The great charade

As the West prepares for an assault on Iraq, John Pilger argues that 'war on terror' is a smokescreen created by the ultimate terrorist ... America itself

It is 10 months since 11 September, and still the great charade plays on. Having appropriated our shocked response to that momentous day, the rulers of the world have since ground our language into a paean of cliches and lies about the 'war on terrorism' - when the most enduring menace, and source of terror, is them. The fanatics who attacked America came from Saudi Arabia and Egypt. No bombs fell on these American protectorates. Instead, more than 5,000 civilians have been bombed to death in stricken Afghanistan, the latest a wedding party of 40 people, mostly women and children. Not a single al-Qaeda leader of importance has been caught.

Following this 'stunning victory', hundreds of prisoners were shipped to an American concentration camp in Cuba, where they have been held against all the conventions of war and international law. No evidence of their alleged crimes has been produced, and the FBI confirms only one is a genuine suspect. In the United States, more than 1,000 people of Muslim background have 'disappeared'; none has been charged. Under the draconian Patriot Act, the FBI's new powers include the authority to go into libraries and ask who is reading what.

Meanwhile, the Blair government has made fools of the British Army by insisting they pursue warring tribesmen: exactly what squaddies in putties and pith helmets did over a century ago when Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, described Afghanistan as one of the 'pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world'.

There is no war on terrorism; it is the great game speeded up. The difference is the rampant nature of the superpower, ensuring infinite dangers for us all.

Having swept the Palestinians into the arms of the supreme terrorist Ariel Sharon, the Christian Right fundamentalists running the plutocracy in Washington, now replenish their arsenal in preparation for an attack on the 22 million suffering people of Iraq. Should anyone need reminding, Iraq is a nation held hostage to an American-led embargo every bit as barbaric as the dictatorship over which Iraqis have no control. Contrary to propaganda orchestrated from Washington and London, the coming attack has nothing to do with Saddam Hussein's 'weapons of mass destruction', if these exist at all. The reason is that America wants a more compliant thug to run the world's second greatest source of oil.

The drum-beaters rarely mention this truth, and the people of Iraq. Everyone is Saddam Hussein, the demon of demons. Four years ago, the Pentagon warned President Clinton that an all-out attack on Iraq might kill 'at least' 10,000 civilians: that, too, is unmentionable. In a sustained propaganda campaign to justify this outrage, journalists on both sides of the Atlantic have been used as channels, 'conduits', for a stream of rumours and lies. These have ranged from false claims about an Iraqi connection with the anthrax attacks in America to a discredited link between the leader of the 11 September hijacks and Iraqi intelligence. When the attack comes, these consorting journalists will share responsibility for the crime.

It was Tony Blair who served notice that imperialism's return journey to respectability was under way. Hark, the Christian gentleman-bomber's vision of a better world for 'the starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor from the deserts of northern Africa to the slums of Gaza to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan.' Hark, his 'abiding' concern for the 'human rights of the suffering women of Afghanistan' as he colluded with Bush who, as the New York Times reported, 'demanded the elimination of truck convoys that provide much of the food and other supplies to Afghanistan's civilian population'. Hark his compassion for the 'dispossessed' in the 'slums of Gaza', where Israeli gunships, manufactured with vital British parts, fire their missiles into crowded civilian areas.

As Frank Furedi reminds us in The New Ideology of Imperialism , it is not long ago 'that the moral claims of imperialism were seldom questioned in the West. Imperialism and the global expansion of the western powers were represented in unambiguously positive terms as a major contributor to human civilisation.' The quest went wrong when it was clear that fascism was imperialism, too, and the word vanished from academic discourse. In the best Stalinist tradition, imperialism no longer existed. Today, the preferred euphemism is 'civilisation'; or if an adjective is required, 'cultural'.

From Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, an ally of crypto-fascists, to impeccably liberal commentators, the new imperialists share a concept whose true meaning relies on a xenophobic or racist comparison with those who are deemed uncivilised, culturally inferior and might challenge the 'values' of the West. Watch the 'debates' on Newsnight. The question is how best 'we' can deal with the problem of 'them'.

For much of the western media, especially those commentators in thrall to and neutered by the supercult of America, the most salient truths remain taboos. Professor Richard Falk, of Cornell university, put it succinctly some years ago. Western foreign policy, he wrote, is propagated in the media 'through a self righteous, one-way moral/legal screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted violence'.

Perhaps the most important taboo is the longevity of the United States as both a terrorist state and a haven for terrorists. That the US is the only state on record to have been condemned by the World Court for international terrorism (in Nicaragua) and has vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling on governments to observe international law, is unmentionable.

'In the war against terrorism,' said Bush from his bunker following 11 September, 'we're going to hunt down these evil-doers wherever they are, no matter how long it takes.'

Strictly speaking, it should not take long, as more terrorists are given training and sanctuary in the United States than anywhere on earth. They include mass murderers, torturers, former and future tyrants and assorted international criminals. This is virtually unknown to the American public, thanks to the freest media on earth.

There is no terrorist sanctuary to compare with Florida, currently governed by the President's brother, Jeb Bush. In his book Rogue State , former senior State Department official Bill Blum describes a typical Florida trial of three anti-Castro terrorists, who hijacked a plane to Miami at knifepoint. 'Even though the kidnapped pilot was brought back from Cuba to testify against the men,' he wrote, 'the defence simply told the jurors the man was lying, and the jury deliberated for less than an hour before acquitting the defendants.'

General Jose Guillermo Garcia has lived comfortably in Florida since the 1990s. He was head of El Salvador's military during the 1980s when death squads with ties to the army murdered thousands of people. General Prosper Avril, the Haitian dictator, liked to display the bloodied victims of his torture on television. When he was overthrown, he was flown to Florida by the US Government. Thiounn Prasith, Pol Pot's henchman and apologist at the United Nations, lives in New York. General Mansour Moharari, who ran the Shah of Iran's notorious prisons, is wanted in Iran, but untroubled in the United States.

Al-Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan were kindergartens compared with the world's leading university of terrorism at Fort Benning in Georgia. Known until recently as the School of the Americas, it trained tyrants and some 60,000 Latin American special forces, paramilitaries and intelligence agents in the black arts of terrorism.

In 1993, the UN Truth Commission on El Salvador named the army officers who had committed the worst atrocities of the civil war; two-thirds of them had been trained at Fort Benning. In Chile, the school's graduates ran Pinochet's secret police and three principal concentration camps. In 1996, the US government was forced to release copies of the school's training manuals, which recommended blackmail, torture, execution and the arrest of witnesses' relatives.

In recent months, the Bush regime has torn up the Kyoto treaty, which would ease global warming, to which the United States is the greatest contributor. It has threatened the use of nuclear weapons in 'pre-emptive' strikes (a threat echoed by Defence Minister Geoffrey Hoon). It has tried to abort the birth of an international criminal court. It has further undermined the United Nations by blocking a UN investigation of the Israeli assault on a Palestinian refugee camp; and it has ordered the Palestinians to replace their elected leader with an American stooge. At summit conferences in Canada and Indonesia, Bush's people have blocked hundreds of millions of dollars going to the most deprived people on earth, those without clean water and electricity.

These facts will no doubt beckon the inane slur of 'anti-Americanism'. This is the imperial prerogative: the last refuge of those whose contortion of intellect and morality demands a loyalty oath. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the Nazis silenced argument and criticism with 'anti German' slurs. Of course, the United States is not Germany; it is the home of some of history's greatest civil rights movements, such as the epic movement in the 1960s and 1970s.

I was in the US last week and glimpsed that other America, the one rarely seen among the media and Hollywood stereotypes, and what was clear was that it was stirring again. The other day, in an open letter to their compatriots and the world, almost 100 of America's most distinguished names in art, literature and education wrote this:

'Let it not be said that people in the United States did nothing when their government declared a war without limit and instituted stark new measures of repression. We believe that questioning, criticism and dissent must be valued and protected. Such rights are always contested and must be fought for. We, too, watched with shock the horrific events of September 11. But the mourning had barely begun when our leaders launched a spirit of revenge. The government now openly prepares to wage war on Iraq - a country that has no connection with September 11.

'We say this to the world. Too many times in history people have waited until it was too late to resist. We draw on the inspiration of those who fought slavery and all those other great causes of freedom that began with dissent. We call on all like-minded people around the world to join us.'

· This is a revised extract from The New Rulers of the World , by John Pilger, published by Verso. See full text of the original article

This article comes from Middle East Information Center http://middleeastinfo.org

The New Rulers of the World , by John Pilger, published by Verso.

from Verso's Web page:

Verso (meaning in printers' parlance 'the lefthand page') was founded in 1970 by the London-based New Left Review, a journal of left-wing theory with a worldwide readership of 40,000. The company remains independent to this day.

The company's head office is located in London, where a staff of twelve produces a program of 60 new titles each year.

Originally trading as New Left Books, the company developed an early reputation as a translator of classic works of European literature and politics by authors such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Ernest Mandel and Max Weber. More recent translations include the work of Giovanni Arrighi, Norberto Bobbio, Guy Debord, Giles Deleuze, Che Guevara, Carlo Ginzburg, Andre Gorz, Jürgen Habermas, Gabriel García Marquez and Paul Virilio.

Commissioning intelligent, critical works located at the intersection of the academic and trade markets, Verso's list of writers in English has come to include many key authors in the social sciences and humanities, with particular strength in politics, cultural studies, history, philosophy, sociology and literary criticism. Such writers include Tariq Ali, Benedict Anderson, Perry Anderson, Michèle Barrett, Robin Blackburn, Terry Eagleton, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Eric Hobsbawm, Victor Kiernan, Steven Lukes, E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams.

From early on in its life, the company retained US rights and has added to its imports a range of distinguished North American-based writers. Editors located on both East and West coasts have signed authors including Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Marc Cooper, Mike Davis, Juan Gonzalez, Christopher Hitchens, Frederic Jameson, Andrew Kopkind, Lewis Lapham, Manning Marable, David Roediger, Andrew Ross, Edward Said and Michele Wallace.

North America today comprises 65% of the company's worldwide sales. In the spring of 1995 Verso opened an office in New York. Primarily handling marketing and publicity work, our American office now has a staff of four.

Verso's success has been marked by several prizes. In 1990 the company received The Carey Thomas Award, presented by Publishers' Weekly to 'celebrate creative publishing at its best in all aspects of the process, from excellence in editorial judgement, through overall publishing philosophy, to imaginative design, promotion and marketing.' In 1991 the company won first prize in the London Sunday Times' Small Publisher of the Year Award. In 1992, Riboberta Menchú, whose autobiography is Verso's best-selling title, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Verso stands today as a publisher combining editorial intelligence, elegant production and marketing flair. Having quadrupled in size over the past decade, the company will continue its progress towards the mainstream of the industry without compromising its radical commitment.

....... all you need to know.

Yes here is an example of the 100 of America's most distinguished names in art, literature and education...Here is the bio of one of these creatures chosen more or less at random. I deliberately picked somone who was not a known public ham such as E. Said. Note the good prof Montoya rose from a background of grinding rural poverty to the comfort of tenured prof at UC Davis. The mechanism for his rise was that tried and true method many generations of immigrants have used; the parent labored and sacrificed so the talented child could take advantage of the opportunities available in the new homeland. Now in its hour of need how does the good prf Montoya repay the land that did provide the opportunities that allows him now to enjoy a life of comfort, creativity and some considerable prestige. Doe he wield his brush to produce a mural showing peoples of the many ethich strains in our country holding aloft the stars and strpes with the burning WTC in the background? Instead Montova stabs his very small dagger in the back of the country that has provided him the opportunity to be what he is. I wonder if he ever thinks what he would be if his parents had remained in Mexico? Another dirt poor peon struggling to have a meal a day.

PROFESSOR MALAQUIAS MONTOYA BIOGRAPHY

Malaquias Montoya was raised in a family of seven children of parents who could not read or write either Spanish or English. The three oldest children never went beyond 7th grade education as the entire family had to work as farmworkers for their survival. His father and mother were divorced in 1952 and it was his mother's desire to support the four of them still remaining at home (by her work in the fields) so they could pursue our education.

Professor Montoya's objective is to educate and be educated by those persons whom he comes in contact with daily. As an artist he feels a purpose to express to each individual the importance of developing that innate quality characteristic of all of us - that of creativity, and to show the relationship between that artistic creativity and community action, as both an educational tool and a catalyst for social change. Malaquias Montoya is Cooperating Faculty in the Department of Art and a Full Professor in the Chicana/o Studies Program at the University of California, Davis. Professor Montoya previously taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley he has been an Artist-in-Residence at Stanford University, a Visiting Lecturer at Mills College, Oakland, California and a Visiting Professor at the Univesity of California, Berkeley. He has also taught at various community colleges throughout the San Francsico Bay Area.

Professor Montoya has been invited to exhibit his art here and..in Europe and Latin America. His prints, posters, drawings, paintings, and murals provide a standard of excellence for students [as well as] established artists; for those who aspire to humanistic goals in the expression of their art. Malaquias Montoya has chosen not to devote his artistic creations to the commerical gallery world. A man of great political and artistic principles, he believes that art should be directed to the broadest possible audiences, including those who do not frequent commercial galleries. Montoya has elected to make the "world" his art gallery. In so doing, he is following a long tradition of cultural theoreticians who have deconstructed the negative social and cultural dimensions of artistic theories opposed to popular diffusion of the arts. There is no ambiguity in Montoya's works, as the art form is used to convey the artist's political message as well as his human concerns. His words are art and his art is poetry. The combination of powerful graphic images and human figures with issues of concern of humanity is perhaps his greatest artistic contribution.

Professor Montoya has received many honors, the latest being the 1997 Adaline Kent Award from the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA and the Art as a Hammer, Honoree from the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, Los Angeles, CA, May, 1997.

Right along with Ed Anser and Katha Politt

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