Why the Rise of Fascism is
Again the Issue
By John Pilger
February 27, 2015 "ICH"
- The recent 70th anniversary of the
liberation of Auschwitz was a reminder of
the great crime of fascism, whose Nazi
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 Holocaust would not have happened.
Had the United States and its satellites not
initiated their war of aggression in Iraq in
2003, almost a million people would be alive
today; and Islamic State, 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 theatre known as news.
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 Libya.
In 2011, Nato 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 sodomising of the Libyan
president Muammar Gaddafi with a "rebel"
bayonet was greeted by the 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 Obama, "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 David Cameron as a
"humanitarian intervention".
Secretly supplied and trained by Britain's
SAS, many of the "rebels" would become ISIS,
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 Obama, Cameron and Hollande, 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 US as it
prepared to "enter" Africa and bribe African
governments with military "partnerships".
Following Nato's attack under cover of a
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".
The "humanitarian war" against Libya drew on
a model close to western liberal hearts,
especially in the media. In 1999, Bill
Clinton and Tony Blair sent Nato to bomb
Serbia, because, they lied, the Serbs were
committing "genocide" against ethnic
Albanians in the secessionist province of
Kosovo. 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,
multi-ethnic federation that had stood as a
political and economic bridge in the Cold
War. Most of its utilities and major
manufacturing was publicly owned. This was
not acceptable to the expanding European
Community, especially newly united Germany,
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
recognise Croatia. Yugoslavia was doomed.
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 privatisation of all government
assets. No sovereign state could sign this.
Punishment followed swiftly; Nato bombs fell
on a defenceless country. It was the
precursor to the catastrophes in Afghanistan
and Iraq, Syria and Libya, and Ukraine.
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 and their
economies stripped of all protection, 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 Afghanistan 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 book '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 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
programme 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 programme 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."
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
authorised support for tribal
"fundamentalist" groups known as the
mujaheddin, a program that grew to over $500
million a year in U.S. arms and other
assistance. The aim was the overthrow of
Afghanistan's first secular, reformist
government. In August 1979, the US embassy
in Kabul reported that "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 italics are mine.
The mujaheddin were the forebears of
al-Qaeda and 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
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 "destabilise"
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, General
Zia ul-Haq, to dominate the region. In 1986,
the CIA and Pakistan'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."
The common thread in fascism, past and
present, is mass murder. The American
invasion of Vietnam had its "free fire
zones", "body counts" and "collatoral
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
ISIS, led by Pol Pot.
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 fibre 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 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
unrecognised as a predatory ideology is the
achievement of an equally unrecognised
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 that 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, 'American
Sniper', 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 Brazil and most of
Latin America. Germans and east 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 programme.
In the 1990s, as former Soviet republics,
eastern Europe and the Balkans became
military outposts of Nato, the heirs to a
Nazi movement in Ukraine 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".
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 Svoboda. 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 Vladimir Putin, 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 Defence
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 Russia's historic,
legitimate, warm-water naval base in Crimea.
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 the western media, they became unpeople
escaping "the violence" caused by the
"Russian invasion". The Nato commander,
General 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.
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, General Viktor
Muzhemko, almost inadvertently dismissed the
very basis for US and EU 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 authorise 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."
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. Saddam Hussein, 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.
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; 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
neighbour, Russia. They want to Balkanise 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
re-established 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 re-awaken the
great popular movements that brought a
fragile civilisation 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.
Follow John Pilger on twitter @johnpilger
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http://johnpilger.com/
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