[THS] !!!!! John Pilger: Warmongers of the world, unite

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2010/05/pilger-war-australia-british

Warmongers of the world, unite

John Pilger

Published 04 May 2010


Is there any difference between Australia’s leaders and the three front-runners in
Britain’s election when it comes to attitudes to war?

Staring at the vast military history section of the airport shop, I had a choice: the
derring-do of psychopaths or scholarly tomes with their illicit devotion to the cult of
organised killing. There was nothing I recognised from reporting war. Nothing on the
spectacle of children's limbs hanging in trees and nothing on the burden of shit in
your trousers. War is a good read. War is fun. More war, please.

On 25 April, the day before I flew out of Australia, I sat in a bar beneath the great
sails of the Sydney Opera House. It was Anzac Day, the 95th anniversary of the
invasion of Ottoman Turkey by Australian and New Zealand troops at the behest of
British imperialism. The landing was an incompetent stunt of blood sacrifice conjured
by Winston Churchill, yet it is celebrated in Australia as an unofficial national day. The
ABC evening news always comes live from the sacred shore at Gallipoli, where, this
year, as many as 8,000 flag-wrapped Antipodeans listened, dewy-eyed, to the
Australian governor general, Quentin Bryce, who is the Queen's viceroy, describe the
point of pointless mass killing. It was, she said, all about a "love of nation, of service,
of family, the love we allow ourselves to receive. [It is a love that] rejoices in the
truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. And
it never fails."

You'll be a man, my son

Of all the attempts at justifying state murder I can recall, this drivel of DIY therapy,
clearly aimed at the young, takes the blue riband. Not once did Bryce honour the
fallen with the two words that the survivors of 1915 brought home with them: "Never
again." Not once did she refer to a truly heroic anti-conscription campaign, led by
women, that stemmed the flow of Australian blood in the First World War, the
product not of a gormlessness that "believes all things", but of anger in defence of
life.

The next item on the TV news was the Australian defence minister, John Faulkner,
with the troops in Afghanistan. Bathed in the light of a perfect sunrise, he made the
Anzac connection to the illegal invasion of Afghanistan in which, on 12 February last
year, Australian soldiers killed five children. No mention was made of them. On cue,
this was followed by an item that a war memorial in Sydney had been "defaced by
men of Middle Eastern appearance". More war, please.

In the bar of the Opera House, a young man wore campaign medals that were not
his. That is the fashion now. Smashing his beer glass on the floor, he stepped over
the mess, which was cleaned up by another young man who the TV newsreader
would say was of Middle Eastern appearance. Once again, war is a fashionable
extremism for those suckered by the Edwardian notion that a man needs to prove
himself "under fire" in a country whose people he derides as "gooks" or "ragheads"
or simply "scum". (The current public inquiry in London into the torture and murder
of an Iraqi hotel receptionist, Baha Mousa, by British troops has heard that "the
attitude held" was that "all Iraqis were scum".)

There is a hitch. In this, the ninth year of the thoroughly Edwardian invasion of
Afghanistan, more than two-thirds of the home populations of the invaders want
their troops to get out of where they have no right to be. This is true of Australia, the
United States, Britain, Canada and Germany. What this says is that, behind the
media façade of politicised ritual - such as the parade of coffins through Wootton
Bassett - millions of people are trusting their own critical and moral intelligence and
ignoring propaganda that has militarised contemporary history, journalism and
parliamentary politics - Australia's Labor prime minister, Kevin Rudd, for instance,
describes the military as his country's "highest calling".

Here in Britain, Polly Toynbee anoints the war criminal Tony Blair as "the perfect
emblem for his people's own contradictory whims". No, he was the perfect emblem
for a liberal intelligentsia prepared cynically to indulge his crime. That is the unsaid of
the British election campaign, along with the fact that 77 per cent of the British
people want the troops home. In Iraq, duly forgotten, what has been done is a
holocaust. More than a million people are dead and four million have been driven
from their homes. Not a single mention has been made of them in the entire campaign. Rather, the news is that Blair is Labour's "secret weapon".

All three party leaders are warmongers. Nick Clegg, the darling of former Blair lovers,
says that, as prime minister, he will "participate" in another invasion of a "failed
state" provided there is "the right equipment, the right resources". His one
reservation is the standard genuflection towards a military now scandalised by a
colonial cruelty of which the Baha Mousa case is but one of many.

For Clegg, as for Brown and Cameron, the horrific weapons used by British forces,
such as cluster bombs, depleted uranium and the Hellfire missile, which sucks the air
out of its victims' lungs, do not exist. The limbs of children in trees do not exist. This
year alone, Britain will spend £4bn on the war in Afghanistan. That is what Brown
and Cameron almost certainly intend to cut from the health service.

Edward S Herman explained this genteel extremism in his essay "The Banality of
Evil". There is a strict division of labour, ranging from the scientists working in the
laboratories of the weapons industry, to the intelligence and "national security"
personnel who supply the paranoia and "strategies", to the politicians who approve
them. As for journalists, our task is to censor by omission and make the crime seem
normal for you, the public. For, above all, it is your understanding and your
awakening that are feared.