Provoking Nuclear War by Media
By
John Pilger
August
23, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "RT"
- 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.
The
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslavia (ICTY) 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
“condemned ethnic cleansing”, 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 heart attack in 2006, 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.
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 the
western media as the “butcher of the
Balkans” who was responsible for
“genocide”, especially in the secessionist
Yugoslav province of Kosovo. 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 [sic], declared that as many as
“225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and
59” may have been murdered by Milocevic’s
forces.
This
was the justification for Nato’s bombing, led by
Bill Clinton and 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 “worth it”.
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 neo-liberal “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. 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”.
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.
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
non-existent weapons of mass destruction 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 excitedly told his viewers
that Blair 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.
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.”
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
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 becomes 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-Qaida is not news. On
21 July, 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
Mujahideen, the Syrian “rebels” are
America’s and Britain’s foot soldiers. Many
fight for al-Qaida and its variants; some, like
the Nusra Front, have rebranded themselves to
comply with American sensitivities over 9/11.
The 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
poll (YouGov Siraj), 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 WMD in Iraq, demand that
Obama attack 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 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
flood tide 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.
In
Britain, the Guardian’s Luke Harding leads his
newspaper’s Russia-haters in a stream of
journalistic parodies that assign to Vladimir
Putin every earthly iniquity. When the Panama
Papers leak 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.
Like
Milosevic, Putin is Demon Number One. It was
Putin who shot down a Malaysian airliner over
Ukraine. Headline: “As far as I’m concerned,
Putin killed my son.” 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 “Siberian
Candidate” 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. “Wouldn’t it be
great if we got along with Russia,” 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
20th 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 Trump is not elected. Pentagon
generals have demanded 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!”
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
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 replied: “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-militarisation 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 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.
Journalist, film-maker and
author, John Pilger is one of two to win British
journalism’s highest award twice. For his
documentary films, he has won an Emmy and a
British Academy Award, a BAFTA. Among numerous
other awards, he has won a Royal Television
Society Best Documentary Award. His epic 1979
Cambodia Year Zero is ranked by the British Film
Institute as one of the ten most important
documentaries of the 20th century.
JohnPilger.com -
the films and journalism of John Pilger
