosecutors could issue extradition warrants in Britain without any judicial oversight, even though Parliament intended otherwise. They made clear that Parliament had been “misled” by the Blair government. The court was split, 5-2, and consequently found against Assange.

However, the chief justice, Lord Phillips, made one mistake. He applied the Vienna Convention on treaty interpretation, allowing for state practice to override the letter of the law. As Assange’s barrister, Dinah Rose QC, pointed out, this did not apply to the EAW.

The Supreme Court only recognized this crucial error when it dealt with another appeal against the EAW in November 2013. The Assange decision had been wrong, but it was too late to go back. With extradition imminent, the Swedish prosecutor told Assange’s lawyers that, once in Sweden, he would be immediately placed in one of Sweden’s infamous remand prisons.

Assange’s choice was stark: extradition to a country that had refused to say whether or not it would send him on to the US, or to seek what seemed his last opportunity for refuge and safety. Supported by most of Latin America, the courageous government of Ecuador granted him refugee status on the basis of documented evidence and legal advice that he faced the prospect of cruel and unusual punishment in the US; that this threat violated his basic human rights; and that his own government in Australia had abandoned him and colluded with Washington. The Labor government of Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard had even threatened to take away his passport.

Gareth Peirce, the renowned human rights lawyer who represents Assange in London, wrote to then-Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd:

“Given the extent of the public discussion, frequently on the basis of entirely false assumptions … it is very hard to attempt to preserve for him any presumption of innocence. Mr. Assange has now hanging over him not one but two Damocles swords, of potential extradition to two different jurisdictions in turn for two different alleged crimes, neither of which are crimes in his own country, and that his personal safety has become at risk in circumstances that are highly politically charged.”

It was not until she contacted the Australian High Commission in London that Peirce received a response, which answered none of the pressing points she raised. In a meeting this author attended with her, the Australian Consul-General, Ken Pascoe, made the astonishing claim that he knew “only what I read in the newspapers” about the details of the case.

Meanwhile, the prospect of a grotesque miscarriage of justice was drowned in a vituperative campaign against the WikiLeaks founder. Deeply personal, petty, vicious and inhuman attacks were aimed at a man not charged with any crime, yet subjected to treatment not even meted out to a defendant facing extradition on a charge of murdering his wife. That the US threat to Assange was a threat to all journalists, to freedom of speech, was lost in the sordid and the ambitious.

Books were published, movie deals struck and media careers launched or kick-started on the back of WikiLeaks and an assumption that attacking Assange was fair game and he was too poor to sue. People have made money, often big money, while WikiLeaks has struggled to survive. The editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, called the WikiLeaks disclosures, which his newspaper published, “one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years.” It became part of his marketing plan to raise the newspaper’s cover price.

With not a penny going to Assange or to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie. The book’s authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, gratuitously described Assange as a “damaged personality” and “callous.” They also revealed the secret password he had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing the US embassy cables. With Assange now trapped in the Ecuadorean Embassy, Harding, standing among the police outside, gloated on his blog that “Scotland Yard may get the last laugh.”

The injustice meted out to Assange is one of the reasons the British Parliament reformed the Extradition Act to prevent the misuse of the EAW. The draconian catch-all used against him could not happen now; charges would have to be brought and “questioning” would be insufficient grounds for extradition. “His case has been won lock, stock and barrel,” Gareth Peirce told this author. “these changes in the law mean that the UK now recognizes as correct everything that was argued in his case. Yet he does not benefit.” In other words, the change in British law in 2014 mean that Assange would have won his case and he would not have been forced to take refuge.

One Room

Ecuador’s decision to protect Assange in 2012 bloomed into a major international affair. Even though the granting of asylum is a humanitarian act, and the power to do so is enjoyed by all states under international law, both Sweden and the United Kingdom refused to recognize the legitimacy of Ecuador’s decision. Ignoring international law, the Cameron government refused to grant Assange safe passage to Ecuador. Instead, Ecuador’s embassy was placed under siege and its government abused with a series of ultimatums. When William Hague’s Foreign Office threatened to violate the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, warning that it would remove the diplomatic inviolability of the embassy and send the police in to get Assange, outrage across the world forced the government to back down. During one night, police appeared at the windows of the embassy in an obvious attempt to intimidate Assange and his protectors.

Since then, Julian Assange has been confined to a small room under Ecuador’s protection, without sunlight or space to exercise, surrounded by police under orders to arrest him on sight. For three years, Ecuador has made clear to the Swedish prosecutor that Assange is available to be questioned in the London embassy, and for three years Marianne Ny has remained intransigent. In the same period, Sweden has questioned 44 people in the UK in connection with police investigations. Her role, and that of the Swedish state, is demonstrably political; and for Ny, facing retirement in two years, she must “win.”

In despair, Assange has challenged the arrest warrant in the Swedish courts. His lawyers have cited rulings by the European Court of Human Rights that he has been under arbitrary, indefinite detention, and that he had been a virtual prisoner for longer than any actual prison sentence he might face. The Court of Appeal judge agreed with Assange’s lawyers: The prosecutor had indeed breached her duty by keeping the case suspended for years. Another judge issued a rebuke to the prosecutor. And yet she defied the court.

Last December, Assange took his case to the Swedish Supreme Court, which ordered Marianne Ny’s boss—the Prosecutor General of Sweden Anders Perklev—to explain. The next day, Ny announced, without explanation, that she had changed her mind and would now question Assange in London.

In his submission to the Supreme Court, the prosecutor general made some important concessions: He argued that the coercion of Assange had been “intrusive” and that that the period in the embassy has been a “great strain” on him. He even conceded that if the matter had ever come to prosecution, trial, conviction and serving a sentence in Sweden, Julian Assange would have left Sweden long ago.

In a split decision, one Supreme Court judge argued that the arrest warrant should have been revoked. The majority of the judges ruled that, since the prosecutor had now said she would go to London, Assange’s arguments had become “moot.” But the court ruled that it would have found against the prosecutor if she had not suddenly changed her mind. Justice by caprice. Writing in the Swedish press, a former Swedish prosecutor, Rolf Hillegren, accused Ny of losing all impartiality. He described her personal investment in the case as “abnormal” and demanded that she be replaced.

Having said she would go to London in June, Ny did not go, but she sent a deputy, knowing that the questioning would not be legal under these circumstances, especially as Sweden had not bothered to get Ecuador’s approval for the meeting. At the same time, her office tipped off the Swedish tabloid newspaper��Expressen, which sent its London correspondent to wait outside Ecuador’s embassy for “news.” The news was that Ny was cancelling the appointment and blaming Ecuador for the confusion and by implication an “unco-operative” Assange—when the opposite was true.

As the statute of limitations date approaches—August 20—another chapter in this hideous story will doubtlessly unfold, with Marianne Ny pulling yet another rabbit out of her hat and the commissars and prosecutors in Washington the beneficiaries. Perhaps none of this is surprising.��In 2008, a war on WikiLeaks and on Julian Assange was foretold in a secret Pentagon document prepared by the “Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch.” It described a detailed plan to destroy the feeling of “trust” that is WikiLeaks’ “center of gravity.” This would be achieved with threats of “exposure [and] criminal prosecution.” Silencing and criminalizing such a rare source of truth-telling was the aim, smear the method. While this scandal continues, the very notion of justice is diminished, along with the reputation of Sweden, and the shadow of America’s menace touches us all.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit:����/ / /��

We bring you perspectives from around the world. Help us to inform and educate. Your����is tax-deductible. Join over 400 people to become a donor or you could choose to be a��.

The post Assange: The Untold Story of an Epic Struggle for Justice appeared first on 51�Թ�.

An historic betrayal has consumed . Having set aside the mandate of the Greek electorate, the Syriza government has willfully ignored the country’s and secretly agreed a raft of repressive, impoverishing measures in return for a “bailout” that means sinister foreign control and a warning to the world.

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has pushed through parliament a proposal to cut at least €13 billion from the public purse—€4 billion more than the “austerity” figure rejected overwhelmingly by the majority of the Greek population in a referendum on July 5.

These reportedly include a 50% increase in the cost of health care for pensioners, almost 40% of whom live in poverty; deep cuts in public sector wages; the complete privatization of public facilities such as airports and ports; and a rise in value added tax to 23%, now applied to the Greek islands where people struggle to eke out a living. There is more to come.

“Anti-austerity party sweeps to stunning victory,” declared a��Guardian��headline on January 25. “Radical leftists,” the paper called Tsipras and his impressively-educated comrades.��They wore open neck shirts, and the finance minister rode a motorbike and was described as a “rock star of economics.” It was a façade. They were not radical in any sense of that clichéd label, neither were they “anti austerity.”

For six months, Tsipras and the recently discarded finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, shuttled between Athens and Brussels, Berlin and the other centers of European money power. Instead of social justice for Greece, they achieved a new indebtedness, a deeper impoverishment that would merely replace a systemic rottenness based on the theft of tax revenue by the Greek super-wealthy—in accordance with European “neo-liberal” values—and cheap, highly profitable loans from those now seeking Greece’s scalp.

Greece’s debt, reports an audit by the Greek parliament, “is illegal, illegitimate and odious.” Proportionally, it is less than 30% that of the debit of Germany, its major creditor. It is less than the debt of European banks, whose “bailout” in 2007-08 was barely controversial and unpunished.

For a small country such as Greece, the euro is a colonial currency: A tether to a capitalist ideology so extreme that even Pope Francis pronounces it “intolerable” and “the dung of the devil.” The euro is to Greece what the US dollar is to remote territories in the Pacific, whose poverty and servility is guaranteed by their dependency.

In their travels to the court of the mighty in Brussels and Berlin, Tsipras and Varoufakis presented themselves neither as radicals, nor “leftists,” nor even honest social democrats, but as two slightly upstart supplicants in their pleas and demands. Without underestimating the hostility they faced, it is fair to say they displayed no political courage. More than once, the Greek people found out about their “secret austerity plans” in leaks to the media—such as a June 30 letter published in the��Financial Times, in which Tsipras promised the heads of the European Union (EU), the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund to accept their basic, most vicious demands—which he has now accepted.

When the Greek electorate voted “no” on July 5 to this very kind of rotten deal, Tsipras said, “Come Monday and the Greek government will be at the negotiating table after the referendum with better terms for the Greek people.” Greeks had not voted for “better terms.” They had voted for justice and for sovereignty, as they had done on January 25.

The day after the January election, a truly democratic and, yes, radical government would have stopped every euro leaving the country, repudiated the “illegal and odious” debt—as Argentina did successfully—and expedited a plan to leave the crippling eurozone. But there was no plan. There was only a willingness to be “at the table” seeking “better terms.”

The true nature of Syriza has been seldom examined and explained. To the foreign media, it is no more than “leftist” or “far-left” or “hard-line”—the usual misleading spray. Some of Syriza’s international supporters have reached, at times, levels of cheerleading reminiscent of the rise of Barack Obama. Few have asked: Who are these “radicals”? What do they believe in?

In 2013, Varoufakis wrote:

“Should we welcome this crisis of European capitalism as an opportunity to replace it with a better system? Or should we be so worried about it as to embark upon a campaign for stabilising capitalism? To me, the answer is clear. Europe’s crisis is far less likely to give birth to a better alternative to capitalism.

“…I bow to the criticism that I have campaigned on an agenda founded on the assumption that the left was, and remains, squarely defeated … Yes, I would love to put forward [a] radical agenda. But, no, I am not prepared to commit the [error of the British Labour Party following Margaret Thatcher’s victory].

“What good did we achieve in Britain in the early 1980s by promoting an agenda of socialist change that British society scorned while falling headlong into Thatcher’s neoliberal trip? Precisely none. What good will it do today to call for a dismantling of the Eurozone, of the European Union itself��?”

Varoufakis omits all mention of the Social Democratic Party that split the Labour vote and led to Blairism. In suggesting people in Britain “scorned socialist change”—when they were given no real opportunity to bring about that change—he echoes Tony Blair.

Not a Done Deal

The leaders of Syriza are revolutionaries of a kind, but their revolution is the perverse, familiar appropriation of social democratic and parliamentary movements by liberals groomed to comply with neoliberal drivel and a social engineering whose authentic face is that of Wolfgang Schauble, Germany’s finance minister, an imperial thug. Like the Labour Party in Britain and its equivalents among former social democratic parties such as the Labor Party in Australia, still describing themselves as “liberal” or even “left,”��Syriza is the product of an affluent, highly privileged, educated middle-class, “schooled in postmodernism,” as Alex Lantier wrote.

For them, class is the unmentionable, let alone an enduring struggle, regardless of the reality of the lives of most human beings. Syriza’s luminaries are well-groomed; they lead not the resistance that ordinary people crave, as the Greek electorate has so bravely demonstrated, but “better terms” of a venal status quo that corrals and punishes the poor. When merged with “identity politics” and its insidious distractions, the consequence is not resistance, but subservience. “Mainstream” political life in Britain exemplifies this.

This is not inevitable, a done deal, if we wake up from the long, postmodern coma and reject the myths and deceptions of those who claim to represent us, and fight.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit: ��/��

We bring you perspectives from around the world. Help us to inform and educate. Your ��is tax-deductible. Join over 400 people to become a donor or you could choose to be a��.

The post Greek Crisis is Not Only a Tragedy: It is a Lie appeared first on 51�Թ�.

, the founder and editor of WikiLeaks, has now been a refugee in the Ecuador Embassy in London for three years.

The key issue in his extraordinary incarceration is justice. He has been charged with no crime. The first Swedish prosecutor dismissed the misconduct allegations regarding two women in Stockholm in 2010. The second Swedish prosecutor’s actions were and are demonstrably political. Until recently, she refused to come to London to interview Assange. Finally, when the British government almost pleaded with her to come, she agreed. She has now cancelled her trip.

The entire episode is a , but one with grim consequences for Assange, should he dare step outside the Ecuador Embassy. The US criminal investigation against him and WikiLeaks—for the “crime” of exercising a right enshrined in the US constitution, to tell unpalatable truths—is “unprecedented in scale and nature,” according to US documents. For this, Assange faces much of a lifetime in the hellhole of a US supermax prison if he leaves the protection of Ecuador in London.

The Swedish allegations are no more than a sideshow to this—the SMS messages between the women involved, read by lawyers, alone would exonerate him. They refer to the accusations as “made up” by the police. In the police report, one of the women says she was “railroaded” by Swedish police. What a disgrace this is for Sweden’s justice system.

Julian Assange is a refugee under international law, and he should be given the right of passage by the British government out of the United Kingdom to Ecuador. The nonsense about him “jumping bail” is just that—nonsense. If his extradition case went through the British courts today, the European Arrest Warrant would be thrown out and he would be a free man.

So what is the British government trying to prove by its absurd police cordon around an embassy whose refuge Assange has no intention of giving up? Why don’t they let him go? Why is a man charged with no crime having to spend three years in one room, without light, in the heart of London?

The Assange case amplifies many truths, and one is the accelerating, global totalitarianism of Washington, regardless of who is elected president.

I am often asked if I think Assange has been “forgotten.” It is my experience that countless ordinary people all over the world, especially in Australia, his homeland, understand perfectly well the injustice being meted out to Julian Assange. They credit him and WikiLeaks with having performed an epic public service by informing millions about what the powerful plan for them behind their backs, the lies governments and their vested interests tell, the violence they initiate. Power that is corrupt loathes this, because it is true democracy in action.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit:�� / ��/

We bring you perspectives from around the world. Help us to inform and educate. Your ��is tax-deductible. Join over 400 people to become a donor or you could choose to be a��.

The post The Injustice Handed Out To Julian Assange Must End appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Following a week in in which the words “heroes” and “heroism” bobbed on a tsunami of raw propaganda, a tribute is due to two unrecognized heroes. The first is Ray Jackson, who died on April 23.

Jackson spoke and fought for a truth that the powerful and bigoted hate to hear, see or read. He said this was a land not of brave Anzac “legacies,” but of dirty secrets and enduring injustices that only a national cowardice could sustain. “Conformity is widely understood and obeyed in Australia,” he wrote to me, “freedom is not.”

I first met Jackson in 2004 during the indigenous uprising in Redfern, Sydney, that followed the violent death of a 17-year-old, Terence Hickey. Known as “TJ,” he was chased by a police car, lost control of his bike and was impaled on an iron fence. The police denied they had caused his death. Not a single Aboriginal person believed them, least of all Jackson, whose campaign for justice will not go away.

A Wiradjuri man, Jackson was stolen from his mother at the age of 2 and given to a white family. The experience taught him about Australian genocide. A lifelong socialist, his specialty was his unflagging investigations into police thuggery toward Aboriginal people, especially the multiple deaths in police and prison custody that routinely go unpunished. Australia incarcerates black Australians at a higher rate than that of apartheid South Africa.

When Prime Minister decimated indigenous institutions and funding, Jackson took his files and videos to his single-bedroom flat and founded the Indigenous Social Justice Association. He fought for the memory of young Kwementaye Briscoe, left to die in a police cell in Alice Springs, and Brazilian Roberto Curti, tasered to death by police in Sydney. He was the champion of countless locked-up Iraqi, Iranian and Tamil . “Never stop fighting for your freedom,” he told them. Shaming official Australia, the government awarded him one of its highest human rights laureates.

Jackson loathed warmongering and would approve of my second hero. This is Scott McIntyre, a young SBS soccer journalist who, in four now famous tweets, set out to counter the authoritarian sludge that demands Australians celebrate the centenary of a criminal waste of life in the British imperial invasion of a century ago — in which Australians and , the “Anzacs,” took part — rather than recognize unpalatable truths about the past and present.

© Shutterstock

Opportunistic politicians and journalists have turned this melancholy event into a death cult that puzzles foreigners. Federal governments have spent almost $400 million promoting it as a fake patriotism — more than Britain, France, Germany and Canada combined, countries that lost many more men in the 1914-18 bloodfest. Today, the military and venal militarism are virtually off-limits for real public criticism.

Why? Australia, a nation without enemies, is now spending $28 billion a year on the military and war in order to fulfill a tragic, entirely colonial and obsequious role, now as Washington’s “deputy sheriff” in the Asia Pacific.

This much we know, perhaps have always known. But watching a contemporary version of crude Edwardian jingoism consume the nation’s intellect and self-respect has been salutary, especially the cover provided by those paid ostensibly to keep the record straight. , a zealot, oaf and one of our cruelest prime ministers, “shone” at the Gallipoli Anzac service, according to Peter Fitzsimons, whose keyboard tomes on the subject show no sign of abating. In the Murdoch press — augmented as ever to promote war after war — Paul Kelly echoes Abbott that remembrance is not enough; that the Anzac death cult “is now the essence of being Australian” … indeed, “a quasi religious force.”

Young Scott McIntyre drove the Twitter equivalent of a five-ton truck through such maudlin, cynical drivel. He tweeted the unsayable about imperial Australia, much of it the truth; and all decent journalists — or dare I say, his freedom-loving compatriots — should be standing up for him. That Malcolm Turnbull, a pretender for prime minister who made his name unctuously shouting about freedom of speech, should connive with McIntyre’s employer, the state-funded TV network, SBS (which has sacked him), is a measure of the state of public and media life in Australia.

That a journalism professor of long-standing, John Henningham, can tweet weasel words that “freedom of speech meant that journalists had the right to speak without breaking the law but did not have the right to keep their job when offending others” is a glimpse of the obstacles faced by aspiring young journalists as they navigate the university mills.

Many young people reject this, of course, and maintain their sense of the bogus, and McIntyre is one of them. He offended in the highest tradition of freedom of thought and speech. Knowing the personal consequences would be serious, he displayed moral courage. When his union, the MEAA, locates its spine and its responsibility, it must demand he is given his job back. I salute him.

*[John Pilger’s articles and films can be found at .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit:�� / /

We bring you perspectives from around the world. Help us to inform and educate. Your ��is tax-deductible. Join over 400 people to become a donor or you could choose to be a��.

The post The Message of Anzac: Put Out More Flags or Shut Up appeared first on 51�Թ�.

has again declared war on its indigenous people, reminiscent of the brutality that brought universal condemnation on apartheid South Africa. Aboriginal people are to be driven from homelands where their communities have lived for thousands of years. In Western Australia, where mining companies make billion dollar profits exploiting Aboriginal land, the state government says it can no longer afford to “support” the homelands.

Vulnerable populations, already denied the basic services most Australians take for granted, are on notice of dispossession without consultation, and eviction at gunpoint. Yet again, Aboriginal leaders have warned of “a new generation of displaced people” and “cultural genocide.”

Genocide is a word Australians hate to hear. Genocide happens in other countries, not the “lucky” society that per capita is the second richest on earth. When “act of genocide” was used in the 1997 landmark report Bringing Them Home — which revealed that thousands of indigenous children had been stolen from their communities by white institutions and systematically abused — a campaign of denial was launched by a far-right clique around then-Prime Minister John Howard. It included those who called themselves the Galatians Group, then Quadrant, then the Bennelong Society; the Murdoch press was their voice.

The Stolen Generation was exaggerated, they said, if it had happened at all. Colonial Australia was a benign place; there were no massacres. The first Australians were victims of their own cultural inferiority, or they were noble savages. Suitable euphemisms were deployed.

Abbott’s Government

The government of the current prime minister, , a conservative zealot, has revived this assault on a people who represent Australia’s singular uniqueness. Soon after coming to office, Abbott’s government cut $534 million in indigenous social programs, including $160 million from the indigenous health budget and $13.4 million from indigenous legal aid.

In the 2014 report, Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage Key Indicators, the devastation is clear. The number of Aboriginal people hospitalized for self-harm has leapt, as have suicides among those as young as 11. The indicators show a people impoverished, traumatized and abandoned. Read the classic expose of apartheid South Africa, The Discarded People by Cosmas Desmond, who told me he could write a similar account of Australia.

© Shutterstock

Having insulted indigenous Australians by declaring — at a G20 breakfast for British Prime Minister�� — that there was “nothing but bush” before the white man, Abbott announced that his government would no longer honor the longstanding commitment to Aboriginal homelands. He sneered: “It’s not the job of the taxpayers to subsidize lifestyle choices.”

The weapon used by Abbott and his redneck state and territorial counterparts is dispossession by abuse and propaganda, coercion and blackmail, such as his demand for a 99-year leasehold of indigenous land in the Northern Territory in return for basic services: a land grab in all but name. Minister for Indigenous Affairs Nigel Scullion refutes this, claiming “this is about communities and what communities want.” In fact, there has been no real consultation, only the co-option of a few.

Both Conservative and Labor governments have already withdrawn the national jobs program, CDEP, from the homelands, ending opportunities for employment, and prohibited investment in infrastructure: housing, generators and sanitation. The saving is peanuts.

The reason is an extreme doctrine that evokes the punitive campaigns of the early 20^th century “chief protector of Aborigines,” such as the fanatic A.O. Neville who decreed that the first Australians “assimilate” to extinction. Influenced by the same eugenics movement that inspired the Nazis, Queensland’s “protection acts” were a model for South African apartheid. Today, the same dogma and racism are threaded through anthropology, politics, bureaucracy and the media. “We are civilised, they are not,” wrote the acclaimed Australian historian Russel Ward two generations ago. The spirit is unchanged.

Having reported on Aboriginal communities since the 1960s, I have watched a seasonal routine whereby the Australian elite interrupts its “normal” mistreatment and neglect of the people of the First Nations, and attacks them outright. This happens when an election approaches, or a prime minister’s ratings are low. Kicking the black fella is deemed popular, although grabbing minerals-rich land by stealth serves a more prosaic purpose. Driving people into the fringe slums of “economic hub towns” satisfies the social engineering urges of racists.

“The Intervention”

The last frontal attack was in 2007, when Prime Minister Howard sent the army into Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory to “rescue children” who, according to Minister for Aboriginal Affairs Mal Brough, were being abused by pedophile gangs in “unthinkable numbers.”

Known as the “intervention,” the media played a vital role. In 2006, ABC’s Lateline broadcast a sensational interview with a man whose face was concealed. Described as a “youth worker” who had lived in the Aboriginal community of Mutitjulu, he made a series of lurid allegations. Subsequently exposed as a senior government official who reported directly to the minister, his claims were discredited by the Australian Crime Commission, the Northern Territory Police and a damning report by child medical specialists. The community received no apology.

The 2007 “intervention” allowed the federal government to destroy many of the vestiges of self-determination in the Northern Territory, the only part of Australia where Aboriginal people had won federally-legislated land rights. Here, they had administered their homelands in ways with the dignity of self-determination and connection to land and culture and, as Amnesty reported, a 40% lower mortality rate.

© Shutterstock

It is this “traditional life” that is anathema to a parasitic white industry of civil servants, contractors, lawyers and consultants that controls and often profits from Aboriginal Australia, if indirectly through the corporate structures imposed on indigenous organizations. The homelands are seen as a threat, for they express a communalism at odds with the neo-conservatism that rules Australia. It is as if the enduring existence of a people who have survived and resisted more than two colonial centuries of massacre and theft remains a specter on white Australia: a reminder of whose land this really is.

The current political attack was launched in the richest state, Western Australia. In October 2014, the state premier, Colin Barnett, announced that his government could not afford the $90 million budget for basic municipal services to 282 homelands: water, power, sanitation, schools, road maintenance and rubbish collection. It was the equivalent of informing the white suburbs of Perth that their lawn sprinklers would no longer sprinkle and their toilets no longer flush; and they had to move; and if they refused, the police would evict them.

Where would the dispossessed go? Where would they live? In six years, Barnett’s government has built few houses for indigenous people in remote areas. In the Kimberley region, indigenous homelessness — aside from natural disaster and civil strife — is one of the highest anywhere, in a state renowned for its conspicuous wealth, golf courses and prisons overflowing with impoverished black people. Western Australia jails Aboriginal males at more than eight times the rate of apartheid South Africa. It has one of the highest incarceration rates of juveniles in the world, almost all of them indigenous, including children kept in solitary confinement in adult prisons, with their mothers keeping vigil outside.

In 2013, the former prisons minister, Margaret Quirk, told me that the state was “racking and stacking” Aboriginal prisoners. When I asked what she meant, she said, “It’s warehousing.”

In March 2015, Barnett changed his story.�� There was “emerging evidence,” he said, “of appalling mistreatment of little kids” in the homelands. What evidence? Barnett claimed that gonorrhea had been found in children younger than 14, and then conceded he did not know if these were in the homelands. His police commissioner, Karl O’Callaghan, chimed in that child sexual abuse was “rife.” He quoted a 15-year-old study by the Australian Institute of Family Studies. What he failed to say was that the report highlighted poverty as the overwhelming cause of “neglect” and that sexual abuse accounted for less than 10%.

© Shutterstock

Poverty

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, a federal agency, recently released a report on what it calls the “fatal burden” of Third World disease and trauma borne by indigenous people “resulting in almost 100,000 years of life lost due to premature death.” This “fatal burden” is the product of extreme poverty imposed in Western Australia, as in the rest of Australia, by the denial of human rights.

In Barnett’s vast rich Western Australia, barely a fraction of mining, oil and gas revenue has benefited communities for which his government has a duty of care. In the town of Roeburne, in the midst of the booming minerals-rich Pilbara, 80% of the indigenous children suffer from an ear infection called otitis media that causes deafness.

In 2011, the Barnett government displayed a brutality in the community of Oombulgurri the other homelands can expect. “First, the government closed the services,” wrote Tammy Solonec of Amnesty International. “It closed the shop, so people could not buy food and essentials. It closed the clinic, so the sick and the elderly had to move, and the school, so families with children had to leave, or face having their children taken away from them. The police station was the last service to close, then eventually the electricity and water were turned off. Finally, the ten residents who resolutely stayed to the end were forcibly evicted [leaving behind] personal possessions. [Then] the bulldozers rolled into Oombulgurri. The WA government has literally dug a hole and in it buried the rubble of people’s homes and personal belongings.”

In South Australia, the state and federal governments launched a similar attack on the 60 remote indigenous communities. South Australia has a long-established Aboriginal Lands Trust, so people were able to defend their rights — up to a point. On April 12, the federal government offered $15 million over five years. That such a miserly sum is considered enough to fund proper services in the great expanse of the state’s homelands is a measure of the value placed on indigenous lives by white politicians who unhesitatingly spend $28 billion annually on armaments and the military. Haydn Bromley, chair of the Aboriginal Lands Trust, told me: “The $15 million doesn’t include most of the homelands, and it will only cover bare essentials — power, water. Community development? Infrastructure? Forget it.”

The current distraction from these national dirty secrets is the approaching “celebrations” of the centenary of an Edwardian military disaster at Gallipoli in 1915, when 8,709 Australian and 2,779 New Zealand troops — the Anzacs — were sent to their death in a futile assault on a beach in Turkey. In recent years, governments in Canberra have promoted this imperial waste of life as an historical deity to mask the militarism that underpins Australia’s role as America’s “deputy sheriff” in the Pacific.

In bookshops, “Australian non-fiction” shelves are full of opportunistic tomes about wartime derring-do, heroes and jingoism. Suddenly, Aboriginal people who fought for the white man are fashionable, whereas those who fought against the white man in defense of their own country, Australia, are unfashionable. Indeed, they are officially non-people. The Australian War Memorial refuses to recognize their remarkable resistance to the British invasion. In a country littered with Anzac memorials, not one official memorial stands for the thousands of native Australians who fought and fell defending their homeland.

© Shutterstock

This is part of the “great Australian silence,” as W.E.H. Stanner in 1968 called his lecture in which he described a “cult of forgetfulness on a national scale.” He was referring to the indigenous people. Today, the silence is ubiquitous. In Sydney, the Art Gallery of New South Wales currently has an exhibition, The Photograph and Australia, in which the timeline of this ancient country begins, incredibly, with Captain Cook.

The same silence covers another enduring, epic resistance. Extraordinary demonstrations of indigenous women protesting the removal of their children and grandchildren by the state, some of them at gunpoint, are ignored by journalists and patronized by politicians. More indigenous children are being wrenched from their homes and communities today than during the worst years of the Stolen Generation. A record 15,000 are presently detained “in care; many are given to white families and will never return to their communities.

In 2014, West Australian Police Minister Liza Harvey attended a screening in Perth of my film, Utopia, which documented the racism and thuggery of police toward black Australians, and the multiple deaths of young Aboriginal men in custody. The minister cried.

On her watch, 50 City of Perth armed police raided an indigenous homeless camp at Matagarup, and drove off mostly elderly women and young mothers with children. The people in the camp described themselves as “refugees … seeking safety in our own country.” They called for the help of the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees.

Australia Beware

Australian politicians are nervous of the United Nations. Abbott’s response has been abuse. When Professor James Anaya, the UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous People, described the racism of the “intervention,” Abbott told him to “get a life” and “not listen to the old victim brigade.”

The planned closure of indigenous homelands breaches Article 5 of the International Convention for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) and the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP). Australia is committed to “provide effective mechanisms for prevention of, and redress for … any action which has the aim of dispossessing [indigenous people] of their lands, territories or resources.” The Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights is blunt. “Forced evictions” are against the law.

An international�� momentum is building. In 2013, Pope Francis urged the world to act against racism and on behalf of “indigenous people who are increasingly isolated and abandoned.” It was South Africa’s defiance of such a basic principle of human rights that ignited the international opprobrium and campaign that brought down apartheid. Australia beware.

*[John Pilger’s articles and films can be found at��.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit:�� / / / / ��/��

We bring you perspectives from around the world. Help us to inform and educate. Your ��is tax-deductible. Join over 400 people to become a donor or you could choose to be a��.

The post Australia Wages War On Its Own People appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The recent 70^th anniversary of the liberation of was a reminder of the great crime of fascism, whose iconography is embedded in our consciousness. Fascism is preserved as history, as flickering footage of goose-stepping blackshirts, their criminality terrible and clear. Yet in the same liberal societies, whose war-making elites urge us never to forget, the accelerating danger of a modern kind of fascism is suppressed; for it is their fascism.

“To initiate a war of aggression,” said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, “is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

Had the Nazis not invaded Europe, Auschwitz and the would not have happened. Had the United States and its satellites not initiated their war of aggression in in 2003, almost a million people would be alive today; and the , or ISIS, would not have us in thrall to its savagery. They are the progeny of modern fascism, weaned by the bombs, bloodbaths and lies that are the surreal theater known as news.

The Libyan War

Like the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, big lies are delivered with the precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent, repetitive media and its virulent censorship by omission. Take the catastrophe in .

In 2011, launched 9,700 “strike sorties” against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. 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.”

The public sodomizing of the Libyan leader, , with a “rebel” bayonet was greeted by then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with the words: “We came, we saw, he died.” His murder, like the destruction of his country, was justified with a familiar big lie; he was planning “genocide” against his own people. “We knew … that if we waited one more day,” said President , “Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”

This was the fabrication of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. They told Reuters there would be “a real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in Rwanda.” Reported on March 14, 2011, the lie provided the first spark for NATO’s inferno, described by British Prime Minister as a “humanitarian intervention.”

Secretly supplied and trained by Britain’s SAS, many of the “rebels” would become part of the Islamic State, whose latest video offering shows the beheading of 21 Coptic Christian workers seized in Sirte, the city destroyed on their behalf by NATO bombers.

For Barack Obama, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy, Gaddafi’s true crime was Libya’s economic independence and his declared intention to stop selling Africa’s greatest oil reserves in US dollars. The petrodollar is a pillar of American imperial power. Gaddafi audaciously planned to underwrite a common African currency backed by gold, establish an all-Africa bank and promote economic union among poor countries with prized resources. Whether or not this would happen, the very notion was intolerable to the United States as it prepared to “enter” Africa and bribe African governments with military “partnerships.”

Muammar Gaddafi © Shutterstock

Following NATO’s attack under cover of a United Nations Security Council resolution, Obama, wrote Garikai Chengu, “confiscated $30 billion from Libya’s Central Bank, which Gaddafi had earmarked for the establishment of an African Central Bank and the African gold backed dinar currency.”

NATO and Kosovo

The “humanitarian war” against Libya drew on a model close to Western liberal hearts, especially in the media. In 1999, Bill Clinton and sent NATO to bomb Serbia because, they lied, the Serbs were committing “genocide” against ethnic Albanians in the secessionist province of . David Scheffer, US ambassador-at-large for war crimes [sic], claimed that as many as “225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59” might have been murdered. Both Clinton and Blair evoked the Holocaust and “the spirit of the Second World War.” The West’s heroic allies were the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose criminal record was set aside. The British foreign secretary, Robin Cook, told them to call him any time on his mobile phone.

With the NATO bombing over, and much of Serbia’s infrastructure in ruins, along with schools, hospitals, monasteries and the national TV station, international forensic teams descended upon Kosovo to exhume evidence of the “holocaust.” The FBI failed to find a single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily denouncing “a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines.” A year later, a United Nations tribunal on Yugoslavia announced the final count of the dead in Kosovo: 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the KLA. There was no genocide. The “holocaust” was a lie. The NATO attack had been fraudulent.

Behind the lie, there was serious purpose. Yugoslavia was a uniquely independent, multiethnic federation that had stood as a political and economic bridge in the . Most of its utilities and major manufacturing was publicly owned. This was not acceptable to the expanding European community, especially newly united , which had begun a drive east to capture its “natural market” in the Yugoslav provinces of Croatia and Slovenia. By the time the Europeans met at Maastricht in 1991 to lay their plans for the disastrous eurozone, a secret deal had been struck; Germany would recognize Croatia. Yugoslavia was doomed.

Kosovo © Shutterstock

In Washington, the US saw that the struggling Yugoslav economy was denied World Bank loans.�� NATO, then an almost defunct Cold War relic, was reinvented as imperial enforcer. At a 1999 Kosovo “peace” conference in Rambouillet, in France, the Serbs were subjected to the enforcer’s duplicitous tactics. The Rambouillet accord included a secret Annex B, which the US delegation inserted on the last day. This demanded the military occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia — a country with bitter memories of the Nazi occupation — and the implementation of a “free-market economy” and the privatization of all government assets. No sovereign state could sign this. Punishment followed swiftly; NATO bombs fell on a defenseless country. It was the precursor to the catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria and Libya, and Ukraine.

War in Afghanistan

Since 1945, more than a third of the membership of the United Nations — 69 countries — have suffered some or all of the following at the hands of America’s modern fascism. They have been invaded; their governments overthrown; their popular movements suppressed; their elections subverted; their people bombed; their economies stripped of all protection; and their societies subjected to a crippling siege known as “sanctions.” The British historian Mark Curtis estimates the death toll in the millions. In every case, a big lie was deployed.

“Tonight, for the first time since 9/11, our combat mission in is over.” These were opening words of Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address. In fact, some 10,000 troops and 20,000 military contractors (mercenaries) remain in Afghanistan on indefinite assignment. “The longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion,” said Obama. In fact, more civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2014 than in any year since the UN took records. The majority have been killed — civilians and soldiers — during Obama’s time as president.

The tragedy of Afghanistan rivals the epic crime in Indochina. In his lauded and much quoted , The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the godfather of US policies from Afghanistan to the present day, writes that if America is to control Eurasia and dominate the world, it cannot sustain a popular democracy, because “the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion … Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilisation.” He is right. As WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden have revealed, a surveillance and police state is usurping democracy. In 1976, Brzezinski, then-President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, demonstrated his point by dealing a death blow to Afghanistan’s first and only democracy. Who knows this vital history?

In the 1960s, a popular revolution swept Afghanistan, the poorest country on earth, eventually overthrowing the vestiges of the aristocratic regime in 1978. The People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) formed a government and declared a reform program that included the abolition of feudalism, freedom for all religions, equal rights for women and social justice for the ethnic minorities. More than 13,000 political prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.

The new government introduced free medical care for the poorest; peonage was abolished, a mass literacy program was launched. For women, the gains were unheard of. By the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and women made up almost half of Afghanistan’s doctors, a third of civil servants and the majority of teachers. “Every girl,” recalled Saira Noorani, a female surgeon, “could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked. We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian film on a Friday and listen to the latest music. It all started to go wrong when the mujaheddin started winning. They used to kill teachers and burn schools. We were terrified. It was funny and sad to think these were the people the West supported.”

Afghanistan © Shutterstock

The PDPA government was backed by the Soviet Union, even though, as former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance later admitted, “there was no evidence of any Soviet complicity [in the revolution].” Alarmed by the growing confidence of liberation movements throughout the world, Brzezinski decided that if Afghanistan was to succeed under the PDPA, its independence and progress would offer the “threat of a promising example.”

On July 3, 1979, the White House secretly authorized $500 million in arms and logistics to support tribal “fundamentalist” groups known as the mujaheddin. The aim was the overthrow of Afghanistan’s first secular, reformist government. In August 1979, the US Embassy in Kabul reported: “The United States’ larger interests … would be served by the demise of [the PDPA government], despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.”

The mujaheddin were the forebears of and the Islamic State. They included Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who received tens of millions of dollars in cash from the CIA. Hekmatyar’s specialty was trafficking in opium and throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. Invited to London, he was lauded by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as a “freedom fighter.”

Such fanatics might have remained in their tribal world had Brzezinski not launched an international movement to promote Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and so undermine secular political liberation and “destabilize” the Soviet Union, creating, as he wrote in his autobiography, “a few stirred up Muslims.” His grand plan coincided with the ambitions of�� the Pakistani dictator, Gen. Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, to dominate the region. In 1986, the CIA and ’s intelligence agency, the ISI, began to recruit people from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. The Saudi multi-millionaire Osama bin Laden was one of them. Operatives who would eventually join the Taliban and al-Qaeda were recruited at an Islamic college in Brooklyn, New York, and given paramilitary training at a CIA camp in Virginia. This was called “Operation Cyclone.” Its success was celebrated in 1996 when the last PDPA president of Afghanistan, Mohammed Najibullah — who had gone before the UN General Assembly to plead for help — was hanged from a streetlight by the Taliban.

The “blowback” of Operation Cyclone and its “few stirred up Muslims” was September 11, 2001. Operation Cyclone became the “War on Terror,” in which countless men, women and children would lose their lives across the Muslim world, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Syria. The enforcer’s message was and remains: “You are with us or against us.”

Afghanistan © Shutterstock

The common thread in fascism, past and present, is mass murder. The American invasion of Vietnam had its “free fire zones,” “body counts” and “collateral damage.” In the province of Quang Ngai, where I reported from, many thousands of civilians (“gooks”) were murdered by the US; yet only one massacre, at My Lai, is remembered. In Laos and Cambodia, the greatest aerial bombardment in history produced an epoch of terror marked today by the spectacle of joined-up bomb craters which, from the air, resemble monstrous necklaces. The bombing gave Cambodia its own Islamic State, led by Pol Pot.

Drones and the “Kill List”

Today, the world’s greatest single campaign of terror entails the execution of entire families, guests at weddings, mourners at funerals. These are Obama’s victims. According to The New York Times, Obama makes his selection from a CIA “kill list” presented to him every Tuesday in the White House Situation Room. He then decides, without a shred of legal justification, who will live and who will die. His execution weapon is the Hellfire missile carried by a pilotless aircraft known as a drone; these roast their victims and festoon the area with their remains. Each “hit” is registered on a faraway console screen as a “bugsplat.”

“For goose-steppers,” wrote the historian Norman Pollock, “substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manque, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while.”

Uniting fascism old and new is the cult of superiority. “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,” said Obama, evoking declarations of national fetishism from the 1930s. As the historian Alfred W. McCoy has pointed out, it was the Adolf Hitler devotee, Carl Schmitt, who said: “The sovereign is he who decides the exception.” This sums up Americanism, the world’s dominant ideology. That it remains unrecognized as a predatory ideology is the achievement of an equally unrecognized brainwashing. Insidious, undeclared, presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, its conceit insinuates Western culture. I grew up on a cinematic diet of American glory, almost all of it a distortion. I had no idea it was the Red Army that had destroyed most of the Nazi war machine, at a cost of as many as 13 million soldiers. By contrast, US losses, including in the Pacific, were 400,000. Hollywood reversed this.

The difference now is that cinema audiences are invited to wring their hands at the “tragedy” of American psychopaths having to kill people in distant places — just as the president himself kills them. The embodiment of Hollywood’s violence, the actor and director Clint Eastwood was nominated for an Oscar this year for his movie, , which is about a licensed murderer and nutcase. The New York Times described it as a “patriotic, pro-family picture which broke all attendance records in its opening days.”

There are no heroic movies about America’s embrace of fascism. During the Second World War, America (and Britain) went to war against Greeks who had fought heroically against Nazism and were resisting the rise of Greek fascism. In 1967, the CIA helped bring to power a fascist military junta in Athens — as it did in and most of Latin America. Germans and eastern Europeans who had colluded with Nazi aggression and crimes against humanity were given safe haven in the US; many were pampered and their talents rewarded. Wernher von Braun was the “father” of both the Nazi V-2 terror bomb and the US space program.

© Shutterstock

In the 1990s, as former Soviet republics, eastern Europe and the Balkans became military outposts of NATO, the heirs to a Nazi movement in were given their opportunity. Responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews, Poles and Russians during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian fascism was rehabilitated and its “new wave” hailed by the enforcer as “nationalists.”

Ukraine’s Fascist Problem

This reached its apogee in 2014, when the Obama administration splashed out $5 billion on a coup against the elected government. The shock troops were neo-Nazis known as the Right Sector and . Their leaders include Oleh Tyahnybok, who has called for a purge of the “Moscow-Jewish mafia” and “other scum,” including gays, feminists and those on the political left.

These fascists are now integrated into the Kiev coup government. The first deputy speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Andriy Parubiy, a leader of the governing party, is co-founder of Svoboda. On February 14, Parubiy announced he was flying to Washington get “the USA to give us highly precise modern weaponry.” If he succeeds, it will be seen as an act of war by Russia.

No Western leader has spoken up about the revival of fascism in the heart of Europe — with the exception of , whose people lost 22 million to a Nazi invasion that came through the borderland of Ukraine. At the recent Munich Security Conference, Obama’s assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, ranted abuse about European leaders for opposing the US arming of the Kiev regime. She referred to the German defense minister as “the minister for defeatism.” It was Nuland who masterminded the coup in Kiev. The wife of Robert D. Kagan, a leading “neo-con” luminary and co-founder of the extreme right-wing Project for a New American Century, she was foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney.��

Nuland’s coup did not go to plan. NATO was prevented from seizing ’s historic, legitimate, warm-water naval base in . The mostly Russian population of Crimea — illegally annexed to Ukraine by Nikita Krushchev in 1954 — voted overwhelmingly to return to Russia, as they had done in the 1990s. The referendum was voluntary, popular and internationally observed. There was no invasion.

At the same time, the Kiev regime turned on the ethnic Russian population in the east with the ferocity of ethnic cleaning. Deploying neo-Nazi militias in the manner of the Waffen-SS, they bombed and laid to siege cities and towns. They used mass starvation as a weapon, cutting off electricity, freezing bank accounts, stopping social security and pensions. More than a million refugees fled across the border into Russia. In Western media, they became unpeople escaping “the violence” caused by the “Russian invasion.” The NATO commander, Gen. Philip Breedlove — whose name and actions might have been inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove — announced that 40,000 Russian troops were “massing.” In the age of forensic satellite evidence, he offered none.

Ukraine © Shutterstock

These Russian-speaking and bilingual people of Ukraine — a third of the population — have long sought a federation that reflects the country’s ethnic diversity and is both autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most are not “separatists” but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland and oppose the power grab in Kiev. Their revolt and establishment of autonomous “states” are a reaction to Kiev’s attacks on them. Little of this has been explained to Western audiences.

On May 2, 2014, in Odessa, 41 ethnic Russians were burned alive in the trade union headquarters with police standing by. The Right Sector leader, Dmytro Yarosh, hailed the massacre as “another bright day in our national history.” In the American and British media, this was reported as a “murky tragedy” resulting from “clashes” between “nationalists” (neo-Nazis) and “separatists” (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine).

The New York Times buried the story, having dismissed as Russian propaganda warnings about the fascist and anti-Semitic policies of Washington’s new clients. The Wall Street Journal damned the victims — “Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says.” Obama congratulated the junta for its “restraint.”

If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained “pariah” role in the West will justify the lie that Russia is invading Ukraine. On January 29, Ukraine’s top military commander, Gen. Viktor Muzhemko, almost inadvertently dismissed the very basis for US and European Union sanctions on Russia when he told a news conference emphatically: “The Ukrainian army is not fighting with the regular units of the Russian Army.” There were “individual citizens” who were members of “illegal armed groups,” but there was no Russian invasion. This was not news. Vadym Prystaiko, Kiev’s deputy foreign minister, has called for “full scale war” with nuclear-armed Russia.

On February 21, US Senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, introduced a bill that would authorize American arms for the Kiev regime. In his Senate presentation, Inhofe used photographs he claimed were of Russian troops crossing into Ukraine, which have long been exposed as fakes. It was reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s fake pictures of a Soviet installation in Nicaragua and Colin Powell’s fake evidence to the UN of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The intensity of the smear campaign against Russia and the portrayal of its president as a pantomime villain is unlike anything I have known as a reporter. Robert Parry, one of America’s most distinguished investigative journalists who revealed the Iran-Contra scandal, wrote recently: “No European government, since Adolf Hitler’s Germany, has seen fit to dispatch Nazi storm troopers to wage war on a domestic population, but the Kiev regime has and has done so knowingly. Yet across the West’s media/political spectrum, there has been a studious effort to cover up this reality even to the point of ignoring facts that have been well established … If you wonder how the world could stumble into World War Three — much as it did into World War One a century ago — all you need to do is look at the madness over Ukraine that has proved impervious to facts or reason.”

© Shutterstock

In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media: “The use made by Nazi conspirators of psychological warfare is well known. 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 for the attack … In the propaganda system of the Hitler State it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.”

In The Guardian on February 2, Timothy Garton-Ash called, in effect, for a world war. “Putin must be stopped,” said the headline. “And sometimes only guns can stop guns.” He conceded that the threat of war might “nourish a Russian paranoia of encirclement” — but that was fine. He name-checked the military equipment needed for the job and advised his readers that “America has the best kit.”

In 2003, Garton-Ash, an Oxford professor, repeated the propaganda that led to the slaughter in Iraq. , he wrote, “has, as [Colin] Powell documented, stockpiled large quantities of horrifying chemical and biological weapons, and is hiding what remains of them. He is still trying to get nuclear ones.” He lauded Blair as a “Gladstonian, Christian liberal interventionist.” In 2006, he wrote: “Now we face the next big test of the west: after Iraq, Iran.”

The outbursts — or as Garton-Ash prefers, his “tortured liberal ambivalence” — are not untypical of those in the transatlantic liberal elite who have struck a Faustian deal. The war criminal Blair is their lost leader. The Guardian, in which Garton-Ash’s piece appeared, published a full-page advertisement for an American Stealth bomber. On a menacing image of the Lockheed Martin monster were the words: “The F-35. GREAT For Britain.” This American “kit” will cost British taxpayers £1.3 billion, its F-model predecessors having slaughtered across the world. In tune with its advertiser, a Guardian editorial has demanded an increase in military spending.

What Do They Want?

Once again, there is serious purpose. The rulers of the world want Ukraine not only as a missile base: they want its economy. Kiev’s new finance minister, Nataliwe Jaresko, is a former senior US State Department official in charge of US overseas “investment.” She was hurriedly given Ukrainian citizenship.

They want Ukraine for its abundant gas; US Vice President Joe Biden’s son is on the board of Ukraine’s biggest oil, gas and fracking company. The manufacturers of GM seeds, companies such as the infamous Monsanto, want Ukraine’s rich farming soil.

Above all, they want Ukraine’s mighty neighbor, Russia. They want to Balkanize or dismember Russia and exploit the greatest source of natural gas on earth. As the Arctic ice melts, they want control of the Arctic Ocean and its energy riches and Russia’s long Arctic land border. Their man in Moscow used to be Boris Yeltsin, a drunk, who handed his country’s economy to the West. His successor, Putin, has reestablished Russia as a sovereign nation; that is his crime.

The responsibility of the rest of us is clear: It is to identify and expose the reckless lies of warmongers and never to collude with them. It is to reawaken the great popular movements that brought a fragile civilization to modern imperial states. Most important, it is to prevent the conquest of ourselves: our minds, our humanity, our self-respect. If we remain silent, victory over us is assured and a holocaust beckons.

*[John Pilger’s articles and films can be found at��.]

We bring you perspectives from around the world. Help us to inform and educate. Your is tax-deductible. Join over 400 people to become a or you could choose to be a .

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit: / / / / / /

The post Why the Rise of Fascism is Again the Issue appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Why has so much journalism succumbed to ? Why are and distortion standard practice? Why is the so often a mouthpiece of rapacious power? Why do The New York Times and The Washington Post deceive their readers?

Why are young journalists not taught to understand agendas and to challenge the high claims and low purpose of fake objectivity? And why are they not taught that the essence of so much of what’s called the “mainstream media” is not information, but power?

These are urgent questions. The world is facing the prospect of major war – perhaps nuclear war – with the United States clearly determined to isolate and provoke and, eventually, . This truth is being turned upside down and inside out by journalists, including those who promoted the lies that led to the bloodbath in in 2003.

The times we live in are so dangerous and so distorted in public perception that propaganda is no longer, as Edward Bernays called it, an “invisible government.” It is the government. It rules directly without fear of contradiction and its principal aim is the conquest of us: our sense of the world, our ability to separate truth from lies.

Had Journalists Done Their Job

The information age is actually a media age. We have war by media; censorship by media; demonology by media; retribution by media; diversion by media – a surreal assembly line of obedient clichés and false assumptions.

This power to create a new “reality” has building for a long time. Forty-five years ago, a book entitled The Greening of America caused a sensation. On the cover were these words: “There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual.”

I was a correspondent in the United States at the time and recall the overnight elevation to guru status of the author, a young Yale academic, Charles Reich. His message was that truth-telling and political action had failed and only “culture” and introspection could change the world.

…had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children might be alive today; and millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and the infamous����(IS) might not now exist.

Within a few years, driven by the forces of profit, the cult of “me-ism” had all but overwhelmed our sense of acting together, our sense of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated. The personal was the political, and the media was the message.

In the wake of the , the fabrication of new “threats” completed the political disorientation of those who, 20 years earlier, would have formed a vehement opposition.

In 2003, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the distinguished American investigative journalist. ��We discussed the invasion of Iraq a few months earlier. I asked him, “What if the freest media in the world had seriously challenged and and investigated their claims, instead of channeling what turned out to be crude propaganda?”

He replied that if we journalists had done our job “there is a very, very good chance we would have not gone to war in Iraq.”

That’s a shocking statement, and one supported by other famous journalists to whom I put the same question. Dan Rather, formerly of CBS, gave me the same answer. David Rose of The Observer and senior journalists and producers in the BBC, who wished to remain anonymous, gave me the same answer.

In other words, had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children might be alive today; and millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and the infamous (IS) might not now exist.

A Trail of Blood

Even now, despite the millions who took to the streets in protest, most of the public in Western countries have little idea of the sheer scale of the crime committed by our governments in Iraq. Even fewer are aware that, in the 12 years before the invasion, the US and British governments set in motion a holocaust by denying the civilian population of Iraq a means to live.

Those are the words of the senior British official responsible for sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s – a medieval siege that caused the deaths of half a million children under the age of five, reported UNICEF. The official’s name is Carne Ross. In the Foreign Office in London, he was known as “Mr. Iraq.”��Today, he is a truth-teller of how governments deceive and how journalists willingly spread the deception. “We would feed journalists factoids of sanitised intelligence,” he told me, “or we’d freeze them out.”

The main whistleblower��during this terrible, silent period was Denis Halliday. Then Assistant Secretary General of the and the senior UN official in Iraq, Halliday resigned rather than implement policies he described as genocidal. He estimates that sanctions killed more than a million Iraqis.

What then happened to Halliday was instructive. He was airbrushed. Or he was vilified. On the BBC’s Newsnight program, the presenter Jeremy Paxman shouted at him: “Aren’t you just an apologist for ?” The Guardian recently described this as one of Paxman’s “memorable moments.” Last week, Paxman signed a £1 million book deal.

The most effective propaganda is found not in��The��Sun��or on Fox News – but beneath a liberal halo. When��The��New York Times��published claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, its fake evidence was believed, because it wasn’t Fox News – it was��The��New York Times.

The handmaidens of suppression have done their job well. Consider the effects.��In 2013, a ComRes poll found that a majority of the British public believed the casualty toll in Iraq was less than 10,000 – a tiny fraction of the truth. A trail of blood that goes from Iraq to London has been scrubbed almost clean.

Name Your Demon

is said to be the godfather of the media mob, and no one should doubt the augmented power of his newspapers – all 127 of them, with a combined circulation of 40 million, and his Fox network. But the influence of Murdoch’s empire is no greater than its reflection of the wider media.

The most effective propaganda is found not in The Sun or on Fox News – but beneath a liberal halo. When The New York Times published claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, its fake evidence was believed, because it wasn’t Fox News – it was The New York Times.

The same is true of The Washington Post and The Guardian, both of which have played a critical role in conditioning their readers to accept a new and dangerous cold war. All three liberal newspapers have misrepresented events in as a malign act by Russia – when, in fact, the fascist led coup in Ukraine was the work of the United States, aided by Germany and .

This inversion of reality is so pervasive that Washington’s military encirclement and intimidation of Russia is not contentious. It’s not even news, but suppressed behind a smear and scare campaign of the kind I grew up with during the first Cold War.

Once again, the evil empire is coming to get us, led by another Stalin or, perversely, a new Hitler. Name your demon and let rip.

The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts I can remember. The biggest Western military build-up in the and eastern Europe since world war two is blacked out. Washington’s secret aid to Kiev and its neo-Nazi brigades responsible for war crimes against the population of eastern Ukraine is blacked out. Evidence that contradicts propaganda that Russia was responsible for the shooting down of a Malaysian is blacked out.

And again, supposedly liberal media are the censors. Citing no facts, no evidence, one journalist identified a pro-Russian leader in Ukraine as the man who shot down the airliner. This man, he wrote, was known as “the demon.” He was a scary man who frightened the journalist. That was the evidence.

Many in the Western media have worked hard to present the ethnic Russian population of Ukraine as outsiders in their own country, almost never as Ukrainians seeking a federation within Ukraine and as Ukrainian citizens resisting a foreign-orchestrated coup against their elected government.

What the Russian president has to say is of no consequence; he is a pantomime villain who can be abused with impunity. An American general who heads NATO and is straight out of Dr. Strangelove – one General Breedlove – routinely claims Russian invasions without a shred of visual evidence. His impersonation of Stanley Kubrick’s General Jack D. Ripper is pitch perfect.

Forty thousand Ruskies were massing on the border, according to Breedlove. That was good enough for The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Observer – the latter having previously distinguished itself with lies and fabrications that backed Tony Blair’s invasion of Iraq, as its former reporter, David Rose, revealed.

There is almost the joi d’esprit of a class reunion. The drum-beaters of The Washington Post are the very same editorial writers who declared the existence of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction to be “hard facts.”

“If you wonder,” wrote Robert Parry, “how the world could stumble into world war three – much as it did into world war one a century ago – all you need to do is look at the madness that has enveloped virtually the entire US political/media structure over Ukraine where a false narrative of white hats versus black hats took hold early and has proved impervious to facts or reason.”

In heralding an extraordinary era of disclosure, Assange made enemies by illuminating and shaming the media’s gatekeepers, not least on the newspaper that published and appropriated his great scoop.

Parry, the journalist who revealed Iran-Contra, is one of the few who investigate the central role of the media in this “game of chicken,” as the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called it. But is it a game? As I write this, the US Congress votes on Resolution 758 which, in a nutshell, says: “Let’s get ready for war with Russia.”

In the 19^th century, the writer Alexander Herzen described secular liberalism as “the final religion, though its church is not of the other world but of this.” Today, this divine right is far more violent and dangerous than anything the Muslim world throws up, though perhaps its greatest triumph is the illusion of free and open information.

The Illusion of Free and Open��Information

In the news, whole countries are made to disappear. , the source of extremism and Western-backed terror, is not a story, except when it drives down the price of oil. has endured twelve years of American attacks. Who knows? Who cares?

In 2009, the University of the West of England published the results of a ten-year study of the BBC’s coverage of . Of 304 broadcast reports, only three mentioned any of the positive policies introduced by the government of . The greatest literacy program in human history received barely a passing reference.

In Europe and the United States, millions of readers and viewers know next to nothing about the remarkable, life-giving changes implemented in Latin America, many of them inspired by Chavez. Like the BBC, the reports of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian and the rest of the respectable Western media were notoriously in bad faith. Chavez was mocked even on his deathbed.��How is this explained, I wonder, in schools of journalism?

Why are millions of people in Britain are persuaded that a collective punishment called “austerity” is necessary?

Following the economic crash in 2008, a rotten system was exposed. For a split second the banks were lined up as crooks with obligations to the public they had betrayed.

But within a few months – apart from a few stones lobbed over excessive corporate “bonuses” – the message changed. The mug shots of guilty bankers vanished from the tabloids and something called “austerity” became the burden of millions of ordinary people. Was there ever a sleight of hand as brazen?

Today, many of the premises of civilized life in Britain are being dismantled in order to pay back a fraudulent debt – the debt of crooks. The “” cuts are said to be £83 billion. That’s almost exactly the amount of tax avoided by the same banks and by corporations like Amazon and Murdoch’s News UK. Moreover, the crooked banks are given an annual subsidy of £100bn in free insurance and guarantees – a figure that would fund the entire (NHS).

The economic crisis is pure propaganda. Extreme policies now rule Britain, the United States, much of , Canada and Australia. Who is standing up for the majority? Who is telling their story? Who’s keeping record straight? Isn’t that what journalists are meant to do?

In 1977, Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, revealed that more than 400 journalists and news executives worked for the CIA. They included journalists from The New York Times, Time and the TV networks. In 1991, Richard Norton Taylor of The Guardian revealed something similar in this country.

Censorship by Omission

None of this is necessary today. I doubt that anyone paid The Washington Post and many other media outlets to accuse of aiding . I doubt that anyone pays those who routinely smear – though other rewards can be plentiful.

It’s clear to me that the main reason Assange has attracted such venom, spite and jealously is that WikiLeaks tore down the facade of a corrupt political elite held aloft by journalists. In heralding an extraordinary era of disclosure, Assange made enemies by illuminating and shaming the media’s gatekeepers, not least on the newspaper that published and appropriated his great scoop.��He became not only a target, but a golden goose.

What we need is a Fifth Estate: a journalism that monitors, deconstructs and counters propaganda and teaches the young to be agents of people, not power. We need what the Russians called “perestroika” – an insurrection of subjugated knowledge. I would call it real journalism.

Lucrative book and Hollywood movie deals were struck and media careers launched or kick-started on the back of WikiLeaks and its founder. People have made big money, while WikiLeaks has struggled to survive.

None of this was mentioned in Stockholm on 1 December when the editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, shared with Edward Snowden the Right Livelihood Award, known as the alternative Nobel Peace Prize. What was shocking about this event was that Assange and WikiLeaks were airbrushed. They didn’t exist. They were unpeople.

No one spoke up for the man who pioneered digital whistleblowing and handed The Guardian one of the greatest scoops in history. Moreover, it was Assange and his WikiLeaks team who effectively – and brilliantly – rescued Edward Snowden in and sped him to safety.��Not a word.

What made this censorship by omission so ironic and poignant and disgraceful was that the ceremony was held in the Swedish parliament – whose craven silence on the Assange case has colluded with a grotesque miscarriage of justice in Stockholm.

“When the truth is replaced by silence,” said the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “the silence is a lie.”

It’s this kind of silence we journalists need to break. We need to look in the mirror.�� We need to call to account an unaccountable media that services power and a psychosis that threatens world war.

In the 18^th century, Edmund Burke described the role of the press as a Fourth Estate, checking the powerful. Was that ever true? It certainly doesn’t wash any more. What we need is a Fifth Estate: a journalism that monitors, deconstructs and counters propaganda and teaches the young to be agents of people, not power. We need what the Russians called “perestroika” – an insurrection of subjugated knowledge. I would call it real journalism.

It’s 100 years since the . Reporters then were rewarded and knighted for their silence and collusion. At the height of the slaughter, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George confided in 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.”

It’s time they knew.

*[This was ’s address to the Logan Symposium, “Building an Alliance Against Secrecy, Surveillance & Censorship,” organized by the , London, 5-7 December, 2014.]

The views expressed��in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect��51�Թ�’s��editorial policy.

��/

The post War by Media and the Triumph of Propaganda appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The siege of Knightsbridge is a farce. For two years, an exaggerated, costly police presence around the Embassy in has served no purpose other than to flaunt the power of the state. Their quarry is an charged with no crime, a refugee from gross injustice whose only security is the room given to him by a brave South American country. His true crime is to have initiated a wave of truth-telling in an era of lies, cynicism and war.

The persecution of must end. Even the government clearly believes it must end. On October 28, the deputy foreign minister, Hugo Swire, told parliament he would “actively welcome” the prosecutor in London and “we would do absolutely everything to facilitate that.” The tone was impatient.

The Swedish prosecutor, Marianne Ny, has refused to come to London to question Assange about allegations of sexual misconduct in Stockholm in 2010 — even though Swedish law allows for it and the procedure is routine for and . The documentary evidence of a threat to Assange’s life and freedom from the United States — should he leave the embassy — is overwhelming. On May 14 this year, court files revealed that a “multi subject investigation” against Assange was “active and ongoing.”

Ny has never properly explained why she will not come to London, just as the Swedish authorities have never explained why they refuse to give Assange a guarantee that they will not him on to the US under a secret arrangement agreed between Stockholm and . In December 2010, The Independent revealed that the two governments had discussed his onward extradition to the US before the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) was issued.

Perhaps an explanation is that, contrary to its reputation as a liberal bastion, Sweden has drawn so close to Washington that it has allowed secret “renditions,” including the illegal deportation of refugees. The rendition and subsequent torture of two Egyptian political refugees in 2001 was condemned by the UN Committee Against Torture, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch; the complicity and duplicity of the Swedish state are documented in successful civil litigation and cables. In summer 2010, Assange had been in Sweden to talk about WikiLeaks revelations of the Afghanistan War — in which Sweden had forces under US command.

The Americans are pursuing Assange because WikiLeaks exposed their epic crimes in and : the wholesale killing of tens of thousands of civilians, which they covered up; and their contempt for sovereignty and international law, as demonstrated vividly in their leaked diplomatic cables.

A “Manhunt Target List”

For his part in disclosing how US soldiers murdered and civilians, the heroic soldier received a sentence of 35 years, having been held for more than a thousand days in conditions which, according to the UN special rapporteur, amounted to torture.

The persecution of Julian Assange must end. Even the British government clearly believes it must end. On October 28, the deputy foreign minister, Hugo Swire, told parliament he would “actively welcome” the Swedish prosecutor in London and “we would do absolutely everything to facilitate that.”

Few doubt that should the Americans get their hands on Assange, a similar fate awaits him. Threats of capture and assassination became the currency of the political extremes in the US following Vice President ’s preposterous slur that Assange was a “cyber-terrorist.” Anyone doubting the kind of US ruthlessness he can expect should remember the forcing down of the president’s plane in 2013 — wrongly believed to be carrying .

According to documents released by Snowden, Assange is on a “Manhunt target list.” Washington’s bid to get him, say Australian diplomatic cables, is “unprecedented in scale and nature.” In Alexandria, Virginia, a secret grand jury has spent four years attempting to contrive a crime for which Assange can be prosecuted. This is not easy. The First Amendment to the US Constitution protects publishers, journalists and whistleblowers. As a presidential candidate in 2008, lauded whistleblowers as “part of a healthy democracy [and they] must be protected from reprisal.” Under Obama, more whistleblowers have been prosecuted than under all other US presidents combined. Even before the verdict was announced in the trial of Manning, Obama had pronounced the whistleblower guilty.

“Documents released by WikiLeaks since Assange moved to England,” wrote Al Burke, editor of the online Nordic News Network — an authority on the multiple twists and dangers facing Assange — “clearly indicate that Sweden has consistently submitted to pressure from the United States in matters relating to civil rights. There is every reason for concern that if Assange were to be taken into custody by Swedish authorities, he could be turned over to the United States without due consideration of his legal rights.”

There are signs that the Swedish public and legal community do not support prosecutor’s intransigence. Once implacably hostile to Assange, the Swedish press has published headlines such as: “Go to London, for God’s sake.”

Why won’t she? More to the point, why won’t she allow the Swedish court access to hundreds of SMS messages that the police extracted from the phone of one of the two women involved in the misconduct allegations? Why won’t she hand them over to Assange’s Swedish lawyers? She says she is not legally required to do so, until a formal charge is laid and she has questioned him. Then, why doesn’t she question him?

This week, the Swedish Court of Appeal will decide whether to order Ny to hand over the SMS messages; or the matter will go to the Supreme Court and the European Court of Justice. In high farce, Assange’s Swedish lawyers have been allowed only to “review” the SMS messages, which they had to memorize.

One of the women’s messages makes it clear that she did not want any charges brought against Assange, “but the police were keen on getting a hold on him.” She was “shocked” when they arrested him because she only “wanted him to take [an HIV] test.” She “did not want to accuse JA [Assange] of anything” and “it was the police who made up the charges.” (In a witness statement, she is quoted as saying that she had been “railroaded by police and others around her.”)

Neither woman claimed she had been raped. Indeed, both have denied they were raped and one of them has since tweeted, “I have not been raped.” That they were manipulated by police and their wishes ignored is evident — whatever their lawyers might say now. Certainly, they are victims of a saga worthy of Kafka.

The “Case” Against Assange

For Assange, his only trial has been trial by media. On August 20, 2010, Swedish police opened a “rape investigation” and immediately — and unlawfully — told the Stockholm tabloids that there was a warrant for Assange’s arrest for the “rape of two women.” This news went round the world.

In Washington, a smiling US defense secretary, , told reporters that the arrest “sounds like good news to me.” Twitter accounts associated with the described Assange as a “rapist” and “fugitive.”

Less than 24 hours later, the Stockholm chief prosecutor, Eva Finne, took over the investigation. She wasted no time in cancelling the arrest warrant, saying: “I don’t believe there is any reason to suspect that he has committed rape.” Four days later, she dismissed the rape investigation altogether, saying: “There is no suspicion of any crime whatsoever.” The file was closed.

Enter Claes Borgstrom, a high-profile politician in the Social Democratic Party, then standing as a candidate in Sweden’s imminent general election. Within days of the chief prosecutor’s dismissal of the case, Borgstrom, a lawyer, announced to the media that he was representing the two women and had sought a different prosecutor in the city of Gothenberg. This was Ny, whom Borgstrom knew well. She, too, was involved with the Social Democrats.

Books were published, movie deals struck and media careers launched or kick-started on the back of WikiLeaks, and an assumption that attacking Assange was fair game and he was too poor to sue. People have made money, often big money, while WikiLeaks has struggled to survive.

On August 30, Assange attended a police station in Stockholm voluntarily and answered all the questions put to him. He understood that was the end of the matter. Two days later, Ny announced she was reopening the case. Borgstrom was asked by a Swedish reporter why the case was proceeding when it had already been dismissed, citing one of the women as saying she had not been raped. He replied: “Ah, but she is not a lawyer.” Assange’s Australian barrister, James Catlin, responded: “This is a laughing stock … it’s as if they make it up as they go along.”

On the day Ny reactivated the case, the head of Sweden’s military intelligence service (“MUST”) publicly denounced WikiLeaks in an article entitled, “WikiLeaks [is] a threat to our soldiers.” Assange was warned that the Swedish intelligence service, SAP, had been told by its American counterparts that US-Sweden intelligence-sharing arrangements would be “cut off” if Stockholm sheltered him.

For five weeks, Assange waited in Sweden for the new investigation to take its course. The Guardian was then on the brink of publishing the Iraq War Logs, based on WikiLeaks’ disclosures, which Assange was to oversee. His lawyer in Stockholm asked Ny if she had any objection to his leaving the country. She said he was free to go.

Inexplicably, as soon as he left Sweden — at the height of media and public interest in the WikiLeaks disclosures — Ny issued a European Arrest Warrant and an Interpol “red alert,” which are normally used for terrorists and dangerous criminals. Put out in five languages around the world, it ensured a media frenzy.

Assange attended a police station in London, was arrested and spent ten days in Wandsworth Prison, in solitary confinement. Released on £340,000 bail, he was electronically tagged, required to report to police daily and placed under virtual house arrest while his case began its long journey to the Supreme Court. He still had not been charged with any offence. His lawyers repeated his offer to be questioned by Ny in London, pointing out that she had given him permission to leave Sweden. They suggested a special facility at Scotland Yard used for that purpose. She refused.

Katrin Axelsson and Lisa Longstaff of Women Against Rape wrote: “The allegations against [Assange] are a smokescreen behind which a number of governments are trying to clamp down on WikiLeaks for having audaciously revealed to the public their secret planning of wars and occupations with their attendant rape, murder and destruction … The authorities care so little about violence against women that they manipulate rape allegations at will.[Assange] has made it clear he is available for questioning by the Swedish authorities, in Britain or via Skype. Why are they refusing this essential step in their investigation? What are they afraid of?”

This question remained unanswered as Ny deployed the EAW, a draconian product of the “” supposedly designed to catch and organized criminals. The EAW had abolished the obligation on a petitioning state to provide any evidence of a crime. More than a thousand EAWs are issued each month; only a few have anything to do with potential “terror” charges. Most are issued for trivial offences — such as overdue bank charges and fines. Many of those extradited face months in prison without charge. There have been a number of shocking miscarriages of justice, of which British judges have been highly critical.

The Assange case finally reached the UK Supreme Court in May 2012. In a judgment that upheld the EAW — whose rigid demands had left the courts with almost no room for maneuver — the judges found that European prosecutors could issue extradition warrants in Britain without any judicial oversight, even though parliament intended otherwise. They made clear that parliament had been “misled” by the Blair government. The court was split, 5-2, and consequently found against Assange.

However, the chief justice, Lord Phillips, made one mistake. He applied the Vienna Convention on treaty interpretation, allowing for state practice to override the letter of the law. As Assange’s barrister, Dinah Rose QC, pointed out, this did not apply to the EAW.

The Supreme Court only recognized this crucial error when it dealt with another appeal against the EAW in November 2013. The Assange decision had been wrong, but it was too late to go back.

Assange’s choice was stark: Extradition to a country that had refused to say whether or not it would send him on to the US, or to seek what seemed his last opportunity for refuge and safety. Supported by most of Latin America, the courageous government of Ecuador granted him refugee status on the basis of documented evidence and legal advice that he faced the prospect of cruel and unusual punishment in the US; that this threat violated his basic human rights; and that his own government in Australia had abandoned him and colluded with Washington. The Labor government of Prime Minister had even threatened to take away his passport.

Gareth Peirce, the renowned human rights lawyer who represents Assange in London, wrote to then-Australian Foreign Minister : “Given the extent of the public discussion, frequently on the basis of entirely false assumptions … it is very hard to attempt to preserve for him any presumption of innocence. Mr. Assange has now hanging over him not one but two Damocles swords, of potential extradition to two different jurisdictions in turn for two different alleged crimes, neither of which are crimes in his own country, and that his personal safety has become at risk in circumstances that are highly politically charged.”

It was not until she contacted the Australian High Commission in London that Peirce received a response, which answered none of the pressing points she raised. In a meeting I attended with her, Australian Consul-General Ken Pascoe made the astonishing claim that he knew “only what I read in the newspapers” about the details of the case.

Big Money

Meanwhile, the prospect of a grotesque miscarriage of justice was drowned in a vituperative campaign against the WikiLeaks founder. Deeply personal, petty, vicious and inhuman attacks were aimed at a man not charged with any crime, yet subjected to treatment not even meted out to a defendant facing extradition on a charge of murdering his wife. That the US threat to Assange was a threat to all journalists, to freedom of speech, was lost in the sordid and the ambitious.

Books were published, movie deals struck and media careers launched or kick-started on the back of WikiLeaks, and an assumption that attacking Assange was fair game and he was too poor to sue. People have made money, often big money, while WikiLeaks has struggled to survive. The editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, called the WikiLeaks disclosures, which his newspaper published, “one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years.” It became part of his marketing plan to raise the newspaper’s cover price.

With not a penny going to Assange or to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative movie. The book’s authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, gratuitously described Assange as a “damaged personality” and “callous.” They also revealed the secret password he had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing the US embassy cables. With Assange now trapped in the Ecuadorean Embassy, Harding, standing among the police outside, gloated on his blog that “Scotland Yard may get the last laugh.”

The injustice meted out to Assange is one of the reasons parliament will eventually vote on a reformed EAW.�� The draconian catch-all used against him could not happen now; charges would have to be brought and “questioning” would be insufficient grounds for extradition. “His case has been won lock, stock and barrel,” Peirce told me. “These changes in the law mean that the UK now recognizes as correct everything that was argued in his case. Yet he does not benefit. And the genuineness of Ecuador’s offer of sanctuary is not questioned by the UK or Sweden.”

On March 18, 2008, a war on WikiLeaks and Assange was foretold in a secret Pentagon document prepared by the “Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch.” It described a detailed plan to destroy the feeling of “trust” that is WikiLeaks’ “center of gravity.” This would be achieved with threats of “exposure [and] criminal prosecution.” Silencing and criminalizing this rare source of independent journalism was the aim — smear the method. Hell hath no fury like great power scorned.

*[John Pilger’s articles and films can be found at .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

/

The post The Siege of Julian Assange is a Farce appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Across the political and media elite in , a silence has descended on the memory of the great, reforming prime minister, , who has died. His achievements are recognized, if grudgingly, his mistakes noted in false sorrow. But a critical reason for his extraordinary political demise will, they hope, be buried with him.

Australia briefly became an independent state during the Whitlam years (1972-75). An commentator wrote that no country had “reversed its posture in international affairs so totally without going through a domestic revolution.” Whitlam ended his nation’s colonial servility. He abolished Royal patronage, moved Australia toward the , supported “zones of peace” and opposed nuclear weapons testing.

Although not regarded as on the left of the Labor Party, Whitlam was a maverick social democrat of principle, pride and propriety. He believed a foreign power should not control his country’s resources and dictate its economic and foreign policies. He proposed to “buy back the farm.” In drafting the first Aboriginal lands rights legislation, his government raised the ghost of the greatest land grab in human history — ’s colonization of Australia — and the question of who owned the island-continent’s vast natural wealth.

Latin Americans will recognize the audacity and danger of�� this “breaking free” in a country whose establishment was welded to great, external power. had served every imperial adventure since the Boxer Rebellion was crushed in . In the 1960s, Australia pleaded to join the US in its invasion of , then provided “black teams” to be run by the CIA. US diplomatic cables, published in 2013 by WikiLeaks, disclose the names of leading figures in both main parties, including a future prime minister and foreign minister, as Washington’s informants during the Whitlam years.

Whitlam knew the risk he was taking. The day after his election, he ordered that his staff should not be “vetted or harassed” by the Australian security organization, ASIO — then, as now, tied to Anglo-American intelligence. When his ministers publicly condemned the US bombing of Vietnam as “corrupt and barbaric,” a CIA station officer in Saigon said: “We were told the Australians might as well be regarded as North Vietnamese collaborators.”

The Americans and British worked together. In 1975, Whitlam discovered that Britain’s MI6 was operating against his government.

Whitlam demanded to know if and why the CIA was running a spy base at Pine Gap near Alice Springs, a giant vacuum cleaner which, as Edward Snowden revealed recently, allows the US to spy on everyone. “Try to screw us or bounce us,” the prime minister warned the US ambassador, “[and Pine Gap] will become a matter of contention.”

Victor Marchetti, the CIA officer who had helped set up Pine Gap, later told me: “This threat to close Pine Gap caused apoplexy in the White House … a kind of Chile [coup] was set in motion.”

Pine Gap’s top-secret messages were de-coded by a CIA contractor, TRW. One of the de-coders was Christopher Boyce, a young man troubled by the “deception and betrayal of an ally.” Boyce revealed that the CIA had infiltrated the Australian political and trade union elite, and referred to the governor-general of Australia, Sir John Kerr, as “our man Kerr.”

Kerr was not only the queen’s man — he had long-standing ties to Anglo-American intelligence. He was an enthusiastic member of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, described by Jonathan Kwitny of The Wall Street Journal in his book, The Crimes of Patriots, as: “[A]n elite, invitation-only group … exposed in Congress as being founded, funded and generally run by the CIA.” The CIA “paid for Kerr’s travel, built his prestige … Kerr continued to go to the CIA for money.”

When Whitlam was re-elected for a second term, in 1974, the White House sent Marshall Green to Canberra as its ambassador. Green was an imperious, sinister figure who worked in the shadows of America’s “deep state.” Known as the “coupmaster,” he had played a central role in the 1965 coup against President Sukarno in , which cost up to a million lives. One of his first speeches in Australia was to the Australian Institute of Directors — described by an alarmed member of the audience as “an incitement to the country’s business leaders to rise against the government.”

The Americans and British worked together. In 1975, Whitlam discovered that Britain’s MI6 was operating against his government. “The Brits were actually de-coding secret messages coming into my foreign affairs office,” he said later. One of his ministers, Clyde Cameron, told me: “We knew MI6 was bugging Cabinet meetings for the Americans.” In the 1980s, senior CIA officers revealed that the “Whitlam problem” had been discussed “with urgency” by the agency’s director, William Colby, and the head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield. A deputy director of the CIA said: “Kerr did what he was told to do.”

On November 10, 1975, Whitlam was shown a top secret telex message sourced to Theodore Shackley, the notorious head of the CIA’s East Asia Division, who had helped run the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile two years earlier.

Shackley’s message was read to Whitlam. It said the prime minister of Australia was a security risk in his own country. The day before, Kerr had visited the headquarters of the Defence Signals Directorate, Australia’s equivalent to the National Security Agency (NSA), where he was briefed on the “security crisis.”

On November 11, the day Whitlam was to inform parliament about the secret CIA presence in Australia, he was summoned by Kerr. Invoking archaic vice-regal “reserve powers,” Kerr sacked the democratically elected prime minister. The “Whitlam problem” was solved and Australian politics never recovered — nor did the nation reach its true independence.

*[John Pilger’s articles and films can be found at .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

/

The post How America and Britain Crushed the Government of an “Ally” appeared first on 51�Թ�.

In transmitting President Richard Nixon’s orders for a “massive” bombing of in 1969, said: “Anything that flies on everything that moves.” As ignites his seventh war against the Muslim world since he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the orchestrated hysteria and lies make one almost nostalgic for Kissinger’s murderous honesty.

As a witness to the human consequences of aerial savagery – including the beheading of victims, their parts festooning trees and fields – I am not surprised by the disregard of memory and history, yet again. A telling example is the rise to power of Pol Pot and his , who had much in common with today’s Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant��(). They, too, were ruthless medievalists who began as a small sect. They, too, were the product of an American-made apocalypse, this time in Asia.

American-Made Apocalypse

According to Pol Pot, his movement had consisted of “fewer than 5,000 poorly armed guerrillas uncertain about their strategy, tactics, loyalty and leaders.” Once Nixon’s and Kissinger’s B52 bombers had gone to work as part of “Operation Menu,” the West’s ultimate demon could not believe his luck.

The Americans dropped the equivalent of five on rural Cambodia during 1969-73. They leveled village after village, returning to bomb the rubble and corpses. The craters left monstrous necklaces of carnage, still visible from the air. The terror was unimaginable. A former Khmer Rouge official described how the survivors “froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told … That was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the people over.”

A Finnish Government Commission of Enquiry estimated that 600,000 Cambodians died in the ensuing civil war and described the bombing as the “first stage in a decade of genocide.”��What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot, their beneficiary, completed. Under their bombs, the Khmer Rouge grew to a formidable army of 200,000.

Under a bogus “humanitarian” Oil for Food Programme, $100 was allotted for each Iraqi to live on for a year. This figure had to pay for the entire society’s infrastructure and essential services, such as power and water.��

ISIS has a similar past and present. By most scholarly measure, and ’s invasion of in 2003 led to the deaths of some 700,000 people — in a country that had no history of jihadism. The had done territorial and political deals.�� and had class and sectarian differences, but they were at peace; intermarriage was common. Three years before the invasion, I drove the length of Iraq without fear. On the way I met people proud, above all, to be Iraqis, the heirs of a civilization that seemed, for them, a presence.

Bush and Blair blew all this to bits. Iraq is now a nest of jihadism. – like Pol Pot’s “jihadists” – seized the opportunity provided by the onslaught of shock and awe and the civil war that followed. “Rebel” Syria offered even greater rewards, with CIA and Gulf ratlines of weapons, logistics and money running through Turkey. The arrival of foreign recruits was inevitable. A former British ambassador, Oliver Miles, recently wrote: “The [Cameron] government seems to be following the example of Tony Blair, who ignored consistent advice from the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6 that our Middle East policy — and in particular our Middle East wars — had been a principal driver in the recruitment of Muslims in Britain for terrorism here.”

ISIS is the progeny of those in Washington and London who, in destroying Iraq as both a state and a society, conspired to commit an epic crime against humanity. Like Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, ISIS are the mutations of a Western state terror dispensed by a venal imperial elite undeterred by the consequences of actions taken at great remove in distance and culture. Their culpability is unmentionable in “our” societies.

Iraqi Holocaust

It is 23 years since this holocaust enveloped Iraq, immediately after the first , when the US and Britain hijacked the United Nations Security Council and imposed punitive “sanctions” on the Iraqi population — ironically reinforcing the domestic authority of Saddam Hussein. It was like a medieval siege. Almost everything that sustained a modern state was, in the jargon, “blocked” — from chlorine for making the water supply safe to school pencils, parts for X-ray machines, common painkillers and drugs to combat previously unknown cancers carried in the dust from the southern battlefields contaminated with depleted uranium ().

Just before Christmas 1999, the Department of Trade and Industry in London restricted the export of vaccines meant to protect Iraqi children against diphtheria and yellow fever. Kim Howells, a medical doctor and parliamentary under-secretary of state in the Blair government, explained why. “The children’s vaccines,” he said, “were capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction.” The British government could get away with such an outrage because media reporting of Iraq – much of it manipulated by the Foreign Office – blamed Saddam for everything.

On September 23, a Tomahawk cruise missile hit a village in Idlib Province in Syria, killing as many as a dozen civilians, including women and children. None waved a black flag.

Under a bogus “humanitarian” Oil for Food Programme, $100 was allotted for each Iraqi to live on for a year. This figure had to pay for the entire society’s infrastructure and essential services, such as power and water.��“Imagine,” UN Assistant Secretary General Hans Von Sponeck told me, “setting that pittance against the lack of clean water, and the fact that the majority of sick people cannot afford treatment, and the sheer trauma of getting from day to day, and you have a glimpse of the nightmare. And make no mistake, this is deliberate. I have not in the past wanted to use the word genocide, but now it is unavoidable.”

Disgusted, Von Sponeck resigned as UN humanitarian co-ordinator in Iraq. His predecessor, Denis Halliday, an equally distinguished senior UN official, had also resigned. “I was instructed,” Halliday said, “to implement a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide: a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over a million individuals, children and adults.”

A study by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) found that between 1991-98, the height of the blockade, there were 500,000 “excess” deaths of Iraqi infants under the age of 5. An American TV reporter put this to Madeleine Albright, US ambassador to the , asking her: “Is the price worth it?” Albright replied: “We think the price is worth it.”

In 2007, the senior British official responsible for the sanctions, Carne Ross, known as “Mr. Iraq,” told a parliamentary selection committee: “[The US and UK governments] effectively denied the entire population a means to live.” When I interviewed Ross three years later, he was consumed by regret and contrition. “I feel ashamed,” he said. He is today a rare truth-teller of how governments deceive and how a compliant media plays a critical role in disseminating and maintaining the deception. “We would feed [journalists] factoids of sanitized intelligence,” he said, “or we’d freeze them out.”

Sanitized Intelligence

On September 25, a headline in The Guardian read: “Faced with the horror of Isis we must act.” The “we must act” is a ghost risen, a warning of the suppression of informed memory, facts, lessons learned and regrets or shame. The author of the article was Peter Hain, the former Foreign Office minister responsible for Iraq under Blair. In 1998, when Halliday revealed the extent of the suffering in Iraq for which the Blair government shared primary responsibility, Hain abused him on the BBC’s Newsnight as an “apologist for Saddam.” In 2003, Hain backed Blair’s invasion of stricken Iraq on the basis of transparent lies. At a subsequent Labour Party conference, he dismissed the invasion as a “fringe issue.”

Now Hain is demanding “air strikes, drones, military equipment and other support” for those “facing genocide” in Iraq and Syria. This will further “the imperative of a political solution.” Obama has the same in mind as he lifts what he calls the “restrictions” on US bombing and drone attacks. This means that missiles and 500-pound bombs can smash the homes of peasant people, as they are doing without restriction in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia — as they did in Cambodia, and . On September 23, a Tomahawk cruise missile hit a village in Idlib Province in Syria, killing as many as a dozen civilians, including women and children. None waved a black flag.

The day Hain’s article appeared, Halliday and Von Sponeck happened to be in London and came to visit me. They were not shocked by the lethal hypocrisy of a politician, but lamented the enduring, almost inexplicable absence of intelligent diplomacy in negotiating a semblance of truce. Across the world, from Northern Ireland to , those regarding each other as terrorists and heretics have faced each other across a table. Why not now in Iraq and Syria?

A truce – however difficult to achieve – is the only way out of this imperial maze; otherwise, the beheadings will continue.

Like Ebola from West Africa, a bacterium called “perpetual war” has crossed the Atlantic. Lord Richards, until recently head of the British military, wants “boots on the ground” now. There is a vapid, almost sociopathic verboseness from , Obama and their “coalition of the willing” — notably Australia’s aggressively weird ��— as they prescribe more violence delivered from 30,000 feet on places where the blood of previous adventures never dried. They have never seen bombing and they apparently love it so much they want it to overthrow their one potentially valuable ally — Syria. This is nothing new, as the following leaked UK-US intelligence file illustrates:

“In order to facilitate the action of liberative [sic] forces … a special effort should be made to eliminate certain key individuals [and] to proceed with internal disturbances in Syria. CIA is prepared, and SIS (MI6) will attempt to mount minor sabotage and coup de main [sic] incidents within Syria, working through contacts with individuals … a necessary degree of fear … frontier and [staged] border clashes [will] provide a pretext for intervention … the CIA and SIS should use … capabilities in both psychological and action fields to augment tension.”



That was written in 1957, though it could have been written yesterday. In the imperial world, nothing essentially changes. In 2013, former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas revealed that“two years before the ,” he was told in London that a war on Syria was planned.��“I am going to tell you something,” he said in an interview with the French TV channel LPC:

“I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business. I met top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria … Britain was organizing an invasion of rebels into Syria. They even asked me, although I was no longer Minister for Foreign Affairs, if I would like to participate … This operation goes way back. It was prepared, preconceived and planned.”

The only effective opponents of ISIS are accredited demons of the West — Syria, Iran and Hezbollah. The obstacle is Turkey, an “ally” and a member of NATO, which has conspired with the CIA, MI6 and the Gulf medievalists to channel support to the Syrian “rebels,” including those now calling themselves ISIS. Supporting Turkey in its long-held ambition for regional dominance by overthrowing the Assad government beckons a major conventional war and the horrific dismemberment of the most ethnically diverse state in the Middle East.

A Truce

A truce – however difficult to achieve – is the only way out of this imperial maze; otherwise, the beheadings will continue. That genuine negotiations with Syria should be seen as “morally questionable” (The Guardian) suggests that the assumptions of moral superiority among those who supported the war criminal Blair remain not only absurd, but dangerous.

Together with a truce, there should be an immediate cessation of all shipments of war materials to Israel and recognition of the State of Palestine. The issue of Palestine is the region’s most festering open wound, and the oft-stated justification for the rise of Islamist extremism. made that clear. also offers hope. Give justice to the Palestinians and you begin to change the world around them.

More than 40 years ago, the Nixon-Kissinger bombing of Cambodia unleashed a torrent of suffering from which that country has never recovered. The same is true of the Blair-Bush crime in Iraq. With impeccable timing, Kissinger’s latest self-serving tome has just been released with its satirical title, World Order. In one fawning review, Kissinger is described as a “key shaper of a world order that remained stable for a quarter of a ����Գٳܰ���.”

Tell that to the people of Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Chile, East Timor and all the other victims of his “statecraft.”��Only when “we” recognize the war criminals in our midst will the blood begin to dry.

The views expressed��in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect��51�Թ�’s��editorial policy.

*[This article originally appeared on .]

��/

The post From Pol Pot to ISIS: “Anything That Flies on Everything That Moves” appeared first on 51�Թ�.

There are times when farce and living caricature almost consume the cynicism and mendacity in the daily life of ‘s rulers. Across the front pages is a photograph of a resolute with indigenous children in Arnhem Land, in the remote north. “Domestic policy one day,” says the caption, “focus on war the next.”

Reminiscent of a vintage anthropologist, the prime minister grasps the head of an indigenous child trying to shake his hand. He beams, as if incredulous at the success of his twin stunts: “running the nation” from a bushland tent on the Gove Peninsula while “taking the nation to war.” Like any “reality” show, he is surrounded by cameras and manic attendants, who alert the nation to his principled and decisive acts.

But wait; the leader of all must fly south to farewell the SAS, off on its latest heroic mission since its triumph in the civilian bloodfest of . “Pursuing sheer evil” sounds familiar; of course, an historic mercenary role is unmentionable, this time backing the latest -installed sectarian regime in Baghdad and re-branded ex-Kurdish “terrorists,” now guarding Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Marathon Oil, Hunt Oil et al.

No parliamentary debate is allowed; no fabricated invitation from foreigners in distress is necessary, as it was in . Speed is the essence. What with US intelligence insisting there is no threat from the Islamic State to America and presumably Australia, truth may deter the mission if time is lost. If this week’s police and media show of “anti-terror” arrests in “the plot against Sydney” fails to arouse the suspicions of the nation, nothing will. That the unpopular Abbott’s reckless war-making is likely to be self-fulfilling, making Australians less safe, ought to in headlines, too. Remember the blowback of Bush and Blair’s wars.

But what of the beheadings? During the 21 months between ’s abduction and his beheading, 113 people were reportedly beheaded by , one of the closest allies of Barack Obama and Abbott in their current “moral” and “idealistic” enterprise. Indeed, Abbott’s war will no doubt rate a plaque in the Australian War Memorial alongside all the other colonial invasions acknowledged in that great emporium of white nationalism — except, of course, the colonial invasion of Australia, during which the beheading of the indigenous Australian defenders was not considered sheer evil.

Australia’s First People

This returns us to the show in Arnhem Land. Abbott says the reason he and the media are camped there is that he can consult with indigenous “leaders” and “gain a better understanding of the needs of people living and working in these areas.”

Will Abbott, the self-proclaimed friend of indigenous people, step in and defend these families? On the contrary, in his May budget, Abbott cut $536 million from the “needs” of indigenous people over the next five years, a quarter of which was for health provision. Far from being an indigenous “friend,” Abbott’s government is continuing the theft of indigenous land with a confidence trick called “99-year leases.”��

Australia is awash with knowledge of the “needs” of its first people. Every week, it seems, yet another study adds to the torrent of information about the imposed impoverishment of and vicious discrimination against indigenous people: apartheid in all but name. The facts, which can no longer be spun, ought to be engraved in the national consciousness, if not the prime minister’s. Australia has a rate of indigenous incarceration higher than that of apartheid South Africa; deaths in custody occur as if to a terrible drumbeat; preventable Dickensian diseases are rampant, including among those who live in the midst of a mining boom that has made profits of a billion dollars a week. Rheumatic heart disease kills indigenous people in their 30s and 40s, and their children go deaf and suffer trachoma, which causes blindness.

When, as shadow indigenous health minister in 2009, Abbott was reminded by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Indigenous people that the Howard government’s fraudulent “intervention” was racist, he told Professor James Anaya to “get a life” and “stop listening to the old victim brigade.” The distinguished Anaya had just been to Utopia, a vast region in the Northern Territory, where I filmed the evidence of the racism and forced deprivation that had so shocked him and millions of viewers around the world. “Malnutrition,” a doctor in central Australia told me, “is common.”

Today, as Abbott poses for the camera with children in Arnhem Land, the children of Utopia are being denied access to safe and clean drinking water. For ten weeks, communities have had no running water. A new bore would cost just $35,000. Scabies and more trachoma are the result. (For perspective, consider that the Labor government’s last indigenous affairs minister, Jenny Macklin, spent $331,144 refurbishing her office in Canberra.)

In 2012, Olga Havnen, a senior Northern Territory government official, revealed that more than $80 million was spent on the surveillance of families and the removal of children, compared with just $500,000 on supporting the same impoverished families. Her warning of a second Stolen Generation led to her sacking. Last week in Sydney, Amnesty and a group known as Grandmothers Against Removals presented further evidence that the number of indigenous children being taken from their families, often violently, is greater than at any time in Australia’s colonial history.

Will Abbott, the self-proclaimed friend of indigenous people, step in and defend these families? On the contrary, in his May budget, Abbott cut $536 million from the “needs” of indigenous people over the next five years, a quarter of which was for health provision. Far from being an indigenous “friend,” Abbott’s government is continuing the theft of indigenous land with a confidence trick called “99-year leases.” In return for surrendering their country — the essence of aboriginality — communities will receive morsels of rent, which the government will take from indigenous mining royalties. Perhaps only in Australia can such deceit masquerade as policy.

Indigenous Rights

Similarly, Abbott appears to be supporting constitutional reform that will “recognize” indigenous people in a proposed referendum. The “recognize” campaign consists of familiar gestures and tokenism, promoted by a PR campaign “around which the nation can rally,” according to the Sydney Morning Herald — meaning the majority, or those who care, can feel they are doing something while doing nothing.

During all the years I have been reporting and filming indigenous Australia, one “need” has struck me as paramount: a treaty. By that I mean an effective indigenous bill of rights: land rights, resources rights, health rights, education rights, housing rights and more. None of the “advances” of recent years, such as Native Title, has delivered the rights and services most Australians take for granted.

As Arrente/Amatjere leader Rosalie Kunoth-Monks says: “We never ceded ownership of this land. This remains our land, and we need to negotiate a lawful treaty with those who seized our land.” A great many if not most indigenous Australians agree with her; and a campaign for a treaty — all but ignored by the media — is growing fast, especially among the savvy indigenous young unrepresented by co-opted “leaders” who tell white society what it wants to hear. That Australia has a prime minister who described this country as “unsettled” until the British came indicates the urgency of true reform — the end of paternalism and the enactment of a treaty negotiated between equals. For until we, who came later, give back to the first Australians their nationhood, we can never claim our own.

*[This article was originally published by and has been reposted with permission from John Pilger. His articles and documentaries are available at .

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

/

The post War, Circus and Injustice Down Under appeared first on 51�Թ�.

“There is a taboo,” said the visionary Edward Said, “on telling the truth about Palestine and the great destructive force behind . Only when this truth is out can any of us be free.”

For many people, the truth is out now. At last, they know. Those once intimidated into silence cannot look away now. Staring at them from their TV, laptop, phone, is proof of the barbarism of the Israeli state and the great destructive force of its mentor and provider, the , the cowardice of European governments, and the collusion of others, such as Canada and Australia, in this epic crime.

The attack on was an attack on all of us. The siege of Gaza is a siege of all of us. The denial of justice to Palestinians is a symptom of much of humanity under siege and a warning that the threat of a new world war is growing by the day.

When called the struggle of “the greatest moral issue of our time,” he spoke on behalf of true civilization, not that which empires invent. In Latin America, the governments of , , , Bolivia, El Salvador, Peru and Ecuador have made their stand on Gaza. Each of these countries has known its own dark silence, when immunity for mass murder was sponsored by the same godfather in Washington that answered the cries of children in Gaza with more ammunition to kill them.

Unlike and his killers, Washington’s pet fascists in Latin America did not concern themselves with moral window dressing. They simply murdered, and left the bodies on rubbish dumps. For , the goal is the same: to dispossess and ultimately destroy an entire human society: a truth that 225 survivors and their descendants have with the genesis of genocide.

Power of Liberal Propaganda

Nothing has changed since the Zionists’ infamous “Plan D” of 1948 that ethnically cleansed an entire people. Recently, one could read the words: “Genocide is Permissible” on the website of The Times of Israel. A deputy speaker of the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) Moshe Feiglin demands a policy of mass expulsion into concentration camps. An MP, Ayelet Shaked, whose party is a member of the governing coalition, calls for the extermination of Palestinian mothers to prevent them giving birth to what she calls “little snakes.”

For years, reporters have watched Israeli soldiers bait Palestinian children by abusing them through loudspeakers. Then they shoot them dead. For years, reporters have known about Palestinian women about to give birth and refused passage through a roadblock to a hospital; and the baby has died, and sometimes the mother as well.

For years, reporters have known about Palestinian doctors and ambulance crews given permission by Israeli commanders to attend the wounded or remove the dead, only to be shot in the head.

For years, reporters have known about stricken people prevented from getting life-saving treatment, or shot dead when they have tried to reach a clinic for chemotherapy treatment. One elderly lady with a walking stick was murdered in this way – a bullet in her back.

Understanding the sophistry and power of liberal propaganda is key to understanding why Israel’s outrages endure; why the world looks on; why sanctions are never applied to Israel; and why nothing less than a total boycott of everything Israeli is now a measure of basic human decency.

When I put the facts of this crime to Dori Gold, a senior adviser to the Israeli prime minister, he said: “Unfortunately, in every kind of warfare there are cases of civilians who are accidentally killed. But the case you cite was not terrorism. Terrorism means putting the cross-hairs of the sniper’s rifle on a civilian deliberately.”

I replied: “That’s exactly what happened.”

“No,” he said, “it did not �󲹱����.”

Such a lie or delusion is repeated unerringly by Israel’s apologists. As the former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges points out, the reporting of such an atrocity invariably ends up as “caught in the cross-fire.” For as long as I have covered the Middle East, much, if not most of the western media has colluded in this way.

In one of my films, a Palestinian cameraman, Imad Ghanem, lies helpless while soldiers from the “most moral army in the world” blew both his legs off. This atrocity was given two lines on the BBC website. Thirteen journalists were killed by Israel in its latest blood fest in Gaza. All were Palestinian. Who knows their names?

Something is different now. There is a huge revulsion across the world; and the voices of sensible liberalism are worried. Their hand wringing and specious choir of “equal blame” and “Israel’s right to defend itself” will not wash any more; neither will the smear of . Neither will their selective cry that “something must be done” about Islamic fanatics – but nothing must be done about Zionist fanatics.

One sensible liberal voice, the novelist Ian McEwan, was being celebrated as a sage by The Guardian while the children of Gaza were blown to bits. This is the same Ian McEwan who ignored the pleading of Palestinians not to accept the Jerusalem Prize for literature. “If I only went to countries that I approve of, I probably would never get out of bed,” said McEwan.

If they could speak, the dead of Gaza might say: Stay in bed, great novelist, for your very presence smoothes the bed of racism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and murder — no matter the weasel words you uttered as you claimed your prize.

Understanding the sophistry and power of liberal propaganda is key to understanding why Israel’s outrages endure; why the world looks on; why sanctions are never applied to Israel; and why nothing less than a total boycott of everything Israeli is now a measure of basic human decency.

Hamas and The Destruction of Israel

The most incessant propaganda says is committed to the destruction of Israel. Khaled Hroub, the Cambridge University scholar considered a world leading authority on Hamas, says this phrase is “never used or adopted by Hamas, even in its most radical statements.” The oft-quoted “anti-Jewish” 1988 Charter was the work of “one individual and made public without appropriate Hamas consensus …. The author was one of the ‘old guard'”; the document is regarded as an embarrassment and never cited.

Hamas has repeatedly offered a 10-year truce with Israel and has long settled for a two-state solution. When Medea Benjamin, the fearless Jewish American activist, was in Gaza, she carried a letter from Hamas leaders to that made clear the government of Gaza wanted peace with Israel. It was ignored. I personally know of many such letters carried in good faith, ignored or dismissed.

The unforgivable crime of Hamas is a distinction almost never reported: It is the only Arab government to have been freely and democratically elected by its people. Worse, it has now formed a government of unity with the . A single, resolute Palestinian voice — in the General Assembly, the Human Rights Council and the International Criminal Court () — is the most feared threat.

Since 2002, a pioneering media unit at Glasgow University has produced remarkable studies of reporting and propaganda in Israel/Palestine. Professor Greg Philo and his colleagues were shocked to find a public ignorance compounded by TV news reporting. The more people watched, the less they knew.

Greg Philo says the problem is not “bias” as such. Reporters and producers are as moved as anyone by the suffering of Palestinians; but so imposing is the power structure of the media — as an extension of the state and its vested interests — that critical facts and historical context are routinely suppressed.

In matters of war and peace, BBC-style illusions of impartiality and credibility do more to limit and control public discussion than tabloid distortion.

Incredibly, less than 9% of young viewers interviewed by Professor Philo’s team were aware that Israel was the occupying power, and that the illegal settlers were Jewish; many believed them to be Palestinian. The term “Occupied Territories” was seldom explained. Words such as “murder,” “atrocity,” “cold-blooded killing” were used only to describe the deaths of Israelis.

Illusions of Impartiality

Recently, a BBC reporter, David Loyn, was critical of another British journalist, Jon Snow of Channel 4 News. Snow was so moved by what he had seen in Gaza he went on YouTube to make a humanitarian appeal. What concerned the BBC man was that Snow had breached protocol and been emotional in his YouTube piece.

“Emotion,” wrote Loyn, “is the stuff of propaganda and news is against propaganda.” Did he write this with a straight face? In fact, Snow’s delivery was calm. His crime was to have strayed outside the boundaries of fake impartiality. Unforgivably, he did not censor himself.

In 1937, with Adolf Hitler in power, Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times in London, wrote the following in his diary: “I spend my nights in taking out anything which will hurt [German] susceptibilities and in dropping in little things which are intended to soothe them.”

On 30 July, the BBC offered viewers a master class in the Dawson Principle. The diplomatic correspondent of the program Newsnight, Mark Urban, gave five reasons why the Middle East was in turmoil. None included the historic or contemporary role of the British government. The Cameron government’s dispatch of £8 billion worth of arms and military equipment to Israel was airbrushed. Britain’s massive arms shipment to Saudi Arabia was airbrushed. Britain’s role in the destruction of was airbrushed. Britain’s support for the tyranny in Egypt was airbrushed.

As for the British invasions of and , they did not happen, either.

The only expert witness on this BBC program was an academic called Toby Dodge from the London School of Economics. What viewers needed to know was that Dodge had been a special adviser to , the American general largely responsible for the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan. But this, too, was airbrushed.

In matters of war and peace, BBC-style illusions of impartiality and credibility do more to limit and control public discussion than tabloid distortion. As Greg Philo pointed out, Jon Snow’s moving commentary on YouTube was limited to whether the Israeli assault on Gaza was proportionate or reasonable. What was missing — and is almost always missing — was the essential truth of the longest military occupation in modern times: a criminal enterprise backed by Western governments from Washington to London to Canberra.

As for the myth that “vulnerable” and “isolated” Israel is surrounded by enemies, Israel is actually surrounded by strategic allies. The Palestinian Authority, bankrolled, armed and directed by the US, has long colluded with Tel Aviv. Standing shoulder to shoulder with Netanyahu are the tyrannies in , , , the , , — if the World Cup ever gets to Qatar, count on Mossad to run the security.

Palestinian Resistance

Resistance is humanity at its bravest and most noble. The resistance in Gaza is rightly compared with the 1943 Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto — which also dug tunnels and deployed tactics of subterfuge and surprise against an overpowering military machine. The last surviving leader of the Warsaw uprising, Marek Edelman, wrote a letter of solidarity to the Palestinian resistance, comparing it with the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ZOB), his ghetto fighters. The letter began: “Commanders of the Palestine military, paramilitary and partisan operations — and to all soldiers [of Palestine].”

Dr. Mads Gilbert is a Norwegian doctor renowned for his heroic work in Gaza. On August 8, Dr. Gilbert returned to his hometown, Tronso, in Norway, which, as he pointed out, the Nazis had occupied for seven years. He said:

“Imagine being back in 1945 and we in Norway did not win the liberation struggle, did not throw out the occupier. Imagine the occupier remaining in our country, taking it piece by piece, for decades upon decades, and banishing us to the leanest areas, and taking the fish in the sea and the water beneath us, then bombing our hospitals, our ambulance workers, our schools, our homes.

“Would we have given up and waved the white flag? No, we would not! And this is the situation in Gaza. This is not a battle between terrorism and democracy. Hamas is not the enemy Israel is fighting. Israel is waging a war against the Palestinian people’s will to resist. It is the Palestinian people’s dignity that they will not accept this.

“In 1938, the Nazis called the Jews Untermenschen— subhuman. Today, Palestinians are treated as a subhuman people who can be slaughtered without any in power reacting.

“So I have returned to Norway, a free country, and this country is free because we had a resistance movement, because occupied nations have the right to resist, even with weapons — it’s stated in international law. And the Palestinian people’s resistance in Gaza is admirable: a struggle for us all.”

There are dangers in telling this truth, in breaching what Edward Said called “the last taboo.” My documentary, Palestine Is Still the Issue, was nominated for a Bafta, a British academy award, and praised by the Independent Television Commission for its “journalistic integrity” and the “care and thoroughness with which it was researched.” Yet within minutes of the film’s broadcast on Britain’s ITV Network, a shock wave struck — a deluge of emails described me as a “demonic psychopath,” “a purveyor of hate and evil,” “an anti-Semite of the most dangerous kind.” Much of this was orchestrated by Zionists in the US who could not possibly have seen the film. Death threats arrived at a rate of one a day.

In one sense, a war against Russia has already begun. While the world watched horrified as Israel assaulted Gaza, similar atrocities in eastern Ukraine were barely news.

Something similar happened to the Australian commentator Mike Carlton last month. In his regular column in The Sydney Morning Herald, Carlton produced a rare piece of journalism about Israel and the Palestinians in which he identified the oppressors and their victims. He was careful to limit his attack to “a new and brutal Israel dominated by the hard-line, right-wing Likud party of Netanyahu.” Those who had previously run the Zionist state, he implied, belonged to “a proud liberal tradition.”

On cue, the deluge struck. He was called “a bag of Nazi slime, a Jew-hating racist.” He was threatened repeatedly, and he emailed his attackers to “get f***ed.”

The Herald demanded he apologize. When he refused, he was suspended, then he resigned. According to the ����������’s publisher, Sean Aylmer, the company “expects much higher standards from its columnists.”

The “problem” of Carlton’s acerbic, often solitary liberal voice in a country in which Rupert Murdoch controls 70% of the capital city press — Australia is the world’s first murdocracy — would be solved twice over. The Australian Human Rights Commission is to investigate complaints against Carlton under the Racial Discrimination Act, which outlaws any public act or utterance that is “reasonably likely … to offend, insult, humiliate another person or a group of people” on the basic of their race, color or national or ethnic origin.

This is Real Journalism

In contrast to the safe, silent Australia — where the Carltons are made extinct — real journalism is alive in Gaza. I often speak on the phone with Mohammed Omer, an extraordinary young Palestinian journalist, to whom I presented, in 2008, the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. Whenever I called him during the assault on Gaza, I could hear the whine of drones, the explosion of missiles. He interrupted one call to attend to children huddled outside waiting for transport amidst the explosions. When I spoke to him on July 30, a single Israeli F-19 fighter had just slaughtered 19 children. On August 20, he described how Israeli drones had effectively “rounded up” a village so that they could savagely gunned down.

Every day, at sunrise, Mohammed looks for families who have been bombed. He records their stories, standing in the rubble of their homes. He takes their pictures. He goes to the hospital. He goes to the morgue. He goes to the cemetery. He queues for hours for bread for his own family. And he watches the sky. He sends two, three, four dispatches a day. This is real journalism.

“They are trying to annihilate us,” he told me. “But the more they bomb us, the stronger we are. They will never win.”

The great crime committed in Gaza is a reminder of something wider and menacing to us all.

Since 2001, the United States and its allies have been on a rampage. In Iraq, at least 700,000 men, women and children are dead as a result. The rise of — in a country where there was none — is the result. Known as and now the , modern jihadism was invented by US and Britain, assisted by and Saudi Arabia. The original aim was to use and develop an Islamic fundamentalism that had barely existed in much of the Arab world in order to undermine pan-Arab movements and secular governments. By the 1980s, this had become a weapon to destroy the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The CIA called it Operation Cyclone; and a cyclone it turned out to be, with its unleashed fury blowing back in the faces of its creators.

The attacks of and in London in July, 2005 were the result of this blowback, as were the recent, gruesome murders of the American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff. For more than a year, the Obama administration armed the killers of these two young men — then known as in — in order to destroy the secular government in Damascus.

The West’s principal “ally” in this imperial mayhem is the medieval state where beheadings are routinely and judicially carried out — Saudi Arabia. Whenever a member of the British Royal Family is sent to this barbaric place, you can bet your bottom petrodollar that the British government wants to sell the sheikhs more fighter planes, missiles, manacles. Most of the 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, which bankrolls jihadists from Syria to Iraq.

Why Must We Live in This State of Perpetual War?

The immediate answer lies in the United States, where a secret and unreported coup has taken place. A group known as the Project for a New American Century, the inspiration of Dick Cheney and others, came to power with the administration of . Once known in Washington as the “crazies,” this extreme sect believes in what the US Space Command calls “full spectrum dominance.”

Under both Bush and Obama, a 19th-century imperial mentality has infused all departments of state. Raw militarism is ascendant; diplomacy is redundant. Nations and governments are judged as useful or expendable: to be bribed or threatened or “sanctioned.”

On July 31, the National Defense Panel in Washington published a remarkable that called for the United States to prepare to fight six major wars simultaneously. At the top of the list were and — nuclear powers.

In one sense, a war against Russia has already begun. While the world watched horrified as Israel assaulted Gaza, similar atrocities in eastern were barely news. At the time of writing, two Ukrainian cities of Russian-speaking people — Donetsk and Luhansk — are under siege: Their people and hospitals and schools blitzed by a regime in Kiev that came to power in a putsch led by backed and paid for by the United States. The coup was the climax of what the Russian political observer Sergei Glaziev describes as a 20-year “grooming of Ukrainian Nazis aimed at Russia.” Actual has risen again in Europe and not one European leader has spoken against it, perhaps because the rise of fascism across Europe is now a truth that dares not speak its name.

The Western media machine was now capable of penetrating deep into the consciousness of much of humanity with a “wiring” as influential as that of the imperial navies of the 19th century. Gunboat journalism, in other words. Or war by media.

With its fascist past, and present, Ukraine is now a CIA theme park, a colony of and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The fascist coup in Kiev in February was the boast of US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, whose “coup budget” ran to $5 billion. But there was a setback. Moscow prevented the seizure of its legitimate Black Sea naval base in Russian-speaking . A referendum and annexation quickly followed. Represented in the West as the Kremlin’s “aggression,” this serves to turn truth on its head and cover Washington’s goals: to drive a wedge between a “pariah” Russia and its principal trading partners in Europe and eventually to break up the Russian Federation. American missiles already surround Russia; NATO’s military build-up in the former Soviet republics and eastern Europe is the biggest since the .

During the , this would have risked a nuclear holocaust. The risk has returned as anti-Russian misinformation reaches crescendos of hysteria in the US and Europe. A textbook case is the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner in July. Without a single piece of evidence, the US and its NATO allies and their media machines blamed ethnic Russian “separatists” in Ukraine and implied that Moscow was ultimately responsible. An editorial in The Economist accused of mass murder. The cover of Der Spiegel used faces of the victims and bold red type, “Stoppt Putin Jetzt!” (Stop Putin Now!). In The New York Times, Timothy Garton Ash substantiated his case for “Putin’s deadly doctrine” with personal abuse of “a short, thickset man with a rather ratlike face.”

The �ҳܲ����徱����’s role has been important. Renowned for its investigations, the newspaper has made no serious attempt to examine who shot the airplane down and why, even though a wealth of material from credible sources shows that Moscow was as shocked as the rest of the world, and the airliner may well have been brought down by the Ukrainian regime.

With the White House offering no verifiable evidence — even though US satellites would have observed the shooting-down — The �ҳܲ����徱����’s Moscow correspondent Shaun Walker stepped into the breach: “My audience with the Demon of Donetsk,” was the front- page headline over Walker’s breathless interview with one Igor Bezler. “With a walrus moustache, a fiery temper and a reputation for brutality,” he wrote, “Igor Bezler is the most feared of all the rebel leaders in eastern Ukraine … nicknamed The Demon … If the Ukrainian security services, the SBU, are to be believed, the Demon and a group of his men were responsible for shooting down Malaysia Airlines flight … as well as allegedly bringing down MH17, the rebels have shot down 10 Ukrainian aircraft.” Demon journalism requires no further evidence.

Demon journalism makes over a fascist-contaminated junta that seized power in Kiev as a respectable “interim government.” Neo-Nazis become mere “nationalists.” “News” sourced to the Kiev junta ensures the suppression of a US-run coup and the junta’s systematic ethnic cleaning of the Russian-speaking population of eastern Ukraine. That this should happen in the borderland through which the original Nazis invaded Russia, extinguishing some 22 million Russian lives, is of no interest. What matters is a Russian “invasion” of Ukraine that seems difficult to prove beyond familiar satellite images that evoke Colin Powell’s fictional presentation to the United Nations “proving” that had WMD. “You need to know that accusations of a major Russian ‘invasion’ of Ukraine appear not to be supported by reliable intelligence,” wrote a group of former senior US intelligence officials and analysts, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “Rather, the ‘intelligence’ seems to be of the same dubious, politically ‘fixed’ kind used 12 years ago to ‘justify’ the US-led attack on Iraq.”

The Power of Public Opinion

The jargon is “controlling the narrative.” In his seminal Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said was more explicit: The Western media machine was now capable of penetrating deep into the consciousness of much of humanity with a “wiring” as influential as that of the imperial navies of the 19th century. Gunboat journalism, in other words. Or war by media.

Yet a critical public intelligence and resistance to propaganda does exist; and a second superpower is emerging — the power of public opinion, fuelled by the Internet and social media.

The false reality created by false news delivered by media gatekeepers may prevent some of us knowing that this new superpower is stirring in country after country: from the Americas to Europe, Asia to Africa. It is a moral insurrection, exemplified by the whistleblowers , Chelsea Manning and . The question begs: Will we break our silence while there is time?

When I was last in Gaza, driving back to the Israeli checkpoint, I caught sight of two Palestinian flags through the razor wire. Children had made flagpoles out of sticks tied together and they’d climbed on a wall and held the flag between them.

The children do this, I was told, whenever there are foreigners around, because they want to show the world they are there — alive, and brave, and undefeated.

*[This article is adapted from John Pilger’s Edward Said Memorial Lecture, delivered in Adelaide, Australia, on 11 September.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

��/

��

The post Breaking the Last Taboo: Gaza and the Threat of World War appeared first on 51�Թ�.

At the international court convened in Cambodia, two former Khmer Rouge leaders, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, have been finally convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity — the that killed up to 2 million people.

landmark 1979 film, Cambodia Year Zero, alerted much of the world to the suffering of the Cambodian people.

*[Note: This film, like all of John Pilger’s work, is available at .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post John Pilger: The Silent Death of Cambodia appeared first on 51�Թ�.

John Pilger first made the film in 1977. It told how almost a million had been forced off their land in 1948, and again in 1967. Twenty five years later, in 2002, Pilger returned to the and to make another film, giving it the same title. The film asks why the Palestinians, whose right of return was affirmed by the United Nations more than half a century ago, are still caught in a terrible limbo — refugees in their own land, controlled by Israel in the longest military occupation in modern times.

“If we are to speak of the great injustice here, nothing has changed,” says Pilger at the start of the film.

“What has changed is that the Palestinians have fought back. Stateless and humiliated for so long, they have risen up against Israel’s huge military regime, although they themselves have no army, no tanks, no American planes and gunships or missiles. Some have committed desperate acts of terror, like suicide bombing. But, for Palestinians, the overriding, routine terror, day after day, has been the ruthless control of almost every aspect of their lives, as if they live in an open prison. This film is about the Palestinians and a group of courageous Israelis united in the oldest human struggle, to be free.”

Pilger distills the history of Palestine during the 20^th century into a comprehensible struggle for land — the theft of 78% of that belonging to Palestinians when the state of was founded in 1948. This, and the campaign to eradicate the indigenous population — exemplified by the current assault on Gaza — are still the issue.

(2011) is a timely investigation into the media’s role in war, tracing the history of “embedded” and independent reporting from the carnage of World War I to the destruction of Hiroshima, and from the invasion of Vietnam to the reporting of Palestine.

“We journalists,” says Pilger in the film, “are only real journalists if we defy those who seek our collusion in selling their latest bloody adventure in someone else’s country. For propaganda relies on us in the media to aim its deceptions not at a far away country but at you at home … In this age of endless imperial war, the lives of countless men, women and children depend on the truth or their blood is on us.”

*[Note: These films, like all of John Pilger’s work, are available at .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post John Pilger: Palestine, War and the Lethal Role of Journalists appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The other night, I saw George Orwells’s 1984 performed on the London stage. Although crying out for a contemporary interpretation, Orwell’s warning about the future was presented as a period piece: remote, unthreatening. It was as if Edward Snowden had revealed nothing, Big Brother was not now a digital eavesdropper, and Orwell himself had never said: “To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.”

George Orwell

Acclaimed by critics, the production was a measure of our cultural and political times. When the lights came up, people were already on their way out. They seemed unmoved, or perhaps other distractions beckoned. “What a mindf**k,” said the young woman in front of me, lighting up her phone.

As advanced societies are de-politicized, the changes are both subtle and spectacular. In everyday discourse, political language is turned on its head, as Orwell prophesized in 1984. “Democracy” is now a rhetorical device. Peace is “perpetual war.” “Global” is imperial. The once hopeful concept of “reform” now means regression, even destruction. “Austerity” is the imposition of extreme capitalism on the poor and the gift of socialism for the rich: an ingenious system under which the majority service the debts of the few.

In the arts, hostility to political truth-telling is an article of bourgeois faith. “Picasso’s red period,” says an Observer headline, “and why politics don’t make good art.” Consider this in a newspaper that promoted the bloodbath in Iraq as a liberal crusade. Picasso’s lifelong opposition to fascism is a footnote, just as Orwell’s radicalism has faded from the prize that appropriated his name.

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 speaks for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron damns the corruption of the ruling class, and no Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin reveal the moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar Wilde, H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw have no equivalents today. Harold Pinter was the last to raise his voice. Among the insistent voices of consumer-feminism, none echoes Virginia Woolf, who described “the arts of dominating other people … of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital.”

Blair’s enduring accomplices are respectability itself. When the BBC arts presenter, Kirsty Wark, interviewed him on the tenth anniversary of his invasion of Iraq, she gifted him a moment he could only dream of: she allowed him to agonize over his “difficult” decision on Iraq rather than call him to account for his epic crime.��

At the National Theatre, a new play, Great Britain, satirizes the phone hacking scandal that has seen journalists tried and convicted, including a former editor of Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World. Described as a “farce with fangs [that] puts the whole incestuous [media] culture in the dock and subjects it to merciless ridicule,” the play’s targets are the “blessedly funny” characters in Britain’s tabloid press. That is well and good, and so very familiar. What of the non-tabloid media that regards itself as reputable and credible, yet serves a parallel role as an arm of state and corporate power, as in the promotion of illegal war?

Blair Went Free

The Leveson Inquiry into phone hacking glimpsed this unmentionable. Tony Blair was giving evidence, complaining to His Lordship about the tabloids’ harassment of his wife, when he was interrupted by a voice from the public gallery. David Lawley-Wakelin, a filmmaker, demanded Blair’s arrest and prosecution for war crimes. There was a long pause: the shock of truth. Lord Leveson leapt to his feet, ordered the truth-teller to be thrown out and apologized to the war criminal. Lawley-Wakelin was prosecuted; Blair went free.

Blair’s enduring accomplices are respectability itself. When the BBC arts presenter, Kirsty Wark, interviewed him on the tenth anniversary of his invasion of Iraq, she gifted him a moment he could only dream of: she allowed him to agonize over his “difficult” decision on Iraq rather than call him to account for his epic crime. This evoked the procession of BBC journalists, who in 2003 declared that Blair could feel “vindicated,” and the subsequent, “seminal” BBC series, The Blair Years, for which David Aaronovitch was chosen as the writer, presenter and interviewer. A Murdoch retainer who campaigned for military attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria, Aaronovitch fawned expertly.

Since the invasion of Iraq — the exemplar of an act of unprovoked aggression that the Nuremberg prosecutor, Robert Jackson, called: “The supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” — Blair and his mouthpiece and principal accomplice, Alastair Campbell, have been afforded generous space in The Guardian to rehabilitate their reputations. Described as a Labour Party “star,” Campbell has sought the sympathy of readers for his depression and displayed his interests; though not his current assignment as advisor, with Blair, to the Egyptian military tyranny.

As Iraq is dismembered as a consequence of the Blair/Bush invasion, a Guardian headline declares: “Toppling Saddam Was Right, But We Pulled Out Too Soon.” This ran across a prominent article on June 13 by a former Blair functionary, John McTernan, who also served Iraq’s CIA-installed dictator, Iyad Allawi. In calling for a repeat invasion of a country his former master helped destroy, McTernan made no reference to the deaths of at least 700,000 people, the flight of 4 million refugees, and sectarian turmoil in a nation once proud of its communal tolerance.

“Blair embodies corruption and war,” wrote the radical Guardian columnist Seumas Milne in a spirited piece on July 3. This is known in the trade as “balance.” The following day, the paper published a full-page advertisement for an American Stealth bomber. On a menacing image of the bomber were the words: “The F-35. GREAT For Britain.” This other embodiment of “corruption and war” will cost British taxpayers £1.3 billion — its F-model predecessors having slaughtered people across the developing world.

Had Clinton forgiven Monica Lewinsky for having an affair with her husband? “Forgiveness is a choice,” said Clinton, “for me, it was absolutely the right choice.” This recalled the 1990s and the years consumed by the Lewinsky “scandal.” President Bill Clinton was then invading Haiti, and bombing the Balkans, Africa and Iraq. He was also destroying the lives of Iraqi children.

In a village in Afghanistan, inhabited by the poorest of the poor, I filmed Orifa, kneeling at the graves of her husband, Gul Ahmed, a carpet weaver; seven other members of her family, including six children; and two children who were killed in the adjacent house. A “precision” 500-pound bomb was dropped directly on their small, mud, stone and straw house, leaving a crater 50 feet-wide. Lockheed Martin, the plane’s manufacturer, had pride of place in the Guardian’s advertisement.

The Clintons

Hilary Clinton, the former US secretary of state and aspiring president, was recently on the BBC’s cozy Women’s Hour. The presenter, Jenni Murray, presented Clinton as a beacon of female achievement. She did not remind her listeners about Clinton’s profanity that Afghanistan was invaded to “liberate” women like Orifa. She asked Clinton nothing about her administration’s terror campaign using drones to kill women, men and children. There was no mention of Clinton’s threat, while campaigning to be the first female president, to “eliminate” Iran, and nothing about her support for illegal mass surveillance and the pursuit of whistle-blowers.

Murray did ask one finger-to-the-lips question. Had Clinton forgiven Monica Lewinsky for having an affair with her husband? “Forgiveness is a choice,” said Clinton, “for me, it was absolutely the right choice.” This recalled the 1990s and the years consumed by the Lewinsky “scandal.” President Bill Clinton was then invading Haiti, and bombing the Balkans, Africa and Iraq. He was also destroying the lives of Iraqi children; UNICEF reported the deaths of half a million Iraqi infants under the age of five, as a result of an embargo led by the US and Britain.

The children were media unpeople, just as Hillary Clinton’s victims in the invasions she supported and promoted — Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia — are media unpeople. Murray made no reference to them. A photograph of her and her distinguished guest, beaming, appears on the BBC website.

In politics as in journalism and the arts, it seems that dissent once tolerated in the “mainstream” has regressed to a dissidence: a metaphoric underground. When I began a career in Britain’s Fleet Street in the 1960s, it was acceptable to critique Western power as a rapacious force. Read James Cameron’s celebrated reports of the explosion of the hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll, the barbaric war in Korea and the American bombing of North Vietnam. Today’s grand illusion is of an information age when, in truth, we live in a media age in which incessant corporate propaganda is insidious, contagious, effective and liberal.

In his 1859 essay, On Liberty, to which modern liberals pay homage, John Stuart Mill wrote: “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.” The “barbarians” were large sections of humanity, of whom “implicit obedience” was required.�� “It’s a nice and convenient myth that liberals are peacemakers and conservatives the warmongers,” wrote the historian Hywel Williams in 2001. “But the imperialism of the liberal way may be more dangerous because of its open-ended nature: its conviction that it represents a superior form of life.” He had in mind a speech by Blair, in which the then-prime minister promised to “reorder the world around us” according to his “moral values.”

In��The Wretched of the Earth,��Frantz Fanon wrote that the “historic mission” of the colonized was to serve as a “transmission line” to those who ruled and oppressed. In the modern era, the employment of ethnic difference in Western power and propaganda systems is now seen as essential.

Richard Falk, the respected authority on international law and the UN special rapporteur on Palestine, once described a “a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political violence.” It is “so widely accepted as to be virtually unchallengeable.”

Obama and American Exceptionalism

Tenure and patronage reward the guardians. On BBC Radio 4, Razia Iqbal interviewed Toni Morrison, the African American Nobel Laureate. Morrison wondered why people were “so angry” with Barack Obama, who was “cool” and wished to build a “strong economy and health care.” Morrison was proud to have talked on the phone with her hero, who had read one of her books and invited her to his inauguration.

Neither she, nor her interviewer mentioned Obama’s seven wars, including his terror campaign by drone, in which whole families, their rescuers and mourners have been murdered. What seemed to matter was that a “finely spoken” man of color had risen to the commanding heights of power. In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon wrote that the “historic mission” of the colonized was to serve as a “transmission line” to those who ruled and oppressed. In the modern era, the employment of ethnic difference in Western power and propaganda systems is now seen as essential. Obama epitomizes this, though the cabinet of George W. Bush — his warmongering clique — was the most multiracial in presidential history.

As the Iraqi city of Mosul fell to the jihadists of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), Obama said: “The American people made huge investments and sacrifices in order to give Iraqis the opportunity to chart a better destiny.” How “cool” is that lie? How “finely spoken” was Obama’s speech at the West Point military academy on May 28. Delivering his “state of the world” address at the graduation ceremony of those who “will take American leadership” across the world, Obama said: “The United States will use military force, unilaterally if necessary, when our core interests demand it. International opinion matters, but America will never ask permission.”

In repudiating international law and the rights of independent nations, the US president claims a divinity based on the might of his “indispensable nation.” It is a familiar message of imperial impunity, though always bracing to hear. Evoking the rise of fascism in the 1930s, Obama said: “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.” Historian Norman Pollack wrote: “For goose-steppers, substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manqué, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while.”

Fascists in Ukraine

In February, the US mounted one of its “color” coups against the elected government in Ukraine, exploiting genuine protests against corruption in Kiev. Obama’s assistant secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, personally selected the leader of an “interim government.” She nicknamed him “Yats.” Vice President Joe Biden came to Kiev, as did CIA Director John Brennan. The shock troops of their putsch were Ukrainian fascists.

For the first time since 1945, a neo-Nazi, openly anti-Semitic party controls key areas of state power in a European capital. No western European leader has condemned this revival of fascism in the borderland through which Adolf Hitler’s invading Nazis took millions of Russian lives. They were supported by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), responsible for the massacre of Jews and Russians they called “vermin.” The UPA is the historical inspiration of the present-day Svoboda Party and its fellow-traveling Right Sector. Oleh Tyahnybok, the Svoboda leader, has called for a purge of the “Moscow-Jewish mafia” and “other scum,” including gays, feminists and those on the political left.

In Orwellian fashion, this has been inverted in the West to the “Russian threat.” Hillary Clinton likened Putin to Hitler. Without irony, right-wing German commentators said as much. In the media, the Ukrainian neo-Nazis are sanitized as “nationalists” or “ultra nationalists.”

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US has ringed Russia with military bases, nuclear warplanes and missiles as part of its NATO Enlargement Project. Reneging on a promise made to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that it would not expand “one inch to the east,” NATO has, in effect, militarily occupied eastern Europe. In the former Soviet Caucasus, NATO’s expansion is the biggest military build-up since the Second World War.

A NATO Membership Action Plan is Washington’s gift to the coup-regime in Kiev. In August, “Operation Rapid Trident” will put American and British troops on Ukraine’s Russian border, and “Sea Breeze” will send US warships within sight of Russian ports. Imagine the response if these acts of provocation, or intimidation, were carried out on America’s borders.

In reclaiming Crimea — which Nikita Khrushchev illegally detached from Russia in 1954 — the Russians defended themselves as they have done for almost a century. More than 90% of the population of Crimea voted to return the territory to Russia. Crimea is the home of the Black Sea Fleet, and its loss would mean life or death for the Russian Navy and a prize for NATO. Confounding the war parties in Washington and Kiev, Vladimir Putin withdrew troops from the Ukrainian border and urged ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine to abandon separatism.

In Orwellian fashion, this has been inverted in the West to the “Russian threat.” Hillary Clinton likened Putin to Hitler. Without irony, right-wing German commentators said as much. In the media, the Ukrainian neo-Nazis are sanitized as “nationalists” or “ultra nationalists.” What they fear is that Putin is skillfully seeking a diplomatic solution, and may succeed. On June 27, responding to Putin’s latest accommodation — his request to the Russian parliament to rescind legislation that gave him the power to intervene on behalf of Ukraine’s ethnic Russians — US Secretary of State John Kerry issued another of his ultimatums. Russia must “act within the next few hours, literally” to end the revolt in eastern Ukraine. Notwithstanding that Kerry is widely recognized as a buffoon, the serious purpose of these “warnings” is to confer pariah status on Russia and suppress news of the Kiev regime’s war on its own people.

A third of the population of Ukraine are Russian-speaking and bilingual. They have long sought a democratic federation that reflects Ukraine’s ethnic diversity and is both autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most are neither “separatists,” nor “rebels” but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland. Separatism is a reaction to the Kiev junta’s attacks on them, causing as many as 110,000 (UN estimate) to flee across the border into Russia. Typically, they are traumatized women and children.

Media Unpeople

Like Iraq’s embargoed infants, and Afghanistan’s “liberated” women and girls, terrorized by the CIA’s warlords, these ethnic people of Ukraine are media unpeople in the West; their suffering and the atrocities committed against them minimized, or suppressed. No sense of the scale of the regime’s assault is reported in the mainstream Western media. This is not unprecedented. Reading again Phillip Knightley’s masterly The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Mythmaker, I renewed my admiration for the Manchester �ҳܲ����徱����’s Morgan Philips Price, the only Western reporter to remain in Russia during the 1917 revolution and report the truth of a disastrous invasion by the Western allies. Fair-minded and courageous, Philips Price alone disturbed what Knightley calls an anti-Russian “dark silence” in the West.

On May 2, in Odessa, 41 ethnic Russians were burned alive in the trade union headquarters with police standing by. There is horrifying video evidence.�� The Right Sector leader, Dmytro Yarosh, hailed the massacre as “another bright day in our national history.” In the American and British media, this was reported as a “murky tragedy” resulting from “clashes” between “nationalists” (neo-Nazis) and “separatists” (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine). The New York Times buried it, having dismissed as Russian propaganda warnings about the fascist and anti-Semitic policies of Washington’s new clients. The Wall Street Journal damned the victims — “Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says.” Obama congratulated the junta for its “restraint.”

On June 28, The Guardian devoted most of a page to declarations by the Kiev regime’s “president,” the oligarch Petro Poroshenko. Again, Orwell’s rule of inversion applied. There was no putsch; no war against Ukraine’s minority; the Russians were to blame for everything. “We want to modernise my country,” said Poroshenko. “We want to introduce freedom, democracy and European values. Somebody doesn’t like that. Somebody doesn’t like us for that.”

The �ҳܲ����徱����’s reporter, Luke Harding, evidently did not challenge these assertions, or mention the Odessa atrocity, the regime’s air and artillery attacks on residential areas, the killing and kidnapping of journalists, the firebombing of an opposition newspaper, and his threat to “free Ukraine from dirt and parasites.” The enemies are “rebels,” “militants,” “insurgents,” “terrorists” and stooges of the Kremlin.

Summon from history the ghosts of Vietnam, Chile, East Timor, southern Africa, Iraq; note the same tags. Palestine is the lodestone of this unchanging deceit. On July 11, following the latest Israeli, American-equipped slaughter in Gaza — over 120 people, including six children in one family — an Israeli general writes in The Guardian under the headline, “A Necessary Show of Force.”

In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl and asked about her films that glorified the Nazis. Using revolutionary camera and lighting techniques, she produced a documentary form that mesmerized Germans; it was her Triumph of the Will that reputedly cast Hitler’s spell. I asked her about propaganda in societies that imagined themselves superior. She replied that the “messages” in her films were dependent not on “orders from above,” but on a “submissive void” in the German population. “Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?” I asked. “Everyone,” she replied, “and of course the intelligentsia.”

*[A version of this article was originally published by and .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

/

The post The Return of George Orwell: Big Brother’s War on Palestine, Ukraine and Truth appeared first on 51�Թ�.