Pilger writes: "Obeisance to the United States and its collaborators as a
benign force 'bringing good' runs deep in western establishment journalism."
U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle aircraft drop munitions on a cave in
eastern Afghanistan. (photo: U.S. Armed Forces)
Provoking Nuclear War by Media
By John Pilger, teleSUR
23 August 16
Obeisance to the United States and its collaborators as a benign force
"bringing good" runs deep in western establishment journalism.
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 Court of Justice (ICJ) 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 "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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S., 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.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle aircraft drop munitions on a cave in
eastern Afghanistan. (photo: U.S. Armed Forces)
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Provoking-Nuclear-War-by-Media-2016
0823-0006.htmlhttp://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Provoking-Nuclear-War
-by-Media-20160823-0006.html
Provoking Nuclear War by Media
By John Pilger, teleSUR
23 August 16
Obeisance to the United States and its collaborators as a benign force
"bringing good" runs deep in western establishment journalism.
he 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 Court of Justice (ICJ) 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 "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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S., 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.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
